January Sales

I think the January sales start late here, because the Spanish celebrate Christmas on January 6th.

I've just been out to the sales on my flatmates advice and was so impressed with the reductions on clothes that I even picked up a suit and held it for a whole 10 minutes before thinking, sod this I'd rather buy a lens for my camera and putting it back.

Genius.

Finally a way to teach graphs and charts to my gangster rap obsessed pupils

Check >>>THIS<<< out

My last post as a 27 year old

Goodbye youth! This is the last image of me looking 27, and a fine one too!



In 33 minutes time I will have been on Earth for 10,227 days. And yes I AM already drunk!

I've got my fingers crossed that I have dropped enough hints to my pupils that I want a 16gb ipod Touch and a Canon 50mm, 1/8, EOS lens. Not sure they really knew what I was going on about...

Watt and Hu

I always like to flog a good (or othererwise) joke to death [as noted by the fact I blogged that one about the whiskers (below) twice] and over the last 2 weeks, I've been seeing how far I could take a single gag with my year 10s.

We've been studying Work, Energy and Power and to introduce the topic I always say

What is the unit of power?

...to which I invariably get a bunch of crap responses like "Volt", "Amp", "Newton"

So I say again

Watt is the unit of power

More wrong answers. I always string this gag out for about 3 minutes as I find that this is the optimum amount of time to get a really pained groan out of them when I tell them that WATT is indeed the unit of power and that it wasn't a question, it was a statement.

So in the next lesson, I decided to compound this gag by saying

Watt is a thousandth of a kilowatt

Watt is the name given to the power developed in a circuit by a current of one ampere flowing through a potential difference of one volt

and

Watt is equal to 1/746 horsepower in SI units

So far I have managed to get pained groans most times, and after 2 weeks of cracking the same gag over and over again in different guises I thought that maybe it was time to move on. Today I spent the day looking for a person named Hu, so today's gag went something like this...

Hu designed a rocket propelled chair in the sixteenth century on which he planned to go to Heaven

Unfortunately, it seems I was beaten to the punch on this gag...

The truth about cats

I was just flicking through my photos and found this classic and was really surprised I hadn't blogged it before.

Rumour has it that, if you cut a cats whiskers off it will get stuck when trying to get through gaps. This is because cats have whiskers that are as wide as the widest part of their body and they use their whiskers to sense whether a gap is passable or not.

Regular readers will remember that I am totally convinced I am a lion and last year I grew my 'tache for 114 days to coincide with the capture of Alan Johnson by the Army of Islam.

At the height of my tache growth, I was out with Phil and Jules on my way to Sarah's place when we went past a fence. Using the logic outlined above I decided that, if I were a lion and my whiskers were fully formed then it should follow that if I could get my head through a gap in the fence without twitching my whiskers then I would be able to get the rest of my body through too.



Unfortunately, it seems that the thing about cats and their whiskers is a load of old bollocks, and it was only thanks to Phil's strong hands that I managed to get my head back out of that damn fence while Jules stood around laughing her tits off.

Serving suggestion

One thing that never ceases to crack me up in the supermarket is when you look at the crazy serving suggestions on packets of food.

Take this one for example.



Now bear in mind that that product you see is in a glass container and that Tomate Frito are basically skinned, stalkless mushed up tomatoes in a jar. What they are suggesting is that you take them out of the jar, piece them back together, put them in some skin and stick a stalk back on.

Marvelous.

Death of a salesman part 2 - The Suicide tape

While working as a door-to-door salesman in the summer of 1996 with John Dougall and the depressed loser Brett Sinclair, the cunning and wily ways of the woman were revealed to me for the first time.

Brett was a an attention-seeking loser, who didn't have too many social skills. Every day he would come in to work, moan about how awful life was and threaten to kill himself.

The first few times I heard this, I was shocked and tried to console him as best I could, but after about 2 weeks I realised that if life were so bad and he was threatening to kill himself every day then his appearance at work every day was quite strange. I hate it when people don't mean what they say!

So, within a few weeks, we had all lost any sympathy for him and his constant whining was, in truth just starting to piss us all off. Every morning in the Rascal at least one of us would say "WHY are you still here?! Weren't you supposed to have killed yourself yesterday Brett?"

One day, fed up of all his whining, we decided to take a more proactive approach and we all threw in a tenner, which went up for grabs to the lucky winner who could push Brett over the edge. We took up a regime of coming up with more and more wild nicknames, at first calling him Bread, then Brettles then Breast which used to make him cry.

DON'T CALL ME BREAST!!! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!! If you call me Breast again I will kill myself!!!

...but day after day he failed to keep to his word and kept coming into work very much alive to annoy us another day.

One day a new girl started at work. She was quite a hottie and all of us teenage boys wanted to try it on with her. I think John made sure that she knew about the bet and she threw her tenner into the pot without hesitation.

By the end of that first week, much to everyone's surprise, she had asked Brett out and suddenly the two were an item! Nobody could quite believe it.

Suddenly Breast was the happiest man alive and came in with a spring in his step and even categorically stated that he no longer wished to kill himself.

It seemed that all bets were off.

Two weeks passed, and Bread was blissfully happy. Hell, we had even stopped picking on him because it was no longer any fun.

Then she turned it on.

On the Friday, two weeks after they had started going out she dumped him.

Not only this but she had to go one step better and hammer the nails into the coffin on her way out.

As a parting gift she gave him a mixtape. It may as well have been called "Songs to kill yourself to".

Contained on the tape were such bittersweet classics as The Smiths "Asleep", the Manic Street Preachers "Suicide is Painless", and various spatterings of Patti Smith and Joy Division.

Breast left the Rascal in tears that day and made his way home on his own having made no sales that week.

Taking her winnings with a smile on her face, the girl and Brett were never heard from again.

Death of a salesman part 1

I started working when I was about 8 in the family business, but by the time I was 16 I thought it was time to bust out on my own, so I got a job in the summer of 1996 as a door to door salesman, working out of Dartford a pretty dodgy outfit run by a geezer called Barry.

It was a good laugh, even though we got paid only on commission and hence got about 50 quid a week and I have a great load of memories.

Every morning, we would bundle into the back of this old Bedford Rascal and head in to the depths of Essex and knock on doors with the words

Sorry to bother you Sir/Madam. I'm from Abbey Cleaning. We've got a special offer on at the moment on carpet, curtain and upholstery cleaning and we were wondering if you were thinking about having anything cleaned.

We would then proceed to overcharge them for what was essentially a hoovering with water after talking them to half to death.

A lot of the time, we'd get turned away, occasionally we had the door slammed in our faces and sometimes people would swear at us. The usual.

I'll never forget the name of this one guy who we worked with though. His name was Brett Sinclair and he had clearly spent his time as the school punchbag. Bless him, he was a complete loser and needless to say, me and the rest of the teenage lads took no sympathy on him at all.

The best bit about it was that he was also totally depressed and the most gullible person I have ever met.

One day, we were out in Essex and I knocked on a door.

This huge, hairy guy lumbers to the door opens it and says, tells me to fuck off cos he doesn't want any double glazing. So I walked off down the path, realised that he didn't want any double glazing and went back. Knocking again, he opened the door a bit pissed off to see me again and tells me to fuck off, he doesn't want to hear about God.

So I walked off again and, halfway down the path I realised that I wasn't THERE to tell him about God. So I turned back round again and knocked again.

This time he told me to fuck off he didn't want to see me at his door or for that matter anyone else trying to sell anything and requested that I kindly fuck off and leave him in peace before he punched my lights out.

This was too good to be true, and a plan had started to form upstairs. Just to make sure I still had his business if he were to change his mind, I jammed a fistful of our business card into his letterbox after he had slammed the door in my face and proceeded to smack them hard and ran off with his curses ringing in my ears.

Going around the corner, I told the lads what had happened and Barry went to get Brett.

"Brett," he said in his managerial manner, "How would you like to make a guaranteed sale?"

The plan was outlined. There was this very strange man who lived in these parts and every year, he wanted to test out our best salesman. He would not make a purchase until the salesman had proved himself a worthy salesman. To do that, he would play hard to get and would initailly tell Brett to fuck off and die. Thereafter Brett's task was to walk straight past him, into his house and tell him that his carpet looked like shit....

...and off he marched while the rest of us hid behind a bush.

Ouch.

My flatmate is on TV again!

One of the Spanish guys, Inigo is another strange flatmate of mine. He keeps turning up on Spanish TV Quiz shows.

This morning, Claudinho went mental

"COME IN HERE ANDY! INIGO IS ON TV AGAIN!"

And sure as hell he was.

He's back!

mini-Andy returns from Argentina. Given a choice of Christmas in Bognor Regis or Buenos Aires, he chose the latter. Read his latest adventure in the normal place www.theadventuresofminiandy.com of course!

Hurray!

The first rule of teaching

Although we don't admit it, we teachers all dream of looking damn cool in the eyes of our students and feeling superior.

My coolest moment in teaching happened a few years ago. I was teaching a lesson and had to go and write something on the board. On the way from the back of the class to the whiteboard I saw that one of the kids had a ruler hanging over the edge of the table so as I walked by I gave it a quick smack.

As I carried on walking it flew up and made an arc over my head then, as in a dream it flew into my field of vision and I instinctively caught it. It felt like scoring the winning goal in the FA Cup final but somehow although I was freaking out inside I managed to keep it together, and casually walked up to the board wrote something and deliberately underlined it.

When I turned around, the class was sat there, every single pupil with slack bottom jaws. One kid just sighed

"Sir you are just *SOOOOOOOO* cool..."

Yeah. Damn.

For the rest of the lesson the kids just stared in wide-eyed awe at me and I felt like David Beckham and Paris Hilton's bastard lovechild.

Anyway, never one to rest on my laurels, I went back over to the kids desk and put his ruler back on the table, obviously leaving it half hanging off the edge.

Thinking up some excuse to write something on the board, I casually strolled to the front of the room. As you can imagine, every eye on the class was on me, so when I went for the ruler you could taste the expectation.

Down went the hand.

There was a clatter as the boys pencil case dropped off the edge, pens and pencils flying everywhere while his ruler flew up and smacked me in the back of the head.

"...and we all thought you were the coolest teacher in the world before Sir"

Bugger!

I TOLD you he was autistic!

So Rich puts a spud in the oven the other night for dinner.

20 minutes later I hear a knock on the bog door and he says, "Geez, have you seen my spud?"

"No idea" I say, through the door. "Why don't you ask the weird dude in the kitchen?"

I only caught snatches of what happened next through the closed door but it went a bit like this...

"Donde esta mi patata?" (Where is my potato?")

"POR QUE?!" (WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO THAT FOR?!)

Rummaging noises then followed, which I assumed was the sound of the oven being opened, followed by a smash and the word

"FUCKER!"

I decided it best to stay on the bog and finish the chapter I was reading before venturing out and surveying the carnage.

Picking through the rubble of the kitchen when I emerged there were bits of pepperoni on the walls and a jacket potato submerged beneath a pizza base in the bin. I'll let you piece it all together.

At home with the Wife

I haven't blogged about my flatmates for a while, and there's been a whole heap of change.

Out with the Dutch dudes and in with a whole new host of characters, Rich from Manchester, Claudinho is now in Einar's old room and out with Gonzo, my best flatmate yet but in between there have been two total nutcases move in.

The first one, a Dutch dude called Jesse was weird. Totally egocentric with a massively inflated sense of self-worth and a desire to be wanted, this guy only seemed to love one thing more than himself.

Me.

He would come home from work and literally WAIT outside my room until I got home, asking Gonzo and the others if they had seen me. This earned him the nickname "The Wife" from Gonzo. When I got in, he used to either bug me or sit outside my room casually talking loudly "to himself" about his various achievements of the day and waiting for some response from either me or Gonz.

Strange.

Anyway, when he moved out and a new Spanish guy moved in I thought "Brilliant, a chance to practice my Spanish".

Anyway, it turns out, on talkin to this guy tonight that this is going to be even worse. This guy is CLEARLY autistic and attempts to try and dislodge him from the 1 metre personal space perimeter have thus far been fruitless. This guy barges into the room looking for a conversation, speaks and understands not a single word of English and has eyes that look as though he wants to murder me.

In Gonzo's own words from Peru...

At least with The Wife you knew he only wanted to nail you dude....

In the latest episode, Psychobride glided into my room tonight. When I turned around he was there, having not made a sound and he asked me in Spanish if I had any paper.

"Tiene papel?" he said

"Si" I replied "Pero solo con lineas (but only with lines I said pointing at the stuff) Cuanto quieres? (How much do you want?)"

"Errrrrm. Uno? Pero tiene rolo?"

"Vale" (Yes Xtina and Xtina's mum this Spanish section IS for you!)

At this point I had no idea what "rolo" meant, and assumed he wanted some sort of OTHER paper that I didn't have, plain or coloured or something snazzy, so I just said and the Spanish equivalent of "yeah whatever" to send him on his way and carried on typing.

A minute later I turned around and screamed. He was STILL THERE and staring at me!

SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!

"Quieres algo mas?" I said

"Erm no" he said and ran off.

Anyway, Me and Rich discussed this weird incident later and it seems that, there being no roll in the toilet and all, that someone is sleeping with a sore arse tonight.

Oh well...

Beware! Household white goods on the attack

The other day I was watching the coverage of the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto's assassination on TV and I don't think I'm alone in thinking that people in that part of the world are a little bit strange.

Following her assassination, the BBC showed footage of the country going mental and going around burning buses and other things. Now I'm not really into politics so this sort of thing doesn't really make any sense to me at all. I mean can someone please explain to me what exactly buses have to do with Bhutto's assassination? What connection has been made here?

A while back I made a comment on Iran and why they appear so backwards to the West. This strange reaction to Bhutto's death has pretty similar effect for Pakistan in my mind.

The best bit of footage though, involved a guy smacking a fridge with a broom. Shit me! I'm no detective but I would say with great certainty that the fridge was not used in connection with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto!

That sort of thing would never happen in the UK. I mean, if Gordon Brown was shot, I can't see any of my neighbours taking that as a sign that they should beat the shit out of their microwave.

Curiosity...

Oh bugger. Now that I'm back in Madrid, my computer automagically detected that I in Spain and Google turned itself all Spanish on me.

While checking out the language options I noticed that they had a Klingon option, which obviously I HAD to investigate. Now I've got to try to figure out how to change it back or at least to Elmer Fudd mode.

Anyone speak fluent Klingon?

Moshan Siknas beg collection

2007 was a great year for my sickbag collection - I added another 12 to the pile, including Germanwings (from travelling to my cousins wedding), Iberia, Air France, Etihad, Air Deccan and Korean Airlines. Most of these have been donated by friends, but the gem of the collection has to be this new one that just arrived from Panda Jenn, from Air Pacific.



Moshan Siknas Beg! Classic!

GES what I found!

Happy New Year Pony!