A blog about everything and nothing...

This blog, as the title implies, is just a mess of stuff I’ve been ‘up to’ lately. For this reason, it may be dull. So there’s your disclaimer.

Right, here we go.

Whatever happened to TV shows where people wave awkwardly as the credits roll?

Well to answer my own whimsical rhetorical question – they’re all on the Challenge TV channel.

One of the holy trinity of channels that we watch in our house – the others being Living TV, home of Most Haunted, where charlatan psychics claim to speak to spirits. And God TV – insert your own punch line about there being no difference between them and Living TV here.

Anyway, every night on Challenge they have the largely forgotten You Bet followed by a double bill of old school Family Fortunes. A show as depressing as it is hilarious.

Tonight someone introduced themselves thus: “Hi Les, I’m Maureen and I work in a fish processing plant in Grimsby. I’ve been there 15 years now.”

I know it’s snobby, but for me there was something quite tragic about that sentence.

One of the questions put to Maureen was “Name something that isn’t alive but has feet”

Obviously they were after something inanimate, like furniture feet.

Maureen, thinking outside the box, suggested dinosaurs.

By that logic, any dead creature could potentially be on the board.

Lesley Crowther?

The Queen Mother?

Margaret Thatcher?

That last one was wishful thinking.

Anyway, enough about my banal TV habits. Let’s move on to my banal shopping habits.

Today I needed to get some work clothes, some slippers and a laundry basket (in no particular order) so off I went to Primark, naturally.

Once I got all that boring stuff out the way I popped into Gamestation and left with this beauty:





A Super Mario DS holder. Oh yes. That’s the kind of thing I get excited over. Rightly or wrongly.

And now to the final thing I’ve been up to recently.

In an effort to make life hard for myself I have chosen to learn Japanese. And I have succeeded. At the former, obviously.

I'm working very hard and making extremely slow progress. It’s always nice to have an inverse ratio of effort to achievement. Not at all demoralising.

They have 3 alphabets, well not so much alphabets as lists of sounds. These are Kanji, Katakana and Hiragana. And letters from all three can turn up in the same word. Splendid!

Katakana and Hiragana are the main ones to learn. Combined they are known as Kana, and are the most common.

Kanji is really hard and I’m told that some Japanese people can’t grasp it so I don’t think I’ll try.

So far I am half way through learning Hiragana.

I expect it will take me a few months to be able to write and recognise the symbols, and even then I think I’ll stick to Romaji (Japanese words written phonetically in English)

I bought My Japanese Coach on DS last week – which Mario is dutifully holding for me at the moment – which has helped a lot. It’s amazing how much a whack a mole word game can improve your capacity to remember.

Right, I’m off to gaze at my Mario DS holder some more. But before I go could I ask you, if you have the time and inclination, to rate my clips.

I’m in the running for a big prize.

I’ll be doing an interview for the site in the next couple of weeks, which I’ll post here.

I’ll also be interviewing a guy for the NSS, who stood up against a creationist teacher at his school in the US. Again I’ll post that here.

Oyasumi nasai!