Photo Fun

A friend pointed me at this site the other day:

Photofunia

They have a load of image effects and templates that you can basically inject your own face on. You pick the layout you want, then upload any photo that has a clear depiction of the face (yours, or anyone’s for that matter) that you want to use, and it uses face recognition technology to grab your face and stick it in the appropriate place on the layout, with the finished image being immediately available to download.

Here are some I prepared earlier:

Daft Vader

Angelina’s new boyfriend!

This one’s called Lenin (?)

Poor Relation

Flying home from Bahrain Karen and I are sitting about eight feet apart, but the curtain that divides us may as well be made of iron. Yes, she’s in Business Class (at the taxpayer’s expense) and I’m in with the chickens, goats, and the other skinflints who are travelling on Air Miles. Every now and then she deigns to come back and visit me, swinging the curtain aside with a newly-refilled champagne glass, caviar dribbled down her chin and wearing a party hat. She looks down at my bowl of gruel and stick of flaccid celery and gives me a sympathetic peck on the cheek before conga-ing her way back up to the front. I give a disgruntled ‘tut’, then scoop up the caviar residue off my cheek with the celery and hope the guards hostesses didn’t notice.

Return To Bahrain

I thought I would see Bahrain again someday, but I didn’t expect it to be this soon. But Hey — Karen’s going there on business (so the hotel room’s paid for) and I have a bunch of Air Miles burning a hole in my account, so why not?

It appears Bahrain has been getting on with life in our absence. Part-built skyscrapers guarded by tall cranes are now fully grown, operational hotels, apartment blocks, and financial centres, and new towers are sprouting from what used to be waste ground. The city shrugged off our departure from the Gulf six months ago and went on growing without us.

I’m back in the Gulf, where waiters and doormen defer to me and call me Sir. Nothing is too much trouble for them, and I like that. It makes me feel important, valued. Simple things like ordering drinks or asking for a better table always go your way here, whereas in the UK I’d be apologising for interrupting the barmaid’s personal phone conversation, and receiving a withering look for my inconsideration. I walk down to the pool and a nice (Indian) man lays out two towels over my sun lounger, erects my parasol and adjusts the angle for maximum shade, then delivers whatever I want to eat & drink; all with a smile. I am happy and content. In fact, the only flies in this ointment are… the flies.

While I’m eating by the pool it seems the Bahrain Fly Grapevine has been in full flow: “Hey, there’s a stupid Brit at the Diplomat who’s just ordered Calamari and fries. Let’s Go!!” The meal has fewer calories than those I burn, swiping at the hordes of flies who want to crap on it. Maddeningly they seem to lose interest at exactly the same time I do. I push the plate away thinking, “There. I’m done. It’s all yours.” And they disappear. It must all be about the thrill of the hunt with flies. I manage to haul my swollen belly upright just long enough to adjust my lounger to the horizontal, then collapse back down for a well-earned snooze. It is at this point that I realise the flies have just been on a break, and now, regrouped and fresh from their midair pep-talk, they return for the second half. The leftover food lacking all appeal, their attention shifts: to my legs. One by one — I swear they’re in formation — they land, tickling, on my knee, shin, ankle, big toe, and start eating/crapping/egg-laying. Whatever it is they want to do on me I don’t want it, so the swatting, wafting and flailing about begins again. I keep the fight up for around fifteen minutes before deciding we are At War, and I banish Mr. Nice Guy to the dugout.

I have a proven technique for killing flies. Forget the one-handed swat and the rolled up magazine. They’ll work one time in twenty — if you’re lucky. No, if you really want to rack up a body count you need the Chris Neal Clap.

Hold your hands about six inches apart either side of the victim’s landing zone, then clap as fast as you can. The fly detects the start of the movement and takes off to escape, but he has nowhere to go but into your rapidly closing trap above. I can’t remember when I first discovered (or invented!) this technique, but I’ve never looked back, and now neither will you.

Oh dear, I’ve gone on about flies way too much. I wanted to write a nice piece about our lovely weekend in Bahrain but it’s turned into The Poolside Fly Massacre. I guess they really got to me. The moral victory may be theirs but they paid for it with many lives.

Well… they started it!!

One Ring To Hold Them All

It’s been four years since I’ve lived with a self-locking front door. The villa in Riyadh had a door that you had to lock with the key from either side, and the house in Langley before that was the same. It was physically impossible to lock yourself out. Great idea, but after a while you get sloppy. You don’t have to worry about having the correct keys in your pocket before you slam the door from the outside, so you get out of the habit.

This is not true of our new flat, which is my roundabout way of plucking up courage to admit that I locked us out the other night. Of course it wasn’t my fault — actually it was the scooter’s fault. Let me explain…

I always used to use a car for transport, and so my car keys and house keys were kept together on the same keyring. If I went out I’d be taking the car, and therefore I’d automatically have my house keys with me. Which I would then have to use to manually lock the front door. Now of course things are different. If I go out now it could be in the car, on the scooter, or on public transport with equal frequency, so the sensible thing to do is to keep car, scooter, and flat keys separate and choose the correct combination for the journey that day. I’d trained myself to select car-and-flat keys if taking the car, or scooter-and-flat keys, or just flat keys, depending.

This has worked fine up until one night last week. Karen and I were going out for a game of Racketball (car mode), but I was still preoccupied with the colour of the scooter’s rear indicators, so I asked Karen if she’d come down to the bike garage (the scooter is in a different garage to the car) to give me a second opinion. Encouraged by her agreement I swept up two sets of keys from the hall table along with the Racketball… erm… rackets (that should be racquets but annoyingly isn’t), and followed Karen out onto the landing, closing the door behind me with a deliberate clunk. Approximately four nanoseconds later I realised that the two bunches of keys in my hand were car and scooter, and that the flat keys were still inside. The same bunch also includes the key to the bike garage so my next thought — inappropriately– was that an inspection of the indicators was out of the question too. Bloody scooter! I love it to bits but at the time I was cursing it under my breath.

We stood there, looking at each other for a while: me trying to think up something witty to say — to lighten the situation without seeming not to be bothered by it, and Karen feeling annoyed yet at the same time accepting the inevitability of the occurrence. Now what do we do? We’re on the landing, in our sports gear, with a squash court booked in fifteen minutes’ time, and with no way of getting back into the flat. I know! We’ll call Jim the Estate Manager. Our block of flats is serviced by the holding company and part of that is the provision of a full-time Manager. That’s Jim. He lives onsite and has spare keys to every flat in his safe. I knew all of this, but the trouble is he finishes work at half past five and should only be contacted thereafter in an emergency. I wondered how his idea of an emergency compared with mine as I dialled his his home number. The answering machine picked it up. Time for Plan B, which was to go to play Racketball, cruising past Jim’s local pub on the way to see if we could spot him there. Good old Plan B! There he was, standing in the pub’s well-lit porch having a cigarette. We parked around the corner and I jumped out of the car and trotted apologetically towards him. I explained what had happened in as felf-deprecating a way as I could manage (which is pretty good though I say so myself), and Jim, being a thoroughly nice bloke, agreed to come back with us to get the spare keys. He entreated a mate to watch his pint and we drove back together for the spare key.

The drama over, and Jim reunited with his pint, we arrived only five minutes late for our squash court. The courts — owned by the local school, so only available for hire in the evenings — are in a seperate block from the sports centre Reception, so after you’ve paid and got your token for the lights you have to go back outside, along the pavement, and in through another set of gates in the wrought iron fence to get to the courts. We emerged 45 minutes later, rather pinker than we went in, to find the school gates chained and padlocked. The car, being parked right outside the gates, was only six feet away but frustratingly unreachable. We were locked in, unable to reach the car or the office. I looked around, and through the frosted glass of another locked door saw a cleaning woman hoovering a corridor inside the office building. I went up and knocked loudly to get her attention. She came over and I offered a shouted explanation of why I was bothering her. She didn’t understand so tried to open the door from the inside, but couldn’t.

“I sorry!” she said, and shrugged her shoulders. I could tell from her accent she was Eastern European. I tried again, she tried again to open the door and failed, and said, “I sorry!” again. After about four episodes of this I told her “Go to office!” and this seemed to work, because a couple of minutes later the Office Manager emerged with the cleaning woman from the sports centre entrance, some fifty yards away and separated from us by another fence. He peered through the darkness before making out our two shivering forms.

“Do you want to get into the squash courts?” he asked.

“Er no, we want to get out but someone’s locked the gates.”

“What?”

“SOMEONE’S LOCKED THE GATES!”

“Oh.” And with that, he trotted down the path and let us out.

Locked out of the flat and locked into a school playing field on the same evening. If I’d read that in a novel I’d have dismissed it as far-fetched.

My Hero

The top three loves of my life are my wife, my children and my scooter. I’m still working out the precise order. There are a multitude of things I love just beneath this top echelon: sights, sounds, smells, art, other scooters etc., and to this group has just been added the writing of Charlie Brooker.

I first discovered Charlie Brooker (real name Charlton. I’d change it too.) when I saw him on TV as a panelist on Have I Got News For You, shortly after we returned from Riyadh. Subsequent research revealed that he’s had his own TV show entitled ScreenWipe, and is a regular columnist on The Guardian newspaper. All of which we missed because we were in Saudi Arabia for the last two years and I don’t read The Guardian.

Charlie is grumpy. No, grumpy doesn’t say it properly; he’s angry, outraged, flabbergasted, spiteful, bullying, insulting. What does it take to get him going? Pretty much any aspect of life today really, but in his column (and TV show that was) it’s other TV shows that receive a good kicking.

Anyone can moan into a word processor — I’m living proof. But the true artist softens the blows by making you laugh. Charlie makes me laugh. Out loud. He’s pissed off with the world and lets you know in no uncertain terms, but he’s also aware of his own weaknesses and isn’t afraid to joke about them. Combine all this with a vivid imagination and an original, concise style of writing, and you’ve got… erm… imaginative, original and concise writing about stuff that pisses him off, that makes you laugh. Out loud.

Here is my gift to you. Read Charlie’s back catalogue of Guardian ScreenBurn and other articles, and buy his book Dawn Of The Dumb. I want to write like this.

Porn Shui

I saw this in the Sunday paper and it made me laugh. It’s not much, but hey… it’s not about scooters.

Porn Shui:  the aspect of one’s desk at work, good porn shui allowing the occupier to surf the net without being overlooked by colleagues.