I was less than shocked to discover today that The Mirror has managed to stretch out Holly’s cleavage to a further day of discussion with a 2-page article discussing the right and wrong amount to show in public. Obviously just a chance to show a dozen or more pictures of celebrities in flesh revealing dresses, from the tasteful and currently highly popular Angelina Jolie to the utterly deranged and hardly dressed Jodie Marsh. With death in Kenya, incompetence and nepotism in Parliament, and street violence on the rise in the UK - you can see why women and their breasts demand so many front page inches.
I have an cold coming. A slow, insidious bug of some kind intent on taking its time. Having spent too long in a freezing cold meeting room on Thursday, I had a sore throat by Friday… and now, it’s got worse. The minor sore throat now feels like I have pebble-dashed the inside of my neck with gravel. I have an extra touch of Barry White in the tone of my voice - and a gathering feeling of congestion. I hate this sort of stuff… I really do.
I received some finely crafted spam today… the sort that really has you convinced from the outset:
Dear user!
We let you know,
that you have 6 unread messages in your letter-box.
Please, check them here:
URL REMOVED
Best regards,
Administration
I mean… that’s good, isn’t it! Never mind those mails from PayPal, eBay and that bank you’ve never had a current account with in Australia, this one really shows craftsmanship. I mean, what was I thinking leaving all those messages unread. No wonder I don’t have any friends on Facebook… I’m just ignoring opportunities thrust upon me by caring parties as yet unknown. One of those messages might be from that nice man in Nigeria who needs my help with his $34 million fortune!
I’m off to check…
Why is it that one days when I decide not to bring a packed lunch to work the prepared dinners prove to look as unappetizing as possible? Or fail to be what you recalled seeing on the menu earlier in the week. I mean, I didn’t bring a lunch in today and recalled seeing roast beef or some kind of meat ball dish on the menu. The beef didn’t materialise and the meat ball meal came in at £2 without much in the way of supporting side dish - savoury rice that has sat under a heat lamp for an hour… Hmm… Now, let me think whether I fancy one scoop or two!
So, I end up eating crisps instead - admittedly cheaper, but far from the filling, warming meal I had hoped for. Maybe I should lower my expectations or go out somewhere for something to eat? Then I might not end up so damned hungry and disappointed.
… Several Words Arranged To Confound preHension.
I currently suffer from a severe case of acronygnorance (see what I did there?) at work, where the TLA (three letter abbreviation ) rules supreme. I, as an upshot of this, find myself staring blankly at emails, notes and documentation bemused by the needless density of hidden meaning generated by a fascination with reducing everything to a minimal length.
When you text someone or post a classified advert in a newspaper, I can understand the need to abbreviate - letter count can cost money and time better spent elsewhere. However, anyone communicating thoughts, intentions or a new process should endeavour to do so with clarity. No one wins over anyone with confusion. Send me a document laced with acronyms and you can expect me to attend the next meeting none the wiser and far from convinced about the point and purpose of your initiative. Want feedback? Sure - stop using stupid acronyms.
Adding a glossary can help, but even that represents a degree of laziness. In theory, a piece of software like Word can actively replace a series of letters with something else - so if you know you intend to use a technical term that begs for an acronym, set it up for automatic replacement. HTML provides an alternative with the ACRONYM tag, which allows you to provide the meaning together with the acronym - revealed simply by hanging over the term in a supporting browser. Perhaps software could provide something similar for those reading documents via computer? That would considerably assist poor sods like myself who struggle to keep up…
Watched “Hugh’s Chicken Run” last night (the first of three programmes about organically reared poultry versus the intensively farmed variety) and I fear I may never eat supermarket chicken again. I know when I eat meat I eat something that lived and breathed not too long ago, but how that animal lived and died matter to me. I knew battery farming wasn’t so great - but in a few random scenes, my view of the intensive process has deteriorated. The enforced survival of the most profitable situation that results in the premature execution of injured or sickly birds by broken neck really bothered me - and I suspect it will get more distressing as the birds get older.
To live and grow under such pressure and in such squalor for less than 6 weeks - have we grown so heartless and indifferent to the lives of the animals around us. I’m reminded of the title of the book recording the last interviews with Philip K. Dick - ‘What If Our World Is Their Heaven?‘
What if he was right? And, even if not, do we have a right to make the short lives of these farm animals so damned unpleasant simply to feed our already distended bellies?
I suffered my first significant exposure to Windows Vista a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still bemused by the experience. I was roped in to help someone make an old piece of software work and it seemed like a simple enough task. I used the Internet to identify the problem and identified I needed to alter a .dll file somewhere. So, the next step - find the .dll file.
Now, in Windows XP, I choose Search from the Start menu, stick the name in - perhaps with a wildcard - and off it goes. Vista - simplicity seems to have got lost somewhere amidst all the fancy Apple-esque graphics. I tried to use the quick Search, which sits within the Start menu, but it couldn’t find what I wanted. Is it something to do with Vista wanting to set up some fancy index? Anyway - I managed to find the more involved search facility and just stared… tapping pathetically at the various options, dropdowns and radio buttons (or something along those lines). Maybe someone intended it to be easy and intuitive, but it wasn’t. I don’t expect to read an online manual or help file to use something as basic as a search facility. It took me about 10 minutes to fathom out without assistance, poking and pushing options that looked promising.
I’m not impressed.
The fact I had to suffer this experience because Vista uses a non-backwards compatible version of Direct X simply tells me that this operating system doesn’t belong anywhere near a computer I own… I shall manage with XP until I finally have the time to spend loading up an instance of Linux in some form or another. I have no desire to go there… unless Microsoft start producing software that brings the user back into the frame rather than simply trying to amuse people with resource-hungry eye candy.
I spent the night in with my family, eating good food and playing board games.
I did not become uncomfortably hot, claustrophobic, or drunk. I did not get stepped on, spilled on, or jabbed in the ribs. I did not hanker after a kebab or find myself pissing against a wall in a shop doorway. I did not find my hearing painfully impaired by dance music spilling heedlessly from pub speakers.
I did enjoy myself. I did spend the time with people who mean something to me doing something enjoyable. Works for me.
Nigella Lawson seems to have a lot to answer for. Aside from being a kitchen tease and a bit of a MILF, she has set the country a-racing to try something different with a bit of gammon. There can’t possibly be any other good reason why I found myself wandering past the jam section of Tesco today to find a man weighing up the difference between two jars of Ginger preserve.
I guess it isn’t a surprise that Nigella Express
has topped the bestsellers lists at Amazon and Waterstones, beating Jamie at Home
by a long shot. I have to admit to buying a copy for my wife and searching round for the best deal on Ginger Beer at the supermarket today. It’ll be gammon for us too in the New Year!
So, whatever will TV cooks come up with next, exciting we home chefs into a giddy frenzy to do something just a little different? They’ve had us conjuring up special things, basic stuff and now we’re doing it in a hurry - next? Rustic style? Everything steamed? All prepared underwater?
Can’t wait.
Now, where did I put my Nigella video and that stainless steel reamer?
I noticed the cover of a paper had a story concerning South Korean scientists creating a trio of cats that glow red under ultraviolet light. Apparently, this breakthrough means a great deal to medical science. Creating clone cats that glow in the dark offers medicine the chance to experiment on curing human diseases. Um… because these cats glow. And… um… we all like people who experiment on defenceless animals.
No. I don’t quite get the connection either.
I can see value to the cat loving community, who could have cats that show up in the back garden if you shine a black light in the bushes. Yes, that makes sense to me. However, how this relates to furthering understanding in genetics and how animals, almost entirely unlike us, can assist in developing cures to very human conditions entirely escapes me.
The scientists seem to suggest that if we can create cloned animals with human-like diseases then we can more easily work on the discovery of cures - but, I’m drawn back to the memory of that drug trial where a chimp dosed with a new medicine suffered no ill effects, but humans who used a dose at a fraction of the strength turned inflamed into balloons.
Just for clarity, Mr South Korean Scientist, cats and humans are not the same thing. No even cats with human voices, like Garfield or Custard.
