Archive for December, 2007

The Latest Obfuscation

Published by Crackerwax on 31 December 2007 in Geeky Stuff and Ranting. 2 Comments

Has it come to this! Has the general public, buoyed on a wave of HD hysteria, become so gullible that they’re going to be fooled by this sort of nonsense.

HD telly con

6.2 million sub pixels? I’ve never heard such a load of old twaddle in my life. Presumably they’re making reference to the fact that each pixel on an LCD panel is made up of a red, green and blue pixel, or sub pixel.

Your average punter isn’t going to know this though, they’re going to assume that the million pixels, sub or otherwise, is the same million pixels they’re used to from digital cameras and as we all know more mega pixels equals better cameras right!

Thinking about it though this could actually have the reverse effect on the type of person they’re trying to attract, who might not have realised that high definition in television terms is still pretty low in comparison to the sort of resolutions available on modern digital cameras.

True HD (as the marketing saps are now calling 1080p in a desperate bid to make it look as though they weren’t conning everybody with the shitty 720p sets they were hailing as a revolution last summer) looks pretty blocky when you put it up against the sort of resolutions you’ll get from even an average digital camera.

1920 by 1080 versus 3200 by 2400, that’s a twofold increase in vertical resolution straight away, don’t want the punters to actually start comparing resolutions now do we? Six mega pixel versus seven mega pixel looks much better than 1080 versus 2400!

Still most punters don’t care, they assume that HD will make Coronation Street look amazing. The sad thing is though that at the end of the day they just like it because it’s flat and shiny and it’s only because said punter has this outlook that the marketeers can get away with this sort of bollocks.

Free Internet Access

Published by Crackerwax on 31 December 2007 in Geeky Stuff. 0 Comments

I’m traveling on the train from Newcastle to Glasgow today and as I do I’m typing this post. How awesome is that?

Ok, I know it’s not the most amazing thing ever, ever, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless and it seems pretty reliable too. I’ve had one freeze in the last twenty minutes, so it can’t be that bad.

From what I can glean by poking around, the service is provided by RealConnect, I’m getting 750kbps upstream and a whopping 6mbps downstream and Google thinks I’m in Sweden. Neat.

Just thought I’d let you know.

Cloverfield

Published by Crackerwax on 30 December 2007 in Movies. 0 Comments

I’m really looking forward to Cloverfield, the new J.J. Abrams produced monster movie. From what I’ve seen so far it seems like a fairly well executed piece of schlock, in the vein of all the monster movies I remember watching as a kid.

Hopefully the creature will live up to expectations and be somewhat more imaginative than the 1998 Godzilla. As you’d expect there’s lots of internet chatter around what the creature actually is, with some saying it’s some form of mutated sea creature (yawn) and others theorising that it could be one of the Cthulhu from H.P. Lovecraft’s stories.

I’m hoping for the Lovecraft angle myself, it’d be a neat turnaround to have an origin like that in this sort of film. The whole radiation mutation angle is tired now, it might have worked in the 50s but you’ve got to come up with something a little better nowadays.

Roll on the first of February…

Party Of The Year!

Published by Crackerwax on 30 December 2007 in Events, People and Photos. 1 Comment

Andy and his mate, whose name I do know but can’t remember, threw a fancy dress party to celebrate their 30th birthdays. We went along and took photos, this is the result.

Oh yes, I should add that the theme was 1977, which in fairness you’d probably get from most of the costumes.


You’ll notice I reference no one by their real name? This is because I can’t actually remember what half of the attendee’s names were (see comment above).

You see, I was very, very drunk…

Keith Richards

Published by Crackerwax on 28 December 2007 in People. 0 Comments

Behold! The three ages of Keef!


I reckon he died about three days after that middle photo was taken but nobody told him. Still at least he’s doing his part to prevent the youth of the world doing drugs, by hoovering them all up every where he goes.

By rights the man should be a corpse by now, not just look like one. In actual fact there’s a specialist dude called David Demko who did a thing about rock stars life expectancy based on lifestyle. Keith Richards was looking to kick the bucket around 52. This was when he was 60.

What a guy!

As far as I can tell Keith Richards was relatively normal up until about, well Christ knows, but I’m guessing he can’t always have been this nut job soaked to the eyeballs on jazz talc who dresses like a voodoo pirate.

The thing that fascinates me the most though is the dynamic between Keith and Mick. In my head it goes like this. The show ends around midnight, Mick thanks the audience and scuttles back stage to count the gate receipts and see how the merchandise is selling, meanwhile things on planet Keith are just starting.

Keith disappears back stage to a pair of waiting Italian twins, Alessandra and Isabella, snorts whatever he can come across, grabs a couple of bottles of vodka for the journey to the restaurant, where he alights, eats a bag of crisps, has some speed, then leaves to find the nearest lap dancing bar, in which he grabs six girls and gets them to put on a show that would make Caligula blush, after which he polishes off another bottle of vodka before getting the manager to get him a cab and two bottles of Jack Daniel’s to take back to his hotel, he drinks these en route.

After a bit of grout he procedes, against all the odds, to bed each of the eight girls, twice, then at around eight in the morning he eats half a bag of Skittles before passing out in a pool of someone else’s vomit, waking at nine o’clock that night by a rodie hosing him down and is wheeled on to stage to rock out and start the whole process again!

Meanwhile back at the venue Mick spent the night arguing with a roadie, trying to get him to hand over the $3 for the third piece of chicken he took from the catering wagon, pointing out that the sign (that Mick no doubt wrote himself) states two pieces for crew. He then goes to bed. With a Horlicks.

How can they co-exist? Beats me.

Doctor Who: Voyage Of The Damned

Published by Crackerwax on 25 December 2007 in Hate, Ranting and Television. 0 Comments

Who told Russell T Davies he could write? Voyage Of The Damned is the worst piece of science fiction I have ever seen.

It is uniformly appalling. One of the reasons for this is that it’s trying too hard to do too many things, as a result any messages it may being trying to convey about prejudice or culture, or whatever, come out as heavy handed and obvious.

Davies needs to understand that exposition is not cool, too often in this (and in Doctor Who in general) characters come out with huge slugs of expositional dialogue. There never seems to be any attempt at subtlety, any attempt to just let the audience work out what’s going on for themselves.

It would appear he’d rather just dump massive bits of plot left, right and centre. It’s as if he’s shouting ‘Hey audience! Pay attention! I’m showing you a plot device, it’ll explain something that’s coming up in a bit.‘. As a result you know that nothing is revealed in Voyage Of The Damned without it becoming an incredibly useful part of the plot shortly after.

I’ll be writing more about this later. Trust me…

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Published by Crackerwax on 25 December 2007 in Funny and Music. 0 Comments

Here’s something to warm your cockles, a true Christmas classic. David Bowie goes on the Bing Crosby Christmas Special and poor old Bing has no fucking clue who he is.


Through the first few minutes of this video Bing has a look of complete bewilderment on his face. David Bowie could be his window cleaner for all he knows. The modern equivalent of this would be Bruce Forsyth and 50 Cent doing a duet of Little Donkey on Strictly Come Dancing.

Anyway after just under two minutes of stilted and deeply uncomfortable conversation we get to the song. I love it!

Where Have All The Golden Grahams Gone?

Published by Crackerwax on 24 December 2007 in Ranting. 0 Comments

Well? Where? Do you know, because I don’t. I’ve hunted high and low and I can’t find a single box of Golden Grahams on the shelves of any of my local supermarkets.

There are plenty of boxes of Curiously Cinnamon, which I assume are what used to be Cinnamon Grahams, but not a single box of Golden Grahams. Of course the emo-hermaphrodite working in the cereal aisle at Morrison’s was less than helpful when quizzed about the mystery, although it did venture into the back to look for me. Which as we all know is code for shuffle off to the back of the shop to mooch around for a bit before returning to claim that they didn’t have any. Which is what it did.

So, no further forward, I was certain the interwebs would hold the answer to this enigma. Fat chance. The Nestlé website still lists Nestlé Cinnamon Grahams but no Nestlé Golden Grahams. Bastards.

(I’m going to take off at a bit of a ranty tangent here but why do they insist on listing everything as Nestlé so and so? I’m on the cocking Nestlé website, I know I’m looking at Nestlé products. Jesus. Get over yourselves.)

It’s a travesty that Golden Grahams have been vanished but Cinnamon Grahams (aside from the sly name change) still exist. I always found Cinnamon Grahams to be too powdery and, well, cinnamony for my tastes. Golden Grahams were delicious, just the right balance of sugar and more sugar. Perfect.

This is all very curious.

It would appear that all trace of Golden Grahams ever existing has been erased from history and I really, really fucking liked them. What happened? I demand answers!

The Dark Knight

Published by Crackerwax on 22 December 2007 in Movies. 0 Comments

I wasn’t looking forward to The Dark Knight. I thought the Bat-bike looked like a ploy to sell toys, The Joker looked sort of strange and was going to be played by Heath Ledger and it all just smacked of being a huge big mess.

Then I watched this.

Fuck me that looks fun, the bit at 1:28 where Batman punches The Joker? Just the sort of lines you want from a movie like this.

As you may have noticed the YouTube version there is somewhat dark and smudgy but it’s worth looking at the HD version because it looks simply stunning.

I’m forever making huge turnarounds on stuff, and this is another one, but suffice to say I am now very excited at the prospect of the new Batman film. What about you?

Does this trailer make you want to see The Dark Knight?

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On Football

Published by Crackerwax on 19 December 2007 in Hate and Ranting. 0 Comments

The scientists have all got it wrong. There is no super massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. It’s taken years of observation but I have now come to the conclusion that we have a ginormous shiny football sitting there instead.

I would imagine it to be surrounded by coach loads of aggressive, England shirted fuck wits, shouting half formed lager fuelled opinions at each other on topics as diverse as race relations and tits, all the while celebrating their own inherent manliness by mind-wanking about England’s 1966 World Cup win against Germany, with England played by eleven Sophie Andertons in wet vests.

Football is quite possibly the least entertaining sport on Earth (or in the Universe I should imagine). I’d rather spend an hour and a half locked under water in a steel cage with a shark that’s being relentlessly poked with sticks than go to a football match. If I could get rid of three things, wipe them out as if they had never existed, they would be football, religion and Derek Acorah.

People that like football are a feeble minded, crass, know nothing pricks who, if I had the chance, I’d brick up in Wembley before pumping it full of raw sewage. From Poland. Which would probably anger them even further. A furious tirade of abuse directed at mythical job stealers/scroungers would constitute their last words as they slowly drowned, the warm effluent burbling into their stupid, shouty lungs.

If you want to make football interesting to me you’d have to arm the goalies. I reckon that would make it pretty bloody entertaining. Each goalie would have a high powered sniper rifle and five rounds of ammunition, the only rule would be that you couldn’t snipe the other goalie. Let’s see how many ‘blistering runs at goal’ the over paid thickos that play the game would make then.

It truly is a game for the weak minded, played by the weak minded.

Only this morning Sol Campbell was on the radio demanding that ‘the fans’ stopped hurling nasty abuse at him. You see, from what I could glean, Sol has been involved in some pathetic on-off transfer deal with Tottenham United and Arsenal Rangers or something, and this has upset the psychopaths from both sides.

I can only imagine it to be a bit like going on to a gaming forum and admitting to owning a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox 360 and thinking that they’re both rather good, which on the interwebs would lead to nothing more than much badly spelt abuse by teenagers with mono-mania.

In the world of the football though, this sort of thing leads to you being castrated with a pen knife in an east end boozer. Short of that, and luckily for Campbell, all this cardinal sin has lead to is ‘the fans’ subjecting him to some horrid, horrid verbal abuse.

Please. You’re playing a game that can make millionaires out of men who would have difficulty writing a shopping list, expect a few hazards son. They’re called fans, which is an abbreviated form of fanatic, which if dictionary.com is to be believed means:

fa•nat•ic (fə-nāt’ĭk)
noun. A person marked or motivated by an extreme, unreasoning enthusiasm, as for a cause.

I’d be thankful they’re only shouting abuse and not leaping on to the pitch and stabbing you in the face with screwdrivers.

Then again he earns £96,000 a week, yes that’s right folks £96,000 a week, more money than a policeman earns in three years. He should be slightly less whiny I feel, I’d bet my brain that a policeman has to put up with more shit in a day than he does.

So what if you have to hear some thick, fat bastard calling you a talentless cunt? You’re safe in the knowledge that once the game’s over you can trot off to your twelve million pound Gloucestershire pad to get sucked off by an eighteen year old with the IQ of a satsuma.

Look at it with open eyes Campbell, if it wasn’t for the people lining the sides of the football court you’d be a fucking salesman in Phones4U. Every day would be spent desperately trying to sell single mums Pay As You Go handsets on Orange, creeping back to your bedsit to eat a tin of beans, then shuffling off to bed to wank yourself to sleep through a haze of tears before having to get up and do the same thing again, six days a week.

They’re your boss, they quite literally pay your exorbitant wages. You should be rejoicing in your luck and privilege, not cluttering up my radio with your badly articulated musings on your poor little life.

Talentless cunt.

Lush

Published by Crackerwax on 14 December 2007 in Ranting. 2 Comments

I like baths. No, I love baths. Soaking away all the stress of the day in a lovely hot bath, maybe a quick gin and cranberry, possibly even a bit of Nintendo DS in there too, who knows! Of course a bath isn’t a bath without a bit of something smelly in it. This is where, for most people, Lush comes in.

Purveyors of finest bath salts and associated soapy paraphernalia, they seems to be on every high street now. Simply walking past Lush makes you feel like your nose is being raped by a bar of Imperial Leather. Wrapped in strawberry laces. Wearing Brut.

Ten minutes inside Lush is the nasal equivalent of staring at the sun through a telescope for two hours. Entering one of the stores makes you realise just what a bad idea it is to keep so many perfumed goods in one badly ventilated place. After about two minutes your eyes begin to water, a minute later you start having difficulty breathing, after five minutes you become dizzy and that’s when they pounce and make you buy a selection of bath bombs.

Not only do they get you to buy them, they make you pick them up with your fingers and put them into clear cellophane bags that have openings fractionally smaller then the bomb itself. This only adds to your sense of delirium as you stand there fidgeting with the bag, bath bombs (actually now called bath ballistics, lest people think Lush is part of a radical Al Queada cell) dropping on the floor around your feet. As pressure mounts you become suggestible to the sales assistants chatter and that’s when your judgement goes and you start buying all sorts of bizarrely named shit.

Worse is yet to come though, after making these rash purchases it’s not until you plonk it in your bath and it starts fizzing like a wasp in a Kinder egg that you realise what’s inside them. Not only do they have the sort of aroma that warps space and time it would appear that they’re made by Doctor Who. The amount of shit that comes out of those things is truly astonishing, once it’s done its job you’ll be hard pushed to see your bath for little paper flowers, bits of twig, confetti and of course glitter.

There’s fucking loads of glitter.

I once had a bath with a what was amusingly referred to as a ‘Sex Bomb’ (closest I’ve ever come) and this thing was packed with purple glitter. The stickiest purple glitter known to man. It doesn’t just stick to your bath, it sticks to your body too and you can’t get it off without a bottle of Cif and a scouring pad.

For about a fortnight after I got out of that particular bath I had a slight purple shimmer, people thought I was some kind of secret homosexual prostitute that plied their glittery night trade in perfume factories. People would be talking to me and then they’d get a slightly quizzical look on their face and start moving their head around to get a better look at my pearlescent sheen. It was embarrassing.

So, to cut a long and pointless story short, I now don’t buy from Lush. If you’ve any sense and want to be able to smell subtle aromas and any point in your life, you won’t either.

What The Fuck Is This About?

Published by Crackerwax on 13 December 2007 in Freaky. 1 Comment

Allegedely filmed on an Air Canada flight London on December 6th this video appears to show a passenger, in restraints, freaking out.

Who are all the guys with the passenger telling him to calm down? There at least three of them, the two guys either side and the guy in front. There are others on the flight I’m sure, as at several points throughout the video a number of large chaps walk up to the guys either side and speak to them. The most sinister part is that no one bats an eyelid.

Anyway watch it and see what you think.

What had he done? Was it some kind of prisoner transfer or was it someone who had just wigged out on the flight?

Whatever way you cut it, it’s kind of creepy.

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