JUNE 29

AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR ME HEARTIES!!!!!!!!! For some reason Saturday was pirate day on the pier so we dragged our arses out of bed and went for a look. So here's an easy update shedloads of photos. Oh, and it's been 368 days since I gave up cigarettes. I won the bet so can I have a fag now?

IN NEWS unrelated to pirates, congratulations to Spain on beating the Germans in the Euro 2008 final. It was a pretty good game only marred by having to listen to the British commentators shilling a shitty ABC show called Endurance, which is basically a piss-poor rip-off of MXC. But that's the brave new world of corporate synergy for you. For example, thanks to our bank being owned by a certain entertainment conglomerate - one which, on my personal scale, is only slightly below Scientology in the selling-bullshit-for-lots-of-money charts - we're bombarded with ads for its crap whenever we check our account. Hail Xenu!

JUNE 25

ONE of the many reasons we're gagging to get our own place is so we can have our own washer and dryer. Even in my scabby student days we were able to do our own clothes in our own flat. I've never been in a situation where I've had to share laundry facilities and it's getting on my tits, mainly thanks to the self-centred arses we're sharing the facilities with.

Apart from having stuff nicked, most of the problems arise because people are just inconsiderate. Among my pet hates are the sods who never come back to get their washing out of the machines, leaving me to either a) come back in five minutes, then another five minutes, then another five minutes... or 2) take their stuff out and dump it on top of the dryers. Given that I don't really fancy wheeling a cartload of laundry back up to our flat I usually take option 2, only to end up with me standing there with armfuls of someone else's damp clothes when they turn up and want to know what I'm doing with their stuff. Typical.

And don't even get me started on the bloody dryer filters. No other bastard seems either capable or bothered to clean them out meaning I'm having to scrape other people's fluff, skin flakes, bits of tissue paper and pubes off the fecking things before I can do our drying. Ych a fi.

JUNE 18

MUCH like the last time it's taken us a few weekends to get to the antique/junk shop off the 405 but on Sunday we finally made it. Needless to say we didn't buy anything but it's still fun to look at the tat on sale. So, armed with Ev's Chocolate, we had a wander and took some pics.

First off in the cavalcade of crap are these framed prints of Scott Bakula as Sam from Quantum Leap. This was a show I watched for about three episodes before my brain kicked in and said "Wait - every single show is exactly the same".

Want to keep your kid's thieving hands off the cookies? Stick them in this jar, which appears to be based on a psychotic bunny with a nosebleed. They'll eat their own eyeballs before they go anywhere near it. You could probably fill it to the brim with freshly-baked crystal meth and leave it in a trailer park in San Bernardino and it would remain untouched.

All we need is a James Blunt CD and the gay bar is complete.

It's a book on the Taliban. It's in German. It was written before 9-11 happened when most people thought "Afghanistan" was an Albanian car company. And you want $15 for it?

"Grandma's Kitchen" by Johnny, aged 12.

Wait... where's the USB port? Where do I plug in my earbuds? And why isn't it white?

Is that the scroll wheel? Is it the 80 gig model? Does it have a colour screen? How do you clip it to your belt? Can I accessorize it? Is it a Zune?

Little Red Riding Hood looks pissed off. Maybe the wolf refused to eat her.

Jesus wept! It's Emric! This is the sort of picture you put above the mantelpiece to keep the kids away from the fire.

When I get a trailer this is TOTALLY going on my living room wall above the plasma TV.

And when I get a Camaro this is TOTALLY going down the sides.

"Music to Shave By"? Brought to you by "The Adjustable Remington Roll-A-Matic® Shaver," no less, and featuring Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Rosemary Clooney and The Hi-Lo's. Nowadays it would feature Justin Timberlake, K-Fed, Hannah Montana and Jay-Z, be brought to you by Bratz and Mountain Dew and be called "Music to Shit By".

This particularly charming piece of America's stunningly racist past is selling for SIX HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE dollars.

At least the manufacturer can honestly say the hair's a perfect replica.

But here's the cream of the crop, the cherry on the cake, the last untangled knot in the Christmas lights of our trip... yes, it's a vintage Vanilla Ice doll!

Vanilla Ice. Good God. I remember seeing Robert Matthew Van Winkle on telly and immediately wishing I wasn't white.

Take these words and rearrange them into a well-known phrase: Than. Bag. Gayer. Of. A. Dicks. The only way this could be a bigger affront to taste and decency would be if it were a doll of Adolph Hitler made from baby skin stuffed with dead kittens and powered by Big Macs.

Judging by his teeth they used a British kid to model the rap microphone. At great expense I zoomed in to get the words: "A complete sound and rhythm machine, with a lowdown rap beat and a hard driving speaker. Crank it up and let it rip!" As a music fan I have no idea what a "lowdown rap beat" is. Hang on, yes I do - it's marketing bullshit. In case you're wondering the words under the Iceman himself read "VANILLA ICE: A silver 'V' on his shirt. You'd best believe you've got the real thing." If by "real thing" you mean an easily-manipulated mannequin with no talent and a lack of genitalia then you're spot on.

JUNE 14

OWNING a Lexus means never having to act like the rest of us.

JUNE 13

I'VE had to lighten the arse off this but it's still one of the best vanity plates I've ever seen.

JUNE 9

THE moral of the story is "don't let your stupid teenagers decorate their own rooms" (and to be honest, the mobile phone doesn't do justice to the awful colours). We've been house-hunting for a couple of months now and this has to rate as the biggest decorating disaster so far. Ev would doubtless say it was the house straight out of 1976 with its orange curtains, lime green carpet and blue-and-gold mosaic kitchen, but I liked that place.

Thanks to the economy tanking quicker than something that tanks very quickly indeed we're finally in a position to buy a house. Well... maybe. What we stupidly didn't think of is that there are literally thousands of people who like us are gagging to buy a house and they're all crawling out of the woodwork at the same time. We've been to look a several that we thought were affordable and made offers on them only to discover that a bunch of psychic bastards got there first and the price had been driven up - in one case from $420,000 to about $600,000. And bear in mind that we've not even been looking at proper houses - we've been looking at bungalows built in the 1950s, which only adds to my conviction that house prices are pulled out of someone's arse.

It's supposed to be a buyer's market but that's not entirely true. House prices have dropped but not as much as we'd like and so many places are up for sale by banks that are only interested in starting bidding wars. We currently have offers on three places and we're waiting to hear if any are accepted or if the sellers come back with a counter-offer. But if we do get one, we won't be letting any teenagers do the decorating.

JUNE 8

I SPOTTED this at a garage in Placentia last week and decided to give it a try as it looked interesting. The label claims it's "a creamy blend of Sunkist soda and ice cream flavour". Well it doesn't, it says "flavor", but you know us Brits and our love for the letter U. Anyway, let's move on as it's late.

Here it is after being skilfully skillfuly brilliantly decanted into one of our top quality all-glass Target vertical beverage holders. Note that a) it's not fizzy and b) there's no head of ice cream, which for some reason I was expecting in a sort of orange-pint-of-Guinness way.

But what is does have is sugar. In bucketloads. Giving a new definition to "sweet", a glass of this stuff could dissolve a tooth in seconds. It is awful and has the dubious distinction of beating Coke Blak to the top of the "Drinks I Wouldn't Use To Put Out A Fire" chart. I managed a couple of sips of this before pouring it down the sink half-expecting a sludge of sugar to be left in the bottom of the glass. There wasn't, but there should have been.