Fuddland

Entries for which there is no obvious other category.

Long-time readers of Fuddland might be aware that I tend to support Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day whenever it comes around. In the past this has been in the form of sponsored commenting, donating an amount to the charity based on the number of comments I receive on Red Nose Day.

This year, due to living in a foreign country and suffering complications of bank accounts and general relative skintness, I decided on a different tactic to show my support: I waited until someone else had a genius idea, and then proceeded to wheedle my way into it.

Thus, I’d like to wholeheartedly recommend to any, all and more of you reading this to make one, several or indeed nine purchases of Shaggy Blog Stories.

A collection of 100 short humorous pieces from the UK blogosphere. All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Comic Relief charity. Contributors include Richard Herring, Andrew Collins (BBC 6Music), Emma Kennedy, James Henry (TV’s “Green Wing”), Abby Lee (Girl With A One-Track Mind), Catherine Sanderson (Petite Anglaise), Zoe McCarthy (My Boyfriend Is A Twat), novelist David Belbin, Anna Pickard (The Guardian), and a diverse selection of some of the UK’s most talented bloggers.

Should that list of well-known names not be enough to encourage a purchase, then perhaps the tingly news that the sixty-fourth contribution to be found within its pages is from this very weblog. In the interests of intrigue, I’ll not be telling you which of the 1,656 [including this one] entries I’ve written over the last almost-five years it is. [Oh okay, one clue: it’s not the one you’re reading now. That narrows it down a bit.]

For full details of all the contributors, and more of the story behind its creation, I’ll point you in the direction of the book’s brainparent and masterminder, Mike Troubled Diva. I’m chuffed to bits to have made the final cut, but even if I hadn’t, I’d still be pimping this book like … I’m sorry, I’m just far too English to finish that sentence. Just go and buy it, and I’m sure you’ll be chuckling at at least 99 of the stories.

Notice in a hotel room in Nottingham:

If you discover smoke or fire shout “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

A footnote added that running around flailing one’s arms before putting a chair through the nearest window was optional.

Umm.

Ideas, anyone?

This is the best optical illusion ever. Look at this friendly dragon what I did cut out and stick together:

Now this is the same model, photographed from the side, and I more promise that I didn’t touch it at all:

The dragon’s head appears to move and follow you around as you observe it from different positions! Make your own from the instructions at Grand Illusions [check out the downloadable video for a better preview of the effect].

[via Boing Boing]

I posted something to the Moblog the other day, via my new phone. But it didn’t turn up. Orange seem to be having a lot of trouble recently in delivering emails I send from my phone. And I can’t re-post it right now because I’m on the other side of the world, so I’m “roaming” as they say and I fear that sending one email with a 25kb photo attachment may cost me my next semester’s grant; for some reason I decided not to pack my tiny-but-handy Bluetooth USB adaptor so I can’t even transfer the photo from my phone to the snazzy laptop my Department lent me. To make up for it, I’ll describe what the MIA-post said.

It was a photograph of a largish aeroplane, taken through a window at Gate 38 in Gatwick Airport. The title of the entry was, tritely, “Leaving on a jet-plane”, and the text accompanying the photo said:

However, I do know when I’ll be back again.

Back home in about three weeks. Until then, because I can’t be bothered to change the settings, assume all entry posting-times are six hours behind their displayed timestamp. And please enjoy the strange oxymoronicness of reading entries from someone who claims to be not blogging at the moment.

There’s nothing quite as manly as dismantling, cleaning and reassembling a bike; the fact that it’s a ladies’ pushbike is neither here nor there [although it may be yonder].

Earlier in the day I caught a random episode of E.R., and as I scrubbed the bike grease and grim off my hands with the aid of a nailbrush, I wondered if hospital dramas are actually anywhere near reality: surely, I thought, the operating theatres must echo with peals of laughter, because scrubbing one’s hands vigorously with a nailbrush really tickles, yet you never see Dr Corday giggling into her facemask.

Can you get left-handed scythes? And, if so, would I be less crap if I used one of those instead of the right-hander we have here? Does anyone want to bet how many feet I’ll have remaining at the end of this week?

Did you know the word swathe means the width of one stroke of a scythe? Hardly a useful measurement, given that it would vary from person to person. One man’s swathe could be another man’s 3.14 cubits.

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who put used pots and pans to soak immediately after use so that sauce or food residue doesn’t dry out and become almost impossibly hard to clean, and bastards.

Read the rest of “Super soakers”…

power = (work done) / (time taken)

or

the amount of energy one bottle of lucozade sport provides exactly equals the energy expended trying to remove the foil seal so you can drink the damn thing.

i find the funniest jokes are the shorter ones — long-winded gags with contrived punchlines tend to bore me halfway through [if i haven’t already guessed how it ends] — so i had a good chuckle at some classic two-liners over at krisalis just now. one of the gags [‘what do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back?’] shares a punchline [‘a stick’] with a completely different opening line [the schoolboy perennial ‘what’s brown and sticky?’], which set me on a quest to think of more two-line jokes that share punchlines.

so far i have:

• what’s brown and sticky?/what do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back?

hmm, they’re rarer than i thought…

as a child, much excitement ensued from watching the car’s milometer turn over from 99,999 to 100,000 [if i recall correctly, it actually turned over to 00,000, being a five-digit display]. there’s not really a rational explanation for this — they’re just two consecutive numbers after all, and not particularly interesting ones at that; going from 112,245 to 112,246 is more impressive if all we’re interested in is big numbers, but we attach special significance to the powers of 10. i could say it was because i was young and easily entertained, but we do still trumpet reaching this kind of milestone no matter what age — recently we’ve been congratulating lyle on his 100,000th page impression. so i have to admit i’m fairly pleased that the very next thing i post will be the one thousandth entry in the fuddland archives.

given the 504 days since my very first post, that’s an average of about 1.98 posts a day, putting me firmly in the tiny percentage [0.012%] of bloggers who update more than once a day [source: the blogging iceberg]. 117,452 words have been typed, of which 12,075 appear only once.

maintaining this site has taught me more about [x]html, css, javascript, php and web standards than i’d ever have learnt otherwise, but most importantly, i’ve made some new, genuine and treasured friendships as a direct result of having a weblog, and that’s the very reason i’ll be updating just as regularly for the foreseeable future.

[no pressure for writing the thousandth entry then…]

i’m not sure of the origin of this — for now the source is ‘my sister’ — but i found it quite interesting that you can read the following without having to stop and figure out each word one at a time.

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

there are two angles from which to approach the renting of a film for a night’s entertainment.

• have a title in mind. you go to the movie rental shop wanting a specific title. said shop is so terrified that you’ll leave without purchasing anything because they haven’t got the one you want, that they stock many copies of each title, driving up rental costs to cover the extra expenditure;

• have no specific title in mind. you just decide you want to watch a movie, but haven’t really got an idea which one. this adds, on average, seven to twelve hours to the renting process, as you wander the warehouse-sized store, picking up each title individually and checking for your favourite actors, directors, genres and — most importantly — the amount of nudity. for every extra person involved in the choice, the length of time this process takes is at least squared.

once the decision has been made, there’s the final obstacle of choosing the munchies — countless pipes of pringles and bags and bags of chocolates line the route to the checkout, and only the hardest sas soldiers possess the willpower required to resist the temptations.

you can never really settle down to enjoy the movie either — there’s always this constant, nagging voice at the back of your head, reminding you that if you forget to return it to the store the next day, they’ll repossess your house, take your firstborn and sell them into slavery.

finally, there’s the inconvenience of having to physically travel to the shop — once to collect the film, once to return it. the increasing popularity of locating the massive stores in out-of-town retail parks makes this particularly difficult for non-drivers such as myself. which is why, since i first heard about it, i thought netflix was a genius idea: you pay a monthly fee, create an ever-growing list of movies you want to rent, and they mail them to you one at a time. you watch it when you like, keep it for as long as you want, and when you decide to send it back, the next one on the list arrives a couple of days later. no pressure, no stress, no fighting, no pringles, and firstborn safe as non-threatened-with-repossession-houses.

so i’ve been waiting, and waiting, for u.s.-based netflix to branch out to the rest of the world, but just when i’d almost given up on them doing that, i’ve found an equivalent u.k.-based service: dvdoptions. i’d rented individual movies from them in the past, since they allowed you to keep them for a week for less than somewhere like blockbuster charged for an overnight rental, but it’s only recently dvdoptions have launched their moviematch service.

i signed up last night and gave them my initial ten titles to activate my account. so long as i get at least three dvds a month — a not unreasonable amount — i’ll not be losing anything over renting them individually. after a brief email exchange with their customer service department [impressively, they replied within the hour] it transpires that they don’t send items precisely in the order they appear in my list, but as near as they can manage according to availability; i was worried that this would mess things up in the case of, for example, renting the six-dvd set of the first series of the west wing, but they’ve thought of that: they won’t sent sets in the wrong order, but will wait until the next one is available [possibly sending something else from the list in the meantime].

throw in a pizza-delivery menu and you’ve got an nice evening-in arranged, without ever having to step out of the house. the perfect hermit existence moves ever closer to being the normal way of life.

so say the fabulous bakin’ boys.

a post over at missiedith’s place led me to the phobia list. knowing the names of a few phobias can be handy in a pub quiz situation, and the more unusual the better, so along with the well-known contraries agoraphobia and claustrophobia, we have:

• allodoxaphobia [fear of opinions];

• aulophobia [fear of flutes];

• barophobia [fear of gravity];

• cherophobia [fear of gaiety];

• dextrophobia [fear of objects at the right side of the body];

• geniophobia [fear of chins];

• hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia [fear of long words];

• lachanophobia [fear of vegetables];

• levophobia [fear of things to the left side of the body];

• mnemophobia [fear of memories];

• phronemophobia [fear of thinking];

• zemmiphobia [fear of the great mole rat].

it’s hard to tell if the name or the affliction came first with a lot of these — i can’t imagine they’d make up zemmiphobia unless there had been at least one real case of a fear of a great mole rat; but then again, what kind of hell would it be suffer from phronemophobia? how would you escape that torment? we already know, from ‘ghostbusters’, that it’s almost impossible to empty your mind of all thoughts.

i’m quite interested in how these phobias get their names; i’m sure if i studied classics at school i’d be able to figure out the likely name of a phobia [or conversely, what a named phobia is the fear of] — those that aren’t obviously contrived, such as hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia or aibohphobia [the fear of palindromes]. for example, if i knew some greek i might know that the root phron relates to thinking and contemplation, and i’d be able to take a stab at the meaning of phronemophobia. unfortunately my london comprehensive didn’t deem latin or greek [or even any modern-day languages, in fact] to be worthy parts of the syllabus, so i’ll just have to learn them all by rote — just got to overcome this damn mnemophobia first.

• which food you were told puts hairs on your chest is dependent on which battalion your grandfather fought with during either the second world war;

• in a house with low water pressure, the moment you step into the shower will always coincide with someone filling the kettle;

• the hardest sound effect to reproduce using only the vocal chords is the one of the six million dollar man jumping;

• trying to get the object and embed tags to play the above soundclip upon the user’s request using their favourite plugin, and for the code to validate, is like nailing jelly to the ceiling.

something’s gone a bit awry in the yahoo groups databases. the yahoo id i had to create, to subscribe to anna’s little red wibbling dinghy, has apparently posted some messages on the ‘hotwheels hangout — a hangout to chat trade and meet others’ group — and what’s more, it was a good four years ago!

i think it’s obvious from the style and content of the messages that it’s not me who’s written them; for example,

or,

[so much [sic] i need an antiemetic.]

rational explanation, anyone? anyone? no, me neither.

tactic: scroll up and down through album titles in media player until something catches my eye; glance at album contents; cue a track from chosen album; repeat.

• soon after christmas — memories of a colour — stina nordenstam;

• adagio — concierto de aranjuez — joaqaín rodrigo;

• nightswimming — automatic for the people — r.e.m.;

• just for a moment — aqualung — aqualung;

• both hands — live — ani difranco & the new york philharmonic orchestra;

• cochise — audioslave — audioslave;

• theme from casanova — casanova — the divine comedy;

• another lonely day — fight for your mind — ben harper;

• red house — live at woodstock — jimi hendrix;

• don’t call it soul — the sound of.. — mcalmont & butler;

• bring me sunshine — songs & sketches — morecambe & wise.

sleep now.

via dog-loving daisy comes the site that acrophonologically analyses your pet’s name.

not owning a pet, i had no option but to enter my own first, middle and last names to see what sort of pet i’d be for any prospective owners.

hmm, no comment on the scary accuracy of this — ‘arf ‘arf.

yes i know i said i’m not going to be around, but i was bored and desperate to avoid unpacking all the stuff i’d only just packed up yesterday. besides, i have to quickly say: vote dvd for july 2003 post of the month! [got to drum up support somehow — looks like some pretty stiff competition out there. must practise my ‘gracious loser’ face for the ceremony.]

not much time for anything besides packing — who knew one small flat contained so much stuff? and can anyone tell me the secret to fitting many differently-sized books into one box?

i just noticed that the new rugrats movie, ‘rugrats go wild’ is rated pg because it u and ‘contains some mild peril’. i thought this might be the first film to be classed according to how much ‘peril’ the characters get into, but it seems something called ‘recycled’ was also deemed to contain some mild peril earlier this year, and it’s only ten minutes long. i always thought the only character who could get into any kind of peril, mild or otherwise, was ms penelope pitstop.

i’ve just found a post i started the other day, saved in draft format, and haven’t got any idea where i was going with it, so here it is in all its unfinished glory:

the ‘nod and smile’ is one of the oddest behaviours to emerge in polite society, in that its intended purpose — that of to save the embarrassment of admitting you’ve not quite understood what somebody has said — almost always leads to bigger embarrassment when it soon becomes patently obvious that you’ve not understood what somebody has said.

its potential misuse can be disastrous [e.g. “my dog died yesterday” “haha, yes, probably…” *thwack* “heartless git”] whereas i don’t think anybody in the entire world would be mortally offended at being asked to repeat themselves. so i say, down with the nod and smile!

nedstat uses some dubious mathematics to predict either an unusually busy or depressingly quiet day for fuddland:

via gordon, here’s a lovely example from the adobe reader faqs of the dangers of copy & pasting without proof-reading the result:

three-sevenths of those ‘readers’ should say ‘acrobat’.

Read the rest of “post eight hundwed and eighty-eight”…

Read the rest of “misunderstanding for compliment effect”…

Read the rest of “a load of old crystal balls”…

Read the rest of “feeling anagrammatical”…

Read the rest of “conclusion: failure”…

Read the rest of “as sure as eggs is eggs”…

Read the rest of “what if i don’t want six eggs?”…

Read the rest of “more miscellany”…

Read the rest of “maximum viewing pleasure”…

Read the rest of “qotd”…

Read the rest of “double meanings”…

Read the rest of “unlocking my inner drummer”…

Read the rest of “i’ve seen the future, baby”…

Read the rest of “cogitation”…

Read the rest of “in the pink”…

Read the rest of “mini milestone”…

Read the rest of “no words going in the mincer here”…

Read the rest of “slanderous searches”…

Read the rest of “taking the mick”…

Read the rest of “anyone got any cream?”…

Read the rest of “idea for a television programme”…

Read the rest of “helgar, helgar, wake up! i have invented…a manoeuvre!”…

Read the rest of “busk a move”…

Read the rest of “erm, errr, ummm. erk!”…

Read the rest of “go into the light”…

Read the rest of “thoughts from the kitchen sink”…

Read the rest of “pluck off”…

Read the rest of “ambitions”…

Read the rest of “dvd vinci”…

Read the rest of “you understand me, sucka?”…

Read the rest of “ooh, get biologists”…

Read the rest of “logical argument of the day”…

Read the rest of “they think what?”…

Read the rest of “nothing to see here”…

Read the rest of “happy birthday stipey!”…

Read the rest of “let us boogie”…

Read the rest of “dubious role model”…

Read the rest of “uninteresting observation of the day”…

Read the rest of “to prevent you being as bored as me”…

Read the rest of “gaining experience”…

Read the rest of “no pressure”…