Mrs B's Strictly party 2 + Nafman the final curtain?

Mrs Bs second Strictly Come Dancing final party was a resounding success, despite the BBC programme itself turning into a Formula one style farce. Personally I think it is sad that the weakest of the final contestants waltzes off with the trophy. Yes the public has the right to vote but why then bother with the actual dancing when they clearly can't tell a fleckle from a clusters of concentrated melanin and think a rise and fall has something to to with the Stock market (although this has recently become just a free fall). It is very telling that Rachel 'if only I had a personality' Stevens appears to be a better dancer than Tom Chambers' "Equine" professional dancer Camilla Dallerup(or should that be saddle-up, harsh but fair, it's a teeth thing), at times during her performance I thought we had tuned into the horse of the year show.... While Mrs B looks terrific, as usual, my attempts to impersonate Bruce Forsyth sees me look more like I just went 10 rounds with a fondant frosting factory
The girls get carried away after Tom went clear on Camilla Saddle-up
Yet more voting scandal as Craig is tricked into voting for Tom by the girls.....
Craig, Bruno and Bruce relaxing between shots....
Credit Crunch what Credit Crunch
Our attempts to snag ourselves a late ski bargain for New Year have gone astray once again. (Last time it was the "No snow" show in Europe. This led to a last minute scramble to get to a snow bound Canada. Since everyone else was in the same boat and all direct flights to Canada were full, it resulted in us having to get to Canada via Dallas - hardly the most direct route from the UK). This year, while there is plenty of snow in Europe, there appears to be a lack of holiday places (The fascist holiday companies appear to have cut back the number of places available, in order to maintain or even drive up the prices. Something about wanting to make it through the current crisis, how mean spirited is that?*) Instead of getting a bargain, we have ended up having to pay more than the brochure price. OK it is only around an extra £20 each, so not the end of the world, but it can hardly be described as the bargain of the century.

* The saddest thing I heard this week was the story about the scum that descended on Woolworths in the hope of getting bargains. These lovely people felt so incensed that the prices were not as low as they had wanted that they started verbally abusing the staff. The very same staff who had just been informed that they will be out of a job, just after Christmas. Sorry if you are offended by my use of the the term scum, I personally feel they deserve something even stronger but I know it would not get past Mrs B's watertight censorship....
McG's take on our pitiful attempts to snag a late holiday bargain.
Nafman the final curtain??
After years of moaning about Nafman**, our badly behaved in-car navigation system, I have finally got around to replacing him. I'm afraid I did the really pathetic thing and had a match-off between Nafman and the new TomTom, setting them both up on the dashboard and watching them fight it out. The main difference I have noticed so far, if you don't count the out-of-date maps that Nafman had from day one, is the estimated time of arrival. The TomTom uses IQ which takes into account the day and time of day (i.e during rush hour it takes quite a bit longer than at say 3am in the morning) and has so far always been within two minutes of the original estimate. To be honest, Nafman's predictions can only be described as optimistic to say the least - Like a politician in power it just does not like to admit to the true position - 30 miles in 10 minutes would be optimistic on a rocket ship at whatever time of day......

** It is actually a Navman but picked up his name after a number of interesting navigational incidents. Some of the highlights of Nafman's career include :-

Never actually being able to admit to the existence of our house. He managed to find two doors down and one door up but not ours. I guess it is lucky that we know where we live.

The day when Nafman decided that he was only going to go left - I guess he was going through his communist phase....

A couple of occasions where he took us off route, around the houses before spitting us back onto the original road a few miles further along.

The time he locked himself in the glove box when we were in Norwich. No amount of coaxing would bring him out. The result was that we were left attempting to leave Norwich without the aid of a map or even some "non-directions" from Nafman, which we could have at least ignored and taken the opposite direction. I'm glad we were only on the outskirts of Norwich. The road signs were so bad that if we had been in the centre we would probably be still there. I ended up having to break the lock on the glove box the following morning. Nafman was banished to his draw, without power, for a number of weeks after that.

Nafman has not yet gone into retirement as I have loaned him out to my Yoga instructress(Lorna)who mentioned that she was thinking of getting one. I explained his limitations and warned her it was just to get a feel for using one before spending out on a more modern version. I don't hold out many hopes though, for as soon as I switched Nafman on and started to explain how he works Lorna visibly switched off......Lorna bright eyed and bushy tailed with barely a hint of the pain she puts me through during yoga. I believe the corrections Lorna makes to my poor beleaguered body gives her a full weekly work out....
As if by magic, once I switched Nafman on, Lorna switched off.
No matter how good the TomTom ultimately proves at the task, it just won't have the same character and blogability of Nafman. It's a bit like Formula One has never recovered from the loss of Murry Walker's incompetent commentary......

I hope you have enjoyed and been entertained by the BlackLOG through the last year. Have a great Christmas and New Year, don't forget to drop into the " BlackLOG - Historical" and tune into the BlackLOG next year....

The "Strictly "door left slightly a jar....

It's been a bit of a hunker down weekend as we prepare for Christmas and Mrs B's Strictly Dance party No.2 (I was all for paying some Philipinoes minimum wage but Mrs B decided she would rather exploit my non-creative powers for free). I thought I had a get out of jail free card* with this weekend's Strictly Dance phone fiasco (If you are not a fan it will mean nothing to you. Congratulations and well done for not being ensnared). I mentioned in passing to Mrs B that it sounded almost as bad as the F1 fix earlier in the year (resulting in me having nothing more to do with the sport) and I felt that my conscience would not allow me to continue to support such a corrupt event. Mrs B gave me one of her harder "Don't go there" stares,(Not even Bernie Ecclestone, at his worst could stand up to a full-on Mrs B stare) which afforded me little choice but to continue supporting the whole corrupt sparkly regime. A Mrs B Stare, fortunately only at half power. I still hope that Bernie Ecclestone will one day walk infront of a full force version and the rest of him will follow his heart and turn to stone...

* In truth I had been really enjoying this series, in a perverse kind of way. That is until last week's "Strictly Burn-out" for me, when through a combination of unfortunate events, including a rash promise to record and watch the Saturday night edition with some friends, because we were out on the Saturday night. Add to this a Mrs B migrain which resulted in an almost fatal "Strictly overdose" as I ended up watching the programme twice in a very short time frame. Aaaarrrggghhhh

The preparations have resulted in not much blogging time, so that's it for the moment. Hope you enjoy the shortness of it, I'll try and get a bit more blogging later in the week (lots of things floating around at the moment), if I can fit it in between Coldplay tomorrow night (yes I have checked both the date and the venue. Thanks for the trust.) and various Christmassie type things.....

Don't forget to drop into the "BlackLOG - Historical".

Attempting to turn the tables on some of life's parasites

"Pssssttt wanna buy a window?"
Mrs B and I had the week off - due to an end of year "use it or lose it" holiday policy for both our firms. As we intend to go skiing at New Year we decided to use this week to do housie things. "Whoo hoo." I shout unconvincingly.

In order to keep myself entertained, I decided it was revenge time for us poor householders and I took the opportunity to get my own back by cold calling some Double Glazing companies. (We do actually need replacement Double Glazing, as the cost off getting our current wooden window frames painted is not far off putting in maintenance-free replacements and in truth our windows are about as secure as an Icelandic bank. Add to this that our so called Double Glazed windows are giving out more drafts then a colander (unlike trying to get an overdraft out of a high street bank at the moment ....). I may have got a little bit carried away, however. After the dust had settled and I checked the appointments calendar I found that I had managed to squeeze 6 appointments into 3 days.

Don't tell me I don't know how to put together a holiday entertainment package...

No,no I really mean it....Mrs B was not particularly impressed, I can tell you....

The first appointment
He came in and told us that every other Double Glazing salesman was a crook and a charlatan. A great start which made us trust him about as much as a snake oil salesman. During the 3 hours of torture that he put us through he did leave us with these gems:

"Yes you can have cream it will look terrific" Followed about an hour later by - "No we don't do cream, it would look awful."

"You won't be able to force open our windows. See this arm?" - He the proceeded to bang his right fore-arm gently against our granite work top. "It has a titanium plate in it. I doubt with even this strength I would be able to open it." Wow, that demo convinced us.

"After a visit from one of my competitors one customer immediately offered me the contract for the whole house before I had even quoted a price." Umm, they sounded like sensible people.....I don't know how we resisted the temptation to just hand over a blank cheque then and there.....

"Now I have educated you about double glazing, any other salesman will know that I have been here." He didn't add "And they will tremble and be rendered powerless with that knowledge." But we had the feeling that that was what he was implying.....

All in all I doubt we would have purchased his windows if he had offered them for free. There would no doubt have been some catch or other....

Within minutes of his departure I had cancelled 3 of the remaining 5 appointments. This was for safety reasons - if Mrs B did not kill me, then a few more of these sessions and I would have ended up strangling myself...

Number two was an improvement and probably would have been the front runner except when we did some background information on some of his advice we realised we would have broken a number of housing regulations. Not just some petty ones mind you but ones that would have made the house unsellable. When he phoned to check why we had not snapped his hand off for his products I pointed out these deficiencies.

Salesman No.2 - "That's OK our surveyor picks up all that"

Me - "You mean the Surveyor who comes around after we have put down a non refundable 20%?"

Salesman No.2 - "Yes"

Me - "So when he comes back and tells us the price has gone up 50% in order to comply, do we get our non refundable deposit back!

Salesman No.2 - "Nooooo"

Me - "Do you really think you have got the account?"

Salesman No.2 - silence ......Click Click Buzzzzzz

Wow, you have got to love those salesmen.

Salesman number three just had to turn up, give us a decent price and some honest advice - He turned up, gave us some decent advice (the Internet is a god send) and the price........

and the price was.....

well, we are still waiting for that.

Is he playing hard to get or what? It feels like we have found ourselves on "Deal or no Deal". Foolishly I thought by doing the cold calling it would put us firmly in control. So, in the meantime we soldier on with our Z rated windows......Please note no parrots were hurt during the creation of this BlackLOG, although a couple of salesmen had their feeling hurt when we failed to fall for their patter...

Is it just me or do salesmen these days just seem to follow
a script and spout out their sales patter parrot fashion.

Mrs B taking lessons on how to deal with 'DG'
Salesmen. At least I think it's for the salesman....
Hang on a second that was me holding the camera...

Don't forget to drop into the "BlackLOG - Historical".