Posted 8:39 PM by Dr_Rock
One of the mysteries of the Turned Out Nice Again universe, along with "what purpose do wasps serve?", is telesales:

"Dr Rock, your postcode has come up on our computer, which means you qualify to be featured in the next edition of our magazine. This means you could have a free luxury kitchen fitted in the comfort of your own home..."

So where else exactly might one have a "luxury fitted kitchen", er, fitted? Of course, luxury fitted kitchen companies are so short of people who've bought their kitchens that they suddenly feel the need to give them away for magazine articles, don't they? In my experience, the only free luxury fitted kitchen is one that is first prize in a fitted kitchen competition - a competition that I haven't as yet entered.

And don't start me on the "free luxury holiday in any one of a dozen Euopean locations" that is mine as long as I attend a short introductory talk in a small village just south of the Brecon Beacons...

"Dr Rock, we'd like to offer you a very competitive quote for double glazing your home..."
"Sorry, I've got double glazing"
"Everywhere?"
"Everywhere"
"Not even a tiny window in the bathroom left?"
"Nope"
"What about a conservatory?"
"Got one"
"Soffits, fascias?"
"Done them"
"Oh"

Oh indeed. Of course, I've been considering double glazing for months, but didn't have any idea where to get any from, so it was an absolute relief to have someone phone up and try to sell me some. Or not.

Still, if all else fails, claim not to be selling anything at all. This is my all-time favourite conversation of all time with a telesales person:

"Dr Rock? We're not selling anything, but we're in your area and would like to give you a free, no obligation quote for a conservatory"
"So you are selling something - you're selling me a conservatory"
"No, we're not"
"What happens if I like your quote?"
"Then we can arrange to have your conservatory built..."
"And I pay for it?"
"Yes..."
"Then you're selling something, aren't you?"
"No I'm not..."
"Yes you are"

Thereafter follows a conversation along the lines of the Argument Sketch from Monty Python, until the salesperson admits defeat and hangs up. Dr Rock punches the air in delight and basks in the glory of the moment...

Of course, the telesales person is often likely to contact Mrs Rock during the day - and then be filled with indignation when told that the Dr is actually at work. Where else am I likely to be at 10:30 on a Thursday morning, for goodness sake??
Still, the occasional telesales person has some success - or so they think - but as the conservatory salesman found out when calling on the then single Mrs Rock, a first floor flat is not the best location to be putting an additional sun lounge in glorious uPVC. Note to all telesales personnel - research goes a long way towards preventing a large commission disappearing out of the (first floor) window...
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Posted 12:30 PM by Dr_Rock
Despite having been connected to the internet for over seven years, this blog is my first web presence, and so each time another 'first' occurs, I'm filled with the urge to let everyone know about it, no matter how mundane the 'first' will be to the more experienced blogger.
Today's 'first' is my first referral from a search engine. I've made no effort to register with any search engines, so the fact that I've been 'discovered' comes as a pleasant surprise. I only hope that Yahoo! Search's offering of my story of school anti-war protests in southern England was useful to the searcher...
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Posted 7:52 PM by Dr_Rock
England have just beaten Liechtenstein 2-0 in the Euro 2004 qualifiers - that's football or soccer depending on your orientation in relationship to the Atlantic Ocean. I didn't see the whole game - with two kids under three years old I haven't seen many complete football matches in a while - but I doubt it was a convincing performance.
No doubt some will trot out the old cliche that "there no easy game in international football" (unless you're playing Scotland, that is), but come on, this is Liechtenstein - population 32,842 in July 2002 according to the CIA World Factbook, of which 11,530, being male and between 15 and 64, could be remotely considered eligible for selection.
Sorry, but there's no excuse for not beating this lot by 4 or 5 clear goals.

This led me to another thought I occasionally have where football is concerned. No matter who my team* (club or country) may be playing, I expect them to win - and like all good football fans, I get hugely disappointed when they don't. Now as a sensible, rational person, I know this is unreasonable, but that's just the way life is. And judging by public outcry (usually where the national side is concerned), I'm not the only one with this unreasonable expectation. My thought is this: do the inhabitants of countries like Liechtenstein have the same irrational expectations? Because supporting a country which has only scored 22 goals in 22 years of international football can only lead to a huge amount of disappointment on a frequent basis. Or do they approach the game with a "we're playing tonight, we'll get hammered" outlook, and then turn their attentions to the latest goings-on in their equivalent of EastEnders? Perhaps if you're Vaduz born and bred, or know someone who is (and a football fan as well, because that's a pre-requisite, obviously), perhaps you'd let me know?

*And for the record, my club team are Crawley Town, currently completing their 19th consecutive season in the Southern League Premier Division of English non-league football - so I too have got used to a fair degree of disappointment over the years...

PS: Liechtenstein are currently ranked 152 in the FIFA World Rankings - behind footballing giants like St Kitts & Nevis (112), Tahiti (118) and Palestine (144). I didn't realise Palestine even played international football. England are ranked 9th.

PPS: Crawley Town won 2-1 today. At last, something I can smile about...
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Posted 8:18 AM by Dr_Rock
Friendly Fire. Now there's an oxymoron if ever I heard one (unlike dumb blonde, which is a peroxymoron). Any death in this conflict is lamentable, but to die at the hands of your own side is heartbreakingly pointless. Somewhere, a wife is having to tell her children that daddy isn't coming home, in the knowledge that he died not at the hands of some enemy, but at the hands of those alongside him in the conflict.

With all the advances in weapons technology, I find it almost inexcusable that we are unable to identify our own planes. Perhaps when the dust settles on this conflict, and Dubya has taken off his ten-gallon hat and spurs, he should consider (if he continues to find conflict necessary) finding a way not to shoot his own people...
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Posted 8:44 PM by Dr_Rock
By popular demand, this week I officially launch...

Eastbourne Herald Watch - your guide to my local newspaper

This week's headline, as you might expect, references the conflict (shhh, don't mention the war. I did once but I think I got away with it) with Iraq. The subject: 200 pupils who walked out of school "in a mass protest against the war with Iraq".
Now forgive my cynicism, which comes about through an experience of life and the memory that as a twelve year old all I was interested in was football, music and the late 70s equivalent of a Playstation (was Pong about by then?), but I suspect that the walkout had little to do with Iraq and more to do with any old excuse to get out of lessons.
And as if to reinforce my cynicism, having left the school gates, and marched down Polegate High Street, where did the kids take their protest? To the local council? No. To their MP, who was holding a surgery in the town that lunchtime? No. (To be fair about that, he wasn't, so it would have been a little difficult even if that had been their intention). No, the protest ended up in the local recreation ground. A case of "we object to the United States depriving the people of Iraq the opportunity to skateboard", perhaps.
The front page story is accompanied by a photograph of some of the protesters, one holding a banner - hurriedly scribbled in black felt tip on a piece of A4 - proclaiming "F**K BUSH". To be fair, both words were spelled correctly, so perhaps the education system isn't failing as much as I'd feared.
One parent is reported to have "criticised the school for a lack of supervision", but faced with 200 disobedient pupils leaving the building en masse, what were the options? Personally, I lament the day they stopped handing out AK-47s at teacher training college.
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Posted 8:04 PM by Dr_Rock
The saga of my missing hits took a turn for the worse today, as the owner of BlogPatrol decided that a fatal crash in the server was an indication it was time to knock it on the head. Although I've only been blogging for a couple of weeks, I feel genuinely sorry for Mr BlogPatrol, for taking the time to provide part-timers like me the chance to have something "clever" on our blogs - for free - only to have it fall apart like this.

BlogPatrol is dead, long live Free-Stats...
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Posted 8:41 AM by Dr_Rock
Thanks to such nice people as Dustbinman and Sasoozie, I am now able to report a much healthier hit rate. At least, I would be had the service provider for BlogPatrol, home of my stats server, not screwed up right royally...
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Posted 2:00 PM by Dr_Rock
The Weather Pixie isn't an accurate representation of me. Believe me, you wouldn't want a Weather Pixie that looks like me!! This is the closest this blog gets to glamour!!
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Posted 8:23 PM by Dr_Rock
Having found lots of niceties to enhance this blog - not to mention to distract the passing reader from the lack of substance in the content - I can now report that in the first two weeks of its existence, Turned Out Nice Again has recorded eleven visitors - two of whom were me!! I'm inclined to sack the advertising agency involved in this less-than-auspicious launch, but for two vital points: One, I didn't hire one, and two, I didn't hire one. Now this may seem like the same point, but it seemed important enough to warrant mentioning twice.

So, in honour of the only comment I've received that didn't come from someone related to me (thanks Cleophas), I've decided to return to the source that initiated that comment - my local newspaper. Perhaps this will become a regular feature, only time will tell!!

There are two things that caught my attention this week. Firstly, the front page story regarding a Sunday school teacher jailed for molesting a four-year-old girl on an aeroplane. This caught my attention not only because of the disgust and despair I feel from the knowledge that a grown adult could do such a thing, but also for the level of detail the paper used to describe the event - detail that could only be of interest to a paedophile.

Secondly, and also on the front page, one of the town's oldest establishments is staging a ladies-only night with two male strippers. The tone of the story suggests the blue-rinse brigade are getting their twinsets and pearls in a twist (I was going to suggest they were getting their knickers in a twist, but this might be reserved for those attending the function), and is accompanied by a photograph of Robert Carlyle in The Full Monty, just to enhance the point. The story concludes that Chairwoman Bridget King was unavailable for comment.

Ladies interested in seeing the horniest stripper on the planet should get their applications in to The Meads Club by April 5th...
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Posted 7:27 AM by Dr_Rock
There are times when your job get you down. Sometimes you moan about it to your colleagues, sometimes your family, sometimes your mates. And then sometimes you tell the world...

This will prove one of two things. Either no-one reads anything on the web, or that job that you didn't much like won't be an issue on Monday morning when your bosses hear about it...
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Posted 8:24 AM by Dr_Rock
This is the stuff dreams are made of if you're a media headline writer - no need to tax the brain to come up with "The Spit Hits The Fan"...
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Posted 7:56 PM by Dr_Rock
FriendsReunited was recently up for sale for a reported £30m. The site was originally put together because a woman nagged her dotcom-employed husband to do it because it seemed like a good idea at the time. He said it would never work, but eventually he gave in, and now finds himself sitting on a nice little nestegg.

In the end, he decided not to sell, and instead is planning to market the idea worldwide, to any nation where they have a) schools and b) an internet presence. It'll never work, of course...

In the meantime, the moral of this story for the downtrodden masses of married men is ignore your wife's nagging at your peril. I'm off to launch PutTheToiletSeatDown.com - somehow I don't think my missus has got profitable nagging sussed just yet...
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Posted 1:23 PM by Dr_Rock
I can't let today pass without making reference to this.
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Posted 8:26 PM by Dr_Rock
Having read Robert Rankin's Web Site Story (incidentally a Christmas present from my three-year-old son who wanted to buy it because it "has a 'puter on the front and Daddy works with 'puters" - not that you'd guess from my ability to produce a decent blog!!), I was reminded of several movie themes, including The Thirteenth Floor, parts of Total Recall and even Red Dwarf's Better Than Life, in which life as we know it could be a computer game or simulation being run by a greater power.

This in turn reminded me of a boy I was at school with, who aged 14 would tell people that we were all just figments of his imagination, and that none of us really existed. Most thought him a little strange, but perhaps he was just years ahead of the rest of us. Though if he were right, he must have had a pretty odd imagination, seeing as he suffered a dreadful bout of bullying (or indeed a bout of dreadful bullying) for a time. Or perhaps that was my imagination...

Personally I think the only person capable of producing a computer game that produces life as we know it would be Bill Gates - and I'm waiting for Life SP1 to come out - George Dubya has to be a bug, surely?
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Posted 3:58 PM by Dr_Rock
Over the last couple of weeks, the letters page of my local newspaper has been dealing with the allegedly contentious issue of whether or not able-bodied drivers should have their cars clamped when they park in disabled spaces. This is sadly indicative of the people who live in this town, for the two factors to be considered when parking the car are (1) cost, and (2) distance to the destination.

I have seen countless drivers attempting to shoe-horn their cars - at great risk to the car and their insurance premiums - into spaces no more than 12 inches longer than the vehicle in order to save themselves walking too far, whilst 50 yards away the road is empty. Needless to say the time it takes to park is far greater than the time it takes to walk 50 yards...

No doubt these are the same drivers that insist on driving the kids - preferably in 4x4s - the 300 yards to school; and for whom treble-parking in front of an ambulance in the process is an occupational hazard. Never mind the London Congestion Charge - stick a congestion charge on the school gates and watch education authorities have not only enough money to spend on books, but enough to give each kid the top-quality wallpaper necessary to cover them in. Either that or watch the drive to work make half-term holidays look like the M25 rush hour...
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Posted 10:47 AM by Dr_Rock
I finally got around to watching Jurassic Park III last night. Top quality special effects, dreadful storyline. Since the last film, Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill) has been promoting the idea that velociraptors are more intelligent than primates and dolphins. His hypothesis is that had dinosaurs not been wiped out, the 'raptors could well have evolved into a more intelligent species than man. Not so intelligent, it seems, to have seen the scriptwriters coming and have declined this film in preference for I'm A Celebrity (Dinosaur), Get Me Out Of Here.
The 'raptors were able to communicate their needs to one another - indeed I swear I heard one saying "Get my agent on the 'phone - tell him next time I see him, I'm gonna eat him" after being landed with a storyline more preposterous than the Ph.D. thesis of Professor Preposterous, Chair of the department of Preposterousness at Oxford University.
Suffice it to say that the 14-year old boy missing on the dinosaur-infested Isla Sorna for eight weeks managed to survive (with the aid of some T-Rex urine - no doubt the creature had wet himself laughing at the plot) and the only victims were those that always die in the best tradition of the-unknown-character-in-the-Star-Trek-away-team...

10/10 for Stan Winston, 0/10 for the storyliners...
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