Sometimes…

You lose your faith in everyone and everything and you feel like giving up.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Four Chords

For those of you who are musically challenged like myself, take heart, it's not that hard as you will see from this little video that my mate Lee stumbled upon.  We had a conversation about this exact thing a while back as he's trying to learn the guitar and I was reassuring him that most musicians only know a few chords anyway.

So, less warbling on my behalf and onto the video!

Four Chords

Surprising wasn't it!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

King Don’t Eat It No.2

This is my second entry of my ongoing series to find nasty things to eat.  In fact this one was an easy one for me as I grew up by the sea so a little bit of seafood would never turn my stomach.  We found this jar in the local Tesco, cost me an arm and a leg though, so I hope you all appreciate the sacrifices I have made for you lot to have a giggle.

Seafood Salad

Doesn't look too bad does it, I think there were cockles, mussels, calamari, baby octopus, prawns and an unidentifiable thingy in there which sort of tasted like fishy rubber.  Looks quite tame in the jar, until you opened it and found that they were preserved in thick oil which covered absolutely everything.

You can click on the images to make them larger if you want to, but I warn you that I don't look too good in them.

The baby octopus were quite delicious, the beaks and guts had been removed so they weren't crunchy, although I do feel that they had been slightly overcooked as they were slightly rubbery.

Everyone in the room was crying out in absolute horror because I was playing with my food, I just can't understand it!

The poor thing did try and escape from my mouth, but I finally managed to get chewing and swallow the little fella.

I'm now in search of something truly nasty, although it's going to be difficult in this country as you just can't get hold of those lovely delicacies that people abroad seem to enjoy.  I might try and get hold of some chicken feet… 

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Finally…

Finally we have had a decent amount of snowfall, enough for me to consider not driving my car, which in a way would be impossible as all the roads have been closed due to a lack of salt/grit.  Apparently the whole nation has ground to a standstill because our councils neglected to procure enough grit because they wanted to save some money, now they are paying for it through the nose because the salt-mines are charging a premium and only producing around 300,000 tons a day.

Anyhow, here are some nice photos I took this morning.

View from my back garden

Not much snow in comparison to some places, but quite a bit for UK standards.  It's about 12 inches deep or so and it's still snowing, hopefully it will keep on going, I do enjoy the quiet.  As you can see, my car is under a pile of white stuff and I'll be damned if I'm going out there with a shovel, well I don't actually own one, so there.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Klingon Robs Store

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/04/colorado_batleth_sword_robbery/

How cool is that!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Communication

I read an interesting article this morning about interplanetary signals, I have however lost the link.  The gist of the article was that due to the vast distances involved it would be nigh on impossible for any current communication device we now have to pinpoint any particular system to send or receive a message.

Makes me wonder why we are spending so much time and money on the SETI project.

It was quite convincing,  the argument stated it is totally pointless trying as any communication sent from our nearest neighbour, assuming there was someone there to send and receive a transmission, would take decades if not centuries.  And considering we have only been using radio waves for the last hundred years or so it's quite conceivable that we may have missed our one chance millennia ago.

Lets argue that there might be a habitable planet orbiting each star we can see with the naked eye, that means there are over a hundred billion planets in our galaxy alone which could harbour life, say that one percent of those have the possibility of intelligent life, surely one of them is more evolved than we are, surely we are not the pinnacle of evolution in the universe on a billion possible planets!

I have long believed that our current civilisation is not the first technologically advanced civilisation that has lived on Earth, there are far too many remnants to prove this, which in itself is another blog entry, so could we have once been part of a greater scheme?

I'll ask you to comment on your feelings as to what is out there, if anything, and also to remark on the possibility of ETB's actually existing. Are we truly alone in the universe?

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Snow

Yes, the UK has come to an utter standstill because we've had an inch of snow!  Some places have up to 12 inches, wow!  Planes have been unable to land at Heathrow, buses and trains have stopped operating, cars are unable to drive on the roads, people can't walk on snow covered pavements.  All schools are closed, ambulances are only attending life-threatening situations, people can't get to work, costing the economy hundreds of millions in lost manufacturing etc.

What the bloody hell is wrong with everyone?  Can't you drive on a little bit of snow without killing yourselves and others?  It's not that hard, especially since the roads have been gritted!

Imagine living in one of the Nordic countries or Canada, temperatures dipping so low you have to warm up your fuel before driving. 20ft of snow instead of two inches, polar bears scratching on your back door because it's too chilly outside!

As you can see it gets my goat that the whole country seems to be unable to deal with a few hours of snow.

Don't get me wrong, I like snow, it looks lovely before someone walks all over it, it's quiet, it's fun and above all it makes Britons look utterly stupid because they can't cope with it.  I mean, it's not like we didn't know it was coming, it was forecast a week ago, it also seems to happen every winter, I wonder if someone in government has noticed this yet?  They could put plans into action knowing that possibly next January 2010 it might snow again.

Arthur C Clarke hoped we'd be landing on Jupiter by 2010, I'd like us to be able to go down the shop on a bus to buy a pint of milk.  Science fiction?  Bloody right it is!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Immortalised Again

I've never been to Australia, I'd love to go, I intend to go when I find the cash to do so, so it seems quite strange that I have been mentioned twice in one of their local newspapers.  Yes, I'm a star in a country I have never been to.

Of course, this is not of my making, it is the work of our lovely Squilla.  She has a column in a newspaper which she writes for, and from time to time she remembers some of the good times we had.

I'm sure she wont mind if I share her brilliant piece of writing with you, after all, nobody really comes to my blog anymore, so copyright infringement be damned.

Surf wax

Have you ever had a moment in life where you truly thought your ship had come in? That at last Lady Luck had landed you the lottery? That your money worries were mercifully no more? Did you stand there in silence with your mouth agape while you contemplated that it could actually, possibly be real? On the last Sunday morning of a late summer weekend, on a beach in north-west Wales, so stood we three.

“Hey, isn’t that that stuff…?” Fundy had nonchalantly commented ten minutes earlier as we ambled along enjoying the coastal view.

“What stuff?” questioned our mate, known as ‘the King’.

“You know. That stuff that’s worth a lot,” Fundy continued. “Whale vomit.”

“What, ambergris?” I piped up, stopping in my tracks. “You’ve found ambergris? No WAY!”

We backtracked to the site in question where, sure enough, in the high-tide drift line, there lay a large balled-up accumulation of mystery substance. It was chunky, chocolaty and waxy; the outer surface bleached and covered in sand. We stood around it with our hands on our hips, not knowing what to think.

Now, for anyone who doesn’t know, ambergris actually is a type of whale vomit. It is a dark waxy substance that sperm whales sometimes regurgitate, possibly in response to an irritation of the stomach lining by the beaks and bones of their ingested prey. It is a very rare find and, among other things, highly valued by perfumers as a fixative for scent. It is worth more than gold and, in all my years as a biologist working on the beach, I had never before seen any. In fact, bar the most basic description, I was not sure what it really looked like. None of us knew.

We stood there and stared at it in wonder. If this was indeed ambergris then we would be fools not to pick it up. There was enough there for us all to retire! We poked at it and picked at it and felt it and smelled it. It smelled oily and fishy and of the sea.

“Have you got a black garbage bag in the car?” questioned the King with a rich-man smile. “Or maybe a few plastic shopping bags? I’m prepared

to take the risk.”

“Me too,” I gasped, dollar signs in my eyes and my shoulders visibly relaxing at the possibility of heavenly assistance from a financial hole. *God I’d love to go on a cruise… I can see myself all agarb, martini in hand…*

The three of us made greedy plans to get it to the car without anyone watching. No one could know of our beach booty. It was ours, all ours… *Mwah-HAHAHA!*

Unfortunately, further investigation soon brought us back to regrettable reality. Probing deeply into the less-weathered centre of our prize, the King took a whiff.

“POOH!” he said, inviting us to smell his fingers.

Luckily we had long learned not to fall for that one and took his word for it.

It wasn’t ambergris at all. It was a big ball of tar. A chunk of shipping pollution washed up on the Welsh shore. YUK!

We all took a step backward, suddenly repulsed. We were collectively horrified that we had almost driven off with a clandestine boot full of sun-baked sump oil. Ew! The only good thing, the King informed us, was that the council beachcombers would soon be by to properly dispose of it.

We buried our disappointment and laughed at ourselves, bolstering our moods by comparing notes of other ‘near misses’ in the lottery of life.

It would have been so grand but it wasn’t to be. And, let’s face it, there are some things in life that ambergris just can’t buy.

© Squilla

What could have been… I just ended up with a smelly finger, story of my life!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Finally…

A poo related post!

Some of you might remember that I was slightly transfixed at the 'old place' about poo related stories.  Over here at Vox I haven't posted any, simply because I have been desensitised to the disgustingness of excrement.

However, this evening I was totally taken aback by a simple statement from my friend Lee.  He said that he always reads my blog whilst having a dump!

Charming!

Each time I sit here and write from now on will be tainted by the fact that I have the knowledge that my drinking buddy reads the most intimate parts of my soul whilst sitting on the throne pushing one out.

Thoughts?

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

What Are You Worth?

Or specifically, how much is your blog worth?  I found this interesting little site but it has its limitations.  I whacked in my Vox address and it came up with a value of £3.88 Million with a daily advertising revenue between £1,440 – $3,600, with daily visitors of 243,000 and daily page views of 851,400.  There are 170 linking domains and I'm rated 1,549 in the web world.

Now I could let all that get to my head, after all, I know you all love my blog and I have many many followers, but I realised quite quickly that these figures are for Vox as a whole, not my pissy little part of it.  However, I put in my domain name, http://www.kigofankh.co.uk and look what came up!

My site is worth
$384.60

I'm actually worth $384.60, or in real money, £268.29p at today's exchange rate.  I seem to have 8 daily visitors and a daily advertising revenue between 5-12 cents.  I can see that I can retire early and live happily ever after.

However what did surprise me is that there are 85 domains linking to my address, so I suppose this is how my net worth has come about.  Links people, that's where the moneys at!

It's also good to know that my part of cyberspace is ranked 26,618,522 in the world.  I know there's a little scope for improvement there, however, when you consider that there is an estimated 186 million websites on the net, that's not too shabby.

How much are you worth?

Read and post comments | Send to a friend