post, award, c64 and maul

hi there

one of those random posts, although i would suspect all of my posts are of a random nature, but anyway.

actually feeling tired and somewhat unwell, so do bear with me.

a number of people have speculated as to when exactly my love-in with Royal mail would come crashing down to a glorious and spectacular end. that would be today, then, really, with some misfortune befalling Spiros.

i sent him a parcel several days, as point of fact two weeks, ago, and it had not turned up. we made an assumption that some twat postman had decided to steal it, or otherwise do something with it that did not involve delivering it to Spiros. as it turns out, this was not the case.

who knew that using a large letter stamp on a large letter, as prescribed and confirmed by Royal Mail, would in fact not be enough to secure delivery? perhaps it relates to some sort of "London weighting" which means everything is more expensive, but my poor chum has had to shell out coins of money to obtain whatever nonsense i decided to send him.

yes, one hundred and twenty four coins, if your coins are 1p ones. i quite like how their "handling fee" is some 400% the value of the apparent deficiency in the valuation of the stamp. twats, they are - not even banks throw that kind of absurd pricing on service. i bet, for a start, that Royal Mail does not go running around offering to pay back customers that might have spent 24p extra on stamps they used.



moving away - briefly - from matters of the Royal Mail and their apparent ills, although letting me down just the once in slightly over six months, today i found this in the shops. at a most reasonable price,

yes, one of the greatest games made of all time for the single greatest computer of all time. Impossible Mission was a must-have for the Commodore 64, in the way that Bruce Lee, Way Of The Exploding Fist and Ghostbusters were.

nope, i never once finished Impossible Mission, no matter how many POKE cheat codes and things i applied. i could never work out rotating and changing the colour of all them puzzle parts; not even when Zzap! magazine published a guide.

will i be able to finish this version on the Nintendo thing? possibly not. not so much as there are three different versions on it, but rather more because James and my (considerably) better half tend to keep my Nintendo away from me, playing whatever it is they play on it.

if i am lucky i will get to have a go on it, perhaps around 3 in the morning.

also found today was this. yes, indeed, it is a likeness of Darth Maul, a character that not even those who moan and wail about the Star Wars prequels can quite bring themselves to express much in the way of dislike about.

if it looks like a statue, or some sort of figure that one stands on their desk, then that is fine. but it is not one of them. also, it is not a pencil sharpener.

what is it, then? well, we shall get to that.

yeah, i also picked up some other Star Wars things, but i will do pictures of them and all that later on.

also i got some rather smart new threads, but i have hoyed the bag with them in upstairs already, prior to me thinking of taking any pictures. so if there are pictures of them to follow, either as they were handed over from the store or being worn, they will also be at a later date shown here, look you see.

speaking of looking, and indeed seeing, a brief pause if i may for the allowance of you to consider some award winning work my Dad did. presumably the use of toothpaste with love beads shoved in it gave him the confidence to go ahead and take this most impressive picture.

good work, Dad, and well done to Gillian for sending it in on his behalf!

you all can, of course, attain if indeed not obtain some splendid work from my Dad by visiting him at this place of business, Old Grumpy's Gallery. as far as i am aware, he will send stuff on to you, in consideration of a fee of course, wherever you are in the world.


on that note, this is the reciept off of a parcel i sent today. no, it was not for toothpaste, and no it has not gone the way of New Zealand.

it is a parcel that i have sent towards the mysteries of the South African Post Office, an organization that actually does not make my experiences with Royal Mail of late seem all that bad. well, the experiences of Spiros, i suppose, but i suspect he is rather glad to have the toy aeroplane and the deck of playing cards. and indeed the notepad, and the saucy cheeky bookmarks. if all of that is what i shoved in the envelope (large) and put a (large) stamp on and then sent it on its way, assuming indeed presuming that it would arrive with all the haste and efficiency one usually gets with first class. not to be, hey ho.

the last parcel i posted to SA, airmail, took just over a month to actually arrive. it will be somewhat exciting to find out when this one does.

right, back to Darth Maul, then. here he is out of the box.

and here he is with his hood / head cloth off. it does not stay on very well. almost as well, actually, as my blueberry takes pictures and that.

what is it? it's a USB memory stick thing. a 2GB one, if you are all that interested. an impractical one, both in terms of the capacity of it and the unlikely way in which one will ever be able to connect it to a device. in respect of the latter, observe.

yes, the part that connects to a computer or whatever comes out of the arse of the statute. the bulky way of it suggests that i am not going to be able to plug it into my PC at all, so it will be relegated to laptop use i guess.

yeah, it was cheap, so i bought two. i may well randomly post the other to someone, depending on what issues Royal Mail come up with on postage costs.

that will do.


be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!