Meaning of Liff

Niche Humour

So I help write this parody blog - which is a sarcastic look at a woman and a company. A lot of the jokes are the type of thing you wouldn't understand unless you were pretty much in the industry but in the good old fashioned parody style we exaggerate, create new facets to her personality and generally take the piss and although it might be very English humour there are a lot of 'Mericans, and Germans, and Indians, and whoever, who clearly get it and find it funny (and contribute to it).

But what utterly amazes me is that some people don't understand it's a joke.

We've made the woman a cheese obsessed mummies girl who says outrageous things about her customers and people believe she's really her (The real her not the evil twin her we created).

WTF?

Even when we tell people directly that this is a parody they still don't understand. Aaarg. It's driving me nuts.

Well actually it's making me giggle but it's also driving me nuts. Mostly because I don't want the people we're parodying to get upset because people think it's real (pushing them with sarcasm is one thing but people using her comments to 'prove' the real company's lying will probably annoy them a little! lol)

A sense of humour's a wonderful thing. It's just a pity a lot of people don't seem to have one :)

I am now sober.

Wow it's so long since I posted - but work was hectic and then I was away for the weekend. Excuses, excuses....

It's amazing how co-incidences happen. This weekend I went on a semi-work trip to a conference (of sorts) where about 80 people from around the world were gathered, mainly to drink and gossip and drink a bit more.

On the second day I wandered up to two guys I hadn't been introduced to and said Hi. After a couple of minutes we discovered that not only were they involved in the same area of business that I am, but that they actually owned a company in Poland I was considering getting in touch with to supply me with some stuff, and that they did business already with someone else I knew. 

Small world huh?

They also gave me some good ideas for other deals I could put together (all including their products of course - they may be nice guys but they sure aren't stupid :) ).

I also think I sold our services to a couple of other people.  So all in all it was a very good weekend. I am officially in detox. There was a lot of money behind that bar and I drank my fair share of it. 

Procrastination

You know you're procrastinating when;

* You realise you've cleaned the fishtank pump rather than getting on with what you should be doing.

* You have no ironing left to do.

* You catch yourself writing a list of things you need to do in descending order of how much you want to avoid them on the basis that you'll start them when you've finished the list.

And the worst of it is that none of the things I'm avoiding doing are actually as bad as the things I've already done. Just in my mind, for some reason, they're on a list labelled 'Yeuch'.

Agg. My Eyes!

More underwear I'm afraid.

I was just doing my usual quick trawl through industry blogs and the Ask Jeeves blog is bragging about their image search results, and I clicked on one of their example links for 'twister' and there were these pictures so I clicked on one.....

At low res this looked just slightly amusing.  You have free choice people but if you click that to see the full size version I am not taking responsibility.

The moral of this story is that if you're planning on playing strip twister a) wear dark colours and b) observe basic personal hygene rules all evening.

Willpower, Saddam Hussain and vibrating knickers.

Underwear is much on my mind today - hey I'm a girl - I love underwear (figleaves have a 70% sale at the moment and I have a £20 voucher if I spend £150 - that's a dangerous combination which I have so far avoided getting into). But anyway, underwear is in the news as well for a couple of reasons.

Firstly these pics of Saddam in his underwear. You'd think, given the problems that other Geneva Convention denying pictures have cause recently, that someone would have had the brains to NOT RELEASE THESE wouldn't you?

There's a fundamental truth of life that two wrongs don't make a right. Whatever someone may have done publishing pictures of them in an attempt to debase them does not make it better.

History is written by the winners, and suffered by the loosers. When one of 'our' soldiers is pictured in a degradng position or endures inhumane treatment we (rightly) scream and shout about it. Saddam didn't treat his prisoners with human dignity but to treat him badly because of that just lowers his captors to a level not much above him.

I've had a lot of arguments in the past because of my views of fairness, history being biased and how people should be treated irrespective of what they've done (the argument about Bomber Harris in comparison to German bomber pilots in the war is a particular favourite)  so I'm fully aware that most people reading this will disagree with me - but tough - I believe if you don't have basic compassion for people, however inhuman they may appear, then you're no better than they are.

So that was the serious underwear news this week - there's also some great non serious news and I can't find this story online anywhere. Im sure I'm just not looking properly - but I can repeat the gist of it.

Anne Summers (a very famous UK chain of shops selling (imo) overpriced and poorly made underwear and sex toys) sells vibrating knickers, designed to stimulate the female wearer (or male I guess if they can fit into them) . A woman has hit the headlines here in the UK because she decided to try her new pair out while going food shopping.

So she was walking around the supermarket and the knickers were working - very well - so well in fact she had several orgasms. Of course that caused the blood to be diverted from her head to, er, other parts of her body and she started to feel faint. By her fifth or sixth orgasm she fained and hit her head on the corner of the shelving unit, knocking herself out badly.

The ambulance was called, a crowd gathered, and she woke up surrounded by a crowd of curious people who were watching as the medics traced the cause of her fainting to her pair of still vibrating knickers.

Her name hasn't been released, but Mystery Woman - I salute you. May your knickers always work as well but may you be better at finding the off switch in future.

I have no willpower, stop me now.

I went out today to buy myself a t-shirt and came back with a skirt and a dress.

That in itself isn't so bad but last week I went to buy myself a t-shirt and came back with a new pair of shoes, and a couple of weeks before that I went to buy myself a t-shirt and came home with a pair of trousers, a skirt and a hair grip.

The problem is I've seen a t-shirt I love, and since it's really cheap I thought that would solve my 'needing' a t-shirt in that style issues. Unfortunately though we don't have that specific shop near me and I've therefore been trying on all the similar t-shirts I can find.

And at the same time shoes, dresses, skirts and everything else. Oh I forgot to mention the underwear and the other shoes. And the other underwear.

As it turns out that style of t-shirt really really doesn't suit me. It's designed for my old 'slim and sporty' look and not my more recent 'yeah I have curves - what's the problem??' look (basically I don't mind being big but I try not to subscribe to the big woman in small womans clothes club). The thing is though, because it comes in my size I've convinced myself it should look good on me. It doesn't. It won't. This style of  t-shirt will never look good on me. I am the wrong shape. I need to get a grip.

So I AM STOPPING SHOPPING FOR THIS T-SHIRT.

If I repeat it like a mantra I hope it may come true.

80's music was truly terrible - but I like it

Actually at heart I'm a bit of a 70's girl - I should be too young for that but I think I grew up listening to an eclectic mix of punk and glam rock (courtesy of Dad) and Jim Reeves and Showaddywaddy (courtesy of mum) together with whatever was on top of the pops or in the car tape deck - so I can probably sing along to almost any 70's pop song and I recognise Noddy Holder without a problem.

But in the 80's I was a teenager, so although I think almost every song from the 80's is trite and embarresing when I listen to them I get these flashbacks......

So this evening I started off digging out some New Model Army and then worked my way through Madness and INXS before hitting Doro and then catching myself singing along to Belinda Carlisle (I'm sorry - I know it's truly sad).  Halfway through "Summer Rain" and while considering whether Cindi Lauper or Sam Brown should be next (and that's a fairly major decision - can take your evening off in entirely different directions believe me) I looked up and found one of the cats looking at me like I'd truly gone insane. How cats can manage to get that much expression into one stare I don't know.

So, suitably chastened, I've put some nice middle aged Queen on.

At weddings I get up and dance to Abba. It doesn't make me a bad person. Honest.

well it's hardly macho is it?

It's too complicated to explain how I found this Darth Vader dog costume but I'm being haunted by bloody pet clothes now. There's a new shop about to open across the road from our office which sells them. I mean we have an estate agents, a chemist, a deli, an off licence, a chippie and a curry house. What goes through someones mind to make them think that opening a poodle clothing emporium would be a good choice amongst that lot?

Anyhow, if you must dress your dog in anything please do NOT dress them in supposedly macho clothes - that just doubles the embarresment surely?

note to self; grow up

Sometimes my boyfriend and I do something that's so stupid that I think to myself (in the mental voice of my mum from when I was about 10) "that's not clever - now grow up and behave"

But oh sometimes it's worth it.

A couple of years ago my brother and the she-witch gave us, for Christmas, a pair of plastic rabbit garden ornaments. I have no idea why, or what thought process was going through their heads (we aren't gardening people and time spent in our garden involves swingball, football, beer and/or food - it's never involved gardening or gnome type ornamentation).

So anyway - for two years these bunnies have been getting more and more bedraggled in the garage (too horrible to even put under a hedge), and we're having a bit of a sort out now so the BF put them in the pile to be taken to the tip.

But our next door neighbour loves things in her garden - in fact she loves things so much she no longer has any lawn - one day I'll publish a picture because no description could do it justice.  So temptation proved too much and we snuck over there  and positiond two cute little bunnies just behind the shingle beach effect bit  and to the left of the large lump of york stone (but not too close to the pottery balls).

No you're right that isn't really funny is it? Well sorry but for some reason it still has us snorting with laughter half an hour later. 

Oh the world must be very boring if you're a proper grown up.

The Unbearable Googleness of Being

Autolink.

A rich and complex tale of a companies search for fulfillment and of the people whos lives and existence is inextricably entwined with its existence.

Autolink sucks.

I like Google, really I do, but AutoLink is very likely to be the defining moment in Googles existence as far as I'm concerned. Make a decision, take a path, there's no going back and the people you hurt will be strong enough to leave. I apologise for the profound thoughts which can clearly only come from most of a decent bottle of red wine, but frankly Google are pissing me off with this one.

So what is Autolink? It's a feature on the Google Toolbar which removes the ability of the website creator to maintain control over what links to where are shown to the website viewer. I realise to many people that's a minor point but it is quite an important one. Pretty fundamental to the purpose of many websites in fact.

I won't rehash my previous arguments here - I've argued enough on this one (don't misinterperate that as meaning I've given up - just take it that I've changed tactics). If you'd like to know a little more about it you can read

http://www.searchguild.com/autoblink/
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050225-104317
http://www.searchguild.com/tpage19006-0.html
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1562
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1723
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/1631

There are of course opposing arguments, but I'm right. I admit I'm occasionally wrong (shhhh, don't tell anyone) but on this I am on-the-button, total-certainty, never-been-righter right and if we don't get an opt out facility my saying "told you so" will be the least of anyone's worries.

Please complain to Google - try toolbar-feedback@google.com  or any other feedback method you prefer.