from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Salvation

Who says Americans have no sense of irony? Here's a first class example of irony in action.

Perhaps that's taking the role of Corrections Officer to include correcting/helping natural selection?

And did you spot the town name? More irony! Is there no end to it?

I saw Goldmember this weekend.

There are two types of people in this world. People who love the Austin Powers movies, and the people who don't. There's no room for indifference here.

If you loathe them, then stay away, rent this movie*, have a good cry, and quit looking down your nose at the rest of us.

If, like me, you like Austin & Co., then go see this movie. This is the best Austin Powers movie so far.

From then on, it's back to the 'real' world, with all the usual faces, plus Beyoncé Knowles as CIA agent, Foxxy Cleopatra. She is well cast in this role, managing to look both Seventies-styled, and sexy at the same time. That's no easy feat.

The new villain, Goldmember, also played by Mike Myers, takes 'being creepy' to a whole new level. He's a 1970's Dutch roller disco fan with no genitalia, flaking skin and a twisted mind. Myers' Dutch accent is spot-on in a slightly clichéd way.

Michael Caine appears as Austin's dad, Nigel Powers, complete with the obligatory Ken Dodd teeth. His spy car is the New Mini, complete with a full Union Jack paint job. This is the only picture I've been able to find of it, despite extensive searches.

In fact, psychologist wannabes among you, will spot an inordinate number of 'father figure' references in this movie. If you saw the edition of Inside The Actor's with Mike Myer's, you'll already be aware of just how much Myers wanted to show his father his success, a success which didn't occur until after his father went senile and was unable to appreciate it.

Throughout the film, Austin is reminded of how his father was never there to see his successes (at school, getting knighted by the Queen).

All in all, as I've said, I think this was the best of the Austin Powers films so far. There's always a danger of an idea having been done to death, but not so in the case of this film. I'd even go so far as to suggest there's room for a fourth film, provided Myers' creativity maintains its current level.

There's one memorable scene, towards the end of the film, where Austin and Mini-Me are sneaking around the enemy submarine, and end up being mistaken for a henchman (Austin is on Mini-Me's shoulders with a long coat on) and are asked to take a medical. Whilst it wasn't high-brow humour (and I like that too), it was incredibly well-executed, and I don't think I've laughed so hard all year. Tears of laughter were streaming down my face, and a one point, I was laughing so hard, I thought I was going to have a nosebleed!

Perhaps that should be my new measure of comedy: "If I aint bleeding, you ain't funny enough."

*In case you're wondering, yes I have seen this movie. I enjoyed it. It was so sad, and it was the nearest I've come to actually crying in a cinema, ever. I had tears in my eyes, especially during that bit when he's in the attic with the young boy and he (Hopkins) starts crying, but I didn't blub. I suspect my British stiff upper lip was contorting my face enough to prevent the tears from falling out of my eyes.

... and no, it's not about my underwear.

The iBook has been overnighted to Apple. It seems the hard disk was jarred whilst writing to disk, causing a head crash. It should be fixed tomorrow and back by Thursday.

My PC has been upgraded from a Pentium II 300MHz, to an Athlon XP1800+, however, the new processor chip burned out within seconds of being set up. Yes, all the cooling was in place, as were the wires. It might have been a short circuit around the processor and CPU shim.

So, I'm down to just one machine still working. My trusty Mac is still going strong.

All that, plust a bunch of other hassles, means that my blogging hasn't been so prolific this week. Bear with me, or breath a sigh of relief - it's your choice.

In other news, EID has been banned by my former employer. Reports are coming in that readers working in said company, are now seeing EID being blocked by the company's "You're not here to enjoy yourself" filter software.

As one friend and former colleague said, "You've made it!"

Warning: this product contains rants

The iBook's hard disk has died. I rang Apple, and they're sending a courier with a box. He'll be requested Monday, arrive Tuesday, and return Thursday with the iBook fixed.

You can't fault Apple's AppleCare plan. It costs less than these so-called "extended warranty" schemes that the electronics retail stores offer, and the problems are actually resolved, quickly and efficiently.

A Lesson From History
When I bought my first Mac (an iMac DV Special Edition), I did so from CompUSA. Given the size of the purchase, I paid $200 for an extended (two year) warranty from them. What can I say? I hadn't been living in the US for more than a couple of months, and I was unaware just how big a bunch of lying bastards they were.

After a few months, I started having problems with the Mac's display. It would flicker, it would discolour, and sometimes it would resize the screen image to be squished into 2/3 of the available space.

So I, like the trusting fluffy bunny I was, mentioned this problem to the so-called technicians* at CompUselessA. I was told that it might be electrical interference. Yeah, right. OK, I'll play along. I went home and checked. It wasn't.

So I took the iMac into the store, and asked them to fix it. They kept the thing for a week, in which time they claimed** that they'd tested it, but been unable to recreate the problem. My suspicion was that they'd actually had it on a shelf, switched off, whilst they used the glass of the screen as a mirror, to help them pop the myriad of pimples, zits and spots that seem to be a requirement for working there. I suppose I was lucky they wiped the puss off the glass before handing it back. After all, who wants a green screen monitor in this day and age?

After another week or so, the display's problems resurfaced, so I photographed it, took the pictures into CompUSA, and demanded action. Boy did I feel good when they hopped to it! The iMac was with them for five days, and when it was handed back to me, I was told that they'd replaced the graphics card, the motherboard and some other component.

After a couple more weeks, the problems reoccurred. This time, Mr Fluffy Bunny was not in da haus.

I rang Apple, and told my story of woe. They, bless 'em, put me in touch with a Macintosh repair specialist, about half a mile from my office, and said that they would pay for everything.

The Truth Comes Out
The technician*** was a nice guy, who really 'went the extra mile' to fix my Mac. In the course of his repair, he rang Apple to ask for a spare part.

To explain for a second, all Macintosh spare parts come from Apple. They are the only distributor, and they ask for the serial number of each Mac before they give a spare part out for it. That way, they know exactly what spare parts have been put in each computer they've sold.

He mentioned to them what I'd been told by CompUSA (that they'd replaced three components), and they checked their records. According to Apple, CompUSA had replaced NO parts of my Mac whatsoever.

Yes, that's right dear reader, they had looked me in the eyes, and lied. Not a little white lie, but a big, fat, pimple-covered red lie, with a side-order of deceit.

Apple sent the Mac technician the one part that actually needed replacing, he fixed the Mac, and I had it back, in full working order.

This Is A Job For... Procrastination Man!
I was (surprise surprise) furious. Not only had these ignorant fuckers at CompUSA taken $200 of my hard(ly)-earned money, they'd wasted my time, and lied to me.

I spent some time thinking about how to complain further, but in the end, apathy set in. My Mac was fixed, free of charge, and the thought of having to talk to those thieving scumbags at CompUSA was more than I could bare.

Employment Policy
The trouble is, that CompUSA knows what it can get away with. It's the biggest electronics retailer in town, and so it knows it can withstand pissing off the occasional customer, by cutting corners on costs, because the majority of consumers don't notice, and keep coming back for more.

Why spend good money employing educated intelligent people, when they can get away with paying a pittance to staff with IQ's lower than their shoe size?

This works well for them, because the majority of the general public know even less about computers than the acne-ridden Fox viewers they employ. So this allows CompUSA to keep costs to a minimum, and profits to a maximum.

AppleCare
If you're buying a Mac, get AppleCare. It costs less than CompUselessA's extended warranty, the work is done by experts rather than lying fuckers, and the service is first class.

CompUSA ELB† Warranty on an iMac: $200 for two years
AppleCare on an iMac: $150 for THREE years

Anyone of any intelligence above that of CompUSA employees can do the math/maths on that one.

Another CompUSA Story
I now only buy consumables (such as blank CD-R disks) from CompUSA. However, a year after all this mentioned above took place, I bought an Apple Pro Mouse from them.

The Apple Pro Mouse, is an optical, one-button USB mouse. In fact there isn't even a button to press, you just tilt your hand forward, whilst holding it, to click.

Anyway, CompUselessA had stuck one of their, "Training available for this product" stickers on the box. After paying for it, I asked, deadpan, if there was a course I could go on to learn how to use this product. The guy on the till†† said that he'd have to ask someone, and headed off to get a supervisor.

I walked out, laughing rather too maniacally.

*These are the members of staff there who have developed their hand-eye co-ordination enough to not immediately stab themselves in the eye, should they be given a screwdriver. The remaining, less-developed staff, are employed on the shop floor.

**That's CompUSA-speak for, "lied through their teeth".

*** An accredited Apple technician, complete with brain, clue, and perfect hand-eye co-ordination.

† Extended Lying Bastard

††cash register, if you're American.

I wasn't going to blog tonight. My iBook is a little under the weather. It's a hardware thing. The hard disk is currently doing an impression of those Government Information films of the 1970's*, with Jimmy Savile.

This sort of thing often signifies that the hard disk is about to die. But this time, I'm ready!

I've backed up all my data from it, onto my desktop Mac, and am currently Norton Disk Doctoring it, to see if it's salvageable. If it's not, I do have AppleCare, so any repairs are covered, and couriered back and forth from my house.

*I'm talking about the ones, encouraging people to use their seatbelts in cars. You'll have to page down on the link to find reference to the Jimmy Savile stuff. The catchphrase was, "Clunk-click, every trip", and that, frankly, is what my hard disk is doing. It sounds like there's a marble loose in the casing!

from the Traffic 'Copter

There's a service you can get in Denver, from our local NBC affliate station, KUSA, called mytrafficnews.com.

Every day, at a time you specify, it emails you traffic news. Most people set it to send them the report, just before they leave the office.

Several friends of mine get this service. I would too, if I had a job to commute from.

I've heard from several people, that the guy who writes it, has a good sense of humour/humor*. This is shown, in the following, which arrived in today's message. It's worth reading it all, as it gets funnier further down:

*See? I'm bi-lingual!

from the Goober Search Engine

You might remember a while back, that I wrote about people discovering EID via some obscure search strings. These were search strings that I couldn't understand why we were in the results list thereof, nor why the person clicked on through to EID. "Naked Carrie Fisher Fakes" was one of them.

I casually monitor site traffic details from time to time, and recently I've noticed that not one, but two people have arrived at EID, from a Google search for, "Canadian bidet".

Of course, I've just realised, that by referring to this term again, I've probably pushed EID further up the Google search results for Canadian bidets.

We appear in the results (I think), because all the words in the search string appear on a single EID page. I'd written about a possible move to Canada, and the very next article was about the hilariously named Bidet Olé. In case you're curious Here's the EID page with it on.

Perhaps this is how I'll make my living via this site. Product placement and referral commision from the fine folks at Bidet Olé.

I just caught the end of So Graham Norton - an outrageous British chat show - on BBC America. It was the last show in the series/season, and ended with a German woman who set off an in- firework display by hitting a target with a ping pong ball.

The thing is, she fired this ping pong ball (accurately, it should be noted) from an orifice below her waist!

All done, in front of a live audience, Joan Collins, and Richard Wilson, the latter two of whom were sat facing her!

I just hope nobody tells Fox about it, or they'll turn it into another 'reality show'.

from the Pearl & Dean Depa pa pa paa pa pa pa pa paartment*

I seem to have seen a lot of films recently, either at the cinema, or on DVD. I've not had time to write individual pieces about them, so I now present a summary of each. They're listed alphabetically, because frankly (Mr Shankly**) I can't be arsed remembering the order in which I saw them.

The Dish
This is an Australian film, so immediately, we know to expect a good film, with gentle humour, earthy characters, and lots of crocodiles all drinking Foster's lager.

In the past few years, I've enjoyed pretty much all Australian films I've seen (Muriel's Wedding and The Castle are two I can remember).

The highlight for me, was seeing a Hillman Minx on the big screen. My dad used to own one of these, back in the early 1970's.

The film is about actual events that happened, during the Apollo 11 mission to land the first man on the moon. During certain parts of the mission, the only tracking station that was large enough to receive radio, telemetry data and video back from the Apollo 11, was near the small town of Parkes, Australia.

And so, this becomes that classic, "small town lads save the day" movie.

There's all the characters you'll have come to expect from an Australian movie; the slightly dorky hero, the naive young guy, the brash middle-aged father figure, the crocodile hunter, the suave guy who doesn't wear a hat with corks dangling from it.

My favourite quote:
American NASA Guy: So, we dont know where Apollo 11 is?"
Australian Tracking Station Bloke: Yeah, it's on it's way to the Moon."

All in all, a gentle, enjoyable comedy, that won't have you clutching your sides, but is a nice way to spend 101 minutes. Unless you've got crocodiles you should be hunting.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past several years, you'll have heard fo the British literary success that is Harry Potter. If, on the other hand, your interior design choices do involve moss, click on the link above for the details about the film.

Harry starts off as the adopted child of a couple who, should being gits become an Olympic sport, will be on the British team. They have a son of their own, modelled on Augustus Gloop from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the film had a different name). In short, they make his life hell.

Harry is eventually asked to join Hogwarts, the school for wizards and witches. This first film in a planned trilogy, focuses on Harry's first year at the Academy.

The young actors in it were good, the special effects were superbly crafted, and ... hold the front page:... Alan Rickman plays a sinister creepy guy, and Robbie Coltrane plays a tall fat guy.

Fierce Creatures
The A Fish Called Wanda crew team up again, joined by a bunch of familiar faces (to British TV), in a story about what a bastard Rupert Murdoch is.

Well, they don't actually come out and say this, but you'd have to be clinically dead not to spot the subtext here.

The villain of the piece is Australian Media Magnate Rod McCain, based in the US, who spends his day buying and dismantling other media and entertainment companies. For reasons best known to John Cleese and his co-writers, he buys a zoo, somewhere in Britain, and sends his henchmen to make it profitable.

Cleese plays an Englishman who's been living and working as a policeman in Hong Kong for the past 20 years, and is now in charge of the zoo. Jamie Lee Curtis does, "a bit of a Sean Connery", and plays herself, with a bad haircut (how could you tell the difference, some of you might be saying), as the American career gal with a heart. Even more improbably, she ends up falling for Cleese.

The reviews for this film were mostly negative, but I enjoyed it. It wasn't side-splittingly funny, but I chuckled at quite a few bits. Anyway, it's good to see Ronnie Corbett getting work.

The Importance of Being Earnest
Take today's two best-looking British actors, add one portion of Dame Judi Dench, a lass†† who looks just like Minnie Driver, but isn't, add a dash of 'token American actress to help US sales', dink around with the original script and stir well.

The link above includes a useful 'user review', that talks about how the producer has augmented Wilde's original story, in order to get more of the younger generations going to see the film.

Well, Mr Parker, it's like this. The younger audiences aren't going to be drawn in by Gwendoline getting a tattoo. The moment they see that it's Oscar Wilde, and not Adam Sandler, they'll be off on their skateboards as fast as their $200 Nikes will carry them.

Mallrats
Kevin Smith, as you may already know, is one of my favourite filmmakers.

Mallrats is yet another film about the whole middle-America slacker culture, and features the inimitable Jay and Silent Bob, in supporting roles.

The film didn't do brilliantly as far as the critics were concerned, but who gives a toss about them. Personally, I loved it! It had all the components of a good Kevin Smith film.

Epilogue
So that's it. We're up-to-date. Sorry it was such a long post. If you're still reading this, then you can now proclaim yourself part of the EID-hardcore (ooh let's just watch all the porn-related searches pick up this site now I've used that word!).

*US readers won't get this joke. Tough luck. It'd take way too long to explain.

**See the lyrics of Morrisey. Bill Shankly was the manager of Liverpool FC in the seventies, when Liverpool† were known as The Red Machine, and seemed unstoppable.

†A city in northern England famous for being my ancestral home. Oh yeah, and some band called The Beatles came from there too.

††Frances O'Connor

from the Star Fleet Dept.

This is apparently, not a joke. It might sound like an episode of Star Trek or Doctor Who, but if it does happen, then don't say I didn't warn you. Let's rock!

Thanks to Tim for the link.

from the Acronyms Division

Props to my friend, drinking buddy, and primary partner in crime, Tim, for coming up with the following new abbreviation in his new blog:

His best trick is at MSN* stations like Didcot Parkway

*MSN: Middle of Sodding Nowhere

from the Church of the Mac Evangelist Dept.

At the same time as I was blogging about my love of Apple Macintoshes, my trusty old Dell PC was dying.

It runs Windows 2000 Professional, which is a very stable Operating System (considering it's from Microsoft). I have Win2K, because that's the platform I needed, when I used to develop software at home, prior to work giving me a laptop.

I refuse to upgrade to XP, as it seems there's little difference between it and 2000. I've previously referred to XP as Microsoft Windows Fisher-Price Edition, as the main change seems to be an unnecessary amount of animation and bright colours*.

Anyway, my Win2K install had recently become a little unstable, as if some DLLs had become corrupted. Additionally, the hardware of the PC was starting to be a tad erratic, sometimes not finding both the hard drives, or seizing up during boot-up.

At the end of last week, it finally keeled over and didn't get back up. It couldn't read it's floppy drive, and it couldn't find its hard disks. It was dead, Jim.

Spock! Analysis Please.
By launching from my Win2K CD, I could see that the main HD was corrupted somewhere around the boot sector. For you non-techies, that's the part of the hard disk that's accessed first when starting up, and tells the system which operating system it's going to be running, and starts that whole process.

To use one of my home-grown technical terms for a sec, I was in a Negative-Paddle-Scenario**

In A Galaxy Far Far Away - Centennial
So last night I drove over to my friend Endre's, and used his main PC (he has about 25 of them in a room that fits about 20 of them, provided you don't' want to breath out), to backup my key data.

Sure enough, the main partition (what was my C drive) was completely tits-up (that's a British technical term, for non-functioning technology), and in the end, had to be wiped harder than a zookeeper treating an elephant with diarrhoea.

So, now my PC has been freshly installed with Windows 2000, and we now begin the long, arduous task of reinstalling all the software I had on it previously.

The Next Generation
What the unsuspecting little tyke doesn't realise, is that there's a new faster processor and motherboard winging its way to me as we speak. In a day or two, surgery will commence.

*Yes, I know Mac OS X has animation and bright colours, but they're a lot more subtle than XP, and besides which, Apple got there first, so Nah!
**ie. Up Shit Creek without one

from the Book of Jobs

For those of you that don't know me, I'm a Windows software developer by trade. At least I was for eight years, before getting laid off. Frankly, nowadays I'd be happy running my own .

I mention this, because it often surprises people, due to my love of Apple Macintosh computers.

I've always had a secret yearning for a Macintosh (insert raincoat joke here), ever since Apple brought out their first Macintosh in 1984. There was always something elegant and 'alternative' about them.

When I moved to the US, from the UK, in 1999, I bought an iMac DV Special Edition (which has now been souped up and acts as a household server), and never looked back. I now also have the new iBook.

I'll skip the rest of the story, as we'd be here all night if I didn't.

Mac OS X (pronounced '10') is the icing on the cake. In case you don't know, Mac OS X, is Unix. It's not a cut-down version. It's not Linux. It's full-on BSD Unix, with all the inherent stability that that entails. On top of that, is a GUI that is just beautiful.

Beyond all the technology, there's one big difference between the beige Wintel boxes, and Macintoshes. Macs seem to have soul.

Now, I know what some of you Wintel bigots will be thinking; "Oh no, he's started the tree-hugging hippy bullshit.", but hear me out.

I told you of my tech background, so that you'd appreciate, that I've come from a professional Windows environment, not the clichéd media background, that used to be typical of Mac users.

Someone once wrote, that Mac users are passionate about their computers. Passionate about both the hardware and the software. They said that you never hear of PC users being passionate about Windows.

Prior to my becoming a born-again Mac user, I'd probably have laughed at this too, but now I think I see what they're on about. There is something special about these machines.

Maybe it's exactly because they're the market share underdog, that makes people care about the platform? Maybe it's because they're just a whole lot more elegant than PCs?

Of course, by now the PC using, pickup truck driving jocks among you will be saying, "Man, who gives a shit about elegance? This isn't lingerie, it's a computer. I just want speed, power, and incredably bad gas-mileage."

Well, you can get a Mac with dual gigahertz processors. Bearing in mind that Macs don't need as many hertz as Wintel machines, that should be more than enough horsepower. Add to that the GeForce4 Titanium graphics card that comes with it, and you can shut the fuck up about it not being a good platform for gaming. Besides, if you're that into gaming, buy a Goddamn PlayStation (yes that's the model name of the new Sony product, aimed at the Atheist market sector).

Anyway, my months away from the world of IT have found me more and more immersed in my writing. Both for Englishman In Denver, and for other projects. One of those is a trans-Atlantic collaborative effort, that if it goes well, may end up being sent off to a number of TV companies!

My point being, I've been out of IT for a few months now, and I can do everything I need to do on my Macs, and right now, I see no need to go back to Windows.

And then there's PDAs. For years I'd had a Psion PDA. They're a British company who produced the world's first PDA, a whole year before Apple released the Newton.

The Psion Series 5mx was a reliable workhorse, that, in addition to a keyboard big enough to touch-type on, had a superb operating system. I was way more sophisticated than Palm (32-bit multi-threaded OS), more on a par with WinCE, but without the need for so much memory, or so much power. Sadly Psion have now pulled out of the consumer market, and are concentrating on the real money-earner for them - industrial handhelds.

So when my Psion was damaged beyond repair, I looked around at what was available, and it was basically the Palm or Windows CE platform. Being a power-user, I opted for CE, as Palm hadn't progressed much since its inception in 1996.

I bought the iPaq, and whilst the screen has been great, the battery life, expandability and software, have made a full-time occupation out of sucking.

Also, of course, I can't synch it with my Macintoshes. Oh sure, there's a project (now released) that attempts to provide this synchronisation of Pocket PC on the Mac platform, but it, apparently, also sucks, and costs $70.

Palm synchronisation is built-in OS X.

Sooo, I'm resigned to waiting for the next generation of Palms, running PalmOS 5 - which will provide a much richer, more powerful experience.

From the sound of it, it'll be like the Psion's EpocOS was... in 1995.

It's been a really nice day today. In fact, I can't remember the last time I had such a positive day. I'm not one for doing pure diary entries here, but today was nice enough, that it's worth noting for posterity.

10am
Got up late. That's a good start to a Saturday morning. My friend Mike called, wanting to meet up for coffee and book buying at The Tattered Cover Book Store, followed by lunch. This sounded so like how I used to spend every Saturday with my friend Tim, when I still lived in England, that I had no problem agreeing to this plan of action for later that morning.

Listened to Car Talk on NPR. This second link, takes you to the streaming signal page, so you can listen (10am MDT next Saturday).

Boy do I love that show. Not because I'm into fixing cars, but because the two brothers on it, sound like they're having so much fun, just being there. They kind of remind me of my friend Tim and I, when we're in good spirits, taking turns to make each other laugh.

At the end of the show, every week, they read the credits, both real, and imagined, including a number of fictional pun-oriented names, for example:

"Our Russian chauffeur is Pickup Andropov"
"Our eBay Specialist is Selma Junkov"
"Our Seat Cushion Tester is Mike Easter"
"Our Director of Secret Strategy is Donnatella Nobody"

A full list is available here.

11.30am
Mike arrives and we drive to the TCB. Have coffee first, which he manages to spill half over mine over the table, later claiming that, "the legs were in the wrong place.". This didn't impress an elderly lady sat on the next table. I made some quip about it to her, and she tutted so much that for a second, I thought I was back in Britain.

I bought the debut novel by one of my favourite humorists, Dave Barry. The novel is Big Trouble. This has been made into a film, that's release was orginally planned to be last September. Given the nature of the story, it was delayed until recently.

1.30pm
Lunch in a typical Creek establishment - i.e. posh. Only in Colorado, would you get a restaurant that simultaneously manages to be posh and has a cheeseburger on the menu.

2.30pm
2.30? Time to see a Chinese dentist! Bu-bum!
I'm soooo sorry.

2.35pm
Found an 'English Tea Shop', which was actually more of a British tea shop, as it was run by a Welsh lady, selling English tea, and Welshcakes.

Confused? The whole UK/Britain/England thing is explained here.

I bought some Welshcakes, Mike bought some tea.

3pm
Across the road to The Wizard's Chest. In short, it's a toy, magic, joke and costume shop.

You haven't lived, until you've seen two grown men, in their thirties, trying on every wig in the place.

I tried on a number of long-haired ones, each and every one of which made me look like a stoner.

Mike tried on a long redheaded wig that made him look like Carrot Top. He also tried on a gingham cap with long red ringlets of hair attached, that made hm look like a camp rabbi.

We both tried on various mullet wigs, and the trailer-trash baseball caps. These consisted of a baseball cap, with long greasy strands of hair, badly dyed as if the blond hair dye is growing out. The resultant look is as if the wearer has a full-on mullet going on under the cap.

We moved on, to the masks section, and nearly suffocated myself, trying on a full-head (I don't want to hear the Lewinski jokes) Bill Clinton mask.

We both stopped just short of trying on the gorilla suit. And people say we have no will power! Pah!

We then headed home. The heat (97F) was starting to get to us.

4-6pm
SWMBO cooked and made bread. I cleaned the house, well, the important bits. Try scrubbing a bath in the roof space of a house that's been in temperatures of 95F for weeks. It's no picnic, I can tell you. There were no sandwiches for a start. Err, I'm rambling again.

7pm
Mike comes over for dinner. We gorge ourselves on a vegetarian pasta dish, and roasted beetroot*. I'm not a vegetarian, but this was mighty fine stuff. The homemade olive bread worked (it's VERY difficult to make good bread at this altitude).

After dinner, we all wandered over to the Wash Park Coffee Co. with the dogs, for coffee and more idle banter. The dog of one of the two owner's was outside. A four-month old puppy that was nearly as big as Miles. She tried her best to get the dogs to play with her, but Miles and Saoirse were more focused on the free dog biscuits.

So, there you go. Enough of the 'Dear Diary' stuff. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

from the London Kills Me Dept.

Who says the British can't lead the world in something?

Isn't our National Health Service wonderful?

In addition to the quip by Leo Laporte on TechTv's The Screensavers, I posted below, he's just put his foot in it BIG TIME with the females on the show.

He was chatting to Megan on the show. She was in the "babe corale" (as he's previously called it).

He then sees something on the monitor behind Megan and says,

Leo: Who's that dog behind you?
Megan: What?
Leo: That dog, over your right shoulder.

Given that Morgan was sat behind her, just over her right shoulder, this didn't go down well.

Leo swore that there was a dog behind Megan, but failed to explain that he meant, on one of the monitors behind her. Morgan wasn't impressed. She stormed over, and threw the script on the floor, looming (she's tall) over Leo.

Then they went to break, and I started writing this.

After the break, Leo says how he's very sorry for upsetting Morgan,

Leo: "...and this is the dog I was talking about."

At which point, someone in the production booth, pressed the wrong button, and Morgan appeared on screen.

This left Leo, holding his head in his hands, in embarrassment and saying how there really was a dog there, honest guv.

They then took a live call, featuring a guy who had his dog on the webcam (this was the dog that Leo had seen). At the end of the call, there was a dog bark...

Leo: Was that Sissy (the caller's dog)? Or was it Morgan?
Patrick: (dumbstruck ... walks away in embarrassment)

Cut to:

Megan: Nice out Leo.

Leo then spent the rest of the show, apologising profusely, and being abused by the women on the show.

Martin Sargent was doing his Twisted List segment on the show, which today was the Top Five Most Inexplicably Popular searches on Yahoo.

Number Five, was "The Barbi Twins".

Martin: Believe it or not, their surname is Barbi.
Leo: What are their first names? Klaus and Heinrich?

Contains new(ish) doggie pics.

Miles has been having problems climbing stairs these past two days. He won't even get into my truck without being lifted, whereas he normally leaps in. Given that he's not even three years old until next September, I was a bit worried.

I've recently registered him at a new vet, as I'd lost all faith in our previous one. Our previous one wasn't chosen by me, and I never really felt comfortable with them. I mean, the woman had chintz 80's wallpaper in her exam room! It didn't feel like a medical establishment, so much as like going to visit one's grandmother for tea.

They gave him a rabies shot this year, despite giving him a three-year shot last year. Don't these people keep records? Well, they do, but it seems like they don't consult them before giving any medication to their patients. Miles isn't he only victim of this kind of blunder. I've had a few other clients of theirs tell me similar tales.

So I've registered him with a new vet, reccommended by a friend. Right from the first visit, the place just feels right. They seem about 10 times more organised than the old veterinary practice. Today was our second visit there.

He was seen by the lovely Dr Martinez, and it looks like he has a knotted muscle in his front leg. She massaged his leg, as did two of the nurses during the initial inspection. All in all, he didn't object. He really likes women, and any hugs or massages are extremely welcome. And, yes, we're still talking about Miles.

Tonight he seems a lot better, but he's on anti-inflamatory painkillers, and limited exercise for a week, just to be on the safe side.

Warning: This product contains rants

I was out walking Miles last night, and stopped at a liquor store to get a bottle of water.

I couldn't find any in the cold cabinets of the store, so went and asked the guys behind the counter.

Me: Do you have any water?
Them: Sorry? You want what?
Me: Water. Bottled water. Y'know... to drink?
Them: (blank look)
Me: Water. You know - H20. That see-through wet stuff?
Me: (sigh)
Me: Evian?

Them: Oh warder! You want a boddle of warder.
Me: Yes! Water. Preferably before one of us dies.

The last bit was said under my breath. To give you an idea of my tone of voice, I've often been told I sound like Basil Fawlty when I'm annoyed.

Most British people think Americans are either a little illiterate or just dumb, because they spell things differently, or use different words. This misconception has never been corrected by the British government. Still that's politics for you!

As I've said before, many many times, I (unlike most Britons) have respect for American English. It's a deliberate attempt to be different from the America's former colonial masters, or as I like to call them, my great-grandparents. Just kidding! ;-)

I'm all in favour of sheer bloody-mindedness and a desire to distinguish themselves from the British. That I can totally respect.

What I can't respect, however, is the refusal of some people to try and understand any accent but their own. It's even more insulting, when you consider that English isn't exactly a foreign language to me!

Oddly enough, this isn't the first time someone has not understood me, when I've asked for a bottle of water. Staff in the ironically-named Einstein Bros*. also seem to have the same abject inability to comprehend me** pronouncing water correctly.

I think the 'water' thing pisses me off more than anything, because the whole problem stems from me pronouncing the word properly, and them being so used to people flattening their T's into D's that they treat me as if I'm the one in the wrong.

So far, I've resisted the temptation to retaliate, but it's only a matter of time now:

"Oh! I see! Warder? Well, excuuuse me. Just how many D's are there in that word then? Hmm? Perhaps you'd like to spell it for me?"

"I don't go around expecting you to correct your pronounciation of it, do I? No. I live with the cultural and language differences between us. So perhaps you could take the gum out of your mouth, and work with me on this!?"

You get the idea. Or rather, the uncontrolled rant.

My point is really not, "I'm right. You're wrong". It's more, "I make the effort to understand you, now return the complement."

Meanwhile, back at the liquor store, after all the confusion over what I wanted was cleared up, and we were all pals, they gave me the warder... err I mean water, for free!

*A chain of sandwich shops, specialising in filled bagels
**In fact one particular young woman (not a lady, mind you) at Einstein's was incredibly rude to our faces, on several occasions, all because of her ignorance about, "people who tawk diffrunt". She talked down her nose at us, because she didn't understand us reading from the 12-item menu behind her. Some time I'll post the e-mail I ended up sending to their corporate HQ after a succession of 'incidents of rudness and incompetance'

A friend has sent me this link to a page about men's underwear on the Debenhams' website. It comes from top geek site Need To Know.

Can you spot the odd one out? Perhaps this is actually the Tory MP underwear section?

Debenhams is a large chain of department stores in Britain. I'm not sure, as they claim, that they really are Britain's favourite department store. I'd have said Marks & Spencer would have been more likely.

It's late night, and I'm watching Dawn of the Dead. What a classic film! They even have a zombie Hari Krishna!

The Screensavers had one of my favourite filmmakers, Kevin Smith, on the show last night. Click on the first link to find the full unedited interview, including stuff that wasn't broadcast.

Considering how hip and trendy the Wash(ington) Park area of Denver is, it's always been amazing to me that there's no within my particular neighbourhood (West Washington Park). My favourite - Stella's - is walkable from the house, but does involve crossing the I25, the bridges over which are all being worked on (so little or no sidewalks) as part of the T-Rex project.

Recently, however, I spotted a tiny little coffee place, called the Washington Park Coffee Company, has opened two blocks from my house. As I drove by, it looked like it was a gap between two buildings, with a door on the front.

So tonight, when Miles and I popped out for a walk, we headed in the direction of Pearl St. I thought I'd see if this place was open late. It was. Not only that, but the owner was outside with his kids. We got chatting, and the kids got friendly with Miles.

Barry, the owner, is a fellow jazz fan, and into the same sort of jazz as myself (Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck et al). He's also an IT guy. It transpires, that it won't be long before he has an open Wi-Fi network up and running, providing his patrons with complimentary high-speed wireless internet access. Could it get any better, you ask?

Well, yes. The coffee was good too. My benchmark coffee these days is a Grandé Latté. It might sound poncey, but you can't beat a drink that comes with two or three shots of espresso in it! Remember, as I said yesterday, I'm a geek and proud of it. Geeks exist on a lot of caffeine. Anyway, Barry's Latté hit the spot, pretty hard. I drank that coffee 3.5 hours ago and I'm still buzzed as I write this!

Miles was also impressed with their fare. They had a large barrell of dog biscuits, and thanks to Barry's young son, Miles was able to acquire at least three of them, just for giving the lad his paw.

The inside of the was a lot bigger than it looked from the outside. Perhaps they used trans-dimensional engineering? It turns out that the premises were an alleyway between two shops, that has been converted into a building. The walls are all exposed brick. In the course of removing external plaster from one of the two buildings either side, old painted advertising was discovered. This has been preserved, as is now part of the 's décor.

So, as soon as their Wi-Fi network is up, you can expect Englishman In Denver to be brought to you live, from the sidewalk, outside The Washington Park Coffee Company*!

*I am in no way affiliated with this company, I just liked the guy who's started it. I guess my one bias is that I'd like the place to stay open, as it's near my house, serves damn fine coffee, and will have wi-fi access for customers soon.

Thanks to author, playwright, actor and fellow tech loon Mike Daisey for this. The biggest laugh I've had all week.

First read this letter written to Hunter S. Thompson.

Then read Hunter's letter to his literary agent here.

Warning: This product contains rants

As a fan of The Screensavers on TechTV, I had to take this test, to see which cast member I'm most like. The result was as predicted:

The Show
For those of you without access to TechTV, The Screensavers is a live 90-minute show for geeks, with a mixture of tech news, software and hardware how-to's, interviews and nonsense.

The Problem
In the past few months, however, it's had its content changed, by a new producer, who seems to be aiming at a more mainstream audience. There seems to be an unending stream of celebrity interviews, most of which are banal to say the least. Some of the people being interviewed know nothing of tech stuff, and aren't interested in it. So why have them on such a geeky show? You guessed it. Ratings.

This is stupid. This is a show on TechTV, not a mainstream network. They're never going to get the viewing figures of a major network, and besides which, people who watch TechTV are into tech. They don't give a flying fuck about what computer Ben Afleck uses!

I'm sorry about the bad language, but you have to understand that I'm a geek, and proud of it. When my favourite geek show becomes less technical than its supposedly simpler cousin (Call For Help), it's frustrating. When I started watching this network, and more specifically, The Screensavers, it was way more geek oriented.

I've read, and contributed to some bulletin boards about the show, so I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. As of this week, there seems to have been a slight shift back towards techiness.

Today, for example, they had their top hardware ‘modder’, Yoshi, showing us how to 'mod' an optical mouse. He replaced the red LED used by the mouse for optical tracking with a blue one, and made a see-thru scroll wheel, to replace the solid one, which he lit internally by adding a second LED. Total cost: $10 plus mouse ($40). Not bad. This is the sort of thing us geeks like to see!

Staffing
Finally, if the producers need to make more redundancies, next time don't sack a guy who everyone likes (Scott Herriot), sack the tech-clueless annoying arts graduates. Specifically, get rid of Morgan Webb. She looks way too much like British serial killer Myra Hindley, creeps me out, and contributes nothing of geek value to the show.

I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but showing us how to tidy up the icons on our Windows desktop does not constitute worthwhile content on a geek show. I think the final straw was when her so-called "Windows Tip" segment, involved showing us how to hack the high-score table in Minesweeper! Just who do they think gives a shit about such things?

Thankfully, the producers have already cut down on the appearances of the cute but irritating Cat Schwartz, with her Valley Girl 'upspeak'.

It's not that I'm against women on the show. On the contrary, the show used to be hosted by the geekiest woman on television, Kate Botello, who was a joy to watch, such was her knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, tech stuff. Oh, and she made the 'geek-girl look' sexy.

Also, in the past few weeks, they've finally let Megan Morrone host the show (she's normally in more of a sidekick). As it transpires, she was a superb host, and an absolute natural at it. She was paired with the very manic Adam Sessler (host of computer gaming show Extended Play), and they made a great team.

I could go on. Oh, wait a minute, I already did.

I haven't been in internet chat rooms for ages. I tried them out for a while, and it was interesting, but ultimately, I'd rather chat to people with a pint in my hand, in the pub.

That said, the other day I was in a UK chat room, just long enough to see the following amusing exchange.

Chatter1: Anyone near Tooting*?
Chatter2: Well, I've just farted. Does that count?

Clearly a nation that grew up on Carry-On films.

I could write a whole humourous article on internet chat rooms. I'll do it sometime, just not now.

*This joke is possibly lost on non-British readers. Tooting is a borough of London, amongst other definitions!

As pathetic as these 'codes' are (geek codes, gay codes, political codes etc). My blogger code is:
B3 d t- k s+ u-- f+ i+ o+ x e l- c-

from the Bathing Beauties Dept.

Benny, one of my two cats, has been looking rather shabby of late. It almost looks as though he's not been washing himself. I'm not sure why. It might be related to the Chaplin-like walk he's developed in the past month or so.

I want to take him to a new vet next week, so it was decided that he needed a bath. The poor dear didn't suspect a think, right up to the point where I deposited him in the kitchen sink, and started the shower*

Thankfully of course, cats have a built-in parallysis feature, activated by grabbing the scruff of their neck. This made the whole process a lot more easier than I'd anticipated.

Just imagine if humans had such a feature. There would be surge in muggings, with fellons sneaking up behind their victims, and grabbing them by the scruff.

So, anyway, he got a shower, then a sudsing with dog shampoo - which bizzarely, had a very pleasant coconut smell. Then another shower to wash it all off him. he looked quite a sight afterwards:

Click to englarge

Bathtime


Towel time


Plotting revenge

He was also the quietest I've known him to be in years.

The Revenge
About an hour or two after this trauma, Benny - who's the sweetest natured cat you could hope to meet - had his revenge.

I'd just sat down to watch a movie, when I got a strange warm sensation behind me. I realised that Benny, who was still wet from his bath, was sat behind me. After a while, however, I sensed that the warm wet sensation was rather more wet than a semi-dry cat's fur should give.

It was at this point that I realised, Benny was taking a piss on me, and the couch.

Both my cats are fully house-trained, and go to the toilet outside. So this, was very much a protest pee, rather than an accident. Benny was then ejected from the house, and made to stay outisde for a few hours, whilst I; a) calmed down, and, b) got the carpet cleaner going to clean the couch.

The Epilogue
Later, Benny was allowed to come back in, and had fully dried himself. He'd also got his confidence back, enough to resume his usual noisy, nagging approach to anyone going near the refrigerator, the cat brush, or indeed, near him.

*American kitchen sinks often have a retractable sprayer, controlled by the taps. It's a brilliant idea that I wish they'd adopt in the UK.

from the Social Responsibility Dept.

My friend Jerry rang this morning, and suggested meeting up, with our respective dogs, at the off-leash park I'd discovered not far from the house. We met up and the dogs had a great time, fetching Miles' frisbee and Saoirse's 'kong**'

Afterwards, I returned home, to find five fire trucks blocking the street in front of the house. Of course the first thought one has at a time like this, is, "Did I leave the gas on?". The second thought is, "You don't have a gas cooker, you idiot."

There had been a small electrical fire in one of the apartments in the triplex*** next-door to our house.

Here's the only pic I took, as I didn't want to seem intrusive with my photography:

Click to englarge

We've seen many tenants come and go, in the short time we've lived in our Wash Park house. Some good, some bad. The particular residence in question here, was rented to a couple, but routinely has about four adults and five children living in it, plus a dog, even though pets aren't allowed.

These particular neighbours - a Mexican family who's behaviour has conformed to just about every negative stereotype of Mexicans - have done nothing but piss off the other residents of the triplex, with their loudness, bad language in front of their children and on the street, and leaving vast amounts of trash lying around. They even have a friend with a large motorcycle, who parks in on the sidewalk, completely blocking the pathway. The other day an elderly lady who regularly walks on our street, with a walking frame, was forced into walking in the traffic, to get round this bike, thanks to the tattooed thug that drives it.

I work with a lot of Hispanic people at the radio station, who are all fine folks, and good friends to me, but these tenants are just setting back the reputation of the Latino community with their every move.

They didn't report this fire to the owner of the building, however, one of the other tenants a decent guy who has just had enough of these thugs, 'dropped a dime', and in no time, the owner arrived.

When she had questioned the number of people in the apartment before, she'd been told by the tenants that the extra people were only visiting. In fact, they quickly sent an adult and three of their children down the road, when they heard she was on-site. This was presumably to reduce the headcount when she came to chat to them. This plan failed, however, do the fact that the owner, myself and another tenant were watching from upstairs, as the excess children barrelled out of their apartment.

The owner will be evicting the entire group.

That particular apartment seems to be jinxed with bad tenants. The last lot where (to quote another tenant) trailer trash, who again, had one official tenant, and three other unofficial ones. Worse still, they were often heard firing off a BB gun in the apartment for kicks. This was despite the fact that they had a small child with living there.

I think what gauls me the most, both with the white trash and the Mexican family, isn't their bad language, nor their general loudness (we only hear it when they're out front), it's the fact that they're bringing up children in this kind of environment.

You have to have a licence to prove you're fit to drive a car. You have to have a licence to own a dog. It's times like this, I can't help but think you should have to have a licence, and do a test, to prove you're fit to bring up children.

*see June 18 2002 for part one.
**a kong is a dog toy, consisting of a length of very strong nylon rope, with a bell-shaped rubber weight on one end.
***British readers: a triplex is essentially house converted into three residences, each with a separate front door. One with two residences is a duplex, and whilst you'd expect one with four residences to be a quadplex, for some reason, Americans call it a four-plex. Go figure.

I've started considering what car to buy in Europe, if/when I return there. With gas at $5 a gallon, the Mountaineer just isn't viable, besides which, if I'm living in either Britain or Ireland, then the steering wheel will be on the wrong side!

I'm seriously considering the New Mini. It's a revamped version of that classic British car, this time, made by BMW. I'll talk more about it another time, but I wanted to share a link with you that made me laugh so hard, I had tears in my eyes. It's almost Pythonesque in its humour.

You'll need Flash and either Windows Media player or Quicktime to see it. Then again, it's a car manufacturer website, and we all know just how over zealous they are about producing resource hungry webpages.

Go here and click on either 'Low' or 'High' according to your bandwidth preference. It's essential you have sound (ie. speakers or headphones.)

The other adverts on the site are OK, but this one is the funny one.

As you may be aware, visitors to my blog are counted, thanks to the wonderful chaps at sitemeter.com.

I can log into sitemeter, and see all sorts of statistics about my readership. If nothing else, it's reassuring that someone's actually reading this drivel I pump out. In addition to breaking down my readership by domain, country, operating system, browser type, hat size and eye colour (yes, they're watching you watching us), it also provides me with information, such as what search string the visitor entered, that my site appeared in the results thereof.

When I went to the last Colorado Bloggers drink... err meet, one of my fellow columnists mentioned that his site had somehow come up in a search with the string "naked Pakistani boys". We all had a jolly good laugh with him about this, and were suggesting suitable meta-tags to embed in our pages, to drive up traffic from search engines.

Needless to say, being the honourable chaps we are, we none of us have done such a thing. Besides which, it's far more amusing to see your site listed in someone's search for porn, when you've never covered such a subject.

However, today - a record-breaking day for visitors to Englishman In Denver - I had my first really obscure search string referral. Englishman In Denver appeared as result No.21 in the search string, "naked carrie fisher fakes".

Given the abject lack of pornography on my site (New blog, "Max Does Denver" coming soon), you've got to wonder how we ever appeared in this guy's search results. What actually happened is that an amalgum of words, from various EID articles, formed the desired search string.

In case you're interested, here we are in the search results.

By the way, to give you an idea of what a record-breaking day it's been, I get an average of nine visitors per day, which is respectable, given the lack of advertising I do, plus the non-commercial nature of the site. Today, however, with only half an hour to go before midnight, I got 19! This is the point in the show, where our British readers are handed over to Peter Snow* and his barrage of computer generated graphics, to show a, "definite swing, in favour of the Raving Looney Party**".

I've seen us listed in some other searches, but this is my first one that's porn-related.

I'm so proud!

*madcap statistical election specialist
**American readers - seriously, this is a real British political party, with real questions, such as "why is there only one Monopolies Commission?"

This is my second draft of this piece. The original version was typed directly into a web page. Bad move. I should known better than to do that. The Blogger system totally lost my work. It's not the first time this has happened. This is why I now write my longer articles offline in a text editor.

Occasionally, however, I have what can best be described as 'a fluffy bunny moment' - staring trustingly in to the headlights of the oncoming truck, a truck containing the Blogger blogging system.

So anyway, on Friday I took Miles to Stinky Dog No More. It's a laundromutt on 6th Avenue.

For those of you (probably non-dog owners) who don't know what a laundromutt is, let me explain. It's a place you take your dog to bathe it. It's self-service, so it's way cheaper than a dog groomer ($10 vs. $30), but it's well equipped with baths at waist height, steps up to the bath for your dog, a shower, with trigger control, and doggie shampoo.

Miles isn't a stinky dog. He was there to provide moral support for Saoirse, who was, after rolling in something at the park.

He got into the bath with relatively little complaint. There was a series of metal loops and a short leash, to keep him in place. This is way better than using the bath at home, where there's no restraint system, and so one spends most of one's time, trying to just keep him in the bath.

Actually, he was rather better behaved than I had expected, and grinned throughout most of the procedure.

Drying, however, took forever to do. After an initial towelling down, Miles was subjected to the Hairdryer from Hell. At least it was as far as he was concerned.

The hairdryer had the appearance of a military jet engine, bolted to the underside of the drying bench, with a vacuum hose to direct the blast of air onto its unsuspecting victim.

Luckily for Miles, he was secured on the table, as I suspect he'd have been blown away by the hairdryer's output otherwise.

For a while, during the drying I blew his fur the wrong way. This gave him 'big hair', so in order to avoid him being mistaken for a female Highlands Ranch resident or Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen, I quickly switched the direction of the jet, and smoothed it all back down again.

He was a little nervous about the hairdryer. Mind you, he wasn't the only one. I had visions of me ending up being thrown about the room, holding on desperately to the hose, as it snaked around like a fire-hose. Either that, or my knee knocking the industrial sized control switch, and the dryer switching gears, causing the whole bench to do a vertical take-off. We might have been mistaken for Snoopy and Woodstock, with Miles atop the kennel/bench and me flying around him with a death grip on the hose.

This didn't happen, and despite his misgivings about the whole trip, Miles looked fabulous afterwards. For the next two days, he was silky soft, until today, when he got to go swiming. Now he's back to his usual clean, but not too soft, coat.

There's no danger of him being mistaken for an interior designer now.