mini-moan: denied the opportunity

Recently I ranted about ripen at home fruit that does anything but. Instead you spend days monitoring that nectarine or banana only for it to rot into compost when you look away.
Today I turn my intention to fruit that is the polar opposite, an example of this would be the Waitrose 'Perfectly Ripe' range which is more 'Perfectly Rotten, Perfect For Compost', though sometimes with Waitrose even their regular range of fruit is rotten before you leave the shop.
On Saturday I purchased a punnet of cherries, and with them being Waitrose they were far from cheap. Yet the very first cherry I removed from the punnet was dripping and rotten, the next also rotten, the one after home to a whole colony of mould, eventually I found a cherry that wouldn't have caused me severe digestive trouble and it tasted, well it had no taste at all.
I returned the cherries to Waitrose and with my refund I purchased 4 Pears, rather expensive golden jobbies imported from New Zealand, although the fact they came from New Zealand should have been the first warning they would be terrible, much like anything imported from New Zealand.
The first pear while massively disappointing was indeed 'Perfectly Ripe', the second '50% Rotten', the third '75% Rotten' and the final '25% Rotten'. With a success rate that low I don't know how they can use the term 'Perfectly Ripe' unless they mean for making White Lightening.

At least with 'Ripen at Home' I get the opportunity to live in hope for several days that my fruit will be ready, the enjoyment of inspecting the fruit and proclaiming 'Tomorrow will be the day, I will feast on various fruits' before the disappointment that is a rotten puddle of decayed fruit where before there was optimism. No, with 'Perfectly Ripe' you bypass the fun and head straight to disappointment town, much like the A34 when heading towards Didcot.

mini-moan: the decider

Today I had a bit of a lie in and didn't get out of bed until the dog woke me at 9:30am.
I looked out of the French doors into the garden, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, the weather was glorious. I really must make the most of this glorious day. What can I do? Where can I go?
Thinking felt like too much hard work so I ended up doing nothing, it might as well be raining.

mini-moan: the a is for 'illiterate'

Today I saw some marketing material which I believe was intended to convey the message of how versatile and flexible the companies product offering was. It may or may not have been worded 'All-around [redacted] for all your needs'.

Obviously the product is so large that it will envelop you which probably means it isn't "Brilliantly Simple", but don't worry I'm all over this and I'll go around to the marketing department and clarify the message they were trying to convey. 

It's nothing a bit of Tipex can't solve.

daily life: twice the entry.

Life is difficult, especially when sausage is involved. But fortunately there are clever people out there able to make our difficult and stressful lives simpler such as the person who invented the melon baller because carving melon into perfectly round bite-size balls was such a chore. I'm so glad I can now stick balls in my mouth with ease.
But then there are things that are designed to make your life easier but instead just annoy the crap out of you, such as for example the little flap on a film lid which is meant to help you pull out quickly but instead actually just rips off leaving half the lid behind, no matter how hard you try you just can't get purchase on the remaining flap and decide to push on through and the result is fluid flying all over the place making a terrible mess.
Or when you tug the string on a tea bag to help thoroughly squeeze all the juice from your sack (some people found that humorous) but it detaches leaving your bag floating helplessly in warm fluid.

These are the things that annoy me.

mini-moan: the 3 rs

If I were the type of individual to have friends and possibly arrange activities for said friends to participate in I may be slightly annoyed if several to many of those hypothetical friends were unable to attend the aforementioned hypothetical activity but rather than informing me in advance chose not to tell me they were busy until 3 days before when I asked them if they were still coming.
That certainly sounds like the type of thing that would annoy me.

It's certainly fortunate I don't have any friends and that I never arrange activities for them or it would be quite embarrassing.

Oh, and the 3 Rs are.

Resquested to attend.
Responded with availability.
Rudeness avoided.

mini-moan: half empty

This has mildly annoyed me for a while but lately it is starting to grate quite massively.
For some reason my mother never drinks to the bottom of her tea cup, she actually leaves about 2 mouthfuls of tea behind.That's particularly annoying because when you pick-up the 'empty' tea cups you end up spilling a mixture of mum slobber and tea on your high quality white DNA branded T-Shirt.
When questioned as to why she leaves tea behind (but never coffee) the answer is "It's cold". That's not even  scientifically possible, the tea she has consumed directly above the 'dregs' would have been colder than the tea beneath it. Why does this same issue not affect Coffee?
Maybe the next time I make her a tea I'll put exactly 2 mouthfuls of liquid into the cup and see if she leaves it untouched because it was 'cold'.

mini-moan: by the power

Something that has really bugged me for the last few weeks are the new Škoda adverts. As much as we all hate to admit Škoda are actually good cars now, well Škoda  are actually Volkswagon now but that's a different matter.
But some marketing moron decided that people still didn't respect the Škoda name and what they needed to do was trick everybody into thinking they weren't buying a Skoda but where actually buying a Schkoda. Now the smug bastard voicing the end of the Škoda advert goes all native like he's a master of the Czech tongue (I wish I could find some Czech tongue).
At least when Geoffrey Palmer proclaimed Vorsprung durch Technik at the end of the VW adverts he was clearly taking the piss, plus he really likes a Custard Tart.

mini-moan: bit shifting.

No, I'm not talking about binary operations because that would just be silly.
The other day I purchased some Innocent Orange Juice, personally I find Innocent products to be overrated and overpriced (my they are overpriced), but it was on special offer at just 90p for a bottle so it was actually about the cheapest jus available.
I had a choice between the smooth 'no bits' and the 'with bits' variety, and being a sophisticated individual I opted for with bits.
Upon pouring my first glass I realised my mistake, instead of the juice flowing smoothly into my glass it slopped out like a yoghurt that had been left in the sun for a month to become lumpier than a 13 year old dog.
At this point I realised when they say 'with bits' they really mean 'Orange juice without the bits removed plus all the bits we removed from the without bits juice also added'. This bottle must have had the bits from at least 10 bottles of juice added to it. I would have had more juice and fewer bits if I'd just eaten an orange.

To me this is outrageous, padding out the orange juice with all the waste products from the 'without bits' product is disrespecting customers and clearly a misrepresentation of the final product. If you can eat your glass of orange juice with a fork it is no longer juice.

:( : rule of three.

Good things happen to bad people

Well, good things certainly don't happen to me so I must be good.

What can go wrong will go wrong

I'm still waiting for something to go right.

Goodness begets more goodness

Then I must be doing something wrong.


Just once I'd like to be rewarded for innocuously stumbling my way through life. Perhaps I am doing it wrong? Maybe I should only care about myself? Maybe I should do whatever I want whenever I want? Be damned with the consequences, although the only consequence will probably be success and happiness.

 

announcement: it's that time again.

It seems like only yesterday I celebrated the

One Thousand View Question Answering Extravaganza!

And now my pointless, unnecessary, uninteresting and self aggrandising ramblings have accumulated just under 1700 views. That means I am soon to approach Two Thousand views, and obviously I'm going to celebrate that milestone as Two Thousand is a bigger number than One Thousand and I measure the value of things based on how big they are, well most things.

This time I will not be asking for my reader to contribute questions that I will answer hilariously, I think you've all learned far too much about me as it is. Instead I have something special planned and in a 'Watch Out! Beadles About' crossed with 'Noel's House Party' style event I will appear on the doorstep of a viewer and whisk them away for a guided tour of my new Laboratoire where they'll get to see where all my top secret research is conducted, tour my cobra training facility and much, much more.

So now might be the perfect time to install a moat and fill it with lava and crocodiles.

mini-moan: what's in a name.

I'm not a fan of our Duchy of Cornwall's range of expensive organic food, so far I've not had a single item from the range that I thought was any good. But today while browsing the shelves of Waitrose I saw a Duchy 'Sandringham Strawberry Yoghurt' for 25p instead of the usual 84p, how could I refuse.
Proudly displayed on the tub was 'Organic', Charlie has a bit of a thing for organic and I believe he only feeds Camilla organic hay (that one was unfair). I wouldn't be surprised if old Charlie brushed his teeth with a stick of organic Celery dipped in organic yoghurt.
But while reading the ingredients on the back of the tub I noticed 'flavouring*', and the asterisk explanation read 'Flavouring from approved non-organic ingredients'. So if the flavouring in this 'Organic' yoghurt isn't organic then how the hell can it be an organic yoghurt?
Shame on your Charlie, you've let me down, you've let Waitrose down and most importantly you've let yourself down.

Also, as the yoghurt was the least Strawberry flavoured I've ever eaten the individual that 'approved' the non-organic flavouring certainly wasn't me. This yoghurt isn't getting the 'tgwmcm' seal of approval.