Today's Review: The Sun

Man, that sun is a pretty cool guy, right? It's keeping us alive right now, giving us all the warmth and light we need. It's keeping us in place too, stopping us zooming off into space to an untimely demise. Without the sun, we wouldn't exist.

So why does it have to be such a jerk? Sure, we can now harness its power for electricity, but does it have to cause cancer? Sunstroke? Why does it have to hurt our eyes when we look at it directly? Look at it up there, all high and mighty. Oh wait, you can't, as I discussed in the previous sentence. What, we have to be in such deference to it that we can't even look at it properly? That we have to be stuck orbiting it until the end of days, when it will just say "screw it" and explode, incinerating us all?

I mean, I appreciate all that big hunk of burning gas has done for us, but for something so hot, why does it have to be so cold?

My rating: 3/5

Today's Review: The Toilets At Southend Pizza Hut

We had a little trip to the seaside today. Certainly not the best day for it, but hey, we had fun. But before beachery, there was Pizza Hut, and with those unlimited refills a man's gotta go. So imagine my surprise when I walked in and saw this:

I'm sure most of you have played the urinal etiquette flash game online. If you' haven't, here it is. Basically the rule goes that men standing at urinals should normally be separated by one to avoid unnecessary junk watching. This bathroom does not only ignore that rule by having only two urinals, but laughs right in its face by placing the two urinals directly next to something else.

It doesn't bother me too much, I'm not a urinal user myself. I much prefer the comfort of solace and toilet paper that a cubicle provides. But imagine if someone was in the first cubicle, or it was out of order. I would be forced to go in the one next to the wall. If someone decides to try and dissolve the urinal cake while I'm inside, the first thing I'm greeted with upon leaving the cubicle is an eyeful of someone else's junk. If I wasn't paying attention I might even bump into them and disrupt the stream. You never want that to happen.

The other urinal isn't positioned better. It's right next to a sink, meaning if one person is washing their hands, and another is peeing in the urinal, cleaning yourself is not an option unless you want to rub up against a guy with his tackle out. Add to this the fact that the sink requiring you to snuggle up next to an exposed man is actually the child's sink, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

Maybe I shouldn't be too hard on them, maybe this is the best they could do with the space they had. But on the other side of the sinks, out of shot, is a massive radiator. Could they not have positioned that next to the urinal and moved the sinks further up? I fear the cubicle situation is unavoidable, but they could easily rectify the sinks. But alas, these toilets are massively cramped, and I'm sure they will be the source of much male awkwardness and invasions of personal space for years to come.

My rating: 0/5

Today's Review: Public Toilets

I went into a public toilet today, something I rarely do. This certain public toilet was the manifestation of every reason I do not go into public toilets. There were flies buzzing round, the lock on the cubicle door was broken, there was no toilet seat (not that I ever number two anywhere than my own home), and the smell was, well, generic public toilet smell. And by generic I mean awful.

It's okay if you go to the toilet in a fast food place or something. It still might be a little bit awful, but at least they have people go in there and clean them, bless their souls. But real public toilets are just plain bad. You'd like to think there's someone in charge of restocking toilet paper and cleaning and whatnot, but there's absolutely no evidence of it taking place, and you just want to get out of there as soon as possible.

But why do public toilets get so bad? It's simple. People are assholes. Public toilets are basically an early form of the internet, but instead mostly based around bodily functions and the occasional sex act. Okay, they are exactly an early form of the internet. In a public toilet everyone is anonymous, especially if they are there on their own. While a person may be respectable and well trained in his own toilet and in the toilets of people he knows, in a public toilet he just goes crazy. "Fuck it, no one knows who's doing this", he thinks, waving his penis erratically at anything but the urinal. Hacks are carried out on toilet seats and toilet roll dispensers, rendering them useless to other users, and locks are broken on cubicle doors, invading the privacy of anyone within. Messages are scrawled on the walls, like pop-ups that interrupt your peeing pleasure. Most give numbers and promises of gay sex. Are they genuine, or are they messages from trolls, waiting to snap up innocent victims for the lulz? Either way, just like the internet.

But while the internet got a little better with Web 2.0, we have yet to see Public Toilet 2.0. I suggest there be put in place a kind of social network of toilets, where graffiti is accompanied with a name, like a status update, and anyone caught unleashing indecent materials on the floor is reported and blocked. They probably already have crap like that in Japan, I don't know. But now all I can think about is Mark Zuckerberg plunging a toilet.

Public toilets are disgusting, but only because people are disgusting when they're not held accountable for their actions. Join me in my fight to make public toilet checkins on Facebook a mandatory action.

My rating: 0/5

Today's Review: Barleylands

We like to take the kids somewhere special at least once every month. It spares them from experiencing monotony and eventually a hatred of their parents. Today we went to Barleylands, just on the outskirts of Billericay, Essex. Upon entering you are greeted by a quaint selection of craft shops, selling tacky but cute stuff for not too extortionate prices. But we weren't here to shop. We were here for the heart and soul of Barleylands, the farm park.

I've been to a few farm parks in my time. They've all got the same animals, and Barleylands today had significantly less animals than usual. We fed some sheep, which was all well and good, but every distinguishing member of the farm park visiting community knows that what sets each one apart from the other is the quality and quantity of the play areas dotted around. Barleylands is by far the favourite i've been to. If you think that the best thing about having kids is being able to support and encourage a budding life to grow in front of your eyes, you're right, but it's tied with being able to play on all the cool shit you used to love when you were a kid, and all the new stuff that's been invented since.

Here's a hint: always go to these places mid-week. There are very few people around, including staff, a lot of the stuff is unsupervised, so even if you're not supposed to climb around the soft play areas you can go ahead and do it anyway. Also, Barleylands has a small collection of toy tractors that your kids can ride and pedal on to get around. I'm assuming that on the weekends a bloodbath ensues every time a kid tries to get hold of one, but Amelia was happily pedalling her blue tractor while Alex got a free ride on one of the smaller ones.

Talk about a life of luxury

So what of the play areas? Well, nestled in a barn at the back of the park is this beast:

Oh yeah, ball cannon fortress, baby. Hundreds of foam balls, four lines of air powered cannons, this shit is awesome. Easy to pick up, difficult to master, you'll find yourself calculating specific trajectories just so you can hit your loved ones in the face. Unfortunately, Alex didn't like the sound of pressurised air launching things, so off we went to find greener pastures.

Ah, slide heaven. The one on the left there, it's super fast, and you land right in a massive pool of balls. The one on the right says you need a mat to go down it, but screw that, I tried it and I went way too slow. But the mother lode is the one in the middle. I haven't seen a death drop slide like that in over 10 years, and I figured the health and safety nuts around nowadays would've gotten rid of them all. 

But hell no, here it is in all its two-story glory. Going down one of these things is like going through a wormhole right back to my childhood. Those tables way in the background there, they had quite a few parents just sitting down and talking. Bullshit I say, they don't know what they're missing. I probably went down these slides more than some of the kids there. But we couldn't stay here all day. Believe it or not, there was something better to do.

Two words. Jumping. Pillow. It's like a bouncy castle but without being a pussy. It's like a trampoline but without the blunt force trauma if you fall off. It's the perfect combination. You can jump high on this thing, and it's just pure fun. If I had a garden, i'd get one of these. Good for exercise, comfy to lie on, and if you go in the middle of the week, you can regularly get it all to yourself. But if any kids try and get on, you can just keep bouncing right next to them and they'll probably fly off eventually. 

I will be going again. My addiction to bouncing requires it.

My rating: 5/5