Dom Davis (The Blog)

So let’s give you an idea of what it’s like to live with my brain and show you what I have to deal with on an almost constant basis. This morning, as I disembarked from the train at Norwich station I thought to myself “Thursday!”, as one does when gearing oneself up for the working day ahead.

This thought rolled around for a while before dislodging some random factoid regarding the naming of the week days and was replaced with “Thor’s Day”, that is, the day named after the Norse god Thor. For some reason this factoid irritated me. “Why”, I thought to myself, “why does Thor get a day?”

At this point a flood of tangential thoughts ensued. Half remembered details of Norse mythology were marshalled in defence of the name; the fact that other gods, such as Freya were also given days; and simply that the week days were named long ago which means their roots had lost much of their meaning, and is also evident in the degradation in pronunciation and spelling. What stood out for me in this cacophony of internal monolog was that Thor had a big hammer. This quickly joined forces with the notion that he was probably over compensating for something and simply added to my ire over his having a day named after him; logic and evidence be damned.

From there is was but a short hop to deciding that I too should have a day. After all, I am the third most important person I know (after Willow and The Zozo) and, since there are 7 days in every week I should easily get a look in. Me, being me, voiced my concern over Thor having his own day, his overcompensating the hammer and my demands for my own day on Facebook. It was here that I first named the day and saw it written down: Domsday.

Upon seeing Domsday I was instantly reminded of “doomsday” and, noting how Thursday was in fact a derivation of Thor’s Day I wondered if my own day might similarly suffer from a deviation from the initial spelling. Could it not be, I surmised, that Doomsday was derived from Dom’s Day and that I already had a day?

Further examination of this postulation had me thinking that not for me some common or garden, run-of-the-mill weekday that was simply churned out once every 7 days with more significance placed upon things happening on the day than the day itself. No, I had the most important of days: I had the last day. After my day there are no more days. Ever.

This addendum to my train of though, and initial complaint was posted as a comment to my Facebook status. In order that I might drive home the victory that I had achieved of one of the more senior Norse gods I felt it necessary to end the missive, in capital letters: IN YOUR FACE, THOR!

While my initial irritation was not with her, and while I did not explicitly state it, it should also be noted that my train of thought also bested Freya, another god. Having, as I had, gained the better of two gods, albeit rather old ones who, in the case of Thor at least, are not really actively worshiped any more, in the space of time it took me to disembark the train, negotiate the ticket barrier and exit the station, I was able to replace the annoyance I had felt with a feeling of jubilation and triumph which placed a smile in my face and a spring in my step.

And so it is that I headed to work, completely and happily oblivious to the fact that my daydreaming and bizarre thought processes had caused me to forget to send my usual morning text to The Zozo wishing her a good day and expressing my love for her, usually via the shorthand notation of x’s for kisses. This failure of memory on my part allowed me to unwittingly clutch defeat from the jaws of victory without even knowing it.

As such the moral of the story is this: do not take on the gods, no matter how old or minor in today’s pantheon, you will lose. #LFMF

Excellent news. The scales point more to the 13 than the 14. Well, actually they pointed more to the 14 than the 13 but since the scales are in the gym I don’t want to be standing there in my birthday suit, smile on my face and tackle in the breeze to get an accurate measurement. Instead I have previously weighed my gym kit using the kitchen scales and found it to weigh 2lbs. This allows me to stand there fully clothed and, with the application of a little mental arithmetic, work our my body weight. So it was a conceptual reading rather than the actual reading, but, nevertheless, it would appear the All Kebab No Belgium Bun With Some Cereal In The Morning Because Otherwise We’d Have No Fibre diet is working well.

None of this helps the fact that my socks have taken to slipping down and rucking up under my feet.

So it turns out that being a 36 year old male who wears a dressing gown opens you up for ridicule. I discovered this after posting on Facebook that I’d set the arm of my dressing gown alight and that perhaps I should keep it away from open flames.

I should point out at this juncture that this isn’t some crappy flimsy towelling thing, it’s a plush velour one from John Lewis, the likes of which you find in posh hotels (and that posh hotels charge you through the nose for if you nick them).

Now, I put it to you (and I’m talking to the blokes here) that, after a shower in said hotel room, you’re going to put on your complimentary dressing gown rather than wonder about in the buff. Furthermore you’ve probably even commented to the other half about them.

I also put it to you that no one wants me wondering around our house (which isn’t fully curtained) wearing just my boxers. It’s not something you want to see at 6:30am. Furthermore, it’s cold and I don’t want to get dressed until after I’ve showered.

Should I not, therefore, purchase myself a posh dressing gown so that every day feels like I’m in a 5 star hotel, and keep myself warm and the neighbours eyes safe at the same time? I fail to see what an acceptable alternative would be.

It’s A-Level results day and across that land millions of teenagers are going through that crappy ritual of opening their results and seeing if it’s really as bad as they think it is.

I rather fluffed my A-Levels first time round which required another year at school and two rounds of results opening. I do, however distinctly remember the results were provided in a tabulated form. Open the letter, skip the opening waffle, cut to the chase and there, writ large, was course, followed by grade.

I mention this because they’ve been showing A-Level students getting their grades on telly today and they’ve been having real trouble reading them. Now I know it’s a stressful time and I know it’s not helped by having a camera shoved in your face while images of you struggling to read your results are beamed live to the nation, but surely its not that hard.

There can only really be two explanations for it: either the insane push to ensure that no one gets anything other than an A (and the addition of the stupid stars so universities can actually work out who the bright ones are), coupled with the breaking down of the courses into bite sized chunks means that the results forms are now hideously complex; or A-Levels have been dumbed down so far that the basic ability to read is no longer a requirement.

While the latter suggestion may seem facetious it is probably worth remembering that, instead of the pros above, they’d probably rather see:

2ldr; l2r nubs. Lol!

The prosecution rests.

So London is burning and Facebook is alight with reports from near the riots, disparagement of the rioters, calls for various forms of more extreme punishment and the odd bit of sympathy for the disaffected underclasses. My views head distinctly to the right in situations like this, but the bottom line is that no amount violence or mollycoddling is going to fix the underlying problem: we, as a nation, drink too much coffee.

Seriously, think back to the height of The Empire. We were the global super power, we ruled half the planet and we drank tea. Now chart the fall in tea drinking, the rise in coffee drinking and see how that correlates to the decline of Great Britain and the rise of Johnny Foreigner.

Look at the emerging economies. Tea drinkers. OK, so the Chinese drink green tea, but that’s probably a good thing. If they drank English Breakfast we’d all be speaking Cantonese. Russians and Americans? Coffee drinkers, one saw a total collapse in it’s government, the other is pawning everything to borrow enough cash to pay its bills.

So pick your short term method of dealing with the rioters and rebuild the Starbucks, Costas, Prets, Eats and Coffee Republics that have been destroyed with tea shops. Do that and, by the turn of next century, Britain will own half the bloody solar system!

The Brollycon system is a regional alert system designed to protect the public from the ever present threat of full scale saturation attacks from either rain, snow or hail. For your own safety please familiarise yourself with the following.

Brollycon 5: No threat of precipitation. Umbrellas and other wet weather gear are not required to be close at hand. Rarely used in the United Kingdom.

Brollycon 4: Possible threat of precipitation. Umbrellas and other wet weather gear close to hand or easily retrievable. The lowest brollycon state of the commuterate to avoid total saturation in the event of surprise attack.

Brollycon 3: Credible threat of precipitation. Brollies and wet weather gear carried to be carried on your person. Depending on the temperature coats may be deployed. Usual brollycon state of the commuterate. Lowest brollycon state of Scotland.

Brollycon 2: Precipitation imminent or light rain. Umbrellas on alert 5, all coats to be deployed, other wet weather gear to be readied for possible saturation attack. Highest alert status. Individuals are allowed to go “brollies free” at their own discretion.

Brollycon 1: Full scale rain. All wet weather gear to be deployed. Unprotected or inadequately protected civilians to seek immediate shelter until precipitation ceases or help arrives. Does not require central authorisation once “brollies free” has been declared.

Current local brollycon status: 2
Personal brollycon status: 1

You know when it’s raining, but not really enough for a brolly so you just sort of grin and bear it? Yeah, it was wetter than that this morning which rather makes the decision not to deploy my ever handy umbrella somewhat silly and leaves me just a little damp. Still I’ll dry.

Anyway, my own stupidness aside, today I’d like to talk about ACAB. If you walk about around the cathedral you’ll see ACAB sprayed everywhere. They style is the same so it’s obviously someone’s tag and the work of a single yoof. ACAB is still active as his tag appeared, in marker pen this time, on a sign near work.

Now, ordinarily I’d just ignore the graffiti and not even bother commenting on it, however, nestled in the riverside walk is a gate bearing the phrase “All Cops Are Bastards”. The writing uses the same canmanship as ACAB and it doesn’t take a genius to realise that ACAB is more than a tag, but an acronym too.

And here we come to the crux of the post. Perhaps one day ACAB may google for his tag and find this post. Perhaps an acquaintance might find it and point him here.

ACAB, you may find cops are slightly more forgiving if you didn’t run round NR3 spraying every available surface with crap. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest you are probably involved in other antisocial, if not illegal behaviour but your low IQ means you are unable to cover your tracks which has lead to a number of run ins with the police. Furthermore, while there are regrettable incidents of police harassment, I’m going to suggest that yours is not such a case and any repercussions from law enforcement agencies is entirely justified.

Just in case that’s all to much for you to understand I shall break it down for you: You, sir, are a dick. Please stop.

That will be all.

So they’re improving Morrisons in Cromer. I have no idea what these improvements entail, but two bits of the car park have been closed off and works are going on, and the cigarette kiosk area is covered up and a temporary one set up. Since I don’t know what the changes are I’ve decided to make some up. Here is what I’d like to see:

Both car park works are close to the pedestrian crossings. It’s my hope that cameras are being installed that will sense when cars ignore the pedestrian crossings. This will then feed details of the car (size, location, velocity, direction of travel) to some form of high calibre weaponry or artillery piece. Hellfire anti-tank missiles would also work. Lastly an articulated arm would be used to push the smouldering wreck into a storage pit for later retrieval and recycling. Past experience would suggest the pits would need to be very large and the ammunition would need to be replenished regularly.

The works inside the store are by the entrance. Hopefully a new “express” entrance is being built. This would be for people who are going to walk into the shop instead of just fucking stopping dead once they’ve got inside, thus blocking it for the rest of us. This entry would again use cameras and under floor sensors to ensure people are maintaining a minimum speed through the entrance. Failure to achieve this speed, or stopping dead will result in a hail of 50 calibre heavy machine-gun fire aimed at the culprit.

These two, very simple alterations would vastly improve my shopping experience.

It was, apparently, the blogs birthday yesterday. I’ve no idea if that was for this or a previous incarnation of the blog (I just had a reminder pop up in iCal yesterday) but it seems I’ve been whittering on at the world for a number of years now (going on 6 if you include TMC. Anyway, belated happy birthday blog.

Anyway, that’s not what we want to talk about today. No, today we’d like to get up on our soapbox and bang on about spam. With the recent spate of high profile security breaches it would seem my details are now being traded to all and sundry and I’m getting inundated with spam, both email and SMS. Given most of it (70+%) comes from yahoo accounts I’m very tempted to just blacklist yahoo.com and yahoo.co.uk on my mail servers. Thankfully with SMS spam it costs money so there is less of it, but email is fundamentally broken and will forever be plagued with spam in its current form.

The solution is simple. We need to evolve. To become one with the Internet and gain the ability to traverse it ourselves, becoming corporeal and emerging at the other side, next to the person responsible for sending the spam so we can then punch them repeatedly in the face. Imagine it, millions of fucked off people, all queuing to punch the fuckers in the face. That would stop spam and reduce global stress in a single stroke.

There is an unmarked building by the railway line north of Norwich, by the DVLA test centre and near Makro. The only signs outside are 5mph speed limit signs. It’s surrounded by twin fences, there is an ‘airlock’ gate system and cameras everywhere. The only vehicles I’ve ever seen in the compound are white, unmarked vans and I’d love to know what it’s for. I’m guessing it’s some kind of warehouse, but for what? Answers on a postcard please.