Thursday 29 October 2009

It's a dogs life.

Today I am going to hand over my blog page to my dog.. She has something that she wants to get off her chest. So here we go.

Woof bark bark woof ruff ruff woof bark ruff bark...

Ooops, sorry, I forgot that you humans are a lazy bunch and can’t be bothered to learn your own languages let alone that of other species.

What I meant to say was mmm nnnm mmm slurp (sorry I had an itch in a private place. Don’t look so disgusted, you know you would lick yours if you could. And for gods sake give up on that “give her a biscuit, she might let you” joke. It’s tired, let it sleep!!)

Now as I was saying. Coats. Why on earth do you insist on dressing us up in coats? We are blessed by evolution, in that we already have a coat. It is made of fur and is warm, ok it does get a bit a bit smelly every now and then, it is always there and we don’t need another one. We don’t need wax, Barbour jackets, we don’t need ridiculous woolly things, we don’t need anything.

Just take us for a walk and feed us and we will repay you with unconditional love and obedience (I’m stretching it a bit with the obedience, but you get the idea.) Give me a woolly coat and I will piss on your sofa!

Woof!!

Saturday 24 October 2009

Childhoods End

While I have been sat here this evening with Mrs Giant68, watching Strictly Come Dancing, I have had a terrible thought. We are going to have generations of people in this country, and possibly many others, that do not know the words to “Chim Chiminee” from Mary Poppins! This is disastrous!

Childhood is being taken away from children with the advent of the new gadgets I like so much. (see the previous blog. Yes, you. Go on, read it now, don’t be so bloody lazy!) Children will sit and play shoot ‘em up games and racing games on the latest game platforms from Sony and Microsoft et al. They forget that there are forms of entertainment that predate the video game. Parents should be encouraging children to read books such as “Swallows and Amazons” and some of the Enid Blyton stories.

They should watch the Disney films until they are sick. They should learn the words to “On the bottom of the beautiful briny sea” from Bedknobs and Broomsticks. They should learn to hiss and boo at King John from “Robin Hood”. Then the world would be a better place.

I intend to tell my granddaughter the story of Bobtail Bunny as soon as she can begin to understand what I am saying. You know the story, I know most of the people in my family know it. “ At No.1 in Rabbit Row, a crowd of bunnies live, you know. The youngest one was Bobtail Bunny, he was so jolly and so funny...”

Oooh, the shiny things...

I am a sad man. It’s a fact. Once a new gadget or gizmo comes out on the market I will covet it. I must admit that I don’t always get it, Mrs Giant68 sees to that. But sometimes I have a little luck and something new will appear at home. Just lately I have welcomed a large, flat 1080p LCD telly into the house. And what’s the point of a tv like that without having a source for high definition, so a Sky+HD box now sits under the telly. Then we have all these shiny new gadgets that each have a remote control. That’s quite a lot of remotes. So we now have a rather good 1 for all remote, programmable over the internet from a central database of gadgets and doodads. Brilliant! Fantastic! I’m happy, loads of shiny new gadgets.

A few weeks ago my PC died. I nearly cried. It had been a labour of love for years, built by myself and upgraded over the years so that it was a bit like Triggers broom. It bore no resemblance to the original PC. But now it was dead and I had to replace it. Did I rebuild it with new parts or do i buy new and complete? I had a look around and decided that I really couldn’t be bothered any more with the building. It was not really cost effective to build anymore, not like the days of my first PC when I would trawl through the computer fairs and cheap deals on components.

So I bought a laptop. Huge amount of RAM and a correspondingly large hard drive. Guess what? Now I am in the process of installing Windows 7 on it. Not a gadget exactly, but it is new and shiny, and I do like the shiny things in life.

I think that, at times, Mrs giant68 despairs. She is happy with same old things that she has always had. “Why do we need a new TV, is the old one broken?”

“No, it’s not broken but we just need a new TV”

“Why?”

“Because.” A bit childish really but I have no good answer. Sometimes you just need new things. What can I say?

Ooh, shiny things...

Monday 12 October 2009

Embarassment

In my study I have an album of photos from my childhood. They were given to me on my 40th birthday by my mum. In her infinite wisdom, she decided to bring them along to my birthday party and show them to all my friends. As all my friends were under the influence of copious quantities of booze they all thought them hysterically funny.

There were pictures of me naked on a hillside when I was about 2 or 3. Pictures of me through my school years. Pictures of me... Never mind, I think you get the idea. They were the sort of photo that gets dragged out when the new girlfriend/ boyfriend finally gets to meet the parents.

But there are only about 30 or 40 of them. That was the beauty of the analogue age. When cameras needed to be filled with a film and then, when the photos were taken, had to taken to the chemist and developed. All at a cost.

Now in the digital age everybody has a digital camera that takes no film and needs no developing. Pictures can be taken willy nilly and downloaded onto the family computer, uploaded to Myfacebookspace or whatever. I have just become a granddad, well, a month ago anyway, and I already have somewhere in the region of 500 pictures of my granddaughter on my laptop. Can you imagine how ,long it is going to take to show all these, and the rest that we take over the years, to new love interest when she gets older. Maybe we ought to give her business cards with the URL of where they are stored online and the message “ carry on without me and let me know when you are finished”