Wordless Wednesday 9

Photos by Giannis K.

Go Carrie!

Should we get you a diamond?
No, just get me a *really big* closet.

What can I say, Carrie Bradshaw is a girl after my own heart :-)

I can't wait for Sex and the City: The Movie to come out. Anyone else looking forward to it?

Consumer evolution

This is sooooo true it's scary. Thank God our TV is still the bulky old-fashioned style ;-)

From Greek skepseis to random thoughts

Sometimes change happens when you least expect it and without having planned for it. I've decided to anglicise the blog address, so I've gone from http://skepseisdotcom.blogspot.com/ to http://www.randomthoughtsdotcom.blogspot.com/, essentially replacing the Greek word skepseis with its English equivalent thoughts and adding random in front (as I couldn't get plain throughtsdotcom on Blogger). After all, what goes in here is rather random, so the new title is quite appropriate.

If any of you have a link to my blog on yours, the link won't work any more unless you replace the old address with the new one. I'm really sorry for the short notice and the extra work involved in updating your blogs. I've been thinking about this for a long time and have kept putting it off, so today I've decided to carpe diem, so to speak, and go for it. I promise not to make any more changes in the near future.

As a nod to what was for almost two years, here's a picture of the Greek equivalent to English tea.


Mmmm makes me think of summer :-)

How cluttered is *your* mind?

It's Saturday morning, I've made a jumbo cup of vanilla coffee and thought I'd try another one of those quizzes. So here's the verdict:

My Mind is 22% Cluttered

My mind is very free. I've liberated myself from most worries and problems. And even if something does start to clutter my mind, I'm easily able to let it go.

How Cluttered is Your Mind?

All well and good, but the question this poses is - if my mind's so free from worry, what keeps it so busy all the time???

The lunar eclipse that never was

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The full moon is seen early Thursday, Feb. 21, 2008, during a total lunar eclipse near Frankfurt, Germany.

I'm totally knackered today and it's all hubby's fault.

Well, most of it, as I was a willing accomplice, but it was his idea: wake up in the middle of the night last night (or rather extremely early this morning) to watch the lunar eclipse. Which sounded like a fun thing to do at 10:00 PM when he first floated the idea. Not so fun (or funny) when we woke up at 2:30 AM, half an hour early due to having set the alarm clock wrong (oops). Still, we persevered. After a little argument over whose turn it had been to charge the camera battery (totally pointless, as camera battery charging is a man's job in our household, like taking the rubbish down or doing the hoovering, not to mention there was nothing to take a picture of, although we didn't know that at the time) we settled down to watch half an episode of Hart to Hart until it was time to get out and look up.

Which we did promptly at 3:00 AM as instructed by the BBC, but all we could see was cloud, cloud and a little more cloud for good measure. We took it in turns to keep guard for a good 40 minutes in the freezing cold (thank God for fleecy bathrobe), and the best we managed to get were a couple of glimpses of what vaguely resembled a round object with a reddish hue. Sort of. In fact, if I hadn't known it was the moon, I'd have thought it was light pollution.

We gave up eventually and went back to bed around 4:00 AM, only to wake up three hours later feeling tired and grumpy, a state that didn't improve during the day. I guess going through a major "corporate planning" exercise at work (aka holding a finger to the wind and hoping for the best, along with lots of number crunching) doesn't help - but that's a whole new post altogether. Let's just say I got home from work this evening feeling like screaming or crying, or both. And breaking things.

According to the evening paper, the next total lunar eclipse is set to occur in 2010. Which I guess is a blessing, as I couldn't cope with another night like last night any time soon. Although to be honest, two raspberry daiquiris later I feel a lot more relaxed - another one and I reckon I'll be totally chilled out.

I'm off to crush some ice.

Barking spam attack

I came home today after a(nother) long day at work to find a(nother) selection of spam waiting in my inbox. Today's pickings include a "555 Euro of Welcome Bonus!" at an online casino - mine if I make not one, not two, but four deposits, an offer for a miracle liquid that will enlarge a certain body part that I don't possess (but if I did, said enlargement would be sure to make my girlfriend ecstatic), another email in a language I don't understand which offers me a bonus of 555 USD (Speel vandaag en ontvang tot aan 555$ in Welkom bonussen) if only I click on a .cn link (didn't know Chinese looked so similar to Dutch!) and my daily request to update my account details by NatWest Bank that goes like this:

Dear NatWest Bank customer,

We have implemented security measures consistent with our internal information security practices to help us keep your information secure. These measures include technical and procedural steps to protect your data from misuse, access or disclosure, loss, alteration or destruction.

One of these security measures is NOF (NatWest Online Form) to help us to keep your personal and banking data up to date.

You should complete NOF on a regular basis.

Please complete NOF using the link below:

NatWest Online Form

NatWest Automated Mail Service. Please do not respond to this mail.

Is anyone actually taken in by these idiots? I suppose they would have found another way to fleece people if spam email didn't work, so it must be working. It seems impossible, but people out there must be gullible enough to believe that there's free money, hugely discounted "Swiss-made" Rolex watches and longer ding-dongs at the end of a spam email. Are they barking mad, I wonder?

Speaking of which, another email that came today from http://www.phrasefinder.co.uk/ informs me that there are a couple of stories which link 'barking mad' with the east London suburb of Barking. One is that the phrase owes its origin to a mediaeval asylum for the insane which was part of Barking Abbey. The second story isn't a suggested origin, just a neat 1980s joke at the expense of Margaret Thatcher. She was known by those who disliked her as 'Daggers' Thatcher - not from a reputation for stabbing colleagues in the back, but because she was said to be 'three stops past Barking'. Dagenham is three stations beyond Barking on the London Underground.

The problem with the asylum tale is the date - it is far too early. 'Barking mad' isn't mediaeval and began to appear in the language only around the beginning of the 20th century.

The first record of it in print is from the USA. The 11th November 1927 edition of the Oklahoma newspaper The Ada Evening News reported on the frenetic and, if contemporary photographs are to be believed, borderline insane sport of Auto-polo:

"At 2:30 this afternoon at Park field, a half dozen barking mad auto polo cars will be whirled into action."

That usage suggests a readership who were already familiar with the phrase, and the playing of polo in cars, while having a strong claim to epitomise madness, isn't the likely source.

A much more prosaic derivation, that the phrase refers to mad and possibly rabid dogs, is a more probable source.

Never let it be said that blogging isn't educational.