Anglodoodle

We went to Venice.

We did  a lot of gazing over the lagoon and at each other. We slept a lot. And my SO finished off his Straight8 Project. I got increasingly pregnant. I mean I was pregnant already, I just got more so, swelling like a great big happy blimp. I did say I got married in cream, not white…

Plan C was the one we went with. We’d have a buffet, beer, and Ceilidh. And plenty, PLENTY of friends.

I got married in cream: be-trousered with lacy wrap. He got married in a tartan skirt, as the Scots are wont to do.

I smiled and laughed so much that my face ached for days afterwards. Ow.

All my brothers and sisters were there – by blood, half-blood and love – and many many kids.

I am married now.

Married to a most fabulous man with a hairy face and a delightful sense of humour.

I believe I loved him from the first moment we met.

It took him a while to get used to me, however.

We would have probably continued to live together for years if it wasn’t for a lovely couple that we just met in a pub at New Year asking “so, when are you going to get married?”.

“So is there ever a good time to ask?” whispered my Significant Other.

“Now?” I said.

And that is henceforth how it shall be remembered.

Massive sucking sound

OK so I’ve decided…I cannot possibly squish the entire ton of news I have for the past few years into one blog post. That might create a super-dense object. Perhaps it would collapse in on itself, like a neutron star, and pull everything with it. And that would be bad.

I will try to avoid this.

Mysteriously pointy-headed

…is it gets harder and harder to update your blog.

And then there’s the difficulty of how much to write, how much to give away. I am a grown-up (or convention would dictate that by my age I really really should be), and a bunch of people may be reading this that will judge me professionally or personally. I mean, who are YOU, anyway? And why are you reading this?  If we are friends, would you not already know all my news from Facebook?

I’m listening to a lot of stupid pop these days, seeing as my downstairs is frequented with workmen that need constant nurturing with  sugary tea and very loud radio. And by the way, they are all doing a fabulous job, and I don’t begrudge them cuppas and pop.

BUT Oh dear god. I am now intimately familiar with the playlists of Radio Cambridgeshire and Heart FM.  I think HeartFM is run by a Winamp playlist of, tops, 30 songs, with occasional advertising and promotional interjections.  Every once in a while, someone presses the “shuffle” button.

Songs I wish they would stop playing on the radio

Oh there are others. Will just have to wait til they annoy me again so I can write them down.

Don’t do it.

So you might be preparing to decorate, and you might cast your eye around your staircase and notice maybe the thickly and sloppily painted staircase posts, maybe the slightly hairy and grubby skirting on either side of the steps and think ‘hang on, that looks like really nice wood’.

STOP.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking wouldn’t it be nice to strip that back, maybe stain it and give it a few coats of varnish.

Really. Stop right there.

You might be embarking on a journey that will last at least three weeks, and make you grubby, sweaty and miserable, probably give you lead poisoning, ruin all your clothes, take you on countless trips to the hardware store, go through acres of sandpaper, seas of paint stripper, and increasingly expensive machines for stripping and sanding.

Yes children, it happened to me. and my hell is not yet over.

The tragedy is that the finished effect (if it does finish) will probably not inspire a great deal of comment, appreciation or admiration of anyone. It won’t look particularly special for all the hard work. The only people that recognize the hard work for what it is and the curse you voluntarily took upon yourself will be those that trod the path before you. They might give you sympathy, a chuckle of shared knowing. But that is it.

So by all means, sand a little to take the decades of painty hair and fluff off.  Fill a little, to smooth out the chips in the remaining paint. And then do the only decent thing to preserve your sanity. Paint the f*cker white again.

The second of the Cambridge Geek Nights, organised by Vero (thatcanadiangirl.co.uk) after the successful Oxford geek nights, was last week. Again I was one of the few women at a techie event. It was a popular, lively evening, and I am definitely looking forward to the next one.

There were some interesting talks, including one by Michael Brunton-Spall of the guardian open platform. Of course, as an audience we were particularly warm to him as his employer kindly picked up the bar tab – particularly yummy cocktails at the Maypole! Richard Boulton gave a good introduction to open source search library that he is coding, Xapian. There were some lawyers who talked about IP too.

There was a write-up in the Cambridge Evening News on 4th August, disappointingly I could not find reference online. Vero, thankfully tweeted about it and posted a scan on flickr. Here it is!

Here it is:

Eat less and be more active.

No good sitting around on the sofa watching telly and eating chips. The fat’s not moving until you do.

Those ads that you see everywhere, on Hotmail, MSN, Facebook…simple. That’s a scam scam scam.

That acai berry extract and stuff labeled ‘colon cleanse’ really won’t help, sorry. Unless you take them as part of a calorie-controlled diet and increase your physical activity, of course…but then you are really just getting into stone soup territory.

Oh, the free sample is just a hook. How do you think they get money to stick their offensive but highly effective ads all over the internets? Easy! They take your Credit card and whap a bunch o charges on it. Oh and another thing, Judy isn’t real. It’s not a blog. It’s a ploy to give the scammy advertiser the personal touch, to connect with you. Just like Mike Smithson and his money site.

Really you just wanted to look at more pictures of the fat chick that’s fatter than you, right?

Yep that’s why I’ve clicked on those ads. Maybe 20, 30 times…

It’s just shocking to me that so many mainstream and successful websites are OK with taking their dirty money, and so encourage their unsuspecting and eager users to play into the hands of con-artists. Yay commerce. Yay unregulated markets.

Update: I followed the link to ‘Judy’s blog’, and noticed that the British version (unlike the US version – same text, different images) has trademark information, terms and conditions printed at the bottom:

All trademarks, logos, and service marks are registered and/or unregistered Trademarks of their respective owners.

Judysweightlossblog.com is an affiliated website, marketing the health supplement products “AcaiBerry Exclusive” and “Effective Cleanse”. …You will be charged the super low price of £79.00 at the end of your 15-day trial period…Unless you call to cancel, you’ll continue to get a fresh one-month supply of Life Cleanse every 30 days for the low price of £79.00 (+£3.95 shipping and handling).

That’s good that they give this information, not all of the ads do, albeit couched in some odd salesmany words. £79 for powdered acai doesn’t sound like a super low price to me. In the year 2088 perhaps that would be a bargain. But not today!

Poor saps that don’t scroll to the bottom and read what they are in for are suckered out of an astounding £82.95 every thirty days unless they call a telephone number to cancel. I’d imagine if the company was really shifty they might never answer the phone or put callers into a monstrous call queue. But…they wouldn’t do that, would they?

That song on the laterooms.com video, it keeps playing when you are watching streaming media on the web in the UK, before and after and between, you’re dying to know what it it is, aren’t you? It’s jazzy, scatty, dancable and ohmygod catchy. You’re walking down the street and all you can hear in your head is ‘ababoop boo boo boo’. What the hell is that music?

You’ve even gone to the laterooms.com website, and visited the Late Rooms Press Releases area, but that too is extremely unhelpful. Don’t artists have to be attributed? Isn’t that the deal?

What the hell is that song? What’s he saying? Baboo? Ba Boo boo? You do a web search. Bah boo. Abahboo? You can find anything on Google. Baboop.

You’ve always been pretty good at finding things. You keep getting results for Betty Boop. Wow. That’s a weird cartoon. Was everyone on drugs?

Did they really show this to kids? So many questions.

There’s loads of sites that are supposed to list musicians and writers for the soundtrack of adverts, and when you look up laterooms.com ‘Dizzy with Choice’ – you’ve at least found what the ad men are calling it – and little comes up. Some helpful person might have mentioned that the laterooms.com song was Bring Your Daughter To the Slaughter by Iron Maiden, which was quite funny actually. But surely someone has the actual information and put it somewhere accessible? What is going ON?

Every time a Levi Jeans commercial came on the TV, suddenly the associated single was played everywhere and immediately available to purchase. Legions of artists had their careers boosted or revived beyond all reason because their song was accompanying the suggested unbuttoning of flies. Hey Babylon Zoo anyone? *snigger*. Hows about Smoke City? Actually that song was quite good (Underwater Love). And I’ve actually got Mr Oiso’s album on the strength of a head-banging puppet, Flat Eric.

So if the song has been driving you mad, you’ve been searching for long nonsensical scat phrases, and nothing has come up so far, this is for you.

Ready? Yeah because I have been dragging this out a bit, it’s my blog, I can do what I like. Ha.

Artist: The Real Tuesday Weld. Album: ‘The London Book of the Dead’. Song: ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’.

It was used in an awesome animation called ‘Last Time in Clerkenwell’ by Alex Budovsky. If the song from hell is not in your head yet, it will be after you watch this.