Sitting on the Sofa reading the papers on a saturday, we happened across this Lonely Hearts ad in the Guardian's Guide.
Fire in Your Belly?
You: Vintage Body, 70-80s, young mind, fit, active and needy
Me: young profess M, 37. Central England/London Call 0905 675 6702, Voicebox XXXX (sorry, he's not getting a free ad on my site - £2.50 a day btw)..
Now, I don't know about you, but if I was editing the Lonely Hearts section in the guide, i'd have thought twice about publishing this one..
Or is that wrong to think the worst? There's no law stating that men in their mid 30's can't date 80 year olds.
But you've got to feel a little dubious over a young man looking for love with a needy, yet active, vintage looking 70-80 year old. He's a young professional so maybe he's actually a doctor advertising for new patients and the ad just got mixed up.. Yeah, that's what it is..
- I've been a bit slack of recent.. Sorry about that.. I'm always a bit busy with work at this time of year.. a longer post is imminent though..
....A friendly Asda checkout operator after I again inserted my bank card upside down in the chip and pin machine and cursed myself for it. I rhetorically shouted "Why do i always get this wrong?" to which he replied, "Because every other bank machine and even most chip 'n pins, you put you card in 'chip up'.. with chip and pin in supermarkets, it's 'chip down'.. Over all these years, your brain has become programmed to put it in 'chip up', and before chip and pin, you only ever put your card in a machine in one way."
"Hmmmm, I never really thought of it before but you're absolutely right!" I say, happy that another mystery has been solved and i'm not as stupid as I thought. Everyone else is doing it too!
He continued. "The people who invented these machines are fools, man.. They might be able to make these machines, but they have obviously not been in enough social environments where you are actually going have to use one on a regular basis.. Well, probably"
Yes. Probably. The poor guy has had to sit here and watch people like me continually put the card in the wrong way, when it should be such a simple task. I'm glad that he investigated this phenomenon and didn't just fear the worst, like I do; that the world is slowly de-evolving.
Someone told me about this at the weekend and i've been hooked ever since.
La Blogotheque specialises in 'Take-Away' concerts. i.e. they get bands to play somewhere a bit silly like, for example, Arcade Fire playing Neon Bible in an escalator or the Spinto Band playing Oh Mandy sitting round a table in a french cafe.
Some of the other highlights include Yeasayer, Architecture in Helsinki, I'm from Barcelona, The Shins and Tapes'n Tapes..
My two favourites so far have to be this one from Beirut
And This one from my current favourite band The Dirty Projectors..
Since starting this blog, two major things have bothered me:
Content
It's actually really annoying trying to come up with an interesting post each time I blog.. I have failed miserably to keep this blog full of interesting posts every day. Even when i've had a bloggable moment over the past two weeks, I've noted it as 'bloggable' but by the time i've come to write the post, I feel that the moment has past and so can't be bothered going back over it to make something interesting out of my wayward trails of thoughts. For me, blogging is a kind of therapy for me, it allows me to clear my head of those things that made me grind my teeth or pull that tense face of mine, if I’ve already had time to go over it in my head or even moan about something to someone, I normally can't be bothered to blog it afterwards.
The other thing about content is making sure it’s of interest to other people which is extremely hard – I’ve now given up on being some sort of cutting edge, witty current affairs commentator as it’s far too time-consuming and people will hate you more for it. People don’t really discuss things on message boards and forums for news and current affairs. They tend to argue, insult and then make their points which will normally get lost in the whole process. Nothing ever comes to a fitting conclusion because it’s impossible to do so. It’s a scary thought but maybe freedom of a speech isn’t such a good thing, especially if nothing ever gets decided, but then is this any different to any government? Maybe totalitarianism is the way forward after all.. Maybe free speech on the internet should be curtailed? Then again after reading about John Titor, I’m glad it’s not..
Spammers
You really are a pathetic pain in the arse.. Fair enough if I'm a voice of a generation and my website is the gateway to millions of potential customers. I would then understand your need to bombard my comments section with lots of banal attempts to put adverts and links up but I think my four sporadic visitors to this site may not be in your target market for products such as Viagara, penis enlargement or unimaginably filthy, sordid porn.. Unless of course, I'm missing something about the demographics of my readers (comments anyone?)....
But then maybe these spammers have just sensed the potential in my site so they thought it's worth leaving plenty of garbled, grammatically incorrrect advertisment riddles now before Overspecific gets too popular?
The fact that the two main culprits have actually gone to the trouble of working out a way around my protection to ward off spam-bots also makes me feel somewhat proud. For anyone interested, if you want to add a comment on a post all you have to do is answer a simple mathmatical question beforehand, the reason for this is that spam-bots do not expect this and so cannot provide a correct answer and thus their attempts to fill up my database with crap fails.... Until now that is..
Anyway.. two people have worked out how to overcome this and have started posting hundreds of comments everyday to my comments section (for some reason it's always the same blog in November or one I wrote in February about Alex James), one advertises porn, porn-toys, Insurance scams (why does this go so well with porn?) and other random ways to help you maximise your enjoyment with porn that you would never have thought of if it wasn't for the internet telling you of such pleasures (Now we all know what a hot lunch really is). The other person hasn't quite got his scripting right so his comments are just a bit nonsensical (although i can see what they are trying to do, again I’m touched that someone has gone to this trouble).
I am now declaring war on all spam-bots...
If you thought 5+2 was a hard mathematical problem to get round, wait until it's subtraction or even division, although it might not be tonight because i'm a little busy..
