"A Good Product Which Does What It Says"

A colleague forwarded this link to me, and I've spent the last 20 minutes crying with laughter at my desk, much to the alarm of those sitting near me.

The reviews on this Amazon product page are comedy gold.

Assisted

Note to members of shop staff: if I approach the counter of your emporium holding items and my debit card, this should be taken as a sign that I have decided what to buy and am ready to pay.

I do not require several minutes of "jaunty" banter on the merits of my purchases, nor on the weather or the quality of music on the radio.

Just let me pay for my stuff and leave.

Thank you.

Square Root Of All Evil

As my office backs onto what, until recently was a massive Aberdeen building site, today myself and two colleagues ventured out at lunchtime for the opening of the city's new shopping/cinema/dining complex, Union Square.

And it was utter bedlam. I've just heard on the news that 10,000 people were through the doors in the first hour.

TEN THOUSAND people. 30,000 in the first three hours. To see shops and restaurants that largely already exist in the city.

The big draw though was the shiny new Apple store. They were giving away t-shirts to the first 1,000 people into the shop, and rumour has it that 100 of the boxes also had iPod Nanos in them. But we took one look at the queue and decided to leave instead.

But even that was hard work, fighting against the flow of 10,000 folk milling around, ramraiding others with buggies, stopping dead with no notice and generally infuriating those of us who are perfectly normal.

Signed Shearer Shirt

A tad optimistic methinks....

Where To Begin

Mrs Wife and I have returned home from our English break, having stopped en route to take in Cirque de Soleil's show in Glasgow with her parents - perhaps more on that later.

As is the case when I am left unattended in town centres or with internet access and free time, I seem to have acquired a large pile of music during our holiday, and I have now begun the task of putting it into iTunes - an endeavour that may take me some time.

While away, I have purchased through a variety of means the following CDs:

Mongrel - Better Than Heavy
Late of the Pier - Fantasy Black Channel
Public Domain - Bass In The Place
The Byrds - Sweetheart of The Rodeo
Clinic - Internal Wrangler
The Dears - Missiles
Dogs - Turn Against This Land
Doves - Kingdom Of Rust
Bob Dylan - Infidels
Bob Dylan - Oh Mercy
Bob Dylan - Time Out Of Mind
Elbow and The BBC Concert Orchestra - The Seldom Seen Kid Live At Abbey Road CD/DVD Box Set
Manic Street Preachers - Gold Against The Soul
Morgan - Organized
Placebo - Black Market Music
Proud Mary - The Same Old Blues
South - Adventures In The Underground Journey To The Stars
Stereo MC's - Deep Down & Dirty
VHS Or Beta - Night On Fire
Wire - Pink Flag
Neil Young - Are You Passionate?
Yourcodenameis: Milo - Print Is Dead Vol 1.
Trainspotting soundtrack

Which represents a varied selection of old records, new records, well-known records and obscure records from a pretty wide variety of genres I think. Finding time to listen to them may be the biggest problem, but I guess that's why we invented iPods and commuting to work.

Dying Virgin

The current collapse of some of Britain's best-known high street traders has had an unexpected effect.

When Woolworths announced that it had begun a closing down sale, the day immediately following the announcement was the 100-year-old company's record highest day of trading. The Aberdeen brach was like food parcel day at a UN refugee camp, scrums of people all but slamming each other into the rapidly emptying shelves.

Yesterday, Mrs Wife and I ventured into Dundee and found ourselves in Zavvi, the oddly-named record emporium formerly known as Virgin.

(Richard Branson obviously bailed at just the right time. And the Virgin is now right royally screwed.)

It was a similar situation to that we encountered in Woolies just before it closed - the shop probably seeing more money flowing into its tills in single days than in the previous six months combined.

It's a curious situation - we're only tempted out into the shops when we think there's a bargain to be had, and we don't care enough to spend money in well-kent high street stores until they're wheezing their last dying breaths.

Ginger Twat

I saw this when I was in Groucho's second hand record shop in Dundee the other day, and I had to share it with you.

The picture is a little out of focus, but the hand-written tag adorning this limited edition vinyl picture disc version of Simply Red's Picture Book album reads: "Free abuse from shop staff on purchase. £4.99".

Looney Tunes

My recently-acquired iPod is a hungry little beast.

I've had it since Mrs Wife and I returned from China at the start of June, and it now contains just under 15,000 tracks.

But I've still not finished putting all my albums onto it, let alone started on the singles squirreled away in the spare bedroom wardrobe.

And on top those, I've still to salvage some of the contents of the knackered Magic Tune Box II, which houses some really strange stuff. The Chemical Brothers' Galvanise spliced with the theme tune to The Empire Strikes Back? Check. The Beatles' For No-One, Scissor Sisters' Take Your Mama Out and George Michael's Freedom mashed together? Check again. Devo, Beck, The Doors and The Who slammed together in a musical marriage made in hell? Check mate.

Now, as a result of having descended into the world of Apple, I'm also to be found regularly having a little look around iTunes. And at 79p a track, I can often be found topping up my collection.

In recent months, I've added Desmond Decker's Israelites and Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra's Some Velvet Morning to Magic Tune Box III.

Now, don't New Kids On The Block have a new record out?

Trolleyed

This week, I'll be playing in three football matches in the space of four days, including my first 90-minute, 11-a-side match in several years.

The last time I even donned the football boots was back when Mrs Wife and I were living in Argyll, and I was training with the local amateur football team.

I'd decided that the world wasn't complete without me showcasing my magnificent footballing abilities on the pitches of Scotland's west coast, but I was scandalously short of fitness.

So I threw myself wholeheartedly into the club's pre-season training campaign.

Until, a couple of weeks in, I suffered one of the worst injuries I've ever received.

Bizarrely, this incident didn't occur on the football pitch, but on the aisles of a supermarket.

It was the weekend of T In The Park 2005, and I had arranged to meet Baby Brother so that we could travel home together to get ready for the festival.

Unfortunately, I forgot to factor in that Baby Brother is an organisational nightmare, and it was after midnight that we finally left Glasgow.

I hadn't eaten, and hadn't bought any food for T In The Park, so I persuaded Baby Brother to stop at the 24-hour Tesco on Dundee's Kingsway.

For those who aren't aware, this branch of the supermarket is roughly the size of Wales. The aisles must be half a mile long. And at 2am on a Friday morning, they were deserted.

And so it came to pass that I rounded the corner with my trolley, and saw a vast expanse of empty aisle in front of me.

The opportunity was too good to resist. Pushing the trolley in front of me, I ran at full tilt down the aisle, until I determined that I'd picked up enough speed to go from trolley driver to trolley passenger.

I should probably explain now that the trolley wasn't a full-size effort with a seat for a small child and enough space inside for a large television set - it was a flat bed one designed for the shopper who needs a grocery receptacle bigger than a basket but smaller than a wheelbarrow.

But I digress. Running along this deserted supermarket aisle at 2am, I hopped on the back of the trolley.

The physics of the situation are simple - 14 stone suddenly hopping on the back of a flimsy trolley at 10 miles an hour doesn't work. The trolley shot out from beneath me and went skidding across the shop floor. I was left to slide along the aisle on my face. Unfortunately, my right foot caught on the floor. My leg, suddenly stretched between my sliding body and my stationary foot, pinged.

There is no cool, calm and collected way to pick yourself up off the floor of a supermarket at 2am when you've got a pulled hamstring. Nor is there a subtle way of picking up and refilling your trolley, or of completing your shopping with an all-too-obvious limp.

As far as I'm aware, no-one saw my mishap. But I'm still dreading the day that I appear on You've Been Framed, my fall from grace (and trolley) having been captured on CCTV and preserved for posterity.

Croaked It

I've spent most of my life in Scotland, and as a result, I'm always keen to see a new part of the planet - broadening the mind, I think it's called.

Mrs Wife and I have trekked through the jungles of northern Thailand; stood halfway up what, at that time, was the world's tallest building and looked out onto the minarets of Kuala Lumpur and onwards to the haze-shrouded hills on the horizon; snorkelled at the Great Barrier Reef; swum in the warm Pacific waters around Fiji; and drunk cheap Mexican beer in a Hollywood garden until the early hours of the morning.

But despite all our previous globe-trotting, there were some things we encountered in Shanghai that we've never seen anywhere else.

For example, on a day trip to Qibao, we spent an hour or so wandering the tightly-packed streets, where we were told we were experiencing "real China".

Many of the shops on these streets were traditional Chinese eateries, where passers-by can grab a quick snack as they head onwards towards their next engagement.

And the food on offer was a tad different to that found in your average greasy spoon cafe.

We saw whole birds impaled on skewers and deep fried, beak, eyes and all. Meats of in an arresting array of unusual colours that we didn't even want to know what animal had met its maker during the butchering process.

Most alarmingly of all (and something that still gives Mrs Wife a severe case of the heebie-jeebies) was a woman sitting on a doorstep skinning a bucket of live frogs and transferring them to a second bucket. The second bucket was a writhing mass of slithering, blood-soaked limbs.

Eating habits aside, the Chinese have an attiutude to many things that, to western eyes, seems strange.

Public spitting and urination is taken for granted. Infants don't wear nappies, but instead have trousers with big holes at the rear. When the child shows signs of needing to relieve itself, it is dangled over the nearest bush/gutter/river and left to get on with things.

Personal space doesn't exist. In a country of 1.3 billion people, perhaps that's understandable. But in the street, people in cars, on motorbikes or on bicycles will cut across your path without warning. On the pavements, pedestrians will do the same, walking diagonally in front of you so that you need to check your pace or stop suddenly to avoid banging into them.

In short, China can, for the first few days, be an infuriating place to visit. But, once you've adjusted to the pace of life in one of the world's most crowded and chaotic cities, it's easier to adapt to the rhythm - knowing that cars don't always stop at red lights, that Chinese people have no interest in anything that is happening directly behind them and that if you really want to buy something in the "fakes" markets, pick a price you'd be willing to pay and stick to it.

Just watch out for the woman with the bucket of skinned frogs.

RIP MTB

Every day, I'm accompanied almost wherever I go by the Magic Tune Box, an incredible device bearing within its dainty frame 15,000 songs.

At least I was until yesterday.

Whilst transferring new music onto the Magic Tune Box, its battery died. "Nobig deal," I thought, "I'll just plug it in."

Except, when I did, it started rebuilding its internal library. And when it had completed that task, it had miraculously lost 2,500 tracks. Not whole albums, not tracks in any logical order. Just 2,500 random tracks.

Despite this sudden removal of 20 per cent of its total of its contents, this incredible piece of technology had decided not to free up the disk space previously allocated to the tracks. So I'm left with a machine missing key tracks from most albums, its memory full and no way of resetting.

So, as a permanent solution, I'm going to sell my soul and jump on the IPod band wagon (10 years too late). I've decided to invest in a 160GB IPod Classic, which I'm hoping to pick up fairly cheap in China next week.

(Doesn't that last sentence make me sound like a real global traveller. Worse still, at one point in the past day, I uttered the phrase "Maybe Ican fit it in between Shanghai and Stavanger." Which probably just makes me sound like a wanker.)

Anyway, RIP Magic Tune Box. It's been a pleasure.

Don't Panic

What's the easiest way to kick-start a period of mass hysteria in the general public?

At the moment, it seems as though all it takes is for some high heid yin to say "Don't Panic".

I ambled along to the local BP garage a few minutes ago to pick up some lunch, and it seems that the world has gone mad. Despite warnings in the media that panic buying of fuel will merely hasten an avoidable crisis, cars were queuing out onto the road in the mad melee to purchase petrol.

The diesel pumps at this garage have already run dry, and it seems that the staff don't know when they will next be refilled.

I'm now wondering if this phenomenon applies only to fuel, or to other consumables? If someone somewhere announced tomorrow that there would be a shortage of milk within the next week, would people start panic-buying cow juice? Could we expect a sudden run on coffee if Colombia and Kenya announced they weren't going to ship any more?

The answer to both of those is probably yes. But what if we were instead told that the world supply of Angel Delight was starting to run short - would Asda and Tesco be stowed out with scrums of consumers fighting over packets of butterscotch and strawberry flavoured stoor?

Or if the suppliers of pickled eggs stopped pickling eggs, would there be sudden stockpiling of these precious resources in kitchen cupboards around the country?

Sounds like a good experiment to me.

A Helping of Humbug

Aberdeen city centre is a nightmare at the moment, with herds of slow-moving people wandering in a seemlessly aimless fashion from store to store.

This is especially infuriating when someone has to make it from the South College Street car park to Bon Accord Shopping Centre, find a Xmas gift for a workplace "Secret Santa", and make it back to the car, all inside 20 minutes.

None of this would have been necessary if the fuckwit on Ebay from whom I have already purchased a "Secret Santa" gift had sent it in enough time for it to arrive before today.

During my return journey through Aberdeen's streets, I was accosted on no fewer than four occasions by people wanting my opinions on something, wanting me to donate to charity or asking me to buy a raffle ticket.

Then, having arrived at the store of my choice, the assistant, whose neck was barely visible beneath lurid purple lovebites, asked in a disinterested fashion if she could help me.

To which I managed (but only just) not to reply: "Yes, you can get out of my way so that I can do my shopping."

Good God - December 6 and I'm already fed up with the Xmas stress.

Waste

It's easy to forget, in this era of the Supersize Big Mac Meal and the Kingsize Mars Bar, that food in Britain was rationed less than 60 years ago.

For people of my generation, Thatcher's Children, a life where you can't eat whatever you want, whenever you want, is unthinkable.

It wasn't actually food that got me thinking along these lines. One day, whilst out walking in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh, I came across a balloon shop. As the name suggests, this was an emporium that stocked only balloons and related parephenalia And it struck me that life in Britain has progressed pretty fast in the last 60 years - from a country where meat, eggs and cheese were rationed, to one where we need a shop exclusively to sell balloons.

I can see vast differences in attitudes between my grandparents' generation and mine, with my parents' generation somewhere between the two. My grandparents would carefully manage their finances, down to the last penny. If something wasn't essential, it wasn't purchased. Household items were repaired, often many times.

My generation is almost the complete opposite. If you can't afford something, buy it anyway and rack up huge credit card bills and overdrafts in the process. If something breaks, buy a new one.

Our society in the west today seems to be geared towards the short term. How can it make sense that it costs more to repair a broken kettle than it does to buy a new one?

The recent Channel Four programme The Human Footprint showed in stark terms how wasteful we Brits are. As well as showing how much urine and vomit we produce in our lifetime, it also said that most of us will get through four televisions and nine DVD players.

The programme's website also has a nifty calculator, which told me that I've probably now consumed 291 tins of baked beans (probably more in my case - I was a student for four years), that I've had 36,011 dreams and bought 183 books.

And it came in short on the number of mobile phones I've had - it suggested six, when in fact I'm on my seventh. In fact, there are now more mobile phones in Britain than there are people.

If anything points at how wasteful a race we are it's that.

Scotia's Joy and Pride

Today is a Bank Holiday in Aberdeen, so I have been spared the hour-long commute to the Granite City.

Unfortunately, this does not mean that I am spared a day of work. Mrs Wife and I spent Saturday in Edinburgh shopping for new furniture that is due to be delivered today. All of this furniture, consisting of a new bed, two bedside cabinets, two chests of drawers and a desk, is flat-packed and designed to be built at home.

So this afternoon will be consumed in a flurry of allen keys, odd-shaped pieces of wood and a mismatching number of nuts and bolts.

Although a certain percentage of the weekend was spent trailing the soul-sapping aisles of Ikea, it was not a complete write-off. I made it to a comfortable Edinburgh hostelry to watch Rangers dominate the final Old Firm match of the season, providing more than a glimmer of hope for the next campaign.

I bolstered my CD collection by a further three albums, and spent a lazy afternoon lying in Princes Street Gardens enjoying the sun.

On a sunny day, Princes Street Gardens is one of my favourite places on the planet. Like Central Park in New York, there is something satisfying about sitting in the peace and quiet in the sunshine, knowing that the city goes about its business just yards away. And even NYC can't boast a view of Edinburgh Castle.

A Bridge Too Far

Having recovered from the lethargy that afflicted me on Saturday as a result of having been up until 4am that morning, Sunday became the day when Mrs Wife and I did the things we had planned to do on Saturday.

We travelled to Dundee to collect the rug we had ordered for the sitting room at Dungroanin', and I was sidetracked for an hour by a CD and record fair. I can never walk past an opportunity to bolster my collection of music at low prices, and was quite happy to spend an hour digging through boxes of CDs.

I managed to add a few choice tunes to my library, inluding two Black Crowes albums, The Rolling Stones' Emotional Rescue, Yield by Pearl Jam and The Beastie Boys' Licensed To Ill, all for two pounds apiece.

So, in a cheery frame of mind, Mrs Wife headed to the cinema. As we are members with unlimited passes, we never worry too much about what is on, and just tend to go with whatever is available.

Unfortunately, on this occasion that meant going to see The Bridge To Terabithia, a kid's film. It was advertised as having been made by the same team behind The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and the short description in the cinema made it sound like a similar premise.

Before I start complaining about the film, I do know that it is targeted at kids. But it was lame. There was little in the way of plot and the special effects left a lot to be desired. In fact, the only bright spots were the gorgeous Zooey Deschanel appearing as a guitar-toting music teacher and a cherubic performance from Bailee Madison.

But, one aspect of the experience WAS very enjoyable - kids' films get all the best trailers. There were no dull previews of the latest period drama or Nicholas Cage snooze-fest. The trailers we saw were for The Fantastic Four, Pirates of The Caribbean, Shrek and Harry Potter.

That really sums my cinema tastes up: the films I'm most eagerly awaiting this year are Spiderman 3, Transformers, Pirates of The Caribbean and Shrek The Third.

So what? I'm a big kid and I'm proud of it. And I'm still convinced that someday I'll grow up to be Han Solo.

Get Me Out Of Here

Yesterday, whilst hunting for those post-Christmas bargains, Mrs Wife and I went our separate ways, she to find clothing bargains and me to seek out those audio-visual deals too good to miss.

Having had my fill of the crowds and the cold, I attempted to find Mrs Wife in a large department store.

So engrossed was I in this task that I wasn't paying too much attention to the departments in which I was wandering, until it was too late.

It seems that whilst attempting to locate the little lady, I had stumbled into the lingerie section of the store. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it).

Which begs the question: Is there a subtle way for a man in his mid 20s, wearing a leather jacket and jeans and absent-mindedly sending a text message to leave the ladies' underwear section of a large high street store?

Should one straighten one's back and stride purposefully out of the area without looking back? Or should one scurry out, casting furtive glances hither and yon, lest someone has seen you?

I think my retreat was a combination of the two - a purposeful stride whilst looking round to see if anyone had noticed.

Over The Counter Culture

The turkey has been stripped of edible meat, the trifle is but a memory and the mince pies are slowly disappearing.

I always find the days following Christmas a bit strange - you spend weeks or even months preparing for it, spend a whole day eating, and then just go back to life as normal.

Well, not quite normal. As early as 9am on boxing day, people were descending on the shops in the hunt for that once-in-a-year bargain.

Even in Brechin, a small town with little in the way of shops, the streets were pretty busy. Hordes of rampaging consumers stampeded from aisle to aisle, barging past their fellow man lest they miss out on that Little Britain DVD reduced in price for one month only.

I dread to think what bigger cities will be like. Mrs Wife and I are to venture to Dundee tomorrow in our own quest for Goods of Reduced Price (like the Holy Grail, only available from Next and HMV).

If there are no further posts to this site, it is because I have been lost in the Bargain Hunter War of 2006.

Sound and vision

Yesterday, I drove for three hours to Dundee, where I exchanged the broken surround sound system for a new one (sorry if this seems to be a recurring theme).

I then drove for three hours back to deepest, darkest Argyll, where I unboxed the system and spent more than an hour feeding cables round furniture and through speaker stands.

Just as I finished this complex procedure, I realised something - I hadn't seen a remote control in amongst all the equipment.

There wasn't one.

So, I then had to strip it all back down and pack it back in its box, ready to be transported back to the store. So another long trip ensued this evening, two hours through driving rain to pick up the third surround sound system.

But it's all working fine now. Bring on the blockbusters!