Penguins & Pessimism

You Have A Lot To Learn … About Our Meet

July 14, 2009 on 3:01 pm | In Forums | 5 Comments

As I said yesterday, my Sunday was spent in Birmingham meeting up with a few amazing people who managed to make my day fucking awesome whilst we didn’t do much at all. Some of you may already have twigged that this is going to be one of those overly long and rather tedious accounts of meets, but no-one reads this blog yet so I don’t have to worry about boring people.

First, I realised that Coventry City Centre is like a ghost town at 8am on a Sunday morning. It was both terrifying and awesome in equal measure. I was overcome by a gigantic urge to stop dead in the middle of the street and start repeating the phrase “We Are Coming”. It would have been so fun. Eventually I decided to stop enjoying the wonderful silence and lack of chavs and wandered over to the train station, buying my tickets from the most inattentive staff member ever and realising I was very hungry and needed breakfast. The only shop open this early was a tiny little newsagents that sold food at outstandingly low prices. The side effect of these prices was the fact that the entire shop gave the vibe that you were very likely to get stabbed. This feeling wasn’t helped by the four massive men in tracksuits behind me who seemed to be looking at me in a deliberately sinister fashion. I was honestly surprised when I escaped with my change.

On my platform, I was approached by a middle-aged man who said “fucking” for every other word, wanting to ask me if this was the train for Birmingham. It was. He seemed to think that me purely telling him he was on the right platform was enough for him to strike up a conversation with me. *sigh* On arriving at New Street, I found Ben staring pointedly at a fixed spot halfway across the station. I had to step in front of him and wave before he even noticed my presence. It was going to be twenty minutes before Tommy and Liz arrived, so we decided to wander around aimlessly for a while, noting that the public toilets were shut. They seem to think that people’s bowels cease to function on Sundays, which they don’t. We then met Tommy and Liz and continued our aimless walk around Birmingham, noting a particular HMV that was rather overenthusiastic about the fact they sold iPods and spending about five minutes looking through the window of Krispy Kremes watching the weirdly encapsulating process of artery destroying doughnuts being made.

This was followed by a trip to Pizza Hut which involved traumatising waiters with leg stroking and Liz, rather unhelpfully, asking for “a salad” without any further elaboration. More aimless wanderings led us to Waterstones where we spent at least an hour taking the piss out of various books. After we noted the stupidity of one particular book entitled “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”, a woman at a nearby shelf decided to pick an argument. It seemed that she wanted to make us (Tommy in particular) the target of a general rant as to how teens are always “taking the piss out of things they don’t understand”. Of course she hadn’t banked on picking one of the few young people who had the intelligence to argue back, which Tommy did, shocking her by revealing that he had in fact read the book in question. She then uttered the now immortal phrase: “You have a lot to learn, young man”. That will never cease to be funny.

Our next destination was the edge of a fountain where we watched a group of young children abusing pigeons and taking an extraordinary amount of pleasure from it. After a fairly boring conversation and the mesmerising appearance of a water worm, Tommy became entranced by the water, allowing the other three of us to leave him behind. Somewhat shockingly, Liz would happily have left him like that all day. Evil so and so! Whilst hiding, Liz tried to take a picture and failed, as you can see:

After we reunited ourselves, we moved on to a park (how unusual xP) where we sat and did not much (how unusual xP) and were approached by a woman who called herself homeless. She was dressed in a suit. Now most homeless people didn’t possess suits last time I checked. Needless to say, she didn’t get any of my money, or anything from the rest of us.

Eventually, we decided it would be best to go home. Before this however, we realised we hadn’t taken any pics for WDWALL. Liz hastily retrieved her camera and made a few attempts.

At the station, we brought our awesome day to a close, reflecting on how we were even more awesome than the people at the London meet. Did they have any anecdotes of evil women in bookshops or homeless people dressed for an office situation? No, because we rawk! When we finally had to go our separate ways, there were some very tearful goodbyes.

So there you have it! I hope you enjoyed the pointlessly lengthy story.

I Have A Prejudice…

July 13, 2009 on 10:36 am | In Forums, Rants, TV | No Comments

The following post would have been uploaded yesterday had it not been for my blog having a spazz attack and refusing to work.

I pride myself on being a very tolerant person. I am incredibly accepting of other sexualities and races. But there is one creature on this Earth that I have a massive vendetta against. That creature is the moth; the most fucking stupid animal ever to grace the planet, more specifically my house.

Moths really seem to be the least purposeful animals around. I can’t see any reason why they need to be around and why they need to fly around me constantly even though they are fully aware that I will kill them just as I have killed their friends and family over the last few months. We recently had quite a large moth problem in my house with there easily being twenty in the room at any one time, which was bloody annoying when trying to make a cup of tea. If I’m honest, they scare me slightly, particularly when they fly into a position where I can’t see what they’re doing. We thought we had eradicated the problem, but they appear to have returned over the last few days with one especially large one flitting around the other night and scaring the living shit out of me.

As some of you may know, I watch a lot of comedy on TV. Recently, every comedy programme on Channel 4 has had sponsorship adverts at the beginning of its commercial breaks featuring what is supposed to be a small snippet of stand-up comedy. The character they have chosen for this character is possibly the most annoying person ever. The subject matter of the majority of his little skits are actually very good, but the way the guy delivers the humour is terrible and often renders what he is saying completely unfunny. I know that these things are only on for about ten seconds, but they really get on my tits that it is the best a very good TV channel can come up with. This is bad; I really could do with getting some better topics to rant about. Perhaps stuff that actually matters would be a good start.

Spent most of today having an awesome amount of fun in Birmingham during the Midlands’ rather shit attempt to upstage the London meet for CF’s fifth birthday. The four of us that went absolutely loved it and had a brilliant day. A full account will be up on here as soon as Liz pulls her finger out and bothers to upload the few hastily taken pictures.

See you all then!