Tag: Foam

Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Get Your Sofa Fixed

There are few things more necessary in your home than a good sofa. Somewhere to socialise, somewhere to relax, somewhere for extra guests to sleep, somewhere for you to sleep yourself when you have fallen asleep in the middle of Newsnight – again, somewhere for you and a loved one to snuggle, somewhere for your visiting nephews to jump all over and smear Easter eggs into.

Here are just seven of the many reasons for you to get your sofa fixed and fit for purpose.

1. You Are Not A Student Any Longer. It might be acceptable, when you are living on beans and super noodles, to have somewhere you don’t care about the spills and stickiness. To have a place where you don’t care that your best mate – the one with his aversion to baths and who’s Mum hasn’t been up to collect the laundry for some time – falls asleep on for the fifth time that week. That time is long gone. Wake up and smell the sofa. Replace the cushions, give it a good clean and put the missing wheel back on.

2. Your Mum Will Moan At You And Think You Can’t Look After Yourself. This is a good thing when it means shepherd’s pie deliveries and the odd bit of dusting and vacuuming. When she is griping over and again about the state of your furniture, it’s boring and avoidable. Get your cushion foam replaced and a new cover and she will sit and chat with you and ask when you are going to let her meet your girlfriend and when you’ll make her a granny. Actually, perhaps it’s better if she just moans about the sofa.

3. It’s Uncomfortable To Idle On A Lumpy Sofa. Idling is important. It’s time to reflect on your life, time to relax and ponder on the universe and all its beings. You can’t do that unless you are sitting pretty or, even better, horizontal on some luxuriously fat cushions.

4. You Need To Have Somewhere For Your Mates To Sit And Watch Football. You can’t have them putting their backside’s through the seat when they flop back down after contesting that all-important penalty or the little celebratory run around the living room. Fix those slats.

5. Springs Through The Bum Ain’t No Fun! Vintage sofa’s may look cool, but springs poking out of old horsehair and straw is a bit of a pain in the arse. Search the internet for reliable upholstery firms or companies like Cutfoam offering foam cut to size that you can cover up those springs and bare bots that leave you bruised.

6. You Can’t Make A Den With Flat, Floppy Cushions. Those visiting nephews will take a lot more intensive looking after and effort on your part if you don’t have some solid kit – and that includes some good stiff sofa cushions that can be propped up against the back to make a den/battle ship/castle. When they’ve finished playing, you can sit them down on the very same sofa to watch a bit of kid’s tv. Trust me, you will want to delay this as long as possible. Fix the cushions.

7. No Woman Will Snuggle With You On A Crappy Sofa. You need a sofa that smells good, that is sif enough to schlompf into, and that is wide enough for you both to fit, but not wide enough that you aren’t pretty close together. Removable back cushions help with creating enough space to lie down for a good old nuzzle.

Enjoy!

April 28, 2012
7 Reasons Not To Throw A Foam Pie At Rupert Murdoch

You probably hadn’t considered throwing a foam pie at Rupert Murdoch. Nor, I must confess, had I, until Jonnie Marbles turned up at the House of Commons earlier today and threw a foam pie at Rupert Murdoch. Then I considered it. After a half a nanosecond or so of consideration, I came to the conclusion that throwing a foam pie at Rupert Murdoch is an imbecilic act. I know that most right-thinking people will probably already have come to a similar conclusion about the merits of throwing foam pies at Rupert Murdoch, so they need read no further; they can simply retweet this piece, press the Google +1 button at the bottom of it (and share it on other social media too) and go on their merry way. For all wrong-thinking people – that’s just you, Jonnie – here are seven reasons not to throw a foam pie at Rupert Murdoch.

Don't do this.

1. It Draws Attention Away From The Hearing. Hitting a man in the face with a pie is a dramatic and attention-grabbing act. Because of that, a lot of the focus of the coverage of the Murdochs’ appearance before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, will be about the pie, rather than the important issue of wholesale corporate corruption that was being raised. Am I writing about the hearing? Are you reading about the hearing? No…well… yes, but only a tiny bit because I’m demonstrating how little we’re reading about the hearing because of the pie. Mostly what’s happening here is that I’m writing about the pie and you’re reading about the pie. I’ll also be reading about the pie when I edit this and eventually, once I’ve finished, I’ll be tweeting about the pie, even though the pie isn’t the point of the hearing. The point of the hearing is corruption. You’ve obscured that.

2. It Generates Sympathy For Him. With one blow of a pie, you’ve turned this man, the head of a corrupt organisation that has nefariously committed numerous despicable and illegal acts, into a victim; someone that’s deserving of our sympathy. Because, while every right-thinking person will abhor what was carried out in Rupert Murdoch’s name at the News of the World, that very same innate moral decency will cause them to see a frail, elderly man being subjected to an assault as an outrage. Because assault is an outrage, no matter whom it is perpetrated against. Even Rupert Murdoch.

3. You’ve Made Him Appear Lovable. It seems that making us feel sympathy for Rupert Murdoch wasn’t enough for you though. You’ve actually made him appear loveable. By provoking his wife to leap so rapidly and publicly to his defence, you’ve demonstrated that he is loved, and very loyally. You’ve taken a man that heads a sinister and morally-bankrupt organisation and caused us all to admire his wife’s love for him. In terms of public relations, you’ve accomplished more for Murdoch in five seconds than his own PR people have managed in the past five years. And you’re not even getting paid for it.

4. You’ll Look Incompetent. While I’m no expert on pie-throwing, I can’t help but think you’re not very good at it. You see, in my (admittedly inexpert) understanding of the act of pie-throwing, a pie is supposed to be thrown by the pie-thrower into the face of the pie-receiver, or victim as they are also known. But what’s going on in this picture?

That man appears to have been caught brilliantly smack in the middle of the face by a pie. But wait! That doesn’t look like an octogenarian media despot magnate. That’s you! You’ve attacked an eighty year old man with a pie and ended up wearing it. That’s possibly the worst throw of a pie in the history of pie-throwing. Throwing a pie doesn’t seem like a difficult thing to do, but you’re not competent to do it. You’re not fit for pie-pose (that only works if read in a New York accent). It was your big moment and you’ve ended up with metaphorical egg on your face. And actual pie.

5. Self-Publicity. It’s an oft-heard-phrase that all publicity is good publicity and this might be seen as having a certain truth to it. If you’re an idiot. For the rest of us, however, and I feel that I am speaking for the entire population of the planet here, you’re going to be forever known as the prick that threw the pie. Badly. That won’t help you with your comedy career. In fact, that won’t help you with any career, and certainly not one that involves throwing or pies.

6. The Police Won’t Thank You For It. The Metropolitan Police are reeling from the repercussions of the News of the World scandal and their reputation has been severely damaged by it, so sneaking into a commons committee that is being viewed by a vast worldwide audience and attacking a git with a pie is going to make them look feckless and incompetent right at the very moment that they probably don’t want to. Now, ordinarily, exposing institutional incompetence might be seen as a good thing, but not for you, because right at this moment, the Metropolitan Police are your landlords. They’re also your caterers; responsible for feeding you and bringing you the odd cup of tea. Probably, in fact, very odd cups of tea. Enjoy those!

7. “All The World Loves A Clown.”, according to Cole Porter. But that’s just not true, in fact, coulrophobia is one of the world’s most commonly professed phobias. What all the world hates, in fact, is a clown. A clown is a coarse buffoon who throws foam pies at people. That’s you. For some duncical, nitwitted, dunderheaded reason you decided to disrupt a long overdue attempt to make News Corp accountable for their actions by pratting around with a pie and you’ve ended up overshadowing an important hearing and distracting from the serious testimony that was being given there. You haven’t damaged News Corp and Rupert Murdoch, you’ve positively helped them. You are a clown. No one likes clowns.

July 20, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons Japan Is Awesome

We’ve published posts telling us the USA is great, we’ve ignore posts telling us France is great and we already know Great Britain is great, so what’s missing? Ah, yes. Japan. Home of the most annoying game ever invented. I never owned a tamagotchi, but it felt like I had a vested interest in the company given the amount I knew about them at school. Girls you see. They liked to talk about them. And I didn’t have the heart to walk off. Thankfully, Japan have done some good stuff too. As Maria Rainier now explains.

Maria Rainier

Everyone knows Japan is crazy. The reasons why Japanese people are crazy is exactly why they’re awesome. Crazy awesome. I mean, who else has come up with female androids, steakhouses with Mexican cooks, Karate Kid, and Jackie Chan, right?

1. Cute. They are the only people on earth who can regularly make poop look cute. Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo does not qualify, Mr. Parker, Mr. Stone. He leaves unsanitary racing stripes wherever he goes and makes a terribly ugly cell phone accessory. Rhinestones look so much more kawaii on unko.

2. Humour. Their game shows are not only extravagant wastes of money that could probably fund a super smart cancer research team if only their scientists weren’t too busy riding elephant-sized bouncy balls and falling into mud pits, but more importantly, none of the humor is lost in translation. No matter who’s talking, there’s still a guy getting hit in the face with a giant foam log, and that’s funny.

3. Resolute. No one takes a punch like Japan, the only country that’s taken not one but two atomic bombs to the face and said, “Oh, so sorry. Would you like to send over a scientific team to study the damage and not help out the 250,000 women, babies, and old geezers who inexplicably survived your atrocity, and then try to justify it 60+ years later by saying we would have killed more of you had you not done it, even if your planned invasion wasn’t going to happen for two months?” Nah, it’s all good, ya’ll.

4. Sushi. They have convinced the West that eating raw fish eggs and octopus suckers is not only healthy and tasty, but sophisticated, especially if you know how to use a pair of chopsticks. They’re laughing their asses off right now, eating their steak and potatoes with a knife and fork.

5. They Will Rule The World One Day. While Naruto and animated school girl porn are distracting Westerners and turning them into malnourished, nerdy, basement-dwelling virgins, the Japanese are busy with their next invention: an invisible army of flying life-sized Gundam with nuclear capabilities. The Pokemon franchise was a total Japan takeover of the western world foiled by Trey Parker and Matt Stone in their groundbreaking investigative journalistic endeavor, “Chinpokomon.”

6. Vendor. They are the gods of vending machines: hot soup, hot coffee, and panties once worn by hot school girls for your pervy businessman pleasure.

7. Ninjas. And samurai. Mr. Miyagi. Ichi the Killer. Those guys.

Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education and performs research surrounding online degrees. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

February 12, 2011