Go forth

How difficult is it, exactly, to make a pair of socks?

Obviously, as a man of manly manliness I don’t – and probably never will – have much experience of knitting, at least until you can easily get patterns for racing cars, spaceships and full scale models of Keira Knightley. But I’d wager that making a pair of socks is simpler than constructing, say, a flatscreen television. Or one of those cheese toastie machines that you buy, use constantly for a month until your insides have turned to butter, and then hide away in the back of a cupboard where it will stay unloved and unused for the next twenty-five years, awaiting the inevitable machine intelligence uprising when it’ll come back and toast your face off.

In fact, I suspect that socks are probably easier to make than most other items of clothing, barring possibly the g-string. They are tubes of wool (or selected synthetic alternatives), sealed at one end and with a bend in it. It’s not difficult. I’ve had many fine relationships with some nicely crafted socks that do the job perfectly well, fitting comfortably, keeping your feet warm and preventing your skin from being ground to a moist and bloody powder by the insides of your shoes.

Someone needs to show BHS how to make socks. Because the last pack that I bought seem to fail utterly at achieving the very basic requirements of sockiness.

First off, I’ve got size 11 feet. Not massive - I don’t have to wear clown shoes or anything - but not small either. You’ll struggle to push me over; like a Weeble, I’ll wobble but I won’t fall down. So naturally, I bought the socks marked ‘Sizes 9-12′. Stupid, stupid me. Because these socks are so tight they push all the blood out of my feet, making my eyeballs swell slightly every time I put them on. I end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall when he gets thrown out into the Mars atmosphere.

I have a friend who once tore a muscle in her shoulder when she was taking off a pair of boots - having tried to put these socks on I now know how she felt. You could sell them to the military - they’d form part of the G-suits that fighter pilots have to wear. 

They’d need a bit of work first, mind you, since there’s another major sock failure that they suffer from. The moment you try and wear them, they fall apart. If you wash them, they fall apart. I fear that were you to shout at them in despair and disappointment, they’d start explosively shedding bits of thread like a poodle with bubonic mange. The leggy bit (technical term) separates almost entirely from the heel leaving your ankle exposed in a way that would cause uproar in Victorian times. 

I think these socks must be the equivalent of the velcro quick-release trousers that male strippers wear. And I really don’t think there’s a huge market out there for male foot-fetish striptease artistes.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I live opposite the family of a true animated hero: the Road Runner. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was absolutely right - cartoons are real, and Wile E Coyote’s eternal nemesis lives happily in Essex, a welcome respite from racing along the dusty roads of the American southwest.

How do I know this?

Because every time someone leaves the house in one of their many and varied cars, they merrily toot their horn twice. Meep meep.

Every.

Single.

Time.

Meep meep.

So it must be a family of Road Runners, keeping the old traditions alive by sounding the warcry and remembering the old days when life was a good straight road and an obsessive canine with an unlimited credit account at Acme Corporation.

Because the only alternative is that the house is populated by the sort of cretinous morons who, having said good-bye to their fellow simpletons, feel the need to announce to the entire street the electrifying fact that they are departing from their driveway in a motorised vehicle. Every time that meep meep sounds, crowds of my neighbours rush to their windows to stare at the amazing spectacle of a magical horseless wagon passing by. Truly we are filled with gratitude that we might be afforded a chance to see this miracle.

Middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep, five in the morning, doesn’t matter - the meep meep endures. I’m sure that even if we were afflicted by some natural disaster forcing us to evacuate our homes - flooding, perhaps, or a many-tentacled horror from under the earth - the last thing I’d hear as I rushed panic-stricken from my home would be the imbecilic double toot from opposite as the subnormal neanderthals saluted their shortly-to-be-eaten house.

It’s time to open an account at Acme.

Meep meep.

Now I’ve had a bit of a rant about doggy accoutrements before but take a look at this:

Aaah, it’s a cave for your pet pooch from Pooch Online. Your beloved bundle of fluff can pretend it’s a bit more of a wolf than its four-inch legs might suggest. This custom cavern is built with a multi-layer construction for “a cozy, calm denning experience”. I’m sure you’ve heard many complaints from dogs who are unhappy with the poor denning experience provided by their owners – a simple basket and blanket just doesn’t measure up when Fido next door can go spelunking through his very own Wookey Hole.

Not to mention the “grand, cathedral-like entry of the root” to impress upon visitors that this is the very highest echelon of fake papier mâché dog caves (although the site says ‘paper mache’ because speaking French is un-American.)

But the defining pinnacle of this astounding canine chamber is the accessory it comes with: a personal, limited edition “Sidekick Rock”. Rover’s life is now complete. Your pet will now have it’s own 70s-fad-inspired pet rock, albeit one that’ll be kinder to the teeth than the original version.

Obviously, by the time I had read through to this point I had already pulled my wallet out ready to buy, despite not even owning a dog. This is the ultimate item to make my life complete. Add to basket, add to basket.

Then, just as I was typing in my credit card details, I noticed something odd. There was a little number that needed my attention – the price.

$5900

Even with the exchange rates at present, that’s around £2,900. It would appear that the current housing crisis hasn’t had a knock-on effect on doggy domiciles. For a lump of paste and cardboard reminiscent of something you’d make in primary school when you’re not eating the glue and flicking paint at the girls across the desk, you’re practically going to have to take out a mortgage.

I hope your dog can afford to pay rent.

Before you read the rest of this post, a notice:

Warning: The copyright proprietor has licensed this blog post (including its non-existent soundtrack) for private home use only. The definition of home use excludes the use of this blog post at locations such as clubs, coaches, hospitals, hotels, oil rigs, prisons, schools, the birthday parties of small children, monasteries, igloos, bawdy houses, deep-sea submersibles, space shuttles and monkey (or related ape) enclosures.

Any unauthorised copying, editing, exhibition, renting, exchanging, hiring, lending, broadcasting, reading, laughing at, quoting, extolling, denying, decrying, considering, ignoring, or thinking of this blog post, or any part thereof, is strictly prohibited and any such action establishes liability for a civil action and may give rise to criminal prosecution, professional assassination, strategic nuclear missile launch and the selling into slavery of the first-born of all your descendants in perpetuity.

Despite the fact that you are reading this completely legally and legitimately, I will now compel you to watch an unskippable film about how copying this blog post supports criminals, murderers, rapists and terrorists, and contributes to global warming, extinction of endangered animals, armageddon and heat rash.

I think you can see my point. I rather object to having threats rammed into my face every time I want to watch a DVD that I have bought with my own money from a completely licit retailer. And today as I browsed the film racks at my local Tesco store in the hope of finding something good to watch in the evening (at the same time worrying about the state of society when finding that The Condemned was in the charts, boasting the all-star line-up of former wrestler ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin and former wrestler-pretending-to-be-footballer Vinnie Jones), I noticed something disturbing. From the flat screens that Tesco seem to have installed everywhere to further the cause of a Blade Runner/Minority Report-inspired advertising-saturated future came the sounds of the deeply irking ‘knock-off Nigel’ anti-piracy advert that’s been doing the rounds on TV.

Great. Thank you Tesco and whichever anti-copying federations are active in the UK. Thanks for browbeating and berating me about piracy even as I stand there hoping to give you money. Perhaps you could put a screen up by the eggs warning me that if I were to buy them and throw them at someone, I’ll be arrested and imprisoned for assault? Or how about a sign by the bananas covering the legal perils of dropping one of their skins and explaining how I’d be sued to kingdom come? Do these people not think that suggesting their own customers are criminals just might not be the best way to go about things?

I shall leave you with this lovely interpretation of the anti-copying trailer from the IT Crowd.

I have new eyes.

Or to be more precise, I have new glasses in order to cater for my evidently inferior genetics – thanks for that, ancestors. Practically the entire rest of my family are long-sighted but I like to be different so I’m short sighted and astigmatic. Perhaps I’m some kind of mutant; that’d explain the instant healing and extendable claws too.

Going to the opticians is fraught with the kind of insignificant minor perils that fill the lives of we upstart hominids ever since we decided to use our opposable thumbs for more than just doing impressions of the Fonz.

Firstly there’s the eye test itself. It’s mostly pretty benign, except for that godawful glaucoma test where jets of air are fired at your eyeballs in order to test the fluid pressure (tonometry, if you’re looking for a new word). Of course, what the optician is really measuring is quite how high you jump out of the chair each time they fire the machine, in the hope of beating Gavin’s score from last week when a customer knocked themselves out on the ceiling. Next time you have to endure that test, look upwards first to see how many dents and little clumps of skull matter are embedded in the tiles above you.

Next, once it’s been pointed out that you have approximately the same visual acuity as an earthworm, off you trot to choose your frames. At this point you’ll be confronted with about a billion different concoctions of wire, plastic and lens from which you must choose just one. Rumour has it that when Sisyphus was given the choice between rolling a boulder up a mountain for eternity or picking out the perfect pair of specs, he plumped for the easier option and headed for the hills.

I’ve often wondered how people with seriously poor vision are able to choose their glasses frames because as soon as they take their current pair off to try on the new set in the shop – hey presto – everything’s gone blurry and they can’t see well enough to decide whether they look good. Bit of a catch-22, that one.

Finally, when you’ve picked the glasses that make you look least like Elton John, you come to that special point when you realise that your fabulous new pair of spectacles are actually going to be somewhat redundant. Because, in order to afford the price of the frames, the lenses, and being squirted in the eye with high-pressure air, you’re going to have to sell your corneas on the human organs black market.

Anyways, I got through all that a week ago without having to auction off too many essential body parts and took delivery of my new specs on Friday. They look like this if you’re interested. From past experience frames by Oakley tend to be extremely comfortable and fit like a glove (if your head were a hand, that is). Plus, they don’t go flying across the court when I make any particularly sudden movements in badminton.

They’re not that dissimilar to my previous pair, and what has always amused me is how ridiculously impractical the case that comes with them is: a huge rounded metal torpedo that, if you can even fit it in your trouser pocket, makes you look like the world’s most well-endowed gentleman. Venture into any airport with it and you’ll be shot on suspicion of carrying a pipe bomb, unless it’s Heathrow where they have no doubt lost the guns in the same place everyone’s luggage has gone.

I got a pair of prescription sunglasses too (here, stalkers), and the case for these is a hilariously even larger black woven-nylon lozenge – about the size of two Volvo’s and a Nissan Micra. This is not practical design, Oakley. When I pack for holiday, the glasses case is supposed to go inside the suitcase, and not vice-versa. This massive coffin will not fit in any pocket known to mankind and is more likely to sit for eternity like a 2001-style monolith.

So then, Network Rail has been fined a record £14 million for screwing up rail maintenance over Christmas.

Now let’s get this straight. Network Rail is having its usual host of difficulties taking care of the tracks that are generally considered fairly important for trains, and trains are of course pretty important for getting trainspotters off the streets where they’d probably indulge their odd compulsions by collecting guns before one day cracking and heading off to work with a bagful of heavy weaponry.

Obviously then, the answer is to take away the money that Network Rail would use to carry out that maintenance because, as we all know, having less money to invest is guaranteed to mean a better service all round. If we took away all their money, just think how absolutely amazing the train networks would become. I expect we’d get a hundred trains an hour, shooting along tracks as smooth as buttered mercury.

And taking away money is much easier than looking into the problem, working out efficient solutions and employing people to do the job properly. I’ll even help them with suggestions on how to get along with even less money. For example, why don’t we convert the whole system to monorail? That’d mean they’d only have half the amount of track to maintain, instantly halving costs and freeing up cash to pay some more fines. Soon the system will be so efficient that all the funding given to Network Rail will be instantly bounced back again to the government, save for a modest fee of around 20 percent to pay for the bureaucrats needed to think up and administer those fines.

Hmm, hold on a minute. Bounced back to the government? What do you mean, ‘back’? Well, here’s the thing. It’s not a big thing, so let’s not dwell on it too much. Barely even important, really. It’s just that Network Rail is funded by…er…the government, although they are quite keen to give the impression that this isn’t the case. And the government is funded by…um…everyone who pays taxes. So this £14 million of fines is just taxpayers’ money that the government gave to Network Rail, and is now taking back again, less all the thousands of pounds needed to pay for the civil servants and paperwork.

It’s a bit like a lovely merry-go-round of taxes, except that this particular merry-go-round happens to be run by some rather creative minions of Satan who are making it slowly spiral inwards, compressing all the cash into a massive black hole comprised of nothingness and terrible rail transport systems.

Genius like this makes my head hurt.

This is the new logo for Cardiff. It cost £45,000.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No.

This does not say Cardiff. It does not evoke images of the city’s history, its castle or attractions. It has no sense of the national pride of the Welsh, or indeed any humanity whatsoever. It just does nothing, slipping out of the mind faster than a greased ferret down a teflon pipe. This is the logo of a low-grade technology park, a cheap paint manufacturer or a doomed-to-failure eBay clone.

I’m not even the slightest bit Welsh, but I feel embarrassment for anyone in Cardiff who is going to have to accept this as a representation of their city.

I was idly skimming through a copy of Marketing at work a while back when the UK launch of the following essential product caught my eye:

Yes, these are exactly what they appear to be. Snausages Breakfast Bites are bacon and egg shaped food items for dogs, presumably for doting owners to feed to their little Fido at the break of day. Needless to say, they originate in America.

I’m sorry, but dogs do not care what their food looks like, as evidenced by their continued survival on miscellaneous brown and grey meat paste from a Pedigree Chum tin. Dogs will eat anything, up to and including sticks, stones and their own poo. Actually looking at what they’re about to scarf down comes as an afterthought.

And if your much-loved bundle of fuzz were to take a glance at these bacon and egg shaped travesties in the moments before slobbering, they’d be pretty disappointed. Because looking at the ingredients, ‘Breakfast Bites’ contain neither bacon nor eggs, making them a kind of zen food: What is the taste of no eggs and bacon?

Holy cow though, they do have oregano, black pepper, basil, rosemary and marjoram – that’s more herbs than I usually use when I cook something. The ‘chicken by-product meal’ sounds mighty tasty too.

A nose around on the Snausages site (and when typing ‘Snausages’ I have to resist the urge to follow it with a ™) uncovers a treasure trove of twee and pointless foods like these 101 Dalmations biscuits with facts about the film printed upon them:

Hint to manufacturers: Dogs cannot read. Humans can read but do not generally read dog biscuits. And even if dogs could read, they aren’t likely to want to know that each dog in a film they will never see has 32 spots. They would much rather have information as to what each character’s bottom smells like – that’s far more relevant to your average canine.

Honestly, novelty shaped food is something that should be restricted to small children for whom rocket shaped breakfast cereal, Billy Bear sausagemeat and alphabetti spaghetti will induce gurglings of delight. I notice that Snausages don’t seem to produce any cat-shaped dog biscuits - maybe that’s introducing owners to too much of what I like to call reality.

Talking about spaghetti though…

Come on now, dogs are descended from cunning wild animals streaking across open plains in groups, running down herds of deer and antelope for food. Wolf packs did not sit and decide to go for a quick spag bol or lasagne instead. A wolf deciding to go for a quick Italian just means it’s chasing a chap who’s particularly light on his feet. Pasta is not dogfood – the only reason Rover will eat this is because it’s wrapped around lumps of lamb and dogs can’t hide the bits they don’t want under their spoon like a child can.

Something that crossed my mind a while back, and has been bugging me ever since, is this: what rationale is there for continuing to supply gas to domestic homes? Think about it…it’s an invisible, intangible, yet highly volatile substance that we have to pump to our houses through expensive and relatively fragile pipelines whereby it ends up perfectly ready to escape through the tiniest of holes and explode unexpectedly, distributing you and your house over much of the surrounding area. If you do manage to keep it confined to quarters, best be sure that your central heating system is up to scratch lest the carbon monoxide snuffs you out in your sleep with the silent hands of an assassin.

If someone asked you to keep a couple of buckets of petrol or a crate of TNT in your house, you’d probably have to think twice before agreeing. But no-one raises an eyebrow at paying to pipe in an explosive gas which presents a serious threat to that very unraised eyebrow.

It’s not just a safety thing; surely it’s extremely uneconomical? There’s a whole infrastructure of pipework, pumping and processing stations dedicated to supplying millions of houses which must cost enormous amounts to install and maintain. Then all we do is set light to it to warm up a bit of water for our radiators and boil some potatoes for supper, all the while hoping our dinner isn’t going to be curtailed by a massive fireball and the sudden rearrangement of our homes into a neat circle of bricks around a crater.

There’s nothing here that couldn’t be achieved with electricity. Sure, the chefs amongst us might say that gas hobs are slightly better to cook on than electric, but it’s not that much of a sacrifice for a safer life. If baked beans could only be cooked by inserting a stick of dynamite in the pot, I think I could just about manage to cope without them.

In the meantime, if we must continue to burn all that natural gas – which at least will get rid of the nasty stuff – send it to gas power stations and convert it into electricity. That’s got to be more efficient than sticking it through the four tiny little burners on your kitchen hob, with half the heat warming your kitchen rather than the saucepan full of Smash.

And if it stops us having to pay an extortionate amount of money to a man from Corgi every time the boiler needs servicing, then all the better. Just what do dogs know about gas that makes their training so expensive anyway?

Thanks for the image from David Forward’s website.