Crackerwax

At the turn of the century – this century by the way – I looked like this:

Puppy for dinner anyone?

You could quite justifiably ask if I was about to eat that puppy, chances are I was. I would eat anything, anything. Around this time I was routinely going for a full English for lunch, on occasion even having two, and in the afternoons I’d sit and eat an entire double pack of Jammie Dodgers at my desk.

In addition I took no exercise. Not a bit. I weighed 16st 11lbs

A few years later I had an epiphany. After a particularly disastrous relationship – that’s another story – I decided that enough was enough and that I needed to start getting a bit fitter. I finished my southern fried chicken bap and vowed to start eating healthily and going to the gym.

Which I did. Eight months later I looked like this:

Posing, not eating.

Now that’s more like it, no? I was 14st on the button in that picture, which, according to the BMI charts means I was still overweight. Fuck it though, I felt good! I could run for an hour straight and still be able to have a conversation at the end of it. In addition I was – for some unfathomable reason, given my foul personality – beating the women off with a shitty stick.

All was well, sadly though I didn’t keep it up, so slowly but surely over the last four years I’ve crept back up to the horrendous seventeen stone, eight pounds I am today.

At six feet tall, seventeen stone, eight pounds puts me firmly in the obese camp. It’s not good. That’s why I’ve decided to turn over a new leaf. I’m going to start going to the gym again, start eating properly, no skipping breakfast.

People asked me when I originally lost my weight, how I had done it. The answer was simple ‘eat less, do more’ and it hasn’t changed. If you consume fewer calories than you burn, you’re going to lose weight.

My aim is by next May to be 14st 3lbs. I think I can do it. No, I know I can do it.

It’s decided! February is to be the month where I finally kick the habit.

There will be no swearing for the entire 28 days. No fuck, no piss, no shit, not even a bollocks. Nada.

For four weeks I will be clean, what’s more I’m going to go cold turkey. On Sunday the 31st of January I will have a good old swear – stopping of course at midnight – then when I wake on the Monday morning that’ll be it, no naughty words.

Of course I’m going to find this insanely difficult, I’ve kind of built up a trusted vocabulary of swear words and quite honestly they work really well for me. I don’t know what I’m going to replace them with but I’m ready to find out.

Fuck yeah!

The most recent of my woeful party adventures occurred about a year ago, at a house party organised by someone I hardly knew. He was a generous chap so unless you were a convicted serial killer, you got an invite.

My excitement at being invited to a party lead to my hasty – and in hindsight, rash – offer to wear a kilt.

Now, I love my kilts and I’ll wear them at the drop of a hat, everyone knows this. However women – for some crazy unknown reason – go a bit funny when they see a man in a kilt. I’ve experienced this before many, many times. I’ve gotten used to it.

You know the sort of thing, questions about what’s underneath it – which for the record is nothing – and such. Although I have often wondered what would happen to me if I approached a girl at a party, complimented her on her dress and then followed it up by asking if she was wearing any knickers.

I can’t imagine it would be a positive outcome. (more…)

So after spotting an amazing offer from Matthew Gehrett for his services in theme song writing I decided to send him the requested fee.

This is the result!

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I quite like it, not sure about the battle axe malarkey but fuck it, it sounds good and not a little Scott Weilandy. So it’s fine by me.

Fuck that fat, beardy, twat Justin Lee Collins, we’re going to bring back Golden Grahams!

Now don’t ask me where they’ve gone because I don’t know. There are rumours that you can still find them but I can’t find them anywhere and believe you me I’ve searched high and low, and looked everywhere. Nada. Nothing. No sign of the lovely Golden Grahams taste.

They’re not on the shelves of my local Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, Sainsburys or, in fact, any fucking supermarket anywhere! (more…)

Is mine! The story behind it goes a bit like this.

Restless Cheese and I went to see Pearl Jam in Manchester last night, in true fashion this was just a bit of an excuse for some hard drinking, although whether or not I’d call white russians hard I’m not certain.

So as far as it goes we arrived in Manchester around half five – after a completely dry train journey – checked into our hotel and then headed off out for a bit of dinner and a couple of cheeky cocktails. Queue the Revolution!

I’m quite a fan of Revolutions – the bars, not the uprisings – they’re generally pretty cool during the day and, if you time it right, not too bad at night either.

So we mosey on in and after a brief tussle with the menu and the outrageous offers we settled on a bargaintastic two for one burger deal (or mushroom-in-a-bap for Restless Cheese), along with some top notch two for one cocktails. Nice! Revolution had clearly lined itself up for a later visit.

It was at this, post Pearl Jam, visit that the coolest thing in the world happened.

Once we arrived back in Revolution the lure of shots was irresistible, the most amazing of which is or was the porridge shot. The porridge shot is a heady mix of vodka sugar and oats, and its taste is beyond amazing. Although some people, who shall remain nameless and who are clearly big mincers, think it’s foul.

Anyway this ambrosia no longer features on Revolution’s shot menu, undeterred by this I asked the lovely Duncan (best barman in the world by the way) if he had access to a secret stash of said alcohol. After a brief furtle in the cellar he returned with a bottle containing – what can only be described as – oaty dregs.

I of course jumped at the chance to consume this most delicious drink and immediately ordered two.

After retiring to a table Restless Cheese and I drank our white russians, interspersing their consumption with a shot or two from our ‘stick’. It was on about shot three that the magic happened.

Duncan approached our table and produced an entire bottle of porridge vodka from behind his back! How much was he asking for this delicious treat? Just £10. Ten stirlings for the most delicious drink in the world?

Did I want it? Yes I did!

Did I get it? Yes I did!

What I do have to say though is that I owe a great deal of thanks to Restless Cheese, for it was on his dollar that this bottle was purchased. Thank you, you are a great friend and I can’t wait to open it to celebrate the birth of your son and heir! I don’t care if that was a drunken promise either, you’re sticking to it!

Very shortly this site will be hosting a petition to bring back the finest cereal the world has ever known: Golden Grahams.

When I say shortly I mean now. Huzzah! Witness the petition is here! Click here to sign the petition.

I trust you will sign it?

I forgot to mention, I got some really cool shit for my birthday.

First on the list is a scarf, a reet long multi coloured scarf, with matching skull cap. Of course that’s not all though. Oh, no.

No, no, no, no.

I got an even cooler gift than that. I got a voucher.

For what? I hear you cry. For what?!

Well calm down my cherubs for I shall now impart to you what exactly it was the voucher was for.

It was for a day of Segway Rallying, just how cool is that?

I know, awesome isn’t it. Although I am slightly concerned by the photos on their site, the people on the Segways all look a bit, well, special needs.

Yay! It’s Dickerdoodle time!

Penny Arcade is running its/their Dickerdoodle competition again! I missed out on it last year, due to laziness and incomprehension but this year I want to win.

If any of you love me, you’ll help. We only have until December 8th, so if you even vaguely care about me and my bizarre inclinations you’ll rock up to my place on Saturday with ingredients and bake until your balls (or lady bits) turn blue.

So, are you in?

Except it didn’t.

My plan to renew my WordPress installation and change my blog theme have gone proper wrong.

Primarily the version of WordPress I’m using is out of date by several revisions, so an upgrade of that would have been good but (there’s always a but) the theme I’d chosen which is a K2 style, is broken under anything more modern than WordPress 2.7.

So, to cut a long story short I’ve just fucked it off for now. The blog is working, sorta, and I’ve changed the Lightbox effect on images but I’ve still got a major job on my hands to get it properly sorted. Lots of admin to do.

I also want to get my One Year gallery centred on the page, but it’s proving a real bitch to do. Damn it.

So far outstanding jobs are:

• File structure housekeeping
• Element alignment (galleries and video)
• Video hosting (move files back to Revver)
• Various layout issues
• Investigate Twitter feed’s temperamental nature
• Update WordPress without breaking anything
• Document issues with NGGallery
• Reduce categories, tag all posts
• Clean up photo galleries (tagging, image sizing)

I can’t think of anything else at the minute but it looks like these issues will have to wait until I take a break in January.

I’ve decided to retire this site.

It’s looking old and well past its best and as Restless Cheese said the other night, it’s a bit word heavy.

So, in order to revitalise www.crackerwax.com I’ve been fiddling with a test site.

Have a looky!

Bear in mind it’s not finished and is only up there to give you a feel for the style I’m going for next.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

I’m sitting here in front of my Mac and I can’t think of a single thing to write, well apart from this thing about how I can’t think of anything to write.

Sometimes it feels like there’s too much to do and I’m paralysed by the choice available to me.

So I’m sitting here listening to Eels and lazily browsing the web.

So often do I end up sitting in stasis, unable to move, not going one way or the other for fear of missing something. Unable to even commit to watching a film, two hours is too much, I might miss something else.

Consequently I miss everything.

This is a mess isn’t it?

I feel compelled to complain to the BBC about the cruel mockery, in Fawlty Towers, of Spanish speaking migrant workers.

It is high time that the BBC prevented this sort of thing from happening in the past.

Clearly I would have complained at the time of broadcast back in 1975 but I was not aware of the outrage I would have felt, had I been watching it then, up until recently, when I saw a rerun on UK Gold.

From what I understand it was originally screened on BBC Two in the early evening. This is entirely unacceptable in my opinion.

I demand that the creator of this racist filth and anyone involved in its portrayal be executed and that the BBC pay Spain a fine of at least €1,000,000.

This is probably the only thing that would enable me to sleep at night knowing that racist, so called, ‘comedy’ like this had at some point been created.

What’s more Aubrey Singer, who I believe was controller of BBC Two at the time, should be exhumed and his corpse made to give a public apology.

Death cannot be tolerated as an excuse for allowing this sort of filth onto our television screens 33 years ago.

It is high time the BBC and its disgusting former performers and controllers realised that the very fabric of space and time itself is liable to rip apart should this sort of thing be allowed to happen at unspecified dates in the past.

It’s true. Today was a voyage of discovery for me that lead to my uncovering of two amazing gems.

The first is that we have Ronald Reagan to thank for GPS navigation! Well, a point of clarification perhaps, he didn’t invent it but he was responsible for allowing its use by civilians.

After a Korean Airlines flight got lost over Soviet territory and was shot down by fighter jets in 1983, it was Reagan that decided that GPS should be declassified. GPS then moved from being a military only doodad to being accessible by the general public!

Additionally in 1996 Bill Clinton authorised the phasing out of selective availability. That’s the noise that’s injected into the signal to prevent it from being too accurate.

So a combination of Clinton and Reagan has meant that I can now locate my nearest McDonalds on my iPhone without batting an eyelid.

The other amazing fact is more of an epiphany.

At the end of Mr Blue Sky by ELO I always thought the robotic voice said ‘Mr Blue Sky’. No! I was wrong!

It actually says ‘please turn me over’, how mad is that? For the past twenty years I’ve thought it said ‘Mr Blue Sky’ and now I find out it says nothing of the kind.

Thing is, I now can’t hear anything other than ‘please turn me over’ no matter how hard I try.

My life is amazing isn’t it?

If John McCain becomes President of the United States Of America I will never go there so long as his administration is in power.

That my friends is promise.

John McCain is out of touch and Sarah Palin is a moron. Not the dream ticket I imagine running a super-power. I guess that means New York would be off my holiday list.

Then again, Tokyo wouldn’t kill me. Who wants a DSi?

Sarah Palin is astonishing. And I mean that.

The intelligent amongst you will realise what I mean by that I’m sure.

So without further ado, watch this…

Find more videos like this on The Spill.com Movie Community

Anybody confused as to my thoughts on the way I want the US elections to go?

Good.

By the way, SpillCrew rock. Nuff said.

I recently announced that, thanks in no small part to his outstanding performance at the end of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, my goal for 2009 was to meet William Shatner.

Well no sooner had I announced this, than I had changed my mind and decided that a less prominent target should be attempted first. Almost like a bit of a warm up.

My new target was to be game writing legend Jeff Minter. My thinking being that Wales was easier to get to than California.

Well, I’ve come under heavy fire for this decision. So have opted to give the final say to my reader. So go on, vote away reader!

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I should add that the original decision to stalk Shatner was undertaken whilst heavily intoxicated. Andy and I had had three bottles of red wine, the remains of a box of white and quite a few vodka and lemonades.

In fact Andy had originally pledged to under take this journey with me but I suspect my cherry-beer-fuelled take on Shatner’s famous speech had probably sent him funny.

As anyone who knows me will testify, my favourite activity, after having downed a few cherry beers, is to quote Captain Kirk’s immortal lines from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

It was this one scene that last night, lead to a drunken conversation where it was decided that the goal for 2009 is to meet William Shatner.

I will be ruminating about how to go about doing this but all suggestions will be greatly received. First on the list though is the setting up of a Google alert for ‘William Shatner’.

Have you seen the new Microsoft adverts, featuring former Microsoft CEO William Henry Gates III and comedian Jerome Allen Seinfeld? They’re actually rather amusing.

Fuck knows what the point of them is, they do seem to be entirely without point, but nevertheless they are still rather amusing.

Have a watch. Part one:

Part two:

Let’s just hope they’re not another Lost and we end up watching them for years, not quite knowing what the hell they’re about!

Oh and just one more thing. Note the really rather cool use, in the first clip, of the mugshot from Gates’ 1977 bust in New Mexico for running a stop sign and driving without a license. Neat.

So here it is, my latest stupid idea to try and while away the days. Ladies and gentlemen I present to you: The Amazing 31 Days In October Movie Challenge!

It is my intention to watch one movie, that I haven’t already seen, for every day in October.

The list, in order, for those that give a shit is:

1. Sympathy For Mister Vengeance
2. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
3. Man On Fire
4. Narc
5. Die Hard 4.0
6. Fallen
7. Secretary
8. The Passion Of The Christ
9. Sideways
10. The Good Shepherd
11. Capote
12. Ichi The Killer
13. A Tale Of Two Sisters
14. Zodiac
15. Monster’s Ball
16. Schindler’s List
17. Spun
18. Kung Fu Hustle
19. Yojimbo
20. Stoned
21. Singles
22. Amelie
23. Million Dollar Baby
24. THX 1138
25. Being John Malkovich
26. Elektra
27. Rain Man
28. 猫の恩返し (The Cat Returns)
29. Renaissance
30. The Machinist
31. Videodrome

Quite a list, huh? Looks a bit daunting but I’m committed, look I’ve dug them all out and everything!

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Stay tuned!

So the Apple event has been and gone and with it my faith in Apple. What the fuck was that about?

My predictions proved very hit and miss, primarily because it was so short.

1. iPod Touch redesigned to have physical volume control, possibly built in speaker
   Victory is mine! Correct
2. iPod Touch range repriced, possible introduction of 64GB model
   A little bit wrong with that one, half a point
3. New iPod Nano design with widescreen
   Correct again, but an obvious one really
4. Possible bump in capacity of 160GB iPod Classic, 80GB to remain
   I would never have predicted a downgrade!
5. iPhone/iPod Touch firmware 2.1 released
   This was touch and go but right nonetheless
6. iTunes 8.0 released, introduction of a subscription service sadly unlikely
   Good guess!
7. Mac Mini possibly dropped from the Mac range
   Given the title of the gig I should have guessed, no Mac news
8. New MacBooks introduced
   See above, October for this now I think
9. iPod Shuffle to receive storage boost to 4GB
   Just plain wrong

4½ out of 9 isn’t bad, probably enough to get an A at A-level these days.

The actual content of the announcement was wank though. ‘New Nanos!’. Yay! Hardware! In lot’s of colours, now we’re talking.

‘The iPod Touch now has volume controls and a wee speaker!’. Good, ok, I can wait for the cool shit.

‘iTunes 8.0 with Genius’. Hmm, yes ok.

‘We’ve decided to downgrade the iPod classic range from 160GB to 120GB!’. Hang on? What?! Eh?

‘Ladies and gentlemen, Jack Johnson!’. Ah-ha, so here we go a bit of Jack and then it’s the one-more-thing announcement!

‘Bye.’. What? Eh?

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Congratulations to Andy and Louisa on their most magnificent wedding.

[singlepic=525]

More pictures will be coming soon.

If you have any pictures of the wedding that you would like posted then please email them to me at photos@crackerwax.com

After having spent about twelve seconds lying in the sun yesterday, I awoke this morning to find that, seemingly, in the night I had caught fire.

My body was the colour of molten rock, the sheets had my outline charred onto them and judging by the amount of pain I was in, I’d had a layer of skin removed.

After spending a few moments considering my options, I gingerly got out of bed and crackled my way to the bathroom.

What greeted me was not pretty (not that it is normally but you know what I mean).

There is a moral to this story. That moral is wear sunscreen. Lots of sunscreen.

For those not in the know a Segway can be best described as being the horse-less carriage version of the chariots they rode around in, in Ben Hur. It sounds freaky but it’s great fun, I suggest you try one at the first opportunity.

Sadly I didn’t manage to get a picture of myself on one, scooting around Bermuda on our Segway tour but let me tell you I want one.

Just thought you’d like to know.

I don’t have sea legs, this has been exhaustively established by my inability to eat, stand up or in fact function in any manner at all whilst on this ship.

Hopefully this situation will improve as I munch my way through a bunch of antiemetics but right now I feel like shit.

Bleeurgh.

This man is getting married.

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So, much against his will, he had a stag do.

The pictures will appear here soon.

I’ve decided to start going to the gym again. I think it’s about time I did too. I had my fitness test today.

The results were at the same time tragic and rather splendid. Odd huh?

My blood pressure is perfect, which is good. My body fat sits at 26%, which is bad. My general fitness level is above average, which is good. My weight is 102Kg which is bad. My resting heart rate is very low, which is good. Life’s a roller coaster, huh?

I also learned from my instructor the ideal, in body building terms at least, is that your biceps should be the same size as your calf muscles. In my case this would mean I could rip the head off a donkey. Suffice to say I’m not aiming for that.

As part of this ongoing health drive I’ve put up a new page. It’s a gallery of pictures of me and it’s going to run for a year. Hopefully we should see a fair amount of change.

I swear I have not felt as tired and run down as I do right now.

I’ve had a busy weekend, in fairness I’ve had a busy few weeks, actually let’s be honest I’ve had a fucking nightmare couple of months.

I’m shattered, I’m going to have an early night, maybe have an early start tomorrow.

In cool news the new iPhone is out on Friday, will definitely be scoping out the queues on my way to work and if they’re small enough I will probably pop in and buy one.

That was a boring post wasn’t it?