Category Archives: Random Silliness

Daily Life, Random Silliness

What would you buy with a £100m lottery win?

This isn’t a problem I really have to consider at length. I haven’t won anything. But I did get asked this question in an online survey I was taking, recently. First it asked what I’d spend £1m on. That was easy. I’d clear my mortgage, quit my job, retrain and/or start my own business doing something.

But the next question was the big one. £100m! What would you spend it on? To start with, the same. Clear mortgages, etc. But it’s £100m! I’d never need to work again. I could clear the mortgage of everyone I know, and barely make a dent in it. There’s the old thing about giving some to family/friends, etc. but still – you would have a lot left.

So the next thing that came to mind was so odd, I thought I’d share it here. Continue reading What would you buy with a £100m lottery win? →

Daily Life, Random Silliness

The Park and Gardner Podcast

If I’m terrible at one thing (yes, JUST one), it’s advertising my abilities, talking myself up, or voluntarily telling people about things I’m up to. I’m the worst self-promoter in the world.

Oh, you want an example of this?

Well, how about this. I do a weekly(ish) podcast with my friend Stephen Gardner (http://twitter.com/lordhyperbole). It’s called the Park and Gardner podcast, and we’ve made 28 episodes of it so far, before I realised I hadn’t mentioned it on this blog of mine at all. So this is me, mentioning it.

It’s recorded in my garage, and it’s basically the two of us talking about the last week, both in terms of what we’ve been doing, and watching on TV, as well as looking at the quirkier news stories. And when I say news, there’s no miserable ones about death or war – just the odd ones about aliens, smut, and usually at least one cute animal story.

It’s available on parkandgardner.com so you can either visit the website to check it out, or subscribe to it by doing one of these two things:

1. If you use iTunes, then clicking this link will prompt you to open iTunes, where you can subscribe.

or

2. If you hate iTunes with a passion, then you can click this link, and then..whatever you do if you don’t use iTunes. Copy and paste it into another xml reader, or something.

Anyway, that’s me self-promoting. The advert ends there. I might mention it again in another year.

Daily Life, Random Silliness

The Spotted Egg

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This morning in the yard behind my workplace, I spotted this:

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An egg.
Not just an egg, either.
It was also moving. With little breeze to blow so much as my hair, let alone the weight of an egg, I thought “maybe it has a bird inside!”
There are lots of birds around my workplace, so you never know. Not sure how it got there, in the middle of a Tarmac yard, without breaking, but never mind that. It’s a baby bird, trying to hatch!

I got some cardboard to scoop it up with (and a box that might make an ok temporary nest for it), and picked it up as carefully as I could. It rolled quickly a I was lifting it, and I nearly dropped it. It was also surprisingly light.
It was made of polystyrene.

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But why?
What is the point of a perfect egg of polystyrene? The only things I can come up with is that it’s used to model eggcups, or confuse snakes. What other use could it have?

Daily Life, Random Silliness

No Milk This Morning

I typically get up for work a couple of hours before my girlfriend. This morning, I got up to discover there was only enough milk for a cup of tea each (we would normally both have cereal as well, at our respective breakfast times). So I had my tea and toast for breakfast, and sat down and wrote my girlfriend a short note about all of this. I’ll save you the hassle of trying to read my spider-scrawl handwriting (which is even worse at 5.30am), and type it up for you now. Continue reading No Milk This Morning →

Random Silliness

(Hideous) Antiques Roadshow

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So a week or so ago, while I was waiting for the BBC’s Sherlock to start, I caught the very end of the Antiques Roadshow. This was the last item they looked at in the episode.

See if you can guess at what point I shouted obscenities at the television.

The complete profanity was something along the lines of:

“Fuck. Off. For that ugly statue of a bloke riding a sheep!?”

I may have said “pirate” at the time. Well he’s got the hat for it.

Random Silliness

Breville it!

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I’ve nothing against the company Breville. I’ve had a Breville toaster that developed a fault, and I went straight out and bought another. I went to buy a kettle a while ago, and the coolest design I could find under £30 was a Breville. So I currently own a kettle and toaster. See:

My kitchen

But this week I went into Tesco, and happened to spot this interesting marketing exercise: Continue reading Breville it! →

Food, Random Silliness

Will and Kate vs Halloween gingerbread people

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Sainsburys. Sorry, Sainsburys.

I spotted these the other day, and it took me back to an unhappy time at the end of April. Ah the Royal Wedding. The day I went for a drive on my own to get away from the unending rolling news TV coverage of two people I don’t know, who I’ll never met, getting married hundreds of miles away.

Well I’ve got some bad news for the happy couple. I don’t think some of their merchandise was as exclusive as they’d hoped. Just look at this. They’re not even pretending. They’ve clearly used the same templates more than once.

April 2011.
October 2011.

The bodies are the same. Even the lines. Pfft. There’s no pulling the wool over my eyes. There are some fairytale endings you can’t mask with icing, Sainsburys.

Random Silliness, Technology

Windows 8 unveiled

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According to the BBC, Microsoft has “taken the wraps off” Windows 8. It will be able to run on ARM processors, and it’ll have a kind-of app-store called the “Windows Store”.

But the bit that caught my eye was that their tablet version of Windows 8 will be called “Metro”. What a shit name that is. Aside from being a newspaper, “Metro” surely means a transport network to most people. Which will leave it wide open to travel-related putdowns/comments… Continue reading Windows 8 unveiled →

Radio, Random Silliness

The Richard Report [part 1]

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If you listened to the radio show I worked on with Stephen Gardner, that ran 1-4pm every Saturday throughout May, then you’ll know that we had a guy on our show called Richard Cook. He was working undercover in the Thornbury area to discover the wrongdoing, and help fight the discrimination and other ills in sectors of Thornbury County Council. Continue reading The Richard Report [part 1] →