Sean Bean is bringing me pies!

Terrible phone reception is work has finally paid off, Sean Bean (O2) and the England rugby team and delivering pies and beer to my house before England dominate France next weekend.  Apparently they will phone around Thursday and ask when it would suit for my priority to be the priority of the Yorkshire courier.

Of course I'm a liar and Britain's Second Greatest Current Actor isn't really bringing me any pies but I think he did speak on the advert and due to his talent it's all set, he compromised my reality in a way Andy Townsend's analysis couldn't.

Back to rugby, still haven't thought of anything to give up when England win, maybe not using my phone for a month while I'm using the toilet.  I think given the emphatic win on Saturday that England are assured of glory, also I guaranteed 100% that during his and my entire lifetimes Chris Ashton will never drop the ball while doing his dive thing, so that's a relief i haven't just doomed us both.

Unrelated to rugger, X Factor actually gave me a few surprises tonight in spite of the clear give away extended footage of the obvious going through people.  We feel that they may bring back some mainly because it seemed obvious they wanted the Scottish girl who hated her home town through.  My main disappointment was that The Keys with their big arms didn't go through (except the small armed one) while The Risk did :| they suck.  I'm going for Liverpool hairdresser, Gav's was the same but for competitions sake is going for Irish yellow nailed girl.  I've only heard my guy sing once but at least he's from Liverpool like Rebecca the best, I should probably follow him on Twitter.

What would I give up for England winning the World Cup

After a discussion the answered seemed to be very little.

Having read that something like 65% of Welshmen would give up sex for a year if Wales were Rugby World Champions I have a think for a while about my options.

I think I could give up curry for 1 week, maybe crisps and chips for 2 weeks, I could probably give up kayaking for a year but I'd enjoy the laziness of it, other than that for a whole year there's pretty much nothing I like that could do without that long.  Possibly champagne if I could still drink goodish cava.  Internet? no, Burger King? no, Living like a king? No :(

Here's the problem - after a month or so I wouldn't think about the victory again, other than 6 nations time, but the year of losing something would be going on and what's life without BK?

A Philosophical Question

Here it is:

If you had 1000 giraffes, 1,000,000 lions, 1000,000,000,000 ducks and infinity shrews and they were fighting to the death, last species wins, who would win?  The battle ground would be a 2 kilometer cubed field, clouds at the top and 1 small 2cm deep 1 foot wide river.  The time limit would be 16,9999 hours.


An interesting side note, 10,000 of the ducks have no beaks.

Lockout Shmockout?

Two posts within the same month means that I am tripping.  I think it's because a laptop I bought broke after 25 days of buying it (refurbished mind) and me thinking I had a year warranty suddenly realising it was actually 30 days and that I was in fact very lucky it broke so quickly.  I just had an email saying I was getting my refund so at least it isn't getting sent back to me telling me I'm wrong and suck.  I assume this is what you get for buying a well speced laptopfor £230 - saying that my living-on-the-edge-mind is to buy one of the same value again and hope it too breaks and then I will get another and so on for maybe a year or two until I've sample every laptop and have lost important files (I have no such files) and unbacked up photos continually for a year.

Moving on from that sorry tale, the current predicament is that my annual fear of the months between June and October, while the NBAseason isn't on, is in full swing with the Internet becoming a really dull place.  In fact the probable reason I got obsessed with buying a new computer was because finding deals and spending money was my replacement for basketball interneting.

This is all amplified due to the lockout, where no basketball is played, everyone wants more money and no one wants to compromise to benefit me, which means there's a good chance there will be no season for even longer or even at all.  I'd imagine this will make me go back to Baseball :( although that ends in September I think and St Louis' star player has a broken arm or some such misery, and I can't trust Liverpool to make me happy.  Any sport ideas would be well received, specifically if they have a lot of stats I can geek over.

On a side note, this book is awesome and doesn't require imagination like a story book

particularly if you love numbers and money, not at all if you don't :-|

 Speaking of economics, I made my too patient girlfriend go here with me when we had like 1 day in London:

A few months of stuff

Another huge wait and this time it was worth it.  At the end of May things got way too real when Mered of Iechyd Da fame peer pressured us into attending the gym's open evening at the bowls club.  Not knowing if we were good at bowls but knowing we were good at other stuff we figured we'd be pretty good at bowls and turned up 2nd to an empty green ready to be bowlt upon.  We did this and the proof is below.

 

Because I am crude I can morally reveal I won 5-3.  There were a few shots where we couldn't contain ourselves from whooping and others like my first bowl that went straight off the far end that were real bad.  Overall it would have been good if it wasn't really windy and if we'd been challenged to a 2 on 2 game, we weren't going to challenge anyone ourselves.

Since then other things of happened, one of which involved going to Buffalos and another where I made risotto with laver bread and bara brith  (bara brith  is a lie)..

I also saw Ferraris I like in London but can't afford :(

If I ever manage to post again I hope it's better than this.

TV Just Reminded Me - Wind farms in Mid Wales

It took me a while to dislike wind farms having learnt in my degree that they're pretty OK (except for the awkward maths) and because my Dad always complained about them and I liked to disagree.

This all changed when I read on some website with potentially no credibility that new wind turbines to be built in Mid Wales would require a valley with a waterfall I really like (and want to kayak one day but never will), Cwm Einion, to be dug up so that supports could be put in for the sweet new extra tall turbines. A load are also planned to be built in Montgomeryshire, Powys, ruining the countryside around this scenic area of Wales and I have heard larger roads will be needed to get the lorries up to the sites.  Wind farms don't even produce reliable power, a backup fossil fuel plant is always required for when there is no wind at peak times and I've often found the weather around Llanidloes/Newtown to be quite stable and I've never heard of our chickens blowing away in all the wind.

I'm not sure if I'm possibly saying we should get some awesome huge coal power plants instead but I mainly don't want a part of the country with relatively few residents being bullied into losing it's countryside because people far away decided their valleys were windy some times of the year.  Considering the pride about the grandness of  it's outdoors Wales isn't a big enough country to be able to hide the damage done to it's countryside when it spreads from one side to the other.

Please get signing the petition found in the links below:

Say No to Tan 8 - Windfarms & High Voltage Power Lines Spoiling our Community

Petition (English)
Petition (Welsh)

Maybe solar power is the answer?

Avoiding Football on Saturday

Two years later and I have to do it again. In May 2008 I had to watch the Wolverine X-Men film so that I couldn't hear the cheers in the pub next to my old house. Back then I did manage to get through the evening without incident. At least until I foolishly went into my bedroom where an open window nearly compromised my entire media blackout. I heard what sounded like a cheer... My heart sank quite a bit, thankfully when I did an urgent check online I found that the cheer was either in my favour or was the blissful groan of people who'd made a morally ambiguous team choice earlier in life.

So with this years Champions League final featuring my old friend Manchester United will probably cause me a fair bit of unhappiness. Especially if Robby sends me a "banterrific" text.

That's basically all I have in my head on this issue other than I hope they lose.