>Hello and welcome to another apparel related post about a pair of shoes that we met today. I say that we met them because they really have a personality all of their own. Perhaps they’re designed to provide personalities to people who are sadly lacking.

Here are the offending articles. I declare that they are possibly the worst shoes I’ve ever seen. Bear in mind that I spent a large part of my career wearing a pair of white leather shoes and long white socks so I know ugly when I see it.

Can you imagine the kind of person that is wearing these bad boys? Far be it for me to be casting nasturtiums, but I think he/she may consider himself to be rather streetwise and a little bit gangsta. I could see Fred Durst in a pair of these in his next homemade porno.

I give these abominations a mr. mac hideousness rating of: -18 / 20043

>Depending on your levels of literacy and powers of observation, you might know that I have some children. “Some” may be three (it was at last count) but it just sounds better to number them as some rather than three. And let’s face it – it’s all about the champagne comedy here.

Anyway, I felt compelled to mention my middle son after reading this post of the lovely ms. mac. You see, this particular son o’ mine is cursed with an exceptionally high intellect. This manifests itself as an eccentricity bordering on tortured genius. You know, the kind of general malaise that curses chestnuts for their indolence, that kind of thing.*

James has a tendency to display casual indifference to most things in his life, indeed he is most happy when he’s playing games or with toys by himself in his room, when his brothers are out destroying corn fields. But occasionally, there will be something which piques his interest and then he absorbs every bit of information about it that he can find. This time his obsession is the dramatic effects of Hurricane Katrina and this new one, Rita. He was quite disturbed by the footage from New Orleans, but not in a childish way. Rather he was thinking about what would happen to the people in the aftermath and how will they get backto normality – a quite mature and adult perspective.

A few weeks back, we let him watch The Day After Tomorrow (a stinker IMHO, but the kids seem less fussy) and he really enjoyed the “science” parts about the meteorology etc. You remember the bit where the three storms were all converging across the northern hemisphere? He certainly did, because when he saw the weather reports of Katrina on CNN, he immediately drew a reference back to the movie.

Today he watched CNN before heading off to catch the bus for school and saw similar footage of Hurricane Rita. I can just see his mind processing the info and out popped the question ” Mum, are you ABSOLUTELY sure we don’t need to be preparing for a snap Ice Age?”

I think it is dead cool that even with his powerful intellect, he still trusts his mother and I to sort things out for him. If we say no, he can accept that the Ice Age isn’t coming just yet. You’d think that for someone so smart, he would have realised by now that we’re relying on him, and the sooner he turns things around for us all, the better.

Mind you, I did catch him looking up directions on the internet for making a tinfoil hat, so who knows how he’s going to turn out.

*I bloody love Dr. Evil. Possibly one of my favourite characters of all time.

>

I subscribe to the Urban Dictionary Word of the Day. They have some absolute ball-busters, and today’s is no exception:

Assvice

eg “Thanks for the assvice, but I think I’ll do it my way.”

Can’t you just see Scott Evil making a comment like this? Ass!

>On Saturday, I had the privilege of attending the Sauber company open day where excited Sauber employees got to show their friends and family around the factory for the day.

For an F1™ buff like myself, it was an absolute blast. We got to see plenty of exciting stuff like the designers workspace and the testing and simulation area. We also saw the carbon fibre manufacturing area where they make virtually every component of the car. There was also access to the mechanical construction areas where they assemble the gearboxes, engines, suspension and even the race bays where they actually put the cars together for the coming events.

However, there were virtually no pictures allowed to be taken. If you were McLaren, Ferrari or Renault I could understand – people might want some of your technology. But Sauber???? They wouldn’t even let us take pictures in the wind tunnel area which they had set up as a kind of museum with one of every car that Sauber has ever raced in various forms of motorsport.

Thankfully, I had the opportunity to flaunt the rules and took a couple of pics. The proximity to the cars and the lack of people running around them was unprecendented for a pleb like me so I had to take my chances.

This was a C24 (2005 model) in the reception of the factory and there was no one about. You can see that security was assured by the red and white tape so I knew my chances were limited. However I started by making a study of the front wheel.

Then, thinking I would do a sort of arty piece focussing on components, I boldly breached security and stepped over the barrier and approached the car. I felt like the flashing lights and guard towers would pop up at any minute so I stealthily covered the 8 feet to the cockpit. In spite of the clearly written Bitten nicht beruhren, I leant against the car to take this awesome shot of the steering wheel

Then one of the wags I was with said “Hey, can’t you read. Please don’t touch.” I freaked for some reason (obviously nowhere near as hardcore as I project), stood up too quick, bashed into the side pod of the car with commensurate amount of noise and then quickly turned and shouldercharged the potted tree you see to the left of the car. All in my haste to get out of the No Man’s Land around the car.

I just about knocked the tree out of the pot and scattered those little red hydroponic stones all over the white tiles. What a bloody palaver!!! I was so embarrassed, I look as if I’d been painted Maranello red. It can be so hard to look cool at times.

It was another fine mess I’d gotten myself into. Imagine the embarrassment if my new best friend Peter* had caught me.

Luckily, he didn’t see me and as you can plainly see, we are the very best of friends.

Stay tuned for my story about my stupidity with the coffee maker this morning – I wasn’t just a knob-end, I was the whole bloody thing!

*For those of you who don’t know, that is Peter Sauber, owner and team principal of SauberF1

>

Thanks be to the buxom wench ms.mac for the link to this here quiz.

>Garrr, today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

So shall ye, a post in pirate talk , this day write. Garrrrr, else ye be flung into the depths of the sea like the scurvy dogs ye be. Then ye can explain yourselves to Cap’n Davey Jones, though I don’t fancy y’r chances with a bloodthirsty pirate like ‘im.

Now get y’r scurvy backsides to work and make y’r own pirate post! Else ye be tastin’ the kiss of the Cat across y’r lazy backs!

I be off to visit that lusty wench ms. mac now. She be just the sort that loves a bloodthirsty pirate to kidnap her and hold her ransom for a 1000 doubloons and a barrel of rum.

>I like to be bombarded by spam as much as the next person, but I found this particular email to be quite amusing.

From: “Nona Haley”

The Only Clinically Tested Penis Enlargement Pills that works..

- add 1-4 inches to your peniis
- 20% thicker
- 5x more enjoyable orgasm
- or your monneyy back without question ask!

Join millions of delighted users which has been benefited
with Maxxlength3.

http://www.maxxsize.us

Apart from the fact that I only have one penis so I shan’t be adding any inches to my penii, the purpose of saturation advertising is to put enough copies of your link out there to get a few bunnies to click on it and then a few of them might buy your product, right?

The thing is though, if your product actually can make my knob 4 inches (!!!) bigger and I can enjoy 5 times better orgasms why did I have to hear about through the trusted medium of spam???

Note to manufacturers of miracle products:
If your miracle product actually works, advertise it on a billboard sized TV in Times Square or at Piccadilly Circus. Granted, it will cost a lot but at least people might actually believe that your product is worth something and then come and buy it. After all, you wouldn’t spend your hard-earned money on a scam so why should we?

I can see why some people wouldn’t want us to all take this miracle product though. When all of our knobs are 4 inches bigger nothing will have changed except that we will feel like we are all looking at our knobs through magnifying glasses, and then who has won? Relatively speaking, all of our knobs will still have the same variations in size that they do now. Pornstars will have 20 inch knobs and people will snicker in the changerooms at the guy with the eight incher.

I predict that if the manufacturers of this miracle product do follow my marketing strategy, disaster will befall us all. The earth’s axis will be tipped off line and there will be an unprecedented and irreversible climate change for the worse. The next ice age perhaps. Then we’ll need a new miracle product to cope with the detrimental effects of shrinkage and things will just go from bad to worse.

Kudos for marketing your product in a responsible and sensible fashion, Ms. Haley. Your commitment to the welfare of humanity is admirable. I for one, realise that you spamming me is nothing more than me contributing to your noble efforts. Keep serving me up that spam. I have some other email addresses you could use too. Also, please find attached my entire email address list for your use so that you may continue the good works.

P.S. Thanks for the remarkable results I have seen over only a four week course of your miracle product. My wife and I have been pleasantly surprised by the remarkable results. Please debit my visa card 5345 8867 3411 0443 every month till further notice.

—End transmission—

>Hi All,

This is my first blog for a while. I have been in a mild funk and wasn’t really up for too much blogging but things are moving along so here we are back on track.

Firstly, I was trying to do some work on a laptop for a friend whose Windows XP had crapped itself. I tried everything and it simply would not reinstall. Everytime it got into the process, it would overheat and shut down. Bugger! Perversely though, it installed Linux perfectly and without a hassle – found all the hardware, hooked up to the wireless network here at chateau mac during the installation (XP has never done that!!!) and basically worked really well. The upshot of this was that I told my friend I couldn’t get Windoze to install, would he like to learn a whole new operating system. He had a particular Windoze application that couldn’t run properly in a Linux emulator so he said no – I could keep it. He has decided to buy a new laptop and I’ll help him to set that up and get his special program running. Score!!!

Only problem is that now I am even more of a geek than before and also an advocate of open source software. Poor ms. mac – she has to put up with me sitting here learning how to use the command line and zzzzzzzzzzzz…………..
_________________________________

Tonight we went to the Gewerbe Ausstellung which was an exhibition of farm machinery (since we live in a semi-rural area) at the local school. An interesting affair. The lovely ms. mac has a post coming up about the tractors etc, so I won’t steal her thunder but will show you some amazing trees (Bäume) that were for sale (Zu Verkaufen)

Check out the beautiful flower on the right. Then there was this one:

This one is even better developed than the previous.

The look on the lovely ms. mac’s face is due to the prices. The first one came in at a fairly reasonable

Your eyes are not deceiving you, that is CHF 18’750.–

The second was the kicker, it comes at an astonishing

CHF 38’500.– That is a lot of cash for a tree in any currency. I’m not saying that they are expensive cos it’s in Switzerland, I’m saying it’s dear cos it’s a tree.
_________________________________

Finally, we found James bike, which had been stolen from the Velo Keller a couple of weeks ago. It was nicked by the little shit down the road, who resprayed it and then he was riding it around the village!! At least in Hoppers when they nicked your bike, they had the decency and good sense to sell on the other side of Melbourne. Went down to see the kids parents and they are going to foot the bill for a new one. Result!

>When does too much fun become dangerous to your health? Whilst enjoying the hell out of more than one bottle of flavoured Absolut vodka, we chanced across something that we cannot identify. Maybe you guys can help us to identify this affliction.

Is it leprosy?

Is it the plague?

Or is it just a Ropey Old Bird having WAAAY too much fun?

I know what I think. The Knapps and the Macs have had THE best week ever in the history of awesome weeks. We know you wish you were here, but we’ve decided that the circle is complete and we’re really not interviewing anymore – sorry.

>This just in from the Urban Guerilla Photgrapher / Blogger:

Whilst waiting for young master James to get off his plane on Wednesday, this abomination was spied trundling his baggage through the arrivals area.

The question on everyone’s lips is of course: What shop even sells pink denim in mens (or even adult) sizes?

I swear that the “dress-sense” of some people boggles the mind!!

*wonders if there are any specific rules relating to the amount of pink denim you are allowed to bring into Switzerland with you?*

Who’s looking after the no-fly list at his departure point?