“What?”

“What nationality is Mr. Sheen?”

“Who do you mean?”

“Mr. Sheen.”

“… Charlie Sheen? or…”

“Y’know, Mr. Sheen. Like from the adverts on TV.”

“Oh. Right. Er… maybe he’s about 60-odd or something”

“…”

“What?”

“What nationality is he?”

“Oh. Haha.. oops. Um.. is he American or something?”

“Polish”

“Oh is he? I didn’t know that.”

“…”

“…”

“???”

“Oh, for fucks sake.”

Here is a blueprint.

And here is the result.

Pretty amazing eh? Let me walk you through it, step by step.

The hole in the floor was cut (by myself) using a mini electric jiggly saw thing. It’s a square hole for a round tube. I solved that later on. The tube itself needed to be joined onto the hacked-off tube protruding from the back of the dryer. This was solved with sellotape. Extra-wide sellotape.

The tube needed to be hard-up against the vent, so string was pulled through the holes in the vent using a cut up strip of plastic from a racing car toy. Once enough string was fed through enough holes, the tube was pulled up against the vent and tied permanently and securely using several bulky-looking knots.

The aforementioned square hole was deemed a bit windy, so with my trusty DIY scissors, I cut a round hole in a bit of silver cake-presentation card. This was secured around the tube against the floor and secured in place once again with extra-wide tape.

The result, as you can see, can only be described as utterly splendid.

My blog now incorporates all my old, old posts from when this thing was run on MovableType. For a long time it hung around in a giant SQL dump on my laptop’s desktop and at long last I’ve managed to restore them into WordPress.

And it was all thanks to a little Perl script, a copy of Poster and a few hundred clicks on a ‘publish’ toolbar button.

Now all I need is a way to do the same for the posts languishing in my old blogger account. For pre-2003 stuff, I may even resort to archive.org.

Er.. sorry if this landed like a bomb on your RSS reader.

There was a self-confessed book fetishist on radio 4 the other day bemoaning the fact that Picador have recently decided to ditch hard-back books (CBATG) and only publish paperbacks from now on. Apparently it’s a great loss that books are no longer pretty, nicely bound objects of beauty, and that they are now ‘disposable’ wrappings for stories, bound for the bin as soon as the spine snaps.

My initial reaction was kinda… meh.

Books are beautiful objects, it’s true. But I can’t really get excited about a book that exists merely as an object to be admired for its lovely jacket-covered craftsmanship. Books are beautiful because of their potential. Their beauty lies in the way that they can change you from what you were before you read it, to what you are once you finish (Hopefully for the better).

I actually find an old, worn book to be a more beautiful object than a pristine one in a bookshop. A dog-eared book with a gnarled, whitened spine is so much more of a beautiful object since it’s been out in the world, realising its potential from its true inner beauty.

That’s why I don’t own a bookmark. That’s why if you borrowed a book from me, you’d see lines in the corners from the dog-eared pages - frequent and worn on hard to read tomes and infrequent between chapters on the can’t-put-downers. That’s why a book that’s borrowed from me won’t quite sit flat on the table because the front pages have been wrapped round the back to accommodate its reader being squashed into a bus seat with knees raised up against the seat in front.

One of my favourite books is one I acquired years ago from an old friend. It’s a paper-back, swollen from an unfortunate encounter from a rainstorm, spine slightly flaking from being over-read. If you read it, you’ll find little pencil notes in the margin questioning the author, and mini post-its marking out bits that the book’s previous owner felt were somehow important.

Now there is a beautiful object. A book that has not only realised its beautiful potential time and again, but one which has accumulated its own story, written over its wrinkled face.

Is it morally acceptable to visit a lap-dancing club on a stag weekend from the point of view of

• The stag
• The stag’s friends
• The lapdancers

Bonus question: Is it morally ethical when your wife/fiancé doesn’t seem to mind, as long as it’s confined to the expected activities to be found going on within said respectable lapdancing club.

Bonus information: We got a lecture from a lapdancer for not buying enough dances.

Thing is, you just knew that the audience was all laughing because the guy looked exactly like Father Ted.

Am I the only one who gets annoyed each and every time he sees it?

The kitchen DIY project is proceeding slowly. Initially I was off work sick and that meant I was also off DIY too. I sensibly decided to follow the advice given by the news and not go spreading my winter vomiting bug to other people. It was only when I went back to work and actually caught the winter vomiting bug that I realised that all I had was a cold. So I was off last week too in a follow-up illness.

All this meant that my wife finally snapped yesterday and demanded that some progress was made. So I made some, by vowing to install some new plugs by the end of the day, including a fancy new switch for the outdoor light which it did not previously have.

I really feel that this project is representative of my DIY skills generally, so I would like to explain some of the key points of my plugs installation. You may wish to observe its finer aesthetic qualities in the linked photo above.

Please note:

• The carefully cut hole that the plugs reside within, and the generous space surrounding it.
• The crack in the light switch from the over-tightening of an over-keen electric screwdriver.
• The stepped positioning, in terms of alignment, depth and angle.
• The complete lack of an earth wire in one of the switches (I’m not telling you what one).
• The hand-build wooden frame connecting the plug boxes to the brickwork. This is built (In part) from bits of old chipboard recovered from the garden, dried off the the oven at gas mark 1 and broken into random small fragments by hand.
• The single screw holding it all onto the wall, positioned somewhere near the top so that pulling out a plug makes it all wobble slightly.
• The two cables going to the extractor fan from the left-hand switch. I don’t know why there were two cables. It’s possible that when you switch on the fan, you’re also switching on something else too. I just don’t know what that is.

Needless to say, after a days work my wife has phoned an electrician who has agreed to come out and do it properly. I think I’ll stick to painting.