"I am a lying shithead trying to sell you something"

Well, that is refreshing, someone who rings you on the telephone and admits the truth.

Unfortunately this did not happen. What did happen was some twat from an Indian call centre that was "ringing me on behalf of Microsoft" tried to get me to allow them to remotely control my PC so that they could "fix some infections that your anti-virus cannot stop" that were apparently "the cause of all those errors and warning messages in your events viewer" - he never once asked me what my warnings and errors were! How do you fix something when you don;t know what is causing the error?

What a cunt! He repeatedly lied to me that he was ringing on behalf of Microsoft, he repeatedly lied to me telling me that the issues were caused by malicious software, he repeatedly lied to me telling me that my anti-virus cannot catch these infections.

If you get a call from "alien touch", or some Indian dude whose English is so bad you need him to repeat it four or five times and then spell it out letter by letter and find out it is "a l i e n t o u c h, sir" just tell them to fuck off and put the phone down.

Luckily I know enough to be reassured that I know what every warning and error on my system is, so after ten minutes of having him explain everything five times, I told him "Look, I'm not going to allow you to connect to my PC - I am a bit of a PC expert, so if you give me the gateway IPs to exclude I can put them in myself." He instantly put down the phone.

I am lucky, there are hundreds and thousands of people out there who, once seeing they have hundreds of warning and errors, may well believe the shit this guy gives them. Rest assured people, most errors and warnings are inconsequential or can be ignored.

If your PC is still running, you have an up-to-date anti-virus, and no-one is sending you mail telling you they got spam from you, when alientouch ring you, just tell them to fuck off.

As a matter of interest, I did tell one guy to fuck off after a five minute phone call trying to get me to fill in a survey on another spam call. I had spent enough time in the middle of a film trying to understand why he didn't comprehend the meaning of me saying "five". The cheeky fucker rang me back and told me he wanted my name and address so that he could sue me for "abusive behaviour" - what a bunch of stupid Indian shitheads! Of course I gave him my address and name ... yeah right!

I hope you scammers all catch a nasty disease and die painful deaths screaming out to whichever elephant god you worship.

(My original post, as Farenheight451, on the Microsoft Answers site

Judge Judy needs flogging

So there I was, sitting on the settee watching ten minutes of Wimbledon while I drank my coffee and prepare for some work I am going to do later tonight. The match finished after five minutes and I started flicking through the channel listings. "Wow," I thought to myself, "Judge Judy, haven't seen that for a while." and I started to watch it.

It turns out that a couple (The Z's) with 4 children, two older boys and two younger girls, had the eldest girls best friend (girl A) stay over. During the course of the evening girl A got a tattoo without her parents consent. In the UK we are a little more lenient with things like sex, which anyone can have fun with if they are 16 or over, whereas the US doesn't allow sex until 18. At the time of the tattoo girl A is 16 - and here we two nations are in agreement, 18 is the age at which you can legally have a tattoo, and not a day before. There was drinking of alcohol involved, legally UK=18 whereas US=21, and girl A was under-age by either standard. The tattooing was performed at Mr Z's neighbours house in his basement, as his family was out that night, and the drinking and tattooing went on until 2 AM - at which point Mr Z goes home leaving his daughter and girl A with the neighbour. Mr Z says that the often leaves his children with the neighbour and this is not unusual.


The girl shows the tattoo, it is the outline of a heart, about half an inch across, and delicately positioned over her right hip. So, with the basics set out, we can see that there are several issues already. It can't possibly get any worse surely? Drinking alcohol under-age, having a tattoo under-age, children up until the early hours of the morning, I'm sure we can see that this is going to be messy.



My coffee finished, I remain watching as this is going to be interesting. How will Judge Judy respond?


For Fuck's Sake! Apparently the issue is not the under-age drinking, the children being up until 2 am, nor the underage tattooing - apparently Judge Judy thinks that the error of judgement was leaving the two girls with the neighbour. She even goes on to tell Mr Z that if she had found that he had left his two daughters with the neighbour she would have called child protective services to have them taken away from him.


WTF!!! Apparently all men, even those that you trust, and have known for years, and have baby-sat your children in the past, will instantly try and fuck your teenage dughters because they cannot resist it. All it takes for a man to do that is to be left alone with girls in the house!


Judge Judy, and anyone who thinks like her should be publicly flogged. If that is how Americans run their country I am disgusted.  

 

OMFG! Why did you say "official site?"

Jeesus! I am sick and tired of all the bullshit that gets spouted out by sites claiming to be the "official" this or that.

Not only that, but most don't even bother to try and give perspective - they are usually some fucking stupid low-life anorak who can't even be bothered to admit the site is as unofficial as a fucking watermelon that claims to have founded Atlantis!

Why? Why bother? Why not just call yourself a "fansite" or "stalker" or summat? You fucking morons!

So many exist it sickens me.

First there was the whole gamut of websites when the net was born, all domain names registered by Mr Small to fuck-up big companies (or did so as a result) who then had to buy the sites off their owners for high fees. Examples include Dennis Toeppen (Panavision.com and Panaflex.com) who offered the Panavision site for $13,000 as it would be "cheaper than suing him". One of my favourites was the guy from San Jose, California, who bought altavista.com for his own software company and sold it to Compaq for $3.3 million in 1999. (NYT article here) The whole thing went a little crazy, especially with things such as AOL successfully getting rights to a site in 2001 registered as Aimster.com, with AOL claiming that they should own it because they have AOL IM - in my mind that is wrong, so wrong.

Then we had websites who claimed to be the official sites of people who we know full well were incapable of understading a computer, let a lone getting a modem hooked up and writing html. Next came the MySpace/Facebook/Twitter bollox, is it really them? is it someone else?

The latest, in fact the one that made me wince the most was the Elmore Leonard "official site" written by his researcher, one Gregg Sutter. There isn't even a fucking word written by Leonard himself, it's all written by this "researcher", who I suspect is only trying to get himself some money because Leonard doesn't need him atm. Anyway, enough of that bollox. There are so many, admittedly most are of a lower calibre than the EL site, after all it is one place that I can find info on my fav TV show, Justified.

http://www.elmoreleonard.com "The Official Elmore Leonard Website"

(P.S. He has his own website at http://greggsutter.com/wordpress/ where he wanks over how he has known Mr Leonard for thirty years)

At the end of the day Joe Public might as well as go for a blind date with some "fit young hot chick" off the net: she will turn out to be a 50yr old guy who lives with his mum in the basement and likes young boys and the "young man seeks older for lessons" will just be 50 yr old Joe who did it for a prank.

Fuck Up Hollywood

OMFG, what is wrong with Hollywood? Let me tell you:

1 No class

2 No imagination

3 Too PC

4 No room for artistic talent

5 Money matters most

It might not matter to most people, but I really feel it's time for Hollywood to do something about it. Who can name any actors from today's talent-pool that can match Gable, Bogart, Brando, Eastwood or Stewart?

In today's money-centric Hollywood I bet your answer is "I can't". It might be because I have spent the last few weeks watching a lot of 30s -70s films, in fact I have now managed to get my top 1000 films bucket list almost completed!, but it might be a more fundamental issue that has caused the demise of European cinema.

I, for one, am sick and tired of all the crappy comic-based films that have become the latest trend - they are getting more and more ridiculous, it's akin to the 50s fascination for cowboy films. I realise that the audience drives the market, but when the audience pays over a billion US$ to see an "avengers" film, something has to be done. Maybe Hollywood will realise that if they make films that aren't explosions every five minutes, or chock full of comic-book characters, they will still have an audience - drive your audiences to strive for more.

The recent spate of remakes surely showed that worldwide audiences might have the attention span of hamsters or goldfish, after all if they have to read subtitles they might drop their popcorn in their lap, but the horrendous remakes of Män som hatar kvinnor into The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Infernal Affairs into The Departed, really illustrate how superb films are remade after only a couple of years for Hollywood to make money out of. In those two cases the Hollywood versions are definitely inferior.

There have been some really good remakes, most notably for me The Last Man on Earth to I Am Legend, Yojimbo to A Fistful of Dollars, Death Takes a Holiday to Meet Joe Black and even Mr. Deeds. Unfortunately remakes such as Assault on Precinct 13, The Italian Job and D.O.A. leave something missing, something perhaps intangible to today's movie-goers: Atmosphere!

With the demise of other countries' cinema we are left with; the USA and their chock-full-of-explosions, China and their actor-on-wires myths, and Indian musicals. To be fair, I am not saying that we should start churning out black & white Swedish films, but I cannot help but think that Europe needs to put more effort into it. So many good European films are not making it to mainstream, most probably due to subtitles, perhaps we need to look at that more thoroughly.

I realise the whole of Europe doesn't speak one common language, but so many speak English I think it is time to adopt it. There are many great actors out there who already span dual languages; Jean Reno, Joaquim de Almeida, Daniela Ruah, Carice van Houten, Mila Kunis ... if only there were more I could think of right now.

Ah well - today's rant over, lets examine some fixes:

1 More money into European cinema

2 Develop talent by convincing youngsters it's ok to act or write scripts

3 Encourage children to spend more time in-front of cameras

4 Keep talent in Europe by paying them more