Humour

“You hit the nail upon the top”: more ludicrous compliments & idiocy from half-wit spammers

Hitting the nail upon the top. Pic credit: Carlos Porto, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/ images/view_photog.php? photogid=345

For some reason, I really enjoy writing about spam (perhaps because it is so entertaining I don’t need to think of anything funny to write myself), so I am pleased to bring readers the latest batch of illiterate rubbish that fills my inbox in response to various blog posts.

Let’s start with a compliment. “Rodney” tells me: “The website pattern is perfect, the subject material is really wonderful”. Thanks Rodney, be honest with me though, you haven’t actually read it, have you?

“Luke” was also enthusiastic. “Hey There,” he writes, “I found your blog the use of msn. That is a very neatly written article. I will be sure to bookmark it and come back to learn more of your helpful info. Thank you for the post. I will definitely comeback.” [sic]

“Eleonor” was even more effusive, though rather less literate. “Definitely believe that which you said. Your favourite reason seemed to be on the web the easiest factor to have in mind of. I say to you, I certainly get annoyed while folks consider concerns that they plainly don’t know about.” (Eleonor, we are soul-mates!)

“You managed to hit the nail upon the top as well as defined out the entire thing without having side effect, “ she continued. “Other folks could take a signal. Will likely be again to get more. Thanks!”

Rodney, Luke and Eleonor had filled me so with pride and self-love that I was positively insulted by a subsequent remark from “Elvia”. “After reading your blog post,” she said, “I browsed your website a bit and noticed you aren’t ranking nearly as well in Google as you could be. I possess a handful of blogs myself and I think you should take a look here [link supplied]. You’ll find it’s a very nice tool that can bring you a lot more visitors.”

Fuck off, Elvia. If my site gets found only by perverts Googling “rancid, bitter, middle-aged, hairy-legged failed woman journalist UK” that’s my bloody business, OK? No need to rub it in.

“Ethan” thought I was lacking in efficiency. “Next, take all the activities you want to accomplish in the first year, and break them down by quarter,” he suggested, apropos of nothing. Would sitting on a spammer until he bursts count as an activity I should accomplish, I wonder?

On a completely different subject, “Stephanie” informed me that “one major benefit of this oil it does is to reduce triglyceride a form of fat made in the body levels.” She neglected to inform me which oil, otherwise I’d obviously have rushed out and bought some. Actually, even if I knew what triglyceride was I probably wouldn’t want to pay a total stranger to help me reduce it – does that make me a bad person?

I simply don’t understand what purpose most of these ridiculous posts serve. The spammers clearly want people to look at their comments and then visit their sites, but why would anyone do so, given such irrelevant and ill-written comments?

What the hell is anyone supposed to make of comments like this one? “I mapped out my route and the first stop was Reagan National Airport where I was picking up a friend”. I’m not a bloody travel writer, “Seth” – you’re in the wrong website.

Seth’s not alone in having not the slightest comprehension of who he is or where he is. “Ryan” commented: “The boy, blissfully unaware of what he has just escaped, wanders up the hill to the graveyard at the end of the street, where he is taken in and raised by the ghosts and spirits who live there.” I’m so at a loss as to what Ryan’s purpose is in visiting my site that I can’t think of a single witty or sarcastic thing to write.

So, moving swiftly on in the hope that I recover quickly, here’s one from “Jesse”, who says: “If any of you know of a forum devoted to follow spot techniques, please reply here, or email me.”

I don’t have the first inkling what a follow spot technique is, and even less interest. Another spam post advertising “cheap London hotels” recommended a hotel that is (I discovered after looking it up on independent sites) very far from “cheap”. What on earth is the point – what are they hoping to achieve?

Perhaps the best offer I’ve had all week was for a brand of e-cigarettes. Apparently, this product looks “similar to a fabulous Marlboro” and the experience is akin to “having an breathed in measure associated with tobacco smoking flavor cigarettes”. Even better, “the cigarettes is supplied in the shape a fabulous vaporized the liquid brought to all the bronchi.” Not only but also, these “fabulous cigarettes repair you wish for not having the tar, untidy lung burning ash, smelly cigarette smoke, grey your smile unsightly stains, or perhaps second hand smoke. What this means is they are really possibly reliable roughly toddlers and children.”

Hm, that sounds lovely but I’m a bit bored now, so I think I’ll just nip outside for a cigarette.

I attempt to annoy a scammer by engaging in time-wasting correspondence with him – Part 1

Most of the scam and spam emails I receive go straight into the electronic circular file, but one captured my imagination today and I thought it would be rather fun to reply to it – all innocent, like.

“The Better Business Bureau has been filed the above-referenced complaint from one of your clients concerning their dealings with you,” was the shocking news that popped into my inbox.

“The details of the consumer’s concern are presented in attached document. 
Please give attention to this matter and notify us of your standpoint. 
We kindly ask you to open the attached report to respond this complaint. 
We look forward to your prompt reply.”

The email was signed by a “Paula Tap”, who holds the position of “Dispute Counselor” at the “Better Business Bureau”. It was actually sent by a “Susanne Cook”, whose email address appears to be in Japan, though I rather doubt this.

Presumably the idea is that one opens the attachment, for what purpose I’m not sure, but not having been born yesterday I didn’t. Instead I thought I’d write back to my new penfriends and see if I could waste a portion of their time.

I replied:

“Dear Susanne and Paula

I was very upset to learn that a complaint had been filed against me. I have always done my best to give a good service to my clients and it is obviously a cause of great concern if a client is unhappy enough to contact a leading authority in business matters, such as yourselves.

I am asking myself, why did the client not contact me direct in the first instance? Maybe I could have explained matters to their satisfaction. Had things got so bad that we couldn’t at least TALK, and try to reach an amicable settlement?

Could you please outline the basic details of the complaint? If it was that matter of the member of parliament and the lady snake charmer, I can say in my defence that I did my best under difficult circumstances and that I always strived to maintain a sense of dignity, diplomacy and good humour. I really feel I can vindicate myself if you could tell me the exact nature of the complaint against me.

If privacy considerations prevent you from revealing the precise details, I will understand, and please could I ask to you tell my client that any shortcomings on my part would have been the result of a concatenation of events, namely an unforeseen shortage of office stationery, the pressures of maintaining a long-distance relationship with a married man in Nether Wallop, Hampshire, England, and my boss’s unfortunate dependence on prescription drugs.

It’s far too long a story to go into now and in any event, I fear you would think I was making excuses for my incompetence, but if you could let me have sight of the official complaint I will do my best to remedy it, even if that means not getting to Nether Wallop in time for the New Year’s Eve celebrations.

We at the Scottish & Caledonian Allied Manufacturers of Buns and Sweet Tortillas are at your service.  

S Fenton (Mr)

Customer Service Representative”

The words are all mine, and I’m rather pleased with the unspelled-out acronym at the end (SCAMBUST), but I owe the initial idea of getting into correspondence with scammers, with a view to irritate, to www.scamorama.com, which has indulged in some hilarious exchanges of emails with various internet penpals whose sole aim in life is to extract money from half-wits.

If “Paula” or “Susanne” reply I will report back.

In which I co-write a song, rather to my surprise, and perform it in public

Pic credit: Nuchylee, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1824

With work being on the slow side, my endeavours lately have been focused almost entirely around creative pursuits, namely music. Having been songwriting for about a year now, alone and with no real idea what I’m doing or whether I’m doing it right, I decided it was time to get some knowledgeable input so I joined the London Songwriters Club http://www.meetup.com/LondonSongwriters/ and went along to their December meeting at the weekend.

The format was great – for starters it’s in a pub, which is always a bonus. Anyway, you get put into a group with two or three other people, quite likely all strangers to each other, and are given a theme and told you have an hour and half to write a song on the subject. Each team then had to perform their song, then there was a guest speaker then an open mic session where people can perform songs they’ve previously written, and get anonymous feedback from the audience.

My team began as me and a prolific songwriter and former music teacher called John Clarke http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDaddio1, who’s been playing the guitar since he was five. Our subject was “Winter” and John said it made him think of a madrigal featuring the line “April in my mistress’s face”. I suggested that we amended that, since the theme was winter, to “December in your face”, and we were off, with a song about a woman who fancies her bloke much more than he fancies her. His expression is always frosty, his eyes cold, his heart frozen, that kind of thing.

Then we were joined by a late arriver, Jennifer Lee Ridley http://www.myspace.com/jennyridley, a music graduate who plays flute and sings and who has the added attribute of being able to arrange and compose. That’s a skill I’ve noticed not many performers have got – some can’t even read music, let alone write it. Jennifer’s specialities include setting poems inspired by the great Romantic poets to music. She came up with a great line about December mist coming down like a shroud, which neatly took us into the second verse, then our final member arrived, one Melissa Dawson-Bowling www.myspace.com/melstarsmusicbox, who plays keyboards and sings, her genre being (my words not hers) power ballads. Melissa spotted straight away that we had no chorus yet, and suggested “With you it’s always winter, but never the festive season”. It’s hard to remember who contributed specific bits – I suppose that’s the way with collaborations – if everyone remembered every last syllable you’d never stop arguing over whose song it really was – but I think I did the bit about the narrator wanting her relationship to be warm like July, but it never is, much to her distress.

We also got a nice bit of assonance, with a line about “icicles in your eyes”.

John was already creating a very workable melody on the guitar, Jenny devised a nice intro on her flute and at the end of the session we were ready to perform – or at least they were. I left that bit to them, not being the strongest of singers myself. Jenny and Melissa did some lovely harmonies that were all the more impressive knowing they’d not performed together before. Click here to hear never the festive season

The guest speaker said our song was “delightful” and had a pleasing melody. Some readers might remember him if they are as old as I. Back in the 1970s there was a group called Marshall Hain, who had a hit with Dancing in the City. Well, the speaker was Julian Marshall, who was the Marshall out of Marshall Hain. He came from a musical family and got into songwriting while still at school, where he met Kit Hain. They went on to have one more hit before the group broke up, though Julian said they are still friends. They are still earning a nice sum every year from that one hit, which gives hope to everyone who’s striving to write a song, though it seems most of the money earned by performers these days is from live performances rather than from royalties on songs. Julian still writes and is now a music lecturer and runs courses in songwriting http://www.londonsongcompany.com/.

Anyway, on Monday I had to start a little job I’ve been asked to do – some web copy for a pro musician I met at a freelance training event the other week. She wanted 300 words about herself – to be trimmed down from masses of information about her musical experience and performances that could be found in various sources.

As I was working on this, an email popped up from John Clarke, who attached the audio of Never the Festive Season. The timing was perfect, since one of my chums from the pub folk club was due to pop round to drop off some sheet music I’d left at our mutual guitar teacher’s. When Bob arrived I dragged him in and made him get his guitar and accompany me as I devised my own simplified version of the song. Bob does a good line in Spanish style guitar, which lent a new aspect to the song, and we twiddled around for an hour or so.

Then in the evening it was off to the pub, where I was determined to perform Never the Festive Season. Tony the Modern Folk Poet, who has been giving me informal guitar lessons and telling me I have no sense of rhythm, in between showing me round his garden and asking me to explain the internet to him, offered to accompany on mandolin. This turned out OK after a reasonably tedious procedure of trying to get my guitar and his mando in tune with each other. The song went down very well – though I realised the tape recorder hadn’t been turned on, so I had to inflict it on the audience a second time. Luckily, they’re a tolerant crowd. My version was far simpler than the original, being dictated by my limited chord vocabulary (I mess about with minor chords and 7ths and stuff in the privacy of my own home but am pretty much a three-chord trick sort of girl under the pressure of public scrutiny) and rather slower (my singing pace being limited rather by the rate of knots at which I can change chords). Still, it came out quite nicely, I think, and the exercise has given me an appetite for more collaborative creativity.

Nuts, spa pool tsunamis, royal visits and budget shopping – the latest gossip from the steam room

On the alert for another water-based coccyx-cracking drama. Pic credit: JulesInKY, www.morguefile.com

The hot topic in the steam room tonight was Nuts: the Nutritional Benefits Thereof. The latest newsletter from the health club management was apparently full of top tips about how to get enough nuts in your diet. Allegedly – I haven’t seen it – the management say nuts are the new garlic-and-tomatoes. It sounded a pretty outlandish claim to me – I mean, how is a handful of brazils and walnuts going to help anyone make a nice spaghetti Bolognese? How would home-made tomato soup turn out if based around a mix of almonds and hazelnuts? Barely adequately, one would have thought.

Anyhow, the topic of nuts held no-one’s interest for long and conversation moved onto speculation about what would be the upshot if a certain club member, who’s built more for endurance than speed, were to take a running jump into the spa pool, while The Boys were in it. Apparently he had recently tried this feat in the swimming pool, with unfortunate results. Not realising the pool is only three feet deep at its deepest, he incurred a nasty crack to the coccyx.

I hardly need mention the opportunities exploited for crack- and coccyx-based jokes, but “a trip to A&E all round,” seemed to be the consensus on what the resulting tsunami would produce if their absent chum were allowed to carry out his daring leap while the spa pool was occupied.

Next on the agenda was last week’s visit by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to the town, to open the newly-refurbished college. Nick said the royals had been greeted by a load of students dressed and made up as aliens. The college does courses in make-up and tv/film production, among other things, so I daresay their choice of dress was something to do with their studies, but Tim said no, they weren’t students, they must have been just the people of the town, come to have a gawp at the Queen. Bill asked if they were wearing Crocs with white socks and grubby tracksuit bottoms; if so, they were definitely the townsfolk, on their way to an afternoon at the Wetherspoons.

Rory then did a rather good impersonation of Prince Philip asking if they could pop into the local Iceland for a spot of shopping when they’d finished opening the college; and the Queen replying that there was no need, the freezer at the Palace was full.

This reminded Bill of a rather coarse joke involving someone bending over the frozen chicken freezer at Iceland. He withheld the rude words though, out of consideration for the “ladies” present, so I thought it only respectful not to repeat the one I’d heard about the obscene phone call and the television-watching husband. If anyone wants to hear it I can repeat it privately, but it does have a very rude word in it – and anyway, I’ve already revealed the punchline, so best not to bother.

Anyway, when conversation turns to Iceland – as it does frighteningly frequently, Rory claiming to be an avid fan of frozen party snacks – I always know we’re in dangerous territory because it means we’re about to start a tedious conversation about Shopping. Never believe anyone who tells you that it’s women who like talking about shopping. Most women I know find the process pretty tedious. But the Boys in the Steam Room love it – and the more budget the better. That lot could form a Lidl and Aldi appreciation society.

Insults fly as “Tarquin” is accused of being too posh and I receive jibes about being overweight

The Boys were on top form last night in the steam room. I hadn’t been for a while, what with one thing and another, and in my absence they seemed to have imbibed a dose of some substance that makes you think you can sing or are funny.

There was a debate about favourite karaoke songs, with Maggie saying hers was These Boots are Made for Walking by Nancy Sinatra. Someone asked how that went, so she sang the chorus, helped by Richard, who stood up and did the moves, following up with a rendition of the bass line to Jimi Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower. It’s quite rare to hear music in the steam room – idle banter yes; half-witted laughter, yes; voices raised in heated political debate, yes; but live music, no. It was quite hot in the steam but everyone was reluctant to leave for fear of missing any of this unprecedented piece of performance art.

We wondered what would be the favourite karaoke song of one of the absent Boys, whom I shall call Tarquin. He’s generally agreed to be the poshest member at the club, which is saying something – we’re in leafy Surrey, after all, and four-wheel-drive vehicles aren’t in short supply in the car park. Rory said Tarquin was too posh to sing karaoke – after all, he’s been known to wear his ermine and coronet to the health club, before changing into his swimming trunks. Nick said he didn’t know about that, but that Tarquin did have Royal connections, namely a Prince Albert. This led to a rather coarse conversation about whether the Prince Albert was too loose and needed tightening, or whether it was actually a bit tight and Tarquin struggled to push it on of a morning.

Like his namesake, Rory Bremner, Rory is rather good at doing impersonations and made us laugh by doing impressions of two of the absent members getting into the spa pool. Even though he didn’t say a word – just imitated their posture, facial expressions and methods of noisily displacing water – we were able to guess straight away who he was impersonating.

Someone speculated as to what people might say about Rory and Nick when they are not there, to which Rory cogently replied: “That’s why we’re always here, so they don’t get a chance to talk about us”.

I wonder what they say about me behind my back. It’s been quite a good week for insults. I bumped into a former neighbour when I was out for a jog the other day – she was walking her dog. Passing the time of day I said I’d taken up jogging to try and lose a bit of weight and she looked me up and down and said: “Mm yes, you have put some weight on, haven’t you? Must be all that food you eat.” Based on the fact that she once saw me making a chicken casserole!

This came only days after my musical guru, the Modern Folk Poet, revealed he’d written a comic song about overweight women, inspired by me. He then made matters worse by bringing the subject up every five minutes.

“I haven’t offended you, have I, by suggesting you’re fat? It’s only a joke.”

“I mean, I didn’t mean to offend you, by implying you’re overweight.”

“I thought you’d see the funny side, being as you’re a bit porky at the moment.”

“It’s not that I think you’re really fat – maybe carrying just a few too many pounds. Bit of exercise, soon shed that bit of flab.”

“Women can look quite nice if they’re a bit curvy; who wants a skinny woman?”

He ran out of steam in the end, before I had to resort to a vicious kick and a “Shut the fuck up.” Anyway, I remembered that I am in a position to get my own back. I have a half-written comic song of my own which I can polish up and wheel out. Set to the tune of What a Wonderful World, by Louis Armstrong, it’s a moderately offensive parody about men with beards, one of which objects the Modern Folk Poet possesses. As soon as I can learn to play C sharp major on the guitar, which the somewhat complex chord structure demands, I’ll be in a position to get my own back.

Pic credit: Michelle Meiklejohn, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=901

….and on a lighter note, some daddy long-legs porn

“Oooh, yeah, baby, I love it when you do that with your big fat thing”

“Can I have a cuddle?” “In a minute. Where’s the fags?”

A pair of daddy long-legs chose the wall above my bed on which to mate the other night. They started, appropriately, at bedtime, and were still at it in the morning. And they showed not the slightest embarrassment about me watching them and taking dirty pictures to post on the internet.

Luckily for me, crane fly sex is a peaceful, noiseless business – they simply sit there for hours with their naughty parts glued together – I’d have been well annoyed if there’d been lots of flapping about and moaning.

They eventually separated about 11am and buzzed about for a bit – perhaps stretching their wings after the long spell of inactivity – before settling languorously back on the wall, a few inches apart, in poses suggestive of extreme sexual exhaustion.

According to Wikipedia, most crane fly species exist as adults only to mate and die. Which might explain why daddy long-legs sex lasts so long – if shagging is your sole occupation, you might as well do it all night long. It’s not as if you’ve got to get up for work.

The Boys refuse to take their knickers off for “Let It Hang” Day: and other piglet-related news

The Boys in the Steam Room displayed little enthusiasm when I told them they ought to go without underwear this Friday to mark “Let It Hang” Day, an event being held in support of the millions of piglets that are apparently needlessly castrated every year.

The event is being organised by a Belgian animal rights group, Gaia, which says vaccination could replace castration as a more humane way of preventing “boar taint”, an odour released when sexually mature pigs are cooked.

Gaia wants men to go commando for the day in solidarity with the piglets, to persuade supermarkets not to sell pork made from castrated pigs. It is targeting men because they are best placed to imagine the pain of castration, especially if they have ever received an unexpected football or stiletto heel in the crotch. “Be careful before you sit down,” the group thoughtfully warned participants.

The group says women can help too by hiding their men’s pants on Friday morning so they are forced to go to work with it all hanging free. Or, as the Google translation from the Belgian charmingly put it, “[women] can help by their husband’s underwear to hide”.

None of the Boys seemed keen to join up. Tim avoided the issue by arguing that the phrase “Let It Hang” sounded all wrong – wouldn’t “Flop It Out” be better? Nick said anyway the organisers probably meant trousers, not underwear, as they were probably using “pants” in the American sense.

Rory crossed his legs and begged me to stop saying “castration”. He added that he had no intention of not wearing his undies on Friday because “if I said I wouldn’t, you’d put it in that diary of yours”.

Anyone who would like to join in can register on the Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=221483921232834. And anyone who’d like to see how piglets are castrated without anesthaesia can see a film clip at http://vimeo.com/25771292

Meanwhile, here in England, in another piglet-related incident, Surrey Police announced today that it had released from bail four people previously suspected of having pinched micro-piglets from an address in Capel in March.

Four micro-piglets have been reunited with their rightful owner, but police continue to appeal for information regarding the whereabouts of the remaining animals, named Squiggle, Dotty and Spotty.

This tickled me; obviously it’s not funny when loved pets are stolen, but I found it quite charming that the police, who events of recent years have led us to believe are primarily concerned with protecting the interests of government and big business, rather than those of the community, are willing to spend time on tracking down a householder’s piglets. Sweet.

Pic credit: Tina Phillips, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=503

Cocaine smuggling and other scatological topics

Conversation in the steam room got a bit scatological at the weekend, so don’t read this if you’re about to have your breakfast.

One of the Boys, who’s a customs official at the airport, was telling us about the increasing number of “swallowers” they’re seeing arriving off international flights. Swallowers, apparently, are those optimistic travellers who board a flight with their stomach full of packets of cocaine. The idea is that, in due course, the packages work their way through the digestive system and emerge at the other end ready to be extracted from the lavatory and sold on.

Airport Man said that suspected swallowers are detained until such time as the packages might reasonably be expected to travel south. Sometimes the packages leak, causing the suspect to exhibit bizarre behaviour and astonishing strength, needing four or more customs officials to hold them down. Other times the packages burst, causing the suspect to drop dead.

More often than not, the cocaine turns up as expected in the toilet pan, causing the suspect to spend long periods of time in a British prison.

Airport Man said some smugglers “hold onto” their stomach contents for days, even weeks, until nature finally forces its way through. Apparently a customs officer has to stay with them until this happens, which must get a bit tedious for both parties. I can’t imagine that someone who’s been used to a regular post-breakfast poo would feel much like witty banter or intellectual conversation after a week of straining to keep it in while being closely watched by a bored foreign bloke in a uniform.

Some smugglers are driven to it out of desperation – one young man was trying to raise money to pay for his mother’s cancer treatment in Africa – others out of coercion, like the young woman who arrived at Gatwick with black eyes and a broken nose but no cocaine, having refused at the last minute to act as a mule.

Airport Man told the tale of one man who got the mother of all sore throats after swallowing 96 packets and refused to continue, at which the drug baron insisted he bend over, and inserted the rest of the 100-strong consignment where the sun doesn’t shine.

And one swallower got safely through customs in London after a flight from Portugal and ejected the packets, only for the compatriots she met at the airport to retrieve them from the toilet and swallow them, unwashed, in preparation for their onward flight to Africa.

Other poor sods have apparently been told that, having had the correct magic ritual performed pre-flight, they will be invisible to the customs officers, only to find that’s not quite true.

Sometimes the detainees are apparently respectable, middle class businessmen who give no outward appearance of being crims, whose baggage carries no incriminating traces and who would normally be let through – the only reason to hold them being the utter conviction of the police in the country of departure that they are guilty as hell, a conviction that often proves correct, once their digestive juices lead to the inevitable conclusion.

All this led to a discussion about whether drugs should be legalised. Most felt this would be a good idea as it would take the drugs trade out of the hands of gangsters and put it in the hands of the state. While agreeing with this in principle, I’m slightly averse to the idea of putting any more profit-making opportunities in the hands of the greedy corporations that presumably would end up running the newly-liberated cocaine retailing industry. The very idea of banning certain drugs would then be unthinkable, since the corporations would simply not allow it. We could then no more ban heroin than we could ban alcohol now – the commercial interests involved would outweigh any public interest.

Rory arrived at this point in the discussion and lowered the tone by talking about his new haircut, an all-over Number One crew-cut, which had left him looking like that dense blond pilot bloke out of Top Gun. Why pay good money for a haircut, he argued, when you can do it yourself with a £12 gadget that, admittedly, did look like it was intended for chopping onions and might perhaps take your ear off.

This led the boys on to discussing other methods of hair removal. Julian said he’d once had his chest waxed for charity and it had stung something shocking. The others weren’t aware that hair grew back after waxing, so I showed them my legs, looking fairly hairy three weeks post-wax. The subject of “back, sack and crack” came up then. Rory said he’d not consider the “sack”, and would far rather deal with that bit with a pair of nail scissors. Julian said he’d never have the “crack”, for fear it would “play havoc with me piles”.

I left them in the spa pool debating the possibility of hormone replacement to address middle-aged libido loss.

Pic credit: Ambro, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1499

Online defamation cases double as I make unfounded accusations of international narcotics smuggling

The number of defamation cases involving libellous remarks made in blogs has doubled year on year, according to a London law firm. This gave me pause for thought as I was about to post a blog facetiously implying that one of my ancestors was an international drugs runner.

However, he’s been dead for nearly a century and it’s very difficult – though apparently not impossible – for the dead to sue for defamation, so I’ll press on with the story.

I’ve been looking for my paternal grandfather and great-grandfather for years (in a genealogical sense). The family surname appears to have been changed at some point, which has made it impossible to locate the right records.

However, I’ve now stumbled by chance across a character who I suspect of being GGF.

Here’s what I know (based mainly on family legend)

First name Myer or similar

Surname not Fenton, but possibly something similar

Probably foreign, was an immigrant

Probably Jewish

Had some connection with Manchester

Had a son born in 1885, called Richard

Here’s how my new chap fits the bill (based on documentary evidence from ancestry.com)

First name Meyer

Surname Feinstein

Born in either Russia or Palestine, emigrated to the US but visited the UK several times.

Jewish

Lived in Manchester for a while

Had a son born in 1885, called Louis

Could be coincidence but you can see how it starts to get exciting. Meyer was a druggist or chemist by trade, and though he became a US citizen, he seems to have spent most of his time popping hither and thither across the Atlantic. The archives are bulging with applications from Mr F, asking for visas and emergency passports so he could nip to and fro between New York, Boston or Philadelphia and Turkey, Austria or England. The captains of the Mauretania and the other transatlantic steamships must have felt quite lonely and distressed if Meyer wasn’t on the passenger list.

Quite often he travelled alone, leaving the wife and kids home alone in Brooklyn. What, I want to know, was a middle-aged, married chemist doing gallivanting all over the world when he should have been at home dispensing headache remedies? And how could he afford all that transatlantic travel?

Meyer the narcotics runner wouldn’t be the first skeleton I’ve uncovered in the family closet. I’ve discovered an illegitimate baby and three generations of alcoholics (not that either were especially unusual in so-called repressed Victorian Britain, but they make the family stop and think a bit).

It’s all circumstantial of course – I can’t yet prove either M’s alleged criminal tendencies or his blood relationship to me. I’ve seen some shocking examples of amateur family historians making wild assumptions and taking them as truths. “My family came over with William the Conqueror” – that kind of nonsense but on a smaller scale. I’ve even heard one person making that very claim. It’s ludicrous – even if it were true, there would be no way of proving it, and no reason to even assume it, given the erratic availability of documentary sources prior to the early 1800s, when registration of births, marriages and deaths became compulsory in the UK.

It’s going to be hard enough to prove a link with a 19^th century Russian-Jewish-American drugs baron, let alone proving descent from 11^th century French invaders.

Pic credit: Grant Cochrane, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2365

In which I grind to a halt and have to be pushed out of the way by two nice young men

My plans for tonight – to spend an hour catching up on the latest inane drivel from the boys in the steam room and then to attend a public meeting about the local aerodrome’s plans for a hard runway – went all awry.

The latter has the local community and parish councils up in arms, with its stated aim of doubling the number of flights. The aerodrome’s management has offered to re-orientate the runway, meaning less noise over residential areas during take-off and landing, but my personal beef is that it’s not the take-off and landing that’s the issue, it’s the pointless driving round and round in circles over my house, making a tedious droning noise that drowns out the radio and telephone conversations. If they were actually going somewhere I wouldn’t mind as much – I think what annoys me is the bored rich boys doing pollution-inducing circuits for no apparent reason other than to boast to their friends that they’re training to be “pilots”.

The company is holding out the carrot of dozens of jobs to be created if their plan gets the go-ahead, but since it has already admitted that staffing levels are much the same whether they have to handle one flight or 50, I don’t get the logic.

I would have said as much had I got to the meeting but I missed out on both my little trips tonight thanks to the car juddering to a halt at the end of the road and refusing to start again.

This is the embarrassingly over-sized Fentonmobile of which I’ve written previously, the vehicle that became my transportation system after the Great Renault Overhead Camshaft Eruption (QED an earlier post). Until tonight it had lived up to the rave reviews given it by the previous owner, my friend Tom, who reckoned it had given him 12 years of carefree motoring. Perhaps it misses him. Perhaps it doesn’t care for the cavalier treatment it’s had at my hands, notably the fact that some little scrote prised out the wing mirror the other week, leaving me with either a bill for nearly £200 to replace the entire unit or having to do a bodge job with a piece of mirror, some cardboard and some parcel tape (I chose the latter).

The F-Mobile is probably also pissed off about the fact that it’s been going around plastered in industrial cling-film since one of the rear windows fell out and shattered to smithereens on Reigate Hill. A very well-known glass repair company was quick enough to turn up immediately after the event but went away when they found they didn’t have the right part, and haven’t been seen since.

Anyway, two nice motorists came to push me out of the way – perhaps motivated more by wanting to get somewhere than by pure chivalry. After a refreshing rest at the side of the road and mulling things over a bit, the F-Mobile decided to give it another go, and eventually started. I know what it was thinking – it was thinking it would let me get half-way to the health club then conk out again on that windy, narrow, unlit, country lane, just to inconvenience and embarrass me. I know how cars think and I was having none of it. Instead, I drove the bugger straight to Peter the Mechanic’s, down the road. They didn’t look particularly surprised to see me there, having been at the sharp end of my various mechanical failures over the years – more depressed, like.

People who have company cars talk a lot of rot about how hard done by they are – having to drive vehicles that someone else insures and taxes and MOTs and services and that magically get repaired for free in the event of a breakdown. I know company car drivers who don’t even bother checking their tyre pressures – because that’ll get done at the next service. “I pay tax on it, you know,” they say. Yeah, and do I get a tax rebate ‘cos I own a manky old rust-bucket that’s down the garage every second week? No. Shut up.

Anyway, the Toyota’s at the garage and I’m having another cosy night in. Watch this space for more on my exciting transport arrangements.

Pic credit: Graeme Weatherston, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=330

I stalk the prime minister and realise I’d be a crap paparazzo

While driving through a village in Cornwall at the weekend, I saw the prime minister walking along the road. As you do.

Kim, who was driving, was excited beyond belief; she was already on Cameron alert because she’d read in the papers that he was planning to visit Cornwall for his latest holiday, and her sister, Catherine, had spotted him in the same area last summer.

But to spot him first crack out of the box like that was amazing. Kim did a U-ey as soon as feasible but there was no sight of the PM on our return journey along the road. We concluded he’d got into one of the big black people carriers we’d seen lining the street, and been spirited away by his minders.

I wasn’t even sure it was Cameron – all I’d seen was a bloke in a navy blue polo shirt and shorts, accompanied by two other blokes. But Kim was convinced, and raved about how nice-looking he was in real life. “Such nice clear skin, and looks so young, ooh he’s lovely!”

Kim is now considering swapping her usual green-themed country-casual outfits for a more marine-style blue ensemble, inspired by how good Dave apparently looks in navy.

It was a strange coincidence actually; I’d recently received a press release from a car insurance company saying that many accidents are caused by the driver being distracted by attractive passers-by. As a result, we’d planned to enliven our journey to Cornwall by looking out for attractive strangers in other cars on the M5, but as it was raining at the time we couldn’t really see anyone, and the fat bloke we saw having a piss in a layby on the A30 near Bodmin hardly qualified as “attractive”.

So to spot Dave pottering along the street was a double achievement. The disappointment at having caught only a passing glimpse of the PM was slightly assuaged less than an hour later when, sitting outside a café in Polzeath, we had another celebrity “spot” – this time, former rugby star Will Carling, loitering about on the sea-front. And to add to the excitement, the bloke in the coffee bar said he’d met singer Will Young in the village the other day, and we overheard a woman on the ferry to Padstow saying she’d just seen comedian Harry Enfield in a café. We wandered round looking for Enfield for a bit but got distracted by a more pressing desire for a sit-down with a crab sandwich and a cappuccino, and by the photo opportunities offered by the sight of a seagull trying to disembowel a crab in the harbour.

Anyway, all this celebrity spotting was like Christmas come at once for Kim, who loves all things “celebrity” – it was like an edition of Heat or OK! come to life, only cheaper.

Our little party was on full Cameron watch from then on, but it was down to me and Catherine to cop the second prime ministerial spot, the next day, while on a hike on the coast path. Arriving at a charming little beach after a sweaty slog round the cliffs, we sat down to rest on a sand dune and idly started scanning the sands for any sign of the PM, just in case.

We’d all but given up when Catherine spotted a black people carrier in the car park, complete with blacked out windows. Nearby was a black 4×4, occupied by a bloke who appeared to be scanning the beach with binoculars. And another bloke, a big burly type with a hand-held radio thing, was on foot, apparently having intercepted a man carrying a camera with one of those enormous telephoto lenses. Imagine the thrill to overhear the paparazzo protesting he was doing no harm and the security guy accusing him of being intrusive. The game was on!

It’s astonishing how alike men look when they’re 50 metres away and dressed in shorts, so I ended up snapping any number of random blokes on the maximum 10x zoom my little camera can stretch to. For a while we were convinced a bloke in a red top was Cameron, but when he eventually wandered a bit closer we could see he didn’t have enough hair, and wasn’t tall enough. I also fired off any number of shots of couples with children, on the basis that among them could be Dave, Sam-Cam (Mrs C) and the kids.

Eventually, Catherine hissed “there he is!” and, about 50 feet away, the PM was climbing up some steps to the car park, accompanied by a huge entourage of adults and children.

I don’t know why, because in political terms I deeply dislike what Cameron stands for, but I somehow felt it would be rude to rush over and start taking pictures, so my photographic efforts were restricted to what I could take discreetly from a distance, having forgotten in the excitement to zoom in. Consequently, the resulting pics show only a bloke with brown hair wearing a dark top and carrying an orange bag, in a sort of fuzzy mist. He could be the PM, or he could be a window cleaner on his day off. You can see from this pic how hard it is to distinguish one person from another in a beach-scape.

Mental note – confine self to taking scenic shots of landscapes and cats and things; you will never join the paparazzi.

Polite greeting overcomes my cynicism about offensive signage

Conversation in the steam room tonight threatened for a while to be almost intelligent, with an interesting discussion about website development, but it descended into its usual levels of inanity when I mentioned I’d been to Climping at the weekend and someone asked if climping was legal, especially in a public place. They all know perfectly well that Climping is a place in Sussex.

Someone then put some aromatic oil on the heater and no-one could decide whether it was eucalyptus or whether it had more fruity, or even floral, overtones – perhaps with a touch of rosemary? They sounded like a bunch of beauty therapists in the fragrance section of a department store.

Rory pretended to read the label and announced that if taken internally it would give the user dark stools; he then left, allegedly to take a stool sample, at which Bill said he should spread his sample over the walls; it wouldn’t make any difference as they were so dirty anyway.

A discussion about the riots, begun on Friday night, re-emerged, this time about the theory that at least some of the burnt-out shops were inside jobs, carried out opportunistically by owners to claim on the insurance or by property developers to make listed sites easily available for redevelopment.

There was some idly childish speculation about whether one of the regular crowd, absent tonight, who had allegedly been seen working out in the gym in tight shorts, was on Viagra. There followed an astonishingly dull debate about the relative merits of the 435 and 405 buses from the town centre, enlivened by Rory objecting to the implications about his seniority of Tim’s suggestion that he (Rory) could use his bus pass on either of these thrilling omnibus options.

I had to leave at this point as I wanted my tea and there seemed no likelihood of the conversation getting more high-brow. But to return briefly to Climping – legal or not – having written previously about the plethora of terse signage telling people what to do and not do in Bristol, I was struck by how polite the signs in Sussex were.

“Please enjoy your visit” urged the sign at the entrance to the beach. Another sign told us this was a “dog-friendly car park” (presumably it likes to pat the dumb chums on the head and give them a biscuit).

Even a sign ordering dog owners to keep their pets on a lead was prefaced with “Polite Notice”; while the sign on the way out of the car park wished us “Safe journey home!”.

A refreshingly different tone from the Bristol signs, the thrust of whose message was “look, stop doing whatever it is you’re doing; now bugger off home”.

New leader Larry gets his claws into government duties

As a cat lover it would be rude of me not to use this pic of Larry, the Downing Street cat, hosting a Cabinet meeting. Larry, it seems, is currently in charge of the UK after our most senior politicians buggered off on holiday, leaving various calamitous economic events to unfold in their wake.

The pic has been circulated by serial Tweeter John Prescott (senior Opposition politician, for any foreigners reading), who has managed to get #wheresthegovernment to “trend” on Twitter these past couple of days. There have been masses of witty comments on this thread, along the lines of “I’ve just been to Ikea, I can put a cabinet together” [geddit?!!?] and “I can draw, can I be Minister for the Arts?”

There’s even been a caption competition, with a prize for the best caption for the pic. My favourite is “8 out of 10 cabinet members (who showed a preference) said that they deserved a holiday”. I also liked “Unpopular guest speaker at the Ailurophobic summer conference”.

I had been planning to whitter on tonight about my disproportionate excitement at getting my first comment on my blog, but I got all distracted at seeing a picture of a cat. Anyway, to cut a long s. short, I received my first proper “comment” – it was Spam really, in that the guy had presumably posted the same thing all over the internet, but it was interesting, and I like interesting. The guy is a campaigner against routine circumcision and posted a whole heap of links to informative sources on the subject. I was baffled at first as to why he’d visited my site, till I remembered I used the word “circumcision” in a post that was actually about something else. If nothing else, this foreskin aficionado demonstrated that my site is search engine optimised! When I’ve got nothing else to do I’ll take a look at some of his pictures, but I’m about to have my tea, so I’d best leave it till my stomach’s less full.

Which brings me back to poor Larry – I hope his stomach’s full too and that the prime minister left someone in charge of feeding the poor wee mite.

Shower dream scandal overshadows WordPress excitement

Much joy and self-congratulation as I completed the transfer of my old website to its new home at WordPress. This might not sound like a huge achievement – a 12-year-old could set up a WordPress site and many probably do – but there was an element of back-room techi-ness involved in cancelling one provider, inputting the codes to transfer the domain name elsewhere and then setting up a Google app to make sure my original email address would still work.

I was well chuffed when I’d done it, partly because I’m quite slow-witted when it comes to anything technical, but also because WordPress is so much better looking, easier and quicker to update and has more functionality than my old site. And it’s far, far, cheaper.

Anyway, I was so excited when it was all up and running properly that I headed up to the health club to find someone to tell. It’s pretty misty in the steam room so I couldn’t say for certain that the boys’ eyes glazed over as I chuntered on about MX codes and DNS updates and name server changes – but I suspect they did.

In any event, “oh” was about the extent of their reaction. I began to realise how IT people and scientists must feel when after months of work they make some enormously exciting break-through, only for everyone else to find the news rather dull.

For some reason the steam room boys seemed far more interested in hearing about Rory’s confession that he’d had a dream about Toby having a shower. He (Rory) had woken up feeling all hot and tense. “Haha, do you mean you were feeling tense, or making tents?” punned Nick, lewdly.

Certainly, an obvious question needed to be addressed: did this dream mean Rory was turning gay? One chap said no, dreams didn’t mean anything, they were just random thoughts. Another of the boys said he’d read somewhere that all erotic dreams, even those about members of the opposite sex, meant gayness was setting in.

It wasn’t an erotic dream, Rory hastened to add – it was just that Toby happened to be in the shower at the time. Naked doesn’t necessarily equal sexy, went Rory’s theory, so dreaming about another man in the shower wasn’t of itself a sign of gayness; though dreaming in the shower about another man probably was.

The distinction seemed moot; the essential fact, the thing one couldn’t overlook, was that one semi-naked man had been dreaming about another, so this remark was received with some scepticism. I reluctantly left the boys to thrash out the issue of  Rory’s sexuality as I wanted to get home and play on WordPress.

Pic credit: Africa

http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1803

The M4 Doughnut Disaster

While the egg robbers and the bacon thief were about their dirty work (see previous post), another comical food-related incident was taking place, this time at a service station on the M4.

Striding happily through the foyer while taking a break on his way to a business meeting, Kim’s brother-in-law Sean slipped on a patch of water and went crashing into a doughnut stall, sending the contents flying. As he lay there stunned, in a macedoine of water, sugar and broken doughnuts, poor Sean must have been torn between the desire to sue someone for the dangerously wet floor and the wish that Ernest the Bacon-Thieving Cat was around to lick the cream off his best suit. Kim’s own personal wish, she confided to me heartlessly, on hearing of the great doughnut disaster, was that she could watch it on YouTube.

Sean got a similar amount of sympathy from the operator of the doughnut stall: far from rushing to assist and console the bloke writhing around the floor in an oozing, sugary mass of rogue doughnuts, she appeared to take the incident as a personal affront, designed to leave her with a heap of unsaleable doughnuts.

By a strange coincidence, the manufacturer of the doughnuts in question is offering an hour’s free parking to anyone who purchases a “Double Dozen” – whatever that might be – from its Cabot Circus outlet in Sean’s hometown of Bristol. I wondered if Sean might be eligible for the free parking since it sounds as though he must have had at least a “double dozen” of the things – though without the dubious pleasure of actually eating them.

Pic credit: Robert Cochrane, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2745