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.

Wake Up Cat

Alice in Blogland Cooperative

I wrote to BlogShares to ask about having found this blog listed there, and got this reply, copied from the comments on my previous post:

Hey! That's me!

Alice - what you stumbled upon is actually called BlogShares - it's a fictional stock market where players receive B$500 to buy/sell/trade in a market based on blogs (valued by, among other things, the number of people that link to the blog). For what it's worth, blogs start at a base value of B$1,000, so a value of around B$20,000 like yours is by no means shabby.

The exact message you found is from what we call artefacts - a way to manipulate prices of the market.

All that said, registration is open to all, the game is incredibly addictive, and a great time - we are also home to a player community unlike any other I've found. Also, there is absolutely no real world value to B$, our currency (unlike games like second life, etc).

BlogShares is the main site.

This is my reply:

Ah, ok, then I'm afraid there has been a misunderstanding.

Alice in Blogland is actually a fully-mutual cooperative. This structure prevents the sale of shares for profit, and is designed to ensure that a company or enterprise serves its users or customers rather than the expectations of shareholders. BlogShares looks like a very busy and interesting site, but because it is based on trading shares for profit, Alice in Blogland is unfortunately not eligible to take part.

The usual system of shareholding in a cooperative is that each service user (each reader in this case) becomes a cooperative member and buys a share for a nominal set fee, usually £1. This share cannot be sold for profit, but as many shares can be created as there are readers willing to become shareholders.

The cooperative model is designed to protect against distortion by markets, so that, for example, Alice in Blogland will not become one big campaign to persuade others to link to it at the expense of writing anything that people really want to read. This model also promotes and springs from a belief in equality, both by implying a democratic structure within an organisation, and by preventing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.

I would love to take part in BlogShares if it were possible to do so with a blog based on the cooperative model, perhaps joining leaderboards of blogs with the largest number of individual shareholders. Please could you let me know if it would be possible to join in on this basis?

What I need to know now is, how many of you out there would like to try spreading a little not-for-profit love around the blogosphere? If a cooperative structure can be made to work in BlogShares, how many of you would become members of the Alice in Blogland cooperative by buying a share for a nominal, fictional amount on a fictional stock market site?

COMMENTS

Available to Trade

Can anyone tell me anything at all about this? I don't get it, but it appears to have got me.

"Alice In Blogland was the subject of much speculation when analysts at several firms were heard to be very positive about its recent performance. Its share price rose from B$379.88 to B$554.63. Much of the hype was said to originate from J.T. Sage whose Oxford Dictionary (artefact) was said to be involved."

WTF???

COMMENTS

Glamorising War

It seems I'm not the only one tearing up military recruitment materials - The Rowntree Foundation has published a report concluding that "Potential recruits to the armed forces are given a misleading picture of military life, including the physical risks and ethical dilemmas involved." More here from the Grauniad.

In the meantime, there will now be a brief window in which this point of view can be taken seriously by The Establishment. It won't last, but while it does I'm going to register a complaint about their T.V. adverts with the Advertising Standards Authority. They are obliged to investigate even one complaint as long as they are satisfied that there "is an issue for the advertising parties to answer," and a nice big official report in the news might just swing that one this week.

COMMENTS

Imagine My Surprise!

Another paradigm-shifting cartoon by Marc Roberts from Climate Cartoons - the full version is even better, but it only fits here if I cut half of it out...

Wasting Time

I'm back at work today and it's all very quiet, so I'm adding to my "Fun and Pointless" links and playing Cat Tetris. It's either that or catching up on data entry...

I've just re-read "Tim is a Homosexual" and correctly guessed eight out of ten programming language inventors or serial killers. These are all linked from Bristling Badger's blog, which has an extensive daft links list and a poll in which you can vote that Chris De Burgh "is the conniving minion of totalitarian shapeshifting lizards".

Now I can't get past level 41 in the Free Rice vocabulary game, and Friendbot just told me "You are not the boss of me, Internet Friend." Charming!

If I had speakers I'd listen again to the "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue" xmas special, "Humph in Wonderland", but since I can't do that I'm actually now going to enter 85 names into a database and then bugger off early. Ho hum.

The Cat's Halo

Sorry, yes, I am still alive! Trying to do too much in too little time...

Here's a quick cat post to keep you all entertained until I get around to telling you about the library book I've nearly finished reading.

Last week a friend gave me this very sweet knitted xmas fairy to put on my tree, which I'm dead chuffed with. The tree isn't up yet so she's been sitting on my sofa, and soon after I first got her home her pink fluffy halo fell off and had to be stitched back on.

The SECOND time I found her halo had come off I started to get a bit suspicious, and sure enough every time I moved it off the floor and turned my back again I'd mysteriously find it back on the bean bag that the cat likes to sit on.

It seems she has adopted it and plans to raise it as her own, and I'm going to have to find another halo for the fairy to stop my tree being toppled by a love-struck cat.

I can't even tell where the halo ends and the cat begins in this one...

Humbug. Already.

Courtesy of climatecartoons.org.uk
(This hasn't come out very well, click on the image for a clearer version...)

Wiggly Leek

Oh yuck. I've been really ill this weekend with a very nasty tummy bug thing which I'll spare you the gory details of. Suffice to say that my entire digestive system now contains only half a packet of bread sticks and five cups of chamomile tea.

I haven't been able to see any friends or go anywhere for fear of infecting people or falling over with dizzy weirdness, but I did manage to take a bag of fallen leaves to the allotment this afternoon to get myself a change of scenery. The last couple of years my plot has been pretty bare by November, but I've got quite a few things still growing this year which cheered me up a bit.

Although all my pumpkin plants died months ago in sheer disgust at the state of the weather and the slug population, all the onion sets that did nothing all summer are now visible under the frost bitten nasturtiums and have suddenly grown into proper onions, so they might just get me through the winter after all. The rainbow chard is bolting and I'm hoping to collect the seed, and I've got loads of huge purple sprouting broccoli that I'm already eating leaves from here and there.

I've also got my first really good crop of enormous leeks, and I brought a nice fat one home with me this afternoon. For some reason it turned out to be all wiggly on the inside:

















I wonder why?

Hoping that by the time I've made leek and potato soup I'll actually be able to eat it...