SIMS 2 and Festivals and Ryan Scair Strikes Again

On a recommendation from Mr. Peter Vigors, we brought SIMS2 into our lives. For those of you who are not familiar with with world of simulated living, SIMs 2 (distantly related to that ol' favourite SimCity) allows you to create neighborhoods and people to live in them (with an amazing amount of detail). What do these people do? They make friends, find jobs, and cook dinner. Why it's so addictive, I'm not sure, but my wife and I have found ourselves sat in front of the computer for hours a day, watching little virtual people go to the bathroom.


Yesterday I came home to find a distraught wife because Social Services had come to take the virtual babies away. And she needed comforting after the virtual Sinéad through a party and no one had fun... I believe her exact words were "I spent 400 pounds on a buffet, why didn't anybody have fun!", accompanied by small sniffles. What's even more ironic is the fact that we now consistently argue over who gets control of the computer and, in general, Sinéad will spend her hard-earned computer time making our SIMs get together with some virtual cuddles...
something is well out of kilter...

General commentary on the UK
Something I find insane about the UK is that, despite the predictably awful weather, there is a continuous series of music festivals throughout the summer known for big crowds, pouring rain, floating tents, and slodging through mud, generally accompanied by sleepless nights, over-consumption of alcohol, and the occasional drug use. What's even more insane is that in general, if one is a festival go-er, one goes to all of them, weekend after weekend after weekend. In addition to this, they think that the rest of the world is like them and admires them for their festivals. The looks I got when I acknowledged that I had never heard of the mud fest know as Glastonbury are indescribable. My thirty-year-old mind does not compute.

Why you need to boycott Ryan Air, an essay in two words:
They Suck.

Oh my gawd. Besides all the basic reasons that we hate Ryan Air: cavalier attitude towards customer service, scalping passengers with carry on luggage fees, complete lack of any sort of empathy in any sort of situation for any reason whatsoever, leaving out of such sh*t airports as Stansted and Prestwick, they are also scary as f*ck in terms of safety. I will never ever take a Ryan Air flight again, I don't care if it is £1.99 before the £75.00 in taxes and fees.

This morning the flight attendant didn't shut the door properly. The big door. The door that looks like an eggs and makes a seal with the exterior of the aircraft when it shuts. She didn't shut the door and she had no idea and the plane started to back away from the gate and someone from OUTSIDE noticed and she had to open it and shut it and it took two flight attendants to shut it properly. Their main role is to make sure that passengers are safe and they did not know their asses from their elbows.

I'm not saying that every employee of Ryan Air is that incompetent but I am so never taking the risk again because if they will hire someone so obviously unsuitable for job in terms of a) common sense and b) physical ability to do the job, I'm sure that there are others. And next time, someone might not notice that they didn't shut the bloody door. [*end rant]

Related Links:
Ryan Air: Caught Napping

Glastonbury Official Site

Glastonbury MUD FOR SALE (what is wrong with these people?)
SIMs2 Support Group (see what I mean?!)

Weddings and Gendarmes and Waterfalls

After an exhausting week in Ireland, complete with Satan's new design for an emotional roller coaster, I had two days at home and one day at work before heading out for a week in the South of France to have a mini-reunion with my friends from Nice and to be a witness for Jo at her and Laurent's wedding in Beaulieu. The wedding itself was held in the mairie of the town where the mayor himself performed the ceremony on his day off bc he knows Laurent from "way back". He mentioned, during the ceremony, that he wanted to see Laurent in a suit because he didn't believe it would happen... well... it didn't really.

From Beaulieu we headed up to Aups and from there it was a coffee in the morning at the Cafe du Grands Cours, next to the "place ombragée", then a day by the lake and exploring wee villages, followed by aperos by the pool, and then a big fat dinner which we should never have been able to eat after all our aperos, but which we stuffed in our gobs anyway.

The reception was held up in Aups on the Saturday and, oh, what a reception. The bride and groom were led into the bar area by the pool (of the villa that they rented on the top of a mountain) by a djembe band. *swish! Laurent, whose job is to be the monkey that shimmies all those big catwalks at musical events to put up lighting and sound, called on his connections and decked out the villa something proper: smoke machine, lighting, speakers in every corner all focused on an outdoor dance floor.

All of this leads us to the fact that solid music blasting at from the top of a mountain until 7:30 in the morning, does not the valley inhabitants happy make. Hence the arrival of the gendarmes, to whom, despite the fact that they arrived in a car up a sinewy mountain dirt path, I was apparently supposed to offer champagne when they came to tell us about the complaints. Personally, coming from the US where that would have been a) a stupid thing to do and 2) a really stupid thing to do, it didn't occur to me to offer the coppers an alcoholic bribe.

At any rate, after having informed the police that a wedding party was the cause of the noise and after them expressing an interest in how many anglophones were present in the middle of nowhere on top of a hill, they backed their way back down the twisty road calling out the general message," Oh, well if it's a wedding... we wouldn't want to interrupt that. Just maybe try to keep it down a little bit. But, you know.... if it's a wedding...".

The response to this by the French DJ en charge... crank it up.

Gotta love France.

Aups is a little village that I've been visiting for the past seven or so years with Jo, who spent summers there as a teenager (lucky bint). We tend to do the same things when we go, paddleboating in the Gorges du Verdon, picnicing by the Lac St. Croix, and stopping for glaces in Moustiers. As you do. This time, with a bit of an itch for exploration, we ventured forth to a new village and new excitement: Sillons-la-Cascade. Chosen specifically because the word cascade was in the name of the village.

Despite the initial terror that the town we were driving into was little more than an épicerie and a tired dog out front, we soon saw a little panneau for the cascade... oh the tremors of excitement that shivered through us as we followed the windy path through olive orchards and past hay bales only to arrive, quite unexpectedly given the fact that we couldn't hear the running water, at a big phat waterfall and an accompanying swimming hole. [photo to come]

Oh hurrah! In my life, so many quests for waterfalls have gone unfulfilled that to arrive at one so bedecked in green splendour of foliage falling from such a height that to see the top one has to tilt one's head back so far that it can't be taken it without the influence of sun shining through spume... truly a moment of unadulterated pleasure. That and I didn't get my a** kicked for leading my friends on a two hour wild goose chase.

Related Links:
Beaulieu - sur- Mer
Aups
Moustiers