Saturday 21 February 2009

Things I've watched on Youtube more times than is healthy...

This is my current best of the best...







I have recently discovered that both the most watched and most consistently fun to watch clips on youtube are all of children or animals being hilarious and adorable. Nothin' wrong with that.

The Great and Powerful Google

Bloggy friends! I put out a cry for bloggy help, and you stepped out of the rain one by one, like characters in a nineteen eighties teen movie. (This simile has been swyped from Fieldsage. Take that, Fieldsage!) Eitherway, I'm glad. It's nice to know I've got at least three readers. Including my mom. (Hi Mom!)

Okay, so what's interesting me at the moment are these strange virals so many of my friends (including me) have been doing on facebook lately - Typing your name + "needs" into Google, and expecting it, like some bizarre interweb prophet, to come up with all the right answers. I mean, I'd find this utterly ridiculous... if it weren't eerily accurate? No, no, I didn't really just say that. (I did really just say that.) Shaddup. Basically, I typed "Deborah needs" and a tear nearly came to my eye when I saw the list that appeared.

Deborah needs help
Deborah needs professional profile
Deborah needs chicken soup
Deborah just needs
Deborah needs your prayers

I have such serious needs! Such very serious needs! Also, not so differently from 2007 (scroll back to read Staceybot's guest posting on my blog about this) I am still rather torn about whether to use "Deborah" or "Debbie" as a full time name. When it comes to the "Needs" game, this discrepency over my name came up with some interesting alternatives... "Debbie needs a saddle" and "Debbie needs to look behind her" being the tops of the tops. (I actually did look behind me.) It did certainly seem, at least from Google, that Debbie was having notably more fun than Deborah.

My internet procrastinating went a step further, and I started to wonder, if Google knows what Deborah and Debbie need, maybe Google also know what I want.

Now can I pause for a moment, while you remain in utter suspense over what I want, to say that I find the very existence of this game slightly... off. And wrong? This coming from a girl who was OCD until she was 22, but the internet - the internet should not be allotted any superstitions, any notions of supernatural powers, any magic - because it's robotic, for one. Man made, for two. And... already magical enough, for three. Assigning the internet supernatural powers is like admitting to a talking android being sexy. Like, it is sort of sexy. But saying so is so very, very, hugely, profoundly, wrong.

Okay- back to what I want. Aside from a sexy Android. No. really. I didn't mean that. GAwd. I didn't.

Deborah wants Jack Bog's Blog
Deborah wants to write letters to creditors
Deborah wants blog catalog topic (this is riveting stuff, isn't it. You're wishing I would start posting about HRM products again, aren't you?)
Deborah wants nothing to do with wankers.

And then I thought, okay, we've got what I need. We've got what I want. But what do I have? Surely, oh knowing Google, you can give me some light at the end of this esoteric tunnel?

Deborah has lost her head.
Deborah has a room to rent in a flatshare.
Deborah has advised Northumbria University
Deborah has also written last Clasman trilogy
Deborah has reformulated its biotec suncare

Oh Google. You are as unforgiving as you are mysterious.

Mom and mom alone reads my blog.

How depressing!

Thursday 12 February 2009

My oh my oh my! (or, David Rakoff sings the blues...)


Well, it's February, Bloggy friends. And I was so pleased with my last post, and so disappointed at the lack of comments (by lack, read, none - not a one!) that I thought I would try to starve the blog of new posts until someone deigned to reply to my brilliant rant about products by appointment to her majesty. I was trying a bit of a "hard to get" approach. I've done it before - if you scroll back through time you'll notice a particularly stubborn bout beginning in August of 2007, which I think went on until the following January. (When Andrew Haydon *did* finally post the first comment, however that comment was mocking my lack of blog postage. Hoisted by my own withered petard.)

Okay, okay, well here I am, now solid in the knowledge that I am alone in my HRM obsession with foodstuffs, but, much like those plucky Masterchef contenders, more determined than ever to put in a good showing. Of course, this does mean coming up with some blog-worthy material. Okay, give me a moment. Okay. Hm. Well.... I woke up today with a bit of a hangover (great start, Pearson. Tell the internet about your hangover. If one day we reach the finite space of publication on the internet and nobody can update anything on wikipedia ever again, at least the annals of time will know you once suffered the consequences of drinking...) Silence, Brackets! As I was saying, I woke up this morning with a HANGOVER, and tried to get up at a decent time, but instead realized that I was going to have to spend the day sleeping the terrible feelings off. It was like having the flu, except I knew that it was all my fault. So even I felt no sympathy for myself. However, this did afford me an entire day of surfing the internet - and if one were to peruse my web-history today, one might find that I...

1. Found out that my flatmate from when I was living in Australia got married in an Asian style wedding and has a gorgeous child with the middle name of Hiro.
2. Checked facebook and gmail more times than is proper or healthy. Perhaps I should check again, just to make sure...
3. Became mildly obsessed with Canadian members of the "This American Life" staff. What the web-history could not show you, however, was the way that I furrowed my brow, annoyed, when Jonathan Goldstein and David Rakoff's wikipedia articles referred to them as "Canadian-American." What the heck does that even mean? It is surely different from Native American. Or is it?
4. Watched the quarter finals of Masterchef. Riveting stuff.

So that's me in a cyber-nutshell. Sans the queen's favourite crackers and jam. What did the day turn out for you?

(Do you see what I did there? I literally demanded a comment. That was a demand! I'm through Playing hard to get with you guys. I read "The Rules." Well, I didn't read them, I read an article about them. Or I skimmed it. Eitherway, I have neither the patience, nor stamina, to Master them. The thing about being subtle is, well, you can always tell yourself you should have been more direct. And that's not good for anybody's hindsight.) Silence, I say!