Valentine’s day massacre

Looking around the bloggerverse over the last couple of days, I’ve been reading the pro and anti Valentine’s camps…Not wanting to be left out I thought I should add the "romantic" BlackLOG spin on the day. As usual for my entrance, the party is so well underway that the DJ is packing up and everyone is trooping out….

I'm afraid I'm in the “hate it” camp when it comes to Valentine’s Day, on the basis that it is pure commercialism….

Mrs B and I stopped going out to restaurants for VD years ago. We object to being squeezed into a production line of Valentine specials menu (sub-standard food at exorbitant prices) , additional tables - generally so rickety that they would not pass basic health and safety checks and are prevented from collapsing only because there is no room for them to topple anywhere….

Any attempt at intimate conversation with your loved one is shared amongst 16 of the closest people in your lives….. not close in terms of family and relationships but close in terms of geography. You are very unlikely to get closer unless you choose to travel on the Tokyo underground…..

If it’s that bad on a normal commute day, you have to wonder
what is it like on bring your child to work days….
 

It certainly does not inspire me to book a restaurant

table in Japan on February the 14th....

Heaven forbid that anyone attempts to get down on one knee and tries to propose in this rugby scrum …Only after the uproar and general excitement has died down would our intrepid suitor discover if he/or she has managed to get engaged to his or her intended. In the worst possible case, if in their excitement our romantic suitor sways around during the proposal, they might well find themselves engaged to a number of people…..

When it comes to extracting your now compressed body from the death trap of (insert the name of any restaurant that you happen to frequent on the 14th February) you should be extremely grateful that the food served up was not in any way edible, as putting on even an ounce in weight would have severely hampered any chances of getting out of the restaurant at all.

It would not surprise me if the phrase “having a crush on somebody” came about through the thoughtfulness of restaurants to get their patrons ‘up-close and personal’ on Valentines night…

Proof that we truly live in a mad world
Just been hearing on the UK news, the story of the business owner who caught one of his staff with their hand in the till. He put a sign around the thief’s neck saying “I stole £825 and I am being taken to the police station.”

The result.....

The thief got a cautions for the theft and received £5,000 compensation from the employer for infringements of his human rights…WTF…

The employer not only had to pay this once “trusted employee” £5,000 for stealing from him but I believe an additional £10,000 lawyer costs. He ended up settling out of court because the costs were spiralling out of control….Talk about protecting the criminals…

I love the irony that our scum bag thief was paid £5,000 for the embarrassment of being seen by around 20 people, as he was paraded down to the local police station.  Thanks to the payment he receievd his face has been plastered over the national news bulletins, advertising his crime to millions of people and exponentially increasing his embarrassment.  It begs the question should he now receive even more compensation for the additional humiliation? It does make you question the old saying “Crime doesn’t pay”….

It's not much better in the States :-

Don't even get me started on the verdict that a magazine had not been malicious in publishing an article claiming that Beckham had paid a prostitute Nici $5,000 for a threesome.  Despite the L.A.Galaxy player proving beyond doubt that he was elsewhere at the time that the alleged liason (or in this case a three-iason) took place, a US district judge, threw out Beckham's case, deciding that the magazine's publishers had not acted with malice when they published the story, and upholding Nici's "right to free speech".

The judge said that the magazine's failure to check their facts properly "doesn't establish malice" - a key component of US libel law.

The only glimmer of hope from this story is since the BlackLOG has a strict policy to never check facts it should be free to say whatever it likes .... So I shall start with the US district judge “In my opinion..hmmm…hmmmm…..hmmmm”

Mrs B apologies for the interruption to this week’s BlackLOG but has put a gagging order on the remainder of this section

Film review - Black Swan
The review of the film suffers a bit from our local cinema’s incompetence. It is not the film’s fault that our cinema advertised the film but were incapable of playing it on C.A.C.T.U.S night * . What made it worse was for once Mrs B had finished early (well early for her) raced through the traffic and actually made it in good time for once, while our friend Mala had driven across from Hertford….

* Cheap As Chips TUeSday – all films £2.99 – well any that they actually manage to show….

We finally got to see the film on Saturday night where the fact that we got to pay full price seemed to have had the magic effect on the cinema who miraculously worked out how to play the film….

From my point of view there was far too much ballet, which is a little unfair considering this is a review of a thriller based around a ballet (please note I never claimed this was going to be a fair review). All that foot bending, toe crunching and spinning with each separate movement conveying a purity of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….sorry where was I….? Oh yeah, in short, ballet does nothing for me….

Still, once I looked beyond the ballet part it was a pretty decent thriller. Even so I still had a couple of other issues with the film. Natalie Portman playing the lead role was so intense, so miserable and so in distress that if she had been playing an actual swan she would have been put down to prevent further suffering (mine certainly if not her own….). Then there was the fact that the lead dancer in a ballet company did not have a dresser…. We live in an age that the lead in the most amateur of productions gets a dresser, even if it happens to be their Mum with some spit on a bit of tissue….

Word of the week
Thanks to “laughing my abs off” for inspiring my idea of a dating site for the terminally flatulent. During the battle of the Blogs (currently suspended through family illness, so you will have to wait a little while longer for my entry), LMAO had been allocated the task of “being a fart advocate”. Her entry included an idea for Speed dating based around selecting your mate based on health & vitality. One sure sign of this is the high quality & large quantity of toots….. With this in mind I bring you:

“Inflatulations” - for people that pass “wind” in the night….

I had thought that I had created a new word but yet again I discovered (via a google search) I was cast as Scott of the Antarctic and yet again Amundsen had got their first….In this case the part of Amundsen is played by the Urban Dictionary who’s definition is -

“The act of loving someone or something to such
 an extent that it causes one to pass gas.”

Energy watch

Monitoring our way to a fortune (or not) with our Solar Panels

KW Produced so far - 201

This has earned us approximately – £85.70 so far

KW generated in the week - 21

Record of the week

St. Valentine's Day Massacre by Cocktail Slippers Diary - I had hoped to bring you the song “Please take your elbow out of my soup” by the fabulously talentless group “The Guys on the next table” but since they don’t exist and won’t ever write this never-green classic, I had to fall back on St. Valentine's Day Massacre

Don't Stand So Close To Me by The Police - This is pure genius at work, as it not only covers both the Valentine restaurant section, with the title, but also the group name covers  "being paid to be a thief part" ….I thank you

Mad World by Gary Jules

Black Swan by Thom Yorke – Almost as intense as Natalie Portman…..

Photo finish

For tonights performace of the Black Swan the

lead role will be played by Mischief...

While she has the black part down to a tee, she

still needs to ruffle her feathers a bit more and

work on that beak….

McG happy to extract himself from the Tokyo tube system,

vowing to never join in the bring a cat to work day again.

As an experiment he rated it almost as badly as

his starring role as “Schrödinger's cat”  

McG working on his intense pose, during his auditions

 for the often overlooked role of the Ginger Swan....

Well done for surviving yet another BlackLOG, I hope you did not find it the experience too bad and will tune in next week for another adventure into the mundane....