I’ve been waiting for some news for quite a while now. This all links back to my post of a few weeks ago, and unfortunately there’s been no movement which is disappointing. I’m not sure I’d say its life changing stuff, but to use the bullshit bingo term it is “game changing” for me at least. So much so, that my happiness levels have been on a bit of a rollercoaster these past 3 weeks as my thoughts and predictions on the possible news twist and turn. Now I’m in the pessimistic quadrant (if such a thing exists) and I’m liable to stay with my glass half empty until the final confirmation is given.

I’m rambling of course, but thats okay because thats what Monday Musings is all about. It also demonstrates why I’ve not been updating here as often. My concentration levels are, as someone has commented quite succinctly in the past week, akin to Dory from Finding Nemo. Quite.

Normal service hopefully will be resumed this week.

Strange things are afoot, which are hard to describe without giving the game away which isn’t something I want to do at the moment.

Suffice it to say that following an event last week, I was contacted by 2 people who had heard about said event. One wanted some advice and the other to offer some. All very strange and hopefully I’ll be able to give context at a later date, but for the moment my mind is racing with possibilities, especially after I spoke to both individuals separately on Saturday and Monday.

Still, 2 days off last week and a pretty bad night on call Sunday/Monday meant that my plans for content were severely curtailed. I would say normal service will be resumed next week, but I want to break from the norm which is why I am focusing on writing more. If you get my meaning.

Look out for a recipe later today (yes, its not Monday), more past comic selections on Wednesday and my take on what fake tan looks like on Friday.

The following was one of the first posts on The Smorgasbord. Something happened (I believe it is technically called an Internet Fart) and it disappeared. However, I had a backup – Hoorah! So, in the interests of completion, historical posterity and my own bloated self worth (not really) here it is again.

So, hand dryers. Yeah, not keen. Never have been.

I never saw the point because they never dry your hands properly. Either there’s not enough puff and you have to stand there for an age, or the heat is so intense that you withdraw your hands after a few seconds in searing agony. So, you have to divest time, flesh or my personal choice, use paper. Which is crap because then you feel guilty for contributing to the destruction of the planet.

Of course they don’t usually have paper towels any more – and by that I don’t mean the rotating towel which is so wrong on so many levels – so your only option is to dip into a stall and get toilet roll instead which can be difficult when all are taken. In those situations, the only option is to use the hand dryer.

The other week, I was given some slightly good news and then some horrifying news on this particular subject. I’d like to share both with you.

Dyson, that fine innovator and purveyor of the highly efficient vacuum cleaner – now with added ball technology – has dipped his hand in the hand dryer market. Literally as the machine has been designed for you to dip your digits into the machine and move around – or up and down – to allow for the full drying effect to take place. Believe it or not, the fact that this looks like some sort of robot mouth is not meant to put you off. Some will be of course, but those people have no imagination.

Which is a shame because those with imagination will steer clear of this monster due to the horrifying news that I heard rapidly after the Dyson news.

You see, the main issue with hand dryers is that they are quite good at blowing out bacteria and – get this – fecal matter. Which I don’t understand because I thought that when you wash your hands you get rid of any fecal matter, unless you’re starting to get into an atomic level and if that’s the case tehn all bets are off really. Of course, the Dyson is supposedly the worst for this as it seems to gather the water from people’s hands in a little reservoir at the bottom of the dryer. Which in turn is probably circulated around by the dryer itself, so while you are shaking your immaculately cleaned hands around the dryer you get the output of other people’s poor clean up jobs whirling around your fingers just waiting to latch onto semi dry flesh.

Nice.

Dyson’s have been around for while now I believe, but following the revelation that they existed I was in a toilet last week and saw them in the metal. What was worse was, after I gave them a huge body swerve to use hand towels, I spied someone else using one and indeed saw the pool of fecal infected water at the bottom awaiting to pounce. I desperately wanted to intervene but unfortuntely I fear that if I had, the surprise would have meant an unexpected soaking so I did the usual and ignored the poor sap as I left silently.

So whats the solution? How do you create a hand dryer which is automatic and is sanitary? I don’t know but something like this that I found could do the trick.

I built a bookcase yesterday.

I feel good about that, probably more so because it was much, much easier than previous attempts. The key, in this instance was that these shelves were not bound by any sides which of course meant that I didn’t have to twist my wrists too much or use the smallest, weakest screwdriver ever invented to be able to get into said fixing.

Now perhaps I’ve been buying the wrong kind of flat pack furniture in the past, but every one of them wanted the outer frame created first (lulling me into a false state of security) then put the internal shelving in place, wherein my lack of triple jointedness signalled my downfall.

• Malformed screws pitched at a 45 degree angle to the shelf.
• Wooden dowlings that were literally square and couldn’t fit into the round hole.
• Splits down the wood as the nail or screw splintered a non existent hole.
• Flesh and blood left as knuckles scraped against the wood grain.

The person who bought my flat years ago probably still has my dried blood inside the bedside chest of drawers I built.

It really was so simple and painless, and I think I may seek this type of configuration for all my furniture needs in the future. Not sure how viable it will be for drawers and beds, but if nothing else it probably adds some feng something or other to the room. Or perhaps thats because there won’t be any screams of profanity polluting the harmony in the room.

As a side note, I did mention to Kate that this was momentous because we didn’t fight when we built this bookcase. Of course she did explain that was probably because I did what I was told.

I now believe I have a foolproof formula for building flatpack furniture.

I’d like to clear up a couple of points here before we get into the nitty gritty.

Firstly, I like having a garden. Grass is nice to lie on (but I don’t) and for kids to play on (which, weather wise, they don’t), and a well kept flower enhanced border is aesthetically pleasing, especially of an evening when some meats have been grilled to perfection on the barbecue, my belly is full and I’m sitting back with my chosen alcoholic beverage enjoying the sun (again, weather wise, thats unlikely). However, I like the idea all the same.

Secondly, I hate my hedge. Its a schizophrenic beast which is half soft downiness and half raging, twisted gnarliness. It gets out of control easily and the only way to calm it is to attack it with some electric shears which have seen much better days… about 5 years ago in fact.

It is with these two facts in mind, that I have today come to the conclusion that I don’t hate gardening, I hate destroying.

My jobs in terms of our garden are simple – I never grow; I only cut, trim, rip or churn. Kate does the gardening as she tends to the flowers and weeds (itself a form of garden genocide, but on a much smaller and “greater good” beneficial scale) but I only spring into action when the grass needs to be controlled or the hedges (damn those hedges) need to be taken down a peg or two.

Not like I’d want to swap or anything, because there is no chance that I have the patience or any sort of aptitude or skill to tend to a plant or a bush. The time I spend out in the garden, laying waste to seas of grass and slicing into complex horticultural structures, is growing however and that makes me sad. Exhausted as well (not to mention pained as another twig decides to fight back and scrape a deep trench into my arm) but painfully sad because I have to give up 4 hours or so at a time to do something that I don’t like, and don’t get paid for it.

No wait, that sounds selfish. What I meant to say was that one sixth of my weekend time awake is spent not creating but decimating. Thats not fun on so many levels.

So, I’m not a gardener, I’m a taker of lives in the Green.

I desperately want that to change but the only way I see that happening will involve a chainsaw, bricks and cement.

So the 8,750 people who signed up for tickets for Michael Jackson’s funeral will know who they are now. Hopefully they’ve lined up their significant other, are packed and ready for their flight, train ride, bus journey or cross country drive. Of course now they’re on ebay and someone is bound to make a packet out of this, perhaps not least hot dog and ice cream vendors who will be descending on the route to the Staples Centre on Tuesday, or the hawkers selling Jackson memorablia – “My obsessed friends went to the Michael Jackson funeral and all they brought me back was this lousy t-shirt and swine flu”.

Life is a lottery huh? Or in this case death is a lottery.

Which makes me think about fate, and then I slap myself about the head a bit because the next step is astrology, tarot and chicken bones.

My initial musing on this was how horrific it was to use something as traditionally closed as a funeral for publicity or potentially to generate cash (because lets face it, a lot of people are making money out of this), but I sort of look like it as a form of controlled pilgrimage; not that limiting the numbers is going to stop millions from attending.

We’ve always had choices in our lives, but when did the element of chance become so prevalent? Competitions aren’t even competitions any more – “No purchase necessary” – but they’re everywhere. Consumables, periodicals, websites all dangling the promise of free things by clicking on links or calling/texting numbers. Which is all fine, but where are the difficult questions that are set to test you, rather than the crapfest which is the multiple choice question:

Q: Which famous musician died last week?

A) Michael Jackson
B) Jichael Mackson

Of course making these harder would inevitably lead to less people taking part, which may end up meaning less publicity or less profit from those premium numbers (we won’t get into the TV voting cash cows in this episode folks). All adds to the sense of dumbing down really and the continual proliferation of something for nothing. Are people’s dreams being stoked or their lives being subdued? Giving someone the chance to see off their idol is one thing, dangling the hope of alleged wealth and a life of leisure is another.

In the meantime, hopefully sense will prevail and Tuesday’s event goes off without incident or injury.

I wouldn’t bet on it though.

I’ve had a lot of things going through my head today. At some point, I’ve thought they would be the right fodder for my normal Monday rant/vent/expression of slight concern but by the time I start writing something else has taken over. That may be more to do with the randomness of my thought process today, or that I can’t bring myself to analyse any of the problems in too much depth.

So in an attempt to put all of the other rubbish behind me, I’ve picked a discussion topic which is always close to my heart – the corporate challenge.

I may be alone in this, but I hate the word now. Absolutely despise it. If someone says to me “The challenge is” or “My challenge to you is” or “Ah, thats the challenge” I really do feel a rage building up inside of me.

Let me explain.

When I joined my current organisation, I liked the word challenge. I would use it on occassion, and especially at interviews – “I’m looking for a new challenge”; “While I like my job, it is not a challenge any more” etc, etc. Sometimes challenge and I would meet up at the weekend, when I had to do some decorating or take on another difficult crossword. Challenge and I saw each other quite regularly, but not exclusively.

However, shortly after joining my current workplace, I realised how quickly challenge can turn. Sitting in one meeting and being given one challenge wasn’t that rare to me, but two, sometimes three mentions of different challenges in a single meeting…. that was new territory.

Still, I was out to impress and donning my metaphorical sword, shield and sandals (quite fetching with a bottle opener on the sole) I slew each challenge with the requisite swiftness, with an eye on quality and risk. Afterwards, once the olive oil was metaphoricaly washed off my torso with a nice bath, I proudly took the hydra’s heads to my boss and dumped them on his desk. Of course, being a hydra, more heads/challenges would grow. And grow. And grow.

Challenge was used so frequently that I soon realised that it wasn’t as powerful as I had once thought, and in fact it was just an impotent word used to try and convey importance in the heat of the moment.

So now challenge makes me feel sick. Occassionally I look back on our heyday together and remember the good times, but the images quickly turn from summer days relaxing in the sun with a tuna cheese half-and-half to venomous exchanges and recriminations late at night over Skype.

Sometimes, I do miss the old challenge.

For those who haven’t heard of the Eurovision Song Contest, it is a showcase and celebration of music that has been running since the 50s (1956 in fact). Member countries from the European Broadcasting Union put forward a candidate and song to represent them in a contest to find the creame of European music, voted on by the television viewers. In the past few years, not all countries automatically qualify and there are heats and semi-finals held before the showpiece event staged at the previous years’ winning country. TV audiences across the world tuned into this year’s event over the past weekend - hosted by Russia - and the calculated audience was around 100 million.

While voting is now open to the full TV audiences from the different countries, there is always some tactical voting for neighbors and political allies. While you would originally scream at the injustice, its all part of the event and doesn’t really affect the final placings. Its all a bit of a laugh at the end of the day, along with the costumes; performances; lyrics and quite unfunny presenters.

Of course, Eurovision may be high kitsch, but like everything else it can be used to tackle serious issues or at least, bring them out into the open. Look at last week; the admittedly camp contest was used by Russian gay activists to help them march against homophobia and rights abuses, something which usually ends up in riots and physical violence against them. In the end it was thwarted, but with such a global audience it did help to highlight a huge problem within the country, where officials call gay protestors “Satanists” or “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

So now its time to widen the scope and include non-Europrean countries. We’re a global village aren’t we, with television and the Internet breaking international boundaries, and so many countries outside of the EBU do watch avidly; why the hell not include the other continents? There’s already an Asia Pacific contest, why not an Americas equivalent or better, combine them all. Take the best from each continent and run localised contests with finalists representing their territories in a World Song Contest? Can you imagine what would happen if the US actually hosted an event? If Moscow can spend $42 million on this year’s, with writhing women on plastic pools of water lowered from the ceiling like some sort of high class mosh pit, what do you think the likes of Washington or San Francisco or LA could do?

Spectacular wouldn’t even get close to describing it.