How to hate the public health system in 10 easy steps

United Kingdom. You need to register for a GP, buy you're foreign so you're not quite sure about the process. You check the golden source: the Internet. This is how it goes.

1. Find the website of the NHS, the public health body. A fairly nice website I must say, well structured. Go to the section "Find a GP"
2. Introduce your postcode to get results near you and check the options that apply. In my case: practitioners that accept appointments at 8am and practitioners that provide travel vaccines. Get one promising result.
3. Read carefully the procedure to apply. There is a form on-line that needs to be printed and filled, nothing else seems necessary.
4. Go early in the morning to the practitioner and hand the paper. The practitioner rejects the form claiming that they use their own ones (even though mine is from the official NHS website). Also they request proof of address.
5. Back home to pick a bank statement as proof of address. Back to the practitioner, provide papers. The clerk discusses for 10 minutes with her colleagues whether they know my address and whether they should accept me. They look in a map and affirm that there's another one closer to my house and advise me to register in that one.
6. In reply, I indicate that I know of the existence of the other practitioner, but I came specifically to this one due to the timetable and the travel vaccines (not provided in the other one). They indicate that travel vaccines are only provided after being registered for 6 months, hence I'll have to go private and pay out of my pocket.
7. Accepting that major drawback (the vaccine is the only reason for which I was registering) I decide go register anyway, you never know. The "local" form that I'm requested to fill looks exactly the same as the one I brought. After filling the form, the clerk uses it to type the details on a computer, it makes me wonder what difference it made if the damn thing is to go on a computer.
8. They claim the postcode of my precious address, EC2A 3AH, isn't valid. I need to bring up Google Maps in my phone to prove them wrong; it makes me worry about the core competences of a bunch of people who can't even read postcodes.
9. After typing in data clerk announces I need an introductory appointment and mentions Wednesday at 4:40pm, I request any day at 8am. "We don't arrange any appointments before 9am". I indicate that according to the official NHS website they do, which is one of the reasons I chose this practitioner. "I don't know anything about that website, but we don't arrange appointments before 9am". It makes me worry that an NHS employee doesn't know about the official NHS website nor its contents.
10. I lose faith in the process and ask the clerk to cancel the registration, I will register somewhere else. Reply is the registration is now effective and cannot be cancelled easily, it will take some weeks to de-register. Weeks, they say. I give up and simply leave.

If this is what my tax goes to I'd rather have the NHS completely shut down.

Late night realisations

Sarah: Oh, so you do have metro 24h
Jam: No honey, this is the fist train in the morning, it's already 6am
S: Really? So we've been drinking all night? But it's only Tuesday!
J: Yeah... Welcome to Spain.

Grrr, bark, woof

It is important to keep a healthy sense of humour... This is the sort of stuff you'd find around my new office:

The right to be right

Note: in this article I refer to a hypothetical senior person that could either be a man or a woman; however, for readability's sake, I refer to this hypothetical person always as he or him. In the text below, when I write he or him, please read he/she and him/her.

I've been thinking about vertical relationships in corporate hierarchies; actually, my thoughts could apply to any vertical relationship: teacher-student, parent-son, senior-junior... I has come to my attention that the common understanding is that, once someone gets to the upper position, he earns the right to be right. Think of the following scenario:

- How dare you challenge him? He is an executive director and you're just an analyst.
- Does it mean he is always right?
- It clearly means he's got more experience than you.
- Well, if he is so experienced he should be able to prove me wrong quite easily, so what's the matter? He makes clear he's the smart one here and I learn something new.
- He doesn't need to prove anything, just shut up and do as you're told.

Sounds familiar? This is what I refer to as the right to be right. Somehow, it has been instilled in our minds that once one achieves a position of seniority that means credibility is granted and no explanations are needed. It's almost as if the person becomes more important than the argument itself.

What is funny about it is that, at the same time that this idea is rammed down our throats (by our teachers, our bosses, our parents...), we are told that we should never rest in our laurels, that we should always welcome new ideas, that in order to keep learning we should keep challenging ourselves... Do you guys see the conflict as well as I see it?

It would be much different if, instead of earning the right to be right, we acquired the obligation to be challenged. The more senior a position the more responsibility it implies, so the more we want to be sure the person is fit for the role. So constant challenge is actually good for the organisation: if the manager responds positively it creates massive trust from the team, and if it doesn't it becomes clear a new person is needed.

Why does corporate culture condemn bottom-to-top challenges so much then? Isn't there too much at stake to simply assume that senior means right? Three reasons come to mind. First, because sometimes battlefield promotions are needed and, although the person is not good enough for the role, there's no one better available. Second, because in environments hyper-charged with ambition (and large corporations usually are) encouraging challenge could lead to aggressive challengers and destroy team-work. And third, because managers face a conflict of interest when encouraging challenge: it could easily expose their weaknesses.

However, I think these risks are usually overstated, and the current world needs more bottom-to-top challenge, not less. We need to live more out of our demonstrable talent and less out of implied abilities. Let's play the game.

Gatos con pulgares

Anuncio de Cravendale, marca lechera inglesa... ¿qué pasaría si los gatos tuvieran pulgares?

Let's get pumped with Jimmy K

Alright, time for some exercise. We've got Jimmy Kimmel before here in El Gato Gordo when he and his girlfriend confessed each other their affairs in a rather unusual way, and he's come back with another awesome asset which could give your ribs the trip of their lives. He's basically turned himself into a gym instructor and has trained some of the hottest girls on Earth, so unbelievably hot that my pizza burned up in the oven while I was watching this.

Highly advisable to have the firemen number at a handy place, visualise at your own risk...

If you need me, I´ll be downstairs

Esta vez ponemos la letra antes del video. Miradla... leedla... traducidla en la medida de lo posible si sabeis inglés... y después dadle al play en el video de abajo. Entonces no sólo la leereis, sinó que la entendereis.
El video está hecho con PS, AE, Illustrator y muuuuchas horas (en torno a 1000 dijo el autor). Digno de ver. Este es el concepto que se apuntaba a principios de siglo como emocional/emotiva/afectivo, ya que transmite el mensaje aunque no tengas medios (idiomas) para entenderlo)

A parte de la animación, la canción original se llama ShopVac, de Jonathan Coulton, y se puede escuchan en Spotify

We took the freeway out of town
We found a place to settle down
We bought a driveway and a swingset and a dog
You got your very own bathroom
I got my very own workshop in the basement

We sit around staring at the wall-to-wall
Take field trips to our favorite mall
Waiting for the day when all the kids grow up and leave us here

If you need me
I'll be downstairs
With the shop vac
You can call but I probably won't hear you
Because it's loud with the shop vac on
But you'll be OK
Cause you'll be upstairs
With the TV
You can cry and I probably won't hear you
Because it's loud with the shop vac on

We hung a flag above the door
Checked out the gourmet grocery store
I bought a mower I can ride around the yard
But we haven't got real friends
And now even the fake ones have stopped calling

Maybe if you forget to hide the keys
I'll take a ride to Applebee's
I'll come home drunk on daiquiris and throw up on the neighbor's lawn

If you need me, I'll be downstairs
With the shop vac
You can call but I probably won't hear you
Because it's loud with the shop vac on
But you'll be OK
Cause you'll be upstairs, With the TV
You can cry and I probably won't hear you
Because it's loud with the shop vac on

I like the Starbucks here that's better than the other one
Because the other one's not as good
They really need to put a light there cause it's hard to turn
It's hard to make a left turn

And when it's time to go to bed
I'm still awake inside my head
I'm floating up above the house and looking down
I guess I gotta go back there
I guess there never was any other answer

And as the freeway hums the cars go by
The headlights roll across the sky
Many miles away but I can see them speeding through the dark

If you need me, I'll be downstairs
With the shop vac
You can call but I probably won't hear you
Because it's loud with the shop vac on
But you'll be OK, Cause you'll be upstairs
With the TV
You can cry and I probably won't hear you
Because it's loud with the shop vac on

Dialogando con los Angry Birds

Desánimo generacional

Hoy para el Friday Clip habia pensado en 'Hey, voy a ver la lista de exitos del Spotify, y cuelgo el nº1 que seguro que será el mejor'. Craso error bonicos... craso error.
Siempre he sido una persona con gustos musicales 'peculiares', pero con el tiempo te haces tolerante... cuando te echas novia te haces 'ultratolerante' con la música que entra en tu coche (tu santuario del rock)... pero dado que Spotify tiene ya más pinta de red social que de reproductor, se supone que refleja los gustos de sus usuarios en base a la demanda de temas no?
Pues resulta los primeros puestos son Mohovi, Bruno Mars, Flo Rida, Pitbull... pero que coño??!?

Sinceramente... la primera canción del top100 de Spotify que 'escucharía' está en el puesto 39, el 'Don´t stop Believing' de Journey. Joder. Quiero decir... Joder...

Desánimo... desánimo porque vislumbro en el horizonte una delgada linea roja... mierda, sabia que en algún momento llegaria...

We chase misprinted lies
We face the path of time
And yet I fight
And yet I fight
This battle all alone
No one to cry to
No place to call home

Oooh... Oooh...
Oooh... Oooh...

My gift of self is raped
My privacy is raked
And yet I find
And yet I find
Repeating in my head
If I can't be my own
I'd feel better dead

Oooh... Oooh...
Oooh... Oooh..

Muisheto Feroz

Fumando espero...

En plena 'crisis' en los EEUU por las legislativas de hoy... se enciende un poco más la mecha de lo políticamente correcto/incorrecto cuando en un tv-show de máxima audiencia, un actor a favor de las marihuna, se enciende un porro y le da unas caladitas a la presentadora conservadora de turno... fuck yeagh... un LOL en toda regla.




También se está preparando una película sobre Tintín, con tecnología CGI, pero no se yo si tendrá mucho éxito porque los directores que la van a codirigir no estoy muy seguro de que lo hagan(Un tal Peter Jackson con otro que se llama Spielberg o nosequé...)

Muisheto Feroz

Shitty funny life (3/3)

And finally, after so many pissing off sentences, my absolute favourite one, the one that got me laughing on a Eurostar train bound to Paris so madly that the old lady next to me was tempted to call security staff and ask them to throw me out the window in the middle of the Channel Tunnel. You'll need a bit of background here, you'll need to know who Susan Boyle is, check this out first. And then the quote (it's a bit harsh, but fun nonetheless):

Everyone keeps asking me if Susan Boyle is a relative. Of course not - none of them will ever manage to chisel their way out of that cellar. I suppose we do have things in common; I look ridiculous dressed as a woman too. Come on, Susan Boyle does look uncannily like Mrs Doubtfire as played by Gordon Brown. She had a lot of people laughing at her because of ther looks, but what people don't realise is that she's probably one of the best-looking people in West Lothian.

I can't make too many jokes about Susan Boyle as the British public have taken her to their heart. What can I say? Britain loves a dog. Sorry, underdog. Let's be honest and say that God broke the mould, just before he made her. Susan claims she has never been kissed. ON that evidence alone, Scotland's alcohol problems are not nearly as bad as previously imagined. OK, so she hasn't been kissed, but this is Scotland. I'll bet she's been fingered on a school trip to Largs. There are probably thousands of Susan Boyles out there who were worried about coming forward in case they got laughed at - and let's just hope her success doesn't change that.

Shitty funny life (2/3)

If you liked the first extract of Frankie Boyle's book you'll probably have realised that he's a bit mean on his humour... For a kid with a problematic childhood like me that's just awesome. So, if you came back for me, here it is:

• [While describing his experience as school teacher in Edinburgh] There were only a couple of kids who were really unbearable. I sat them together so that if I felt the need to fart I could walk casually by their table. Kids never really think of teachers as farting, so they'd go absolutely nuts at each other.
• The brace position they ask you to take up in the event of a crash [of a plane] (head between knees) is actually designed so that your teeth will stay with your corpse and they can identify the body. I reckon that if you time it just right at the moment of impact you can probably spit all your teeth into someone else's lap, messing things up for everybody.
• Those who tell you there's no such thing as a good way to die are people who have clearly never heard the phrase "drug-fuelled sex heart attack". On a plane going down you'd fuck anything. [...] That's why they never released the black boxes from 9/11. It's probably nothing but sex groans and the occasional "Blow this tower, Mustapha!".
• "Hello madam! I've always loved people who have the ability to do make-up in the car. Did you hit a couple of speed-bumps?" [...] "Don't worry madam. One day you'll meet a man who'll love you for what you are. Forty".
• Eventually, we ordered a pizza and watched a movie. It was A Perfect Storm, that George Clooney tuna movie. It says a lot about that film that even high on ecstasy, eating pizza beside a beautiful woman I was going to fuck before and afterwards, it was still shit. I hope they use that sentence as a quote on the DVD box.
• "I have a thought about sexual politics. Why is it that when I find a vibrator in my girlfriend's drawer, she's liberated? Yet when she looks in the chest that I keep under my bed and finds an artificial vagina, I'm a pervert? So what if it is a dog's vagina that I keep alive with batteries."
• Of course, we've all fantasised about our own funeral, wondering how sad everybody we know will be, having that girl we always loved turning up distraught, leaping from the coffin as a zombie and becoming Ground Zero for the death of humanity. Wendy Richard was buried in an eco-friendly coffin woven from bamboo. I'm planning on doing the same as that's how I'd like to go. Ripped apart by ravenous pandas.
• You know what makes ideas great? Cocaine. If they sold it with your popcorn this shit would make a lot more sense to you. Wesley Snipes was so desperate to be famous he allowed us to make him black. And call him Wesley. Thanks for eating my ass, Wo-Ling-Ho.
• I get some of my best ideas during heart attacks. You think you've lived? Unless you've had a heart attack inside Uma Thurman's ass, you've never lived.
• [During an interview] What's your favourite Star Wars character, and why? C-3PO, although I hate it when he rapes those student nurses. Often, when I talk about this to friends, we wonder if it was actually Star Wars that I watched.

And get ready, the coup de grace is still to come.

Shitty funny life (1/3)

I recently finished the Frankie Boyle's biography "My shit life so far", one of the funniest things I've ever read. For those of you who haven't heard of him Frankie is one of the most famous stand-up comedians in the UK, albeit a rather controversial one. His jokes many times go beyond the line of the politically correct, far beyond, and yet, that might be the reason he's so great. I was going to present you with my favourite extracts from the book, but I realised it was so long that I'll have to split it in three parts. Here's the first bit, I'm sure this will prompt you to go to YouTube and look for his videos:

• You can tell what class you are by this simple test. There's a fox in your back garden. You're upper class if you get on a horse and chase it with a pack of hounds. You're middle class if you make your children draw a picture of it to send into Blue Peter. You're working class if you beat it to death with a shovel and make soup out of it.
• Lust if a big part of most men's personality. They just tend to make a point of denying it, so they can get more sex.
• I think there is a lot that we don't understand about our sex drives. Scientists have discovered that apes will exchange meat for sex. And by scientists I mean a clinically depressed butcher going through a rather messy divorce.
• The Church of England service is incredibly similar to the Catholic one, whit the same fruity robes and hats. I can't understand the Anglican Church being so down on homosexuality. If you don't like gays, stop acting so gay.
• Have you seen the YouTube video of the protestor being assaulted by the police officers [at the G20 demonstration in London]? It's like a deleted scene from The Lord of the Rigns. I keep expecting the camera to pan up to show the burning eye of Sauron glowing above the Bank of England. Eyewitnesses say she was definitely provoking the officer before she was assaulted. She's lucky she wasn't totally innocent otherwise she'd have gotten seven bullets in the head. The police officer hit her with a baton after she shouted "I'm a woman!" at him. It's almost as if he thought she was reminding him - "Oh yes, the small ones, they have weak legs, thanks for the tip". These were the officers most highly trained to deal with incidents like this What the hell were the untrained ones doing? Headbutting clergymen? [...] That whole scandal made me angry. The internet's got so many clips of policemen beating people up, it's a nightmare finding any porn.
• Once I woke up in Tommy and Jane's and found that I couldn't see. Eventually, I realised that this was because I wasn't wearing my glasses. I had a tribal memory of vomiting out of a window, so I looked out of the window in the living room. There, two floors below, my glasses stood face-up in a puddle of vomit being eaten by a seagull. That served as a sort of wake-up call and five years later I quit.

That's enough for today, stay tuned.

Bailando con las manos

Se dice que 'el q espera desespera', pero en el Gato Gordo decimos que 'El que espera, se lleva un friday clip' xDDD
Aunque ya quede poco de friday... ahi va un clip. Ale. Temazo del verano en Expaña, pero con esta nueva coreografia gana mucho

Bieber vs. Cobain

Talking Tomcat

The latest discovery from my flatmates: The Talking Tomcat.

Talking Tomcat is a phenomenon on the Internet. Is over 6000 results in YouTube. It's even an iPhone App. It's awesome. It's... it's a pedocat.

Revenge of the Cat

The entire World is shocked by the fact that a woman threw a cat to the rubbish meanwhile a street-cam was recording her. This seems to be the preface to the 2012 doomsday.
The original video:





And now... revenge!!!





Have a nice cat-weekend!!

The blues is for the rain

As day goes by... raining and raining... I'm much more sure that the Blues Music was made for days like this.
Dave Meniketti / I Remember

Humor de Lunes... segunda parte

Como es Agosto para todos... los repartidores de coñas llegan con cierto retraso a la redacción del Gato Gordo. A parte del humor desmotivador de esta mañana... aqui viene la segunda parte: Donde está la carta? Aqui? no... aqui? noooo... a esperaaaaammmmmpffffgh....arf... aqui!!!

Muisheto Feroz

DeMotivation Monday

Ok, es el segundo lunes del mes de Agosto, y hace muuucho calor, así que... para empezar

Haz las cosas fáciles, no te compliques ni un pelo...


Y cuando hables, di las cosas claras...


Aprovecha para definir tu sexualidad en las fiestas patronales de tu pueblo...


Y si estás trabajando y piensas que estás solo... FAIL! Nunca estás solo...



Ala, a disfrutar bonicos

Muisheto Feroz