Wolfie’s July Project 4

I must confess that the Project is suffering somewhat this month. You see, I’m on holiday (vacation if you’re from t’other side of the Atlantic) and so I’ve decided that all bets are off.

Having said that, though, I’m still being quite good; whilst I have been indulging in a few ciders they’ve not been too excessive. Food-wise I’m doing OK-ish, but there has been more chocolate and crisps than there otherwise normally would be. I work on the basis, though, that I’ve earned it.

What I thought I’d do would be to skip it for the rest of this month, and then get back on track in September (with a break for my birthday half-way through).

I must say that though I still haven’t invested in those scales to see if I actually have lost any weight, when I look in the mirror there is definitely less to see. So I’m going in the right direction.

Enough already…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6956208.stm

Once again, Pete Doherty has not been put in prison for his continuing drugs offences. How many “last chances” is the pathetic criminal justice system in the UK going to give this guy? If he’s guilty of the offence, put him away. If you’re not going to put him away, find him not guilty, stop arresting him and let him get back to killing himself with his drug of choice. Frankly, I’m fed up hearing about the talentless little twat.

Is there anybody out there?

I’m sitting here in front of my computer and it’s struck me the number of ways that I now have available to me for keeping in touch with people. I’ve got the trusty old landline phone for making “proper” calls and the mobile for emergency calls but I’ve also got all of the Net based things - Skype, iChat, Windows Messenger, as well as those “social networking” classics Facebook, Twitter and Pownce. Oh and we musn’t forget email!

I make that a total of nine; which is about the same number of people that I might possibly want to contact at some point. I realise that I’m not the most social of people, so my circle of friends and acquaintances is quite small, but even for people that have lots of people that they want to be in contact with do we really need this many ways to contact them? Isn’t this all a bit of overkill?

Yet I’m addicted. iChat, Messenger and Skype are nearly always on, I check Facebook with monotonous regularity and I’ve got all my friend’s blogs in my feedreader so I’m always up-to-date with them (actually, that makes ten; I forgot about blogs!) I’m now even starting to get into Pownce and Twitter, although God knows why.

Then there’s message boards; how could I have forgotten about them? That makes 11. At least with message boards, though, they tend to have a structure and a focus to them - you’re engaging in a dialogue with others about a particular subject.

So, all-in-all, I have more ways to contact people than people to contact. I know I’m not alone in wondering why we need to be constantly in contact; do we really have so much to say? I know I don’t.

Man, it was 30 years ago…

I wrote a post a few days ago to commemorate in my own small way the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. I called that post “It was 30 years ago today”. I’ve just been re-reading the post and it struck me that something in my life happened 30 years ago!

I remember being 14 and meeting someone who was an older brother of a kid I went to school with. In the way of such things at the time, we all looked up to him because he was the cooler, older sibling. I asked him how old he was. “21″ he said. At which point I thought to myself “I’m never going to get THAT old - 21 is really old”.

I remember in 1980 - the first decade-turn that any of us could remember - we worked out how old we were going to be in the year 2000. “32? No, that’s too old, I won’t ever get THAT old!”.

Various milestones have come and gone, most of them unremarked. 18 was a week of partying, followed by several months of partying for mates 18th as well (getting punched out in Ziggy’s, Steve’s elephant trunks); 21 was fairly quiet, 30 not a murmur. I’m 40 next year and they say that’s when life is supposed to begin…

- - -

I just paused there. That last line sort of snuck up on me.I’m going to be 40 next year. That really has no meaning for me, because I don’t feel any different from when I was 14. I look different (although not that different, because I still get recognised by guys I went to school with and haven’t seen since) but I don’t feel it. How can I be coming up on 40?

Your life is what happens to you while you’re busy doing other things. As Ferris says, “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you’ll miss it”. Until one day, you’re sitting there saying “It was 30 years ago…”

Wut teh F&^% is dis?

There’s much about the Internet that really just sort of passes me by. It’s either not in my personal radar, or I just don’t get it.

Such a thing is lolcat. I’ve seen it all over the place and I really just don’t understand it. There’s a Wikipedia entry, there’s a popular blog, everyone seems to be using it.

I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to the English language; I don’t like to see adulterations of it, because they just seem dumb to me. It gets me in trouble sometimes. It makes me look like an old fuddy-duddy most of the time. But Mr Davidson and Mr Johnson would be proud of the stand I’m taking.

I suppose that lolcat is just an extension of street-speak, part of the ever-evolving, living language that we use. I do mourn the passing of proper English though.