This week, I have mostly been lusting after Dr Wilson, Greg House MD’s long suffering best friend, member of the board of House’s hospital and head of the Department of Oncology.
And in the episodes I’ve been watching recently in the middle of the night, we learn he blow dries his hair, AND he can cook.
Phwoar.
It’s good to have a something else to do as well as elections
Whilst idly checking my server logs as yet another way of putting off going out leafleting, I see that today I appear to have a record low number of hits – just 10 page hits since 0:01 this morning.
I imagine everyone’s out enjoying the sunshine or delivering leaflets, or like me, accidentally sleeping through most of the opportunities to both.
I will crosspost this to LibDemBlogs – that usually bumps my hits by 50%.
And now I’m heading out to pick up my leaflets and go canvassing.
It’s going to take an awful lot of sleep in May to make up for all this metabolism-challenging activity in April.
One of the things I bought with my Amazon One Click was a “best of” CD of the Who, that featured the three tracks from which the three theme tunes for CSI, CSI Miami and CSI New York are taken. (Who Are You?, Don’t Get Fooled Again and Baba Riley)
I thought it would be good to listen to the whole songs, and a bit more by the Who.
Actually, having now heard the songs and most of the CD, I think I prefer the short versions in TV serial titles. Bah.
This time two years ago, I was doing almost exactly what I’m doing now. My car got locked in again, I’m behind on printing target mail, so I’m still in the office at nearly 4am.
Most nights when I park in the bingo, I set the alarm on my phone to remind me at 10pm that I need to move my car to avoid getting locked in. This evening when my phone buzzed, there were so many people around me talking that I pressed ignore, and hey presto, a few hours later, I’m locked in.
There are plenty of people in Chesterfield who have offered a bed for the night in such circs but for no real reason I can justify to myself, I am reluctant to take them up on the offer.
And anyway, the letters still need to be printed.
Liberal England reports his Lordship is restored to good health and writing his diary again.
As usual, some rather good snippets.
Quite the saddest event of the year so far has been the ending of the engagement between the delightful Sian Lloyd and our own Lembit Öpik. The Member for Montgomery, you will have read, has instead taken up with one of the Cheeky Girls, though I am not convinced that even he could say which one with any confidence. One must be wary of continually harking back to the ‘Good Old Days’, but I have to say that I cannot recall having trouble of this sort with Clement Davies and the Beverley Sisters.
Although you’d have thought that someone with such an attention to detail as to include the umlaut on Öpik would remember the circumflex in Siân.
Blimey. Since I last used it, MyHeritage.com has has had a major Web2.0 facelift and has all sorts of shiny bells and whistles. And given how many people on facebook seem to be using it, will be getting huuuuge great server bills for all the JPGs like the one above that they will be serving off their own machines.
It’s not the first time it’s been suggested I look like Philip Seymour Hoffman. Bah!
Since we’re being all Web 2.0 I’ve imported several address books into Facebook to see who I netted, and have added a few more people to my contact list. It then told me there were a further 1066 people in my contact list who weren’t already on Facebook. The mind boggles. I have no idea who most of them are!
Today, after resisting for years, I turned on One-Click on Amazon.
I’ve a feeling I will come to regret that.
I was challenged to make hats for the cats out of the foil that came from my Easter eggs, like Rapitinui.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get any Easter eggs. I did get an Easter bunny for which I was very grateful. But no eggs. So no cat hats this year.
When you go canvassing with the Lib Dems, normally, you’re armed with canvass cards that carry quite detailed information. For any given household, you will know the full names of the people on the electoral register, their dates of birth if they have recently turned 18 or are about to. You will know whether or not they have voted in the past (or at least whether or not they were issued with a ballot paper) – this information is available to political parties who get their act together and collect the info in time. You will also know whether they’ve been canvassed before and how the person doing the canvassing interpreted what was said. (We never know how people vote – we just talk to them, and we get an impression.)
Armfuls of data. But not the really useful stuff.
You don’t know how they are known, you know their full name. If you knock on a door, and ask for Patricia when the woman there is known as Pat, you immediately put hackles up. I’d not be impressed at people addressing me as Alexander, even though that is what will be on the electoral register.
For women, you don’t know what title they use, and you can tread on all sorts of toes by getting Miss, Ms and Mrs wrong.
So there’s a few things to worry about before you even ring the bell.
Once you have pushed the button and not heard a bell, you face your next dilemma. Does the doorbell work, but just ring out of earshot? Or is it one of the thousands of bells which don’t work, and you should knock as well. If you do knock, and the doorbell did work, even though you didn’t hear it, you risk annoying the householder who will come to the door huffing and puffing and saying, “Yes, I heard you the first time,” which doesn’t put them in a good frame of mood to be pestered by a politico.
But if there’s no doorbell, you have to knock anyway. And you have to knock at the right level. Knock too quietly and no-one will come. Knock too loudly and you risk giving the impression you’re a bailiff, and no-one will come. In some of the less well-maintained parts of town, if you’re too rough with a door, or gate, etc, then you will break it if you’re not sufficiently gentle knocking or opening.
But assuming you’ve got through the hurdles of the name and the doorbell (and with all these thoughts going through your head whilst waiting for someone to come to the door you often forget the name of the person whose door you are knocking on, and look a pillock when you have to consult your canvass card again while you desperately try and scan down the page and remember which house number you’re at) you then have to start a conversation with a stranger who doesn’t want to talk to you.
Which is always fun.
Scant weeks after I wondered what it would be like to have Ming Campbell on Twitter… someone’s doing just that!
Niles's Blog 