Good Try Lazy Twat!

So you're lazy, but you want to get a lot of money all at one time. You're too unlucky to win the lottery and too repulsive, both physically and emotionally, to marry someone rich. On no! What are you ever going to do? Why...you try some of that good old fashioned Australian engineering (no, not wombat fucking) and sell your life on E-bay!

Basically this guy got so depressed about being a loser that he tried to sell his entire life. House, car, job, friends, etc, etc, etc all up for sale. What was his life worth on the open market? $384,000 US dollars! Which is about the value of just his house. That's, ummmmm, that's not good Aussie guy. I wonder if the new owner will get to bang his ex-wife? That's could be a boner, I mean bonus. Unless she's a monstrous shrew, then $384,000 cash and a shack in Oodnadatta sounds pretty good.

Look out wombats! There's a new man on the prowl! Or walkabout. I guess that's what they call it down under.



Side note; I can't really make fun of this guy too much. If I could get $384,000 for my life I'd sell in a second. As it is I think I'm worth about $483.00. And that's only if you sell my blood plasma.

Badlands Booker

This has always been one of Danny and my favourite photos on the internet:
We had no idea who it was, but it is guaranteed to make us laugh. Why is he wearing that awesome helmet? Because eating that burger is dangerous?

Anyway, today we found out that that guy is none other than Badlands Booker. Former professional eater.

Not only that but also:

Badlands Booker is the finest competitive eating-themed hip hop star in the world.

Enjoy.

What is the hilliest city in England?

I think the hilliest city I've ever been to in England has to be Bristol. Is this why the government has made it Britain's first cycling city? I can't think of many cities that'd be more crippling to cycle around. Well, half the time, half the time it'd be the easiest city to cycle around I suppose.

On average it's flat... shit that sounds dangerously like maths, and I promised Danny no more maths.

Fending for myself

My girlfriend's going away for the weekend, to see her sister, so I'm going to have to do everything for myself this weekend. It shouldn't be allowed.

I definitely will be doing loads of useful housework and won't just spend the weekend sitting on the sofa watching football and eating crap food. Definitely.

Five a day

I was just reading this critique/discussion of the Government's "Five a Day" fruit and veg scheme. I wanted to have a look at what the government considers a portion of each type of fruit and veg.

So I put five a day unquoted into google and it came up with the following :

five a day = 5.78703704 × 10-5 hertz

A brilliant bit of maths there from Google calculator. Do you eat portions of fruit and veg at 5.8 X 10-5 hertz?

Oh god. I'm the world's biggest nerd.

Who needs maths? You.

I was just reading this article on BBC News about the problem we have in the UK of not enough people studying maths, and the general cultural issue of maths being seen as difficult and uncool to be good at.

I always thought it was weird that people have this attitude towards maths, at my house when I was little maths was always talked about as a fun interesting thing, and possibly as a result of that or possibly because of some mental aptitude I always found it really easy. I did Maths, Further Maths and Physics A-Levels because the amount of duplication on the courses meant it was much less work than three completely different A-Levels. And you got no essays to write.

The thing that really surprised me about that article is that you have proper adults, presumably out working in the real world, saying they don't use maths in the real world. Really? What jobs are they doing? Even if you aren't doing a mathematical job there are tons of areas where you use maths every day.

eg. in light of current housing market problems I have been making a few calculations around mortgages. A simple calculation might be if house prices drop by x% how much would I have to overpay my mortgage by to make sure I have paid off enough of the loan to be able to get a remortgage deal this time next year? (too much)

People must be working stuff like this out all the time. What difference will a fuel price rise of 5p make to my monthly fuel costs? How many people spend any time at all having to work with spreadsheets, performing computations on rows and getting complex reports out? Or have to create or read any kind of graph? That's all maths. Builders need to work out stuff like "how much cement will I need?", or "given that VAT is 17.5%, how much should I knock off for cash if I'm not going to declare this to the taxman?", or "how much of this weeks salary can I send back to Poland?". What kind of surcharge will I have to pay for my flight at the check-in desk if I weigh 220lbs, my bag is 33lbs and it's a 5$ surcharge per kilo for every kilo, or part thereof over 100 kilos.

Perhaps people don't realise how much maths they are using when doing stuff like that.



The other day I had to work out the difference in area between taking a circle for a "within x miles" calculation and just using a square.* I ended up having a discussion with a drunk friend of my brothers that evening. He actually said "When does anyone use something like geometry in the real world?".

Sometimes knowing a bit of maths and being able to work something out makes life easier, sometimes it's quite fun to be able to work something out. It can also save you money and money = work therefore maths = good.

*Answer is that the square is 4/π times larger, or the area of the circle is 79% of the area of the square.

That'll be a $500 surcharge fatty

So, airlines are thinking about charging passengers fees based on how much they weigh. Or maybe they aren't, because they know the practicalities of it might be a little difficult. "Would you mind stepping on the scales madam?" "YES!". What about the fattest man in the world? What would he pay?

We've already heard stories of people wearing most of their clothes to get on the plane, so they didn't have to pay an excess baggage surchage, so what would people do to get around this? Airlines being airlines they wouldn't give you money back off your ticket if you were under their average weight, just add a surcharge if you were overweight. This could lead to a black market in getting skinny people on the same flight to carry your stuff for you. Of course, it could be 5lbs of heroin and land you in a Thai prison awaiting the death penalty so do be careful.

In many ways it doesn't matter. You'll be getting the train or something won't you? You don't want to be a planet raping bastard who's killing the planet by flying do you? Even if it is much quicker and cheaper and easier and the only downside is having to cut down on the Big Macs to keep the ticket price down.

Happy belated birthday to us!

Yeah, we were too lazy to even blog about our own blirthday. Blogday. Birthblog....no, that would be gross. Blirthday day it is. Apparently it was May 31st. So happy birthday to us.

And congratulations Mike Deez Nuts on 1 semi-successful year. It was semibecause I managed not to get arrested or killed by a samurai, but we didn't get rich. Oh well.

Shame on all you twats for not wishing us a happy birthday. Part of blogging is being an attention whore. And that's part of having a birthday too. Nobody paid attention to us. :(

Happy Birthday LazyView!

I just realised we totally missed our first birthday. Happy Birthday to all of us at LazyView, from all of us.



We posted 214 times over the course of the year. We aimed to make an average of 1 post a day so we're 152 posts short (I think it's a leap year). Surprisingly that means we posted about 71% of our target, even though we only hit our target for the month 3 times.

We did only post 59 of those posts in the second 6 months though, a pathetic 1 post every 3 days. Never mind.

Oh and I told Danny we missed the birthday so he's blogging too. He'll probably invent some stupid phrase like Blirthday to describe it.

Dishwasher Wars

I just stumbled across this blog post on the Guardian website. It describes the running battle this blogger has with his partner "The Baker" in the kitchen and especially over the dishwasher. I'm sure "The Baker" is some kind of hitman, possibly an Italian American version of Bunman.

Back in the early days of Lazyview (nearly a year ago!) I mentioned my own struggles with the dishwasher. Anonymous commenter said they had a meticulously stacked dishwasher. I was fairly shocked. It has stuck in my mind all this time and I'm reminded of it whenever I see a dishwasher and this article brought it all back. Now we have someone else claiming that they painstakingly rinse their plates and carefully organise the dishwasher. What's the point? If you've gone to all that trouble you might as well just have hand washed the dishes in the first place WHICH IS WHAT I HAVE TO DO NOW BECAUSE I HAVE NO DISHWASHER SO SHUT UP COMPLAINING YOU STUPID GUARDIAN BLOGGER OR THE BAKER WILL BAKE YOU INTO A PIE!

Mmm pie.

Incidently, I read somewhere that dishwashers have dirt sensors, and if the dishes are all basically clean they turn down the cleaning power.