He's the daddy!

For the first time in a very long while I feel a little hopeful about this world and where it might go next!

Do the Shake n Vac....

....and put the freshness back!

Remember that stuff? Shake n Vac, the cure-all for the perfect 80's housewife suffering the unimaginable traumas of pet and tobacco smells lingering in her pristine home! The stuff itself might not be remembered but the ad. campaign that accompanied it is unfortunately hard to forget. It was one of those typically naff ads of the decade that had the annoying ability to ferret it's way into our subconscious and despite our derision of it, we all whistled and hummed the damn tune for months, if not years on end! If you don't remember here's a little reminder;


Anyways, can you believe, that stuff still exists to this day! And how do I know? Because I have some, worse than that I just used it (though I promise you without the dancing or hideous skirt)....and believe me, it hasn't improved with age, the smell is more likely to cause asphyxiation than 'freshness', it's horrible.....but today is the dreaded six monthly flat inspection day and as usual I have been up since the crack of dawn with all things clean, and in theory sweet smelling, in my usual efforts to eradicate every trace of our smoking sins in a no smoking property!

I'm pretty sure I succeeded in my eradication but I suspect the heinous perfume offered up by the iconic Shake n Vac dust is probably as much an irritation for any one's alveoli as cigarette smoke and not much sweeter smelling! Did our parents really think this stuff was pleasant way back when?

...and as usual on these occasions, Hammy is in hiding in the bottom of the wardrobe and the darkness has again fooled her little nocturnal body clock resulting in much scuffling and noise making....I think perhaps she needs a little more training in the principles of a 'covert mission'!


*Oh and... GO OBAMA!!

The global economic models explained!

Probably not very politically correct but very funny! ;o)

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away...

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters
of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a
debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all
four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to
a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who
sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on
one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving
you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organise a riot, and block the roads....
because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called 'Cowkimon' and market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month,
and
milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine
productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the **** out of you and invade your
country.
You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of a democracy....

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.

Jingle freakin' bells!

It's that time of year again!

With the sound of Jingle Bells barely seeming to have stopped ringing in my ears from last years manic festive 'push', suddenly Christmas seems to be looming somewhere too close up ahead again already.

Or at least that's what the retail marketing gurus would have us believe in their now annual routine of terrified scrambling for dominance in the market share stakes and desperation to pressure us all into a life of guilt and inadequacy if we don't fall victim to their clever blackmail psychology, and spend a kings ransom on crap our loved ones probably never wanted in the first place and will likely be on eBay by boxing day anyway!

Too many years living the 'joys' of Christmas in retail of course means that none of this palaver surprises me but it never ceases to annoy me and to some degree sadden me. An enforced trip to Tesco yesterday bought it all back, which was a bad idea on any level on a Saturday and saw reduced Halloween merchandise (why do they sell that stuff? Experience tells me most of it will be sold at a loss the day after Halloween, or not sold at all and loiter in the bowels of the nations retail stockrooms gathering dust until the next Halloween non event) fighting for supremacy in the aisles already with all those things we absolutely must have to put the jingle in our Christmas bells!

Too soon, too soon was the cry.

Guys, yes, it's you lot in marketing I'm talking too....do any of you remember when Christmas was Christmas? When it was actually about joy, love and peace, even for those without a religious bent, when children got a few well considered gifts and were happy with them, when families got together around a real tree adorned with baubles and trinkets saved sentimentally from one year to the next, when tinseled lights twinkled in gaudy colours that had been lovingly placed in the annual excited tree decorating ritual were the festive decorative norm instead of designer plastic monstrosities embedded with microchip multi-function fibre optics and when Christmas started in December, not in the middle of the bloody summer!

But perhaps you don't remember, perhaps when you took your oath of allegiance to the mighty marketing dollar you chose conveniently to forget....or maybe in your unending struggle to pull the wool over our eyes, that's us, the minions you want to reel in, you just simply began to fall for your own crap!

I promise you guys just one thing this Christmas, however hard you try, I will not be so much as looking at a Christmas card for a while yet!

Humbug!

Daisy the curly cat

For those among you who like myself have something of a 'penchant' for all things feline, if you haven't met Daisy the curly cat yet I suggest you do!

Daisy is a Devon Rex who lives in Florida with her brother Harley and she is one of a kind. Daisy updates every day and never fails to brighten my morning and make me smile or laugh out loud....really if you are a cat person you have to go see for yourself what Daisy gets up to. Just to whet your appetite here is Daisy in her 'love bug' outfit!


And for those of you concerned about any welfare issues, I promise you Daisy is a very happy cat and one of the best cared for, lovely natured felines you could wish to meet and her human knows all there is to know about caring for cats :o)

Busy is good!

Well, whilst the level of work gemmak designs has bought thus far to my door might not be likely to keep me in diamonds anytime soon, it is keeping me busy, very busy...and that's a good thing! Yes, I mean it.

I might have a stiff neck and shoulders from sitting hunched over my laptop for much more time than even my normal excesses, I might not have the ironing pile under the same degree of control as is the norm and I might not be 'twittering' at my normal level but I like it, it's kinda nice!

I am too busy to worry about the usual 'worry stuff' that too often hovers about in my head, I feel like I have some small degree of purpose, instead of drifting around aimlessly day in and day out, I am doing stuff that mostly that I enjoy and best of all, a very rare occurrence in gemmak's-ville..... I have slept right through the last two nights!!!! Yipeeee.

Busy is good! All I have to do now is maintain it somehow....oh, and try to catch up with my ever growing email mountain!

OCD for cats!

Busy, busy, busy....no time for a real post right now so just a 'cheaty' post today!

Gotta love it tho....

Brand and Ross - Some perspective please?

What's with all this ridiculous hoo ha over Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand then?

The media are obviously suffering a slow news week to be making so much of this story and the 10000 of the good and the righteous, who apparently contacted the 'powers that be' to complain about the incident, must have little of importance in their lives if they can get so hot under the collar over what is in reality little more than a prank that overstepped the mark.....albeit arguably not in a very kind way.

I'm not a fan of Brand, though I will admit to being rather amused by Ross and I can perhaps understand why Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter might feel slightly affronted but hell fire, have people lost all sense of humour and perspective? The stunt might have been a little over zealous and somewhat ill considered but it was hardly a hanging offence now was it?!

These guys, like them or not, are at the top of their game, they are in a branch of the industry that has always pushed the boundaries and always will, it's how the 'art', for want of a better word, evolves and it's not too many years since the pious and petty were creating a similar commotion about Monty Python and like (the link is not lost on me, Python, Cleese, Sachs, see where I'm at here?!!!) and look what happened there!

Ok, if it is felt appropriate then an apology might be in order but to sack the pair of them would be utter codswallop!! Hammers and nuts come to mind.....and even more so given that the whole issue lost any credibility when this morning it would appear Sachs granddaughter has seen fit to talk to The Sun!

She must be feeling "totally and utterly exposed and betrayed" then!

I rest my case.

One thing is for sure...most of us had never heard of Georgina Baillie (that's the granddaughter if you were still in any doubt) before all this, but we certainly have now...funny that isn't it? What is it they say about any publicity being better than no publicity?

If the BBC, long time British establishement benchmark of common sense, reason and forward thinking, capitulate in the face of pressure to sack these guys they will go way down in my estimation. An apology? yes, a severe reprimand? maybe but sacking?..... let's get just a little perspective here shall we chaps!!

Don't say 'old'!

Please allow me a moment of self-indulgent, mild annoyance! I am feeling somewhat miffed this morning and what's more my miff'ed-ness is caused by something I can do absolutely nothing about....and that in itself miffs me even more! Miffed, miffed, miffed!

So what is it that's 'got my goat', me is what, more specifically the general collapse of me, the decline of all things physical that are me, or were me once upon a time!

I really never imagined I would dislike getting older, there are in theory at least, supposed to be benefits to the ageing process, we are supposed to feel more 'sorted', more at ease with ourselves, have attained a greater degree of comfort in our own skin, be less concerned of what others think, feel confident in who we are and have the best sex of our lives as a result of all this confidence and comfort. We are supposed be financially secure, at the peak of our career and looking forward to a gradual lessening of life's pressures.

Yeah right!

Whilst I won't take issue with the confidence aspects what everyone fails to warn you about, or you choose conveniently to ignore, is the fact that all these things might be fab.... if only your physical self could keep up the bloody pace!

What's with all this disintegration? I have too many bits already that groan badly in the cold weather, my vision seems to be almost daily getting further from the 20/20 it once was, I have hormones that really are moaning, hell, adolescence was a walk in the park by comparison, I am 'blessed' with some ailment that means my hardly filled teeth, are literally falling out of my head and now if I fall asleep on my tummy (which is the only way I can fall asleep these days) something very peculiar happens to my back and I can't maneuver myself into an upright position without himself rolling me very carefully and gingerly off the edge! How elegant.

Worse still and to add insult to injury I now find a 'dimple' (I can't bring myself to say the 'C word', the ladies among you will understand) on my thigh, I 'lost' my car in Tesco's car park for fifteen whole minutes last week and I find I can't remember a file path long enough to actually get to it, or a piece of code long enough to type the whole damn thing in one hit!

So where did it all go so horribly, hatefully wrong I wonder? When did all this disintegration sneak up on me without my noticing it's gradual advance?

I can see very little to recommend this getting older malarkey save for two things, knowing that if I don't get what I want for Christmas then no matter, the next one will be along any day now and having the ability to find it amusing, when a body part I didn't previously know existed gives way spectacularly, during what is supposed to be some of the best 'carnal activity' of my life!

Yum yum!

Something a little more lighthearted today! Needs sound.

Weird or what!!!

The weirdest, spookiest thing happend to me first thing this morning and I might add it was something I could probably have managed my Sunday morning without !

Those of you who are of a delicate nature might like to close this page now, this is weird and it's not a pleasant subject matter to say the very least.

Ok, we all know how odd dreams can be now and then, the weird and sometimes not so wonderful that our sleeping minds manage to drag up occasionally and mine is up there with the best of them but the one thing I never do is have what might be called traditional nightmares. By that I mean nightmares of the 'horror movie genre'... but last night I did. I had a truly horrible nightmare revolving around the severing of someones head (big ugh) and the subsequent 'transportation' of said severed body part around the streets of some nameless town! Don't ask me any other details, I don't recall any more than that thankfully but it was one of those disturbing vivid nightmares that was still with me, bothering me, when I got up.

The fact that I had this nightmare is probably not very strange or spooky given that last night Fletch and I watched a TV show about horror movies just before we went to bed, but bear with me here, things were about to get very much more weird!!

Having having woken up a little and having just kindly regaled Fletch with the tale of my nightmare (I'm too kind) I settled in front of my lappy with my first cup of coffee of the day and got about the business of checking my mail. At the top of the page was an item of spam that had snuck it's way through to my inbox. I use a preview pane so there was no avoiding the offending mails contents....which was just one line, no link, no nothing, just one, short, line of text as follows;

"Man Parades Streets With Severed Head"

WTF!!??

I have to admit to being er, ever so slightly fazed for a moment or two despite the fact I am not superstitious and believe in almost nothing.... but hey, it was early, I hadn't woken up properly!

Further investigation revealed that there was a news item a few days ago regarding a guy in Bangladesh who paraded the streets with a severed head, so no doubt that was somehow the prompt for the spam but it still seemed pretty weird that I should first have the nightmare at all and then the first thing I see on my computer is that very un-delightful little missive!

A hamster in the hand ....

...is worth two in the cage!

Yesterday, after all these months, I finally got to hold Hammy without suffering a mortal wound and believe me, she is more than capable of delivering a rapid response, disabling offensive that the SAS would be proud of when it suits her...just ask Lisa!

By chance yesterday I was chatting to someone (Thank you LD) much experience in all things hamster, who promised me if I followed her rules I would get this stubborn little creature 'eating out of my hand'.

Before I began I had to furnish myself, as a very necessary precaution, with 'hamster gloves'. These are not purpose designed of course, just nice soft fleecy gloves which I had sourced earlier in the day at Tesco for the princely sum of a pound. It was thus that in the early evening me and Hammy set about coming to some mutual 'understanding' where this biting malarkey is concerned!

And it worked, I did exactly as I had been instructed and within a half hour madam was sitting on my hand, yayyyyy...not for very long I grant you but we managed two repeat performances and I was even able to cup her in both hands and stroke her at one (short) point!

There is of course no pictorial evidence of this momentous moment... Hey, I had my hands full, but it is progress indeed and as a reward she was allowed free rein in her favourite game..... breaking into the treats bag, a game which I might add she completed in record time, pegs? pah...no problem!

Round two tonight. Me and this hamster are going to do this thing!

It's a funny old (virtual) world!

The interweb has long been derided for it's dangers, the risks to children, the odd bods that acquire fixations, spammers, phishers, stalkers and all the other sundry negative issues surrounding it.

We hear endless stories of children sitting for hours in front of a screen instead of 'playing out' and getting much needed exercise, relationship breakdowns, the porn issues of course never go away yada, yada, yada, and whilst all of these issues have importance and in some instances very severe repercussions that require firmly addressing, it's not all bad, in fact most of it is good, it's just that as ever is the case, good news is not news!

I *cough* probably don't need to spell out for you that I love ( I know that's probably an inappropriate use of the word but you know what I mean) the interweb, it's impact on my life has been very significant and for anyone who questions that very fact, yes, it's a good thing! I won't bore you with all the old psychology regarding 'real' life versus 'virtual' life and I'm not going to even attempt to sway the sceptics but again this morning the web bought the two together for me in a very positive way.

Someone I long ago lost contact with for various reasons suddenly popped up on my screen, someone who was quite an important part of my life but who perhaps out of necessity at the time became estranged. Without this thing we call the internet there would have been no way on earth we could have resumed any kind of contact, it just wouldn't have happened, but instead now we have the opportunity to at least pass the time of day, catch up a little and hopefully let any bygones be bygones....that can't be a bad thing in my book internet!

I'm not proud!

So....the relaunched gemmak designs has it's first two customers completed and up and running, here and here. Two in the first few days isn't bad but I want more, I'm twiddling my thumbs and I need something to twiddle them around so to that end I'm extending the '£10* off' offer for a further week.

That means you can have a complete makeover from as little as ($34) £20!!! What more could you want? Don't answer that!

See, like the title says, I'm not proud, I can beg! ;o)

*applies to full redesigns.