Farty's Fortunes

Friday 31 October 2008

Farty's Friday Chart

UTHIS

Assuming this works on your browser, can you name that tune?

And if it doesn't, have you considered Firefox?

Wednesday 29 October 2008

Computer Terms Illustrated #9

And still they come...

Wireless

Wireless

Broadband

Broadband

Marquee1

Marquee

Fork

Fork

Spawn

Spawn

Parallel Bus

Parallel Bus

Serial Bus

Serial Bus

Collision Detection

Collision

Robots File

Robots

Intertubes



Still looking for entries to my Xmas Competition...come on, guys, how hard can it be?

1 Well it works in Firefox :-P
Update: Marquee might work now in IE...stoopid pooters!

Monday 27 October 2008

Seven Random Things About Me

Tagged by Helena. I'm supposed to tell you seven random things about me and since everything about me is random, you'd think that shouldn't be hard...

1. I do like getting tagged with memes and that. Just click on the "tags" label down there and you'll see what I mean.

2. But sometimes I forget I've been tagged.

3. For instance, I got an award off GiGGLe months ago and still haven't put it up or nominated anyone else. My bad. Farty, put up that award FFS!!

4. You see, if I do this meme straight away (Oct 21st), I just tend to copy the person who tagged me, because that's what's freshest in my memory. See 100 Things About Me for a good example. I totally ripped off Blissfully Decaffeinated. Still feeling guilty about that...

5. But if I leave a meme for too long, it just sneaks off and hides under the bed.

6. This isn't going too well, is it?

7. Bugger.

8. I like discovering new bloggers, it's a pain in the arse trying to keep up with them all but the really really good ones make it so worthwhile.

9. And if I don't always leave a comment, well, my excuse is that I read your blogs on my moby and it won't let me leave comments on most blogs. Stoopid moby! Then when I get home I forget. [Yeah, they'll swallow that.]

10. I'm rubbish at sums and anybody from my Applied Maths and Statistics class at uni who says otherwise is a liar (confidence level 95%).

Mmm. Let's tag Misssy, Middle Aged Woman, Welsh Girl, Spanish Goth, John Greenwood, Brom and #Debi.

Friday 24 October 2008

Farty's Friday Chart

Cable Car

Apparently this only reached #96 in the Billboard Hot 100, but spent five weeks at #1 in the UK and reached #2 in Oz. Good Evans!

Name that tune.

Tuesday 21 October 2008

Computer Terms Illustrated #8

Trojan
Trojan

Worm
Worm

Spyware
Spyware

Thumbnail
Thumbnail

Hibernate
Hibernate

Flash
Flash

Snail Mail (really)
Snail Mail

Forum
Forum

Packet
Packet

Elements
Elements

Scroll
Scroll

Monday 20 October 2008

LOL Money

Tagged by Belgian Waffle. I, er, found these leaflets, somewhere and, sort of, adjusted the text, so to speak, to reflect the current situation.

Closer

Sits Vac

Fred Who?

Och, it's only money, quit whining.

Update: I've added this one to show Ms Waffle that there are people in some of these leaflets.

Darling

Sunday 19 October 2008

Do Merkans Get Irony?

It's been said that Merkans don't get irony. I beg to differ, but let's put it to the test.

Every Sunday, the new Hit 40 UK is announced on the wireless steam radio. Since literally several people tune in each week to listen to their favourite modern beat combo or troubadour, this is a Big Thing. Sometimes a top artist is even invited onto the show so that we can see hear their reaction to becoming/failing to reach #1.

Rewind...

Last weekend saw the Televised Live Final of Britain's Got The Pop Factor And Possibly A New Celebrity Jesus Christ Soapstar Superstar Strictly On Ice, the culmination of a fifteen-week series on Channel 4, hosted by Cat "I'd never swear on live TV" Deeley.

The Winner's Song, imaginatively titled "The Winner's Song", was released on Monday October 13th 2008 by Irish transsexual Geraldine McQueen. As was LeoLeon lazyitis Jackson's first single since winning last year's Z Factor. So guess who was number one in today's UK charts?

Pink, of course. But Geraldine was #2 ahead of Leo Leon at #3. Simon Cowell, Leo Leon's boss, was reported to be spitting feathers. Leo Leon himself certainly was...I'll see if I can find/post the relevant part of the Hit40 show, but in the meantime, watch this:



Do any Merkans out there "get" the irony?

P.S. I am totally buying her followup Once Upon a Christmas Song, just to see the look on Cowell's face when his new protegé is trumped at Ecksmas.

P.P.S. Did I mention that Britain's Got... is a spoof? Just so that's understood. I'd hate anyone to think we were taking this seriously.

P.P.P.S. And there was no 15-week series.

P.P.P.P.S. But the hit single is real, and it really kept Jackson's piece of crap away from the top spot.

P.P.P.P.P.S. And Cat Deeley really did scream "Fucking Shut Up!" on national TV. Our free speech beats your free speech hands down.

Friday 17 October 2008

Farty's Friday Chart

Baby Boys

You would not believe how many photos I had to sift through to find this one.

That's not a clue, but this is.

Wednesday 15 October 2008

More Random Crap

EyesSorry for not posting sooner, I've had my eyes glued to the TV and it took this long for the solvent to do its thing.

So. How are you? Really? How nice/terrible. Anyway.

I loved this article where the Ozzie PM, Kevin Rudd, reckons excessive pay packages for fat cat bank execs should be outlawed globally, because: "excessive greed by executives in some financial institutions had worsened the current crisis". Yeah. Let that sink in...now, can anyone splain the difference between ordinary common-or-garden greed and excessive greed? 'Cause it's all greed to me.

Some bint from Michigan has driven all the way to Nebraska to dump her thirteen-year-old son on the welfare system. If he's such a handful, why not just wait till he goes out on a shoplifting expedition or whatever, then move house without leaving a forwarding address? It totally worked for my cousin ****** [deleted on legal advice].

Oh. There's this Merkan blogger called Dooce. What an odd name. Apparently she's quite popular, but I've never really "got" her until last week, when she posted this. As she says, turn up your volume and wait for her to smack the pole. Fucking A.



Don't forget to tune in for Farty's Friday Chart. Toot toot!

Saturday 11 October 2008

100 Things About Me

Apparently you're supposed to use your 100th blog post to share 100 things about yourself with your readers. I must have missed that tweet. Whatever a tweet is. Ah well, better late - 304 posts late - than never. Now the question is: who will get bored and give up first - you or me?

1. I love Nadine Coyle off Girls Aloud.

2. Except her speaking voice.

3. I always think that Irish people sound too whiny.

4. Except if they're from the Southern end.

5. Like Lisa Burke off Sky News weather.

6. That's the only thing I miss about not getting the Sky channels with cable any more.

7. I never watched Lost anyway.

8. Another thing I don't like is Brussels Sprouts.

9. I use to dislike apricots, because the fuzzy skin gave me the creeps.

10. Which is odd, because I always loved peaches.

11. But then, for years the only peaches I ever ate came from a tin.

12. Yes, I am that old.

13. I love apricots now, the skin doesn't bother me any more.

14. I still hate sprouts.

15. Does 14 count as a different thing from 8?

16. Do I care?

17. Yes, a bit. I'm way too analytic about trivia.

18. Haha. I said anal.

19. Did I mention I have a very short attention span?

20. Apparently not.

21. Also, did I mention I have a very short attention span?

22. Must resist temptation to click away and play that Aha song again.

23. Too late. *clicky*

24. That's better.

25. Crikey, a quarter of the way through already.

26. What can I nick off of Blissfully Caffeinated?

27. I could read by the age of five.

28. On my first week at school, I so astonished the teacher that she thought I must be reciting the reading book from memory.

29. So she fetched today's paper and got me to read that to the primary 7 (12 year old) class, just to embarrass them.

30. Never mind that it embarrassed me too.

31. Thankfully, I remember nothing of that episode, and only have my mum's word for it now.

32. And she's dead, so really you just have my word for it.

33. I wonder if she made it up or if I just imagined that she told me?

34. She also told me she was a witch, which I totally believed.

35. So you'd better not question the authenticity of 29, or you'll turn into a slug.

36. I'm an Aries.

37. But we're naturally sceptical, so I don't go in for that astrology crap.

38. Kind of negates 35, doesn't it?

39. The only kind of braces I've worn were to keep my trousers up.

40. I'm surprised I got this far through the list before resorting to html.

41. Oh. I forgot about 261. Told you I had a short attention span.

42. Right. I need a cup of tea...

43. I like Assam best.

44. Oh! Oh! Something slightly less boring. When I was 12, my class went on a school cruise on the Nevasa, which was so fooking huge it bumped into Leith docks on the way out and made a huge dent in our cabin. A bench which had been bolted to the wall inner hull snapped right off.

45. On the crossing from Embra to Norway I was sick as a dog.

46. Which is really not pleasant.

47. The only choice of drinks available to 12-year-olds was tea or coffee.

48. The tea was abominable.

49. The coffee? Slightly less so.

50. It was two years before I could look another cup of tea in the face.

51. Teacups don't generally have faces. I know.

52. Woot! Past the halfway mark already, and there's still plenty stuff I can steal off BC.

53. I have no idea why I used the word "woot" there. AFAIK it means "want one of those". Meh.

54. I get the feeling I'm being drawn into another culture, with its own language.

55. Like woot, AFAIK, Meh and awesome.

56. This is not how I was brought up.

57. I was told off at school for saying: "Ah ken!" when the teacher asked the class a question.

58. She said the correct phrase was: "I know".

59. But she kent what Ah meant.

60. Standards appear to have slipped somewhat in the past 45 years, I may have to write in to the Daily Telegraph and lodge a complaint.

61. I have never written in to any newspaper.

62. I did write in to radio stations a couple of times.

63. The first time was to BBC Radio 2. In green ink. For some reason I didn't put any address on the postcard. I think I may have thought the Post Office was clever enough to work it out for themselves from the text.

64. They didn't read it out.

65. I may have been stoned at the time.

66. Actually? Almost definitely.

67. After hearing Nick Drake sing the very short song Place To Be, late one night on the radio, I went out the next day and bought The Complete Recorded Works.

68. The other time (see 62) was to Radio Forth, as it was then known.

69. That one did get read out on air, but it was totally misinterpreted.

70. How it came out was: Modern marriages never last; we've been married six months; so play us a song before she chucks me out.

71. What I meant was: Even though modern marriages never seem to last, we've been married a whole six months already and we're still going strong, so nyah nyah nyah. Now play us a fooking record.

72. Maybe I should have used that exact wording, just to be totally unambiguous.

73. Shouldn't the opposite of ambiguous be monoguous?

74. This is harder than it looks. I'm off to steal another one. BRB.

75. Before that, BRB means "be right back". I should have looked that one up a long time before I did.

76. LOL.

77. I have three brothers, but my sister has four. I don't think that's weird.

78. Time travel is weird, OTOH. But I've blogged about that before.

79. Well, now I have.

80. And whatever happened to "I before E except after C"? Eh? Eh?

81. I'm a big fan of science. I love the idea that at any moment some amazing discovery will completely change our whole perception of reality.

82. Or destroy the universe.

83. Science is pretty scary, actually.

84. There was this science fiction story once about someone who invented a machine that allowed you to view any event at any point in space or time, but because of some stupid quantum effect like Heisenberg uncertainty the further you went back in time (or presumably the further away from here), the fuzzier the picture became, so people ended up spying on their neighbours in real time. I would buy one of those.

85. Also, computers? I've loved them since as long as I can remember. Which is about three minutes, but anyway.

86. In 1977 I read a report by the AAAS which predicted that within ten years scientists would have figured out how to implant tiny computer chips into our brains to make us all into super-geniuses. Yeah, way to go, youse boffins! You don't look so smart now!

87. Of course maybe all the scientists are super-geniuses now and they're keeping the technology to themselves. Selfish super-genius bastards.

88. You're not still reading this crap, are you?

89. This is post number 404. I was originally going to title it "Post 404 Not Found" and leave the text completely blank.

90. When I took my first "proper" job as a computer operator, it was a stop-gap thing until I learned my way around computers, then I would become a programmer.

91. I stayed in that job for fourteen years.

92. In that time, programmers went way down in my estimation.

93. All the good programmers are super-geniuses living with their scientist chums on a secret invisible island in the mid-Pacific.

94. With robot fembot servants.

95. And weather control, so they never get hit by hurricanes or that.

96. We get left with the dregs. Point. Click. Oops.

97. If they could do their jobs properly, I wouldn't have one.

98. So I suppose I shouldn't complain.

99. But man, I'd love to be on that Pacific island right now.

100. Oh. Finished. I win.

1 I inserted the Aha link after reaching 100, so that doesn't count.

Sketchy Arm

A new take on an old music video...

...see what I did there?

Merkan-English Dictionary #17

Thought I'd better splain some English expressions too, for a change.

Bubble and Squeak - A uniquely English dish, composed (or decomposed) of fried up leftovers. And then given an odd name 'cause kids will eat anything with a funny name, as long as they don't see eyeballs.

Dick Van DykeSpotted Dick - There he is!


Toad in the Hole - Toad. Hole. What could be smipler? Apart from the complete lack of toads or indeed holes. I mean, isn't it obvious that this refers to sausages cooked in Yorkshire Pudding batter? With gravy. Mmmm...

Grill / Broiler - It's a grill because you put stuff under it and then grill it. Broil isn't even a proper word, I bet someone accidentally put an 'r' in 'boil' and then had to come up with a plausible excuse in a hurry and that's the best they could do at short notice. "I'm just going to broil an egg." "You're going to what?" "Erm. Broil an egg? You know, like boiling it only, like, under the grill." "Oh, you mean like scrambled egg on toast, only grilled a bit more after putting the egg on the toast?" "Yes, that's totally what I meant. Broiled. I'm just nipping down to the library to write that in the dictionary since you've obviously never heard of that word before. Then I'll come right back and broil that egg and serve it up and eat it. You want some? "Oh, yes please, can I have mine with some spramped parsley?"

TurnipTurnip - We carve these out and put candles in them at Halloween (HAL-LOW-EEN) to make ugly scary faces and that.

McCainMcCain - They make French Fries and roast potatoes and that, right?

Friday 10 October 2008

Why Women Need Catalogs



Have a nice weekend!

REQUEST FOR URGENT CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Someone's been taking lessons from the Nigerians...

From: Minister of the Treasury Paulson
Subject: REQUEST FOR URGENT CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

Farty's Friday Chart

*they'll never guess this one*

Whistler's Mother

Wednesday 8 October 2008

'Glowing' Jellyfish Grabs Nobel

When I saw the above headline on the BBC News website, I naturally thought that someone had trained an actual jellyfish to steal one of them Nobel medals. Hahaha, silly me!

Nobel Jellyfish

Hey! Come back with that!

Tuesday 7 October 2008

Computer Terms Illustrated #7

This week: storage sizes, arranged in increasing, er, size.

Bit

Bit

Nybble

Nybble

Byte

Byte

Half-word

Half-word

Full-Word

Remember this?

Double-word 1

Double Word

Killerbyte(sp?)

Killer Bite

Megabyte

Megabite

Gigabyte

Gigabite

Terabyte

Terror Bite

Petabyte

Petabite

Jacobyte

Jacobite

Trilobyte

Trilobite

1 I'm not a fan of Starbucks - can you tell?

Monday 6 October 2008

Pope Criticises Pursuit of Wealth

This news snippet caught my eye today in between watching global share prices plummet.

"The only solid reality is the word of God," said the world's most pious man, welcoming 253 bishops to his humble abode in the Vatican City.

When questioned about the Vatican's investments in General Motors, General Electric, Shell, Gulf Oil, Bethlehem Steel, IBM, etc., his Holiness replied: "Sure, that money was just, er, resting in my account."

A Vatican Yesterday






As if that weren't proof enough that the Catholic Church has a sense of humour, click here for an ecumenical discussion on whether dogs go to Heaven (praise be to the Bloggess).