Assorted bits and pieces

You know how it is, there are lots of little things that don't quite merit a post on their own and then they sort of fall through the cracks. So here are some of the results of my Autumn cleaning:

Firstly, my favourite piece of spam from the past couple of weeks, it was sent to me by tony_tocco111@yahoo.com if any of you English ladies, between 16 and 35, are interested in getting in touch with Tony.

RYAN,

This might seem like an unusual Email.

My name is Tony and I live in Clearwater, FL in the United States.

I am very interested in being introduced to a girl from England for travel experience and possible marriage.

I hope you might know several girls affiliated with University College London who might be interested in meeting an American guy.

I am 36 years old and sell advertising. I make a very good living.

I am open-minded and age is not the most important factor. I am open to talking to ladies between 16 and 35 years of age.

I am 100% serious about this. I would prefer to meet a girl that can come here, possibly on a tourist visa. For the right girl, under the right circumstances I might be willing to go to England.

If you help can me with this I will forever be indebted and ryan james nichol will always have a friend in me.


Thanks,

Tony

Sadly, I can't think of any girls affiliated with University College London who might be interested in meeting Tony. I'm sure he's just a poor mis-understood man, or a psychopath, or one of the more convoluted con schemes I've heard about.

Two reasons why, the Football365 feature, Mediawatch is excellent? Firstly it speaks ill of the dead, by reporting the following quote from Tommy Smith about the recently deceased Emlyn Hughes, "We used to call him thrush. Why? Because he was an irritating cunt." (ETA: I discovered today that American's don't call thrush 'thrush', or more specifically they only call it thrush when the infected area is the mouth, typically the mouth of somebody with HIV, when the infected part is a vagina — or a woman's vagina, as the OED likes to put it — it's just called a yeast infection.)

Mediawatch also keeps me up to date with the latest, good and bad, headlines from the papers. As in today's effort from the Sun, 23-Ton Truck Rams Rooney (And Miraculously The Truck Survives), and from earlier this week an animal related pair, Police dog wanted slash but found stash and Cat Shot For Second Time. (Of course none of these come close to the legendary Knicker Nicker Nicked.)


Today I received an email from the Office of International Education, here at Ohio State. They were waffling on about some student run international film festival, the mail included the following paragraph:

Films from the following countries will be shown: 11/13 India; 11/14 Iran; 11/15 Turkey; 11/16 Central Africa; 11/17 Argentina; 11/18 Iran; 11/19 China; 11/21 India. (No film on Saturday, November 20.)

At the time I read it I was going to make some snide remark about how the Office of International Education should really be able to distinguish a region from a country. But then I discovered the Central African Republic, which I had somehow managed to forget, or never know, about. A little further digging and I uncovered a plethora of (well three) other African countries of which I was unaware: Comoros, Guinea-Bissau and, Sao Tome and Principe.

Finally, I'll end with a couple of adverts. Firstly, everyone should really be using the new Firefox browser. It does everything a browser should, and it does it all well. My new favourite thing is the BugMeNot.com extension, which is a frankly genius idea. For those of you who don't know, and why don't you, BugMeNot.com is a website which maintains a library of logins for those annoying web pages that require mandatory logins (e.g. newspaper sites, speciality sites, etc.). The extension adds an entry to the right-click menu, which automatically selects a username and password from the BugMeNot website and fills it in. Thus speeding me through the annoying logins and maintaining my privacy.