Month: October 2003

Lily Fredricks

On Wednesday night, we all went over to Lee and Zoe’s to meet the incredibly cute Lily Fredricks, their four-week-old baby girl, for the first time. Sadly, she was mostly asleep for the evening (presumably, given that there was clearly an acceptable level of attention being devoted to her by all these strange people in the house, she could happily nod off without having to try), so none of us got to experience, say, her allegedly legendary flatulence at first hand.

We also all went away thinking what a good baby she was, despite Zoe and Lee’s suggestions otherwise–no doubt she began bawling loudly the moment we all left.

Amusingly, it turns out that Lee isn’t the only person to have made this mistake…

David Blaine chubby

Every now and again, I remember to check the stats to see what random search queries have lead people here over the last month or so.

Most of the recent random hits have been from people trying to crack CD copy protection (to which I say: “click cancel, people, click cancel!”). But in amongst the five or 6 versions of the phrase “bmg copy control” that appear in the top 20 search strings, I was delighted to discover that a number of people found their way here over the last month by searching for “David Blaine chubby“.

After posting regularly for most of last week, you might have noticed that bloggage* has been somewhat slow this week. It’s not for want of things going on, though. There’s been all sorts happening to the people around me recently.

Some of these things are the wonderful, life-affirming kind, but then I don’t think it’s my place to broadcast them to the world when I’m not sure the people involved have done that fully yet.

On the other hand, some of the people around me have experienced things that brought out the worst in the people around them (and I don’t mean me, by the way, I mean other people around them). However, as they don’t involve or affect me, it’s not really my place to talk about those things either.

All of which doesn’t leave me with much to talk about this week. Sorry. Things will be back to normal next week, I’m sure. By that time I will hopefully be properly underway on the whole novel writing thing, so there will be much to say. The countdown to my holiday on the other side of the world (yah!) will also be into single figures.

In the mean time, why don’t you sponsor Richard Herring to run the Marathon. He used to be on telly, you know.

* amusingly, when I copied this entry into Word to do a spell check, it wanted to change the word “bloggage” to “luggage”. I like the idea of my luggage being a bit slow this week.

Elliott Smith: 1969 – 2003

I have just found out that Elliott Smith died on Tuesday from apparent suicide. I can’t believe it, actually. I was a huge fan, although I only saw him live the once at Glastonbury three years ago. I had to go to the new bands tent on my own to see him, but, it being the new bands tent, I was able to squeeze in to the front and rest on the front barrier for the duration of his set. I think I have some good photos somewhere at home.

I might write some more about this later, but I think for now I’ll just have to dig out Either/Or and XO and have a listen.

Drink up, baby, stay up all night/The things you could do, you won’t but you might/The potential you’ll be that you’ll never see/The promises you’ll only make

I’ll keep them still

Forgive me for coming over all NTK.net, but, bloody hell, Amazon got a shitty exchange rate when they converted their profit into Euros:

Sales Growth: “Amazon reported a net profit of $16m (£9.5m; 13.7 euros), or 4 cents per share, for the three months to 30 September.”

That’s $1.1M to the Euro…

Passengers are advised to use alternative routes just bloody well walk to work, ok?

It occurred to me this morning, on my inadvertently circuitous route to work resulting from the Victoria and Northern lines both being broken, that this standard piece of London Underground advice is utterly pointless. It essentially equates to saying:

“The such and such a line is not working, so passengers are advised not to use it (which they, er, won’t be able to do anyway)”.

Even worse, though, is that if like today the alternative route that you might otherwise have taken is also broken, then why bother saying it at all? It’s rather like those patronising apologies from a computer on the South West Trains network. In fact, why don’t we replace this announcement with something more realistic, like: “Passengers are advised to give up on getting to work today at all; why don’t you just go home and go back to bed…”.

Yesterday there was an elderly woman in front of me at the checkout in Waitrose buying 40 large beef-flavoured packets of Cesar dog food. It was most odd. She had two people helping her pack her bags (she also had a lot of other shopping, but it was the large quantity of dog food that I noticed most). She appeared to have wiped out the supermarket’s entire stock of this particular brand, as the third and fourth slabs of 10 packets were both still fully wrapped in cardboard. Presumably having already picked up everything on the shelves, she had had to get the staff to get her whatever else they had in the stockroom. Maybe she would have bought more if they had had it.

When the cashier had finished ringing up her purchases, she asked the lady: “is that all he eats?” Presumably, like me, the cashier thought that buying such a large quantity of dog food was not entirely normal, but the lady seemed rather surprised that anyone would ask such a question of her, and took ages to reply that yes, that is, in fact, all he eats.

I’m sure this is not normal, but not being a dog owner, I wouldn’t know. Anyone?

“Yay! One thing the world needs more of is young conservative women.”

Oh look: Susan’s back. It must be so terrible for her to live in a country overrun with “rabid liberals” that so upset her with their opinions that don’t entirely match her own. You can find out more about some of the rabid liberals running her country: here.

Subject: What If You Died Tomorrow?

Is the subject heading of a spam email I just received. Unfortunately, as with most spam these days, the subject heading bears no relation to the contents of the mail (a devilishly intelligent trick, of course, as I for one will only buy that penis enlargement I’ve been after if it is advertised in an email with the subject heading “Re: Your Details”).

Anyway, so this email wasn’t actually about what it pretended to be about, and it didn’t provide any answers to the existential questions it inevitably raised. What If [I] Died Tomorrow? Well, perhaps it’s a chilling death prediction, but I think the main consequence of my untimely death tomorrow would be that there would be no one around to delete the torrent of pointless, frustrating and annoying spam pouring into my hotmail account on a daily basis.

Since you asked, like.

Update: Experiment

Thinking further about the whole spam issue, I want to try a small experiment to see what happens when you post your email address on a publicly accessible website like this one, so here are two email addresses:

mysp_mtestaddress@hotmail.com

nosp_mplease2 [at] hotmail [dot] com

I discovered when I tried to set these up that, rather ironically, Microsoft won’t let you use the word “spam” anywhere in your email address username.

I wonder how long it will take for these addresses to get spam. Let’s wait and see.

[I have also created a third hotmail account, which will be my control address, to see how much spam you get just for having a hotmail address. I won’t be posting it anywhere or giving it out to anyone.]

I’m not quite sure how we ended up in London’s most overcrowded club (Brixton’s The Living) on Saturday night. Ok, that’s a lie, I know how we ended up there (I wasn’t that drunk… oh, actually, maybe I was: I did, after all subsequently have to be reminded that we’d got on the bus to get there), I’m just not sure why. At some point in the evening, a whole pile of flyers offering free entry had just magically appeared at our table, and from that point on there wasn’t really any question about it. Even the fact that it appeared to be 80s night wasn’t enough to stop us.

From what I can remember, I had a very good night. For the first two hours (well, I did start at 4) it was just me and Sally, but despite my initial fears that no one was actually going to turn up, turn up they most certainly did. They also bought me a lot of drinks (despite going to the cashpoint between the pub and the club, I was quite surprised to find the money I’d taken out was still there in my wallet in the morning; I’m not sure I can recall actually stopping drinking at any point though).

The above photo was chosen mostly for the way it encapsulates the tail end of the evening. The rest of the photos are on flickr.