Pikeya

Today, I am going to talk about something that angers me… No, not my Daily Booth picture, which is at the time of writing, plastered to the front page of my blog like a poster for abortion, I speak of another ailment to my psyche; Ikea.

The multi-national company have recently made their mark in Southampton, which has duly enraged me enough to write a very aggravated blog article! Yes, I talk of the store made infamous by providing massive amounts of modern (well, by modern I mean almost entirely fake pine) Swedish furniture, keeping what we assume to be affordable prices and, perhaps their greatest achievement of all, the pioneering of the do-it-yourself generation (of which I rather begrudgingly know no other, past the occasional glimpse at a off-pink lounge set in the occasional charity shop).

The new Ikea store is reported to be the biggest in the south, and as far as I can tell they aren’t kidding. The building itself has been placed rather strategically next to West Quay and the Leisure Centre, in amongst a collective of other superstores, a commercial gold mine that’s a mere 5 minute walk from the train station. The problem I have with it, however, is how grotesquely imperious it is.
Have a look:

Christ… Ikea? More like Isore. Towering over Borders and Tesco like some giant, inordinate beast readying to swallow the entirety of the Southampton shopping district, the new Ikea is absurdly large and visible from almost every point within a 5 mile radius. A garish blue and yellow icon now marks it’s territory like a gargantuan tom cat pissing in the middle of our town centre.

For a company renowned for it’s innovation in space saving, they could have made a better effort to, say, flat-pack the building down a bit. Was there any real need to go so far up? As far as I know, there isn’t a massive market for 20 foot tall, fabricated shelving.

What a horrible image to be greeted with as you leave Southampton Central, as if the terrible tile montage in the train station itself isn’t bad enough, now I feel as if the entirety of my home city has been branded by the bloody Swedish. I’m sorry, that’s not fair, we have a higher count of Polish people last I heard. Where is our BATA ZAOPATRZYĆ, eh? WHERE IS IT?

That’s it, I’m done here, if you could just imagine me, now having gotten bored of pestering you, rambling off into another room accompanied by the crazed mumbling of a drunken history teacher.

To Do

1. Turn the microwave into a time machine.
2. Grow my beard longer than my own height.
3. Run over Andrew Lloyd Webber with a transsexual train.
4. Write a musical about it.
5. Write a feature film about writing a musical about transsexual trains.
6. Kill off one of the cast so it gets big press.
7. Buy a cat.
8. Take lots of pictures and subtitle them all with moronic language.
9. Shave the cat.
10. Get plastic surgery to look like the queen.
11. Become a master of evil and spread pestilence across the country.
12. Rick roll Rick Astley.
13. Tube roll Rick Astley.
14. Sausage roll Rick Astley.
15. Mmm… Sausage.
16. Destroy the one ring in the fires of Mound Doom.
17. Wear a cup on my head for an entire month.
18. Polish the table in the kitchen.

Boom, Skateboard

Check this out! I mean… what is going on? Did UNKLE just decide to blow up a load of skaters? Is this even real, these people have balls.

On the blog front, I have removed the entirely banal ‘recent posts’ widget, which merely saved you the trouble of scrolling down the website a little bit. I’ve also added my Twitter updates widget, so if you have a quick glance you can see those juicy clips of prose I tend to make daily.

Huzzah

Rejoice, for now you can do two amazing things at once! Check out my blog and also check out my DailyBooth picture! You see, I have cleverly stuck my latest DailyBooth picture (which is subject to change, rather curiously, daily) as the first post, where it will likely stay for a while until I get enough complaints or my own face eventually becomes tiresome to me.

Which is probably never.

DailyBooth

today's picture

Neo-Farmers

Champagne

Firstly, I should thank my Dad for pushing the best part of a bottle of champagne at me during dinner tonight. We ate out, for Mother’s Day, and I have come back needing my bed. Tucked up, cosy as ever, I write this.

I tried a trial at Match.com this weekend for shits and giggles, on the Dr Pepper principle, but as it turns out everyone is either really fat or a complete stereotype. Wait, that should be and/or, because 80% of them are both.

I enjoy romantic meals, walks on the beach and ‘insert generic sport here’. My favorite quality in men is humor, and they shouldn’t take themselves too seriously… For some reason, after having searched for ‘the one’ in all the nightclubs in Bournemouth, it turns out all the guys I hooked up with were narcissistic wankers, I just don’t understand my bad luck?!?!

I’m pretty sure there isn’t as contrived a collection of personals in the entire universe, and you have to consider that I am writing this as a note on Facebook.

Yes, every now and then there is a rare gem that sparkles out in the sea of womanly mediocrity, but advances on an internet dating site are a bit feeble… and I’m not sure my profile picture is as good as it could be, unless you girls are really after Chewbacca.

Still, I’ve had enough champagne tonight to lower my standards (I’m sure) and they all still appear grotesque and uninteresting. I now face resignment, perhaps I will actually have to brave a conversation with someone… and be lucky enough for them to be both interesting and equally interested.

No. I’m fucked.
Really, we’re all fucking fucked. (totally not the champagne talking)

Do you Poken?

A friend at work quizzed me today on these.

Unfortunately, I could not provide anything more then puzzled silence, even when I was looking at them online. The concept is bemusing, but definitely worth a glance for pips and giggles.

On the website, you’re presented with a collection of colorful toys, and a brief explanation behind them. Curiously, the idea is that when you meet new and interesting beings, instead of asking for their phone number or something a normal person might try, you pull out this strange mispronunciation of Pokemon and perform a pseudo-sexual merger with another in their possession, presuming they’re of the mind to bring one around with them too.

...what?

After this is done, you can use your (more then likely) gratuitous amounts of free time to plug your Poken into a computer and instantaneously add your new friend to the social networking site of your choice… instead of merely searching for their name… like a normal person.

I’m not sure I understand the point, possibly because there is none. Internet commercialism has become a pick-and-mix of wonderful, colorful, sparky and completely useless crap.

So perhaps the question to ask is not “do you Poken?” but more appropriately, “does anyone?”

On the offhand, ducks are awesome.

Knockout

“the only fail here is that kick, that didn’t do shit”

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Change is one of those things that people both embrace and despise with the flippant disregard for their own hypocrisy seemingly common in everyone who isn’t always as stubborn an arse as I am.

Our view on change in general is as fluid as (insert standard fecal joke here) and people can’t quite reason if change really is a good thing or not, so (ironically) quite often they change their minds about it. Obviously, I am generalizing like a priest and there is a level of context involved in our opinions that leaves us with at least some semblance of logical thought, but in the grand scheme of things I’m not really sure people are fans of change, progressive or not.