You’ve gotta hand it to the spammers.

In an effort to bypass spam filters, their “Enlarge your penis” emails now have even sillier subject lines. Just today I received these: “Bomb her womb from your huge cannon!”, “Elongation of your baby-maker size is not a dream! (Your banana is too small)”, “Most popular way to increase your dummy length (Your Big Daddy is too small)” and “Stop being a sniper, be RAMBO”.

I’m actually looking at my spam folder regularly now, just for new laughs. I guess their plan worked!

I live in a small block of flats that has a shared front-door and post box. Some muppet keeps letting Pizza Leaflet Guy in to hand-deliver leaflets to every flat and while I frown upon this security lapse, I’ve got used to it. So when something was popped through my door at 8pm last night, I thought it was another advert for Extra Ultimate Novelty Deep Pan Extreme.

But no, it actually turned out to be a note written by a neighbour, someone I haven’t even met yet, complaining about the noise. Read more »

Further to my recent post about poor spelling, I noticed this story on the BCC website the other day. It discusses how oral exams could be dropped from foreign language GCSEs because they are “too stressful”.

If this went ahead, it would be possible to get a pass in a foreign language even though you’ve neither written nor spoken a word of it under exam conditions. Unbelievable.

Kids, get this: exams are supposed to be stressful. Sure, getting a good grade is important, but what you learn from dealing with these stressful tests is the ability to better handle stress in real-life.

What is happening in schools? Why are we taking away all the difficult stuff and making it so easy for kids these days? Overcoming difficulties is crucial character building and we seem to be very keen to completely obliterate it from school life. Are we now churning out softies?

I’m all for continuous assessment if it genuinely tracks every pupil’s progress. But exams, stressful or otherwise, do in fact give you a good indication of the capability of a child. I was a reasonably intelligent pupil, but I hated exams and wasn’t very good at them. Yet I never claimed they were too stressful and I managed to get good grades — incidentally as the first year of people to take GCSEs after ‘O Levels’ were shelved.

If an otherwise bright child fails an exam because it’s too stressful, there is something else going on, it’s not simply the stress of the day. I’d argue that if kids are failing due to ’stress’ then they have been failed by a system that didn’t understand their individual learning needs or their personal circumstances in the first place.

Some of my online time is spent using forums and messageboards. The quality of forum content is variable, but on the whole it’s readable and understandable. However, some younger messageboard contributors seem to have the intelligence and writing capability of a tin of spam. I regularly see badly written and badly spelled incoherent dross and it’s getting on my nerves. Not because it’s low quality, or even because it’s ignorant, but because I think it shows how the education system is failing our children. Read more »

A perk of working from home is the ability to make a nice lunch. Winter blues call for warming soups and the good old Campbell’s Condensed always goes down a treat with some crusty white doorsteps. But shock horror today! The label had changed and slapped over the classic red and white band was an ugly swatch: “Soon to be Batchelors”.

Batchelors will only ever make me think of grim, salty, dusty cup-a-soups that my mum subjected me to as a kid, not the lovely thick and creamy Campbells that Makes Double. This is a soup tragedy!

So many icons of 20th century culture are being swallowed up, rebranded, rebooted, renewed — and often to the detriment of the product in question. Will there be anything left for us to remember in ten years? Twenty?

Luckily, further investigation reveals that Batchelors won’t be changing the recipes and as they haven’t actually bought the brand, we might yet see Campbells on the label again in 2013.

I wonder by how much this will increase the value of Warhol’s classics?

Last week I went for a run for the first time in about 10 years. Actually, I say run it was more of a slow jog. Though when I say slow jog, I guess I really mean it was a brisk walk interspersed with some slow walking. And a sit down.

Fitness is not my thing. It doesn’t seem to run in the family either. I’m pretty sure my Dad didn’t exercise much more than his drinking arm and the closest Mother gets to any kind of activity is jumping from one personality to another. Literally.

I want to get fit. Really I do. I’ll enter my 36th year in August and I feel tired all the time so I can’t neglect this part of my life any longer. But after feeling achy and exhausted all week after only a short run, maybe I need to start even more simply?

Perhaps a night in the pub exercising my beer biceps would be a good start?

Overdosed on blogs this week and noticed that everyone is summarising their 2007. Bandwaggoning, here’s mine:

highs

• Finally moved away from my home town after only 35 years :-)
• Increased my salary significantly — for a short time
• I had balls big enough to reject a ’sensible’ career path
• Went to Glastonbury for the first time with highlights of The Who, Madness, Editors and Shirley Bassey!
• Met a lovely lady
• Made some new friends
• Became my own boss as a freelance webbie thing and haven’t yet had to promote myself
• Started writing a blog and realised how much I love it
• Discovered the only things I missed from home were my few close friends
• Quit psychotherapy
• Learnt more about the father I never really knew
• Joined Facebook with all its great connecting capabilities

lows

• Mum’s craziness (and therefore my own guilt) reached astronomic levels
• Lost a friend through my decision to reject corporate hell
• Struggled to make friends in a new city
• Learnt that flat sharing with an idiot is both a false economy and a waste of time
• Found some more ailments to add my steadily growing list
• Getting to grips with London’s expensive and confusing transport system
• Joined Facebook with all it’s shitty pointlessness

things to achieve this year

• Gain enough paid employment to clear my debts and save some cash
• Have a decent holiday
• Start a fitness regime — morning runs are the first thing, from next week. Eeek!
• Get a better daily routine: earlier nights and earlier starts
• Spend less time on the computer
• Buy a decent camera and start experimenting
• Start drawing again
• Explore London and find some decent pubs!

If I manage to do even half of those I’ll be happy. :-)

• Beautiful photographs of forgotten “sound mirrors” built in the First World War as a low-tech precursor to RADAR
• Amazing pictures of bouquets frozen in liquid nitrogen then shattered
• Limo see-saw

Corporate giants beware: Consumers are getting more and more tech-savvy and can use the web against you. The Guardian shows how 2007 was the year of consumer power. Another great example of how the web is maturing and being used in positive ways.

Andrew Collins has written a great post outlining why it’s “time for a return to - or a formalisation of - good manners.” It’s a shame that his Manners Manifesto even needs to be written, but I’m glad someone is still thinking this way.

I already try and do as much as I can from his list and that comes from one of the good things my mother did for me as a child: she taught me good manners. These days she’s a lunatic schizophrenic who collects dead birds and literally expects God to provide for her, but I’m glad her middle-to-upper-class aspirations gave me those good manners.

However, I don’t agree with everything Andrew says. I never buy the Big Issue because it’s dire. I have sworn at a free-newspaper vendor on the tube who barred my way into Canary Wharf station by sticking his arm out right in front of me — immovably. And I’m not always that friendly to strangers, especially since moving to London: get too friendly and you’re likely to be knifed in the guts or receive a toe-cap to the bollocks. Be even friendlier and firearms might be involved.

Neverthless, it’s good to see a rallying call for better manners. I’m going to try and improve. Will you?