X Factor having a 'theme' so that the judges and 'mentors' can completely ignore that 'theme'.

So apparently it was rock night tonight on the X Factor, not that you could tell with those world renowned rock artists of Cee Lo Green, Kesha, Salt 'n' Pepper and Cher all covered tonight. Where were the stella guitar rifts, the amazing drum solo's, the up tempo and heart rate increasing tempo, the risky lyrics and dancers to match (no wait, X Factor did have the last bit, in fact that is something guaranteed and it cold be that the dancers are the most talented people on the show)?

Mean come on Tulisa, you're not that stupid, you know "tik tok" is in no way a rock song and if you were in any doubt a quick check on Wikipedia would have told you it is a "dance-pop and electropop song that uses a minimalist video-game beat interpressed with handclaps and synths. The songs verses use a rap-sing vocal style while the chorus is sung; throughout the song the use of Auto-Tune is prominent." (remember kids, wikipedia is gospel)

However I shouldn't be surprised really because the stupidity, blindness and lack of honessty in what are deemed to be judges of musical talent is there for all to see. Who do they think they are kidding when they try to pimp the chances of there several mildly talented singers that are just there to make up the numbers? Are they really trying to make me believe that the likes of Jonny, Frankie, Crag, Sami, Janet and 'Rythmix' (i assume there is some irony in this groups name) will be mega selling artists that will stand the test of time... really Louis... really??? FUCK OFF!

What you really want to do with these two-bit comedy acts is to make as much money out of them as you can, as fast as you can, while they are working for peanuts and the contestants themslves hold the false impression that fame and fortune is only a small number of phone votes away? I'm not saying there aren't some with talent, but had they only included these we'd be looking at a 4 week show.

It is the utter distain the whole show has for the public that watches it that riles me, all it wants to do is shaft kids of the pocket money on downloads, shaft the parents of these kids with increased telephone bills due to incessant phone voting and shaft those with week minds in believing mediocre can get you fame and is acceptable to put in front of a whole nation at prime time on a Saturday evening. Come on Cowell, your cash cow is running out of mik, time to rebrand (properly) and sell the same shite to us over again with a new name on the door!

Washing up

What a pain in the absolute bottom washing up is! I've just sat down for a cup of tea and online winge following round 1, but have round 2 of tonights battle to look forward to when I can be bothered to move again (which might be soon if the Ms puts on Law & Order.... dun dun!)

I appreciate those of you who are Greek, or rich enough to be able to afford a dishwasher, or maybe even servants, or those of you who eat out of takeaway boxes each night won't really understand where I'm coming from but for the rest of the few that may stumble across my rants I am sure you can sympathise.

And tonight is no normal washing up task, it's a particulary horrid one as 'her in doors' has cooked something quite enjoyable for dinner which is all very lovely when your getting stuck in, but as you dish out the third different type of veg from the third different pan it then dawns on you that it is you and you only that is expected to do the washing up.

Tonight's exact line up of items includes, one largish pan, three saucepans and lids, 5 big plates (there's only 4 of us, who had the other one?), 2 small plates, a pirex dish, 2 rather grease filled baking trays, a large lunchbox, 1 microwave cover, a gravy jug, 3 tea mugs, 3 glasses, various larger utensils included a bloody difficult to get open masher machine thing (what is wrong with the old style masher and brute force?) and of course the never ending run of knifes, forks and spoons - how the he'll did the few items I ate amount to this?

There's some really horrid items as well, ones that will leave little bits of vegetable, meat or other minting things stuck in the plug hole meaning you have no choice but to prod at the plug hole with your fingers, or if the water is looking particularly gunky and poo coloured, a spoon!

Conveniently, most people in this house get into the habit of either dumping the washing up items in the bowl, resulting in the need to taking all of the items outs before you can start filling the bowl with water and the special three squirts of washing up liquid or simply hiding the items they've used around the house meaning before I can have a nice little game of hide and seek before I get to the task at hand.

So I've filled up the bowl, chucked the cutlery in and submerge the opening item only to find I've left the hot tap on all the way through and the waters about 1 million degrees. Never fear, I'm a man and will get through it, as my hands turn a bright red and the first few plates i stack up relieve themselves of excess steam.

Things are going swimingly, all the plates and cups are down and there's only a couple of peas and some weird stringy stuff in the water, but then I notice the pans - they really should have been rinsed first, but fuck it, they go in. Then there's the gravy jug and potato masher and perhaps they should have been too, so I move the bowl so I've got a little gap to the sink below and try and give them a little bit of a wash over so to not dirty my water anymore. "Ah shit!" that's still hot!

So I've burnt myself, my fingers are all prunney and the kids have kindly come in, dumped some extra items for me to wash and left without even the thought of picking up a tea towel or saying "you sit down with a cider, I'll take care of this" god damn. But the fun is not over, as the game of draining board tectris is starting to get exciting. I have a whopping great big pan in my hand but only the space for a egg cup remaining, but if I move this here, that there, turn that upside down and rest this on top of that... I end up smashing a plate!

So I'm stuck - I have no more room, but 10 or 12 items to go and with everyone else claiming to busy my only choice is to pick up the tea towel and do the drying as well, grrrrrrrrrrrr. After childishly insisting for the first few items that I won't be putting them away, I give in and put them in the appropriate draws or at least the draws I think are appropriate, I await to be told that yet again I've put things in the wrong place (well if they're in the wrong place, how did you find them?).

Slowly but surely, the draining board is cleared and the task at hand is looking a lot more manageable so a second wind flows through you and you start speeding through the next few items. However, this is a foolish thing to do, as when you come round to do your second set of drying with the damp rag that was formly a tea towel you realise you haven't done a very good job, there's stains remaining, bloody great Big noticeable ones. Ah well, you've already dispensed of the filthy water which is trying to negotiate it's way through the plug hole so the only thing for it is to rub at the stain with tea towel as hard as you can... But then it remains on the tea towel... And then it transfers to your next drying items... So you decide to hide them (like putting a plate at the bottom instead of on the top) in the hope no one will use them... But they do... And they always notice... The ungrateful sods, if you wanted a good job why did ask me to do it?

And so finally the job is done, or so you think - the Ms wants a cup of tea now, and so the never ending cycle begins again.

Addiction

God I hate addiction, it's just so... addictive!

As a man that is far too easily sespitcal to addictive tendencies and has very poor will power I'm constantly finding myself in different states of blooming addiction - fags, booze, gambling, cleaning, chocolate, crisps, caffine, credit cards, Red Bull, Family Guy etc, etc, you name it, I've pretty much become addicted to the lot (thankfully not all at the same time, otherwise I'd be a skint, fat, hyper maniac, with a terrible headache, liver disease, cleaning the
kitchen 17 times a day, only stopping for several KitKat Chunky's and a packets of frazzles).

The only things i'm not addicted to is drugs (phew!) and sex (because god knows, i'm pretty shit at it and no one gets addicted to something that they're crap at, with the exception of gambling.)

Take fags for example - I started smoking in my teens and from what I can recall at the time, the idea behind it was to fit in with a girl I quite liked that also smoked (women - the stupid things you do to impress them). At the time, I remember thinking to myself that I wouldn't get addicted, I'd quit after I was 21 or something. Now I'm well on my way to 30 and I'm still puffing away, after several pretty crap attempts to quit. I tend to last only last a couple of hours without before caving in - I reward myself with fags, how messed up is that!

Then there's alcohol - I've never been a really big drinker, so to say I'm addicted is perhapse misleading but I'm definately drinking more than I used to. It used to be the odd Cider on the weekend and the occasional night out with the boys, but it's now got to extent that there's a nice bottle of top standard Russian vodka chilling in the fridge.

Red bull - there was the one a day routine for an entire month, but luckily I weaned myself off that, partly due to the fact your pee starts to smell funny (or maybe that was just me), although thinking of Red Bull makes me think of how well it would go with that chilled Vodka in the fridge.

And may i introduce you to my new found addiction, gambling - I blame winning £300 in a day from the spare £5 in my account for this, as the evil addicted
side of my brain now tells me there's gold to be made from those horses. I find myself betting on random things - soccer in Columbia? I haven't a clue who these teams are, but put a fraction next to them and I'm suddenly interested.

Fecking addiction and all the evil but fun things associated with it - it really does suck.

Footnote: if the missus ends up reading this, I did not gamble the kids uni fund... honest... and yes, believe it or not I did have a cleaning addiction but the cleaners anonymous support group got me through that one pretty quickly.

The Rugby World Cup being held in New Zealand

So this years Rugby World cup is being held in New Zealand, one of the eternal power houses of rugby and to most it will seem fair that they have their chance to host this moderately sized sporting event.

But whoooa, hold on minute, what time do the games kick off? 5, 6 o'clock in the morning GMT - well how bloody inconvenient of you New Zealand! I didn't even realise the clock went to these times in the morning, so deep in my slumber I am at these times!

So who's fault is it? The IRU? New Zealand? No, i blame the person devising the god awfully complicated time system across the world time and the tectonic plates for moving New Zealand to practically nowhere - I'm surprised the place got found as quickly as it did, as it's not exactly close to Australia in nautical terms and surely any explorer that had bother to get as far as Australia would have said enough of this and turned back home?

Work does really need to go into finding a way to bring New Zealand closer to the rest of the World as it's a really nice place (I've heard) but a 56 hour flight is not of interest to me at all and making an artoficial all around the world sun so that we can all use the same time.

Yes the New Zealand people could appease us Northern Hemashpere watchers by moving the kick off times so they are inline with our normal watching times such as 7 / 8pm in the evening, even if that does mean they have to play the games at 3 / 4 am - they're not totally blameless in this.

Hopefully they do a good job in hosting and no doubt the All-Blacks will sparkle all the way to the final before falling flat and losing in the final to 'those nice guys from South Africa' but sadly I won't be watching a my eyes wouldn't function at that time even if I wanted to.

Ranting is big in the Netherlands apparently?!?

"Hallo" my Dutch friend (i don't believe there's more than one of you, despite what the stats might suggest!). "Welkom" and "Waar zijn de toiletten, alsjeblieft?"

Neil Warnock

What a tosser.

iPhone / iPad auto complete

The people at Apple think they're pretty clever, producing swish looking gadgety things that make many a man and women lose control of their wallets or purses and hand over their hard earned cash to the evil machine - and I know the feeling, I've been afflicted with this brain wash technique twice.

Yet, one thing that annoys me about their products, more than anything else is the auto correct feature in which in apples infinite wisdom, they have decided to use the spacebar/punctuation as an indication you want to accept the prediction of what you were actually trying to type. How bloody stupid, regardless of whether I've got the word right or wrong, the buttons I'm naturally reaching for immediately after will be the spacebar or if I'm at the end of a sentence a full stop, question mark or if I'm feeling fancy an exclamation mark!

This results in me having to type several words over and over again, which is very grrrrrrrrrrrr! God knows, it's happened at least 10 times just typing this shit.

And another thing - is the fact they are called 'apple' ironic considering this was the infamous forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve (or was it Steve) couldn't resist? Perhaps all us Apple users will be going to hell (or he'll according to the decking auto correct) and if the love of all things apple related does result in a meeting with Satan in the past life, my love of cider and apple pie/crumble (how did you get 'dribble' from crumble Apple?) means I'm royally screwed!

Eastenders

End.

The useless National Lottery Button!

Why have all the who ha about pressing the big red shiney button on the special podium when we all know the bald guy with the white gloves blatteny presses a button to the side of the machine (Guinevere, Lancelot, sir bob, what ever the machine happens to be called) immediately after the celebrity or Jodie Pringer presses down on the red knob.

Can these celebrities not be trusted to sucessfully press a real button? Why hasn't one of the celebs gone "what the duce, this button does nothing?" out loud on the show? Why do we have to have the big song and dance about a lottery which is dying on it's arse - I remember when jackpots went up £10 million a week, nowadays your lucky to win a million, unless it's the farcical euro millions.

It's all bollock Camelot so stop it... and while your at it, get rid of the plus 5, dail play and thunder ball draws no one really gives a toss about these (they can keep dream number I likebtrying to guess the numbers when they come out)

End rant and breath.

People using heavy machinery in the early morning!

Will the bastard drilling into the road outside please refrain from doing so to at least 8:30! And is it really necessary to reverse that truck quite as many times as the reverse bleeped is suggesting? Not very pleased :-(

Madonna

The fact that at even at the ripe old age of 82, I probably still would! Can she not just grow old and ugly?

Ill advised restraint

You study the form, you like the look of the favourite in the last race and contemplate putting on a bundle of cash because your overall betting performance hasn't been great and your misus is gonna notice the cash hole when she plunders your hard worked cash whilst shopping tomorrow.

You check the price across sites, you have a £100 bet keyed in, you like the fact that £300 would be yours if you win but then in cmes your conscious... What about little Jimmy who needs new shoes? Gas bills coming up? Gyres on the car look a little warn?

So you tell yourself no and step away and pat yourself on the back when you see the horse make a poor start.

But then what's this, he's picking up places, he's now near the front, oh bugger he's romping home! There I am frantically yammering my phone keys, hoping the betting site has an unfortunate lag and will accept my after the event bet - no it does 't, and so the evenings ruined with you constantly thinking of what you could have won.

Bugger, bugger, bugger!

Realising your getting older

In your hey day you think your invincible, old people are funny and you imagine that you're never going to go the way of your dad.

But then slowly but surely, father time starts catching you up. It starts with little things, such as experiencing a small degree of difficulty and discomfort when getting off the sofa, the sudden interest in news and current affairs meaning your more interested in the times headline than who's on the front of FHM and you end up watching Newsnight by choice.

Then the bigger bomb shells start dropping non you as you discover your idols are either past it, or the new ones are younger than you, you've started using phrases you parents would use, your getting increasingly concerned about your chlestrole level, even though you haven't a clue what it is, it's just advertised a lot and seems something to do.

You find yourself interested in how many miles to the gallon your car does, qvc replaces the midnight views of babesation, you scoff at paying £100 plus for a pair of jeans, choosing to go for the cheaper option instead and declaring them as much more comfortable. And names - you never know who anyone is anymore, you cycle through several names beginning with the letter you think it is, only to find out your no where near... And that it's a stupid new fangled name that back in the day wold have been piss take material -but not now as everyone's called Spraticus now and it wouldn't be 'PC'.

Reminiscing becomes all too frequent and you long for the good old days when your wife's breasts stood up on their own accord. You still take a good look and a cheeky wink at the new female office temp, and being a silver fox there's some interest back (you maybe older but you haven't lost all functions...yet)' but the feeling of guilt and wrongness due to her beginning 'young enough to be your daughter' gets in the way.

And finally the most clear sign of all that you've finally reached older age and your can no longer be consider young - you prefer to sit down on the toilet than standing up.

Cherish your outh young uns, cherish it - and if yu see any of the above happening to you, buy a sports car and grow older disgracefully.

Sheep

Sheep really grind my gears. There they are, all fluffy and eating grass trying to avoid the advances of natives from over the boarder what do they do apart from that... nothing... Worse than nothing, They provide wool which is then given to me in the form of horrendous christmas jumpers.

I don't care if some believe these to be back in 'fashion' they look ridiculous, as do men in tight jeans and quiffy hair. It's not the eighties, we established we looked ridiculous back then in the 90's so why bring these statements back - the misguided thoughts of outh.

And there's another thing - outh these days have little to no respect, whats going on here? When I was a outh I was scared of older people, yet these kids have no fear - there all for smashing the windows of tesco and looting loads of monster munch.

But don't get me started about Tesco's. They fecking everywhere, I can't avoid the beggars even though I do try. The caniving sods, luring us in with the funny adds with the flatly towers lady, making us think they were on our side by providing us with cheap poor qua
Ity food, but no, they were realng us in so they could gain control of us and en jack up the price. £2 for pringles - sod off, it's a potato and a bit of salt!

I'm hungry, quite fancy some crisps if I'm honest so that's it for now.more tomorrow, if I can be bothered.