Grumpy Old Rabbit

Grrrrrr

Grrrrr! I'm an old cross patch today! Just grumpy in every way. And, from what I've been reading, I'm not the only one. So, in an endeavour to get it out of my system, and become a sweetness - and - light Old Rabbit again, I'm going to write it all down. It's cheaper than therapy.

Traffic Calming

Now there is the oxymoron of our time. WHAT IS CALMING ABOUT IT? Sod all! Now, I live at the top of a hill, which goes down to our local town. In the old days, I never really noticed the traffic on the hill. Then someone decided it would be a Good Idea to have a traffic calming scheme. Overnight, up popped three traffic islands. Well actually they are not 'islands' because they are not in the middle, or even very far offshore. No, these little beasties are firmly anchored to the safe harbour of the pavement on each side of the road. Traffic cuspate forelands if you will. A bit further down a real traffic island appeared, only to grow into a true archipelago over the next couple of weeks. Then a couple of the forelands disappeared. Only to allow some road works to be carried out opposite that would otherwise have blocked the whole road. Now, I ask myself, no, maybe I won't bother...

Calming, my paw! Now it is all done, the calming effect is evident by its total absence. It is about as calm as Drake Passage on a windy night. The distance between the forelands has been carefully calculated so that it is very difficult to know if you can get round before encountering the vehicle coming in the other direction. So now the net result is either that the driver decides that discretion is the better part of valour, and slams on the anchors at the last minute, or 'goes for it', banging a couple of gears down the box and swerving violently past the foreland. In either case the result is certainly tyre squeal, often honking, and every now and then one hears salutations that would not be used when addressing Her Majesty. Not what I want to listen to on a Sunday afternoon.

I wonder if anyone has calculated the amount of energy wasted by all the wheelspinning acceleration, grinding of gears and squealing of brakes? No, didn't think so. But we can all rest easy knowing that Something Has Been Done.

Imperial Units

Off to England tomorrow, and I know the grumpiness will set in as soon as I get off the ferry. In fact, as soon as I see that sign that says 'Drive on the Left - Max speed 70 m.p.h.' Now all EU counties, I believe, are nominally metric, so what is this persistence with these measurements from the middle ages? Well, I suppose it stops me going senile. As the road from the ferry winds through the town to the motorway the speed limit changes seemingly for every crossroads. My car only has a metric speedometer, so I have to go through mental gymnastics at each change until I memorise them all again. Ah, a bit of open road. Look out for junction 13. The sign says in 300 yds. At least yds are easy - being, near as dammit, metres in disguise. Now we get to the hotel. I've got the roof box on, which brings the height of the vehicle, so it says, to 1.95 metres. The hotel proclaims a headroom of 6'3". Scrape. Well, we're in and I need a drink. One thing you can only get in England is English Ale and damn good it is too. It comes in pints, whatever they are, and in a couple of hours I won't care. Thank Goodness.

Fashion

Kitten Heels

Some things should just never be. Just looking at these infernal pieces of footwear makes my blood boil. No! No! No! Don't do it! No! No! No!

How low can you go?

It always makes me grumpy to see fashion deliberately flouting the obvious. Take the waistband on jeans for example. Now, whilst propping up the supermarket trolley waiting for the Smaller Bunny to sniff out a bag of carrots or whatever, I can't help but notice that waistbands are going south for the winter. The Good Lord provided a thing called a waist to hang pants from - s'pose this is why the thing round the top is called a waist band - but the fashion designers are having no truck with this.

In the seventies pants were hung from the waist - look at the 'Psychiatrist' episode of Fawlty Towers if you don't believe me - but no more. Firstly a goose pimpled band of flesh was displayed, then it progressed to showing a wing shaped tattoo - and now we are entering the territory previously reserved for plumbers fixing your P - trap. If you have a figure like someone on a five - day cleaning contract in New York you might get away with it, but elsewhere the belt tension to defy the effects of gravity results in bits of the personage of the unfortunate wearer being displaced - usually to the part rendered visible in the form of a fleshy overhang.

Now this leads me to wonder where it is all going. Presumably a point will be reached where no amount of belt tension will hold the things up. So what to do? Just chuck away the waistband completely, and then you are left with two jeans legs. Now, how do you hold these up? With a garter or suspender belt one supposes. But is the world ready for this on public display? The other day I saw someone wearing a skirt over a pair of jeans and thought 'Why?' Now we know.

Red Nose Month

Now don't get me wrong. I've nothing against Children in Need, or the concept of Red Nose Day per se, but, like Christmas, it is expanding to take over everything on each side of it. There was something I thought was going to be on the Beeb t'other night, and lo and behold, when I turned the TV on I was greeted with 'Celebrities do Red Nose Something-or-Other'. I could tell they were celebrities, because despite spending seven years working in television, I hadn't heard of any of 'em. Like at Christmas, I get really grumpy when I see the whole world apparently getting off on something that leaves me feeling colder than a dead fish on Seaton Carew sands.

Sport for All

Which brings me nicely on to sport. I've no idea what the Good Lord created me for, but it certainly wasn't for sport. Well, not as it is done in UK schools, anyway. I have the physique of a stick insect and the eyesight of a bat (but unfortunately no radar). The only thing I've ever been any good at is tenpin bowling, thus proving the commonly held assertion that this is the sport for people who don't do sport. Hanging around on a muddy field in the middle of winter in underpants and a t-shirt just doesn't ring my bell. If others want to do these things, well, good luck - but please, keep it to yourselves.

So why is it, despite there being several hundred channels available on my satellite tv decoder, that whenever one of these brute force and ignorance type sporting events is being televised it always manages to replace one of the few programmes that both the Smaller Bunny and I want to watch? Grrrr. Not only do I miss my program, but I get aggro to the ear'ole thrown in to boot, as if somehow it is all my fault that a load of blokes cavorting in a field of mud is more important than whatever we were going to watch.

Grey is the colour

The chemical industry has come a long way in the last few years and we have a whole range of hitherto unheard of dyes and pigments of every hue. So what do most car manufacturers do? Paint their products grey. Arrrgh! The streets are full of them. Grey, Grey, Grey. What kind of people buy these things? Does it reflect the move to a service economy where the only people buying new cars are in finance, insurance, banking and accounting? Have all the creative people left town, or are they 'resting' and not in the market for a 'nice motah'? Oh, well, that one's not grey - look! - it reminds me of the sludge I scraped off the bottom of the water butt last autumn. We've had the Age of Aquarius, now we're in the age of mediocrity. Don't give anything for popular consumption any colour or flavour or you might upset someone. Dumb it all down. Put 'My' in front of all nouns - 'My Computer' - 'My Inbox' - Eeeech! It has even happened with opinions. You can't have one, 'cos if you do it will contravene some tenet of Political Correctness.

On Sunshine and Headlights

There I was, on a nice sunny day, driving along in the Rabbitmobile minding my own business, when a 4WD came screeching up behind with all the headlights and foglights on full. Now, lets see, four headlights, two foglights, marker lights and the rest - that has to be close on 400 Watts - enough to light 20 sitting rooms with low energy bulbs. What a waste.

Poly - Chronic Ringtones

Now every now and again I get tapped up to replace the mobiles. The Smaller Bunny and Rabbit Kittens must have the latest things, you know, nothing to do with communicating - camera, games, diaries and polyphonic ring tones. It is truly wonderful to have a phone that miaows like a cat or moos like a cow, but are these flights of fancy really suitable to alert one to an incoming call? I'd say not.

Many are the times that I have been lumbered - I mean, asked to do a favour - only to be asked something when so doing to which I have no idea of the answer. So what do I do - Yes, phone! And what do I get? Brrr-Brrr --- Brrr-Brrr --- Brrr-Brrr --- Brrr-Brrr --- Brrr-Brrr --- Brrr-Brrr --- "Your call has been diverted to the Flying Pig voicemail". At this point the phone is close to going in the nearest pond, ditch or toilet pan. I've paid for a call - thanks to the Flying Pig useless flippin' voicemail - and got no result. Probably this means I've had a wasted journey to where-ever-it-was as well. On questioning the intended benefactor I know what I'll get - "Oh, the phone was in my bag and I couldn't hear it ring!" I seeth under my breath - "then make it go 'ring - ring' - not me - flippin' ow!" Grrrr.

Its a Gym, Jim, but not as we used to know it

Once upon a time we had a gym membership. A nice friendly little place to go and work up a sweat before dinner, whilst listening to some music. The music was provided by a half reasonable stereo system, the trainers bringing in an assortment of CDs to play. Not all of it, obviously, was my first choice, but it was all good stuff. Of course, it was too good to last, and at the behest of the greedy beggars from the music industry the stereo was removed. It was replaced by some commercial setup, blasting plastic pop with less quality than a wind up gramophone. We tried taking our own digital music players with studio type headphones to keep out the other din, but they got too sweaty and looked ridiculous. So we never renewed our memberships, and invested in an excercise bike for the basement. Which brings me to:

Griping Music Executives

Ever noticed how the music business is forever griping about sales being down, and how they blame it all on the Internet? Well, when I go to the Rabbit Kittens' student digs, what do I find? Bob Dylan playing, Led Zep and Hendrix posters on the wall, dammit, stuff I had on the wall back in the sixties. When will they wake up and smell the rabbit poo? The reason they can't sell the modern stuff is because most of it is a load of synthetic plastic twaddle.

Ode to the Ad Hoc Shopper

My wife's an ad hoc shopper
She never makes a list
I take her shopping every day
for items that she's missed
I'd have been a great philosopher
and mathematician too
If I'd not spent over half my life
in the supermarket queue...

Alien Packaging

Some people wonder if aliens will visit us. I reckon they're already here. And they are designing the packaging for things like CD-ROMs and videotapes. These things are obviously designed as a test of intelligence, resourcefulness and ability to handle stress. The aliens want to test us, much as we test monkeys by getting them to pile up boxes to get to the bananas...

There you are, five minutes to the start of a programme, and the Smaller Bunny decides she wants to record it for posterity. The only blank tapes are in the three pack you bought last week (to have a few in hand for when they stop making them). Now, custom dictates that there is a little ripcord thingy you pull to open the outer layer of packaging. Can you find it? Like hell. Ah - pull - snap - soddit! - 3 minutes to go - start with the claws - bah, broke a nail - why can't they use glue like this on things you want to stick fast - like stamps... Ah, a weak spot - riiiiiiip - good, the outer layer is off. One minute and counting - repeat the polaver for the inner wrapping. Now there are lots of little bits of plastic wrapping nicely charged with static electricity looking for something or someone to cling to - me most likely. Just what you don't want hanging around a devilishly complicated piece of electromechanical apparatus. Is that all of it picked off? ALL OF IT? Then into the hole it goes, and hit record with half a second to spare. I need a drink...

More grumpy diatribes coming soon...

Soon to be available in OpenDocument format.

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