Loads of people have cupboards, attics, garages and spare rooms filled to bursting with old possessions they no longer need or want. When you get around to having a clearout, there are a few obvious possibilities: you can give things away to a charity shop, you can flog them on Ebay, or you can throw them away like a piece of rubbish. The latter option seems rather pointless - and you never know, you might need that reversible Jason and Kylie duvet cover again some day - so if an item is too big or too pointless to lug down to the post office or the charity shop, it’s tempting just to keep it lying around. That way lies madness, and a garage full of junk.

Luckily, as ever, there is an alternative! Sign up to Freecycle, where you can offer your unwanted clutter free to others in your local area. If someone is willing to take that oversized inflatable snowman off your hands, they’ll come round to pick it up - so aside from the remote possibility of telling an axe murderer the way to your home, it’s a hassle-free way of clearing some space and getting your old stuff into the hands of people who might actually appreciate it.

You can bag some decent stuff on there too. Free, unwanted hi-fis are a relatively common sight. I landed one a couple of months ago - hey, the CD player doesn’t work, but nothing’s perfect.

Now if someone - anyone - would take my old 17″ CRT monitor off my hands, which I freely admit in the ad is “quite blurred” and worst of all, “beige”, I’d be able to recommend Freecycle unreservedly. As it is, give it a go if you’re remotely interested in tree-hugging, saving the planet, and all that. What’s the worst that can happen? You feel a crushing sense of rejection because nobody wants your stuff, even for free. And that’s not all that bad at all.

I hate wasteful companies. You know the sort: the kind of people who send out the tiniest, most indestructible item known to man in the biggest and thickest cardboard box they can find, swathed in reams of bubble-wrap and funny foam crisp-like things. Or the kind of firm who insist on sending you their catalogue, week in week out, even though you’ve only ever bought the one thing that got you on their mailing list in the first place.

It’s annoying. There’s nothing you can do about it. The company doesn’t charge you for packaging - not directly, at least - and the most you can do with the acres of packing material is save it all in the hope that one day you’ll sell a huge, fragile item on Ebay and be able to recycle it.

A case in point is Novatech. They may be very swift and, in my experience, helpful mail-order company, but man they love their packaging.

This week they sent me these two relatively small and difficult-to-destroy items:

The wireless access point was snug in a cardboard box not much bigger than the device itself. It wasn’t going to move around or get crushed in there. A spindle of blank DVDs is virtually indestructible. But that didn’t stop them packaging these items in a box this size:

I mean, what? That’s the biggest box ever. Those foam things are now filling a shopping bag to the brim, in the bin. There’s nothing else I can do with them, aside from collecting them forever or scouring the country for some kind of ‘foam things’ recycling centre.

Amazon tends to package things well, with the minimum of waste. Even Ebuyer, though they love their packaging, generally use plastic bags filled with air as padding, which don’t take up a lot of space in the bin once you burst them.

So all companies, learn from Amazon’s example. I’m fed up of having a bin full of cardboard, funny foam things and plastic bags. Imagine that multiplied across the entire country - it’s a lot of crap nobody wants.

P.S. Fulham railway station or Fulham Broadway station? I can’t decide!

The BBC are staging a live event in Manchester city centre next Friday to mark Easter. While their previous version of the concept, Flashmob the Opera, went well and made great telly - set as it was in a busy commuter station and not in the middle of scally country - I’m going to start being cynical about the success of the Manchester version.

Inspired by yesterday’s Grand National (I’d love to be able to place a deadpan “my horse died, by the way” here - but I can’t), I’m running odds on various outcomes. You can’t actually bet on these because my name isn’t Mr Ladbrokes, but hey.

The current odds then:

Everything goes fine - 10-1
A load of scallies stand constantly around in the background and spend more time mugging into the camera than you’d think humanly possible - 3-1 (J. Fav)
It rains a lot and everyone buggers off home early - 3-1 (J. Fav)
Scallies steal one or more outside broadcast vehicles before joyriding them around the M60 and driving them into the sea - 100-1

I’d go for an insanely long-odds spread bet comprising all of the above.

Mmm, I think I’m onto something here. You can never go wrong talking about sweets!

Fruit Pastilles, then. As I alluded to in my previous update, Fruit Pastilles are simply my favourite sweet thing of all time. And I’m not kidding: I’ve been through an entire cinema-style bag of them tonight. It’s not for nothing I have nightmares about all my teeth falling out.

Nestle have tried to liven up Fruit Pastilles by releasing special limited-edition packs, like the ‘alien’ themed ones from a few years ago with their weird flavours. They don’t need livening up, though - as the premiere jelly-based sweet covered in sugar, it’s impossible to beat them. Maynards have tried with their ‘Wine Pastilles’ and their ‘Sours’, but nothing can come close to the simple elegance of the classic Fruit Pastille.

If you get bored of eating them individually - we’re all only human - try combining opposing colours for a whole new taste explosion inside your face. Red and green work well. The only downside is that you get through them twice as fast. :(

On the plus side, the sugar rush is twice as immediate and effective. It’s like drugs, probably!

Urged on by Thrik, I have decided to follow the lead of The Remi and review “cultural” things. Things like Chewits.

Do they even make Chewits any more? I’m more of a Fruit Pastilles man, even though I’m faintly behind the whole ongoing Nestle boycott thing. Hey, I don’t buy any of their other products! Ahem.

Anyway, Chewits. Little cubes of sticky, sugary goodness. A bit like Opel Fruits (sorry, Starburst), but not quite as good. I lost at least one baby tooth to Chewits when I was a young ‘un, which was useful for me as they were going to come out anyway and that way I didn’t have to deal with the trauma. The Tooth Fairy believed me when I left a note explaining why I had swallowed the tooth.

What?

Anyway, Chewits are great. You should buy them immediately, probably. They used to give me really weird poos, but did you really want to know that? I doubt it.

We’re all supposed to be abandoning our cars and taking to either using public transport or cycling everywhere, apparently. I stumbled across a brilliant site (linked from BBC News) with some excellent examples of why taking to your bike might be a very bad idea indeed.

While some local councils spare no expense in marking their cycleways clearly, some prefer the alternative approach. Some go out of their way to make the cycleways as unobtrusive as possible, while others are high-visibility and their use is highly advantageous. Forget those bike lanes in Germany where you have to share with buses and get your own set of traffic lights at junctions to allow you to cross before cars start cutting you up - we deal with the problem much more cost-effectively with well-designed filter lanes and completely segregated stretches of cycleway!

Seriously now, what the hell? I can only assume that local councils are paid by central government per cycleway. The stupidest one I’ve seen with my own eyes was in Scotland, where the incredibly narrow cycleways added on either side of the road made it too narrow for two cars to pass without - guess what - encroaching on the cycleways. Nice one Scotland. That was as nothing to these horrors, though - more hilarity on the site.

Have you ever listened to Radio 2’s morning news bulletins? They always end with the results of some new poll or research project. I’m sure they’ll mention this one tomorrow.

The latest is that UK children are less ‘intelligent’ than their counterparts 30 years ago. This ‘intelligence’ is not measured in terms of exams passed or school marks - exams are blatantly getting easier, and have a look at your mum’s O-level papers if you don’t believe me - but rather by administering to a sample of children the same test that was first given in 1976. Today’s youth did not do well.

I don’t think this is particularly surprising. Children learn through creative play and experimentation, neither of which they have any pressing need to engage in. When you can watch Cartoon Network 24 hours a day, why bother?

I don’t think this is an entirely new phenomenon, either. Just have a look at the number of self-taught scientists there were in the 19th century. Were they all incredibly clever back then? No, just bored, I reckon.

TV, games consoles, the Internet and finally, piss-easy exams are making things too easy. There’s no need to find new ways of keeping yourself entertained when you can just sit like a lemon in front of the telly and have it beam effortlessly into your gaping face. I demand a return to children sitting at home rubbing pieces of Lego together because they have nothing better to do. And from those pieces of Lego will spring child prodigies the like of which the world has never seen! Since 1976.

When you visit a forum and it’s all:
You last visited on Sat Nov 26, 2005 3:37 am
The time now is Sun Nov 27, 2005 7:05 am

Damn that forum. Damn it to hell!

We’ve had Murphy’s Law, we’ve had Moore’s Law, now I think we’re ready for some new laws for the modern age. I’ll call them Huzbo’s laws.

1. The number of satellite dishes visible in a town is inversely proportional to the quality of nightlife to be found there.
2. No matter how carefully you put your iPod away, it will always emerge with the headphones in a hopelessly tangled mess.
3. The above is especially true if you are trying to set up your iPod inconspicuously, for instance while about to get off the bus.
4. You will only trip over cracks in the pavement, walk into lampposts, or have equally embarrassing accidents when a gang of scallies are approaching.
5. You can listen to WinAmp or your iPod on shuffle for as long as you like, and nothing embarrassing will come on until other people are around to heard it.

I think that’s enough for now!

I’m starting to wonder whether the Crazy Frog is just a nefarious ploy by the BBC to finish ITV off once and for all.

I mean, think about it!
Step 1: Make an incredibly annoying ad
Step 2: Pay ITV to show it every ad break until everyone is heartily sick of it.

At this point, ITV haemmorages viewers every time it comes on. Ad breaks become worthless because people learn to switch over during them.

Step 3: Thanks to ITV’s new pricing structure for ads, saturate ad breaks with nothing but ads for Crazy Frog, Sweety the Chick and that bloody dragon thing. And maybe a few “No Win No Fee” dodgy soliciters’ ads too.
Step 4: Stop paying! ITV dies!

The only way to make the plan absolutely flawless would be to stage it while ITV is devoting a ridiculous amount of airtime to a pointless reality show that nobody watches - but has reportedly cost them around £15 million to make - just as it is about to be crushed underfoot by the new series of Big Brother. Oh wait!

Still, if you’re as sick of Crazy Frog as I am, maybe you can find the perfect antidote here. Warning though: contains sweary-do’s!