Chris Worfolk's Blog

Google have started pushing their new browser, Google Chrome.

I will give it a full review once I’ve had a play around with it though first impressions I can’t say I am filled with excitement. It doesn’t seem to have any particuarly innovative features though it does do quite a bit of bragging about features that Opera have already beaten them to.

To be honest though it’s just going to be another browser to have to test and fix for if it takes off. I have enough of these already, we we sure we don’t just want to use one browser like back in the day?

Another Tuesday, another record breaking A-Soc social. This time we managed 18 people just creeping ahead of the previous summer socials and most probably the most well attended event since Rationalist Week 2008. We had more people in there than the rest of The Old Bar put together including both patrons and staff.

There were so many people I wanted to chat to I didn’t manage to make it round everybody though I did manage to beat Oli at pool. It was fantastic to see everyone in good spirits too – Rich returned for a second week which was fantastic, Liz got quite drunk, George was out and about and both Matt’s were brandishing a smile which I am most pleased about.

The evening came close (in a way) with my somehow standing on the steps outside of the union preaching about upcoming events to everyone and though I am reliably informed by a multitude of texts from various people that many of the others went on to party in Hyde Park. Fantastic stuff.

We headed over to Oakwood McDonald’s for dinner this evening.

As I pulled in I found a BMW parked across the pedestrian crossing which then started to reverse and almost went straight into me. I presumed he was just picking someone up and was about to leave so I thought nothing of it.

However as we walked back round we saw the guy in the car talking to some youths and hand them a small bag of something.

We headed inside and having been asked what I wanted I replied, “you know, there is someone selling drugs outside.” The shift manager then disappears off and doesn’t return for 10 minutes. I went out to see if something bad had actually happened – no sign of the shift manager but the car was still sat there and greeted me with a

what the fuck you looking at?

Luckily, having gone back inside the shift manager re-appeared 5 minutes later so I don’t really know what happened there. Maybe he actually did get killed and replaced with some kind of evil clone. Who knows. The important thing is I didn’t get stabbed, which I think is a line I’m going to end most of my stories on from now on ;).

I really enjoyed Saturday night. Sat in a car park in Castleford eating some kind of chicken wrap.

But as myself and Becky talked the night away we arrived on the scary fact that we are approaching 22. Making our next landmark birthdays 30! I’m almost 30! That’s so old, so amazingly old. I mean, you’re actually past it by then, on the downward slope, your life effectively over. How scary is that?

The figures don’t lie.

Abstinence only education really does work for the Bible belt of America. Almost one million teenagers get pregnant in the United States each year. Teenage pregnancy rates in the states were abstinence only sex education are far higher than those in states that offer proper education.

What does this result in? Lots and lots of young Christians having babies which are then raised to be a whole new generation of Christians. As I said, works fantasticly. Maybe we should be giving out condoms with holes in for freshers’ week?

Having said all that, I didn’t watch a lot of the Olympics mainly because it just annoyed me. We seem to have been a bit too happy, smiley, everything is fine with China. Let’s review a few of the news stories that came out during the games.

The fireworks were pre-recorded.

Nobody turned up so they rounded up groups of students to make the stadiums look full.

To construct the new venues they bulldozed people’s houses with compensation.

People’s families suffered due to the people being involved in the games being taken away to camps so they couldn’t look after their families.

The fancy trains that said “made in China” on them were actually made by a company in Canada – who were ordered to de-badge them and put “made in China” on them in an attempt to stop people associating said term with crap quality. When in fact, of course, it is, hence why they went to Canada for their trains.

They spent a third of their GDP on the games, rather than feed their people.

They decided the young girl who was singing was too ugly so they hid her behind a curtain and put a better-looking girl out there miming.

They managed to perform the closing ceremony without using any amplification on the drums.

They had people carrying “nothing to see here” boards on standby as seen when the Hungarian weightlifter bent his arm back.

Their no doubt equal and fair selection process for the hundreds of people dancing in the stadium somehow presented any overweight or even slightly imperfect people from appearing.

Finally, the coordinator for the ending ceremony of the Olympic games said the western world couldn’t do amazing ceremonies like China did because…

• We respect human rights
• We have no dicipline and stop every 15 minutes for coffee breaks
• We only work 4 and a half days a week
• We aren’t willing to suffer enough
• However he does complement North Korea on their ability to stage such performances.

Did I miss anything?

There are a few things I want to talk about here. We need rather well I thought. Russia beat us to 3rd place in end but but 4th for Britain is really good, after all if there is one thing we are good at it is losing at sports.

Anyway, syncronised diving. It’s not a real sport is it? I mean seriously, you’r just jumping into a pool at the same time. It’s not big and it’s not clever. It’s very good to do at some kind of swimming club with 7 year old kids but an olympic sport? Of course not.

Also, London 2012, how are we supposed to follow this? Well anyway it’s irrelevant as we’re not even going to try. There is already talk of how we are going to hold a more “intimate” games, which basically just means less impressive.

And what was our closing ceremony about? It did have some rather nice features but it was spoilt for me by the fact that the big red bus we had, turned up on time. I don’t really feel that sums up British culture. Oh and the commentator accidentally called Leona Lewis a “superstar.” Finally, in case we hadn’t lost all self respect we ended it with “here’s David Beckham, he’s not going to say anything we’re just showing off.”

Finally, I just want to be clear that the man we sent to represent us in front of the rest of the world – was Boris Johnson. Kept him away from Britain for a while I guess. It’s good to see I’m not the only person who actually uses my jacket pockets.

Good stuff.

Yeah :D.

Life is just expensive. I’m sure it never used to be.

I mean, I came from from Tesco this evening being £100 less well off. Between the £50 I spent on good (I’m not sure how, I only spent £10 on alcohol) and £50 I spent on petrol, it’s just depressing to do a Tesco shop these days. Though it is mighty tasty :D.

The chances are that most if not all of my friends (well technically they aren’t friends, they are colleagues as they are outside the circle) from work are never going to read this blog post. Never the less, I would like to say thanks for this weekend. It’s been amazing.

Having got out at a very reasonable time on Saturday night we settled down on the benches outside for a beer and sat around chatting for a while before heading off to Cass for a sandwhich. It was so like old times. It’s something that has really been missing from the night shift but very gradually, we’re bringing it back.

Sunday night we headed down to the pub quiz to spend our winnings from last week. We didn’t fair quite so well in the quiz this week though we did manage a rather impressive turn-out. We soon found our way to drive-thru and then by a series of interesting events, the car park at Tesco Garforth where we had spent countless nights over the years. Maybe my youth hasn’t quite slipped away just yet.