» Cheating cheaty cheats

Money forging
A friend of mine once got handed a totally rubbish forgery of a five pound note and only realised when he tried to pay with it. It got me thinking that even if you make a far from perfect copy, people will be unlikely to check a fiver to see if it's forged.

In our computer room at uni we had a colour laser printer which was an awe-inspiring technology back in the day (6 years ago). I ironed a five pound note, scanned it and printed it out a few times which took ages becasue I had to get the front and back aligned on the same sheet of paper. Then I crumpled them up and rubbed them with my fingers until they had that slightly greasy feel. Then i went to a really dingy dark student club and spent them! Only 20 pounds worth, but enough to make me feel like a smooth criminal. But still failed to pull anyone.
(Mon 21st Nov 2005, 9:09, More)

» World's Sickest Joke

Limerick
My favorite sick limerick.

There was a young chap called dave,
Who kept a dead whore in a cave,
He said, I admit,
she does smell a bit,
but look at the money I save.
(Tue 6th Dec 2005, 13:52, More)

» Booze Related Disasters

Stupid, stupid, stupid
Final year of university (not first, for a change) and I get a phone call from a friend who I haven't seen for ages and we agree to meet up. We go to a cheap student club, at some stage we stand at the bar, drink tequilas, get belted, dance for a bit -- all standard stuff. Then I feel I want to go home, a procedure that begins with going to the bus stop. This I do. There I make the acquaintance of two extremely shady characters; the part of my brain that usually tells me when people are Up-To-No-Good has unfortunately been deactivated by alcohol. They ask me if I would like to “smoke some gear” and I think, yes a bit of the ol’ mary jane would go done well now, so why the hell not?

So we head off to find a place to “smoke some gear”. Why don’t we just spark up at the bus stop? This is a question that fails to pop into my booze sodden brain. Why are we, in fact going to one of those city loo /automatic cubicle type things, to smoke? Again I don’t ask. We jam ourselves in the thing and smoke a kind of pipe-like device. My brain goes into a very unsteady orbit, just inside the moon’s trajectory. Eventually I notice that the stuff we are smoking is not green or brown but in fact very white. What is it, I ask. Crack, they reply. Marvellous, I say. We leave the toilet and they suggest going to a party where there will be more “gear” and “loose women”. Great, I reply. If they had suggested that I inject heroin into my eyeball with a rusty needle I would have probably agreed to that too. But before we can go to the party they need money, and –whatdoyaknow— there’s a cash machine right there. So I withdraw 50 pounds of my student funds but don’t give it to them. We get into a mini cab, head for the nearest dealer and I hand him the cash instead. Interestingly they keep the stuff in their mouths in small wraps and can talk away without you noticing it’s even there. Anyway, we drive around some more, go to some more toilets, smoke some more crack, and I eventually realise there is no party. I want to go home. Give me some of the gear, I say. After all, it is technically mine. They refuse. Eventually I relent, leave my new found friends to the gradual and wholesale destruction of their lives and wonder home in a daze. I remember my saliva was as thick as glue in my mouth and feeling very very bad about myself.

And that was the story of how I smoked crack when drunk. Needless to say, it hasn’t happened again.
(Fri 19th Mar 2004, 12:04, More)

» Fire!

Sun, Sea, Sand, Fire
My father is a major-league pyromaniac ( a trait he has passed on to me ) who uses any excuse to make a fire. The bigger and smokier the better. The need to dispose of things usually gives him the best reasons, be it a pile of branches, a tire found in a hedge, or a wendy house beyond repair.

Once the whole family went for a day at the beach with picnic and what-not. And there right beside our towel and piknick-hamper-delineated private territory we find a huge congealed lump of black stuff, with bits of tarpaulin, pebbles, sea weed, ends of frayed rope and other crap all glued into one unsightly mass. This thing, about the size of a tractor tire, presumably started its life as an oil slick and ended it as a lump of nautical blue-tack that just acuumulated more and more random crap.

Once we had set it on fire it burned magnificently, producing huge amounts of pitch black toxic smoke -- as I have mentioned, it was mostly hydrocarbon in nature. Others on the beach decided to move their bases discreetly away rather than start a fight. It was also obvious that nothing short of an airport fire crew could put out the hellish inferno. Anyway, the fire burned down and ended, as all fire sadly do and I noticed on closer inspection that some molten rivulets of plastic "lava" had run out of the fire and down the beach before solidifying into something resembling bakelite. I broke off the tip of one of these lava flows and put it in a plastic bag to remind me of this happy day on the beach.

On the way home I stuck my nose into the bag to admire my trophy and must have breathed some of the air that was in it which by this time was laced with a toxic cocktail of gas. The result was that within three minutes I was hit by a headache so bad as I have never experienced before or after. I suffered in agonising silence all the way home and then went straight to bed.

I wonder what those fumes did to my young and underdeveloped brain.

Apologies for length. I should be debugging a program but found something better to do.
(Thu 3rd Nov 2005, 13:23, More)