Derivative versus influence

I notice, and I am vain enough to think that some of my readers may also find (actually, I am vain enough to think I have readers, and am diligently failing to install Google Analytics in order to maintain this illusion) that my ramblings vary considerably in voice and style depending on what I have been reading recently. Given I try to read only the finest quality literature, smut and other blogs this should be a good thing, but I have occasionally allowed myself to be a little lazy and actually continue an argument or thought that I read somewhere else, written by wiser fingers than mine. I am not going to stop doing this, as I’d run out of ideas way too fast, but I would like to apologise.
Which I have just done.

A slinky on an escalator

A perpetual fun machine..?

Ooh, but the timing issues. Disappointment, by definition.

Oh, the horror! Life without Google

"When Google Owns You" So, some guy is devastated when he is locked out of all (yes, you read that right, ALL) of his Google accounts.
Oh come on. Suck it up. You lose access to your Google for a day. What happens?

• You miss a few emails from your friends about some party they're having: they'll call you or something. Or you can stay in. Or go to a random bar and pick up a stranger for a night of wild sex. Whatever.
• You miss your update from the various stupid websites that you never read anyway, but always intend to 'get around to'. Try a book.
• You can't update your blog for a day or so. Well, honey, neither can I half the time, but I'm blaming that on Grey Goose, not Google.
• You lose access to the Google spreadsheet you and your housemates use to keep track of who bought the Tide and toilet paper. Pin your reciepts to their door and take the money out of their wallet. You don't live with uptight people, right?
• You can't check on Google analytics to see who is reading your blog, and you've been noticing for a while than one of your fourteen regular readers is from Korea, and you suspect it is a cute Korean girl who likes your picture, so you've been dropping some cool references to Asian pop stars in and are dying to see if she read them... You need to get out more. Really.
• Your photos should be on facebook or on your wall.
• Your groups won't notice you are gone.

Face it, the only Google apps that are necessary for life as we know it are maps and search, and you don't need an account for those.

If I lost access to facebook for a day, though... no, I can't even picture it. It's too painful.

What's in a name?

Hippopotamus. I am not fat. I don't have unusually large teeth (although one at the front sticks out a bit). I like water, not so much mud.

My name is an homage to British comedians, writer, actor, asexual and all-round bloody genius Stephen Fry who wrote a bizarre, sick and hilarious book called 'The Hippopotamus'. The eponymous hippopotamus (oh, how much should that be the start of a poem?) is an alcoholic, lecherous old (male) hack/poet. I am, or aspire to be, at least three of those things.

Repeat, not fat and muddy. Also not in Africa.

Why oh why...

... are contact lenses sold in identical packaging to pregnancy testing kits? This seems extremely odd, and opens the manufacturers of both products up to numerous lawsuits due to a mind-boggling range of possible misadventures.


I first noticed this walking past a small billboard on the subway, which displayed a longish, flattish white cardboard box covered in subdued yet supportive blue graduated lines, and the obligatory attractive yet responsible-looking young woman (you can tell she was responsible because she wasn't blonde, wore minimal make-up and had a thoughful expression). However, on second glance, I became very concerned for the youth of today, given the tagline: 'All-day comfort, daily use'.



On prolonged inspection it became clearer that the product being advertised was not, in fact, a pregnancy test, but a package of disposable contact lenses. However, if my 20/20 vision was fooled, I can only imagine the confusion of someone with poor eyesight. They may well only realize their mistake at the checkout, when they recieve a disapproving look from the lady behind the register who pointedly suggests that maybe they want to pick up a few packs of condoms, 'to prevent it happening again'. Is this a throwback to the days when young boys were told masturbation would make you go blind? If so, surely advocating safe sex is an odd moral gear-change: 'No, dear, playing with yourself is wrong, you should go and have actual sex with some emotionally vulnerable girl. But do use a condom. Oh, and here is some of that KY jelly with the warming effect...' (which is another odd product to buy, given it is usually sold next to sanitary products, which meant for years I thought that it was intended to help with tampon insertion).



So, I am calling on those stalwart souls in P&G and J&J's marketing departments - please don't create any more daily moral quandries and quagmires with your confusing implications! Can we have nice simple slogans like 'Think you're knocked up? Check' and 'Can't read this sign? Buy me'. Plus some advice about how to keep enough of a grip on the KY jelly tube to close it when you just covered your hands in something designed to make them slippery...

Cuil - what was all that about?

Was this a case of great marketing (or at least better than the million other Google-killers out there) let down by insufficient hardware? I mean, the name (usefully appended with 'pronounced cool', to end the inevitable confusion from having such a weird name) has been all over mainstream media. I've watched with horror as completely un-tech-savvy pundits explain to their equally uncomprehending audiences the intricacies of why Cuil's search alogrithm/mechanism/program is better than Google, before giving up on even these vague technicalities and going with the 'bigger is better' approach and shouting about how many more pages Cuil has indexed than Google.
So I gave it a try, and typed my own name into Cuil (will 'Cuiling' oneself one day be as sad an admission of terminal narcissm as 'Googling'? I confess to doing it the latter fairly regularly. Will I go blind?). First shock: the results come up in clumps across the screen instead of a nice, sensible, scrollable list. I have difficulty processing this and want to run screaming back to Google, but I persist in the interests of research.
Most of the top row results are about sports teams with players that share either my first or second name, not both. There is one result in the middle of the page referring to a man with the same name as me that works somewhere boring (he usually comes up on my Google searches too). The usual Google top-spot comes somewhere down the left hand column, and is the homepage of someone with the same name as me who hasn't yet put anything but his/her name on it. My actual target (pages containing articles I have written for various print media) is right at the bottom on the left, and requires a bit of scrolling to read fully (I will charitably blame this on my small monitor). Not impressed.
I've also heard something about their servers crashing/not handling things, and an even more intruiging report of sports queries being re-routed to their cookery server (one imagines the server holding a wooden spoon and wearing a flowered apron...) but to me, failing to award my gems of literary and journalistic genius a top (or even second-to-top-row-third from the right) spot on their strange category-based results page gives me only one possible verdict: not cool. Google will survive (for now).

Update on the silly friend’s love life

He turned up to their last date and apologized for his appearance, saying he hadn’t been home yet. This was at noon on a Sunday. She threw out a few snarky comments about the previous evening, obviously fishing for details or, even better, denials. However, it was perfectly obviously he’d been banging some other girl all night, and he wanted her to know this. Just to mess with her further he began to flirt with her even more obviously than usual, including hand-stroking, playful shoulder shoving and standing indecently close behind her in line for the coffee they went for after lunch. She came home afterwards in a daze, high on sexual frustration and misplaced excitement, convinced even further that things were progressing well.
At the suggestion that she could, well, ask him what the fuck was going on (or even, at a pinch, whether he was actually single) she all but punched me in the mouth. She ‘doesn’t want to rush things’ (this from the girl who has been wondering if he would get on with her mother) and she is ‘worried she’ll scare him off’ (damn good job in my opinion). Clearly she isn’t actually sure, is terrified of rejection and the manipulative little shit knows this.
If I’m wrong I’ll be happy for her. No, really. I’ll even go to the wedding.