Hmm, this might explain a few things...

Google Number Ones

That pesky Merrick has tagged me for a meme:

"Give me five great things that your blog or websites rank number one in Google searches, then tag five other blogs. Bonus points if you manage to have any sexual content in the phrase."

So here goes - this blog is number one in Google searches for:

bastards and medium sized shards of glass
skinny nearly-naked women in the weird ice palace thing
singing "Jingle Fucking Bells".
Everything was methodically sniffed, the back doorstep was peed on
be rather odd at an otherwise very pointedly Jesus-free event.

Bonus points, I think, not only for sexual content but for the mental images conjured up if you imagine these as one continuous narrative.

Gonna pass it on to Ralph, Dr. Rob, Dr. Shroom, and... of all people writing anything on the internet I'd LOVE to see Charlie Brooker do this. He usually has at least five great, original, hilarious phrases with sexual content in everything he writes, and then he gets it all published in the Guardian. Still haven't tried his Spotify challenge though, so he'll probably ignore me.

That only makes four other people I'm tagging, so if anyone else would like to volunteer then feel free to add yourself.

My Furry Flat

Things which don't work so well with cat hair on/in them:

Velcro
Selotape
The filter in the washing machine
Hand-rolled cigarettes
The wheelie button on my computer mouse
Margerine

Things which work better with cat hair on them:

The cat

So, should I shave the cat?? Just look at her about to sit on the sellotape here:

Mizzy Has Adventures

A neighbour was looking after Mizzy for me while I was away at Glastonbury, and he said that the first time he came round, when he opened the door and she realised it wasn't me, she "did the cat equivalent of bursting into tears." I'm sure she settled down after that, but since I've been back she's been super-cuddly, wanting to sit on me and lick me all the time which is very sweet and makes me feel we're nicely bonded now.

The weather is really hot and I've got a few days of wellie washing and drying out the tent to do at home, so today I put a collar on her with a bell and a tag for my phone number, and let her out of the flat.



Everything was methodically sniffed, the back doorstep was peed on, she tried out some paving stones for rolling around on and she let me catch her again at the bottom of the garden when I started getting nervous.

Having a little sleep now after all that excitement.

I've Forgotten How to Blog!

I recently sent work-related e-mails from home and forgot to erase the automatic signature, which says http://alice-in-blogland.blogspot.com/. The recipient noticed, and then several other work people turned out to have read it too, including my boss...

I’m sure I must have left the same signature at the bottom of something or other I’ve sent my mum at some point as well, although god knows whether she’ll have figured out what a “blogspot” is or what to do with it, especially since it doesn’t begin with “www…”

For some reason I mentioned this blog to my half-sister too, who I’ve never met but who I’ve been in contact with for the first time recently by e-mail, and on whom I’m very much still making first impressions…

And then, before xmas, I went to a big co-op party where, (at least as far as the more coherent parts of my memory of the evening suggest,) about three different people said they'd read something or other I'd written here. Although come to think of it those could all have been the same person wearing different wigs…

Now every time I sit down to punch random musings into my grubby keyboard, I keep imagining my boss, my mum, someone who’s going to be my sister and every Leeds activist I’ve ever met, all in different wigs, all gathered around the same computer screen waiting for me to do something worthwhile here to justify the publicity. It's been making it a bit difficult to write.

I feel quite a lot like a rabbit again, this time one caught in headlights.

What if I say something stupid?

I suppose that question implies that I don't think any of those people have ever heard me say anything stupid before, which is extremely unlikely given the rubbish I come out with in person when I don't even have to be able to spell any of it.

Anyway, deliberately pitching to specific audiences is for advertisers, I'd rather write about whatever I want and assume that only people who'll tend to like it will tend to read it. I guess really I just can't decide what to blog about, and the more I think about it the less I can prioritise.

Plenty of better-informed-than-I-am people are already writing about Gaza, on which subject it's as much as I can do to suppress a scream every time I hear words like "proportional" and "right to exist" - some things I get too pissed off to even rant coherently about.

The UK government has just given the go-ahead for a third runway at Heathrow, which I probably will rant about when I've caught up on reading everyone else's rants and worked out what actually needs doing next about it.

And of course capitalism continues to eat itself, with some amusing and some scary consequences which so far haven't included me losing my job, being repossessed or having to do a masters degree.

So how to get this blog habit going again?

My most productive days often start with a lot of aimless but active flitting around, just feeling the caffeine kick in and tidying things up entirely at random whether they need it or not. I then usually start seriously doing about three or four things at once, while making huge lists of other things like taking the bins out and finding out where that smell is coming from (those two things are "on my list" right now), which I may or may not do when I lose momentum on any of my supposedly primary tasks, or if I somehow manage to actually finish any of them.

Sometimes I'll then suddenly be seized with a very specific project that I'm absolutely compelled to completely immerse myself in right this minute, develop and expand into all available physical and mental space, and concentrate on to the exclusion of everything else until it occurs to me that I haven't eaten for hours, I haven't slept for days and I haven't returned anyone's calls since last Tuesday. That's how shelving gets put up.

I think I'll have a good flit around, aimlessly tidy up this blog a bit and see what happens. Making a nice cup of tea is usually a good start.

Rabbit photo © MzePhotos.com, Some Rights Reserved

Back From Reality

Right, first things first: I've been unexpectedly absent from this blog for a couple of weeks due to some Real Life stuff that isn't blog material. This has meant that I haven't mentioned the Daily (Maybe) Best Green Blogs 2008 yet, which has meant that I've only got three votes for the "People's Choice" with one day to go. You can vote here if you read this in time, but I think I may have missed the window for frantic self-publicity. Oh well. I've lost the top spot I had last year, but I'm frankly amazed to still be included in the Top 20 given the quality of all the others. I'm especially pleased to see Beansprouts in there, which I've liked for ages - Hi Melanie!

Second thing second: It's surreal, dark and part-animated. It's called "The Wrong Door", and it's on BBC3 at 10:30pm on Thursdays, or here on i-player if like me you still don't own a freebox digiview thing. In general I don't really like CGI animation - it so often doesn't move convincingly, and fails to be truly life-like while also missing out on the rich and distinctive characters and textures that scruffier stop-mo techniques can give. For a sketch show though it'll do nicely, especially if it matures a bit further into edgy weirdness.

Other things in no particular order:

Wasp thing - why are so many wasps dying in my flat suddenly? Is there something in here that attracts dying wasps, or something that kills passing wasps, or something that attracts lots of wasps which then die in average numbers given the time of year but it seems like a lot because there were so many to begin with? And how long will it be until I step on a not-quite-dead one with bare feet?

Fat furry thing - my neighbour's cat is back, along with quite a few extra rolls of cat fat she's acquired over the summer. As soon as she's settled down I'm going to start chasing her twice round the flat every day for exercise. I'm just cultivating a false sense of security for a while by putting a blanket on a table for her and rubbing her ears...

Good Advice

(Click for a bigger version if you can't read the text properly)


I'm guessing it's probably from Private Eye.

Change of Address

I mentioned recently that I've been having big problems with bluebottle.com, who have provided my e-mail account for a couple of years now and who are crap. I just about managed to dump them before they dumped me this week, but not without spending several sunny days indoors staring at a stupid computer screen. Sorry if I’ve been ignoring you.

When I first set up my account I couldn't get it to talk to Outlook properly/at all so I ended up just leaving everything on the server, and it was oh-so-convenient to be able to access it all from any computer anywhere. This did eventually mean having two years worth of correspondence saved somewhere out in cyberspace and not backed up anywhere, but hey, that’s not a problem when it’s all working fine, and what could possibly go wrong…?

A few days ago, just as I was beginning to get warnings about having reached my capacity and needing to delete some old messages, Bluebottle sent an email to all their users to let us know that they're no longer going to be providing free accounts, we have ten days to download any of our correspondence that we'd like to keep, and then please would we bugger off if we're not going to give them any money.

“Panic” would be too strong a word considering the way I’d probably feel about, say, finding that I’d fallen into a polar bear’s private swimming pool, or being trapped in a lift for 41 hours, but I was pretty quick to send a pathetic message to Techie Friend begging him to come over and make it work please. Techie Friend being good at this kind of thing, it now does work in that all 3000+ messages that were on the server are now on my machine and won’t be deleted by Bluebottle. Unfortunately, the downloading process and the fact that I haven’t bothered to organise anything into folders for two years means that I now just have a very very long list of messages in no particular order. In fact it looks quite a lot like my paper filing system.

I've spent nearly four hours today putting thousands of messages into 38 sub-folders in Thunderbird. This is in addition to time spent persuading five Yahoo groups to use my new address, trying to somehow capture all the e-mail addresses I've ever used which Bluebottle holds onto forever in a massive, badly-punctuated list rather than permit me to keep a proper address book, changing 38 subscriptions to various accounts and websites many of which I'd forgotten I had, and writing to everyone I’ve ever met to let actual real people know my new address.

So, apologies to anyone reading this who has written to me recently and who I haven’t yet replied to.

If you still only have either of my old addresses then my new one is the same username @riseup.net – I will get anything sent to the riseup address, but the process of moving has left me with three different inboxes and a large folder called “dump” which is going to take me a while to sort through. I will reply to you all, but for the moment you are probably marked blue for “To Do” in a funky new Thunderbird folder somewhere.

I honestly don't remember it being this hard to change my physical address, although it has been a while since I've moved house and I'm probably forgetting.

On the plus side, I've got my new address talking to Thunderbird to avoid ever having all this hassle again. I can now do italics and different colours and all kinds of exciting things, and other people's text gets wrapped rather than keeping going for six feet or so off my screen to the right. Unwrapped text quite unfairly makes people seem very longwinded. I haven't even started on creating my own mailing lists yet, but look out world…

Wall-Painted Animation

Wow, look at this...

Bluebottle.com Is Crap

My STUPID e-mail account is TOTALLY inaccessible because NO bluebottle.com pages will load at all because bluebottle.com is so CRAP.

Apologies to anyone trying to contact me by e-mail - if it's urgent and you don't have my phone number then try leaving a comment here.

How to Sell Your Head

I was going to write about the lack of advertisements in Sao Paulo, Brazil. But then I saw this:

Life Explained On Film

Half of Tescos up the road is now piled high with chocolate Easter eggs, and the other half is plastered with red plastic heart-shaped things. Thought I'd share "How to Survive Valentine's Day When You Are Single" from Video Jug - personally I'm quite looking forward to seeing lots of unsold chocolate go on sale at the weekend.

You can see such other useful things on Video Jug as "How to Get Out of a Car Without Showing Your Knickers," "How To Stop Leaving the Toilet Seat Up" and "What To Do If You Catch Your Parents Having Sex"*. Enjoy.

* Quality of advice may vary and is not necessarily endorsed by this blog.