Thursday, February 04, 2016
Czech or German Beer. Which is better
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Bavarian Beer...yes please
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Spring just around the corner
Thursday, March 06, 2014
Arsenal Vs Everton, FA Cup Quarter final ticket allocation moodiness
Not impressed with the way their club has sneakily reduced Everton's allocation from the 9,000 they we are entitled to down to 5,000 on some fairly ropey "safety" grounds.
Evertonians are desperate to see this game and this tweet made me think instantly of what you'll see at the Emirates this weekend :
Sneaky blue bastard
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Ugh, terrible, terrible blogging by me
Monday, February 10, 2014
SevenStreets bizarre spat with Giles Coren.
They seem to have took the post down now but here it is from the cached version
Giles Coren, F*ck Off
By David Lloyd / 16 comments
Labels: NONE
Today, according to his Twitter feed, Giles Coren (or an oil painting of a man much more handsome) is coming to Liverpool. He has elicited much sweating and salivation from some in our city. He comes to dine. But, he has a caveat – it must be somewhere edgy, not ‘trad’ (apparently, the Italian Club Fish sounds a bit ‘trad’ “All all big pepper pots, red tablecloths and flabby lasagne” – incidentally, how hil-arious is that tweet? The man should be writing funnies for the News Hudlines) And it must be a short walk from the station – one assumes because he has no serviceable backbone.
Oh, talking of which…
Coren must eat in somewhere ‘Spunky, not poncy.’ Well, give him his due – he knows all about spunky – recall his spunky letter to the minions at the Times:
“I don’t really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do… And the way you avoid this kind of fuck up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it’s easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.”
Giles was pissed off because the subs had changed ‘where to go for a nosh’ to ‘where to go for nosh’. He continued…
“And you’ve fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy? (note nice, casual racist slur thrown in for good effect, readers? The plasterer is Irish. Not from Mr Coren’s tribe.)
“And, just out of interest, I’d like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy.”
The subs replied:
“Sub-editing is a noble profession. It is also a thankless one – particularly when your writers call you a “useless cunt”. None of this, however, can excuse your nasty, bullying, “know your place, you insignificant little fuckwit” e-mail. Yes, it’s funny, in a way that pieces that use “fuck”, “shit” and “cunt” so liberally often can be, but, please – someone made a mistake. They surely had no intention of sabotaging your deathless prose. So you don’t like what happened to your piece – have a word with your editor. The hapless sub will no doubt already have been soundly thrashed and had their dictionary privileges removed.”
The irony? The man’s about as funny as foie gras, and about 1/100th as witty as his father. And he’s coming here to give us, what, some crumbs of comfort? A future review in that tumbleweed connection of half-realised rejoinders, his flaccid column? Or is he en route to signing that book he’s mercilessly flogging around the remainder shops of the UK? Perhaps he’s up here because, well, it’s our turn. The nationals ‘do’ the north every couple of years, so we’re just gonna have to sit tight and brace. And if it’s found that, yes, we’re Northern, and are deserving of no more than flabby lasagna and big pepper pots (does he mean grinders?) then, dear readers, we must thank Mr Coren for being so kind as to let us know. If we’re lucky, we might glean some amusing Mise-en-scène from his journey up here. Surely to god he’ll get some mileage from an overweight family tucking into a Whopper before the train’s left Euston? He might even encounter a cheeky Scouser at Lime Street, to weave into comedy gold from his Kentish Town office.
What’s fascinating is the spectacle of many of our Twitter followers begging him to try this restaurant, or that restaurant: of course, many of them are PR types, who’d sell what little soul they had for a tepid review in the Times, but others, well, their unseemly scramble to buddy up to Coren – a man whose racist sloganeering (‘the Polacks’ can ‘clear off’ out of England is one of his milder anti-Polish tirades) falls somewhere between Richard Littlejohn and Nick Griffin. You can read more about his tiresome tirades, against women in a particularly insightful Daily Mail column, here.
What’s happening here is the awkward machinations of a posh boy trying to be spunky, not trad. But failing lamentably. Like the flabby lasagna-faced clown he is. For all his railing against lacklustre grub, his column is a tedious table d’hôte of half-baked constructs, served lazily lukewarm and lacking any real nutritional value. The format? A side order of self deprecation, a dollop of lazy observation and lashings of conceited coulis. It’s the journalistic equivalent of MSG. An hour later, and you’re famished.
So when he acts like a latter day Galloping Gourmet and plucks one lucky Liverpool twitterer out from obscurity to be his luncheon partner (“come if you’re an interesting woman, not if you’re a boring man. anything in between is fine” – oh LULZ Giles, stop, you’re killing us…) I sort of weep a little for humanity.
Coren’s a man who gets paid handsomely to put others down – that’s fair enough, the world needs more of this, please (and he’s bang on the money when he says blogging is an “…activity that requires no more skill or aptitude than you’d find in any weaned primate”).
Trouble is, the man’s got a skin thinner than a Tesco Value banger: say anything against his column on Twitter, or in response to his half-arsed prose, and he goes off like an over-zealously primed Krug at the Frontline Club. And, in his moody little paroxysms he conflates sweary words with wit, smart social observation with snobbery, atonement with bigotry and writing with wank.
Yet look at how giddy Liverpool gets at his arrival. Here’s a man, who swears, is employed to make Sue whatshername look even funnier on the telly (even when he’s wearing comedy trousers, the dolly grip still gets more laughs), and writes words for a proper paper, and we’re like hand-dived scallops, quivering in his clammy fist.
Let’s hope the city, or the waitress, doesn’t disappoint him, or the luncheon atmosphere might be ruined by his favourite lady put down: ‘go fuck yourself you barren old hag.’ You can read more of the man’s bon-mots here.
Yeah, fuck off Giles. We know where to eat. We know how to eat. We know what to eat. If we had to wait for instructions from the London frontline before we tucked in, we’d be as dead as artisan burgers are this year. How terribly trad.
Sorry, I’m a blogger, that’s all the wit I have at my disposal. And my cuppa soup (Parochial and Ham) is on the boil.
Friday, October 11, 2013
National Bring your Bear to Work day
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Front garden willow tree 14-5-13
This year when everything else burst into life the tree stayed bare and sure enough most of the wood seemed to be dead. There was some shoots growing off the trunk so to give it a chance we had to take drastic action
Cut it down at the weekend and here it what is left. Am posting it so I can check how much it has grown over the summer
Monday, April 15, 2013
Google Analytics problems and bugs
Unusual for me to go about techy things but the current version of Google Analytics just isn’t fit for purpose. Things that took 2 minutes in the previous version take 20 now or are basically impossible.
Here is a screen-shot of me viewing segment data from a couple of years ago :
Note the numbers, 2500 rising to 4000…brilliant, let’s get that into a spreadsheet
Oh, great…Why can I see the correct numbers on the screen but not export it?
Also why on earth did they change the format of the data export for more than one segment? Instead of the old columned format
You get this :
Make a graph out of that if you can.
This sort of thing is typical. Have been onto their support people but to no avail…I know it is free so I shouldn’t complain but the old version was great. This version makes a big thing about gimmicks like “real time” tracking but is that really useful to a webmaster?
Saturday, April 06, 2013
Absolutely perfect day for a walk on Crosby beach to see the Gormleys
Thursday, April 04, 2013
Dawksplaining : A definition
When I was a kid I read a book on physics, it was okay...explained a fair bit about molecules, how they bind together. Atom what they are made of etc etc
I found it interesting but I didn't want to really be a scientist and so didn't read up on it much more.
Much as I love hearing about the wonders of the universe and ambition and intelligence of scientists to take human knowledge that little bit further if I were to challenge and mock a particle physicist on the basis of my sketchy knowledge of the topic (based as it would be on decades old knowledge and whatever I've picked from watching Brian Cox fly to all four corners of the globe to demonstrate how gravity works) you'd think I would be on shaky ground....you'd be right.
Why is it then that someone who stopped going to Church years ago feels they can, with confidence, talk about someone's belief system and tell them what they believe is wrong
I am not talking about skeptics, you don't have to believe the same as me...the world would be dull if we all did. I am talking smug, supercilious often aggressive and insulting barracking just for someone having the gall to believe in something they don't.
In the backdrop of his Holiness retiring and Pope Francis being installed and now Easter I've had a few of these conversations and almost universally I've been derided and told what I believe is nonsense ("imaginary friend", "mental illness", "bigot" etc) although singularly not one of these people has asked a single question about my Faith or beliefs.
That's Dawksplaining.
Not everyone who believes in God, is a right-wing, evangelical creationist...next time why not talk to them and actually have a conversation.
Graphs of UK newspaper circulation figures
The vile headline in the Daily Mail yesterday made me curious about which newspapers are actually getting read in the UK. Pretty depressing picture