mini-moan: paro-illegal.

This moan has been brought to the surface after sitting through 80 minutes of vulgarity branded as 'humour' which is the film 'Stan Helsing' and I certainly wouldn't advise anybody to be as foolish as I by watching it.

The 2000s saw a boom in parody films which has thankfully slowed but has far from halted. Since 'Scary Movie 2' we all became rather sick of it and for every gem such as 'Meet the Spartans' that was released you had to also suffer through an 'Epic Movie' or worst of all a 'Dance Movie' (I only managed 30 minutes of that one).

When the parody is more pathetic and far less entertaining than the terrible film(s) it was meant to be mocking you should draw a line under the whole experiment and move on with your life. Can we please stop with the parody films before they start making awful parody films of terrible parody films?

mini-moan: somebody get the plunger, there's a blockage.

Yesterday I was watching the first episode of Alphas and I thought to myself "I've seen that guy in something" but I had absolutely no idea why I recognised him. Then it started to bug me, I couldn't enjoy the show because instead I was just trying to remember how I recognised him. I started recalling all the television shows he might have been in at some point and kept drawing a blank. It was driving me mental until I relented and looked on Wikipedia and "Of course, he was in that".

But even worse than trying to remember where you recognise somebody from is when you are trying to remember their name. You are pretty sure it starts with a "C" so you start going through every possible name in your head "Chris", "Craig", "Charlie" "Cameron", after many hours of this you resort to Wikipedia and it turns out it's actually "Peter", so not only have you wasted many hours trying to guess somebody's name for no real purpose, you never even had a chance of being victorious in that pointless pursuit.

And no, I'm not going to tell you who it was because I know not knowing is bugging the hell out of you.

deleted: not fit for consumption.

Sometimes when compiling my posts I have lots of brilliant ideas that just don't make it. Perhaps they didn't work very well, maybe they were a tad complex for my rather simple minded readers, or sometimes despite being brilliant they ruin the flow of the post. My last moan had several ideas that didn't make it into the final product (much like the rice doesn't make it into a microwave curry), but unlike the deleted scenes on that DVD you've never watched these are worthy of your time.

It's the same story when you buy a Steak and Kidney pie, you'd need a high powered electron microscope to detect the kidney particles in one of those and everybody knows the best part of a Steak and Kidney pie is the kidney. In fact forget about the steak and give me a Kidney pie I always end up giving the steak to the dog.


And they might as well rename Chicken and Mushroom pie to just Chicken pie because I have a larger crop of mushrooms growing in my bathroom than I've ever found inside a Chicken and Mushroom pie.


Maybe the reason you get hardly any rice in a microwave curry is because they use that super rice where each grain contains the nutritional equivalent of an entire paddy field. We could probably solve the worlds hunger problem by shipping a couple Tesco Tikka Masala and Pilau rice out to the starving nations if that really is the case.


So there you have it, some brilliantly funny and amazingly insightful comments that didn't see the light of the internet until now.

food: carbohy-light

As a sad and lonely man (have I mentioned this before?) much of my diet consists of microwave meals for one, in fact the microwave becomes your second best friend when you've been single as long as I have even if operating it is so torturous eating broken glass seems like a more inviting prospect and probably more flavoursome compared to all the ready  meals I've previously eaten.

But a big problem with such ready meals are the portions, we all know they aren't very generous, but why is it that there is barely any carbohydrate and far too much protein? You'd expect it to be the other way, god knows how poor the meat has to be if it works out cheaper than rice or potato and I certainly don't want anybody to tell me where it comes from. 

Take a microwave curry as an example, you'll get 3 grains of rice in the 'rice' compartment and 2 dozen flocks of chicken in the 'curry' compartment. That's hardly a balanced meal, so I'm sat there already depressed because I'm alone eating a ready meal trying hard not to wonder where they found a square chicken from which they can carve the perfect 1" cubes of meat while carefully rationing my last grain of rice as 90% of my meat curry is still on the plate. Perhaps it is all a ploy to increase the sales of Naan bread, you'll certainly need a score of them to mop up the bounty of curry sauce because you obviously won't be able to do so with all that rice you didn't get. Don't even get me started on a microwave chicken chow mein that will contain all of 2 noodles and a slither of cabbage.

daily life: that's grate.

Due to my immense charm and unsurpassed wit whenever I am around people laughter ensues and normally this isn't a problem. But the problem lies in the laugh and some people have the most atrociously grating laugh imaginable, the type of laugh that makes you want to stick your head into a bucket of wet cement and wait until it sets. Nothing spoils a jovial conversation more than the sound of a dying donkey piercing the air.

If you have a Jimmy Carr laugh (evidence attached), then my advice is that you purchase my new 'theguywhomoanscalledmatthew Annoying Laugh Removal Kit' which comprises a tgwmcm licensed needle and heavy duty thread that can be used to sow your mouth completely shut and thus preventing the escape of your suicide inducing laugh.

announcement: calling time.

You may remember on Saturday I began the search for a  protégé  and my post box has been overflowing. If you haven't been contacted by my representative then unfortunately your CV just didn't cut the mustard. 

My Laboratoire has already begun the processing and analysing of the fluid samples that have been trickling in over the last few days, and with the exception of one individual trying to personally deliver their sample freshly through the letterbox which was embarrassing for all involved this has been an uneventful process. If you have yet to send in your sample then note it is intended for you to place it into a SEALED PLASTIC CONTAINER, I thought that was obvious but apparently some people did not comprehend this correctly. Dorris the Laboratoire secretary had quite a shock. We've had to place her on emotional leave and she will likely require many more months of therapy to fully recover. Worse of all the Laboratoire was closed for several days while a team of experts decontaminated the facility.

mini-moan: let's see what happens

I feel obligated to write a moan because I have made a promise, but my mind is blank. Earlier I had a fantastic idea for a new post, the ideas were coagulating inside my mind and I could taste it, smell it, hear it. But now I have completely forgotten what that moan was going to be. That brings me to a new moan, how can you just 'forget' something? One moment something is clear in your mind and the next you haven't got a clue, often you mutter the words "I've got something to tell you" and then you are stood there as if somebody has just removed your brain and replaced it with Colcannon (although they forgot to mix in the cabbage).

Now I know how the guy in our company meeting the other day must have felt, he's lucky nobody could see him or it would have been even more embarrassing. And how can somebody not know Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? It's a classic book that has been butchered in two separate film adaptations.

mini-moan: it's the taste

I can't eat Asparagus, well that isn't true, I can eat Asparagus but then I get really bad Asparagus Wee. When I say bad I mean bad enough to cause a gag reflex. It stinks for days even after the smallest quantity of Asparagus has been consumed, I wouldn't be surprised if merely looking at Asparagus was enough to make it stink. The smell is on par with 'funky tea' prescribed by a 'crazy lady' that goes 'woooo' while waving her hands in front of you.

And it isn't just my wee, it also makes my sweat smell so during the summer the house needs to be evacuated when Asparagus is on the menu.

The problem is I like Asparagus, so what am I to do? Answers on a postcard.

But why am I telling you this? You don't want to know about my bodily fluids and their various odours, or do you? The correct answer is yes, and that's why I told you.

mini-moan: a depressing sight.

This will be a quick one, that's something I tell all the girls.

I'm about to show you two pictures both of which are meant to be representations of the same item.

We spent several hours carefully excavating but were unable to locate the second layer of biscuit in this 'Double Decker' deliciousness. We then hired a team of forensic investigators who were also unable to uncover the fabled second layer despite the use of many thousands of pounds of radar and x-ray technology. Eventually we contacted Derek Acorah  who promptly rushed around on the promise he would get to eat the second layer should it be discovered, he wasn't able to contact the second layer from the spirit world, but he did contact my fist with his nose.

mini-moan: it's all about the extra d

Yesterday inside the shop,
Upon the aisle I saw a mop,
A mop that cleans across dimensions three,
I don't think it's the mop for me.

That's enough poetry for the time being, but in case you don't get the reference click the linky.
And here is that mop;

So what is the moan? The moan is that everything now needs to be 3D and you already know how I feel about that. I resisted posting about how Hollywood is trying to squeeze more money out of us by re-releasing films in 3D such as Titanic and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, because now those films will be so much better.

Maybe there is just something wrong with me, but I thought every mop was already 3D, and that mop doesn't seem any more D than my previous mops. Can't wait until the 4D mops launch, just imagine how clean I could get the floor if I could be bothered to mop it, or maybe once mops are 4D they will clean the floor while still stood in the cupboard with no need of water, detergent or even touching it. Where can I get me one of those? And if a 4D mop can do that what will a 5D mop be able to do, I don't think my imagination is capable of even comprehending such a mop, but I believe it will cause world peace over night and most importantly find me a girlfriend.

announcement: fire up the pope mobile.

I know everybody gets great joy from reading my posts, and who wouldn't? They are immensely clever, unbelievably witty, expertly crafted by a master in the art and most importantly resonate with my loyal readers.

But I have decided that it isn't fair for me to hog the limelight, and I am giving one very privileged reader the opportunity to collaborate with me on creating a moan in the near future. This will be a full moan including hand crafted artwork and of course a masterful series of words sculpted to produce maximum enjoyment.

The lucky reader will get to meet their idol, me (although I will of course obscure my identity much like The Stig), spend the day with me, have a light snack, present me with an idea and of course collaborate on the post.

There will be an extensive screening process consisting of phone interviews, and series of scavenger hunts that become increasingly more challenging and a final challenge that will require you to be dropped in the wilderness with only a Space Hopper and your wits to help you survive. If more than one person survives the final challenge a duel to the death will decide who emerges victorious.

I am accepting CVs from now (contact details are below) and will begin whittling down potential candidates in the coming weeks. Candidates that make it through the initial CV round will be required to provide samples of their bodily fluids which will be analysed in my Laboratoire to ensure their bodies contain the minimum threshold of Moan-i-Clorians.

Please email your CVs to;

youCouldBeLikeMe[at]tgwmcm.com

Alternatively via post;

Office of the CEO

Moan Towers

MO69 6MH

United Kingdom

anouncement: statistical anomaly

I thought it might be a good idea to post some statistics about my blog now that it has reached such an impressive milestone.

At the time of posting
88 posts
1071 views
The largest traffic source is AVForums.com with 111 followed closely by Facebook at 98.
epic failure is the biggest search term that brings people to tgwmcm with a grand total of 34
Despite my guidance Firefox is the most popular browser with 383 with Chrome following at 282
1 person apparently has the Image Shack Toolbar - I have no idea either.
The UK leads with 628 views followed by the U.S of A at 287.
Jan has apparently viewed the blog 4 times for that is the number of Netherlands readers.
Lithuania isn't even on the board, I think they get The Internet next year.
Windows leads the pack at 653.
And to the 17% of readers using a Mac I demand you stop reading my blog.
rotfl: blatant attempt to get more readers. is the most popular post with 83 views
One of my favourites bargains: money saving tip #1 is third with 32.
And finally, I've earned 1p in Adsense so just 5999 more until I get paid.




When you put it like that the whole thing seems rather pointless. Here's to the next 1000, maybe everything will have changed by then and all will be right with the world, although I wouldn't hold my breath.

finance: what a bunch of bankers.

I am fuming because today I drove to the Halifax in order to obtain a Bankers Draft or to put it another way withdraw MY MONEY from MY ACCOUNT.
While requesting MY MONEY I was informed there would be a £20 fee, I was silent for a brief moment before asking WHAT? When I have previously requested Bankers Drafts there has never been a fee and certainly nothing a unbelievable as £20.
The cashier (who was clearly a 'banker', everything about him screamed banker with a W) replied

'Your Current Account has a Personal Cheque facility so we charge for a Bankers Draft' 

Although my current account doesn't actually have a Personal Cheque facility because the Halifax no longer issue cheque books for new personal accounts and even if they did nobody accepts cheques any more. What is more preposterous is that the Halifax pay me £5 each month to have my Current account but then charge me for taking my money back out. Now you know how the Halifax can afford to pay you £5 each month.

So then I popped next door to Nationwide who surely wouldn't charge such a ludicrous amount. And I was correct, they only charge £10 but that is a £10 charge to give me MY MONEY, but at least they actually issued me with a chequebook (used a grand total of two times).

Most insane of all is that banks have for years received great criticism for high charges levied when people bounce cheques or their accounts become overdrawn. People have successfully reclaimed money back for these 'unfair' charges. But have you heard a single complaint about the high fees to withdraw money from your account? I have no issue with charging for unauthorised overdrafts as this is a breach of trust with the bank, but when the bank charges me an even higher fee for simply trying to withdraw MY OWN MONEY it has gone too far.

special event: One Thousand View Question Answering Extravaganza!

I'd just like to start this special event with the touching remark that a loyal reader sent me alongside their questions.

I have to say that it is a great honer(sic) to send you something created by my mind

Must try harder, what exactly is an 'honer'
But seriously, such statements make the great effort of compiling this blog worthwhile.

So on with the questions.

This first question may help all you tgwmcm wannabes.
How can one become a professional moaner?
Unfortunately it isn't something you can become it is something you are. To become such an expert in the field of moaning as I, contrary to your beliefs, is not the result of many years practising, immense dedication or vast investment. Instead it requires you to be a sad, pathetic and lonely individual with too much spare time.


What do you think of other people that moan?
I have no time for other people moaning because they are simply too pathetic at it. You have to moan with finesse, swearing wildly and rambling incoherently isn't moaning it is a sign of a simple mind and I cannot stand a simple mind.


Next up is a light hearted question.
What is your favourite party decoration?
'Wang Balloons', in fact wang shaped objects (which are distinctly different from objects that are wangs) amuse me in general. So a balloon that is in the shape of a wang is the ideal way to decorate for that 'special occasion'.


This next question is slightly odd (and badly worded).
Does putting annoying things into writing mean that people hear less moaning from you in real life? Why?
If you in fact meant 'Does conveying your annoyance in writing mean you moan less in person, and if so why?' Then the answer is;
I like to think my written moaning is merely an extension of, and not a replacement to, my everyday moaning. Often my blog posts are based on moans I have recently verbalised. Of course, I don't have much opportunity to moan in person as I have little human contact as a result of my pathetic and lonely existence. So no, I do not moan less as a result of this blog, I moan even more.


Where were you born?
I was not born on your planet, instead I arrived here inside a meteorite in a time before your calendar began. My birth occurred on a planet deep inside the Moan-Nebula called Moanania and the day of my birth was in fact a planet wide holiday marked by great celebrations for I was a God amongst my people. But one day a great misfortune struck my planet as our fuel supply 'Moanium' ran low and my people sacrificed their lives so that I may live. Unfortunately the planet I arrived on was yours.


How do you imagine your audience?
Bouncing up and down with no clothes on.

Slightly personal but I'll answer anyway.
How old are you?
That is a tricky question, much like a dog I do not age as a human. When I was born my age was equivilent to 63 of your human years. Inside my cellular structure are small life forms called moan-i-clorians which age my body 1 minute each time I moan. I am at the time of this post 647 years old which equates to 307,154,079 individual moans.

And finally.
What is it about moaning that makes it so enjoyable to read?
The enjoyment you obtain from reading this blog does not come from the fact I moan incessantly, but instead from my great skill with the written word, my vast intellect and of course my immeasurable charm and sophistication.


So there you have it, if your questions were not answered that is because they were pathetic much like you and therefore not worthy of my time. I will in fact be billing those that sent me stupid questions triple for wasting my time.

mini-moan: an awful surprise

I like to think I have a sophisticated a discerning palette in fact I really like to think that even though it probably isn't true. And there is nothing worse than eating a food, in particular a sweet, that is delicious on the outside but deep inside a demon lurks.

As a child I was deeply scarred by the abomination or rather abonbonation that is a strawberry bonbon with a toffee centre. The horror that struck me when the delicious strawberry tangy outer layer was breached to reveal not a sweet strawberry filling but instead a fudgey monstrosity. Don't think for one moment I dislike fudge, for you would be wrong, but you might as well fill the middle of a bonbon with Stewed Donkey Feet if you are going to ruin it with fudge.
To this day I am so terrified of coming across this vile mixture that I haven't purchased a strawberry bonbon since :(


And just in case you were wondering, I'm just finishing up the One Thousand View Question Answering Extravaganza so stay tuned for more.

warning: not big and not clever

When I opened up the comments on my blog in response to a request by a fan (because I am that nice)  I warned you that certain behaviour would not be tolerated, and the other day a breach of trust occurred. Somebody posted the following comment on this post.

 This is completely unacceptable and I have a crack team of investigators from 'The News of the World' checking voicemails around the clock to track down the perpetrator of this vicious crime. Consider yourself warned.

And if another incident such as this occurs I'm cancelling the One Thousand View Question Answering Extravaganza, plus their won't be any cake.

announcement: cease and desist

The time has now passed to submit questions to the One Thousand View Question Answering Extravaganza and the required [read amended thank you very much individual that messed the whole thing up ;)] view count has now been reached. I will be spending the next few days collating, pondering, self indulging, procrastination, creating, dissecting, mastering&buttering, and if there is any time left answering your questions. So stay tuned for the griping finale and maybe you will get to see your question answered.


Did I forget to mention that those of you lucky enough to have your question answered will be charged a small administration fee, when I say small, I mean in comparison to the vast joy that you will receive by having your idol fulfil your very own request. This will automatically be taken from one of your accounts with no intervention required as I wouldn't want to inconvenience my loyal viewers.


TTFN.

mini-moan: £6 for some pâté on toast, you must be kidding

I actually proclaimed '£6 for some pate on toast, you must be kidding' when reading the menu at a restaurant about 18 months ago. When fellow guests ordered (much to my dismay) and their food arrived it transpired that the toast was a single slice of Tesco Value white loaf that had seen the inside of a toaster, and the pâté was 'wafer thin' I was right to be so disgusted.

What is up with restaurant prices these days? If it costs me £6 to buy the ingredients for making 20 portions of pâté on toast and with superior quality ingredients I might add, then it is outrageous for a restaurant buying ingredients at even lower cost to charge that for a single portion. I think you can probably buy a sofa in DFS for £6 on a Double Discount weekend.

I don't want to come across as a skinflint but it seems like people have forgotten the true value of things at the moment, especially when somebody told me they were charged about £4 for a single slice of quiche at a farm shop :O

So why am I suddenly bringing this up now? I don't know, must be bored I guess.

mini-moan: sync failed.

One of the most annoying parts of modern communication is that it is often asynchronous and this can cause problems because you have no idea if the other party has received a message let alone read it. Text messages are one of the biggest causes of confusion in communication as unlike a phone call which guarantees your communication will arrive they have a tendency to vanish into the electronic ether.

How many times have you sent a text that has disappeared? Perhaps the message you sent  decided to go on a little trip to Narnia and returns 20 years later without ageing a day.
This has certainly happened to me, I've known text messages arrive 3 days after they were sent so sending messages containing relative time information is useless and even worse confusing.

Let's use the real world scenario that prompted this post.
Somebody sends you a message that reads 'can come around 11' which then arrives at 11:24. What am I meant to do with that? Assume the message's flight was cancelled and it had to catch a later connection? Or maybe it was meant to read 11pm/23:00? Or the least likely scenario is they mean 11 tomorrow? Of course nobody would assume the last option was the intended message would they ;)

You know who you are!

mini-moan: we were on a break.

It always happens, you are driving down the motorway or a dual carriageway keeping a safe and sensible distance between your vehicle and the vehicle in front and suddenly a car/van/lorry manoeuvres itself into the gap and you suddenly have to slow down or your two vehicles will be quickly transformed into a stretched limo.

What is the cause of this mentality? Are people in such a rush to get to their destination that the extra 5ft of progress they gain is so important?
Well, they may arrive 1 second earlier because of this, but when they cause an accident I can guarantee they won't be arriving on time.

apology: don't blame, shame.

I have to make an apology for something that recently happened of which I am deeply ashamed.

A colleague of mine became so excited at the prospect of my One Thousand View Question Answering Extravaganza that he/she decided to increase my view count as quickly as possible. As a result there are 17 fraudulent views of my blog, and that now means that the Q&A will not be posted until my blog hits One Thousand and Seventeen views.

Again, I apologise deeply for this and have taken steps to ensure that such breaches of trust do not occur in future.

mini-moan: life of a single man

Do you remember back in the day when alongside a music album selected tracks would be sold singly and played on radio stations and have music videos made for them? And do you remember that these single songs released from the album would also have extra tracks not available on the album as a way to encourage you to buy them because if it was just the same as the album why wouldn't you just buy the album?

Well if you do remember that then you are one of the few because no longer do singles contain additional tracks, or if they do they contain a 'Radio Edit'. Why the feck would I want to pay money to hear a track already on the album I've purchased and then an edited and butchered version of that same track? The answer is that nothing would ever make me want to do that.

Take Muse's Plug In Baby single from their 2001 album Origin Of Symmetry. It contains the following tracks.

1. Plug In Baby
2. Nature_1
3. Execution Commentary
4. Spiral Static
5. Bedroom Acoustics

Now look at their Undisclosed Desires single from their 2009 album The Resistance. It contains.

1. Undisclosed Desires
2. Undisclosed Desires Radio Edit.

I know which I'd sooner purchase.

mini-moan: universally shite bric-a-brac

Just because there is a slot, it doesn't mean you can stick something in there are words I often hear and never is this more true than for the USB ports on your computer.
Universal Serial Bus is one of the greatest parts of modern computing if you don't remember faffing around with Parallel Port, Serial Ports, Joystick Ports and a whole slew of proprietary ports you are lucky because now you can connect phones, hard drives, flash drives and many other gadgets by just sticking that all familiar plug in that all familiar hole.

But with great power comes great responsibility and now that power is used to power (do you see what I did there) all manner of useless crap that people foolishly buy. Most of these sales of USB powered junk ultimately end up as gifts and as a result just ruin somebody's birthday, wedding, Christmas, Bar Mitzvah, <Insert Occassion Here>. I mean nobody would buy a USB powered coffee mug warmer, or Homer Simpson desk lamp for themselves would they?
I own one of the above items :(

Please, if everybody stopped buying this junk then maybe our resources (and sanity) wouldn't be depleted so quickly in the pursuit of profiteering of the misery off others.

http://gearcrave.com/2007-11-09/top-10-most-useless-usb-gadgets-of-all-time/

mini-moan: mr blue sky

I'm sad, incredibly sad, but you already knew that didn't you? But I'm also not very happy either and that's because I foolishly decided to take 10 days of holiday and as I type to you it is the final day of that holiday.

So you think that I'm sad because my holiday is over, quite the opposite, I'm incredibly happy that it is finally over and I am royally annoyed that it ever started.

In the last 10 days there have been a grand total of 2.5 days of sun and it's actually raining at the moment as it was yesterday. I've been bored out of my mind for 10 days and I can't wait to get back to work.
This isn't right, what am I doing wrong that means I hate being on holiday? In fact I know exactly why, but I can't go into that here.

mini-moan: past tense possessive

This is something that has bugged me for years. Nowadays it is no longer correct to say or write 'he' when talking about an individual of unknown gender. Previously 'he' would often be used as a general catch all just as 'man ' is used to refer generically to humans.

Due to a change in gender roles and a move to equality 'he' has gone and fair enough, but it has been replaced with the monstrous 'he/she', 'he or she', 'his/her' .etc. And this is what I cannot understand, instead of saying he/she which is clumsy and painful just say 'they', 'their', 'them'.
Our language has built into it a gender neutral way referring to individuals or groups of unknown or indeterminate gender, so why do people insist on 'he/she'.

I can only assume that people are naturally writing or saying 'he' and then quickly correct themselves to say 'he/she'.

And why the feck is a cat always 'she' and a dog always 'he'. If another person asks 'What's his name' when referring to my female dog I'll deck them.

announcement: self satisfying.

I'm appalled at the thoughts that have just raced through your minds - You disgust me.

Anyway, onwards and upwards.

This blog is approaching 1000 views, no you didn't misread, nearly 1000 reads of my ramblings have occurred across just over 70 musings. Although I think most of those views are by a single reader (you know who you are).

So, to celebrate I will be conducting a special Q&A that will be posted after the one-thousandth view and therefore require you to send in questions that I will grace with an answer.
Get thinking as you've probably got about 5 days before that magic 1000 is hit so I'm setting a cut-off date to Friday 13th April, the day seems particularly appropriate.

Send in your questions to superAdmin[at]tgwmcm.com (address obscured to foil those clever spam bots).

I won't be able to answer every question I receive, it will take me ages to answer all 3 of them, but I'll try my best.

mini-moan: does not scan.

All upholstered furniture manufactured after 1950 must have a manufacturers label permanently attached which shows compliance with the The Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988.

 Yes, you read that correctly all furniture manufactured after 1950 must have a manufacturer fitted label stating compliance with regulations introduced in 1988. So unless you are Doctor Who or happen to have a flux capacitor lying around, you can't legally sell any furniture manufactured between 1950 and 1988.

I've previously mentioned the British legal system is weird, and this certainly proves it.

technology: curse you

I'm pretty traditional in my daily life, 99% of my media consumption comes from the good old fashioned satellite dish the type of satellite dish your grandparents would have had, none of this new fangled internet that all the kids are using these days.
But there are some web only shows that I enjoy to watch and I often visit The Escapist for shows such as LoadingReadyRun, The Big Picture with MovieBob and of course Zero Punctuation. As much as I enjoy much of the content on The Escapist something has always bugged me about using the site and that is because when you view a video in full-screen the mouse cursor doesn't hide, it just sits there glaring at you like a petulant child. So you sit there delicately trying to position the mouse cursor at the far right side of the screen so it doesn't distract you, but you can always see a little white line peering out from the edge of the screen as to say "I'm always watching, you can't get get rid of me that easily". I've never seen the reasoning behind keeping the cursor on the screen, nearly every other site has learned that after 5 seconds you should hide the mouse cursor because it just annoys the :censored: out of people watching the video.

And now Youtube are at it, many of the new HTML5 videos suffer from 'cursor incursion', along with a stupid dialog that asks 'Do you want to allow watching this video in fullscreen'. Of course I fecking well do, that's why I hit the Fullscreen button. Why would I want to watch it in a 5" box and not the entire 46" screen I have available. It's not like I can do something else while watching the video such as filling in my tax return or writing a blog post about how annoying watching online videos can be.
Then Youtube really starts to pee me off when it has forgotten to show an advert, it's amazing how many adverts you now get on Youtube, so it then gets stuck and forces you to refresh the page so you then see the advert it previously forgot to show you.

This was originally going to be a mini-moan, but by the time I got to the end of the first paragraph I had released so much bile, so brace yourself a full moan is coming - Hoooowwwwlllll.

And those bloody expandables you get on websites such as The Escapist. Things that fly out of the video player and fill the entirety of your screen like that creepy little girl in the ring who lunges out of the TV. They scare the bejeebus out of me.

And everytime you watch a Youtube video you have to close a damned banner advert, and then often another one shows up, and another, so you miss the first minute of the video just closing banners. And Blip.tv is worse, they show up in random parts of the screen and just wont die no matter how many you close, and just when you think you've won, 3 minutes later another will pop-up. It's like playing an endless game of whack-a-mole.

And videos that have advert breaks in the middle piss me right off, you can always tell because the timer bar at the bottom of the video has little lines so as to say 'Hah, you know what's going to happen when you reach this point, I'm going to try and sell you crap'. And often they put an advert about 1 minute before the video ends knowing that by that point you aren't going to leave.

It seems like a backwards step, with HD PVRs and massive screen TVs or projectors we evolved our media consumption to a point where we could see our favourite shows in glorious quality without the interruption of adverts, and now I'm watching a pixelated mess with unskippable adverts that annoy me with stupid dialogs and banners. Progress, it's not what it's cracked up to be.

daily life: follow the signs

It's thirsty work being a sign.

Over the course of the last few days I've seen more and more signs that just make no sense. Signs are pretty expensive to produce so you'd think more care and attention would go into the wording of them before sending them off to print. On the positive side they make for entertaining reading when you are bored and stuck in a traffic jam.

Today, while waiting 20 minutes to get into the tip (I certainly know how to show someone a good time), I saw these entertaining signs.

'The Origin of all waste delivered in commercial vehicles and trailers will be checked' - How are they going to do that then? Does every item of waste have a unique barcode on it indicating where the waste was produced? Will they sit the waste on a chair in the middle of a dark room and shine a bright light in it's face until it confesses it's true origin?

If you weigh 3501Kg your not coming in, and I don't care who your father is. They've probably got one of those people that can guess your weight standing by the gate at all times.

mini-moan: look mum, no hands.

Something very odd has happened to the post delivery, for some reason the posties have shed their trusty Royal Mail bikes in favour of Royal Mail prams. Obviously Royal Mail are trying to show how much they care for your post by treating it like a precious little baby.
The only other theory I have is they've all become jealous of Postman Pat flying around in his helicopter and decided to trade their bikes up their bikes in an attempt to look more 'rad'.

Do you like my secret filming skills? I used to do all the Fake Sheikh filming for The Mirror, sadly the work from that gig has dried up now.

mini-moan: interrupt handler

You may have noticed that I've now got a new logo for the mini-moans. The old one just didn't work as well as I thought it would, but I'm still not sure about this one either as it's rather meh.

But on with the post.

I watch a fair whack of TV, I guess having no friends or social life of any kind means you have to fill the void and mask the crushing loneliness some how. I can put up with adverts on TV because we live in a capitalist society and things aren't free (maybe in the 24th Century Gene). But what I can't stand are adverts that abruptly start often mid sentence during some important dialogue or during an exciting action scene, most of the time when the adverts end you find a few seconds of the show is lost and now you have no idea what happened while you were subjected to an advert for Vagisil, is intimate feminine itching really that much of an issue?

I'll stop now before this becomes a full blown moan.

mini-moan: the bottom of the ocean is the safest place to be

Channel 4's documentary series Dispatches is tackling a big topic this week with Dispatches: Why ships sink.

I'll tell you why ships sink, because they fill up with water which means the mass of the ship increases and it is no longer able to displace enough water to remain buoyant. See, I've managed to save 1 hour of your life by removing the need for you to watch that episode of Dispatches.

Next week I'll explain the mystery of 'Why do you always find something in the last place you look'.

mini-moan: three from the top and two from the middle please carol

I'm a man that's easily annoyed, and there's one sure way to annoy me, squeezing the toothpaste tube from the middle. I just don't understand why anybody would do that, it makes no sense. Not only does it make it harder to get all the toothpaste out of the tube, but what advantage does it give you? I get so annoyed when I have to spend 5 minutes correcting a toothpaste tube that's been squeezed from the middle. I'm staying at mums for a few days and she is a perpetual tube middle squeezerer, there's just no changing that. It seems odd because my Dad was so emphatic about squeezing from the bottom and obviously taught me well (I know what your thinking and you have a dirty mind), you'd have thought the practice would have rubbed off on her. But it didn't :(

So to any of you out there that are unable to use a tube properly, for my own sanity get one of the tubey pump thingies so I don't have nightmares about all the lumpy and misshapen toothpaste tubes lying on the shelves of medicine cabinets or in glasses by the sink.