I may not like him or his company much, but Bill Gates does, to borrow a catchphrase, “do a lot of good work for charity”. So, actually, I’m glad he and his wife have been named two of Time’s People of the Year. Well done, Bill. You deserved it.
Mobile phone companies have the ability to spot iffy calls
Now isn’t that interesting? Turns out that network providers can detect when a call is likely to be fraudulent. T-Mobile claimed it couldn’t spot that 30+ calls to Romania from Spain in the middle of the night might suggest my phone had been nicked. Yet actually they could. They just wanted my money.
Just as a matter of interest, what do you call someone who benefits from the sale of stolen goods?
More Instant Spanish flashcards
I’ve finally posted week 5 of my Instant Spanish flashcards to my iFlash page.
Birthday absence
Sorry I haven’t been posting for a few days: work and my birthday both got in the way. Enjoyed my day off, but now I’m straight back into the slog of things.
The good old Amazon wish list proved useful this year, yielding 
Teach Yourself Instant Italian and Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?: The Encyclopedia of Modern Life, both of which I’ll be writing about later. Sarah also decided that I needed support in my rash promise to make a new Gordon Ramsay recipe every week (I made “Sublime scrambled eggs” yesterday) by buying me a blow torch. Crèmes Brûlées all round then.
My lovely wife is also taking me to the theatre on Saturday to see Otherwise Engaged, which should be fun: I’ll be posting a review of that on my media blog once I’ve seen it.
But as a celebration party for the day, we did a tour of Greenwich, taking in The Mitre pub and Café Sol. The latter is a reasonable TexMex, although we encountered the strangest waitress there. She spoke fluent, accentless English, but couldn’t understand a word of it. Very strange. Wished she’d had a label on her saying “I’m from…” so that we could have used our combined French, German, Spanish, Russian, Welsh and Greek to have a stab at helping her out. She was probably from Poland though, so we’d almost certainly have been stuck on a certain river without either a paddle or one of our main courses all the same.
Mr Yousaff: your time is nigh!
Remember Mr Yous(a|o)ff? Seems someone with similar thoughts to mine also lives in Lewisham and has referred him to the Advertising Standards Authority! Excellent organisation that they are, they do clamp down on offenders.
First off, my congratulations to Mr Richard Sanderson for having the foresight and the community spirit to do such a generous thing.
Secondly, I’m now feeling a bit rubbish for not having done the same. Do you think the fact that I recycle all the paper people leave by the mailbox, turn off the lights in the bin room when no one’s using them and generally channel my efforts into “green” things compensates? I hope so.
Still with Year of the Volunteer under way and the RSPCA in urgent needs of people to stroke cats and rabbits (according to Radio 1), maybe I should find other ways to boost my karma as well?
The benefits of meditation
Meditation really is good for you and your brain it turns out. I have tried some meditation, but of the Hindu, not the Zen kind. Didn’t do much for me, but I didn’t stick with it very long. Plus concentrating on the air going in and out your nose really doesn’t occupy your mind much. I just kept drifting away. Maybe I’ll add it to my New Year’s Resolutions.
My psychic powers
My sister and I were out on the town last night. We’d decided to see Broken Flowers (I’ll probably review that once I’ve worked out what it was all about) but before then we had pizza. We discussed many things, including QI, the quite interesting show featuring Stephen Fry and Alan Davies. We discussed Mr Davies at length then adjourned to the cinema.
Well waddaya know! Who should be there in the audience but Mr Alan Davies himself!
Clearly our combined psychic powers summoned him to us.
We’re going to discuss Chris Morris the next time we meet to see if it works again. Okay, we’ve already seen him a few times (a Beck concert in Camden comes to mind), but it’s for science, you understand.
Sucking in three languages. Or maybe four.
So I’m on the phone, trying to set up an interview – in French. It’s going well. I can understand her, even though she starts our conversation off in German, just to throw me. She can understand me, even though she’s French and normally only non-French French speakers can understand me.
Then she hits me with the double-whammy of “Your French is very good” (why, merci beaucoup!) and “You can speak in English if you want” (if my French is good, why would you say that?) then starts speaking in English. So now I’m having trouble “code switching” and can speak neither French nor English – I hate it when that happens.
But then things get worse. She asks me a question and instead of “Yes” or “Oui”, I say “Si”. Normally, I’m pretty much guaranteed to start speaking German accidentally at times like this, but I actually started speaking Spanish. How odd is that, given I’m still on “Week 4” of Instant Spanish? It wouldn’t have mattered so much if it weren’t for the fact “Si” means something almost completely the opposite in French.
So now I suck in four languages, including English. Brilliant.
Gullible people required
If you don’t live in SE London, you probably don’t get this rubbish through your door:
Mr. Yousaff
International Spiritual Healer God Gifted
Born with this Knowledge
I can give help and advice no matter what your Problem is,
I can solve them with one visit. I can help you with Practical solutions concerning marriage, business and court cases and sexual problems. I can improve your life and I can bring back your lost friends, loved ones and relations, I can make your marriage better and I can give instant good luck in family Problems, I can remove from your life black magic, illness and eliminate habits like Drinking and smoking etc.
Anyone who has these problems contact
Mr. Yousoff Now
QUICK RESULTS GUARANTEED
First thing this guy needs is a magic wand to fix his punctuation and capitalisation. If he can bring back the dead, a full stop shouldn’t be too hard. The second thing he needs to do, of course, is decide whether he’s Mr Yousaff or Mr Yousoff.
However, my burning question is: “Does Mr Yous(a/o)ff actually make money?” If he fixes everything with just one visit, he must have higher call-out charges than the average plumber, just to break even. And are there really enough staggeringly gullible people to support him? Sure, there’s a reasonable number of Africans living here, who I’m guessing are his target market (insert disclaimer about Africa not being a single country, all have different cultures, etc). But they can’t all believe this stuff surely, any more than 100% of the locals round here watch Second Sight on Living or the French are a homeopathy-only nation? I could do a vox pop to find out, but that would involve stepping out into the oh-so-cold air. So maybe I won’t. (Gosh, what a fantastic journalist I am. In mitigation though, I wouldn’t be paid for it and I do have a lot of deadlines to meet right now – all of which will pay me.)
Even if any of them do believe, though, is a psychic sticking his badly phrased flier from the 18th century in someone’s letterbox the cultural equivalent of an undertaker driving around town in his hearse, shouting into his loudhailer about two for one offers – that is, possible but not the done thing? I’m sure there’s a case study for a marketing mag in there somewhere.
More Spanish flash cards
I’ve added flashcards for Week 4 of Instant Spanish to the iFlash page. I am moving faster than that, honest; I just want to make sure that there aren’t any typos, before I upload them.