No radio

Yesterday at work, we were having a quiet afternoon, so I went off to find something useful to do. I ended up at the workbench in one of our upstairs rooms, where I made myself a coffee and spent a few hours fixing up some old PCs that were sitting around awaiting repair.

My plan had been to listen to the radio while I did this. The workbench has a little audio monitoring panel, with green LEDs bouncing up and down like on your dad’s 80s hi-fi, so I turned up the volume and found it playing Radio 1. There were no other controls.

With some difficulty I traced the cables out of the back and found they disappeared, unlabelled, into a hole in the floor. I went to the audio router at the other end of the room and tried switching stations on anything I could find tuned to Radio 1, but none of them were right.

No problem, I thought. It’s the 21st century. I’ll use my phone. So I opened my TuneIn radio app and selected 6music.

The app informed me that this station wasn’t available in my territory due to geographical restrictions. I looked around to confirm my surroundings, and yes, I was indeed sitting in Broadcasting House where 6music is assembled and broadcast, and my phone was connected to the building wi-fi. It was, therefore, legal to listen to that station in my present geographical territory.

Nothing I did would persuade TuneIn radio of that, though, and my coffee was going cold, and the PCs weren’t getting fixed. Sometimes, even when it’s your job to make the radio work, you can’t make the radio work. So I listened to Absolute 80s instead.

War of Science

There is a war on the horizon.

If you squint for long enough you can see them, dressed in their white lab coats, wafting beakers and bunsen burners around like slices of cheese. Science is in the air, an unmistakable smell that burns and pleases the nostrils in equal measures. There are three factions battling for the lauded position of Kings and Queens of Science. It will be long and it will be bloody. Not everyone will make it through, oh yes, there will be casualties. You best call your loved ones now because you’re definitely going to be late home tonight.

Real science has no place here. That’s a whole different category of its own so it’s staying on the sidelines, cheering on the pretenders and secretly laughing to itself about the whole affair. It’s brought a bag of Haribo and it doesn’t plan on sharing it with anyone else. Behind a veil of thin mist, and a long black trench coat, it nibbles on fried eggs and cola bottles without the surrounding crowd realising what is going on.

So who are these people, these candidates of coercion and comprehension? Pull up a beanie and let’s get started:

We Are Scientists

Not only making a bold claim in their band name alone, ‘We Are Scientists’ are also in the running for best album cover ever for their debut ‘With Love and Squalor’. It’s got so many kitties I lost my shit several times writing this post. So there’s a lot of moxie coming from these Californian power pop masters, the only problem is that none / neither of them are actual scientists. The name was chosen after being mistaken for scientists after taking a rental truck back to the depot. Pop music was never the place a ground for things that made sense. There’s no truth in any of this but, damn, can they write catchy as hell songs.
We Are Science

I actually made a bit of a mistake here. I was under the impression that comedian Marcus Brigstocke had a short-lived science program called ‘We are Science’ which lampooned science for laughs. It was actually called ‘We are History’ and had nothing to do with it so they’re automatically disqualified for not being the thing that I thought it was. Bastards.
Nina and the Neurons

Kids TV can’t keep up anymore which is why the BBC and ITV gave up on it in the afternoons and shoved it onto either early morning slots that nobody knows about or digital channels that you can stream at any hour of the day. When Reuben was small, we would occasionally watch ‘Nina and the Neurons’ because it had bright, colourful graphics and was educational in a non-boring way. It also had, because you cannot get past my troubled history of fancying women on TV, a very attractive host in the guise of Katrina Bryan who, with her Scottish accent and being in front of my eyes, kept my attention. After a very quick check on the good ole’ Google pegs, I cannot see any scientific qualifications to her name. This is further cemented by the fact that she played a pregnant lady in a banned advert for Irn Bru where the dad is slowly coming around to the idea of calling his daughter Fanny by drinking the aforementioned drink. She played a character who was a scientist; good actress, bad science. The only things here are japes and sex appeal.
Me and Kev

I got a ‘D’ in my Chemistry A Level.

Kev has a Twitter account called ‘Wrong Science’.

I think we know who won this.

Calendar Conversion

Way back at the start of the year, when we all excitedly built our, now legendary, lego pouring beans calendars, we all deiscovered the small but important flaw that not all the pages actually fit inside.

At the time I shoved in all those that fit, and the rest went in the luxurious golden box it was delivered in. (Which incidentally, still smells of whatever magic they put into laser printers to make colours stick to paper).

Well at the start of the month, the time came when that initial tranche of pages ran out. Giddy, I opened the gold box and wanged in the rest of the year, only to discover it was too baggy and they all fell out every time I moved the thing.

Modifications were needed, and modifications were made…

The holey-bit was trimmed down by removing two layers of the thin bits, and thus a perfect fit was once again achieved.

Don’t worry though, this being Lego, all the spare bits are safely stored on the back.

They’re all ready to be re-fitted when next years calendar refill-block duly arrives from Chris at Christmas.

Four Word Reviews: King of Stage

After four long months – that’s over nineteen weeks, if you’re counting, or more than a third of a year – I have finally returned home. Just temporarily, for now, you understand: Steve Stevingtons has an important three week “Malcolm in the Middle” conference to attend, so the place is empty. But temporarily or not, here I am. And if I am back at my desk again, you know what that means: it’s time to grit my teeth and endure another dreadful album of unknown provenance. Today, we subject ourselves to Bobby Brown’s 1986 debut album, King of Stage, released when he was just 17.

Birthdingtons lunch

Today I became 36.

Today I had the day off work, and we actually went out! We went out for lunch, do you remember that? I barely do. Being able to go out for lunch.

Well we had to drive all the way to Harrogate to do it because we fancied going to Wagamamas and that was the nearest one that was open, but it was almost, almost, like the before-times.

That, and all the waitresses were dressed as surgeons, and there were screens on the tables, but it was almost like the before-times.

Oh, and you had to pay by using your phone via a website because despite bringing us drinks and food for an hour or so, holding the card machine for us to beep would be just too risky, but it was kind of like the before-times.

Aaaand they only had a limited menu, because… reasons, but it was a bit like the before-times.

OK so it was nothing like the before times, but we had a child free lunch out in a nice restaurant with nice food and the weather was nice.

Today I had a nice day.

Announcements

Even with all this time, or well now that I’m back at work this time where I’m not out running rampant like I normally would pre-lockdown, I still seem to find myself in this position most months of being on the cusp of four posts and not quite being able to find the last one.

I had several ideas which will no doubt appear next month once I have had a chance to actually do some research or, at least, download the pictures so it’s not one massive block of text with me pointing at things that aren’t there. I suppose that could work though, slightly less absorbing than an empty space where a post should be.

I was even going to drum up some thrills for a new caption completion. Alas, by not going anywhere or doing anything there are no strange photos in my phone for me to pass off as my own efforts. So let me fill up this with a couple of shout outs:

Happy Birthday, Kev. I hope you realise that we have now known each other for 24 years. Once our friendship reaches the big 25 we may have to do something special like flying into space or getting drunk on a park at 11pm. Your choice.
We’re smooshing into the second half of the year and my work colleague is already talking about Christmas, mainly because there’s cock all else to look forward to at the moment. It also means there’s only five more months of lovely PB calendar action before we must all return to boring, humdrum calendars that don’t have owls in coffee shops, notebook selfies or any of my book covers.
I still need a haircut. I have to get it sorted next week because I’m fast approaching Cousin It from ‘The Addams Family’ level of hair proportions without one. You know how hairy on the go I normally am, this is more like hairy through the window on a jetpack.

If anyone else would like to announce anything please feel free to do so.

Banana safari

The modern world is an amazing place. I went to the kitchen a bit hungry, just hoping to peel a banana and let that squishy yellow mush satisfy my snack reflex.

But my banana had other plans. Look at this sticker.

“Visit my farm!” it says. Well, you’re damn right I’m going to visit your farm, Mr Banana. Let’s do this.

Slam those numbers into the Dole website and you can join me on a banana safari. Welcome to farm 10608, the Guapiles 2 Farm in Costa Rica. Here’s some Guapiles Facts.

Costa Rica is home to over 100 volcanoes, five of which are still active.
The farm meets the ISO 14001 standard for environmental management, relating to waste management and air, water and soil contamination.
All plastic waste is collected, sorted and reused or compressed into bales and recycled.
The farm’s full official name is “Guapiles 2: This Time It’s Personal”.
It’s 6.03pm there right now, and 23 degrees celsius. (This one will vary in accuracy depending on when you read it.)
204 people work here.
The farm is in a region called “Limón”, despite growing bananas, not lemons.

So far, so absolutely brilliant. Obviously, the next thing I wanted to learn was the story of the grinning bloke at the top of the page, who obviously loves his life at Guapiles 2. I want to know whether he knows the other 203 people by name, and whether he gets involved in collecting, sorting, reusing or compressing into bales and recycling the farm’s plastic waste. I want to know how he feels about the ISO 14001 certification, and whether he thinks Guapiles 2 is ready for ISO 14002 yet.

We will never know the answers to these questions. It turns out that Pedro – he’s definitely called Pedro – doesn’t work at Guapiles 2. Smash any five digit number into Dole’s palace of lies and there he is, pretending he works at Perla 3 where it’s now 29 degrees celsius, or Zurqui C near Sarapiqui, or one of just 70 people working at the evidently very exclusive San Jose 2.

Pedro has let me down, an agent of Dole, purveyors of fantasies and ruined dreams. I don’t know what to believe any more. It seems crazy that I ever thought you could grow bananas in a place called Lemon. How foolish I have been.

I threw the bananas in the bin, and had a Twix instead.

Literary Gold

I know what you’re both thinking and, no, it’s not another one of my much-loved, imitated and lauded best-selling novels. Calm down my precious fans, you haven’t missed a pre-order for another first edition that you can keep your families warm with over those long winter months. This is something completely different.

Prior to being hoisted back into clothes and into the general population by work, I was having yet another sort out in order to try and fit a large amount of THINGS into the same space they’ve been living in for six months now. This requires a meticulous amount of opening boxes, sighing loudly and then trying to squish something else into it in the hope that the top will still stay on once I’ve pushed a large rectangle into a tiny triangular slot. Most of the time it works. Soon I may have to invest in some more shelves and possibly some hammocks for the corners.

I unearthed yet another pile of gibberish, which is what I refer to anything I was scribbling in prior to this post. I have a lot of it, notebooks and notebooks of word guff hastily wangled around early attempts by post-modern hedonistic oober artist, Reuben. Sandwiched in-between my original lyrics for ’10 out of 10 out of 10 (out of 10 out of 10)’ and Reuben’s sketches for something called ‘Pirate Chicken and Son’ (spoiler: you don’t need pants to be cool), there was a couple of pages you may recognise:

It’s important for a number of reasons:

It features Chris’s disgusting scrodsack of change (or was it Kev’s?);
There are a number of facts including Marshall can sense mums with his crotch, that mushrooms come last and that I am an eager-maniac;
The original appearance of cult favourite Wexford and his cheese-polishing adventures;
The height chart to explain how tall Kevin is.

I would donate the entire thing to Chris’ archives but there some boring old Christmas lists and some other questionable songs I wrote that take up the majority of the book so it would be a fool’s errand. I may carefully rip the pages out and send them via special courier so that they reach you in one piece now that Steve “Steady on, now” Steveingtons has finally given up on his restraining order and let you back in your flat.