Who's got two thumbs and owns a DVD box set for a slightly terrible 80's cartoon about an all-girl rock group?

I am sure lots of people!  But also, this guy.  Lady guy.  This person.

Me!

That's right, I finally got around to buying the series off of Wyatt, taking advantage of his impulsive nature and subsequent buyer's remorse to get it for cheaps, like the terrible terrible friend that I am.  Of course I will heartlessly take advantage of my closest friends' poor life choices, do you even need to ask?  And of course I've been watching it nonstop since I got it!  I just finished season two.  Unfortunately there's only three seasons -- whyyyyyyyyyy, the show is so amazing!  So terrible!  So unintentionally hilarious!  Why did it have to end so soon, alas.  Well actually, three seasons is a pretty long time for a kid's cartoon to run, I guess.  It's like six non-kid's-show seasons.  Plus it's entirely possible that if the show ran longer even my unreasonable, incomprehensible love for the series would run out, along with my patience.  Three seasons is plenty, I guess. 

But anyway!  I am excited for this.  For a few reasons!  One, the DVD set is actually adorable.  Seriously!  The discs are all designed to look like vinyl records (despite the fact that I'm pretty sure that when this show came out people had started using cassette tapes already), with different colours for the different seasons.  I'm delighted to actually have the box set rather than just download the seasons from Pirate Bay or something.  Plus it isn't taking up any memory on my already-crowded harddrive, which is another perk to DVDs!

Guess what colour season one is!  (hint season one is purple)

Another reason I am happy with this series?  I get to write episode recaps!  Or at least try haha.  I desperately need to mock these episodes, I might as well try my hand writing recap-reviews!  I haven't seen episode recaps online anywhere for this series, at least not for the entire series.  I'm planning to start at the beginning and continue until either I finish the series, or it stops being fun to do.  Here's hoping it's the first one!

A third reason I am happy with this series, I cannot get enough of owning terrible terrible things.  This box set is going on my shelf right between Howard the Duck and Spice World.  Actually it probably won't go next to Spice World because that's a VHS and does not belong on my DVD shelf.  But that is where I will file it in my heart.

I would like to apologize for the worse-than-usual quality of the photos in this post.  I lost my purse

a few weeks ago and my camera along with it, so all I have to take photos with is my iPod touch.  

But oh well, it's Jem.  Why worry about quality now?

Ahaha, Hunger Games.

Just saw the Hunger Games.  Later I'm sure I'll end up doing the proper bloggy thing to do and actually write a post about what I thought of it, but I just need to get this off my chest first.

I don't know who did the costuming, but I love them for it.  I mean, the first costume they put Katniss and Peeta in are those total villain costumes -- seriously, they've got the spiky black leather stuff and they are on fire!  The book played it off as all dramatic and impressive, sure, but it wasn't till I saw that part of the film that I realized holy shit, they look fucking evil!  I made a couple gifs and in every one Kat and Peeta look villain-tastic.  It's like the Baroness meets The Rani or something.  With fire, so a little Team Magma thrown in?  And hell, a bit of Sauron l flair to boot.  Check these outfits out.  Watching these gifs out of context I get the vibe that these two are some sort of somewhat-confused villain team on a conquest tour or something.  In a parade in the city they've conquered, I dunno.  Katniss's hair looks really familiar too, but I can't think of where I've seen a similar style.

Kat kinda looks like the Master in that screen-banner thing.

Neil Armstrong is dead.

It has begun.

DUN DUN DUNNNNN

Theme song covers

I've seen some pretty impressive covers of theme songs.  Like, really good ones, did you see that death metal My Little Pony cover?  Badass.  Or Super Mario Bros on the theremin.  The accordion version of the Imperial March.  Not to mention just about everything in a capella.

But oh my god, this Jurassic Park cover is fucking amazing.  I almost wish it had been in the actual film.  

so perfect

Todd Atkin is why America is terrible.

Well, one of the reasons why America is terrible, at least.

I was in the car with dad and heard over the radio that some American politician said that a rape victim's body naturally prevents her from becoming pregnant.  What?  No, really, what??  Seriously America, there is something wrong with you.

So I looked it up when I got home, turns out it's even worse than I thought!  Apparently it's only "legitimate" rape victims who are given this magical Rape Science pregnancy prevention.  And also this dude is a completely terrible person.  Seriously, what the hell is wrong in America.

Even setting down that somehow this is a popular political stance, that rape victims shouldn't get abortions because baaaaabiiiieeees -- why is somebody this fucking stupid allowed to be a politician in charge of creating laws.  Oh my god.  I'm literally stunned speechless by this.  Not only that somebody would be this completely terrible as a human being, but that somebody would be this completely fucking ignorant.  It's like, does this guy even realize that facts are actually a thing that have to be real, or does he think that if he thinks it really really hard it becomes true?

Now I'm not saying Canada is perfect in every single way and none of our politicians are dumb or bad. I mean, look at Stephen Harper, he's a total dirtbag.  But this guy just comes off as being, I don't know, evil or something.  Seriously, what goes wrong in your head to make you think that any of this is an acceptable opinion for a decent human being to hold, much less for a decent human being to say out loud on television in a position of authority?  Because you know, there's the whole abortion/conception/babies thing, and then there's just being a terrible terrible person who hates women and doesn't seem to think of them as real people but instead as babymaking boob-wearers.

What?  Oh no.  Nonono.  My sister just told me that he's a member of the United States House Committee of Science, Space and Technology.

Fuck you very much, eBuddy.

So eBuddy is an annoying piece of crap, did you know that?

It's not that it's a bad program per se. I used it all the time in college because I didn't have a computer of my own and the only ones I had access to were the school computers, so no MSN.  eBuddy did the job well enough then.  If it were just the quality of the program I wouldn't really mind it at all.  I mean, I didn't really like it, but I didn't hate it then like I do now.

See, it's not the program itself that I hate.  What I hate is how every time I have to use eBuddy, if I'm not on my laptop or if MSN is being a douche, eBuddy takes it upon itself to change my display picture and status message.  And it never said anything about doing that.  So I didn't realize at first, since half the time MSN won't load display pictures for me, that I was going around for a week or two with the eBuddy logo instead of my picture, and that my previous status message had been changed to promote eBuddy.  When I clued in, I was...less than pleased, let's say.

Putting it simply: I don't appreciate being taken advantage of like that.  I didn't sign up to become a walking advertisement for a service I'm not particularly fond of.  But the kicker is, I wouldn't have minded if they had just said something when I signed in!  I can totally get them saying "Because we provide this service for free, we have changed your display picture and included a link to our site in your status message in exchange for providing you with an alternative to MSN" or something.  But by not asking, and by not even alerting me that they've changed my visible information, eBuddy seriously pissed me off.  I've started avoiding eBuddy entirely, using other MSN alternatives when I need them, and my status message for the past month has been about how irritating eBuddy is.  So, thanks to eBuddy sneak-changing my status and image, not only did they not get the advertisement that I wouldn't object to giving them had they just asked (or even just had the decency to let me know!) to getting negative publicity because I'm complaining about how terrible they are every time I see them.

So like my MSN status message says: I am not using eBuddy, because eBuddy can go suck a rotting hippo cock.  I'll stick with Skype and Beejive for MSN replacements.

Turns out it's hard to find photos of rotting hippo cocks online, but you get the picture.

The Egg Quest: Concluded?

Can it be?  Have I discovered the secret to Delicious Eggs?  Has my lifelong quest to improve terrible foods finally come to an end?  Can I really call it a lifelong quest if I only started it a couple of weeks ago?

Yeah, I guess not.

Anyway, I made some scrambled eggs tonight.  They were delicious!  At first.  They turned gross when they started to cool off, I guess eggs are the sort of thing that only taste good hot?  Is that an egg thing?  I don't eat eggs how should I know.  Cooling-off breakfast taquitos are still good though.  But I'm pretty sure they are magical wands in food form what with the being unbelievably delicious thing.

So my scrambled eggs: I discovered the secret to making them taste delicious.  I must add as many other ingredients as it takes to mask the egg-taste.  Which sure, maybe it's cheating, but seriously eggs are gross and I don't know if I can fix that.  So I added a few lumps of grated cheese, a quarter of an onion, four slices of bacon, a bit of milk, butter, and a bit of pepper and sugar.  Is it weird to put sugar in eggs?  Batman, any thoughts?

Wait, no it's not weird or no you don't have thoughts?  BATMAN COME BACK I'M CONFUSED

Anyway, the recipe I was (mostly) following said to fry the bacon while you prepare the other ingredients.  I am sorry, Recipe, I guess you're a lot better at dicing onions and finding the pepper and grating cheese than I am.  Or at least you can do it a lot faster.  Because when I tried to do it that way I got like, less than halfway through dicing the onion before the bacon started getting burn-y.  Again.  Saved it in time this go around, though!!  Anyway here's a Life Tip, when you try a new thing always assume it will take you approximately sixteen times longer to do the little nibbly details than it did for Person Who Has Done It A Million Times And So Wrote A Recipe For Scrambled Eggs Where They Think It's Totally Reasonable To Prepare All The Ingredients In The Time It Takes To Fry Bacon And By The Way Bacon Apparently Needs A Lot Of Attention So Maybe You Shouldn't Do Anything Else While Making Bacon If You Are As Not-Great At Cooking As I Am, And This Name Turned Out To Be Way Longer Than It Needed To Be.  Gasp, pant, breathe.

Anyway, the recipe is pretty similar to the eggs I made last time, what with the bacon and the cheese.  So clearly, the secret ingredient that made them Delicious instead of Tolerable was the onions.  This doesn't surprise me.  Onions are amazing.  They are the most delicious things in the world and every time someone tries to convince me otherwise it just makes me more certain that Onions Are The Best Thing Ever Fuck You.  Don't believe in the awesomeness of onions?  They made scrambled eggs taste amazing!  Onions are magic, I'm telling you.

Magic.

For the record, add a bit of onion soup mix to the patty-meat when you are making hamburgers or mooseburgers, it makes them taste amaaaaaazing.  Fuck yeah, onions!!!  =D

So, is this the end of my egg quest?  In finding the secret to making yummy scrambled eggs, has my journey finally come to a close?  Can I lay to rest my weary spatula, hang the apron, and close the pantry door for good?  Okay okay Batman's telling me to shut up already.  Besides, I didn't even use a spatula.   Or own an apron.  Also I don't technically have a pantry.  Well, maybe I have a pantry.  A pantry can just be a shelf full of condiments, right?  Like it doesn't specifically have to be a food-closet-thing, does it?  Oh.  Wikipedia says my shelf of condiments can't be a pantry because a pantry specifically has to be a food-closet-thing.  Well fuck you too, Wikipedia, fuck you too.

I'm sorry, Wikipedia.  I didn't mean it.  Can we be friends again?  I miss you.

Pumpkin Scissors and more adventures in gif-making!

Pumpkin Scissors is one of my favourite animes of all time.  Granted, I'm not into anime as I used to be, so I don't watch as much of it any more.  So maybe there are better series out now that should also be loved by me?  Feel free to suggest any, I'm trying to get back into watching the stuff.

But Pumpkin Scissors is amazing, for super serious.  It avoids a lot of those irritating flaws that made me mostly stop watching anime in the first place.  Not all of them, mind, the series is subject to some irritating filler and that obligatory "lovable" super-creepy womanizer.  But on the other hand, FUCK YES ALICE MALVIN OMFG

One of these days I'll have to write a proper blog post on how fantastically amazing she is.  And the series in general.  I haven't watched the series in full in a year or two though, so I'll watch it again to re-familiarize myself with it before I start publicly fangirling.  

The reason I bring it up now, though, is because I'm still making gifs!  Except I got bored of Pirates after that weekend, so I've been trying to think of what other movies or shows I could make gifs out of.  And, of course, Pumpkin Scissors!  Duh!  Why did it not occur to me sooner.

The show desperately needs more love, and there is a depressing dearth of PS fics, gifs, and fanart online.  One of those things I can help with!

Well okay technically speaking all of those things I can "help" with.  But gifs are the thing I choose to help with, on account of my being a lazy bastard.  I've learned my lesson on how terrible Blogspot is with photodumps, so now I'm posting the gifs I made of Pumpkin Scissors on my Tumblr, which will hopefully co-operate.  Look here, here, and here.  I only did gifs of the first episode, but I might do more of later in the series later if I don't get distracted.  Won't post them here, though.  To Tumblr!  Mostly because hey, I can actually use tumblr now, that's new.  I've had an account there for a while but ignored it because I had no idea what to post lol.

Sometimes people suck.

An open letter to some of the more irritating customers of the store we were doing a job for a few weeks ago:

Just for future reference, the next time you try to enter a store from the exit door, and you see a couple of people in flagman vests and hard hats standing on ladders fiddling with wires from the nonfunctional automated doors?  It might not kill you, much to your surprise, if you were to enter through the working Entrance door about five feet to your left, clear of any obstructions.

Also, if the Exit doors have been pulled shut and powered down while people work on them, and while the Entrance door that you should be using anyway is working perfectly fine (again, just five feet to your left!), please do not physically pull the Exit door open.  Perhaps it didn't occur to you that it had been closed for a reason, but maybe the ladder leaning against it and the people obviously working on the door wiring should have been a sign.

If after becoming fed up with the previous store customers the aforementioned vested-and-helmeted workers create a barricade of lawn chairs to deter people like - well, to put it bluntly, people like you - please do not shove the lawn chairs aside and try to pull the Exit doors open so you can enter the store.  As I said, the functional Entrance doors are five feet to your left, and labeled in large, bright green letters.  I apologize for inconveniencing you with this arduous detour.

Finally, when the nonfunctional closed barricaded Exit doors have been further decorated with a hastily made sign saying "Please Use Other Door <------" scrawled in Sharpie on a scrap of printer paper.  When you came up to the door, gaped uselessly at the sign, and then turned to me saying "Uhh, can you open the door?  I can't get in."  I just wanted you to know that the pause before I told you to try the Entrance door to the left wasn't because I was trying to understand your question.  I was just desperately hoping to spontaneously develop some dark magical power with which to strike you down.  Sorry again for the inconvenience.

Love Never Dies: embarrassing but fun

I'm gonna be honest, Love Never Dies is a guilty pleasure of mine.  It's a little embarrassing to admit that I love it as much as I do.  I mean, objectively, I get why a lot of people dislike it.  It's certainly not equal to Phantom of the Opera.  The story is exceedingly silly, the music isn't as good, and honestly PotO didn't need a sequel.  In fact, there's a reasonable argument that the sequel actually detracts from the fantasticulosity of the original.  Well, not really original, the actual original Phantom of the Opera is Gaston Leroux.  Which if you've never read it is still pretty good!  Not least because of how often the Phantom calls people "a great booby."  Hahaha, boobies.  Classic.

Not what he meant, but still. Boobies. Heh.

But still, LND.  I just can't help but love it!  I know it's got pretty glaring flaws, but it's got enough good bits to make it genuinely enjoyable despite them.  For example, the music being not-as-good as in Phantom doesn't mean the music's actually that bad.  That's the problem with comparing decent things to awesome things, the decent starts looking crappy because of how awesome the awesome thing is.  And the silly story....well, it's very silly.  But I've read sillier fanfic that I still enjoyed.  And that's basically what LND is, live-action musical fanfic that just so happens to involve the original(ish) creator.  After all, it is partially based on Phantom of Manhattan, which is in fact published fanfic.  When I went to the movie theatre to see the screening of the Sydney production of Love Never Dies, I didn't go in thinking "At last! The long awaited second half of the Phantom's story!"  I went in thinking "This is going to be amazingly ridiculous and I am going to love it for that."

Amazingly ridiculous.

I already knew the general plot beforehand, because Internet.  Spoilers: Raoul had become a drunken gambling loser who lost all his money, he and Christine and their son Gustav go to America to make money singing, and Erik the Phantom hires Christine through deceit and trickery to sing at his carnival because he has a carnival now.  Surprise!  Turns out Christine had an affair ten years ago right before getting married to Raoul, tracking down the Phantom for a sexy night of sexy sex (a moonless night btw, because dude's ugly remember?  hot ladies can't sex ugly dudes if the light's on!) and then the Phantom ditches her because somehow he didn't realize she loved him?  So Gustav is actually the Phantom's son, to the surprise of nobody watching because it wasn't exactly subtle before the big reveal.  You mean the ten year old child who's uncommonly gifted with music is actually the son of the genius musician Christine knew ten years ago?  Never!  So Erik the Phantom and Christine have their happy ending where Raoul fucks off and they get to be all sweetly in love because nobody actually remembers all the evil stuff the Phantom did in the first movie, may the shippers rejoice, but then Meg accidentally kills Christine when she kidnaps Gustav and tries to commit suicide.  By the way Meg is a crazy person now and has fallen in love with the Phantom, despite all her excellent don't-be-in-love-with-an-evil-opera-ghost advice to Christine in the original.  So yeah, very silly.  But fun-silly, in a way that works!  No, it doesn't all make sense when you look at it next to PotO.  But it's like, it could make sense in a fanfic-universe, because that's how fanfic works.  It takes canon and sort of bends it just enough that, say, Christine could leave Raoul right before the wedding because she's realized that she truly loves the Phantom despite, you know, everything.  The same way that so many people find Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy slash fic to be adorable and possibly realistic.  Or Draco and Hermione, if you aren't a slash fan.  Doesn't make much sense, isn't everybody's cup of tea, doesn't really work with canon at all.  But still fun, and still almost possible with the right bending.  The right fanficcy universe-bending, I mean, not sex-type bending.  Or element bending, that's a different series.

universe-bendy.

Of course, it's only fun-silly in a way that works in my personal opinion, because the show does have a lot of legitimate haters.  LND does kind of ruin the plot of PotO a teeny bit, what with the Phantom suddenly not being crazy and evil any more and Christine apparently developing amnesia after running away from the evil scary man who tried to kill her childhood sweetheart, did kill several un-hot people over the course of the musical, and tried to imprison her and force her to become his unwilling wife, and also, possibly his worst crime, destroying the beautiful and historic Paris Opera House.  But it's a silly musical with decent though not PotO-amazing music, pretty incredible effects, and fanfic-like shipping.  No, it's not equal to Phantom of the Opera, but if you were expecting it to be then you are also very silly.  Nobody expects a sequel to live up to the original.  Have you never seen any of those direct-to-video Disney sequels?  

What did you expect from these?

Things I Learned Today

If you try to get rid of a moth via toilet, it will just fly away before you can flush it down.

My dad will take at least two tries to figure that out.

Maybe I shouldn't be allowed to cook.

I destroyed another pot today.  I'm not very good at this whole kitchen cooking thing.  I'm not even normal-makes-food-taste-gross bad cook, I'm like, bend-the-laws-of-physics-to-make-things-impossibly-terrible kitchen destructor.  Case in point, I melted a stainless steel pot.

Granted, it probably wasn't actually a steel pot.  It was sold to us as one, but considering the whole melty-ness of it, Dad says it probably has an aluminum bottom.  Still though, I didn't know pots could do that before today.

I was only trying to make spaghetti!  Unfortunately, my attention span is.....less than great.  Actually my attention span might be non-existant.  I was thinking about how absolutely starving I am, and was like "There's sauce in the fridge, I'll put on spaghetti!  Spaghetti is awesome!"  So I fill a pot with water, and put in about twice as much as I needed on the reasoning that I'd probably forget about it and let half of it boil away before I remembered.  This is standard practice for me when boiling water.  It's not really a good omen.

So I go back to the living room, intending to reply to a message on MSN and then getting the noodles from the pantry.  But of course I get distracted, and completely forget about being hungry and having the stove on.    I only remember when Mom gets out of bed and goes, "Hey, what's that smell?  Are you cooking something?" You know that moment where you can just feel the "oh shit" expression forming on your face, right before you drop everything and run?  I do.

So I drop everything and run to the kitchen, and find that our new stove is apparently much hotter than our old stove.  The water has completely boiled away, the bottom of the pot is glowing orange, and when I pick it up to move it off the hot burner only half of the bottom of the pot came with it.  There's pools of molten metallic liquid on the burner, and the pot's got these silver stalactites hanging of the bottom.

So I try cooling the pot in a saucepan of water, but it doesn't seem to work very well. The pot keeps screaming at me.  So I give up and put it upside-down on another pan on the back of the stove -- no, that one wasn't on, I only turned on the one burner this time.  Mom and Dad come in and marvel at the incredible way I destroyed the kitchen this time.  None of us even knew pots could do that!  Especially not really good, supposedly stainless steel pots.

Luckily, my parents are awesome.  Once I was at a friend's house and she accidentally let a pot boil dry.  The pot wasn't really damaged, but her mom still freaked out about it and they got into a screaming match over it.  Compare my parents, they see that I've completely ruined one of the best pots in the house and they immediately start laughing about it.  As long as nothing's on fire, they're happy.  And at least this time I didn't scorch a hole in the floor!  I should tell that story someday, it's a pretty good one.

Long story short, Mom shrugged it off and went back to bed and Dad told me to get my camera because this was kind of totally awesome.  Now I have a spiky-bottomed death-pot and an old Wowbutter jar with the giant lumps of metal we picked off of the burner that Mom told me to keep as a souvenir.  And also pictures to prove it happened.  I'd say this was probably my best cooking-fail yet.

Learning to make a gif, and also pirates

So I watched the four Pirates of the Caribbean movies over the weekend.  I'd seen the first two and the last one -- well, the last one for the moment, I hear a fifth is in the making.  I don't mind.  Some people online think all of them past the first one are awful, but they're not that bad.  None of the follow-ups turn out as well as the first one, but they're all fairly endearing.  Though I developed a sudden love of Davey Jones over the weekend and have always had an undying devotion to mermaids, particularly creepy/evil mermaids, so I may be somewhat biased.

SO GOOD 

Anyway, my sudden love of Davey Jones and his betentacled face (though not so much his bescrotumed back-of-head) started from him doing that one thing in Dead Man's Chest, where he's talking to Jack the first time and goes, "Price? (plupt)" and I replayed that scene like a dozen times because it looked just so hilarious.  I realized that I desperately needed a gif of that scene, just looping for eternity.

I looked all over Tumblr for ages (ok fine it was for like five minutes but on the internet that's a really long time ok) and couldn't find it, so I decided I'd look up a tutorial or something online and find out how to make my own gifs.

I downloaded Freemake Video Converter because I was pretty sure I didn't have a program on my computer to cut videos with.  I played around with it for a while and figured out how to do it easily, since the program is nicely simple and straightforward.  So when I had a few video clips to gif-ify, I went online looking for a tutorial on how to make it go from video to animated gif.

I found one tutorial that was supposed to be on how to make an animated gif with Windows Movie Maker.  I checked my computer and went, "Oh!  I have that! I didn't need to download the Freemake one at all!" and read on.  The first part was all about cutting the video -- it looked a little more complicated than it was on Freemake, so I figured it was still worth downloading.  "Okay," I thought.  "So the first half of this is all about cutting the videos to size, right.  But I've already done that...let's skip to the end and see how to make the gif in Movie Maker, not just cut the video."  Turns out, you can't make gifs in Movie Maker, despite the tutorial being "make gifs in Movie Maker."  Well that was annoying.  The last step was, "oh by the way you can't actually do this in this program, surprise!  But here's a link to a completely different program to download that will do it."  Kind of annoying but hey, whatever.  So I download the program, Movie to Animated Gif.  It was crap.  I tried to use it a couple of times and it kept crashing.  Thanks a lot, useless tutorial.

So I looked at an online program or two, but all of them put their website's logo on the gif.  One of them offered to remove the logo if you paid money.  No thank you, website.  I'll just find some software to download after all.  I ended up getting Free Video to GIF Converter 2.0 and it was pretty good.  Again, a very simple easy-to-use program and the GIFs I made work fine for the most part, but sometimes they seemed to delete the last frame or two which made a few GIFs not as complete-looking as I wanted.  But still, I am delighted!  LOOK AT ALL MY PRETTIES!!! Warning, a ton of GIFs.  Also, um, spoilers for Pirates, I guess?

I'd hide these under a cut, but I have no idea how to do that and am too lazy to look it up, so I guess you'll just have to deal with a dozen GIFs loading and possibly spoiling you for these films that came out a couple of years ago.  Sorry about that.

Edit: Looked up lj-style cuts for blogger, found some halfway promising ones, they turned out to be useless.  I'll just cut a bunch of gifs and post them on my tumblr or something later, I guess.  And make the ones posted here a little smaller.  Maybe that will help a bit.

Family Reunions

Here are some things I learned at today's family reunion:

There are few things more awkward than every stranger in the house knowing your name, your hobbies, and what you studied in college when you haven't met them in your life.  Also, most of them expect you to know at least their name and how they are related to you.

Four year olds suck at Scrabble.

However, when they ask you "What does drunk mean?" they won't question it if you say "Uhhhhh......clumsy it means clumsy drunk means you're very clumsy."

It might catch you by surprise the first time, but the second time it happens you'll be totally on the ball when you have to jam your fingers into a cocker spaniel's mouth to grab the Scrabble block he's trying to swallow.

A Samoyed's fur is so dense and fluffy that when you pet it you can leave visible handprints.

Also, you will need to dig for at least five minutes before you'll be able to find a collar.

Kale is disgusting.

Veggie burgers aren't half bad.

Drunk old people are hilarious.