Ports Thoughts

I like eating out. Whether it is Steak and Ale pie in a local pub or moules and frites at Belgo , Japanese steak at Benihana or a cheeky curry after a couple of ales. However, what I don't like is restaurants which are totally over priced and over hyped because they are affiliated with some TV chef. So it was a little disturbing today to have a post card pushed through the door advertising Barnes Grill, the latest venture from celebrity flump Antony Worrall Thompson. This makes it one of the closest restaurants to our house but do I really want to eat at Chez Flump? Of course we will because the post card entitles two people to a free glass of posh wine each. Yup, that's how shallow I am.

I was out last night at my best mate Matt's birthday bash in a Chinese restaurant off Oxford Street in London. Mainly the group comprised the usual suspects but Matt had also invited 4 super geeks who are studying for an MSc in Information Security with him. It didn't take the geeks very long to notice that I was wearing a T-shirt with IBM on it. "Why are you wearing an IBM T-shirt?" they enquire. "Because he works for IBM" interrupts Matt. "Eeeugh", sneer the geeks, "why would you want to work for a behemoth like that?". "Actually", I explain, "I work for the Lotus bit." "Oooh" nod the geeks with reverence, "Lotus is cool"

There are many folks that have sincere and committed beliefs in a religion. I have absolute respect for these folks and would never ridicule them despite the fact that I don't personally think that organised religions can ever pass common sense, logic or any test of evidence. The reason I respect them is that I understand the concept of faith (which by definition demands a lack of proof) but more to the point have found that in general the religious folks I have met to are really nice people. Obviously I'm talking about proper religions like Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses and Scientologists are idiots and deserve to have L.Ron Hubbard read Battlefield Earth to them for eternity. Because of the sensitivity of the subject I would not normally dream of commenting on such things. However, the Da Vinci Code movie has caused me to break my silence because of the unbelievably outrageous demands of the Catholic Church. In the UK, leading Catholics have de...

Blimey! As I wrote a couple of posts ago, I had a nightmare getting hold of our new Table Tennis table due to the incompetence of Argos-Sport.com. Still, it arrived a few days ago and I decided to forget about the past and live in the present. The instructions seemed pretty straight forward and it even helpfully stated that it would take just 45 minutes to build. I should have guessed that things were not going well when it took a hour before I realised I had the wrong screw driver :-( How was I to know that a Pozidriv Screw Driver is different to an ordinary Phillips? Here is the evidence . Anyway, with Ali's help I managed to get it constucted, but as you can probably see from the photo's - by the time it was built it was too dark to play :-( And not only that but those cheeky Argos scamps had out done themselves by forgetting to include a few parts as well. As luck would have it, I was then very busy for the rest of the week so still didn't get a chance to have a play ...

I read with interest that the media, particularly the UK tabloid press, are blaming the Football Association for the failure to appoint Luiz Felipe "Big Phil" Scolari to the job of England football team coach. This makes me incandescent with rage. There is no doubt that the FA have been a bit disorganised, but lets have a look at the facts. Why are the England team looking for a new manager 5 weeks before the World Cup starts? It's because the tabloid press have been hounding the current incumbent Sven-Goran Eriksson for months to say if he was going to stay on in the job after the end of his current contract. Now it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Eriksson would probably and quite rightly have liked to have decided whether to stay on after the World Cup but he was forced into deciding before the World Cup by the ridiculous argument that he owed it to the fans to let them know. What! Why? And the media just wouldn't let it go until he decided to tell the...

At the weekend we replaced a dodgy old chest of draws on which our TV sat with a fine sheesham wood table . Since the chest is going to the rubbish tip I needed to remove and relocate all the contents. Two of the draws contained photographs which were easily moved, but the third draw contained loads of unmarked or partially marked cassette tapes . I haven't played any of these tapes for at least 10 years, mainly because I don't possess a cassette player. The fact that these tapes had been ignored for so long means that they aren't very important and that most of them will be filed in the bin, but I wanted to check what was on some of the tapes for incase there were any lost gems, particularly home recordings from my early musical days. So I hot footed it to Curry's to find the cheapest tape player I could find. They no longer sell "pure" tape players so I had to resort to buying the cheapest combined cassette/CD/radio which was just $16. Well there were two...

So a couple of weeks ago I ordered a table tennis table for the back garden. Table tennis is always fun because people generally think they are better than they really are and tend to get a bit competitive. Just right for when your having a barbecue and a few beers with some friends on a sunny day. I asked for it to be delivered last Saturday. Maybe I'm getting too cynical, but it didn't really surprise me that having spent all day waiting for it - it didn't appear. So I shot off an email to the supplied address asking when to expect it or if they couldn't say, give me details of the delivery agents and I'll contact them direct. It's kinda important to know - it's not like they can pop it through the letter box or hide it behind the bin. The silence was deafening. So having had no reply for a couple of days I rang them up asking why they still hadn't contacted me to say when the delivery was scheduled. They said they would ring me back with the informat...