Teh Webolg

Just a very quick message to say that the site is still here, just about, and will be updated as soon as there`s something new to slap online! It`s a bit like the lame days of the 1990s - I`ll get some "Under Construction" GIFs onto the pages.

So what`s been happening? Well life-wise quite a lot I guess - moved house, up to my eyes in work, and really don`t have a lot of time to do stuff. Rubbish excuse, but it`ll have to do for now. I should have some time in August to do stuff. Try to contain your excitement. I`d like to make the site look a bit less crap, but having not touched PHP in well over a year now, that`ll take a bit of time to master, and it might be worth asking someone who knows how to make a site look non-shit for advice!

On top of this, some muppet keeps sneaking onto the server (it`s shared hosting) and injecting crap into my code, so you may have seen malware warnings and pages vanish. How very professional. I checked file permissions etc. and all is OK there, so I can only assume they`ve got onto the server by exploiting something a bit higher, like cpanel. Meh! So another thingie I`ll need to do (cos I`m losing faith here in the hosting company) will be to set up something from home to check the pages, and fix `em if they get overwritten.

Anyway, feel free to love the crappy animated GIF. I couldn`t find the colour cycling rainbow horizontal line for the authentic 1990s feel.

After much hmming and haaing and general persuasion from a couple of people, I`ve been talked into growing a moustache and trying to get a bit of sponsorship in aid of the Everyman cancer charity. The aim is to raise as much money as possible by growing a rubbish moustache for the month of September.

I hope to hack together a little bit of script soon that will pull down the recent images and donations, so they`ll appear here. In the meantime, please chuck a couple of quid if you can at the just giving tacheback page!

Photos have been thrown together on flickr

Apologies for lack of updates on the site for a good 9 months really! Talk about life getting in the way of wasting time! Hopefully over the next few weeks and months new stuff will start appearing! Expect some extra spammage of TacheBack to appear throughout the site until the end of September too!

You can also partake in the TacheWars and pick your favourite facial fashions!

And a warm headstaggers welcome to 2007 to all you lovely people.

Hats off to the BBC. They may get paid a shitload of money via a stealth tax on anything capable of doing anything with radiowaves (some day I`ll tell you about the row I had with TV licencing because I bought a bloody standalone aerial), but by god this has made my festive season.

The real Jim Branning, actor John Bardon has been appearing on a charity show where celebrities get to strut their stuff and attempt to sing. They are then judged by some half-talented musicians, the most important of which would have to be Stewart Copeland, known as a founder member (and drummer) for The Police, and for writing the music to The Equalizer. What a cracking show that was. Robert McCall doing bugger all yet managing to beat the baddies.

Brought via YouTube leechy goodness, here is (the real) Jim Branning in all his glory. FUCK YEAH!

I could almost snuggle up to Jim, skin him, and wear him as a flesh overcoat. Mmmmmmm. Here`s Jim doing Maneater by Nelly Furtado. Truly impressive stuff.




Tina Turnip`s Simply The Best. Well she obviously ain`t - check out JIM!.. John.



... filed under site updates cos I`m lazy and don`t have a Jim section. Oops.

Now added to the Jim songs: Hard To Beat.

My PC seems to be ready to die.. so Jim may need to rest for a little while.

Lazy Jim has been trying to keep warm in the cold UK climate, and has picked up his trusty instrument and twanged his g string for you, dear readers. Contain your excitement. Please.

In this installment, Jim brings you:

* Blackbird - nicked by The Beatles
* Last Goodbye - THIEVED by Jeff Buckley
* Oh What A Circus - stolen by David Essex - Jim`s even demonstrated his War Of The Worlds talents
* Pulling Mussels (From The Shell) - pinched by Squeeze - those naughty Tilbrook and Difford chaps
* Sweet Talkin` Woman - ELO - Jeff Lynne! SHAME ON YOU
* Take Me I`m Yours - Squeeze - nuff said.. Jim`s going round to see those two later on, with a cricket bat

Today it was announced that yet another price increase was on its way to grab Londoners by the bollocks and squeeze out every last remaining drop of financial spunk. It seems that Ken Livingstone is starting to believe his own bullshit that the transport system is getting better. The World`s Best Transport System even. Utter wank.

Day after day after day late overcrowded trains and late overcrowded buses take, it feels, a good 10 years off my life. Who trains these bus drivers anyway? The Stig? It`ll shortly be £2 to travel 1 stop. Great way to entice people into using public transport. Below is a bad photo of another 21 unopened refund forms, and one opened. And another 20 odd claims to put through. Yep, London`s transport is getting better; it`s only an average of 4 delays (15 minutes or more) a week in place of ... 4 delays. Just a quick reminder - you can and should claim for your delays. That`s £66 worth of shit travel for free sitting on the floor, and not to be sniffed at. Even by people with sniffing fetishes.

Now they`re forcing that fucking Oyster card down our throats even harder than before. A bit like the build up to a donkey punch. We`ve already seen that as well as supposedly allowing TfL to plan their services, they retain a shitload of information. Wikipedia is the best, most reliable source of information on the net, of course. This page is great. Illogical use of ticket. Too long spent making interchange. Too long on journey (how the fuck do they work that out when they can`t get from A to B without going via the rest of the Chinese alphabet to get there?). Zig zag through gates.. Disco fever? Passenger may have stiffy? Low blood pressure?

My advice is to pick up a weekly Oyster card. The staff will insist that you need to register it. This is not the case. I have been Oystering for ages, racking up a good 6 cards so far, and have never registered. I have however had to argue with the staff that it is not necessary. Pay by cash if you can. If not, use a good credit card with a bank that has legally agreed not to hand your data out willy-nilly. When you suffer the day-after-day-after-day delays on the tube, make a note. You need the time of journey, starting station, and end station. Wait until you`ve a good 20 or 30 delays to claim. Then pop over to the Tube refund page and fill the details in. Don`t worry about the station of delay, etc. fuck it - you`re not there to do their jobs - just put your journey start station again. They`ll probably move the refund page again.. they have a habit of not only not informing passengers that they can claim refunds, but hide the easiest way to make a claim.


In a few weeks (because it takes ages to process an online form - I wonder how the likes of amazon.com ever took off) you`ll receive a pile of individual refund coupons. They`re so interested in providing a good service that each coupon arrives in its on envelope (see photo). At this point, your Oyster card is tainted, so you must get a new one. Weekly. Non-registered. When you come to refreshing your Oyster, hand over a wad of coupons and any remaining cash in the smallest denomination possible. Pennies seem to cause most annoyance. Repeat until the day you retire. I`m not sure yet what to do with the old ones, but will find a nice way of destroying the chip and leaving the remains of the plastic card for recycling.

Another handy tip I have is for people who need to make journeys outside their Oyster card zones. Mine covers (for example) zones 5-6. Should I need to go into London, I pay over the odds and get a full travel card. Card your way into the station, and swipe your Oyster card out. That`s one recording of you leaving the station, when in fact you`re just starting your journey. Have your lovely evening out, drinking the finest ales, and try to get home. If you manage to make it back without a 2 hour delay (memories of 5 weeks ago come flooding back), swipe out at the end of your journey with your Oyster card. You`ve now technically left the station twice. It`s all about punting duff data into their database. The barriers don`t care if you leave a bit of time between swipes.

Unfortunately you`ll never avoid the multitude of CCTV cameras on a single platform at a small station. That`s for another day, where I`ll risk arrest by trying to count the number of CCTV cameras at my local station. Probably be branded a terrorist for that one.

As much as I hate London`s transport and the twats who operate, run, and manage it, it produced this wee beauty of a blog. In every shit weblog post, a little gem...

In the meantime, I`ll be claiming another 20 odd delays, getting a new Oyster card, and repeating all over again. All because I have nothing to hide, and object to people recording everything I do just so it can be proven I was doing nothing. Assuming I don`t get shot in the head for looking a bit foreign, or carrying a rucksack, or wearing a coat on a sunny day...

Wankers. Waste of space, and waste of money.

Have re-done the gallery. It`s probably a bit flakey at the minute, and I need to re-categorise all the pics and ditch the really bad ones (the worse than usual rubbish ones), but it should be grand until I get some time to fix it all up.

I`ll add a little search thingie at some point in the future. There`s probably a lot to be said for being unemployed and having time to hack this stuff. Ho hum.

As usual, the erotica section of the gallery will probably get the most hits. There are some weird people out there.

Part 1 of the site update is almost complete. A pile of new Jim songs have been added to the music page, and a wee streaming player has been added. Most songs have been upgraded to glorious slightly-better quality sound too. Before you listen, it might be worth picking up a few boxes of Kleenex, because this stuff is gonna blow your mind. Maybe.

Jim`s been too lazy to transcribe some of these lovely tunes wot he wroted and were stolen by the bastard stars of today`s hit parade, but promises he will add them later on.


Part 2 of the update will be a new gallery thing, which should look a bit less pants, but I wouldn`t recommend nipping down to William Hill and putting a fiver on it just yet.

The BBC web site has a little section for sending Sebastian Coe some questions. I decided to send in a few, just so they can be ignored.

Here are were my questions:


I`d like to know why this money is being wasted on hosting the olympic games when hospitals are closing, people are out of work, and land is being repossessed and businesses being shut down.

I`d like to know why a city that can`t transport its residents around is expected to cope with extra visitors.

I`d like to know when Old Trafford became part of London and if its use is provided free; if not, are the residents of Manchester being forced to pay?

I`d like to know why we, the non-supporting residents of London were not given a way to oppose this disgusting waste of money.

I`d like to know why London is the be all and end all of these olympics, and therefore why money is being wasted on UK-wide roadshows. If Germany could manage to host the World Cup without centralising the event in Berlin, why does the UK not receive the same treatment?

Does the olympic committee plan to waste money each year celebrating the winning of the right to host the games?

Why are we expected to pay for this event? Given that corporates will be allocated the majority of tickets for sponsorship, does anyone at your side of things honestly believe the people of London will benefit in ANY way, other than those planning on milking the property market?

Proof proper that the internet is packed full of wankers. Wouldn`t mind giving these bozos a few "glory bumps" via my size 10 boots.

Short`n`sweet.

Some new stuff for the site on the way, as soon as I`ve written it. Rant rant rant.