chesneycat

Link seen via James Nicoll's LJ.

I want to make this stop.  Seriously. 

*sigh*

Of course, that'd mean edumacating the masses on a sisyphean scale...

Laser-equipped battling helicopters are NOT boys toys, dammit!

This really winds me up.  I'm fed up of seeing the supermarket toy aisles divided by gender, I'm fed up of everything aimed at girls being pink, and I'm fed up of the lack of anything interesting on offer to both girls and women aside from fashion or shopping.  I hate the advertising stereotypes, I hate the all-smoking, all-boozing pregnant Kerry fucking Katona and her interminable Iceland ads, I hate the emasculation of men (except when they're selling me diet coke or chocolate), and I hate the fact that we're all meant to sit comfortably in our narrow, boring, squalid little lives, thinking of nothing but what we can put on hubby's credit card rather than actually getting out and having a life!

[...and breathe...]

Yeah, this is why I watch a lot of BBC telly.  Less adverts.

But I did see something that initially looked rather refreshing between the two halves of last night's excellent Avatar episode on Nick Toons.  A racing circuit, aimed at girls. Yes, it was pink.  Yes, it was part of the Polly Pocket empire.  Yes, it's shockingly badly made, and wouldn't last five minutes with an average kid. 

And worse, it comes with the following description:

"Wanna go to the mall? I’ll race ya! If anyone understands a girl’s passion for needing to shop immediately, it’s Polly Pocket and her friend Lila. And this racetrack set is just the thing to get them to the mall in record time."

*sigh*

On the plus side, you can get dozens of different cars (purely for accessorising purposes, naturally *rolls eyes*), and it's still a race track.

But what the fuck is wrong with playing with a racetrack that actually looks high-octane?  I got proper cars to play with as a kid, not that pink tat!  Even my sister's Barbie car was a decent shade of RED, a proper car-shaped convertible rather than a frilled pink monstrosity that even Penelope Pitstop wouldn't be seen dead driving.  [Now there was a character that appreciated geeky gadgetry!].  Yeah, I also played with My Little Ponies, and Barbies, and She-ra characters... but at least they didn't spend their time shopping!  The Pony Collective were performing artistes, who put on every west-end musical we'd ever heard the score of (Phantom was a particular favourite... one of my ponies did a fantastic Carlotta).  The Barbies were towering Greek Goddesses, wreaking all kinds of havoc on the LEGO civilisations beneath their lofty Olympian cupboard drawer.  And the She-ra characters?  Well, they got up to all manner of outdoor adventures, exploring the garden wilderness.  Enough to give Action Man a run for his money, and better groomed besides.

And yes, we raced our cars.  We built our own tracks for them out of whatever junk we could find in the garage.  We attached parachutes to them and launched them out of windows.  We never once did anything as lame as visiting the mall.  [Because seriously, who wants to go shopping with mum when you could be at home playing with your kid sister?]

I want my battling helicopter, and I want it armed with a class-4 laser. Then I'm going to send it aloft for as long as its feeble batteries will last, to fry teeny-tiny holes in the next gender-stereotyped toy I see....

Is there anyone else out there *just* paranoid/superstitious enough to fucking HATE chain letters.


That is all.

On sunday, we encountered a woman driver who was indisputably full of Fail.  Jez had parked outside the co-op, a couple of feet behind a small-ish estate car.  Plenty of room for the car to be manouevred out, especially since she had another two feet of empty space in front as well.  But, as we closed the car doors, she came running up to us.  Apparently, a space that I could've squeezed out of if it was a quarter of the size was far too small for her.  Could we please drop the car back another half mile or so? She was ever so sorry, but had just popped in to the shop to buy a pint of milk, and didn't think any other road users might just happen to park behind her while she was inside.  Because it's not the busiest local shop in the world or anything...

Oh, we silently obliged, but I'm sure the look on my face told her all she needed to know.   Lady, I know parallel parking can be tricky, but if your driving skills are THAT poor, you should NOT be on the road!  Sheesh, but you're giving your sex a bad name.

Rant number two - debt. I have every sympathy for people who get themselves into debt, but a story on the news this morning pissed me off a little.  They began it by explaining how this woman had suddenly found herself 40K in the red, but oh, she DESERVED our sympathy because it wasn't spent on luxuries, but on bills and mortgage payments which had doubled, and OH WHO COULD HAVE EXPECTED THAT?!

Sorry, but no.  Since when have interest rates always remained the same?  And it's not as if we don't have the memory of rocketing rates and repossessions in the 80s (and to a lesser extent, the 90s), is it?  Seriously, what do you EXPECT is going to happen when your lovely three-year fixed rate mortgage expires, and you end up on whatever the standard rate is today?  Come ON people - it's not rocket science!  Stretching yourself for a mortgage is bad enough if you know you can't really afford it, but displaying a level of willful ignorance that'd put an ostrich to shame...?  Nope, you're getting zero sympathy from this corner.

On a less snarky note, last night I gave a talk to our local astronomy society, and it went down wonderfully.  I'm so chuffed with myself.

EDIT - when I tag my posts with either "idiot of the week" or "rant of the week", surely a snarkfest isn't unexpected?  Oh, internet, you make me weep!

Sheffield's a delightful city, really.  Especially when you're in a car.

Back when we were looking for houses, we used to drive up here from Cambridge on one day during a weekend, and squeeze in as many house viewings as possible, armed only with a rather out of date A-to-Z.  I think eight or nine was the most we ever managed, and after that we decided to stick to six or less. When you're considering properties anywhere in the southern half of a large city, and you end up hop-scotching from one side to another, it does get a bit unmanageable.  But anyway, the problem wasn't the distances, but the roads we had to drive on.  Sheffield council doesn't seem to believe in clear road markings, lane warnings, or indeed any kind of useful signage.  You eventually figure out where you're meant to be when you've just passed the last possible point at which you could change lanes, and not a moment sooner. Add to that the fact that the driving test centres are either exceedingly lax round here, or there's something in the water that makes the average local regress to a baboon-like mentality, and you have a recipe for Pain.  And all the directions involve local things, for local people, that outsiders like us don't really comprehend.  "Oh, you want to take a left after The Wicker", and stuff like that.

But we eventually learned our way round.  That's the only thing you can do, really.

So anyway, yesterday Jez picked me up from work (west of centre) to go and watch the Transformers movie (Centertainment, near Meadowhell on the north-east side of town).  We (rather foolishly, as it turned out) opted to take the short route round the north side of town, heading for The Wicker and then north east from there - the alternative was skirting round the ringroad to the south, and going the long way.  There's a lot of roadworks going on right now - they're doing something to the ring road, but I can't quite work out what - but surely we couldn't go wrong over a distance of about a mile?

We took six wrong turns.  Six.  Okay, we discovered how to get to The Fat Cat (a nice pub on Kelham Island - I tried to get there last year following the brown signs labelled "Kelham Island - this way!" and spent half an hour being lost, before finally giving up and walking) which was a good plus, but we nearly gave up and drove home, only we couldn't find a road that would get us out of that scabrous pan-dimensional road-hell...  but somehow we found ourselves on The Wicker instead (see how horrid it is?)...


...and from there it was almost easy.  Except there were never any signs until after you needed them, more arseholes than you can shake a stick at, and by the time we got to the cinema I'd got down to chippolatas on the "bad driver=tiny dick" scale.  Bah.  If south Sheffield is bad, the north is orders of magnitude worse. Maybe it's got something to do with having a blind MP that the roads round Brightside are so shitty?


But at least Transformers was cracking good fun.

...only this time, it's not mine. But it's so good, I simply had to share it with you all, even if a substantial part of it is effectively just an advert for Dawkins' new output.

The Rant


Oh - if you miss the Professor Yaffle reference, I'm posting an episode of Bagpuss next.

Today's rant of the day is Other People's Code.

Thursday and Friday last week, I wasted loads of time trying to track down subtle variations in the output from one massive pile of code.  Today, I've been wading through a different pile.  I know how it all works now, and it seems to be doing about what I'd expect most of the time... except that it seems to be doing something rather inexplicable to one parameter.  E-mail has been sent to the author, and I'm waiting for answers. 

In the meanwhile, today may turn out to be a useful day, or a complete waste of time.
Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

What a crappy week.  My antibiotics are making me confused, depressed, and all my food taste like oily metal. Work is frustrating - it was going badly enough this week anyway, but my one-true-programming language seems to have just disembowelled itself with a rusty shovel.  Cue plenty of wailing and screeching and fruitless hacking on my part.  Our local tech guru will be able to fix it, once he's not on night shifts on the far side of the world any more.

And it's pissing down with rain.

Good thing our first year examiners' meeting isn't until this time next week... I feel the need to hurt something right now.

*sigh*

*drinks MORE tea*

What's with it about people making a big deal of how stupid they are?


Seriously, I don't believe they're as thick as they make out. 

But for some reason, it seems more socially acceptable to point out that you don't get something, or you find it hard to understand, or you simply can't be arsed to put in the miniscule amount of effort that you'd need to actually grasp it. What's wrong with standing up and saying, no, I never used to understand that, but now I do? How about admitting that you're prepared to learn, and grow as a person, and asking for help if you actually need it.  Or just saying nothing, and figuring it out for yourself.

But sitting there giggling, while you wave the "look at me, I'm stupid" banner high above your head.... gah!

Do you think this'll make you look better? Or that any friends or kudos you gain from dumbing down is worth having?  Or is this just another part of your passive-agressive, it's-never-my-fault-that-the-world-shits-on-me thing?  

God, this bugs the hell out of me. 

How many times have I had my specialist appointments moved now?  Because the guy wanted to take a bit of NHS time off?  Because so long as he doesn't piss off the paying customers, it doesn't matter?

Jez's biggest pet hate is people who talk when they ought to be sitting there silenty.  In cinemas, during a film. In concerts, while the orchestra is playing pianissimo. And in the theatre, while the actors are on stage, like they were last night.

One row behind and five seats across, a couple in late middle age were sitting with two pre-teen girls.  They spent the entire first half whispering, despite the shushing from every direction, and a few spoken "be quiet!"s. All the while, Jez's blood pressure is slowly rising.  He can't ignore people like this - as soon as he notices them, the irritation just keeps growing.  So, come the interval, he decides it's time to say something himself.  Not much, just pointing out calmly and politely that (a) talking during a production is incredibly rude, and (b) distracting to the surrounding members of the audience, while looming over them with his full height.


They didn't exactly apologise, and the kids glared at us all the way through the second half, but there was definitely less talking going on.

What they did offer, in lieu of an apology, was an excuse:

"The girls don't understand.  They're French."

Oh, so that's supposed to make your constant chatter all right, is it?


Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people taking their kids to performances (Mum and Dad certainly took Sarah and I to plenty of them), but if they're not capable of understanding a film without you explaining every single bloody scene to them (I'm talking about YOU, granny-with-the-four-year-old who went to see Spiderman 2), for god's sake, rent the damn DVD! If the storyline of a play is too complex for them, explain it to them before you go, or afterwards, or during the damn interval!  And if you can't get them to sit quietly through half an hour of Classic FM without whinging about being bored, is exposing them to two hours of Debussy really a good choice?


I think not.

So sit down, and shut the fuck up.

This post is inspired by a number of things. It's a topic that I'm rather fond of, I'll admit, but the two things in particular that brought it to my attention today were a thread by Lady Arwyn in the AMCF poll forum and a bit of market research I did in town yesterday afternoon.  The market research in question was for a new deodourant from Laboratoires Garnier, complete with mock-shop, advert-viewing and a five pound Boots voucher (way better than the usual cheap biro!) by way of reward. They're not going to appreciate my rather cynical responses, but at least they weren't Palmolive... dear god, the advert they'd come up with for that product! Picture a clumsy office-moron in her own little dreamworld, prancing around her workplace tripping over every good-looking man in sight, and spewing multi-coloured fake flowers out of her armpits every time her elbows raised above waist height. Oh, and all of this was to the cheesiest music imaginable. By the end, I was half expecting a fluffy pink unicorn to leap out of the nearest filing cabinet.... 

Anyway, the Dove advert was the usual "women come in all shapes and sizes", Sure was all "Yeah! Active! Busy! Womyn!", I'm blanking on the fourth, and the fifith, of course, was the Garnier advert.  Their new product, "Mineris", contains "all the goodness of naturally occuring minerals" or some such twaddle like that.

Firstly, minerals are minerals, and chemicals are chemicals. If it has a certain composition, that's what it's made of, end of story. It doesn't matter whether you milk it from a genetically modified goat, dig it up out of the ground, manufacture it in a massive ICI factory in the north-west or call it down from the ether via the eco-friendly hymns of new-age hippies.

It. Is. Still. The. Same. Thing.

In fact, digging up the "naturally occuring" variety out of the ground may be far more damaging to the environment than manufacturing it from more greenly available basic materials, but that's by the by.  My point is, I'm FED UP with companies and the public at large blithely going "ooh natural goodness" without a thought as to whether it makes a blind bit of difference at all.  Which, generally speaking, it doesn't.  Arwyn's thread hit the same nerve. There are too many people out there saying ridiculous things like "ooh, I don't want to pollute my body with chemicals". [Heck, let's poll AMCF and see what they think.]



Part of me thinks that if they did stop consuming any and all chemicals, the world would rapidly become a far more sensible place.

Oh, and the other problem with the deodourant?  It was meant to last for a whole 48 hours!  Seriously, two whole days.  Come on!  Are the people who purchase Garnier products really likely to go without a shower that long? Is anyone? What's the point of having something that'll work that long, when you'll wash it off before it's even been there half the time? If you DO NEED a 48 hour deodourant, can I suggest that you save your money and bathe more often?  Your friends, family and work colleagues WILL thank you.

I think I shook off the viral tonsilitis some time on Friday evening or Saturday morning.  Trouble is, my nose was already a little congested, and the right combination of factors has allowed the bacteria to take hold, big time.  Oh joy.  Sinusitis. Thank heavens for my facial steamer. It's not a perfect substitute for proper decongestants, but it helps.

What did people do before the invention of soothing-balm tissues?

Still 4w4d & counting...

Anyway, today I rang up Continental and my holiday insurers to see what my options were for rearranging my flights to Hawai'i.

The situation is this: Jez and I fly out on the 3rd April, he flies back on the 12th, which is when I would have gone up the mountain, and I was due to fly back on the 17th.  Of course, being pregnant, I can't go above 12,000ft, and even lower altitudes are not recommended.  So, I need to sort out alternative accommodation on either Big Island or Oahu (potentially with an extra inter-island flight as well), or get earlier flights home.

The girls I spoke to at Continental were fantastic.  I'm damn sure they did everything they could, which amounted to bugger all in the end, but they spent the best part of an hour trying to sort something out for me - and all of this is stuff that they're not obliged to do.  I think I'm going to write them a nice letter, assuming the flights go okay.

My insurers, on the other hand, balked from the start.  Arsetards.  Yes, I know that being less than 36 weeks means that I'm fit to travel.  But no, that does NOT mean that I'm fit to ascend the biggest fucking mountain in the whole world (yeah, I'm counting from the sea floor, but as far as single lumps of mountain go, it's the biggest, so nyaaaah), and no, the observatories don't have a portfolio of hotels scattered across the islands.  I can't cancel full-stop, and I can't recoup the excess costs.

Watch this space.  Paul at work was lovely, seeing me in my utterly distraught-cum-ready to tear people apart mood, and is trying to get something sorted with PATT.  I may come out better off from all this after all... as my flights (and hence Jez's) can't be cancelled due to events which occured after I booked them, the research council may still be footing the bill.  And if they don't, well, I haven't used up my travel grant quite yet.

Final thought.  Tea does, indeed, make everything better.