Mr and Mrs McMuffin

slate update

37 hours and still no cat poo. I think we might be onto something, fame and fortune beckons. We need a brand name, it's a pity 'Shitbegone' is taken. I quite like 'Crapattack' but perhaps 'Mr and Mrs McMuffin's organic herbal cat deterrant' has a cosier feel.

Further update: 39 hours poo free, then Ra shows his disdain for our business idea and all talks with major pharmaceutical companies are cancelled. I think Ra had been saving this one for the whole time, it is enormous and very smelly. Mr McMuffin wanted to put a picture up, but that is really going too far.

does this make sense?

Mr McMuffin has been so prolific today that this blog is in danger of becoming 'At home with Mr McMuffin with occasional guest appearances by Mrs McMuffin'. I feel as if I need to say something, but I can't be bothered to think about the interview and the news that awaits me tomorrow.

I have been reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Last night it was too hot for me to sleep so I turned my attention to one of the most arresting of quantum improbabilities arising from Wolfgang Pauli's Exclusion Principle (1925). I think I may have cracked it, I wonder if the 'pairs' of subatomic particles aren't in fact a pair but the same particle, a 'mirror image' able to exist at the same time, but not in the same location.

After congratulating myself on my genius, I was going to make myself a little tinfoil hat, but instead got a damp towel off the washing line and draped it over me. I felt cool for the first time all day with the wet towel over me as a blanket and fell asleep. It was bone dry by the time I woke up. Mr McMuffin actually managed to sleep with part of the duvet over him which I think must be indicative of his extra terrestrial origin. That's just not normal.

look...

Mrs McMuffin is useless. It wasn't that hard. Look, I made a workng time machine during my lunch hour this afternoon. For those of you who want to emulate my work, I found Bill Bryson's book invaluable. I have sent back a hamster, a cheese sandwich, and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, to 1976. They have all returned none the worse for wear. Mrs McMuffin will not consent to being a subject of my temporal experiments, but it is for the good of all mankind. Therefore, later tonight when she has dozed off in front of the television, I intend to use my time machine to send her back to 1982. I am torn. Does the end justify the means?

News: Mrs McMuffin is missing. Mr McMuffin says: I have no idea when she has gone, one minute she was sleeping in front of the TV and the next she was gone. The Police are appealing for anyone who has knowledge of her whereabouts to come forward.

.mac alias

I thought I was being really clever. I set up a .mac alias for Mr and Mrs McMuffin so that we could email people without giving away our real address. I set up a separate account in Mail and I thought that was that. But, the way it all works is that it duplicates your in box, so instead of currently having 412 messages I ended up with 824. I decided to delete all the messages in the newly created mail box, and YOU know what happened. Yes, I managed to delete all my emails. Fortunately they only go back a couple of months, but I lost quite a few addresses that I hadn't got around to saving in my address book. Oh, well.

call me

I got a new phone today. A Sony Erickson T630, which was my free upgrade to the T610 I have been using over the last year. Very nice phone by the way. The T630 seems to be exactly the same phone with a slight makeover. I suppose the screen is a bit sharper too. Anyway, I have now set up the T610 for Mrs McMuffin, who has refused to use her phone, a Siemens C35, since I got the Sony last year. She claims that she doesn't like mobile phones, but I noticed her looking at my new phone with lust in her eyes, and then she stopped using her own, admittedly inferior, one. She almost sounded excited when I told her that I had cleared out the T610 for her and put her numbers into it. Although she later denied this.

It got me thinking about the first mobile that I got for Mrs McMuffin. I bought it for her birthday about five or six years ago. A house brick thing by Phillips, but it wasn't the biggest one around by any means at the time. We met up with Ms Gypsy Tart at a local pub after work on her birthday. I gave her my present, and she excitedly unwrapped it. She looked at it, and said "why the fuck did you get me this?" She put it to one side, and opened Ms Gypsy Tart's present, looked at it, and said "what am I supposed to do with this?" I have to put the pain of that moment to one side for now, so that I can carry on with my post. I really wanted to talk about the size of the phones. I have taken a picture of all four phones together, and tarted it up a bit. Just because, alright.

A year or so ago Mrs McMuffin's 11 year old neice was desperate for a mobile phone. She was pestering her mum and dad day and night. Out of the kindness of our hearts, we offered her the Phillips phone. Without any hesitation, she said "no, thanks." An 11 year old child turned down our telephone because it was too big and ugly. She was right, of course, but it was so unexpected.

Not sure where I am going with this, so I'll stop here.

la la la la la...

...I can't hear you, Mr McMuffin.

this is why I love dogs...

This is an amazing news story about dogs being able to smell cancer. Right now the best and brightest dog minds in the world are busy trying to work out how to communicate this to their humans. In a separate story, they have discovered that cats can smell cancer in humans too, but they have decided that they don't like the smell, and just as soon as they wake up, they plan to go and live with a neighbour.

word warrior

I just did an online IQ test, and apparently I am quite clever. I won't tell you my score, that would be just too boastful, but here are what the results say about me. I know it's nonsense, but they nearly persuaded me to part with cash for the full results. Be careful. Oh, you do have to sign up with them for your results, but they don't seem fussed about what information that you give them. The test takes about 10 minutes.

Your Intellectual Type is Word Warrior. This means you have exceptional verbal skills. You can easily make sense of complex issues and take an unusually creative approach to solving problems. Your strengths also make you a visionary. Even without trying you're able to come up with lots of new and creative ideas.

I really must do some cleaning now or Mrs McMuffin will kill me.

skype

Is it just me, or does Skype seem like a really good idea? Telephone calls, instant messaging, file transfers (up to 4GB in size) all over the internet, and it's free. You can also buy credits to make calls to old fashioned land lines and mobiles, and that it is incredibly cheap too. Apparently it is an adaptation of all that peer2peer software that has been around for a while. This may very well spell the end of us having a land line. I am very concerned for BT. How will they manage?

Oh, and they have a global telephone directory where you can search for people all over the world. I found a couple of people with the same name as me, one in Canada and one in Japan, and I have sent them an IM just to say hi!

i am man, hear me roar...

I don't believe it. I have finally worked out how to set the clock on our eight years old microwave. The instruction book went the way of all instruction books in our house, much to Mrs McMuffin's disdain. I don't need an instruction book to work out how to use new stuff. Throw a DVD player at me and I can work it out, eventually. I am truly supertechnologist. However, until today, the microwave had me defeated. For some strange reason I just could not work out how to make what is a very complicated system involving four buttons get the machine tell me the correct time. I even resorted to asking Ms Gypsy Tart to set it on one occasion and, God knows, she's not the sharpest tool in the box. Well, those days are behind me now. You know, I might just go and set it a few minutes ahead, just for the heck of it.

proper health information

Warning to Steve, this post contains information about women's bodily functions.

I've lost count of the times women at work have moaned to me about their periods only for me to find out that they're on the pill. When I suggest that they might want to do something about it, they look at me as if I'm mad. This explains what I've been trying to for years.

We try to keep this blog nice and fluffy, but sometimes I find myself becoming irate over some of the things I read at this excellent blog. Can you bloody believe it?

Rant over, let's have a picture of a slinky cat.