whoohoo.co.uk – The British Dialect Translator
Thanks to Barbara for letting me know about this – I can see this one doing the rounds on Friday. I quite like the idea of the Jolly Well Spoken translator, wot, wot?

PostSecret
Wow, this is one of the best ideas I’ve ever seen.

Jesus help me. One of my colleagues is incapable of just having a conversation and then moving on; he has to follow everything up by Googling it and downloading anything connected with a subject. Another colleague has just been talking about hearing “Always look on the bright side of life” as somebody’s ringtone yesterday and as a consequence, I’ve just heard the fucking thing on loop myself for the past 10 minutes! He’s a really sweet bloke, but he’s obviously not busy enough. And yes, I realise that that’s coming from somebody who’s writing blogs in work time too – but I can multitask.

RARRRRR I’M A BLOG
Yep, he’s a blog alright! I like things like this, this is the sort of crap you get e-mailed on a Friday. Some of the scary album covers make up one of the best Powerpoint presentations I’ve ever seen – I may post them if I can be arsed. Let’s just say, “Julie’s 16th birthday” is in there with them.

Only complete nobheads forget to put their headlamps on while driving at night. Drivers and pedestrians use elaborate methods to draw errant motorists’ attention: pointing; flashing their own headlights; running after the car, mouthing “Your lights!”; and my own particular favourite is to turn my own headlamps off then on again.

My “Your lights!” method came about because of a scare story that was circulating Manchester about ten years ago. Apparently, it was a gangland ploy to attract motorists as targets for random (I’ve used “random”!) assassinations: drive around with your headlamps off, then track down and shoot the first driver that flashes their headlamps at you. For some reason, I thought that turning my headlamps off then on somehow disqualified me from being the recipient of a bullet to the head – I’ve no idea how I came to this conclusion, but there you go. Even more worrying was the fact that nothing corroborated the gangland assassination rumour and, an even more serious symptom of my paranoia was that I was living in Coventry at the time!

Anyway, only complete tossers forget to put their headlamps on while driving at night. However, a really ineffective way of alerting people to their forgetfulness is to flash your headlamps at them as they’re waiting to pull out of a junction that you’re turning in to – they just think that you’re flashing them to go. But anyway, I’d like to express my thanks to the nice Renault Laguna driver who flashed me as I was pulling out of Tesco’s petrol station this evening; I did eventually put my lights on as I got on to the main road. Tit.

Eye-hand coordination
Having just purchased a massive tub of olives from Tesco, I’ve discovered that somebody must’ve switched the garlic-stuffed olives with the plain, unpitted variety somewhere in between me spooning the things out of the bowl and them landing in the tub. How do things like that happen?

Your mind plays tricks on you, don’t trust it.

Getting a new mobile can be a pain when you have to learn new technology and also tell people that you have a new number. It’s so very irritating to have to change your number within 3 months of getting it because you keep getting phonecalls and messages for the last person to have that number. Apparently, no new numbers can be generated, so old ones are recycled – but only after they’ve been out of action for 2 years (allegedly).

Well, if your name is “Sam” and you used to have the number: 07976 938 365, thank you very much! You could’ve told your huge circle of associates (and I’ve heard from most of them) that you’ve changed your number. Thanks very much also to the muppets who want to contact “sexpot” Sam after over two years without being in touch. Dickheads. Thanks also to the mobile networks for providing second hand numbers; perhaps they should wait for a number to be out of use for 5 years before they fob it on to somebody else.

Some advice for our American friends. We British are pretty good at deciphering your odd spelling, grammar and punctuation, but I know for a fact that the Americans are pretty stuck in their ways when it comes to their quaint interpretation of the English language. Not only stuck in their ways, but annoyingly crap with it. So, a “mobile” is what those in the States would insist on calling a “cellphone” or even worse “cell” (dur!).

It’s the fact that they insist on continuing to use their odd spellings and words when in the UK that is rather tiresome. If an American was in France, speaking French, they’d speak French (one would assume). So why then do they speak American when in the UK? They throw in words that we don’t use here, use stupid spellings that make words look ridiculous. Arrogance, that’s what it is.

One of the most annoying things is computer software such as the Microsoft Office applications that always default to American English, no matter how many times you set the default to UK English. A frexample is e-mailing using Microsoft Outlook: you can set the default language to UK English, but as soon as you reply to a message or forward one on, it reverts to US English and changes the spellings of everything – making the author look a complete tosser.


Some may think this “analyzation” a little over the top (seriously, some Americans make up words like this and how they ever managed to sneak a “z” into analyse in the first place is beyond me), but it really does piss me off. It’s bad enough having their crap spelling forced on us in books and webpages, but us lot in the UK and the rest of the English speaking world accept it as them being too stupid to learn how to spell properly. However, when Americans tell us that we’re spelling things incorrectly or using the wrong punctuation because we’re using our own language? That really gets my goat up!

The bastards!

Bitching
This is an old blog, but I found it really very funny. It just shows the anger and hatred that can build up towards somebody who you really do not enjoy living with. The mental torture of whoever wrote this oozes from every paragraph. “I HATE HER, I HATE HER, I HATE HER!” Brilliant.

Actually, I just had to double-check the date on this to make sure it wasn’t from 2001 when I was giving my lodger a hard time (I ignored her for 2 months till she moved out). It’s all well and good having a bitch about somebody in a blog, but you have to remember that they could well be doing the same about you.

We’ve all seen lame serving suggestions on food packaging and in adverts, but I was rather stunned to see what Kwik Save (40 years of low prices!) was suggesting in their latest flyer:

I don’t think I’d be best pleased if somebody offered me a slab of raw beef or a selection of raw pork chops – no matter how much it was dressed up with fresh herbs! Very reasonable prices though, there’s no argument with that. And Christmas was never Christmas without the “Liquor saving Kwik Save” ads on TV.

Next door’s washing is still on the line. Unbelievable. I might go round and tell them that Birds Eye fish fingers and Kwik Save ‘steak’ cut chips are half price this week. It’ll save them eating from McDonalds or the chippy every night. Deep breaths and calm thoughts.

Wigs on fire
As I was drying my hair this afternoon (yes, afernoon, it’s SUNDAY!), I noticed either smoke or steam coming off it. No wonder the smoke alarm’s been going off.

True Romance
My sister has just noticed me writing this post and she asked “Have you got a bloke?”. Eh? Apparently she thought I was writing an e-mail to somebody “special” – well, I could do that, but I might get a court order put on me for stalking. She’s obsessed with finding somebody for me. Jesus help me, I might go and take holy orders. Saying that, I think I’d suit a wimple and I quite like navy. I know most of the words to the Sound of Music too, so I could do well.

Moustaches on women
It’s not attractive, but it’s something that starts to happen in women’s mid twenties. If we’re not careful, we get the full beard to go with it by the time we’re 35 too.

“Sometimes I think muesli is God’s way of making Shredded Wheat seem interesting.” For some reason (habit), I have a combination of the two for my breakfast; today, there’s a bit of mixed dried fruit thrown in there too. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough milk to cover it all, so it’s a bit of a struggle. They could’ve used this stuff in the witch trials.

For most people, the weekend is great; anticipation of Friday evening is just about the one thing that sees us through Monday mornings. Once Monday mornings have been negotiated without incident, a kind of numbness descends that anaesthetises us for the rest of the working week. If we’re lucky, Monday to Friday brings us no challenges greater than battling to and from work, or fighting to hold off on a king size Twix in that period between 3 and 4pm when blood sugar plummets. Unfortunate people have to use their brains and other skills to do work. Eeeeugghh. Whatever happens, the working week is tiring and it’s a huge theft of our time that’s never compensated enough by our salaries. The weekend gives us the opportunity to relax, to be ourselves, to do the things we want to do, to ACHIEVE something!

Odd then, that somebody who looks forward to the weekend so much, has wasted this entire couple of days by having ridiculously long lie-ins! In all fairness, these were fuelled by late nights, sleep that was disturbed by strong winds and the cats being upset because they thought the strong winds were actually a big monster outside that was coming get them (if only). Nevertheless, I’ve wasted the entire weekend and I still feel crap.

Any excuse to avoid going to the gym and I’ll take it! It’s not that I don’t want to go, it’s just that I ache so much and I’ve got a pain in my ankle/shin that was brought on by having my trainers fastened too tight while I was running the other night. I think I’d cut off the circulation around my ankles and it didn’t half ache, now it’s a bit painful to walk on. Some people just aren’t made for physical exercise.

Arsehole bloggers who mess about with their page templates to remove the Blogger header bar thing really piss me off. The header bar is the bit with the search box and the “next blog” button. It’s sometimes fun to scroll through the blogs to see what’s going on, but sometimes, you’ll get to one where some dickhead has buggered about with the template and removed the “next blog” button because they think their crap page is so great that you’ll never want to move on to the next one. Fuckers. Oh, and music in blogs is shite too. But the worst combination is a foreign language blog, with music, where the “next blog” button has been removed – great for when your having a sneaky look while you’re at work and you can’t navigate away from the page. Thanks very much.

Valentine’s Day is here soon, Monday to be exact. As a person who’s never been on the receiving (or giving) end on Valentine’s Day (awwwwww), it’s always been quite an interesting occasion to observe as an outsider. If you care about somebody, your partner, you should really tell them as often as possible, but folk get busy and it’s easy to forget those things when there’s so much other stuff going on. Because of such pressures, Valentine’s Day is obviously a good occasion to take time out and use the opportunity to tell somebody that you care. And if, like me, you have nobody (unbelievable, I know), then it’s just one of those things; maybe, one day, someone will come (in the words of Mick Hucknall).

It is totally incredulous that a load of people will make plans to commit mass suicide on this day while logged on to an internet chat room! Not knowing what their motives are, it’s not fair to judge, but if folk are so depressed about not having anybody special, they ought to get their arses out of the house and do a bit of socialising with real people. They shouldn’t be cruising the internet for other people who are living in similar vacuums.

In the main, chat rooms are great fun; they give people from all over the world the chance to “meet up” and have a laugh. Sometimes, real friendships and relationships evolve when people get chatting over the internet (I have some very real and very wonderful mates who I met on tinternet). Chat rooms can also provide a dynamic forum for discussion on many different topics. However, some users do take things far too seriously and trouble can result. Having been a regular visitor to a particular room for a good 6 months a couple of years ago, I saw the whole spectrum of chatters (there were some complete weirdos) and I’m the first to admit that it can be a very compelling activity, mainly because it’s such good fun. However, when it switches from being fun to being an absolute essential for your daily existence, then you’re in trouble.

I wonder how many bloggers used to or still visit chat rooms; it seems a natural progression.

Woman’s Weekly?
You’ve got to be a British comedy fan to understand what that means.

Google Adsense
No idea how it picks which ads to display over there but it has absolutely nothing to do with me, Your Honour. Apparently, it scans the content of your blog, or website, and it posts adverts that are relevant to your topic areas. Strange then that there are no ads for colonic irrigation aids, incontinence supplies or hired hitmen.

The Adsense thing only went up today and the last time I looked, it had earned me 7c! I knew my writing would earn me some cash one day, but I won’t be buying that cottage in Lancashire for about 23,000 years at this rate. Oh, to be discovered….