recepticle=Sunday, February 27, 2005

the story of lent
emily and i were trying to figure out the story of lent. here's what we came up with:

jesus died for our sins on good friday (but what's good about that?), and then he came back to life on palm sunday (because his palms healed?), then he went to a garden and cut a donkey's ear off.

on shrove tuesday he made pancakes for everyone and fed the five thousand, then he walked through the desert for forty days and forty nights until he found a lamp with a genie inside. he wished for a thousand easter eggs, and then he built an ark made of chocolate to save all the little animals from the great fire of london.

- posted by lawrie at 1:45 PM ~ comments

Friday, February 25, 2005

way to go, chris
i just received two emails in a row from a homophobic and apparently dyslexic young man. here they are, completely unedited:

subject: lmaoo
message: this site is extremly fagish but ya have a hot girlfriend m,aybe get rid of the pink shit is extremly gay.....

five minutes later:

subject: *cough* Fag *cough*
message: on seecond thought you look like a fag.. so the site fits you. mind as well keep it fagish...

i mean, really now. i don't even know where to start on this veritable cornucopia of illiteracy, so rather than point out the obvious, i thought i'd spend 10 minutes seeing what i could find out about this guy, using his email address as a starting point. here's what i learned:

email: seycopath@adelphia.net
email 2: chris@feverrocks.com
name: chris evin
age: 17
birthdate: 03/03/1987
location: loxahatchee, west palm beach, florida
telephone: loxahatchee 236-7013
his band's website: feverrocks.com
aim: seycopath
yahoo: feverlead
images: here's his face

chris likes to play unreal assassins and 'install car stereos', apparently. he also 'knows a producer lady' that will help him and his metal/rock muppets 'kick some shit off'.

golly! i've certainly released a lot of personal information about him now, haven't i? i should probably let you all know that 'FeVeR' have a guestbook that's open for some abusin', and i'm sure chris is more than capable of getting the same as he's given. bombs away!

- posted by lawrie at 4:37 PM ~ comments

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

somebody clearly has a sense of humour
irony of ironies, i just received an email today to put in a tender for a new 'speed or safety' government website.

i've just updated some of my links on the right, there. i think you should all go and say haldo to chris eighty4. i'm not getting very much work done today because i keep going to the window to look at the snow. i'm such a girl.

- posted by lawrie at 4:40 PM ~ comments

king of the road
as i was driving through the major (but mostly minor) boroughs that make up my home town this afternoon, i decided that today's blog entry would be about mercedes and bmw drivers and their flat-earthed beliefs that the entire road system should revolve around them, and all who traverse their bidirectional world should bend to their every whim and fancy. however, as of this evening, things have taken a slightly more sinster turn, and so this particular field of moron study will have to wait for another evening.

if you know me, then you'll know that one of my most prized possessions is my mini cooper (although it's not just mine; emily and i bought him together). he's called chester. here he is. isn't he pretty?

on my way to rehearsal this evening, some guy who clearly wasn't watching the road ran right into the back of me, at quite a fair speed. i was stationary, giving way to another car at a roundabout when it happened. i got out and just about died when i saw the back of my car; it was completely caved in. the guy who ran into me got out and seemed fairly placid about the whole thing, said he didn't have his insurance details with him, so we swapped names and numbers. utterly shocked, i cancelled rehearsal with a very understanding mark and johnny and drove home, wherupon i burst into tears.

fast-forward to when i've got my shit together, and i try calling the guy on the number he gave me. big fucking surprise, the number is a dud. so, i call my insurance company who kindly me inform me that this won't affect my premium or my no claims bonus (yay!), and that i should call the police, since it's an offence to not give out insurance details.

shortly after this phone call, my mobile rings with a withheld number. i answer the phone:

lawrie: hello?
car-wrecker: hi, is this lawrie?
l: yeah, hi.
cw: hi, this is the guy who ran into your car.
l: yeah, i know. listen, i need to get your insurance details. and the number you gave me doesn't work.
cw: oh yeah, well that number won't work [gives another number]. yeah... well, listen, yeah? i don't wanna do this with the insurance, i was wondering if you just wanted to do this private. see, my brother works in a garage in birmingham and he can fix it all if we just do it private.
l: um... no. just give me your insurance details...
cw: but i thought we could just work this out privately, yeah? see, if i go through the insurance, my premium's gonna go up...
l: who are you insured with?
cw: uh, ummm... it's, uh... [gives a company name]. but my brother can just fix it right up. i saw it, it's just a dent. he can just hammer that out.
l: dude, you caved in the back of my car. thor couldn't hammer that one out. what's your policy number?
cw: uh, i don't have it. it's at home in london.
l: can't you call your parents and get it?
cw: uh... yeah, i did, but they can't find it. my dad is coming up from london to take a look at my car, because the bumper's cracked. listen, maybe we can meet up tomorrow and sort it out private, yeah?
l: my car is dead. you need to give me your insurance details; it's a legal requirement.
cw: uh, yeah... okay. i call you tomorrow, yeah?
l: uh huh. bye.

just to check, i call him back on the new number he gave me. first try: no answer. second try: "the number cannot be connected at this time." third try: dead tone. so, i sent him a text message with my insurance details, and now it appears i'll be playing the long and happy easter egg hunt that is merry-go-round the insurance dodger.

woo. motherfucking. hoo.

- posted by lawrie at 12:26 AM ~ comments

Thursday, February 17, 2005

buy our blocks of concrete!
"Dragon World - where emphasis is on life. Total quality throughout with a superb selection of property types constructed in new resort developments, mostly around golf courses by Zim Design or Dave Gir. Sympathetic use of the existing, combined with innovative project planning makes every Whum project stand out from the rest."

how is this english? this is what i've been doing for most of every waking moment in the last two days; writing copy for some crappy spanish property agency. actually, scratch that; to say i've been 'writing copy' is to imply that i played a creative role in the poo mountain of english that is the paragraph above. no, i've been given a 'website' that is, in fact, 54 web pages constructed entirely from gif images and 5k of javascript bullshit. there is not a scrap of text on these pages; no title, no paragraphs, no alt tags, just 535k of gif. so i have to cut out the things that look like buildings and retype the whole. fucking. mess.

bullshit. BULLSHIT.

- posted by lawrie at 12:02 AM ~ comments

Friday, February 11, 2005

o! customer, hark at thy stupidity
there's only one thing in the whole entire world that would ever make me want to work in a customer service related job ever again: blogging. it is the only justifiable reason for putting yourself through the wholly self-inflicted torture of dealing with normal people on an everyday basis, for wages that could barely stretch to a box of turkish delight for dinner every night.

i realised this when talking to my good friend euan of the the copperpot journals, who is currently running the drum centre store in leicester. as we stood there discussing the various merits of ride cymbals, a woman walked into the store. she walked past the cream stratocaster with pearloid scratchplate for Ł2,000, past the wall of gibson, ibanez and fender guitars, towards the back end of the store where euan and i stood between a wall of premier, tama and ludwig kits and a rather dashing central aisle made entirely of snare drums. pausing a moment, she then turned back towards the guitar counter and said "do you have any church collection plates?"

"here you are," i would have said, had i been working there. "here's a zildjian z custom china collection plate. that'll be Ł358 please. oh, is that too much? well maybe that's because it's a cymbal! we have a lot of those, seeing as this is the fucking drum centre! get out of my store, you degenerate flump!"

- posted by lawrie at 2:34 PM ~ comments

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

i am become rock, the destroyer of drums
in the space of three months i have gone from having a fairly decent set of cymbals to having a small collection of gold-flavoured scrap metal. how did this happen? rock %26 roll killed my cymbals.

the first ever decent cymbal i had was a 16" zildjian a-custom. the fact that most of you are musically inept monkeys who share more musical common ground with a ham salad than with me (no offence), i shall explain this in cha-ching terms; first cymbal, Ł180. Second cymbal acquired, my father's old 20" 1970 paiste 602 crash/ride. in 1970, it cost Ł35, which in modern monies roughly converts to... i don't know, nine hundred pounds? something like that. then came another a-custom, this time a 17"; recommended retail price: Ł207.

amongst that lot, my dad also gave me his old spare hi-hats, a pair of 15" superzyns which he had to buy in an emergency one saturday afternoon in the seventies for Ł4. those superzyns are probably worth about the same now.

so what's happened in the last three months? they've all been fucking destroyed, bar the superzyns! yes, that's right. the Ł4 hi-hats are the only metal frisbees that have survived my drumming wrath, and i now have to lay out something like four hundred thousand pounds to get replacements that probably won't break. okay; so that's probably an exaggeration, but i have a really awful headache. stop judging me and fuck off you bunch of gypsies.

- posted by lawrie at 2:57 PM ~ comments

Friday, February 04, 2005

a call to arms
help! i rather urgently need someone who can write japanese fairly fluently in either hiragana or katakana (romaji = unacceptable) and would be able to translate a 140-word letter from english into that magical language of the land of the rising sun.

as payment, i offer the eternal gratitude of four doe-eyed wonderchildren and possibly even a basket of mini-muffins. i will do anything you want; i'll even stop sending suspicious-looking envelopes filled with talcum powder to children's hospitals. puh-lease! it's urgency! i mean, it's of the urgent! quickness!

- posted by lawrie at 1:47 AM ~ comments

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

pooreo
i actually posted this on the brand-spanky-new group blog dovka.org today, but it decided to eat my post instead of publishing it, so i'm posting it here.

there is a guy called simon. not 'lying simon' or the even more despicable 'slimy simon', but just regular 'simon'. no quotes.

he is my girlfriend's brother, and for most of the year he lives and works in new york as a soccer coach. he recently obtained a new yorkian girlfriend called rowena (and by 'obtained' i obviously mean 'won the heart of', as opposed to 'purchased at walmart'), who is very lovely and brought me and emily a giant box of oreos.

i like oreos. a lot. almost as much as robots. it's very hard to get oreos over here, since shops seem to stock them sporadically, and when they do have them, they hide them in the children's clothing aisle, or the fish counter. i recently discovered that oreos that arrive in britain come from spain, whereas the american oreos are manufactured inside the continental united states. this may go someway to explaining the slight difference in taste; what it does not explain is why eating any number of oreos in a day, from one upwards, turns my poo the exact same colour as an oreo. i even did a dietary experiment to make sure it was the oreos and not a coincidence. it's the oreos.

i can only hope that my poo doesn't have a creamy centre as well. god, i wish i hadn't typed that.

- posted by lawrie at 11:49 PM ~ comments