I always throw up in my mouth a little when I listen to the radio. Everything on it seems custom made to annoy and confound me. The Rock Star refers to the phenomenon as “the Emperor’s New Band”.

So it’s our duty as carriers of the flame of good taste and creativity to promote musical goodness when we find it.

These guys, when they make it, will have earned it. They’re almost always on tour and definitely at their best when seen live. They’ve got an exceptional stage presence and are at least 15 times better than any of their peers who have become overnight Emperor’s New Band sensations.

Help out a hard working band by downloading from iTunes. The whole album is good, but for first-timers, I heartily recommend the track “Disarray”.

99.99% of the time, I’m more than happy to leave any kind of celebrity fashion critique to the lovely ladies over at Go Fug Yourself. They pounce upon grievous fashion felonies with wit, sophistication and sarcasm. But goddamn, people, someone has to speak out about this.

And who better than the Bard himself?

Shall I compare thee to a complete disaster?
Thou art more sparkly and more bone-y.
But thou hast sold out to a corporate master
In the hopes of making lots more mone-y.
Sometimes too great the lure of pop stardom calls
And being svelte sadly all the more so.
And so the rules of fashion fall,
As you seek to bear your freakish torso.
On thy headstone it shall be read,
On lettuce leaves and Evian fed she,
And on the boards she dared to tread
In catsuit that did give an mighty wedgie.
So long as you pedal your semi-naked pop-y pluck,
 So long as we print your photo, we’re left asking, “WTF…?”

I’ve been trying to do something constructive at work today.

For those of you that don’t know, I work as a PA and office manager for my father-in-law who is one of the European gurus of GPS. Surveyors have little busts of him on top of their theodolites to which they occasionally make offerings of grain or small mammals.

In May, I’m accompanying him to a Navigation conference in Manchester. From what I understand, it’s going to be a big room with lots of very smart people who might want to buy things from us and I have to wear a suit. Being that this was my only understanding of my duties, PPD suggested that I try to learn a little about what we actually do. Not a bad suggestion, as it turns out.

So in my first act of trying to understand how GPS actually WORKS (I had a fair idea before, but some of my studies have been useful nonetheless) I’m going to attempt to explain the concept of triangulation to you, my readers. I would wager that 99.9 percent of you already KNOW what triangulation is, but my theory is, if I can explain it, I understand it.

Auntie Blogapotamus’s Triangulation Explanation (borrowed in part from howstuffworks.com)

Say that you’re lost. I mean, REALLY lost. Your plan to drive across country blindfolded wasn’t the best idea you ever had, and ever since the The Great Sign Blackout Bill passed under the Homeland Security Act, no place or street names exist any longer, but AT LEAST THE TERRORISTS DON’T KNOW WHERE THEY ARE EITHER, SO HA HA.

You stop to ask a passer-by where you are.

“You’re 625 miles from Boise.” says the terrified local, skittering for cover. The Great Sign Blackout Bill also made it a capital offence to TELL anyone their exact location. Let’s see those terrorists find any national monuments to blow up NOW!

Knowing that you are 625 miles from Boise isn’t much help. You could be anywhere within a 625 mile RADIUS around Boise.

So you see if you can scout out another local who might give you a better idea of where you are.

You finally find a guy on the corner and ask him.

“Well, I can tell you that you’re 690 miles from Minneapolis,” he says, taking a bite of his sandwich.

You drop him with a stomach punch. You’re starting to get very annoyed indeed. Knowing that you’re 690 miles from Minneapolis gives you a little more to go on, but still doesn’t really give you a good idea where you are.

Leaving your winded victim behind, you grumpily go in search of some real help.

The next person you encounter is a guy in a suit talking on the cell phone. He’s rather annoyed that you’ve interrupted his conversation with your trivial question.

“If you must know, you’re 615 miles from Tucson. Can’t you see I’m busy?” he snaps.

At which point you stab him in the face for being so unhelpful.

However, he has provided you with the last piece of the puzzle that you need to pinpoint your location.

You are in Denver. And you think you hear police sirens in the distance.

So, in theory, this is also how GPS works, albeit in 3 dimensions rather than two, with ellipses rather than circles and with 4 satellites instead of 3. (although you really only need 3 to get a fix) And with less stabbing.

Everyone clear?

A little bit of manky humor for a grey Monday morning.

The Rock Star and I are both doing the web version of Weight Watchers to shed a few unwanted pounds. Neither of us are real diet kind of people, but the nice thing about the “Point” system is that you can still eat biscuits, but you have to “budget” for them. This can sometimes lead to you becoming “hungry” and “cranky” but at least you have a few less love handles.

We were idly playing with the food index and looking up the point values for foods like bourbon biscuits and Weetabix, when the Rock Star rather cheekily entered into the search box the name of a rather popular male bodily fluid.

Incredibly, this is what came up.

NEVER……EATING…..AT KFC……AGAIN.

Let’s see if there are any voices from the choir who want to sing this tune.

So, The Rock Star and I are going out tonight with Captain Hairy and his significant other, The Child, for her birthday. She’s going to be all of 8 or something, I don’t know. (Note: ARTISTIC LICENSE. Captain Hairy has his faults, but paedophilia is not one of them.)

We went out and dutifully bought gifts but neglected to buy a card. Now here comes my diatribe, entitled, “Why Giving Cards Along With Birthday Presents Is Pointless.”

You give someone a gift, right? “How nice!” they say as they tear open the wrapping, revealing the bounty within.

You also give them a card WITH the gift. “Oh!” they say, fake smile straining the edges of their lips, “A card too! How thoughtful!”

They’re then forced to open the damn thing to read whatever half assed message or completely lame greeting card slogan might greet them on the inside and say “thank you” a second time for a piece of cardboard that cost you all of 1 pound. The exception of course is when the card IS the gift, i.e. gift vouchers, money, etc. (The Brits seem to think vouchers are crap gifts, but that’s a whole other subject entirely.)

I have nothing against cards on their own. If you can’t be with someone on their birthday, anniversary, Christmas, cards are a nice way of saying “hi”. But what, I ask you, is the point of giving a card along with a gift when it is most likely just going to become land fill fodder when the wrapping paper is thrown out?

I would like to announce the arrival of the first loaf of bread from our breadmaker.

It’s only taken around 4 months for me to drag the beast out of the cupboard and resolve to use it then and there. On the other occasions when I have dragged it out, the universe was against me in one way or another. Usually I was missing just one ingredient; one of those things that you just don’t keep around the house as a rule, like fast acting yeast or powdered milk, prompting a forehead slapping “D’oh!” and resulting in me having to drag the monster back to the cupboard. (When you have a kitchen counter the size of a postage stamp, you can’t leave a breadmaker lying around.)

It was only after we started the program that we realized that it would be 4 hours before we got our first taste of bready goodness, so The Rock Star generously offered to stay up til midnight to take the loaf out of the machine. (I’m not sure what happens if you don’t. Bread gnomes? The End Times?) He’s more the night owl out of the two of us anyhow, so he happily composed a lovely little piece of music in Logic while I got some shut eye. However, he did wake me up for the grand unveiling and we had extremely tasty bread at 12.30am, causing restless sleep for the rest of the night and dreams involving me in a nightclub wearing a tutu, but on the whole, I’d say it was worth it.

Okay, four posts in a day is getting silly, but this begs reporting.

Who doesn’t like to idly sound off about things that your opinion is utterly useless on? So I was perusing the BBC site this morning and reading their take on the birth of the “TomKitten” and felt compelled to leave a pointless and pithy comment in the “Have Your Say” section regarding celebrities touting religion.

I wrote the following:

“Katie Holmes, for months now, has had the perpetual expression on her face of someone who got everything she ever wanted only to find that it wasn’t so great after all and OH MY DEAR LORD, HOW AM I GOING TO GET OUT OF THIS MESS??”

Pithy and pointless. So imagine my surprise when I got a call from the BBC World Service this afternoon asking if I wanted to be part of a radio phone-in show discussing the whole celebrity religion phenomenon.

I now kind of wish I’d said yes, just to say I’d done it, but at the moment I was asked, I felt that if my opinion is going to be broadcast all over the world, I’d rather that it’s not about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and their stupid ass religion. (not to mention that I’m really bad at speaking off the cuff. Probably one reason I didn’t make it as an actress.)

If you don’t believe that people are reading the drivel that you write on the internet, think again.

 3 blogs in one day. This is all getting a bit decadent.

On the 1 o’clock news this afternoon, it was reported that every bill paying adult in the UK had an average of £24,000 worth of debt, including mortgages.

I personally am doing my best to throw off that curve. As of 3 o’clock this afternoon I am entirely and utterly debt free. I owe nothing to nobody. In fact, my personal net worth is actually in the black to the tune of almost 400 pounds. Which rocks most mightily.

It is now my hope that I can assist the Rock Star in paying off his debts, incurred while courting me over 11 years ago. Only fair, really.

I think I might have mentioned some time back that old-time dolls and illustrations tend to give me the creeping horrors.

Once I got over that, I spent the rest of the morning laughing my ass off at Wondermark.

Check it out.

I use the F-word on a regular basis. It’s not something I’m proud of.

Swearing is rather like getting addicted to drugs. First, the harmless D-word. Then the S-word. Using the S-word on a regular basis can be a jumping off point for the F-word creeping into your daily vocabulary. Then before you know it, you hear the C-word coming out of your mouth in a moment of extreme rage. I don’t like the C-word in particular, but I have used it on occasion to describe the most heinous of individuals or deeds, but only to The Rock Star. (lest my syntax confuse you, I have never used the C-word to describe The Rock Star.) It’s an ugly word, although Captain Hairy has come up with many more disturbing phrases to describe the body part that the C-word literally represents, making the C-word look more like the D-word.

The F-word is the new S-word. It’s versatile. You hear it on the streets being used as both verb and adjective.

For example: “That guy over there is an F-ing C-word.”

One can argue in this case that F-word is an adjective, describing the SORT of C-word that the gentleman in question is, although due to it’s “ing” ending, it is more likely to be considered a verb, describing something that the gentleman who is a C-word DOES. But then again, my grammar is a bunch of S-word.

So, yesterday evening, when the Rock Star and I returned to our boat to find one of the canal side windows smashed, you can pretty much imagine that I used the F-word.

The Rock Star (who is ALWAYS more level headed and even tempered than me) suggested that there were many explanations for it. My first thoughts turned to the much hated anglers who fish in the marina even though there are big NO FISHING signs everywhere. Fish are smarter than you give them credit for. Anglers tend to throw heavy, lead weights very close to boats in order to get as close as possible to the fish, often causing damage and occasionally broken windows. While I was ready to go hurtling out the door, find the nearest angler and beat him to death with his own box of maggots, the Rock Star suggested that perhaps we were bumped by another boat or perhaps the victim of some stupid kids skipping stones.

At any rate, in the interests of decency, here is my open letter to whomever forced me to spend half an hour cleaning up broken glass with the worst sinus headache I’ve ever had.

To the complete C-Word who shattered our window,

Listen to me, you bastard F-word, your A-word is going to be mine if you ever show your F-word-ing face around our marina. You think, just cause we live on a boat that we can’t start some S-word? Well, you’re in for a big F-word-ing surprise, my friend, because I have a good mind to make you EAT the contents of our F-word-ing vaccum cleaner bag. Let’s see what a little shattered glass does to your stomach lining you mindless F-word!

Hugs and Kisses,

Blogapotamus Rex.