When I'm 64

I'm 31 on Monday. Where does the time go? Fair enough, 31 isn't exactly old (note the tenuous link to this post's title - and there's more to come further down, oh yes!) but I still feel exactly the same as I did when I was, say, 13 or something. I don't have a bad back, no creaking limbs, no wrinkles, grey hair or liver spots...in fact I still get asked for ID when I buy alcohol. Some may say this is a bit of a blessing, but I see it as a bit of a piss take - especially as most of the time I'm a good deal older than the cashier asking for said identification papers. I don't really have any answer for my relatively youthful appearance, especially when most of my contemporaries generally look pretty haggard in comparison (sorry guys, but its true), but I do know one thing - it fucks me off when I get called 'young man.'

Don't ask me why, but that moniker really grips my shit - even more so when (as above) the term is dished out by some cunt who's younger than me. It's like a put down, as if calling you 'young' means 'less worldly' or something. I know this is all a load of bullshit that I'm spouting here, and I shouldn't spend my time wondering what some random dick means when they call me 'young man,' but what winds me up even more is realising that not only am I usually older than them, but I've (probably) seen and done a hell of a lot more in my time than they could ever imagine. When somebody calls me 'young man,' I want to grab them by the sides of the face, touch foreheads and perform a goddamn mind-meld info-dump on the fucker and let them know all the shit I've been through; all the places I've been too and all the experiences and sadness and joy and strife I've been subjected to - all while they were either wondering at their first pubes sprouting or having their Findus Crispy Pancakes warmed up by mummy. Cunts.

Just wanted to get that off my chest. So yes - I'm 31 years old (young?) on Monday. I'll be celebrating this momentous milestone in true British fashion by getting well and truly ringbolted (tipsy) on Saturday night. Excellent.

I went to watch Manchester United play against Reading in the FA Cup last Monday night. It was a pretty dull game in all honesty, but on the plus side I found £5 on the pavement on my way into the stadium. We were sat up in the top tier of the Sir Alex ferguson stand, and while it was a pretty steep incline, the position offered us a sterling view of the pitch:

Other than that, there hasn't been much of interest or import happening. I've decided to start looking for alternative means of employment, as the job I was offered still hasn't started and the recruitment department are still dragging their asses over a start date etc. I've been waiting the best part of two months now and the sheer boredom of being off work is starting to drive me insane (there are only so many Archfiend/AVGN/Irate Gamer bitching Youtube videos one can stomach in one day/week/month), so I think I'm just going to have to cut my losses and look elsewhere for a way to earn a meagre crust.

Speaking of boredom and ways to quelch it (thanks Tenacious D), I recently went to my mum's house to retrieve some more of my random boxes of shit I'd been storing there.

One of these boxes contained my old Nintendo 64 and a handful of games (post title? eh? yes it's true - I'm a genius!), and I was pretty stoked at the thought of being able to hook the old girl (the N64, not my mum) up to my massive plasma TV and play Golden Eye, Mario Kart 64 and (shiver) Mission Impossible in all their anti-aliased glory. Imagine then, my world-ending disappointment when I hooked the N64 up and threw the switch only to be confronted with a blank screen. I tried all the channels and a whole host of different cables/inputs only to be met with the same 'no signal - check connection' message floating around the screen. I thought there may be something wrong with the TV so I tried it with the other, smaller Samsung LCD we have - no joy, same thing. I did a bit of Googling and discovered to my abject horror that no, the N64 will not work with most of these new flatscreen LCD/LED/Plasma screen TVs due to the maximum resolution output (or some such shit) of the N64 console. Goddamn archaic Nintendo hardware architecture! When I think about it though, the N64 looked pretty awful on the old CRT TVs of yesteryear (well, the 1990s) so blowing the lo-res crap up to HDTV proportions would make it look even worse, so its probably for the best: rose-tinted specs with lenses the depth of jam jars wouldn't have made them look any less horrible. Although, I wish I'd known that before I went and splashed out on Jet Force Gemini, World Driver Championship and Perfect Dark. Harrumph. My only option is to go and get an old portable CRT telly from somewhere, but not having a car could make that a little tricky.

Watch this SDTV space.