My Comeback...

You know how sometimes you just sort of don't blog - you think of things to blog about and then think, "ah, forget it..."??
Well, I have been going through a bit of bloggy blues... thinking about blogging this; planning to blog about that ...and actually blogging nowt!

So, just to reactivate my blogginess, here's a joke made up by an old school-mate of mine, a lad who has to be given credit for successfully going through the whole of his formative years in Liverpool carrying the burden of being called Alex DeGier - I mean it's a great name but imagine in Liverpool ...

"wass yer name mate? DeGier...hey dat's de gear dat mate..." and so on and so on...

Anyway, his joke. When I was an SPTTCA (student part-time temporary clerical assistant) in a Bootle tax office in the far-off 70s, I tried to liven up a grey civil servant afternoon by telling them this joke ... they laughed for weeks about it:

A bloke goes into a pub and he sees Vincent van Gogh sitting over in the corner.

"Hey, Vincent," he shouts, "fancy a pint?"

"No thanks," says Vincent van Gogh, "I've got one ear!"

As my dad would have said, it tickles me that one!

And Speaking of Backs...

Bloody backs! Down with backs!! Backs are stupid!!! Never have a back!!!!

Backs are proof to me that if there had been an intelligent designer (of course there wasn't an intelligent designer but if there had been) then he/she or it was definitely NOT very intelligent.

Yes, I have a bad back. This phase of bad-backness has been going on for the last few weeks... just one wrong move and boing, there it goes... agony!

And you get no sympathy for a bad back.

Every time you get up from your chair and shout "ow!!" your kids just laugh at you....

Even the correct terms for "bad back" are a bloody nuisance. Take lumbago for example.
When I was a kid I always thought lumbago sounded really funny... I pictured a kind of special humbug. I mean the expression just doesn't tell you anything does it?

For example broken leg is pretty clear or sprained ankle but lumbago? What's that supposed to be?

Or look at sciatica, that's another non-name...

"I have sciatica"

"Oh, is that The Who's new album?"

The Germans are a little more helpful. It's called Hexenschuss in German which literally means witch shot... i.e. you have been shot by a witch. That captures the idea quite well.

However in Anglesey (Wikipaedia link) I found brief but nevertheless welcome respite from the physical and mental torture of lumbago. We were walking along the cliffs near Bull Bay and my back was twitching and pinging with pain. We came upon a little narrow wooden bench for walkers to sit on to admire the view. Now I had the idea to stretch out on it and... wonder of wonders... NO PAIN... just a warm sinking feeling of relaxation...

The Druids were pretty big on Anglesey, you know... hmmm...

Anyway, someday I must go back (oh please yourselves)...

Back to School...

Three of the most awful words in the English language if you are a school kid - and just to rub it in they are plastered all over the shop windows in England too...

Anyway in deepest Bavaria it is back to school today - one day later than it would normally have been because the Pope was here. Just why that should make any difference I don't know unless it was a PR attempt to make him more popular amongst the local kids.

Back to school...arghhhh... how I hated it; catching the busses you hadn't caught all summer, feeling itchy and uncomfortable in the new unworn uniform you still had to grow into...and then the smell of the school again - that unmistakable pong of insufficiently aired school buildings... streams of kids eddying up and down the corridors and finally the form room - our prison cell for the year - where we would find out which group of sadists, loonies and misfits were going to be entrusted with our education this year.

It is maybe one of the few "advantages" of being adult - unless of course you belong to that group of sadists, loonies and misfits - that we don't have to go through "back to school" any more.

Well, I'm off to teach a class of dozy business people to speak English... back to school huh? How about a nice grammar test for the first lesson...

Happy Birthday Harddisk

Listening to the Bavarian news channel yesterday evening in the car, having finally returned to Munich, I heard that the harddisk is celebrating its 50th year in 2006.

Up until 1956 the most moden computers which existed had been using magnetic tape or punch cards to store data...but then IBM came up with a computer which had a real harddisk for data storage.

This new feature was the size of a wardrobe (2m x 2.2m x 80cm) and weighed about a ton but it could store a staggering FIVE MBs!! That's just about one long mp3!

It makes you wonder what they did with such a miniscule memory...

Oh, and the cost for this harddisk with its 5 MBs was a mere three and a half thousand dollars a month (that's to lease it)!

Progress is not always bad.