Happenstance is also a 12 letter word

Christmas is that rare time I don’t have internet access.  Which, given that I’m usually online 24 hours a day, always feels a little odd.  Working (uninterrupted) in the kitchen/dining area is quite pleasant - but on the whole I’m glad to be back in London.

I had a long list of things that I can blog about - but as with all spur-of-the-moment things, I’m not interested in writing about them now as they’re all history :p

The major salient points would be that:

1) I ate about 5 ginger, 4 orange, 2 coconut (ick), and 3 butterscotch biscuits coated in chocolate (but I only managed this because my sister and I bought our parents some ‘festive’ cookies from Waitrose that we wanted to try… - instead of gorging ourselves on the usual Fererro Rocher).

2) My friends have a 14 month baby girl who will eventually learn to be speak, and will be bilingual (french/english), and watching her use baby sign language for ‘more’, ‘please’, and ‘thank you’ is pretty cool.  I’d only ever read about it before, but it sure makes her life easier when trying to figure out that mum is saying ‘more’ in more ways than one :p  And no, I still don’t want any of my own…

3) Romeo and Juliet - where Leo first meets Claire Danes as you start to hear the strains of Desree’s "Kissing You" is still piercingly romantic =)  (To me anyways :p)  That scene alone propels the movie waaaaaay up there …

Yup.  That was it … those were the things that made an impact on me this xmas :p  Bring on the new year … let’s see what the coal face reveals.

A survey in the US (I read) guestimated that an average of 1 in 20 americans cannot read, write or carry a conversation (*snigger* nothing further on that note.  And no jokes about the South).

If you’ve been here before, you’ll also note that 7 out of every 10 are supposidely over their ‘perfect’ weight - although perhaps someone should adjust that ideal figure now that OVER HALF of them are bulkier than healthy life permits.

In the same way that there are hardly any women to be found with the ‘classic’ hourglass shape now because of a change in lifestyle and eating habits, should our perception ‘normal-sized’ people grow as well? 

In any case, that wasn’t why I was posting today… Those of you eating, look away now.

List of animals:
Elephant
Dog
Zebra
Giraffe
Camel
Monkey
Anteater

List of body parts:
Hand
Toe
Neck
Thigh
Back

Very innocuous you might think, until you put one of them together…  Either the arabs are insinuating phrases into everyday life, or the Discovery channel has much for which it must answer.

Behold, the conversation of the day.  Dedicated to Zander.  Or whichever sick person started it over here…

Girl #1: Why do I always have camel toe?
Girl #2: Are you buying your pants too tight?
Girl #1: No, I think I gained weight.
Girl #2: Where, in your labia?

– E Train

The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for Man,

But one prize is beyond his reach:

The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among it’s desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
—W. H. Auden, British poet and essayist, August 1968, 1968

The poem has nothing to do with today’s blog - but it’s not an inappropriate tangent. 

I have this peeve.  It’s not a major thing in my life, not enough for me to keep it in a cage, or feed it and make it a pet peeve.  What is it?  Why, the strangeness of language and its mutations.

I like the way new words flower out of a combination of others, created by an agreed educated minority that the consensus acknowledges as being ‘knowledgable’.  Or ones which seem like some omniscient mind made them just so.  "Awwww, that’s cute", I think sometimes, "I’ll store that away for later and use it so I sound clever."  Tch.  So I’m shallow…

Examples?  Hmmm

"Spear-phishing" - targeted phishing
"Lifehack" - tool or technique that makes your life more efficient/easier/less chaotic
"Geofence" - virtual boundary on a geographic region

These are the kind of words you can look on, nod and admire.  They have some kind of pre-established depth to them somehow.  Some solidity.

As with all things, there is balance.  It’s peculiar colloqualisms that grate, that my mind strains to reassign to its new, alternate meaning.  I had enough problems with ‘gay’ when the word was hijacked - how can anyone cope with all these new turns of phrase? 

"aks" - the colloquial version of ‘ask’.  Is it specific to Londoners?  Did someone illiterate come up with this and somehow it became popular?  It’s only 3 letters for crying out loud, how can you spell 3 letters incorrectly and make it cool?  Are we keeping it real here? I have to know so I too can use this mountain of a word.

Eventually, I get over it and adapt and start using words that used to stick in my craw … but the first couple of months sure are a killer …

Moving along swiftly … I am, unfortunately, a bit british, apologies course through in my blood on a regular basis, and I have to stop myself from saying sorry for things I can’t be held to blame over - which is why I found this quite amusing:  (taken from www.overheardinnewyork.com )

HS guy: Would you like to buy a bag of M&M’s to support our basketball team?
Chick: Sorry.
HS guy: Come on, just one bag, we’re raising funds for our team–
Chick: Sorry. I’m sorry.
HS guy: "Sorry", what is that, "sorry"? Why don’t you just say "no" if you mean no? Why don’t you just say "no"?

–13th & Broadway

PS. In case I happen to lose my sheet of paper that reminds me of what I need to get from Ikea, it reads:

Clothes rail
Curtain rail -> "curtains"
Pillowcases
Towels
Bedside table.
Angular lamps - many
Pictures: Kitchen xlarge, Bathroom xlarge, Hallway xmany
Things behind curtain thing
Shelf?
Mirror

Okay, this is going to be somewhat long.  So go and brew some tea, or coffee and get comfy.

I’m a modern tech/geek person, and I want to upgrade to a new laptop.  Okay so far?  However, I know I shouldn’t spend money on a brand new, specific (1400×1050, 14", 7 hour battery life, 1.5kg weight) laptop from Japan because, well, I can spend the money on other things.

My solution?  Amazon/Ebay off anything that’s not important, that I don’t use, and/or which isn’t nailed to the floor in the flat.  Good huh? 

It takes me 4 hours to list all of these things, and the majority of them are sitting eagerly on the kitchen table (don’t ask) just twitching to be sold off as part of Waidat’s Worthy Laptop fund.

The emails come in … 2 of which are purchases, and I’m happy!  The other 10 drop into my mailbox, and they’re all requests from DIFFERENT email addresses from nice people around the world who would like me to tell them how much it costs to ship to Nigeria because their poor (insert relative here) needy relative requires 6x Nokia communicators.

I’m like … WTF?  (If you don’t know what that means, just ask).  Nigeria?  Damn, those 419 scamming groups have found something else to steal… maybe they can really make money on receiving shipments of phones from other suckers and somehow conning them out of their cash.

So I ignore those … and 2 days later (that’s today), another ‘query’ email comes through… innocuous I thought.  I answer it, and the nice guy says that once he’s back from his travels, he’ll buy one …

But no. (Ack, incorrect grammar, but I digress).  After the aforementioned buyer decides that he does in fact want to buy … I receive an ‘official’ confirmation email from Amazon telling me that they’ve multiplied my postage fee by tenfold (that’s 60 pounds for a communicator) to …

… yup.  You guessed it.

Nigeria.  Except.

This email looks genuine.  The copy editor actually seems to actually be able to copy and paste everythign EXACTLY as per an official Amazon email.  Except the emails are different.  They’re not the official ones…

I realise that by replying to the queries, they have my email address … which is why only have I received this ‘confirmation’.

Want to know the differences?

1   Nokia 9210 Communicator [Electronics]

You have agreed to dispatch no later than two working days

after the buyer’s purchase on 10.12.2005.

In the unfortunate case that you cannot provide the item that

you have sold, you should issue a full refund.By contacting the

customer care@ (amazon.co.uk-heldpdesk@iowa.usa.com)to make enquiry for

your refund.

Your buyer’s delivery address is below (please use your own address
as the return address and enclose the packing slip for your buyer’s
reference):

Here are the details of your completed Amazon Marketplace sale:

Order #: 736-7411744-9878720

Listings: 1

Total Item Count: 1

Listing 1:Nokia 9210 Communicator [Electronics]
Listing ID: 1207R908414
Quantity: 1

Buyer’s Price:£59. 99
Postage & Handling: 60.00

Total Amount: (£104.16)

Wow.  The address:

Tope Elegbeleye
Shop 1 wonderful God plaza,

Agbelekale

Abule-Egba

Lagos

23401

Nigeria

well Mr. Tope Elegbeleye Shop 1 wonderful God plaza.
Unlucky!  Go find some other unsuspecting fool to con.

I feel sorry for all the people who are using the internet for the first time.  This, I imagine you could only spot with prior knowledge of these kind of scams.

Shame on you Amazon for not protecting your customers.

Meanwhile, the laptop fund is up to £120.  Only another 1000 to go :p 
I need to go stand on a street corner somewhere, and carry a red maglite. 

And a lantern.
And dress up.

Hmmm.  The idea has merit. 

… omg.  Sell my flat, buy a porn company complete with all assets (haha … I said assets…)

Best blog post evar! 

Evar!

PS. Sorry about the complete lack of legitimate content in this post, but the censors will get to me if I tarry too long and it’s hard writing material about pr0n.

Ho ho ho.  I’m so witty.  I’m going to clap myself on the back.  I award myself a million points a la "Whose Line is it Anyway" for l33t gutter humour.

… that I happened to overhear while I was on the bus, was two public school girls (from the accent and general demeanour) discussing grades, and rewards.  It turns out that (and in some cases, you just had to be there) that one of their Design and Tech. teachers gives out more gold stars than the other.

Normally, this wouldn’t be funny - unless you’d been idly listening to them rabbit on about other girls, lessons and teachers for the previous five minutes in quite proper english until:

Girl1: "… and if it was Ms. Sanderson, I would have received bare gold stars!"
Mother: "Bear stars?"
Girl1: "Lots of gold stars!  Ms. Rabham would only have given half as many."

Things were normal for a while … then something else that made me double take:

Girl2: "I hate learning French!  I don’t know why we have to do it, I much prefer my Mandarin class"

…

I swear, somewhere in upper suburbia, there are hordes of little 14 year old schoolgirls with a better grasp of spoken Mandarin than me.  That brings a wry smile to my face for some reason.  Knowing that they speak ghetto English and Mandarin just weirds me out though.

The future is bright. The future is red with gold stars.