Money.......

I discovered once i got a job a few years ago that i have an illness, which pretty much involves spending an money i get within about........half an hour of getting it,
i thought i'd mention this now as today is a perfect example!!!!

i checked my bank account this morning to find myself £500 up from yesterday, government decided to give me a bursary...thanks very much :D
(maybe they read my rant about how they screw us over financially? haha)
but anyway back to the point. i had that extra £500 before it very quickly became an extra £270 instead, thanks to the guitar shop pulling me in with psychic powers.
the result is a superb brand new union jack design les paul, i've played it most of the morning and it's just unreal,
when people always told me how some guitars just sound better, i was like, if they all go through the same amp how can they sound that different,
but in comparison to my telecaster,(which i still love) this is just something else, its beautiful, and as soon as i saw it in the window the other day i fell in love,
and accompanied by a second hand solid case i though it was a good investment...but thats just me!!!

i have told myself however that i'm not spending the other extra £270 on anything that is only really a major luxury, probably just more beer or something!!!!!

you know what i'll keep it short again today.
some of us have podcasts to record you know!!!!!!

new podcast!!!!

it looks like although i've only had a blog for just over a week...ish.
i'm already going toend up using it slighty less due to the introduction of a new Podcast that will be hosted by myself and the wonderful craig render.
so keeo a look out for that, chances are we'll use that alot more than this now,
but i'll still have the odd ramble on here!!!!!

http://billyandcraig.podbean.com/.

Mark Leicester..........

I've done one about my housemates, and i thought I'd leave it at that for today.
but i had a brain wave, the one person i can probably write the most about, and he practically lives at our house too!!!!!
the infamous Mark Leicester, or just Lester...or d**k face which ever really....
i don't even know where to start.....
oh i know where...this guy has serious sexual issues!!!!!!!!
more than likely a closet gay...i say closet, he almost sounds quite open about it. he's always 'bill will you suck me off' in his dodgy Scouse accent. or trying to bum me or sedge in the middle of the corridor.
which may be why he has the name he does....molester!!!!!
but when he's not molesting people or asking me if everyone i've ever met it fit, or whether i'd bang every other person that comes on the tv or walks down the street.....don't even get me started on Bedford, i'll get to that later!
a massive guitar enthusiast and bassist, like to steal my guitar when i come over and attempt to play it!!! lol kidding lester, co founder of the band i'm now a part of, and mankin some pretty good stuff. although i worry if we let lester write everything obe song would eventually be about raping old ladies or something sick like that.
i seriosuly think this guy has got a twisted twisted mind!!!!
he can get very erratic and loud, especially after a few drinks!!! always one to stand up at a party and get it started, which he normally defines as getting his arse out in public or something like that.
But the strongest memory i have of Lester is from one weekend just outside milton keynes, in Bedford for the busa outdoor athletics championships.
somehow..and i'm still not sure how, but i got lumbered with lester, jc and andy owens, (both other guys make up our band)
all sleeping in one room, with a double bed between 4 of us. and i know full that when you read this lester all you have to read is...'here's a scenario for you' and you'll be laughing!!!!
but we'll not get into that...no i might as well. it basically consisted of about 5 hours of constant questioning about the most stupid stuff. e.g. 'hey billy, here's a scenario for you, if you naked, and you fall over on another naked man accidently, is that gay?' like i said for about 5 hours, i got no sleep that night!!!!!!
it didnt help that we'd booked a hotel across the road from the gayest gay bar you'll ever see...the pink punter!!!!! enough said really.....unfortunatley for alot of our athletics team who tryed to get it, they were told, they werent 'gay enough' which made me laugh cos lester would probably have sucked him off for a flapjack.
but after that weekend i got conatantly pestered by this strange man, and i don't think i'll ever be rid of him!!!!!
but we love him all the same!!!!!!!
just think if we didnt have any lester's in this world then.....no that doesnt really work actually, becuase there would probably be less theft, sexual assualt, other violence and general crime!!!!! lol ( i don't know why i said lol, i hate it, it's such a stupid little thing, how often when you sat lol are you actually laugjing outloud!!!! maybe thats one for another days, there's quite a few words that annoy me!)
anyway back to molester.
oh how could i forget, for thoise of you that don't know, i'm a christian and i attend quite a few christian things each week, lester...lets say....is not.
and the banter we have over that is priceless, i brought some friends back from my uni's christian union once, to find he'd stuck an upside down cross on my door, which he found hilarious!!!!! luckily i managed to get it down before the guys saw it!!!!!
oh the drajma that could have caused. but he's always finding new ways to challenge my beliefs...bless him!!!!!
that'll do about him i think before his head gets so big he can't get our of his room, just cos i dedicated a blog all about him!!!!!!
to lester, the sexually confused, sad, thieving, violent, molestering scouse anti christ!!!!!!!

My Housemates.......

for once, i'm not going to sit here and just rant quite angrily about something that annoys me...although they have there moment!!! :p

I love living in my house, and i thought I'd take a few minutes to give everyone else an insight into the people i live with. how they make my laugh till it hurts, and at the same time drive me up the wall!!!!!!

so lets start with...erm......Pete.
Pete lives in the room next to me where a wall about thickness of a sheet of paper separates us, which means its not hard to hear whats going on the other room...this definitely has its downsides!!!! not so much this year really, but last year when Varrie lived in that room...well, i'll get to her later!!!
pete has managed to aquire the name duracell from the rest of us, due the fact that we played football once and the guy just kept on running, seriously he's a machine!!! and he has his girlfirend over quite abit so it has other implications!!!!
but unfortunatley everyone has their downsides, and pete has a very rare illness which they say is uncurable, called isupportmanchesteruniteditis. symptoms include mocking liverpool fans, and gloating about being top of the table, and winning the premiership in recent years, it's a sad sad thing, and we all feel for him, hopefully they'll find something for it,l and no-one will ever have to suffer this dreaded illness ever again!!!!
but aside from being a manc he's a great lad, and i certianly don't have as much stuff on him i can mock him for than i do other people......other people like.....

Rosie..
rosie, rosie, rosie, never a dull moment when she's around, normally due to her priceless dippyness and gullableness (not sure if that's actually a word, but if i told rosie it was she'd believe me!!!) some of the stuff she comes out with is just priceless!!
for example wandering why her salmon was silver on one side!!! thinking gullable was written on the wall behind her cos we told her it was, claiming food doesnt taste as good outside!!! stuff like that!!!!
but she's a dear, and the house has certianly livened up a little since she moved it, i would say louder, but it could only be louder if there were two varries......getting to her later!!!!!!!
although she has a tendancy to want to steal my clothes for some reason, strange girl!!!!!
mostly the cool t-shirts pinned to my wall,
i've done a little estimating and worked out she spends 99.9% of her life on the phone to someone, normally while eating a burger from marmaris!!!!
she's a bit of a cleanaholic, not very keen in living in the craphole that our flat sometimes is, even though most of the time its not her mess.
which is good in someways, cos it means her room doesnt smell like sick/dead people anymore, i'm not even going to explain that, i think it's better to leave you to your imaginations!!!!!

so moving onto Charlotte.....
i have to start off with charlottle about her ridicoulus accent!!! i knew when i moved up north i would encounter a variety of northern accents, but the stuff that comes out of her mouth is just something else!!! even the pizza places mocks her when she orders over the phone. (chips and graaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavy!!!!)
she's definetley settled into student life....by that i mean she spends alot of money on clothes and doesn't go to uni very often, and when she doesn she just moans about it!!! but then dont' we all!!!!
her diet consists primarily of fish finger sandwiches and taboo.
i'm sorry charlotte if you read this i'm going to have to go back to your accent, i really have never heard anything like it, give her any normaly sentance to say and it'll be something you've never expereinced before..well i say that i guess most people from leeds speak like that, poor poor people!!!! :D

but before i mock her too much i'll move onto.....Sedge
sedge, shut the sedge up you sedging sedge, you just stink of sedge, so getting your sedging sedge out of my sedge before i kick you in the sedge.
how to describe sedge..... a character. he's almost like the daddy of the house, he does alot of cleaning, sorts out all the bills, takes the rubbish out most of the time, and always keeps people laughing with his dodgy stoke phrases, 'no word of a lie, or debeeeeet card'
has recently aquired a craving for mash potato and carrots....when he actually cooks the carrots. with some form of pie, otherwise just one massive pie and eating it out of the dish.
really really funny when he's drunk, he has no idea what he's going its like the little child inside him is allowed out to play, and he just goes crazy. funny funny times.
and if he moves out next year like he says he might...to comute from stoke!!!!!!
then i'm going to shove a pineapple up his arse.

Laura Varrie!!! i knew i'd get to her eventually.
the best way to describe varrie i think is, to take a child who's had 24 cans of red bull in 10 minutes, give them a mega phone and a stupid hat an thats pretty much her.
the craziest, loudest, scariest person in the house, not someone you'd want to meet in a dark alley!!!!! she's scares the crap out of me!!!! has a wonderful nack for not doing her and daves washing up.... yeah you heard varrie!!!!!!
she spends about 6 hours on a night our putting make up, and then another 4 hours taking it off after.
but the one thing you'd instantly notice about her is the random noises she makes!!! high pitched squeels and full on bellowing/shouting/screaming are common when she's around.
likes her bag of wine,
but just a crazy crazy person!!!!!!

Michaela,
currently away on placement for about 6 weeks so i can slag her off all i like and she can't do anything about it!!!!! but i'm not that mean!!!!
firstly she's a DIRTY SMOKER!!!!!! likes her chocolate, you can tell when someone likes their chocolate too much because they sit in the front room eating chocoalte spread straight out of a jar with a tea spoon!!!! another person who tends to come out with funny dippy things, or things that don't quite seem that stupid until you've said them. (10 inches is big enough for me isnt it?)
gets quite agressive when she's drunk, and when she's not falling over and breaking her ankle she's normally hitting someone or kicking them in the groin...
also another takeaway addict just like rosie and charlotte. infact i'm not sure ive ever seen michaela make a proper meal.......ever.
oh she does make me laugh!!!!

thats pretty much everyone in my flat.
apart from seabass but thats another story......
although i could go on about the guys the sort of live with us in the flat below (it's basically just one big house)... er hang on how long is it already cos i've noticed these are getting increasingly longer and i'f i do go-on thats another 4 people to talk about....

erm no i think i'll save that for another topic, maybe later today, maybe tomorrow or whenever.
this is quite lengthy enough i think!!!!!

Football.......

this is a strange one for me, becuase 80% of the time, i'm football mad, and i get very very passionate about games and about liverpool......
BUT...... there are so many things about football that drive me completely mental.

lets start with money shall we, that's always a good place to start....
a few weeks ago i had my tonsils out, can be a risky operation, but i knew i was in good hands, the surgeon had about 30 years experience and has had situations in the past where ha has had to think fast in order to stop someones bleeding and save their lives, the whole process of an operation is so intricate and there are no room at all for errors, this is a guy who lives with serious pressure everyday when putting people under the knife, every single day people lives are soley in his care. if anything goes wrong in an operation, its him that has to take the fall for it, which could include making mistakes that lead to difficulties in theatre. society would collapse without surgeons, doctors, nurses to keep the nation as healthy as they can. and surgeons at best get paid 80 thousand pounds a year. thats alot of money, but when you look at what they do. i think its worth it, they deserve to get paid that much, based on their job.
Professional footballers? spend 90 minutes a week kicking around a ball for the enjoyment of the watching community, supposedly role models? yeah right, when you have people like joey barton in football how is that good role modeling, half of them can't spell the club they play for,
75% of them can't speak the language of the country their team plays in. they start fights with their own team members. swear and shout at match officials and are generally retarded arrogant morons. who get paid....ooh let me think, oh yes somewhere in the region of £30,000-£100,000 a week!!!!
lets take chelsea for example, starting 11, maybe on a combined weekly wage of around just under £1 million. enough to pay just over 10 surgeons for saving people lives over the course of a year. something not quite right there is there.......
but its not just what they get payed. how is one person worth £100 million!!!!!!!! thats like 1/4 of the entire building costs for 2012....FOR ONE PERSON TO KICK A BALL AROUND A FIELD!!!!!!! its ridiculous.
if i was prime minster, i'd tax all footballers 30% + of their wages and put it straight into the education system, nhs, and housing. how many problems would that solve?
we're supposedly in a recession, people cane barely afford to feed them selves and pay bills anymore, and yet here we have Wayne (i'm an ugly, arrogant, childish, immature t**t) Rooney still being payed £90,000 a week or whatever he's on just just shout abuse at people and be a general d**khead.

so after ranting slighty about the ridiculous amounts of money these 'professionals' ( i say it like this because how many of them actually act professionally?) get paid, i'm going to move onto something a little closer to home. quite literally....

I've been a massive Liverpool fan for over 15 years now. and every year i live with the disappointment of being that little bit short of the title, and every year, we say, 'this is our year!!!' this season for example we got to Christmas top of the table, and thats been great for us, we beat Chelsea away from home, beat united at anfield! awesome!!....BUT WHAT GOOD IS IT IF YOU CANT PUT A GOAL PAST STOKE CITY IN 2 GAMES AGAINST THEM!!!!!! seriously, stoke twice, Fulham, west ham, Everton, and Wigan last night, we do all the work beating the big important teams, and then manage to draw against borderline relegation candidates, and most of them while playing at home. its almost soul destroying being a Liverpool fa this year, once again its going to be a case of close, but not close enough.
although i have to stress at this point my utmost sympathy to any Newcastle or Portsmouth fans, the two teams who i think have probably got it worse than us.

what else....oh yeah..the national team!
where to even fecking start. oh i now, how about the fact that the english team doesn't have an english manger....with any english backroom staff...apart from stuart pearce bless him.
there's 60 million people in this country and we can't find one of them to lead our country adequately, oh but capello is a great manager billy, why would you say that? i'll tell you why, because i firmly believe that each country should only be able to appoint staff from there own country, you can't have players from other countries, why should coaching staff be any different?
but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter because the england team is wank. all because of the stupid money going round the premiership which means everyone buys foreign these day's and english lads don't even get a chance, and those that do are thrown into the full england team too early, you watch theo walcott burn out before he's 26... trust me

mmm anything else....yes, of course yes, how could i finish without saying anything about manchester united and alex fecking ferguson.
i think i was one of the few people the other week who stood up after rafa had his rant about 'sir' Alex Ferguson.....SIR??? what the hell did he do to deserve that, he's a good manager. woopteedoo. plus he's Scottish, no Scottish people should be allowed any honors from the queen, purely based on the fact that most of them hate us English....you know i've decided my next rant is definitely about Scotland...watch this space!!!
anyway back to old red faced chew gum himself, i live in Ormskirk, about 30 miles or so..(i don't actually know haw far it is thats just a guess) from Manchester, and i can smell the stink of his arrogance from here. it fills the air in the north west like cloud of pollution, when he's talking on tv i can see all the plants outside dying just from the effect of it.
there are two questions i've always wandered about Alex Fergsuson. and they are, how much does he pay referee's and how often, but i don't think i'll ever find that out....
last penalty at old Trafford against Manchester united? no i can't think of one either.

i should probably give it a rest there, although i feel i have so much more to say, it is getting bit long and if i was you i wouldn't want to have read even half of this!!!!
so maybe lookout for football part 2!!!!

is it just me, or am i getting more and more aggressive as this blog goes on?

in the meantime....... stick two fingers up in the general direction of manchester....i find it helps!!!!

Coming from the Isle of Wight.....

I'm hoping this will appeal to both everyone i know from both up north. and from the island, everyone i talk to from home seems to get similar abuse!!!
so here's a few things you mainlander's should know!

1. you don't need a passport to get to the isle of wight.
2. we don't use euro's
3. we ARE part of England.
4. it is not part of France..(don't even get me started on France!!!!!)
5. we do have electricity
   
6. we do have internet!!
7. we are not all inbred!!...(that's only the west side of the island......and Brading)
8. you don't need a work permit to work there.
9. we don't speak any foreign languages
10. we don't have our own government ( although our county council thinks it rules the world!)
11. we don't have our own king
12. we do not all live in caves
13. we don't have to swim to get to Portsmouth
14. we don't still travel around in horse and cart
15. the isle of wight festival is a real festival!!! i didn't make it up!!!
16. and yes muse did play on the island. i didn't make that up either!!!!!
17. we are not a conspiracy to hide nuclear weapons and are an actual island with people living on it!
18. dog's are not illegal (Gina you're so gullible!!!)
19. we don't drive on the right hand side of the road.
20. you don't have to post stuff by airmail to reach the island!!!!!!
21. it does not have a population of 'about 50'!!!
22. just because i live there, i don't know everyone else from the isle of wight!!!!
    
23. and finally..we are not a leper colony

I'm pretty sure i've covered everything that anyone has every said to me about the isle of wight since i've lived there.
But if you have heard anything stupid from anywhere about the island.
let me know and i'll include it!!!!!

University.....

Is it just me that see's paying £3125 a year to sit in a room full of people who couldn't care less about whats going on, listening to a lecturer read out straight off a power point which then goes into a shared folder online afterward anyway stupid and a waste of money?

it seems to me that everywhere i turn in university there's people trying to 'save me money' various phone companies who tell me i pay too much to phone people and what have you. and you think oooh I'm a student look at the wonderful offer's that get thrown my way!!!!
unfortunately I'm a bit more of a realist, and don't buy a great deal of it, although there really are somethings out there that will save you money! for example, living 350 miles away from home i just could not survive without my rail card, traveling up and down the country would cripple me...(even more than it already does!)

But recently it's not the university as such screwing me over (which i will get to in a moment) that's been getting on my nerves. its been my immensely greedy landlord, who see's any oppurtunity to make more money out of us whenever her can. because quite frankly..... he's an arsehole.
it's still only january, and yet we've been told if we don't have our contracts for the next year signed by tomorrow, the rooms will go to other people.......this is the contract that starts in about 8 months....... but further to this he's found new and exciting ways to take our money away.
rent's gone up, although not massively so i can't really complain too much about that, as it's 0nly an extra £2 per week. what does severely annoy me though is why he feels its necessary to increase our summer retainer..by £70, which is almost a 50% increase on last year, 7 people in our house, so he gets an extra £490 for nothing, needless to say, i'm not and the rest of my house are not happy. and the worst thing is, is that there pretty much isnt a lot we can do about it, we can't exactly threaten to move out. he'll just get new people in anyway, probably tell them the rent is even higher cos they don't know what its been this year, and he wins even more!!!!
but whats more, and what really annoys me, is the fact that with all this extra cash we're supplying him with, we asked him what improvements he would make to the flat to account for such an increase, to which he told us pretty much nothing, and our house isn't great, a broken fridge and freezer, a broken sofa, carpets are....well lets just not even go inot that, they're not nice lets put it that way. broken floor boards and constant electrical and plumbing problems.... to which he sends his retarded son round to sort out, who then leaves us without heating or electric for about a week, and then blames it on us because he can't do his fecking job. it's a joke!

so anyway. back to the university itself, and what they do with money, well they get a mass load more money from us now, to pay people who can read and tick boxes, who should probably be on less than i was when i had a paper round. and what do they do with all this wonderful money? NOTHING!!!!!! oh no wait, they do alocate some of it to sports teams...i say some of it, i'm on the athletics team and we get our event entry fee's payed for.....and thats about it, most of the time no travel, and we never get accomodation or food payed for us. which is another wonderful way they've found of stealing our money.
they get in hollyoaks 'stars' (and i use stars in the loosest possible term) to come in and dj and what not for an hour, charge a fortune for that, i would go along, but i think i'll save it until they actually get someone worth coming to see....not like chico from last year....what a tit.
so what else, oh yeah, our university doesn't even own our student bar, or the sports facilities. but from what i hear has enough money to buy both of them tomorrow and still buy out leeds football clubs 30 times over. so we have to pay to use the sports facilities, (another way of shoving their hands into our wallets and robbing half of whats in it) and we have to pay....i'll just repeat that for anyone who did'nt get it....WE HAVE TO PAY TO GET INTO OUR STUDENT UNI BAR !!!!!! what the hell!!!!!!!!!!!

oh and just to finish off my little rant.. next year as i said my rent goes up as well as my summer retainer....tuition fee's go up again..i think, my student loan and grant? both go down, thank bellends, you worked that one out well didn't you. food prices go up, rail prices go up, and i have LESS money next year than i do now... and right now and haven't got a pot to piss in....well not after our landlords son tryed to fix it i havent!!!!!

note to self.....i need a job.

British rail......

I had another one of my fantastic youth parliament meetings today, and being a regional meeting means i have to travel to somewhere generally in the south, on this occasion Reading.

But over the past few weeks.....i say weeks, months. i keep picked up on things about traveling by rail that really get my goat.

lets start with the obvious, the fares, ok fair enough if i want to go to a university several hundred miles from my home and the region i represent, the fares aren't going to be overly kind to me, but the rate they seem to keep going up by quite frankly gets on my man boobs, and i don't like things on my man boobs!!!!

although in the case of youth parliament meetings my travel is funded, its getting to the point where if i want to go home for a week i have to sell myself on the street for 8 hours a night, 7 days a week, for about 5 weeks....and that's just to buy a fecking crappy bacon sandwich which i'm still pretty sure is just a mixture of plastic, cardboard and plasterscene.

another thing that annoys me to know end, is the fact that they continue to keep rising prices on fares, yet we still have to pay to use the bloody toilets in most main stations!!!!!! IT'S A PUBLIC TOILET!!!!!!!!!!
but not only that, but when you finally do get to a toilet thats free of charge, becuase you held it in to save money and went on the train instead, half of them are out of order!!!!!!!!!

and yet again after all these fare rises, having to pay to crap out the remains of your plasterscene bacon sandwich, i still fail to meet connections because of 'unfortunate delays' i have to stand back and wander what exactly we get for our money when you travel by rail? apart from a numb arse, stomache olsers, severly decreased finances and having to wet yourself........oh wait i know what else we get....

no bloody seats!!!!!!! how many times have i payed an african countries debt to firstly get on the thing, for the food to be life threatening, and then have to wait an extra 40 minutes because the driver did'bt turn up on time in birmingham, to then find that when you get on there's not actually enough seats anyway and you have to spend the most enjoyable 3 hours ever stood in a corridor next to the toilet (which is out of order) and keep moving in order to let people past you who need the toilet (which is still out of order but no-one seems to say mention that to passengers over the tannoy, why is that?) and have some crazy man next to you telling you about what train used to be like 40 years ago when he was my age....thanks

all i want is to sit in peace and quiet without someones auntie sat next to me falling asleep and snoring, listen to my ipod, eat some real food that i didnt have to sell my younger brother to get, and just have a nice comfortable journey.......if only!!!!

i'm getting a bloody car!!!!

Old People.....

I've been brought up in a society that tells me to respect my elders and i have absolutely no problems with that,
they've been around for along time, done they time at work, and seen various governments poo on them from a great height over many years.
BUT, what really gets my goat, is the unreal sense of disrespect that i get from old people either because they're just being ignorant, or because they stereotype me as a thug and no good youth because I'm under 25.

example. How many times do you stand to one side on a narrow pavement or narrow shop aisle to let some old lady slowly wander past you, for her to then NOT EVEN LOOK AT YOU, LET ALONE SAY THANK YOU !!!!!!
don't worry love, not a problem, yes I'm quite happy to let you past, but its not your god given right,
as well as that, i work in a small shop in my home town which is jam packed full of the elderly, and the amount of them that just slam their money down on the counter, take about 20 minutes to find that 5p that they know is in their purse somewhere. and after all this just walk off without a thank you, or anything.
Manners go along way, how are we supposed to teach youngsters that if not even old people can be bothered to utter one word of acknowledgment as they pass you!!!


Another thing about the aged in this country that really winds me up, is old drivers.
how on earth is 90 year old great grandad going to have the reactions to avoid a crash, my great grandad is turning 96 this year, and only stopped driving about 4 years ago, and the only reason he conceded to our constant lectures about how dangerous it was at his age is because he can barely see the front of his own car while he's driving, let alone the road and other road user's, many a time I've been stuck in a car behind someone who can barely make themselves a cup of tea, but perfectly happy to plod along in their Toyota Yaris at 20 mph in a 40 zone.
I'm a big fan of the whole, when you're 65 whatever it is, having to retake your test every 2/3 years, or whatever it is, just so that those that really aren't able to drive anymore and shouldn't be on the road no longer are, lets not forget that when your that age you didn't even have to take a driving test when you first got a car. back then owning a car WAS passing you're driving test!!!

However I'd like to stress that obviously not all people over 80 are like this, and i do know some very nice elderly people, with manners, and have the sense not to sit behind the wheel of a car, so don't be offended granny if you're reading this (which you won't be because I've never met a person over 75 with a computer never mind internet access!)
although it seems to me as people get older, this pattern seems to emerge!!!

I think that'll do for now,
before i get too many zimmer frames thrown at me the next time i go shopping!