I,The Blog Dog,on behalf of my significant other,Deidre,and all my loyal staff,would like to wish all my readers a Happy New Year!
Thank you for following my adventures over the past few months and I hope you continue to thrill at my death-defying escapades throughout the coming year!
Right….LET’S GET PISSED!
Do you wear glasses or contacts?
Have you ever thought about laser vision correction surgery?
I’ve considered it for years,but deemed it to be too expensive,not too mention the thought of having my eyes zapped by lasers,but these days the procedure has become almost routine and much cheaper.I’ve been a spectacle/contact lens wearer since I was about 8 years old-I’ve never believed that wearing glasses is a good look…call it vanity if you will,but to be able to wake up in the morning and not have to fiddle with contact lenses would be great.
Check out these info-nuggets about one of the most well-known procedures available today,Lasik-
Lasik can reduce or eliminate the need for glasses or contact lenses.
Lasik is the most often performed surgery in the US.
Lasik vision recovery can be as little as a few hours, but most see well in about a day or two.
Lasik normally has no pain.
If you’re reading this in the USA then you may like to visit the Stahl Eye Center…it has been serving patients for more than 35 years.The Stahl Eye Center doctors’ patient outcomes have been independently verified by nonprofit Lasik patient advocacy USAEyes to meet or exceed the national norms for Lasik results. Fewer than 100 doctors nationwide have attained this certification.You will find the links below.
Lasik is also available in the United Kingdom,click the Optical Express link below,from less than £400 per eye.
Some helpful links:
Stahl Eye Center
If your hard drive is currently bursting at the seams with all that downloaded pornography music,then it may be time to upgrade.
Gigabyte,shmigabyte–that’s so last century…..you want a Terabyte at least.
Below is a handy,cut-out-and-keep guide to the chuffing enormous data storage sizes we may be seeing in the future (sadly some of them are science fiction at the moment).
(I’ve rounded the figures out to 1000GB=1TB for simplicity,but it is in fact closer to 1024GB)
1000 GIGABYTES=1 TERABYTE.Could hold 1000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica,300 hours of good quality video,or 3.6 million 300 Kilobyte images.Currently available as external hard drives or on Apple Imacs–will soon be standard on all PCs I suppose.
1000 TERABYTES = 1 PETABYTE=1,000,000 GIGABYTES.Could store 500 billion pages of standard printed text.The same amount of data would fit on 500 million floppy disks.
1000 PETABYTES=1 EXABYTE=1,000,000,000 GIGABYTES.This is BIG….it has been said that 5 Exabytes would be equal to all of the words ever spoken by mankind….a billion gigs,for god’s sake….
Can you take a bit more?
1000 EXABYTES=1 ZETTABYTE=1,000,000,000,000 GIGABYTES.A trillion gigs…that’s a lot of Cliff Richard songs.In 2008, Americans consumed 3.6 zetabytes of information online.
1000 ZETTABYTES=1 YOTTABYTE=now we’re getting silly-1 QUADRILLION GIGABYTES-1,000,000,000,000,000.It would take approximately 11 trillion years to download a yottabyte file from the Internet using high-power broadband. You can compare it to the World Wide Web as the entire Internet almost takes up a Yottabyte.Also 50 times the number of red blood cells in the human body…
This is where we get a bit weird….
1000 YOTTABYTES=1 BRONTOBYTE…not a dinosaur’s dinner,but 1 QUINTILLION GIGABYTES,or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 if you get turned on by zeros…
….and because someone obviously had too much time on their hands,they came up with this-
1000 BRONTOBYTES=1 GEOPBYTE-1 SEXTILION GIGABYTES…1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.Apparently the number of grains of sand on the planet….
Phew.
I used to think a 512 megabyte hard drive was a lot…
Space is big.
I mean really big.
Bigger than the biggest thing ever.
You might think it’s a long way down the street to the off-licence,but that’s just peanuts to space.
So wrote Sir Douglas Adams,and he knew a thing or two…..he wrote a hitch-hiker’s guide to the galaxy.
And space is fantastic,full of unbelievable,mind-blowing stuff.
AND…space is IMPORTANT-when all the Pot Noodles run out,we may have to go and live there…so obviously it would be a good idea to know a bit more about it before we pack our suitcases.
But…the amazing nebulae and black holes and weird sort of swirly bits are all a very long way away….
….so you need a big,fantastic,important telescope to look at it.
Well there is one…in Swansea….but maybe not for much longer.Run by volunteers,the Observatory is in danger of closing because the local council are reducing the funding they receive,so they can’t keep it open for much longer.It’s the largest telescope in Wales.
Even if,as you read this,you are nowhere near Swansea,or have no interest in astronomy,I appeal to the insatiable thirst for knowledge in each of you,the desire to touch the unknown.
A petition has been set up to save it-the link is below.500 signatures are needed by 23rd December–the total currently stands at 344.It’s completely free and only takes a minute of your time,and you will help save an important building for the next generation.
Petition –http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ObservatoryTower/
Join the Mission Swansea-Save Swansea Observatory group on Facebook-http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=169245606304&ref=share
Travelling through the less reputable nooks and crannies of Sky telly late one night,I came across this little gem from the dim and distant days of the 1970s-
Return Of The Saint,starring hopeless Roger Moore wannabe,Ian Ogilvy.
It was awful….but I can remember watching every single episode back in the day,but my excuse is that I was young and impressionable.
I even had a Corgi model of The Saint’s Jaguar XJS—the coolest car on television at the time.I used to thrill to the exciting theme tune,marvel at the cutting edge special effects used in the title sequence (I have included this below so you can either laugh at it’s naffness or cringe because you remember it)
Running for only one series consisting of 24 episodes between September 1978 and March 1979 (I looked it up,I’m not THAT sad),Return Of The Saint was an updated version of the original series starring Sir Roger Moore,with the international man of mystery Simon Templar now played by Ian Ogilvy.He would fight crime and dodge the fashion police on a weekly basis,whilst simultaneously doing what I now recognise as being a very bad Roger Moore impersonation.
He’s GAGGING to be Rog….but he can’t quite pull it off.Funnily enough,our Ian was hotly tipped to replace Rog as James Bond,but luckily that never came off.
He just ain’t got it.Granted,he’s got a BIT of something,but not a very big bit.
He knows how to wear a roll-neck sweater though.And flares.
The overall impression you get from watching tv shows from this era is how totally,utterly,sodding depressing Britain was in the 70s.The locations are depressing ,the actors are depressing-compare Return of the Saint to Starsky & Hutch or something similar-that show is exotic in comparison.
I lived through those depressing 70s without really knowing it-only looking back with modern eyes do you see how much crap we put up with back then.
I used to think that my Eagle-Eyes Action Man was state of the art.
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.
I shall leave you with this-and kids,if your parents say they don’t remember this,they are LYING!!!
Lady GaGa
Woman?
Man?
Neither fish nor fowl?
Half rice,half chips?
Well..it doesn’t really matter what position she assumes when faced with a WC,I reckon she’s fantastic.
I’m an old git…but I just can’t get enough of Bad Romance.
Sadly not everyone would agree with me…here’s Telegraph “journalist” Lucy Jones this week talking bollocks in every paragraph of her article-
*****”It was inevitable that Lady Gaga would eventually grace the Sunday ratings-chasing appendage of The X Factor. She of the peroxide hair and exploding bra is the show’s Goddess. They are supine before her success and her synths. Last night, Dannii Minogue actually bowed down before her and even Simon Cowell looked sweatily sated.
For viewers at home though, it was a moment of clarity. Lady Gaga is superbly overrated. I don’t believe anyone could have watched her performance and not thought (a) I am watching cod-Dana International performing Eurovision pop in a dancing bar with a sticky floor or (b) these routines could have been choreographed by young cousins messing around with some loo roll and their Grandmother’s fancy dress box.
What I find so flummoxing is that this woman has generated so much hype. Her songs are tedious, her performances naff, her lyrics are stupid. Please can someone explain the attraction? Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person who doesn’t have the keys to Gaga’s oubliette – waiting to be let in, with only NME, which voted her most over-hyped act ever, for company.
What put this into stark relief for me was a Yeah Yeah Yeahs gig I went to last week. There you have – in lead singer Karen O – a mesmerising rock star. She put Gaga to shame with her opening outfit: a low-wattage light bulb poised on her head supported by a dog’s white protective cone – the kind they wear when they have fleas – and elongated arms underneath a shamanic cloak. From that, she moved onto a cerise gimp mask, a skin-tight playsuit emblazoned with prawns and a multi-coloured Indian headdress. Five enormous inflatable eyeballs stuck to the back of the stage were released into the ecstatic audience. It was a joy.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs finally entered the mainstream this year with the albumIt’s Blitz, so I think I’m entitled to compare the two but, frankly, there is no contest. Karen O’s performance turns life on its head; Lady Gaga’s reliance on her breasts and costumes induces nausea. Gaga is a Cheese String to Karen O’s Epoisses.
And any pop star whose fame depends on whether or not she is a hermaphrodite is clearly scrimping on substance. Rumours like this have made her a tabloid dream, and even the Sunday Times Magazine chose her for their cover story yesterday. The fact that she attracts highbrow attention may be due to her background as a “classically trained musician” and a “writer” – as if that makes it all OK.
Here’s a quote from the Times interview with Lynne Barber where Gaga talks predictable poppycock about her latest live show:
“My evolution is from the beginning of time, so I start as a cell, and then I become a vertebrate, and then I become a full animal, and there’s the birth of the economy, and trade and war, and then it’s the Apocalypse.”
I imagine Gaga’s musical apocalypse won’t come any time soon: people love to be saturated in pop goo. But how I wish it would.”*****
Lucy….baby…sweetie….I’m sorry your boyfriend left you for another woman,but please don’t take out your suffering on us poor readers….leave it at home,it’s for the best,otherwise you’ll end up embarrassing yourself.
Oh you already have…never mind.
And since when did anyone on The Telegraph even know what pop music IS? I thought Telegraph journos still believed Maggie Thatcher was PM.
Is this an attempt by the Torygraph to “get down with the kids?”
Quite apart from the fact that Our Lucy is as jealous as feck of anyone successful and innovative,her article is also very badly written and not even regurgitating words you once saw in a dictionary like “flummoxing” and “oubliette” can really help her.
Actually,I could write articles like this…I could be a Telegraph journalist,if that’s all it takes.
Hopefully Lucy will have a look at my blog and recommend me to the Telegraph bosses….or at the very least,learn something.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/lucyjones/100005453/lady-gaga-on-the-x-factor-overrated-much/
Click the link to see the original article and the comments…they absolutely roast her 🙂
TROPICAL MOMENTS 
