Let them know it’s Lard-Aid time
‘I am now extremely worried about the lard shortage, and feel something should be done,’ says Dave Streather. ‘How about
organising Lard-Aid, and composing a suitable song to promote it?’ Only if you lot write the song.
‘I have enough spare around my waist that I’m sure could help. A bit of liposuction and everybody would be better off,’ says Lewis Utley, getting donations off to a cracking start.
‘Lard is NOT the tip of the iceberg. If it had been, the Titanic would not have gone down,’ says John Blenkinsop, adding that he eats M&S sandwiches and does not have a beard.
Finally, Ian Gomeche points out that if you’re looking for ideas about what to do with your solid fats over Christmas, Last Tango in Paris is being shown on TV.
Sing-a-long-a-homophone
Two homophone carols for you this week, courtesy of Julie Maddison. First: Wreath Wreakings. ‘Wreath wreakings sulphur Ian tar/Bare ring if tease sweet rabble a Pharr/Feel Dan found inn more hand mount inn/Fall owe wing yawned oars tar/O’s tar off one dust tar off knights/Tar whither oil boo tea bee write...’
‘I struggled with this one,’ she says. Not as much as we did, Julie.
And so we conclude our homophone poetry with her finest contribution: ‘Oak camel leaf hay fall/Gee oil fall land try am fan/Toe cam me oak commie two Beverley hem/Command bee hoe old hymn/Bourne thinking avenge gels/Oak ham lettuce a door hymn... Cry stir flawed.’
Extreme beards
Last week’s ‘inverse goatee’ excited much comment.
‘I think it is a true goatee, but you’ve been sent a colour negative,’ points out Dave Harris. More pictures of your bad facial hair please. We’re particularly interested in beards without moustaches and anything in an unexpected colour, with champagne for the worst.
And the winners are…
It being the end of the year, we’d like to say thanks to you for filling Backbytes with your informed, amusing or just abusive email. That’s why we’d like to offer our awards for 2004.
Best waste of time: We were briefly entertained by your stories of ancient computers that could be persuaded to play songs when you fed them with the correct punched card. But seeing as anyone under 50 is unlikely ever to have seen one, this is a pleasure denied to most of us. So the best waste of time this year was the challenge to make up your own IT epitaph, which kept you going for three months. For those who found it all too much effort, Tony Holroyd’s suggestion: ‘This stone intentionally left blank’.
Most pointless argument: We were tempted to pick the debate on whether you can use a mobile phone on an aeroplane, and if not, why not. In the end, we think the best idea was an anonymous suggestion from a reader: ‘Maybe airlines should allow people who want to try their phones in flight to step outside to use them.’
Certainly the powerful arguments on what the plural of mouse mat should be gave us great pleasure, but we preferred Wayne Carter’s poser: is one of those fun-sized Twixes with one bar in really a Unix?
Silliest survey: The survey that showed that 95 per cent of advertising and marketing professionals have had an office affair, but only 54 per cent had done so in IT was certainly poignant. Instead, we choose the survey that showed that 75 per cent of people would tell a stranger conducting a survey their password in exchange for a bar of chocolate. As reader Chris Osborne points out, this proves that 25 per cent are too stupid to make up a fake password to get free chocolate.
Most disgusting activity: The all-you-can-eat lunchtime buffet at Pizza Hut, where unless you can get at least 16 slices in, you don’t even get a Backbytes mention. Enjoy Christmas lunch.
Fat’s the way, aha, aha, I like it
Concerned letters continue to flood in about the national lard shortage. We can’t believe that it isn’t getting more coverage, and are expecting our in-depth coverage of the scandal to secure us an award for investigative reporting in the near future.
‘Have you considered the possibility that it’s all a marketing ploy for the new product: "I Can’t Believe It’s Not Lard"?’ asks Mik Towse, of xemik.net.
‘I’ve had to grease my bread tins with butter for some weeks now, which is far less effective,’ says a reader too embarrassed at this culinary faux pas to reveal his name.
‘The other potential conspiracy is that there’s a shortage as the stuff gets used – in ever greater quantities – to persuade flavour into such things as fast food, so there’s less remaining for those of us with greasing needs. A public inquiry, perhaps?’
We will be calling for one at the earliest opportunity.
Lip service
After last week’s survey on the prevalence and shape of facial hair in IT, Chris Bell raises a valid point. The survey revealed that 45 per cent of chief information officers and chief executives had moustaches, prompting Chris to wonder how many of those surveyed were, in fact, female.
Hairy monsters and super geeks
And on that subject, we really shouldn’t encourage you, but we always do. Our latest mistake was in asking you for pictures of your unusual facial hair.
‘Behold the wonder of the inverse goatee,’ writes Matthew Harris. ‘Hair where the goatee decrees there shall be no hair, no
hair where the goatee decrees there shall be hair.’
Why? we scream in anguish, but there isn’t an answer, so let’s just stare in bewilderment.
Sound the alarm
We’ve often made fun of BT this year, and we’d like to say we’re sorry, but instead Jason Clarke, at East Sussex County Council, sends in this excellent piece of business logic culled from BT.com, explaining burglar alarm call-out charges.
‘If your burglar alarm fails caused by a fault on the line and you have to call out a supplier to reset the alarm, we will not compensate you for this expense. The problem, and hence the expense, arises because the line becomes faulty, not because we failed to repair it within our guaranteed time.’
High am dray minger far why tuck wrist mass
All together now… our search for homophone poetry has inspired reader Julie Maddison, at Emerson Process Management, to create a Christmas carol songsheet.
We don’t have space for all the verses of all the carols, but we can bring a couple to you this week, so you can photocopy them and use them to torture your family at Christmas:
We begin with: ‘Won sin Roy old aphid settee/Stewed hello lee cat hells head/Wear a moth her lay dare bay bee/Inn a mange her four abed/Mare wee woz the at moth her my old/Gee suss cry stir lit tell chi old…’
And pray join the chorus of: ‘Weary shoe a mare week wrist mass/Weary shoe a mare week wrist mass/Weary shoe a mare week wrist mass/Sander ha pee knew ear/Goo tie ding sweep ring/Two Ewan Dorking…’ and that’s as much as we can bear.
Next week: We bring you the words to Oak ham lettuce a door hymn.
So long, sandwiches
We trust the 800 of you who claimed our sandwich recipe list by emailing ‘yum’ to Backbytes have stocked up on essential ingredients for the fillings: imagine having bread, and then realising you have no Angel Delight to put inside it. What a fool you would feel.
For 2004’s final word on sandwiches, we turn to IBM’s Neil Adamson, who used to fight in an Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment as a gunner on a Scorpion Combat Vehicle.
‘On exercise, the gunner’s sole role was to keep the commander and driver plied with coffee or tea (to keep them awake), and with food,’ he writes. ‘We lived on Composite Rations, known as Compo. Essentially, everything came out of a tin.’
The full breakfast would be tinned sausages, tinned bacon grill, tinned baked beans and fried bread, but often this took too long to prepare.
‘A quick and simple alternative: we were issued oatmeal blocks (tinned), about half an inch thick. Take one and apply a thick layer of processed margarine (out of a tin). From a tin of processed cheese, cut a slice and apply it to the buttered oatmeal block. From a tin of jam or marmalade, apply a thick layer. If you needed a sugar boost, it was entirely reasonable to add a spoonful of sugar.’
Delights like this could keep you up for four days or more at a time, Neil explains. That’s probably how long it took to chew the first mouthful.
Fat’ll be the day
Shock news: it seems the British lard shortage is actually real – and we just thought it was a silly newspaper story designed to fill space.
‘My mum popped into her local Co-op to buy some lard for her seasonal mince pies and found they had none,’ says Angela Walker, at Skynet Applied Systems. Alan Homer, at Worksuite, reports that his local supermarket has only a gap on the shelf where the lard used to be (this is in Solihull, in case you are thinking of visiting and not bringing your own saturated fats).
‘It’s been that way for at least three or four weeks now,’ he says, suspecting covert government involvement in a bid to change our eating habits. ‘Hopefully, it will return because lardy cake is difficult without the lard… What if lard is the tip of the iceberg? Perhaps butter will be the next in line.’ It hardly bears thinking about.
A hacking good way to get revenge
The moral of this story is: don’t upset Linux people, because they’ll mess you up bad. Chris Hills, at North East Worcestershire College, was the first to send us a screenshot of SCO’s homepage this week, featuring the immortal sales line: ‘We own all your code. Pay us all your money.’ What can the hackers be referring to?
Better el diablo you know
If you really haven’t heard enough about sandwiches yet, then we suggest you pop over to www.danontherun.com/sandwich.htm to find out about ‘el bocadillo del diablo’. Dan has even supplied layer-by-layer pictures. Of his creation. Definitely a man we could do business with, although we wouldn’t offer to buy him lunch.
Let by-gones B-Gone
Andrew Turner writes with an interesting addendum to our discussion of B-Gones. ‘Phil Smith is wrong about MP-B-Gone,’ he says.
If you recall, Phil pointed out that MP-B-Gone already existed: it’s the vote. ‘Voting means you are always stuck with an MP; in fact, not voting has the same effect.’
This remorseless application of logic to dispel our lazy assumptions is what marks out IT professionals from the rest of the population. This, and your unusual beards.
Information comes at a premium
Generally, we prefer to criticise BT’s haplessness when it comes to broadband, but we call it as we see it. And now that reader Andrew Healing points us to Telewest’s Blueyonder ISP help page on premium-rate diallers, we feel we should pass it on to you.
‘You may have heard recently about a new internet scam that uses premium-rate dialler software,’ it says. ‘The unscrupulous groups who use this software fraudulently target unsuspecting internet users, so it is important you take appropriate measures to protect yourself from these scams.’
What would those be? Well, one might be to call Telewest for more information. ‘For further, more detailed advice on removing premium-rate dialler software from your PC, call our dedicated Telewest Extended PC Support number on (0906) 991 0001. Please note: calls are charged at £1 per minute, and call charges from mobiles and some other networks may be higher.’
Poetry cornered
Jonathan Allport supplies this week’s rather good homophonic poem, which we can approvingly report really makes your head hurt, despite the cheating use of a couple of proper nouns.
‘Aye am assist add minister ray tore/Anne bearer grate bird on/Farther Bach up’s Faye Ling nigh tonne knight/Ender ray discoing Ron/Eye Cannes hotel air knee won/Further surfer is bran knew/Butt eat rarely cameo fee bay/Wither place Mattel Lee two.’
To baldly go
We bring relief to those of you who are silently wondering what on Earth you can do about the curse of male pattern baldness while at work.
Research by scientists at Jena University, Germany, shows that some balding men can be treated with caffeine to delay hair loss. There are two ways to accomplish this: either drink between 60 and 80 cups of coffee a day or, more practically for those of you who have to spend at least some time at your desk, smear coffee directly on to your scalp.
Of course, if you do this with a sideways motion, it will have the added benefit of sticking your comb-over more securely to your head as well.
Hair today
Like a junkie who can’t quite get clean, we keep getting suckered by stupid surveys designed to get the attention of columns like ours. That’s why we were relieved to get a really important news release from The Training Camp this week: 47 per cent of males in its survey of IT experts have facial hair.
‘Even more striking was the clear link between pundits’ field of expertise and their beard pattern. For example, 46 per cent of commentators with a deep knowledge of application development were also proud owners of David Bellamy-style bushy pieces. Just over 45 per cent of CIOs and CEOs, on the other hand, were pictured with carefully trimmed moustaches. Bucking the trend were employees of Microsoft, of whom over 75 per cent were completely clean-shaven, independent of job title.’
Of course, if you have interesting facial hair, we’d like to see it. That is, assuming the words ‘interesting’ and ‘facial hair’ can ever be used together.
