its been a while since i blogged but fear not - this time has not been wasted! i have devoted every waking minute to producing a guide to saving money for those of us struggling to keep our budgets on a leash, it is thus with great pleasure that i offer you tip number one: money saving toilet humour

the number one money saving tip i could ever offer you is summed up in two beautifully monosyllabic words: 'bog roll'. yes toilet paper is, for most people, by far the greatest ongoing luxury expense and also one of the ones that we are least conscious of. for generation after generation our ancestors have gone without the fluffy quilted feel of the andrex puppy's favorite roll and yet to us to do so is appauling. clearly however, it's far from ideal to completely neglect one's hygiene, or in fact to continually self deficate, so i have a couple of suggestions that might help you out:

explore the wonders of nature... sure pooing in the countryside might be a liberating (if nettley) experience, but there's no where you can poo where others wont someday follow so i'd really discourage it, but nature's orchard of naturally grown wet wipes is ripe for the picking. have a wonder through your garden and pick a few leaves (waxy ones are best avoided, except perhaps for the final wipe) or head down to a forest, bag in hand, and pick a week's supply (and get some fresh air and exercise whilst you're at it). much as i believe in recycling i'd strongly recommend picking fresh leaves and not getting them off the floor where an army of other animals may already have used them (and of course decomposition leads to a crumbly arse experience).

consider the beeeday (sp)... yes it's no wonder i can't spell the darn word, when was the last time you saw someone using one? urr, scrap that, when was the last time you thought about using one? my point entirely... and it's not a completele coincidence that Beyonce's new album shares its title with the scarcely found (and even scarclier used) bum fountain, beeeeeedays are back in a big way. why waste paper/trees/trees wiping ur arse when the wonder of water can willingly wash away all but the most stubborn of residues... sure the more polite in society know full well that the bottom fountain really serves only to finish off a job well done but why not push the boat out and try for the full experience... those of you who sadly don't have a bottom fountain can improvise with the shower, or simply use your hand and later rinse under a tap.

of course both of those previous ways (the latter parts of the latter especially) are hideously disgusting... in fact you'd be much better off just going for the 'single sheet' as opposed to '20 sheet roll up' approach... the effort is less and the end results just as good. of course for the cheeky and liberal handed amongst us (now, now, this is no smut) there's always the option of the office roll... feel free to help yourself to an occasional top up on your way home and never need buy one again. moral outrage about such pilfering aside the fact remains that few of us are employed by bosses willing to splash out on a roll more comfortable than the pull out sections in the free newspapers we get through the door... result? well unless you work in a quilted-velvet-touting big city firm you're best off raiding your neighbours recylcling bins on the big day... and if you do work in a quilted-velvet-touting big city firm its time you reread dickens' a christmas carol and worked out why scrouge's life was somewhat lacking.


UPDATE: thanks to everyone who's e-mailed in with the suggestion of using the andrex puppy to do the job... to each and every one of you i have this to say: 'YOU ARE SICK!'. fur, tail or tongue, each way substantially worse that the one before and none in the least bit attractive. your details will be forwarded to the rspca forthwith...

ahh... as ever im bringing sexy back, and whilst those other fellas might not know how to act i sure do... yes its monday, so time for the obligatory over-the-weekend post! 

now its always dangerous to blog when you're feeling a little uninspired and perhaps i should take on some wisdom from the great bloggers of our time and only blog when the mood takes me... but, ever the slave to routine, im still gonna keep you informed

yeah mondays are just one of those days... dragged back into the office against your will and still reeling from the night before its hard to achieve much other than make it through to the end of the day, then you have marketing and then its nearly bed time...

streuth

well yah, the weekend was relaxing not least of all because i had a whopping two lie ins!! there was a little baking, some sofa arranging, picnic having, football playing and even a little suround sound film watching... generally good... cept when the bloomin baptists blocked me into their car park, grrr

ooh, and we recorded some material to make music videos with... who knows how it'll turn out once edited... 

'he' being 'me' and 'me' being, well, still 'me' really... yes we were without internet out here in rural papworth for most of the day - which led to a(n un)surprisingly productive period of work... but after a while I got bored and thought I'd have a quick stab at digital manipulation... oh the fun of it... nothing fancy, just a quick magazine style airbrush...

and this is what I started with... yes indeed, a picture of me... how egotistical. well the real problem with the photo actually is the focus... i mean its as much a picture of a computer bag as it is a self portrait, a little bit of averaging blur later and already the composition looks infinitely classier... hueing the face to a warmer tone makes it look like that i've at least been on holiday somewhere this summer and gives me that much sought after bronze.

whilst we're fiddling with skin tone a few lighter strokes under the eye go a long way in creating the illusion that I do actually bother to sleep occasionally and by darkening the pupil itself (and applying a subtle red eye effect to give it more definition) and voila, i sorta look awake... well i look down more than anything but hey.

my skin, dare i say it, is far from perfect (but not nearly as bad as my teenage years) none the less a subtle use of a clone brush on some of the rougher areas gives the feeling of a more supple and youthful skin, unaged but the raggers of life/war.

the hair was a bit messy when this was taken and whilst there's not a lot you can safely do to this by tidying up the bufon a little and fading out a few strays round the ear you can make it look a lot tidier... though perhaps unrealistically so...?

the neck isn't exactly a desired focus so a gentle blurring is applied here along with a very very slight lightening underneath the chin... this removes any shadow-implied double chins but has the risk of giving you a grey/aged beard! the t-shirt too is one of my boring ones and there's a noticeable lack of a collar... its tempting to paint one in or recolour it, but without a similar picture to clone too its hard to produce anything which doesn't look eerily neon and fake... so we'll blur that out of focus too.

 

and there you have it... not a lot's changed (the biggest and most impressive changes were subtle shifts of the focus which have greatly improves the composition... both are cropped from an original photo with acres of space and not much going for it) but i do look a lot healthier... so send me your pics and i'll have you looking like you're fresh back from the bahamas before you know it...

i have been umming and urring for a number of days over a big consumer decision... some of my lovely relatives gave me some money for my birthday and (as im not the kind of guy to use it to pay my credit card bill off with) it seems only fitting that i should buy something new and shiny...

so i've been a little torn between getting a funky little sat nav (so i dont get lost everywhere i go) and a nice big widescreen lcd for my computer (the rest of which is highly pimped except the screen which is sadly stuck at 15". sat nav won at first but a few people put me off and i have one i could borrow from work occasionally anyway... i looked for a monitor and found an okish one that was cheap enough... but i put off buying it for a day.

then its price went up a little and it became out of stock... and i also started to think maybe i should save the money... then i had a journey where i was a bit confused as to where i was going and (combined with a couple of people's recommendations) sat nav took the lead again ... blimey huh?

well anyway, just yesterday I found a really fit LG monitor (i had looked at their site straight away but the official website denies the knowledge of a widescreen model) which is 20.1" big and just fit fit fit... and today I have it on my desk at work... tonight it shall be lighting up my bedroom :-)

now i just need to get a DVD with fireworks on it to inaugerate the display... mmm yum!

yes i know, i haven't blogged for days... the more astute of you will probably know that i've been back home in london seein friends/family/former housemates and then swanning around through the countryside of madingley... the rest of you probably think i've been locked in the bathroom with my shaver

 

but that's simply not true, see i only bought my 6 blade Gillete Fusion Power shaver today, so I couldn't possibly have done so... 6 blades huh?? well ya... 1 of them's on the back for trimming purposes which leaves a mere 5 on the front... leap frogging the Wilkinson Sword Quattro, but not quite competeing with the 16 blade monster I once saw in a spoof advert.

yes i've been pretty psyched about this shaving sensation since i first read about it in marketing week... and i got the power (ie vibrating) version cos othersiwe it'd simply be a step back from my M3 Power... I can't wait til try it, but tragically have a 3 hour marketing lecture tonight... why me?

xTina's new one's out today... i wanna hear some more... 

well its a rediculous name for a film and there was this certain air of inevitability haunting the dialogue throughout the film that at some point someone was gonna have to say the phrase but, despite never fully clicking with many of the emotional facets of the film, this was a most enjoyable piece of cinematography.

the film seemingly sets itself in some freudian world, with almost religious echoes, where the sins of the father are so clearly echoed onto the son and the disconnection and gap that this creates leads almost directly to the mental ruin and sexual confusion into which we're first introduced. there's a cast of semi-famous faces, who were no doubt even less famous at the time, with key roles from Annakin Skywalker, the insestuous one off Lost and even Mr Quantum Leap/Enterprise himself.

there was a quaff of cheese that drenched the film as through a series of heartfelt encounters, emotional stunts and general demolision relatoinships are rebuilt and people are changed... in almost as highlighted a way as Nannee McPhee Sam loses makeup, jewellry and his general negative outlook on life, but the end of the film is as much about tragedy and the end of an era as it is about restoration and rebuilding...

the underwater fight scene and car chase did little to add to the generally slow pace of the production 

chip and pin? chip and spin more like... in an unprecedented security leak every single Natwest PIN number has leaked onto the internet... its more than a little worrying so I guess I'll have to keep extra good care of my card now... cos yeah, I checked and mine was there...

http://www.positiveatheism.org/crt/pin.htm