My name is Jose Gonzalez
I have something quite amusing to report. I am trialling out some speech to text software – to be specific: Dragon Nuance Naturally Speaking. It can be a little daft at times, but when it works it can be a great tool.
I just tried saying: ‘My name is Jose Gonzalez‘.
Do you know what it typed onto the page? Can you guess?
This is what ‘Dragon’ has to say about me:
My name is awesome and valid.
I’m quite an agreement with the software to be completely honest and I don’t see why I should teach it to spell my name when it can obviously substitute my name with something equally worthy and adequate.
Job well done, ‘Dragon’ software makers!
Awesome and valid
Remember Bum bags?
Bum bags were trendy and snazzy at one point in the 80’s. Thinking about it, probably everything was snazzy at one point in the 80’s. But bum bags were one of those things that were snazzy AND useful… until we invented fashion.
Fashion and the taste police put an end to the trusty, snazzy, useful bum bag. It killed it outright.
If you’re not sure what a bum bag is – or if you’re shuddering at the words, conjuring up horrendous images.. then relax. The bum bag was a pouch with a waist strap that allowed you to carry all your shrapnel around in one place instead of having it all over your pockets. You can see a bum bag ‘in action’ here to the right.
Well, bum bags are not things that you admit to. They’re like Kilie Minogue and Jason Donovan… you just don’t admit to liking their duet efforts. And for the record… I do not like Kilie Minogue and Jason Donovan! I’m sure they’re smashing people and I’d love to attend their yatch parties (I’m serious) so please do send invites. I’m talking about the duet efforts… which I’m entitled not to like.
I do on the other hand hope that Kilie Minogue and Jason Donovan agree with me on the bum bag issue. The truth of the matter is that bum bags are damn handy! I for one cannot wait until they reinstate the bum bag as a fashionable item. We are all going from day to day, searching our pockets incessantly for our car keys, change to pay for the sneaker bars and coffees… My God… how many hours off your life do you think all that rustling inside trouser pockets cost you over the months? And this is my point: it’s a needless waste that can and should be stopped right away by bringing in a useful tool to take care of this issue… and we have such a tool in the bum bag! Just look at the car keys next to the image of the bum bag! It’s efficiency times 10!
Dear fashion world and Wallmart, please bring back the bum bag so I can get myself a snazzy one and save lots of time.
Now, having said all this about the bum bag, I feel I must point out something crucial here… and that is… pimping up your bum bag! They say a picture paints a thousand words,so I’m going to show you exactly what I mean.
My good God, what were they thinking of! OK, there is NO NEED for this to have ever happened… Look at it! Not one but TWO drinking bottles? Where is this person going to that they need a bum bag loaded with bottles? Up a mountain? If so, this is the job of the backpack! Let’s not confuse the two items now…
Can you imagine walking around with this bumbag? You’d look like an action man (the toy that is…). Even in a world where the bum bag was an iconic symbol, where everybody walked around freely with their snazzy bum bags… turning up with THIS monster of a bum bag would make you the laughing stock of the year! It’s the equivalent of the pimped up car that went slightly wrong at the very start because it wasn’t really a car to be pimped up in the first place! It’s like adding floodlights to your bumbag!
Is it any wonder then that the bum bag died a death… with this kind of… thing… going on? I mean, where do you draw the line? If you start showing up with bum bags like that, then somebody else will make a bigger one, and a bigger one, and before you know it we’ll all be walking around with bum bags the size of small wardrobes, dragging them along behind us or permanently walking at 45 degree angles! And this, ladies and gentlemen, defies the whole point of the bum bag… which was always meant to be a small compact handy (snazzy) device.
Having said this, I still await eagerly the day they make a huge comeback. I will be first in the queue. In fact, I may just buy one and stash it away until such day arrives, so I can stroll out of the house triumphantly donning my spanking new bum bag. And I can tell you that it won’t have water bottles attached to it!
Food for thought
Lately, I keep finding bits of banana lodged inside my t-shirt. This morning I discovered some crunched up walnut hanging around the back of my right ear, and just the other day somebody pulled (like a magician) an entire lettuce from my left nostril!
Hmm… I don’t think I’m eating properly…
My phonographic magazines
I found a pile of phonographic magazines under the bed today, but they took them away when they caught me composing myself.
Prisons are overcrowded
Yet another fabulous idea from the people in charge…
Prisons are over-crowded. So what do we do? We shorten criminal’s sentences, and in some cases we subject the naughty bastards to community service: brushing the streets and painting fences for 6 weeks will teach those buggers not to rape anybody in future…
Somehow, I’m not surprised by this. If you look at previous fantantic ideas to deal effectively with the criminal element you’ll soon arrive at my favourite one of them all:
What did we do with all the convicts in the country? That’s right: we sent them to a paradise tropical island called Australia. In the meantime, we all stayed here in England, enjoying the never-ending rain and the beautiful gale-force winds that make the cheeks blush blood-red and the eyes weep with anguish. Whoever thought of that one really wants congratulating in a special way.
And here we are again today, faced with the same problem. And this time, ironically, we can’t send them to Australia because they decided to make up some immigration laws to stop everybody else from moving in!
OK, so let’s review the options:
We have a bunch of psychopaths and we can’t fit them all into small cells.
1. We could shoot them and be done with them.
Problem: this would cause an uproar.
Ok: we could shoot them, be done with them AND tell nobody.
Ok, let’s be humane about this.
2. We send them to a paradise island.
Nope. We already did that one.
3. We send them to France.
No objections there…
I have a better idea. These people are mostly violent types: they like to punch and get punched; bully and abuse. OK, why don’t we slip some uniforms on them and send them out to the front line? Chose a conflict – any conflict. There you go. Have fun.
At least when they get shot to pieces, it was for their country…
If that was the way criminals were dealt with, I would stop stealing stationary.
Where’s my bag?
Everybody’s talking about loosing the carrier bag. A town in the UK has already implemented this: shops no longer give out bags. Instead, people have to walk around with boxes or canvas bags just in case they decide to shop for something on the spot.
This is because plastic bags are bad for the environment (mind you, so are humans, but we don’t go around disposing of them permanently (at least in a systematic way). Plastic bags simply don’t die: when you dump them, they take forever and a day to disintegrate (if they do, at all).
The cardboard box and the canvas bags are set to become daily essentials. The fashion industry will soon begin making sexy cardboard boxes and canvas bags that set your hormones on fire.
If you ask me, I think the carrier bag is a damn handy invention. It prevents you from dropping your shopping all over the place.
Why then, can’t we make bio-degradable carrier bags? This would solve the problem! We could go shopping AND carry our shopping around in carrier bags!
Is nobody thinking?
We can take the caffeine out of coffee; the fat out of food; the enjoyment out of life… and you’re telling me we can’t make a bio-degradable bag?
The black one is always more expensive…
I have come to the conclusion that, in life, you always pay more for the black one.
My pencil is chinese
My pencil is from China. How can I tell if it contains excessive amounts of lead?
How clever is your sat nav?
Do you talk to your sat nav? Do you argue with it when it tells you to go one way and you want to go the other? Do you shout at it and call it stupid when it can’t lock on to a satellite signal and you discover that you’ve been driving the wrong way for 2 miles when it finally does? Do you yell over it when it repeats an instruction at you at least three times, as though you were stupid?
I feel much better now…
Things that go boom
I had an idea today whilst sitting at the traffic lights. I was thinking for some reason about land mines and how many soldiers lose limbs when they have to test a land strip for the things.
Have you ever seen them doing this on TV? They tip-toe along and prod the ground very gently with a stick. And then, sometimes, they go boom.
Well, why not use rats instead? Why not pack a few truck-loads and then let them loose on the strip? As long as the soldiers and the rats don’t become friends on the way there, nobody gets ‘hurt’.
I mean emotionally.
Except the rats’ friends…
OK, if that’s a little controversial (Mickey Mouse has friends in high places) why not pack truck-loads of dead rats instead? They could throw the rats up ahead of them to see if they go boom.
Surely that has to be better than risking your own limbs?
OK, they could lob melons up onto the strip from a safe distance. At worse, they get showered in pips.
OK, that’s not a good option while there’s a food shortage…
Damn it, they could throw anything in front of them!
Why doesn’t somebody tell them!
I’m friends with a big fat spider
A big fat spider wearing glasses rushed into my bathroom this morning.
I shouted: ‘Hey, four-eyes!’
The spider laughed at my math…
The joke of the millenium…
This really would be a stunning joke to be remembered for ever and a day…
When the crew of the next NASA space shuttle re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere back from their orbital mission, we should all slip into monkey costumes and freak them out!
May contain nuts
Sometimes I feel like I’ve been living under a rock, having just emerged to find that the world has gone mad.
It’s useful if you have allergies to see ‘may contain nuts’ (or traces of nuts or whathever) on the label of a cake, especially if the cake is covered in chocolate and cream and you can’t tell by looking at it that there’s nuts inside it.
But how much can you dumb down this stuff? Packets of nuts now have labels that read ‘contains nuts’! I heard about this, and I didn’t believe it until I saw it for myself. If you were allergic to nuts, would you really eat a packet of nuts if the label didn’t warn you that they were nuts? And what if you were dyslexic?
Can you imagine the court case? You’re suing Nuts Co because you are allergic to nuts, and knowing this, you ate a packet of their nuts believing that this was okay because the label didn’t say that their nuts are actually made out of nuts, just like every other nut on the planet.
If I were the judge, I would throw you in jail and drop the key in the ocean. And that’s just for being stupid.
Where do we draw the line? If you have to mention that nuts contain nuts, then I suppose you have to point out that toilet paper is made out of paper! But why stop there? Why not go back a step in the process? On the packet of toilet paper we could write: contains bits of tree.
If people with nut allergies are likely to get confused if the label on a packet of nuts doesn’t warn them that the nuts contain nuts (and that’s another thing: don’t they know what a nut looks like? If something can potentially kill you, you’d make a small effort to try and memorise what the thing looks like so that you can avoid it…)
But anyway, if there are indeed certain individuals that are likely to get confused when the label doesn’t mention that nuts contain nuts, how are they going to react when they read that the piece of tissue they’re about to wipe their undercarriage with contains bits of tree?
I say we confuse everybody and reverse engineer everything on the label. Let’s go sub-atomic: people would be dropping dead everywhere, from stupidity.
If we go back enough (or down, however you want to look at it) to the particle world, you’ll find that everything is made out of the same stuff anyway, so what do you write on the label then? Contains stardust?
And here’s another quantum conundrum: if I’m made out of the same stuff as a Mercedes-Benz, how can I be allergic to it?
And where is my badge?
Where the hell is the sell by date?
I refuse to believe that I am the only person to whom this happens on a regular basis:
Checking the sell by date on a tin or a can…
You start by looking at the label, where you would think somebody logical would place the sell by date, so that it can be found easily. But no, of course the sell by date isn’t there: why on earth would they print it on the label, where somebody might find it?
So you turn the can around in your hands and you read the label a few times, scanning for those elusive words and discovering instead a host of ingredients that you didn’t know you’d been consuming all this time, and by the third turn you’re beginning to think that maybe it’s better to eat the stuff and keel over after all than to spend the best years of your life trying to find the damn date.
But damn it, you started this and you’re going to finish it!
Okay, so having turned the tin this way and that, you finally run out of places to look at. So then you check the bottom of the tin, which is ridiculous of course because who the hell would write the sell by date on the bottom of a tin? But no, there it is, in full shining glory: the very thing you were looking for, right on the bottom of the tin.
But no, hang on! It’s not the bloody sell by date is it? The print actually says: check top (or side, or elsewhere) for the sell by date!
Why on Earth do they do this? What a waste of print! Why bother going to the trouble of printing on the item: check other side for sell by date? Why not just write the sell by date there in the first place! It uses a less ink! You could have the sell by date printed on both places – in the place where they’re going to hide it anyway, and in the place where they’re going to write ‘check on the side for sell by date’! This way they save on ink and production costs, and you stay sane! It’s a win win!
And if that’s too much trouble, why not use a bright orange (or yellow) label to write the sell by date in?
And yes, this just happened to me AGAIN.
Dyslexia
Why is dyslexia so hard to spell?
Is it so the rest of us can see what it’s like?
ADDIS
I have a distinct memory of a particular advertising campaign some years ago, but it’s so ridiculous that I’m not entirely sure whether my mind (for some bizarre reason) has fabricated this.
Round about the time when HIV was first receiving a lot of media attention, one particular phrase became a kind of slogan. It was:
AIDS, don’t die of ignorance
For some reason I seem to remember laughing uncontrollably (and in disbelief) at another advertising campaign run about that time, for dyslexia – or rather, for dyslexics (which is quite ironic when you think about it, to try and reach them with textual adverts… some people should just be sacked on the spot).
Anyway, the advert I remember said:
ADDIS, don’t die of dyslexia.
Did I imagine this?
PS I’m serious!
There are 9 million bicycles in Berlin…
What a great song by Katie Mellua… who I thought was actually Katie Tonsil
But every time I hear it I want to know if it’s true that it’s a fact!
How does she know this? Is there a census for bicycles in China?
This bothers me.
I’m going to stop listening to that song…
Phoneticalities…
Why is the word phonetic NOT ‘phonetic’ in itself! If it was, it would be spelt ‘fonetic’!
I believe the Irish spell the word ‘fonetic’. This makes me tremendously happy. Somebody somewhere does think!
But back to the cretin who thought fonetic should be spelt with a ‘ph’. Could this perhaps be the same joker who then came up with the ‘phonetic alphabet’.
Do you know what the first word of the fonetic alphabet is?
It’s Alpha.
Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid?