I Should Have Been an Elephant

Well, it's been a while. Quite a few silly things have happened to me since my last entry, but I can't remember any of them now. Maybe they will come to me.

I do remember something relating to the last entry, although it wasn't anything silly. Just me forgetting about the no-smoking ban in cafes and having to traipse down the street carrying a plastic cup full of coffee so I could sit in the park at the end of the road. This particular cafe used to always be full, but on that occasion it was practically empty. I had to go by the law court on the way to the park and there were several police persons and a couple of lawyers outside smoking away, although that has always been the case as smoking has been banned in there for a while. Just struck me as rather amusing at the time.

I can't think of anything else to say, so I'm going.

Google Mood Ring (Dark Blue):Impassioned, delighted, whiff of romance

Light-Up and Cough-Up

Well, today's the day. Yes, from today a certain section of people in the UK are being mercilessly victimised and forced to live like smelly, parasitic entities from a lower spiritual plane. In other words, today is the day that smokers can no longer smoke in public places. I didn't even know about this until my 10-year-old son told me about it a week or so ago.

There's more to it than that and most of it makes no sense. I haven't even bothered to check-up on it, all I know is that it sounds totally stupid and is all based on whether or not the smoking is taking place in a home or a place of business. If it's a home, it's allowed, which means (and this is a good one) that if your home is also your place of business, you can't smoke in it. Yes, you heard right, you can't smoke in the privacy of your own home. Doesn't even matter if you live alone and have no other workers to contaminate with your revolting vapours, you still can't do it. Like hell you can't. I am seriousy considering starting a home business purely on principle.

Smoking is now banned in pubs, but not in hotels. This is because a pub is a public place, but a hotel is classed as a home. This means, of course, that the hotel bars will fill-up and the hotel owners will increase their profits to the detriment of the pub owners. I may be wrong, but I would say that there is a larger majority of smokers in pubs than there are in the country generally, so there's a fair bit of profit to be lost there. Smokers can go outside pubs to smoke, but they can only smoke in shelters with one side and a roof or something, 'cos if they have three sides (or something) they'll be public places. This presumably also means that if they just have a roof, they're homes. So, all we need to do is knock our walls down and we can work and amoke in our homes to our lungs' content.

And lorry drivers can't smoke in their cabs. Since when was a lorry driver's cab a public place? Bearing in mind that they spend a lot of time sleeping in them, I'd have thought they were more homes than business premises. But of course, they're working in them too, so that explains that. Not very logically, but the entire thing is totally illogical.

The punishment for lighting-up is that the naughty smoker has to pay a £50 fine if they're caught. The council will be employing officers to sneak around looking for errant smokers and I bet every single one of them is one of those evangelical ex-smoking types. You know the sort I mean. The most unfair aspect of it is that the person who owns the premises the smoker is smoking on (such as a pub owner) will be fined £2,500. A slight difference there. I would strongly suggest that no pub owners go to the toilet or anything, just in case the entire pub lights-up in their absence.

I don't want to talk about this anymore, it's boring me silly. Go to this link to read a much funnier and far more informative blog post about this topic. Before I go, though, read the title of this post again, because I think it's rather clever. Cough-up has two meanings, you see. Get it? Good. Have to keep you on your toes.

Google Mood Ring (Dark Blue): Impassioned, delighted, whiff of romance

Pointless Opportunities

So I finally get my blog accepted for this silly thing that is supposed to earn me money if I wax lyrical about products I've used (or products I pretend I've used) and things like that, but there's this problem. Out of 93 open 'opportunities', the only one I qualify for is talking about the site offering the opportunities and telling everyone how wonderful it is and how much money I've made from it.

HELLO, people offering these 'opportunities'??? See the problem???

Google Mood Ring (Black):tense, stressed, working too hard

Down With This Blog

OK, so I am somewhat miffed. Before my 2-year hiatus from this blog, it had a 5/10 Google rating. When I came back, it was down to 4/10. How it managed to stay that high for two totally unposted years is more than slightly puzzling. However, now that I am back, it has suddenly gone down to 3/10.

Does this mean my blog does better without me posting anything on it? Perhaps I should just shut-up permanently ...

Google Mood Ring (Grey): Anxious, ill-at-ease, strained
(Is it any wonder after seeing my rating?!).

If It's Loose, Don't Lose It

Lots of things irritate me, on account of how I am easily irritated. Most of all, I am irritated by stupidity, especially stupidity caused by lack of attention to obvious detail.

No more is this demonstrated than in my total aversion to the misuse of words and one thing that really drives me insane is the inability to differentiate between "lose" and "loose". Why do so many people get these confused? It should be obvious from the pronunciation alone what they both mean, yet so many people insist that they are going to, for example, "loose their mind" ... what does that mean exactly, that they are going to send it on some sort of rampage?

Let's get this straight once and for all. When the word "loose" is pronounced, it has an "s" sound; when the word "lose" is pronounced, it has a "z" sound. If that simple difference is borne in mind, there should be no margin for error and no excuse for it. To make it even clearer, "loose" is the opposite of "tight" and "lose" is the opposite of "win". So, if you say "I know I am going to loose the game", what you are really saying is "I know I am not going to tight the game", which makes no sense whatsoever. It also makes you sound like a complete idiot.

Oh and while we're at it, the words "to" and "too" are pronounced differently, too (not to). So, you would "go to work, too" (light "u" sound followed by heavy "oo" sound), you would not "go too work, to", although you might "go to work to work".

Google Mood Ring (Blue): Comfortable, breezy, at rest, lovable

Unwashed Teenage Blondes

Well, for those who know what I mean, Second Life is down for updating and the Beta grid doesn't seem to be working either, so I may as well prattle in here a bit seeing as I haven't done for a while.

Perhaps I will moan about my teenage daughter for a paragraph or two. What is it about teenage daughters and clothes? Mine has like hundreds of things to wear, but yesterday she wanted to wear the one thing that hadn't been washed. Never mind that everything else was clean and dry, it just had to be the one top that she'd forgotten to give me for washing the day before.

We had far more fun during the Easter holidays, though. Her hair is naturally medium-dark brown with red highlights. Due to the fact that, like her mother, she can be a bit scatter-brained at times, the majority of her schoolfriends have told her that she should have been born blonde (she was actually dark blonde as a toddler, but it darkened). Anyway, to this end she decided to colour her hair blonde. Unfortunately, being 'blonde', she didn't make too good a job of it and ended-up with a large patch of very blonde hair on top, surrounded by reddish blonde, graduating to gingery-brown as it went further down. She did all this at her father's and he hadn't the common sense to tell her that with hair the length of hers she'd need two or three packets of colourant, not one. She did try using several others afterwards, but it didn't seem to work.

I had a similar problem when I was her age. My hair then was extremely dark brown (blue-black in some lighting), but it also had red in it. Blonde highlights were all the rage when I was about the same age my daughter is now and as my mother didn't want to pay for me to have them, I decided to try them myself. I bought myself a box of peroxide, grabbed an old toothbrush, and ... well, the end result was several huge frizzy pieces of ginger fuzz and the eventual loss of an entire head of hair that had taken me years to grow to well past the bottom of my bra strap. The hairdresser insisted the only way to solve the problem was to cut it all off to nape of the neck level (way above the bottom of my bra strap, on account of the fact that I have never worn a bra around my neck). Since then, it hasn't seemed to want to grow much past my shoulders, so goodness only knows what damage I did to it.

The upshot of this is that my daughter ended-up having to colour her hair medium-dark brown and the final count in financial terms was around £30 to get herself back to the colour she'd started with.

Google Mood Ring (Blue): Comfortable, breezy, at rest, lovable.