Things that make me angry Vol 3. (Road Raging!)

If you're not a driver then you're probably not going to fully appreciate this post, but keep reading on anyhow, you may learn how to avoid being unknowingly annoying!

I've often ranted at the Mrs and also on Facebook about other road users, how it seems that a lot of them must have found a drivers licence in a Cornflakes packet! I know I'm not the only one to have such thoughts, so to all the rest of you who think like me, you have my utmost sympathy!

Those of us who do a commute to work will possibly be more aware of the insane idiots on the roads than those who drive far more casually, only possibly though! Below I'm going to do a list of common moronic road behaviour:

1. Indicating

You see those little things stuck to the side of your car? They are called indicators, when activated by the stalk on the steering column they flash and let everyone around you know what you are planning to do. This sounds like common sense right? For most of us it is, because we're sensible people with no wish to make things difficult for those around us. However some folk, I'm looking at you, BMW drivers, seem to think that indicators are just a fashion accessory for the car, just a bit of bling to tart it up a bit more. So I'm going to be a good citizen here and tell you that, no they are not some useless ornament, they are vital thing on the car, learn to use them you middle-class twits!* It infuriates me no end when I'm sat at a junction patiently waiting to get on the road when the approaching Beemer suddenly slows right down and takes the corner without letting me know what the fuck he/she/it is about to do! So for fuck sake learn some common road decency!

2. Roundabouts

Now I know that when taking driving lessons roundabouts can be confusing and terrifying things. I know this because I too was once a learner and roundabouts gave me nightmares. However once I learned the basic rules for navigating them I saw them for what they truly are, places where idiots go to shit other drivers up by displaying no knowledge of lane discipline. Seriously the amount of times I've been cut up on a roundabout has now gone beyond count! They're really not all that difficult to manage. First of all get in the correct lane, if the approach to a roundabout has two lanes then the left lane serves the first exit off the roundabout, and sometimes the second depending on how large the damn thing is. Second and this is a tricky one, if you're in the right hand lane move toward the inside of the roundabout and drive clockwise around, when you're passing the exit immediately before the one you need, indicate to let other drivers know you will be changing lanes and departing the roundabout, they will appreciate you for it. Thirdly and finally, do NOT go all the way around a roundabout in the outside lane, this could possibly cause you to cut other drivers up and potentially cause you to suffer fist related injuries, use common sense!

3. The brakes

This is one that really does make my blood boil! Just imagine, you're driving along, everything on the road is moving smoothly and things are right with the world. All of a sudden you start to drop down a hill and the driver in front of you hits the brakes, now this of itself isn't a huge problem, everyone takes the edge off their speed a bit when going downhill, but some take it to extremes. Imagine you're behind someone who seems to take a perverse delight in tapping their brakes every few seconds, so that you've constantly got a red light in your eyes, just imagine how fucking maddening that can be! Seriously brake riders are amongst the worst humanity has to offer**, they tootle along, foot glued to the pedal slowing everything and everyone up, it's enough to drive a reasonable man to murder! What goes through these peoples minds? Are they aware that they're courting a horrible death by irate driver? Do they get themselves off by foot pressure? Do they think that if they remove their foot from the brake pedal on a hill their car will spectacularly explode? I think the answers to these questions will forever remain a mystery to me. All I will say to them is, please stop riding your bastard brakes, I really don't fancy jail time for mutilating you in the middle of the road!

4. Taxis

Ah taxi drivers AKA the ignorant cretins of the road! If you ever want to seriously piss off your fellow drivers, then get a job in the taxi industry. You will learn lots here, such as; how to cut people up properly, how to park on double yellow lines like a bellend, how to indicate even less than a BMW driver, how to stop abruptly while causing maximum carnage behind you and finally how to drive like an idiot the wrong way on a one way street! Taxi drivers are a menace***, I'd like to think there's a special hell set aside for these people, one with a meter running constantly that charges them for every little movement they make! Unfortunately though taxis are kind of a necessary evil in the world, because unless you are tee-total, you cannot enjoy a good night out without relying on their dodgy driving and extortionate prices. It's a cruel world isn't it?

5. Boy racers

One of the perils of being out and about in your pride and joy is a particular type of road user, specifically the "boy racer". You've all seen them in their tacky looking Vauxhall Corsa's, with shit music booming out of an even shitter stereo system. They can usually be found either parked up somewhere wearing baseball caps and looking like extra's from Shameless, or riding so far up your arse that they could probably clean your tonsils for you, just waiting for a chance to overtake you with all the speed of sluggish iceberg! Just like the above mentioned taxi drivers, these morons are dangerous, if they're not making your ears bleed with their terrible music then they're either choking you to death with the crap that blasts out of their exhaust pipes or they're jumping red lights and forcing you into the kind of reflex braking a Formula 1 driver would be proud of! How some of these kids pass their tests is a bigger mystery than the Bermuda Triangle! How they can even see through the clouds of cannabis smoke inside the car is a bigger mystery still. And how more people haven't thought to run them off the road during their torturous overtaking attempts is a mystery the likes of which no man will ever solve! Do yourself a favour, if you ever see one of these pathetic specimens on the road, turn off at the next available opportunity ... but remember to indicate!

* - Not all BMW drivers are middle class twits, nor are they all bad drivers, but there is enough to create a generalisation.

** - Obviously there are worse examples of humanity than brake riders, but I don't encounter them much, if at all, so I can make such a dramatic statement.

*** - And not all taxi drivers are complete menaces, a few I've used lately have been pretty good and safe, but again there's enough of them to make these sweeping generalisations.

This is it for tonight, thanks for reading ... if indeed anyone did!

Things that make me angry Vol 2. Lurn t speel kuhreckly!

I was reading through Facebook last night and for whatever reason I decided to click on a post and read the comments ... fuck me, a day later and my eyes are still bleeding due to the complete and utter mangling of the English language I observed! I seriously think I'm going to need therapy to cope with what I saw!

A little bit of background here; I'm an English student and a writer of (mostly unfinished) stories, I take great pride in my ability to spell, and if I don't know how to spell a particular word I'll look it up and learn how. So, as you can probably imagine, bad spelling is one of the things that can particularly annoy me. I know to some people it's not a major thing to get annoyed by, but it's my eyes that are offended by this, so I don't care about other peoples opinions!

I believe that bad spelling is down to two things, poor education and pure damn laziness, and I'm going to be offensive on both of those things!

I'll tackle laziness first. Back in the day, when mobile phones were a new toy to play with and text messaging was in its infancy, you had limits on how many characters you could fit in to a text and thus shortening words such as 'you' to 'u' became the norm. Now I could deal with that, albeit with a gritting of the teeth, but it was acceptable to a degree. But here's where I get a bit miffed, communications technology has moved on from those prehistoric times, we are no longer limited in our messages, so why is lazy spelling still so prevalent? I see some people trying to explain it away with pitiful excuses, like "it saves time to write ur instead of you're." Seriously?? It takes a few fractions of a second longer to write a word properly, just what the fuck were you planning to do with that fraction of time you saved? Solve world hunger? Cure cancer? Does it really affect your life to hit a few extra keys on the keyboard? Now in my opinion (key word to notice there is OPINION), bad spelling just makes you look like an uneducated moron, and it baffles me as to why people show themselves up to the world in this way.

Obviously all of this is just my opinion, and like someone once said, 'opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one and they all stink', so you can ignore all of what I say, but please be aware that if you write shit like "2mora", "4eva" and "h8" (yes I've seen those three used recently), then in my mind I am strangling you with acid soaked barbed wire!

Now onto poor education, and despite what I said earlier about being offensive I can be a slight bit more lenient here ... well to a degree. Not everyone is brilliant in school, some people just never grasp what it is they're being taught, they can be cut some slack because at least they do try and communicate properly, if atrociously, even if they never do get the whole 'there', 'they're' and 'their' stuff correctly. It sill makes my eyes bleed when I have to read what they're trying to say, but I don't always feel like disembowelling them and stamping on their entrails. But there are those who simply refuse to learn, they spend over a decade in school and leave less educated than when they started! Slight over-exaggeration there maybe, but you know where I am coming from. I suppose these people can be put firmly in the lazy camp. These are the people who I seem to encounter more frequently than others and thus are the people I most frequently think about visiting horrible tortures upon!

(Just a quick lesson for folks!)

I feel as though I must add an afterword here, for those who don't really know me.

This post was mainly written in jest, I don't really wish any kind of violence upon anyone. Yes bad spelling does grate on me, but not in a psychotic kind of way. A lot of good friends of mine are not great with the written word, I don't judge them on this, their overall character is far more important. So if anyone reading this is any way offended, don't be, I'm sure there is a lot about me you could all pick on!

Now go forth and eat a dictionary! 

Things that make me angry Vol 1. (There will be a Vol 2)

So just lately I've found myself climbing back on my soapbox again (I never really left it), and ranting to my soon to be wife about crap that really grinds my gears! And I thought to myself, why should the long suffering fiance have to be the only one to hear about everything I think is wrong with the world? So I've had the bright idea to share the anger among you, my devoted reader (yeah right!). As I have quite a few subjects that bring out my ire, I think this could easily become a series, and in the process revive the blog from its cyber grave.

Okies, useless introduction thing out of the way, here's part one!

Reality TV

Now I think all who know me know that I'm not exactly a fan of reality TV, you know as it's absolute fucking garbage and aimed at people who've supped too much Special Brew that they think the Jeremy Kyle show is the height of culture! Ok so I'm generalising just a bit there, I know some good people who watch this shit, but even good people can have execrable taste at times!

Anyhow the reality TV 'phenomenon' has taken over our screens, it seems to be on every channel at every time of day and its main purpose seems to be to make brain dead cretins into Z list celebrities. You know the type, those who think that showing off their abs and/or plastic tits on national TV gives them the right to turn up at trashy nightclubs and expect to be given preferential treatment, complete with the token paparazzi to photograph them falling over at the end of the night after way to many WKD's!

I'm heading off on a bit of a tangent here, so back on topic, with the next paragraph.

Actually you know, I don't think I have one specific topic here, I'm just ranting for rantings sake, it's actually quite cathartic!

I did try and watch Love Island earlier, to try and get an idea on why this crap is so popular, however I had to switch over after five minutes, the amount of preening, mooning, bitchiness and all around moronic behaviour made my eyes bleed and my brain melted down through my nostrils! I mean holy shit are these people actually real? I've been around a few places and nowhere have I encountered such pathetic examples of humanity. I could be wrong here, but I think there's only one brain cell on that island, and all the 'contestants' have shared access to it! All they seem to care about is getting a shag on live TV! Is this what the youth of today aspire to now? Or am I just turning in to a grumpy old bastard with no concept of today's new cultural landscape?

You know the worst thing about this reality television shite? It's killing off creativity! It seems to be easier nowadays for TV execs to put something like this on our screens (or anyone of the various 'talent shows'), instead of something interesting and well made that requires a bit of investment on the part of the viewer to fully appreciate it. I know there is good TV around, but how much of it is actually shown on the mainstream channels? American Gods, Game of Thrones, Lucifer, all shows that have a good idea behind them, all getting good reviews, and yet are any of them shown on the Beeb? On ITV? Of course they're not! They're all on channels that require some form of payment, which is pure bollocks!

Anyways, I'm ending this here, it's all getting a bit incoherent and my writing skills have become a bit rusty. Apologies to anyone who does suffer reading through this crap, suffice to say, my next effort shall be far better, I just wanted to do something to set the creative juices flowing again!

A long overdue update!

So I haven't updated this bloody thing in quite while, in fact I'd almost forgot about it! So it's time to rectify that!

As all my dedicated readers (all zero of you) know, this blog is just a thing I use to mess around with and generally try and fail to be funny. Well that ain't gonna change! I can hear you all sigh in relief there, or is it resignation? Anyhow I'm going to carry on writing this as I always have, only with a bit more serious stuff in it ... well serious to me! Snippets of my ongoing story writing and what not!

As I'm currently a few thousand words into what hopefully will turn out to be an Urban Fantasy novel, you're going to get bored with some of that!

Starting soon I'm going to write a little series called "what makes me angry", so keep waiting.

Just as an aside, can all who DO read this leave me a little comment, either in the comments section here or on Facebook? It would be rather kind!

Until the next time, cheers!