kevingillan.info » sillies

In my day, all we had… (etc)

kev — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 08:08:09 +0000

Wow, this really is real. Checkout Amazon’s ‘Imaginarium’ (yuck) for great security related toys:

Customers who bought this also bought…

Playmobile Police Van
Playmobile Tanker Truck
Playmobile Bank Counter

Obviously that sent me on a quick browse of the military toys I found, as you’d expect, lots of the ususal replica tanks and planes etc. I really enjoyed the well-placed quote marks in the description of this missile launcher:
“Mega Missile Launcher – Take command of your very own ‘peace-keeping’ tank!”

She falls

kev — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 08:12:09 +0000

I came across this flash ‘game’ that basically involves you throwing this bikini clad woman around a bare skyscape, through which she falls. I found it oddly compelling, and it sparked off this stream of consciousness.

Feel free to come back to the comments and call me a plonker if you like

Peak Oil and What to do with a Useless SUV

kev — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 08:15:42 +0000

According to a friend:

Let the pants shitting begin. We’ve hit Peak Oil three months earlier than Kenneth Deffeyes’ most pessimistic calculation:

So, what to do with that damned SUV when the price of petrol gets beyond your means? A couple of suggestions:

Kick out the floor and walk it around Flintstone style – a great work out!
Park it in the garden, remove all the glass and leave it to rust as a particularly dull and expensive climbing frame.
Recycle all the materials to make ingenious low-tech weapons. Get punk hair and look forward until everything goes a bit Mad Max.
Sell your house, and continue to buy petrol so that you can get little Johnny to school ‘safely’.

Got any more? Gi’s a comment.

How to… be well rounded.

kev — Sun, 13 Jun 2004 09:02:37 +0000

Once, being well-rounded was easy because you just had to know the rules of cricket, the poetry of Rudyard Kipling and some of the more obvious military tactics like running at the enemy firing guns or hiding behind a wall firing guns (the crucial factor being that the enemy is armed with pointy sticks).

Today, being well-rounded is much more difficult, its all about about balancing acts. The major difficulties are: work-play; work-family and business-personal relationships. Which just goes to show that if it wasn’t for work everything else would probably just slot into place.

One must achieve balance by finding an expertise in every area of the home. Become a gourmet in the kitchen, a wonderful parent in the living room, a sensitive lover in the bedroom, an erudite wit in the study, an appreciator of nature in the garden, and a creative DIYer all over the house and you might be some way to well-rounded. Of course, the boom in building luxury apartments for the young and dynamic makes this gargantuan task much more managable by offering just three rooms and 78 channels of TV so you can watch others be wonderful, sensitive, erudite gourmets with beautiful gardens and conceptual art built into the breakfast bar while you grunt between the microwave and the sofa.

Of course, you cannot let your body acquire any of the characteristics you demand for your whole being. The well-rounded individual should be slim and sporty, with the well-toned muscles, perfect skin and robust tan that can best be achieved with an obsessive focus on diet and exercise. Second best seems to be a combination of the Atkins diet and a hot grilling under the sunbed so that you begin to resemble that nostalgic corn snack, the frazzle.

(Apologies to Guy Browning)

Greenery #1 – Bug those slugs

kev — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 09:03:34 +0000

Just getting into homegrown veggies to discover the horror of slimey bags of nothing much eating your dinner before its even been dug up – this can turn even the most consistently vegan hippies into calculating, muderous plotters. I’m (reliably?) informed that a slug can have 11,000 grandchildren, so lets not worry too much about reducing the slug gene pool. To help you plan your speciside the Centre for Alternative Technology in North Wales has compiled this vicious guide.
It covers beer traps, citrus fruit and many things to do with scissors, but I’ve yet to find mention of the ‘homeopathic remedy’ (in this case read ‘witchery’) that a friend recommended:

Take one dead slug.
Burn it.
Dilute in lots and lots of water.
Spray all around the garden and watch incredulously as for the rest of the summer your veggies grow unmutilated. Or maybe not. I’ll keep you posted just as soon as I’ve managed to set one alight.

Finally, in ecological terms, your biggest cause of slugs is your garden’s tidiness. Beetles are a natural predator and like to live in dead and rotting wood – so don’t clear it away!