Archive for July, 2008

So this weekend I was at Scotland’s biggest music festival/gathering of scum, T in the Park.This marked the first time I’ve been to the site in Balado, Kinross and to be perfectly honest - I won’t be back. The site itself was ok; what you’d expect from a festival really. Big grassy fields, loads of toilets (disgusting toilets, yes, but again, it’s what you expect) and loads of decent bands.

I had the pleasure of catching some established bands like Rage Against The Machine, Bowling for Soup, Amy Winehouse, REM, as well as little known bands like Ghost of a Thousand, Departures and Cancer Bats. I was lucky enough to have backstage passes for the event, and if it wasn’t for that I’d have gave up on the Saturday, and went home.

The problem with festivals is always the food prices, the manky toilets and more often than not the weather. But this time, for me and a whole lot of other people if festival forums are anything to go by, the worst thing about this years festival was guy’s and girl’s pissing everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

By the time Saturday afternoon had hit, you couldn’t look anywhere and not see a guy or girls bits on show. Worst of all, these people were not just going to the perimeter fence to do it. No no. They were quite happy to just stand up (from their drunken stooper) and take a leak where they were, only to sit down in it again - even if the toilets were right beside them. I actually saw one guy peeing ON a porta-loo. WTF!?!

The level of alcohol consumed was frightening. I mean, I had my fair few, but there were people of both genders sprawled out across the field like the aftermath of a battle. How you can possibly enjoy any of the bands in that state is beyond me. Speaking to a mate on the phone that didn’t go, he told me Glasgow was a ghost town - “that explains it” I said to myself.

The other major bug-bear of my festival experience was the security. These guys were from about three different companies and didn’t communicate with each other which meant if you went past one gate, you had little or no chance getting back in - even with my Access All Areas pass.

The security staff were rude, unwashed and lazy. Here’s a photo that sums up these guys performance over the weekend:

In conclusion; I don’t reckon I’ll be going back to T in the Park unless the security?stop people pissing everwhere, which is a shame because you get to watch some really good bands.

The latest ?sport’ around town is “Urban Wave Dodging”. Sounds cool right? Well, um…

As we all know the UK sucks for weather, its sunny 0.0001% of the time and dull, grey and wet the rest of it. Some kids have found a way to enjoy the massive amount of rain we’ve had so far this ?summer’, and are entertaining drivers as well.

Forming in a group next to a large puddle, you can see the youngsters (or chav’s depending how you look at it), hey encourage drivers to drive fast through the water, soaking them in a log-flume like fashion. Awesome.

These pictures (from the Metro) show that the drivers are having just as much fun, although some boring folk drove slowly and carefully. The folk that did that should really have thought ?this is a chance to soak chav’s for all the time they’ve scratched my car, etc’

Witness Tom Cook, 44, said: ‘The boys were gesturing to cars to drive fast through the water as they stood right on the kerb. Some of the cars were picking up speed before they got to the big puddle and soaking the boys.”

He added: “It just goes to show what a miserable summer we’re having when you can wave-dodge in towns.”

But a Police spokesman said: “The dangers of children playing on roads are obvious.

“Water lying on roads creates an extra hazard for drivers who might struggle to control their vehicle. The consequences of which could be very serious indeed.”

Well maybe those drivers shouldn’t be driving if they can’t control their vehicle, and right now we need some cheering up. The kids aren’t breaking in to our houses or standing on street corners with knifes. They’re just having fun. I say let them play.

In a sickening act, the family of one of the 7/7 London bombers are holding a party at his grave in Pakistan to “celebrate his life”. Shehzad Tanweer will be remembered “as a martyr” by over 400 relatives, according to an article in the evening standard.

MPs have branded the ?party’ a “damning insult” to the memories of the 52 commuters murdered in the bombings three years ago today.

The newspaper said that the party had been held twice before and is organised by the bombers Uncle Tahir Pervex, a property developer. Verses of the Koran and rice and curry are to be handed out at the event.

Andrew Dismore, MP for Hendon, north London was appalled at the family:

“It is absolutely appalling that his family are choosing to mark the date in this way. What are the Pakistan government doing about this?

“Five people from five different ethnic and religious groups died from my constituency on 7 July 2005 and this is a damning insult to their memory and their family members. Most Muslims would be absolutely horrified.”

Aldgate bomber Tanweer, 22, Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Hasib Hussain, 18, and 19-year-old Jermaine Lindsay also died when they detonated rucksack bombs on three crowded Tube trains and a No 30 bus.

News of the party came as families of victims of the bombings and survivors today gathered at King’s Cross station to remember the victims of the blasts. The pavements around the station, from where the four suicide bombers set off on their terror campaign, were crammed with commuters as passers-by stopped to pay their respects.

I can’t believe they are doing this. It’s terrible, and I offer my condolences to the families of the victims of the horrific incident three years ago.

So today i’m feeling ill as hell, so i thought i’d cheer myself up with one hundred interesting facts. Good times.

Some of them are probably nonsense, but meh…

1. If you are struck by lightning, your skin will be heated to 28,000 degrees Centigrade, hotter than the surface of the Sun.

2. If you trace your family tree back 25 generations, you will have 33,554,432 direct ancestors - assuming no incest was involved.

3. The average distance between the stars in the sky is 20 million miles.

4. It would take a modern spaceship 70,000 years to get to the nearest star to earth.

5. An asteroid wiped out every single dinosaur in the world, but not a single species of toad or salamander was affected. No one knows why, nor why the crocodiles and tortoises survived.

6. If you dug a well to the centre of the Earth, and dropped a brick in it, it would take 45 minutes to get to the bottom - 4,000 miles down.

7. Your body sheds 10 billion flakes of skin every day.

8. The Earth weighs 6,500 million million million tons.

9. Honey is the only food consumed by humans that doesn’t go off.

10. The Hawaiian alphabet has only 12 letters.

11. A donkey can sink into quicksand but a mule can’t.

12. Everytime you sneeze your heart stops a second.

13. There are 22 miles more canals in Birmingham UK than in Venice.

14. Potato crisps were invented by a Mr Crumm.

15. Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in their correct order.

16. Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow but none for hello.

17. The word “set” has the most definitions in the English language.

18. The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating its letters is uncopyrightable.

19. Windmills always turn counter-clockwise.

20. The “Sixth Sick Sheik’s Sixth Sheep’s Sick” is the hardest tongue-twister.

21. The longest English word without a vowel is twyndyllyngs which means “twins”.

22. 1 x 8 + 1 = 9; 12 x 8 + 2 = 98; 123 x 8 + 3 = 987; 1234 x 8 + 4 = 9876; 12345 x 8 + 5 = 98765; 123456 x 8 + 6 = 987654; 1234567 x 8 + 7 = 9876543; 12345678 x 8 + 8 = 98765432; 123456789 x 8 + 9 = 987654321

23. The word “dreamt” is the only common word in the English language that ends in “mt”.

24. Albert Einstein never wore any socks.

25. The average human will eat 8 spiders while asleep in their lifetime.

26. In space, astronauts cannot cry because there is no gravity.

27. Hummingbirds are the only creatures that can fly backwards.

28. An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

29. Cockroaches can live 9 days without their heads before they starve to death.

30. A flamingo can eat only when its head is upside down.

31. The lighter was invented before the match.

32. It is physically impossible for pigs to look up at the sky.

33. The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year.

34. Scientists with high-speed cameras have discovered that rain drops are not tear shaped but rather look like hamburger buns.

35. The first Internet domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985.

36. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone back in 1876, only six phones were sold in the first month.

37. Approximately 7.5% of all office documents get lost.

38. Business.com is currently the most expensive domain name sold: for $7.5 million.

39. In 2001, the five most valuable brand names in order were Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, and Nokia.

40. In Canada, the most productive day of the working week is Tuesday.

41. In a study by the University of Chicago in 1907, it was concluded that the easiest colour to spot is yellow. This is why John Hertz, who is the founder of the Yellow Cab Company picked cabs to be yellow.

42. It takes about 63,000 trees to make the newsprint for the average Sunday edition of The New York Times.

43. On average a business document is copied 19 times.

44. The largest employer in the world is the Indian railway system in India, employing over 1.6 million people.

45. Warner Chappel Music owns the copyright to the song “Happy Birthday.” They make over $1 million in royalties every year from the commercial use of the song.

46. All babies are colour-blind when they are born.

47. Children grow faster in the springtime than any other season during the year.

48. Each nostril of a human being registers smells in a different way. Smells that are made from the right nostril are more pleasant than the left. However, smells can be detected more accurately when made by the left nostril.

49. Humans are born with 350 bones in their body, however when a person reaches adulthood they only have 206 bones. This occurs because many of them join together to make a single bone.

50. May babies are on average 200 grams heavier than babies born in other months.

51. Leonardo da Vinci was dyslexic, and he often wrote backwards.

52. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had only one testicle.

53. Queen Lydia Liliuokalani was the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Islands. She was also the only Queen the United States ever had.

54. Rolling Stones band member Bill Wyman married a 19 year-old model Mandy Smith in 1988. At the same time Wyman’s son was engaged to Mandy Smith’s mother. If his son had married Smith’s mother, Wyman would have been the step grandfather to his own wife.

55. There are 158 verses in the Greek National Anthem.

56. There are about 6,800 languages in the world.

57. There was no punctuation until the 15th century.

58. Children laugh about 400 times a day, while adults laugh on average only 15 times a day.

59. The coconut is the largest seed in the world.

60. There is cyanide in apple pips.

61. If you were to take 1 lb. of spiders web and stretch it out it would circle the whole way around the world!

62. If every person in China stood on a chair and jumped off at the same time…it would knock the earth off its axis!

63. A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in just one night!

64. The shortest war on record, between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896, lasted just 38 minutes.

65. The Shell Oil Company originally began as a novelty shop in London that sold seashells.

66. The symbols + (addition) and - (subtraction) came into general use in 1489.

67. If you save one penny and double it every successive day, (day two you have 2 pennies and day three you have 4 pennies, and so on), by the end of 30 days you’ll have $5,368,708! (or ?’s or whatever currency).

68. It is not possible to tickle yourself. The cerebellum, a part of the brain, warns the rest of the brain that you are about to tickle yourself. Since your brain knows this, it ignores the resulting sensation.

69. The best time for a person to buy shoes is in the afternoon. This is because the foot tends to swell a bit around this time.

70. The typical lead pencil can draw a line that is thirty-five miles long.

71. Due to precipitation, for a few weeks, K2 is taller than Mt. Everest.

72. Astronauts get taller when they are in space.

73. There are over one hundred billion galaxies with each galaxy having billions of stars.

74. The surface area of the lungs is roughly the same size as a tennis court.

75. A dog can hear sounds that are 100 times fainter than the faintest sounds that a person can hear. If a person can just hear a noise that is coming from 10 feet away, a dog could hear that same noise from 100 feet away.

76. If a sole (a type of fish) lays upon a chessboard it can change the colouring of its body to match the pattern of the chess board. The sole takes about 4 minutes to make the change.

77. Of all the animals on earth the mosquito has contributed to the deaths of more people than any other animal.

78. In the courts of the Roman Empire, instead of swearing an oath on a bible, men swore to the truth on their statements while holding their genitals. Hence the word ‘testify’, from ‘testicles’.

79. The first soap powder, produced in 1907, was made with Perborate and Silicate - hence its brand name, Persil.

80. If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, there would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Americas and 8 Africans. Only 1 would own a computer.

81. All elephants walk on tiptoe, because the back portion of their foot is made up of all fat and no bone.

82. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

83. Hawaii has the only royal palace in the United States.

84. Chicken liver can be used to change A type blood to O type blood.

85. It takes only 8 minutes for sunlight to travel from the sun to the earth, which also means, if you see the sun go out, it actually went out 8 minutes ago.

86. The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.

87. An octopus has 3 hearts.

88. If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

89. The hair on a polar bear is not white, but clear. They reflect light, so they appear white.

90. Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.

91. The combination “ough” can be pronounced in 9 different ways; Read this: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”

92. The blue whale has a heart the size of a small car and its blood vessel is so broad, that a person could swim through it.

93. A left-handed person finds it easier to open a jar than a right-handed person because they can supply a stronger anticlockwise turning force than a right-handed person. However a right-handed person will find it easier to tighten the jar up afterwards.

94. The orbit of the Moon about the Earth would fit easily inside the Sun.

95. A chameleon can move its eyes in two directions at the same time.

96. Typewriter is the longest word that can be made only using one row on the keyboard.

97. Because of the rotation of earth you can throw a ball farther to the west than to the east.

98. The name of all the continents ends with the same letter that they start with.

99. Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

100. There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar (euro, pound).

So as pretty much everyone in the UK is aware, its Wimbledon time again. And last night casual supporters were sucked in to believing the hype that Scottish player Andy Murray has what it takes to win the title - the last time a British player won was 72 years ago by Fred Perry.

Producing a classic comeback to beat Frenchman Richard Gasquet, Murray has finally got in to his stride: “That was the best moment I’ve ever had on a tennis court. To come back from two sets to love and win it is an awesome feeling. The crowd got behind me just when I needed it and to have them behind me was a privilege.”

Looking down-and-out after the second set, he come back to win the five set battle 5-7 3-6 7-6(7-3) 6-2 6-4.

With the crowd going crazy with excitement and sporadic “Murray Murray” chants breaking out, the match didn’t finish till 2129 BST. “The light was tough at the end and I wanted to try to finish the match,” Murray said.

Murray went into the fourth-round encounter having lost both previous matches against Gasquet. Gasquet, 22, gradually wrestled control of the first set from Murray, missing two break points in game eight before making the vital breakthrough in an extraordinary game at 6-5. Murray saved two set points from 15-40 with an ace and a running backhand, a third with a similar shot after a dramatic rally, and a fourth with a big serve and sharp volley.

The Briton could not stem the tide forever, though, and the pressure told when, facing a fifth break point in the game, he pushed a drop volley into the tram lines. That took the wind out of his sails, deflated the crowd and gave the sometimes fragile Gasquet a huge confidence boost.

In the second game of the second set, Murray’s love of the drop shot reared its head, two poor efforts letting Gasquet back into the game before the Scot double faulted. Gasquet was now in the mood to capitalise, driving Murray back with a thumping forehand and punching away a forehand volley to break. There was half a chance for Murray as Gasquet struggled to serve out the set, missing his first two set points on serve at 5-3, but the Briton could not capitalise and picked up a warning for an audible obscenity as the set slipped away.

Gasquet was well and truly in the groove now, his peerless backhand the highlight as the winners began to flow and four break points came and went at 2-2 in the third.

Gasquet blows a gasket

The Frenchman missed another two break points at 4-3 before taking the third with a sweeping cross-court backhand winner, but the Centre Court came alive when Gasquet’s notoriously suspect nerve failed him and he could not serve out the match.

After two lengthy games it came to a tie-break and Murray surged into a 4-0 lead, taking it with an incredible backhand winner from way outside the tram lines that had the 15,000 spectators on their feet.

He raced through the fourth set in a little over 20 minutes with a blistering display and, after Gasquet was booed for taking a comfort break at the changeover, Murray broke at the start of the final set. With the time approaching 2100 BST, a visibly shaken Gasquet missed a break-back chance in the second game and began questioning the umpire about the light.

The officials were not about to step in, though, and Murray eventually completed his first ever comeback from two sets down in three hours 57 minutes, taking his second match point with the pulsating Centre Court shrouded in darkness.

“I think he got a bit nervous towards the end of third set,” said Murray. “I had to keep fighting, he was completely outplaying me and once I won that third set his head went down and I kind of ran away with it.”

The Scot goes on to face Rafael Nadal in Wednesday’s quarter-finals. Murray has a 0-3 record against the in-form Nadal but is optimistic that he can trouble the world number two on Wednesday. “I’m definitely a better player than I was before and fitter,” he said. “If I play like that again there’s no reason I can’t win.”

With Henman hill now forgotten, can Murray do what so many before him have not? Or will the pressure become to much.