A gift from the Gods of Spam.

Here's a little secret. Sometimes I actually like spam. As long as it is riddled with errors, full of weirdness and makes me laugh out loud. Like this piece of oddity I received, unsolicited:

simply click to enlarge

Let's take a closer look at some of the wonders of this mail:

1. Let's start with the greeting:

'Dear Sir...'

Really?

I mean you do have a 50% chance of getting it right, but still. What am I to assume from this greeting? That you don't believe women have the need for Christmas toys?

Or perhaps that women don't like fluffy doggies?

Oh I get it, what on earth is a woman doing on email? She should be in the kitchen making shark-fin soup. How foolish of me, I shall log off the internet-machine immediately and return to sweeping the kitchen or having a baby.

Let's move on shall we. (I was joking when I said I was going to log off.)

click to enlarge.

2: 'Greetings for the day & Enjoy your good health.

Not all that much wrong with that. At least it's polite, however it does have me a little confused. Are you enjoying my good health, or do you want me to? Please let me know, I'm currently unsure whether I should be enjoying my good health or if that's your job.

Point 3. Can 'Christmas hats' really be considered toys? I'm just saying.

And last but not least,

4. Your name is 'Jack Dong'?

Really?

Do you moonlight as a male porn star?

Is your middle name 'Ding'?

And the most pressing of questions? Are you really trying to sell me Christmas Toys, or is this a cover for some Taiwanese underground mafia thing, and if I respond I'll instantly find myself chained to a sewing machine in a sweatshop in somewhere called Padang, sewing white fluffy bunny tails onto the top of Christmas hats?

Yeah, maybe I won't respond.

Don't call me, I'll call you.

And so once more into the breach we go. Hopefully in a couple of weeks it will be into the beach we go. But for now we must work. And so, here is yesterday's column. Hope you enjoy.

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick
EVERY KIND OF RING, EXCEPT AN ENGAGEMENT RING.

This story recently broke in the news about a forty two year old Dutch woman who was charged with stalking after she called her ex boyfriend 65 000 times over a period of a year.  

They might have a problem if the case gets as far as a conviction, since they won’t be able to fingerprint her. I doubt she has any prints left on her fingertips after all that button pressing.

And imagine her phone bill? When you’re in a relationship, particularly one of those soppy all-consuming new ones, one expects to have a slightly elevated telephone account, what with all those extra calls to say ‘hi’, and ‘good morning’ and ‘good later morning’ and ‘oh how I missed you between 10:05 and 10:11 when your phone was out of signal’. As well as those endless conversations that go on late into the night, ‘no you put down first, no you put down first, no you put down first’, so a few extra calls are to be expected, but this is ridiculous.

I imagine the poor guy never had a chance, even if he had wanted to try to return one of her calls. He probably couldn’t ever get through to her because her line must have been constantly engaged. And when he never called her back she must have just become more obsessed with calling him, it was a vicious ring cycle.

By my mathematics, which is dodgy at best and shocking at worst (so I can only guarantee general accuracy here), assuming this lady slept an average of seven hours a night, and took a little time off to eat, paint her nails, smoke a joint (she’s Dutch, so I’m just speculating here) and go to the loo every now and then, I figured out that she must have called this guy around a hundred and seventy eight times every single day, Monday through Sunday. That’s ten times an hour.

Forget her ex-boyfriend, her boss must be pissed, he should be the one pressing charges. Where in amongst all that calling did she find the time to do any work? Unless she’s a receptionist, then I suppose it was all just an extension of what she does all day anyway.

Time is a funny thing. There are never enough hours in the day, what with all the schlepping and carrying and shopping and feeding and working we have to do to keep the world turning. Yet somehow we do seem to manage to find the time for the little things that are important to us or make us happy. For example, just last week was such a crazy busy week, I was way, way, way too busy to sort out my stupid taxes, I did however manage to tweet 68 times. So I guess time, particularly available time, is all relative.

When questioned by the police our Dutch lady friend with the itchy dialling finger said that she didn’t think her actions were all that excessive. The gentleman she was calling on the other hand, didn’t necessarily agree with her. In fact he flat out denied that they’d ever even had a relationship. The third party in this relationship, the Dutch lady’s cell phone service provider, reported utter devastation at the resulting restraining order she received and offered to hook her up with a list of friends they hoped she might be interested in. She said she’d be sure to call them back and let them know.  

Okay I'll take that cocktail now.

Is it just me or has this year been caharayzee!
I can't believe it's mid-November already.

When I look back, parts of the year have inched forward like a very slow snail on strike, whilst other
parts (probably the majority of it) have hurtled towards me, and then passed me by like a train, off it's rails, on tik.

A friend recently sent me this:

I think it came off Pinterest, thank you whoever made it. Let me know if it was you and I'll attribute.

Now let me just be clear here, it hasn't been a bad year, A lot has been achieved that I'm massively proud of. It just hasn't been an easy year.

It's been massively busy and full of trials and brave, sick friends who have mountains to climb, and the usual shenanigans that life throws at us, and some personal (and might I add unsuccessful) attempts at gaining balance and adjusting to the shifts the universe is sending us. (I'm not a hippie, really I'm not, but any idiot, even a non-hippie capitalist one can tell that the universe is shifting.)

And to be honest I think I'm just about ready for my cocktail and a hammock now.

Bring on December.

Rule 34

Hi hi. I want to tell you something today. I'm not sure what it is that compells me to tell you my innermost thoughts on this monday morning, after all, I realise this isn't Twitter, but stick with me anyway.

I love writing this column every week. I have a great time coming up with ideas of what to write about, and even the physical writing of it is lekker. But every now and then I just like one column a little more than others. I know it's probably wrong, and one should like all ones children the same amount, but I can't help myself.

The Pastafarian one was a favourite, and I also particularly enjoyed writing the one about the scientists who went looking for the world's most boring day. And now I can add this little column to my list. It's a personal favourite.

I hope I haven't built it up too much and now it's disappointing. Oh dear.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
 

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick

THE LAWS OF LIFE

Our world is governed by a complex set of theories, laws and rules. There are the super-complicated ones that are best left to the rocket scientists, like e=mc2, the theory of relativity and how my new DVD player works. And then there are the other simpler ones that we live by day to day.

Like the law of gravity, which will see you land on your arse if you drink too much tequila. The law of threes, which ensures that in the very same week that the love of your life dumps you, you prang your car, and set your kitchen on fire. There’s also The Five Second Rule, which states that if you drop food on the ground, as long as you pick it up within five seconds it’s still safe to eat.

And of course there’s Murphy’s Law, which guarantees that if you wear even a single item of white clothing on any given day, you’ll spill coffee all over yourself before nine am.

Most of these laws are age old, going as far back as Newton, Einstein and the dinosaurs. The Rule of Thumb, for example (if you wash your car it’s guaranteed to rain) has been around since the beginning of thumbs.

So I was quite excited when I recently discovered a more contemporary rule that seems to have only popped into existence over the last decade or so. It’s called Rule 34.

Rule 34 is a now generally accepted Internet rule that states that pornography, or sexually related material exists for every conceivable subject. Basically in layman’s terms, you name it, there’s porn for it. And if not, then porn will be made of it as soon as The Internet hears that it hasn’t been done yet. (See Rule 34-B.)

I checked, and it’s true. Type ‘Spiderman’ plus ‘sex’ into the Google machine, or ‘Coffee Mug’ plus ‘sex’, even the search ‘Club Sandwich’ plus ‘sex’ returned over two million results. Try it if you dare, but remember once you’ve seen something, you can never unsee it. A lesson I learnt the hard way when I typed in ‘HB pencil’ plus ‘sex’. Scarred for life I tell you. So perhaps if you don’t have a strong constitution, or if you feel an affinity towards HB pencils, it’s best to just take my word for it, Rule 34 is out there, I promise, and it’s kind of scary.

Of course whatever you invoke Rule 34 on has to be a concrete or representable object. So you can’t call Rule 34 on existentialism, for example. That wouldn’t work. But nice try you loopholers out there.

I spent a fair amount of time researching the rule, and was well-prepared to invoke Rule 34 on Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem and The Old Spice Guy, on behalf of all the ladies and interested gentlemen parties out there, but it turns out Rule 34 was invoked on all of them ages ago, in many different positions and on dozens of different occasions.

As with most rules, however, there is one exception, and the exception to Rule 34 is an ironic one. In that you cannot Rule 34 the Rule 34. Although if we give the internet long enough, I’m pretty sure someone will figure out a way.

Letters in books

Deems just posted this on Twitter.

It's a fantastic idea, about as genius as cookies with milk, or cars that go vroom, or movies in 3D, whoever came up with those ideas are the same amount of smartness as the clever person who came up with this:

Click to enlarge so you can look-see

I love the most that it's hand wrtten on puppy dog writing paper.

I want to find a little personalised note in the next book I buy please, I'm just putting it out there into the universe.

Hey I just had an idea. I'm going to write my own little love lettery grateful thank you for buying me type note, and slot it into a copy of my latest book, This Way Up, at an exclusive books somewhere in Cape Town this weekend.

Only problem is I don't have puppy dog writing paper... hmmm... I'll have to get me some of that. Or maybe one with kittens, or ponies, or naked men. I wonder if they make paper with naked men on it... that will do.

Thanks Deems.

Happy Friday all. 

Stick a fork in me, I'm done.

So today the plan was that I was going to write and post something really, truly funny and insightful, with a human truth that was going to make you smile first, and then nod, knowingly, and then think, oh my goodness, that's totally what happens to me.

But then I found this online (where else):

And it was so classic it made me snicker into my teacup, and then I forgot what I was going to write about that was going to be so charmingly thoughtful and funny.

And so now, I'm afraid, you're just stuck with this, a very funny piece of word-play utilising America's sweetheart, and a piece of cutlery.

Happy Thursday.

Blackboards in porn

I'm in internet heaven. The ever-fabulous Zwier sent me another gem, which I shall in turn pass on to you.
It's a website called:

The basic premise of the site is that a bunch of nerds pause on the frame in various pornos that use blackboards. Then they zoom in and grade what's been written on the board, for accuracy, levels of difficulty and how hard they've tried.

Here's an example from the site.

This is the scene right before the teacher accidentally drops her pencil on the ground under the hunk student's desk, and then when she gets down on her knees to pick it up she accidentally... wait, hold on a second, that's not what we're here for... back to the contents of the blackboard:

So according to the blog, the contents of the blackboard are:

Mathematics - year 8 level

This sets out to be a good illustration of the function more commonly expressed as y=x². (Why the teacher has chosen A and S is unclear; these are sometimes used in lower case form as acceleration and distance respectively, but the relationship between them would not then be physically correct.)

The graph has then been plotted, but sadly this is where the lesson begins to falter. Firstly, axes on the graph should be labelled with 'S' (horizontal) and 'A' (vertical). And the graph that has actually been plotted seems to be more like:
1. S=0 A=4
2. S=4 A=8
3. S=6 A=15

The graph is roughly the correct shape, but is not positioned correctly: it clearly intersects with the vertical axis at A=4. Even allowing for other drawing errors, this is a function more like A=bS²+4. It would also have been useful to extend the graph to S<0.

Finally, the teacher should make sure that her students keep their focus on their work. She only has three students, so can't complain too much about the pupil-teacher ratio. The teacher is giving all her attention to the lone male student, allowing the two female students to talk to each other, thus reinforcing gender stereotypes of women in maths, despite being female herself.

and they score it a:

5/10 Shows some promise

Here are some highlights from two others from the site. If you want to read the whole thing, visit here and check it out for yourself. It's worth the visit.
Here's the freeze frame, sorry to pause in the middle of the story, it was quite rivetting...

you see Bambi (with an 'i' not a 'y') just got an F, which means she'll never pass, and if she doesn't pass, she won't graduate, and then she can't go on to Harvard and become a forensic pathologist, and then she won't be able to save the world from an outbreak of toe and finger disease which will rip through the universe in 2019... oh no, how will she get Mr Dick Todgerson to increase her grade...) sorry I digressed, back to the blackboard:

According to the blog, the contents of the blackboard are History - A level standard or higher.

The nerds on the blog reckon:

Two blackboards shows that a lot of work has gone into this lesson.

And:

It's not a bad map by history teacher standards, though St Petersburg is too far south and Vladivostok too far north. But it certainly gives an idea of the key areas -

And they score it:

Overall: a very good effort - 7/10.

Some blackboard contents however aren't as advanced and don't score as well:

1 + 1 = 2

Oh well, I guess it's a good thing she's getting paid to give blowjobs, if that's the extent of her mathematical ability at that age 

And you thought there was no need to study hard and stay in school to become a porn star!

The serious business of sex.

Morning, dunno about you but I had a lovely weekend, hope you did too. If not, here's a credit, use it for next weekend.

Here's yesterday's column. And again, I'm sorry about my disappointing absence last week (if you didn't notice i was missing, please pretend you didn't read that sentence), I can only hope it really does make the heart grow fonder. I will try to get back on the wagon this week to redeem myself.

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick

GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT SEX

 Is it my imagination, or do women take sex a lot more seriously than men?

I heard about this study some researchers did on a university campus in America. They got a good-looking man to approach fifty women on campus and ask each woman if she would have sex with him that night. Apparently the poor dude got forty-five no’s, three slaps in the face and two charges of sexual harassment.

Then they got a good-looking woman to approach fifty men on the same campus, asking the same question - ‘Will you have sex with me tonight?’

Altogether she got sixty-two resounding yesses. Which was surprising since she only asked fifty men. The twelve extra yeses came from all the guy’s friends who asked if they could come along too.

And that’s not the only example that comes to mind. Let’s look at prostitution for a moment. If we had to compare the amount of female prostitutes in the world with the amount of male ones I don’t think our numbers would come anywhere close. And that’s not because men aren’t willing to be prostitutes. Hell, I know at least a dozen guys who would kill to be paid for sex. It’s more a demand thing. If there were more women out there wanting to pay to have casual sex, the men would be there in less than a heartbeat, ready to lie back and think of England. But that’s just not how women operate.  

Of course there are exceptions, but for most women sex has meaning and importance and a whole string of morals and emotions attached to it. Why is that, you have to wonder?  

One theory I have is that maybe men and women have differing attitudes towards sex because of the consequences. If you take AIDS and crabs and all those other awful sexually transmitted diseases out of the equation for just a moment, the consequences of sex have the potential to be way more serious and life-changing for a woman.

While it’s certainly a miracle and a wonder of nature blah, blah, blah, being pregnant and giving birth isn’t the most fun you can have. Swollen ankles, weird cravings, ruined breasts, and let’s not even get started on that whole having to pee every three seconds thing, or the fact that your body is no longer your own.

When you look at it that way, it’s no wonder women take sex so seriously.

What are the physical consequences of having sex, for a guy? So you might have to change the odd noxious nappy. Throw in some serious sleep deprivation, and then there are the swimming lessons, birthday parties and school concerts that land on the day of the Currie Cup Final. Hardly disastrous in comparison.

And I’m sorry, but being out of pocket for nappies and schooling, or child support hardly counts as a physical consequence, even if it does cause you some pain in the wallet area.  

What if we had to reverse the roles? Imagine if every time a man had sex there was a chance (even just a small one) that he might fall pregnant, and then over a period of nine months his balls would balloon to the size of a watermelon (who knows, that could be how it might work), and then he’d be forced to squeeze a five pound baby out of somewhere (I don’t even want to hazard a guess where). After which he’d have to let the thing suck on his nipples every three hours or so for the next year?

If that had to happen, I can’t say for sure, but I’m willing to bet that men would also suddenly begin to take sex a whole lot more seriously.

What a week.

What a week, I'm sorry I haven't been here. Back to normal next week, promise. X

Waiting for the phone to ring

Shit, another Monday. That was quick. Well here goes:

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick

WAITING FOR THE PHONE TO RING

Have you ever waited for the phone to ring? Either oblivious of the law that a watched telephone never rings, or simply blatantly ignoring that fact, and believing in your heart of hearts that you are different and therefore the cliché doesn’t apply to you.

At least these days we have cell phones, so we can take them with us wherever we go. And we do, (Ahem, yes, I’m talking to you, using your cell phone at the cinema in the middle of the movie) ensuring that we never miss as much as a call, a text, or heaven forbid, even a tweet.

One wonders whether it wasn’t perhaps a single girl sitting at home alone night after night waiting for her phone to ring, who first had the idea for the cell phone? Necessity is after all, the mother of invention.

In the old days we didn’t have it as easy as we have it today. Not only did we have to walk to and from school uphill in the snow every day, watching out for dinosaurs along the way, but we also couldn’t leave the house if we were waiting for a call. Even taking five minutes out to go to the loo was a risky business. Unless the stretched, twirly cord of your phone reached that far. Ours didn’t.

Showering was also a risk. A ringing telephone could easily be missed over the sound of running water. And showering is doubly dangerous because everyone knows that the second you get in and lather up your head with shampoo and your face with soap, the phone is ten thousand million times more likely to ring. Sometimes one almost considers taking off all ones clothes and climbing into the shower and lathering up whether you need a shower or not, just to try cause Murphy to make the phone ring.

And back then when you did, after a couple of days waiting, eventually have to pop out to buy milk, or run the dog to a patch of grass, you’d do it as fast as you could, urging the dog to poop faster goddammit, so you could get back home again.   

Other symptoms of any extended telephone stake-out included picking up the phone at random intervals to ensure there was a dialling tone. Or phoning a friend or the electronic clock to check the phone was still working. And when the phone did eventually ring, it was never who you were hoping for, and you’d find yourself irrationally annoyed with the caller for tying up the line.

The guy, or caller, on the other hand, often has no idea that he’s being waited on by the callee. Over there, at his house, on the other side of the twirly telephone cord, he simply gets on with his daily routine. The truth is that on day one he desperately wanted to call, but his rules have been passed down to him in man-code for centuries and he’s been told he is under no circumstances allowed to call you, he has to hold out till day five at least.   

On day two he still has quite a strong urge to call. But everything he knows tells him it’s still too soon. Unfortunately by the time day five rolls around, something shiny, new or electrical has caught his eye and he’s been distracted. Although somewhere deep, deep in the back of his mind, buried under the memory of a great burger he once had, he has the strangest nagging feeling that there was something he was meant to do that day, but for the life of him he just can’t remember what it was. 

Night night.

This Way Up, now available in paperback.

I have news.

November not only sees us one month closer to the end of the year (What? Where did that come from?) But it also sees the launch of my latest novel, This Way Up, in paperback. Sorry, I hope it isn't terribly boring and gauche of me to bring it up, but I thought I'd share the news. 

Hopefully it makes for a good summer beach read, or a maybe Christmas present for your aunt/mother/sister/girlfriend/favourite prostitute/self?

If you'd like an idea of what the book is all about, here's a just out review from Women24, written by wonderful friend of the word and book, Kelly Ansara.

I've copied and pasted the body of the review below if you'd like to read it.

This Way Up - Review by Kelly Ansara

Summer's fast approaching and if you're looking for the perfect beach read, look no further than Paige Nick's This Way Up.

Stella du Preez has the perfect life. Well almost. She is married to a great man. She has a great, supportive family. She lives in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Her friends are the best. But … well, her job isn’t great. As the sex column agony aunt, Dr Dee, she has to deal with an almost unending slew of queries about the ickiest of things when all she really wants is to be taken seriously as a journalist. Then, just when it seems like things can’t get worse on the work front, Stella’s dream job – of features writer – is given to the all-too-likeable Thandi.

Upset and disappointed, Stella calls Max to tell him what has happened, but instead she tells a small untruth – a little white lie – that slowly but surely unravels her whole perfect world.

I first came across Paige Nick’s writing in her weekly column in the Sunday Times. A Million Miles from Normal is a truly South African column full of wit, humour, sarcasm and africanisms that only us South African’s get when we're laughing at ourselves. Naturally, I jumped at the chance to review This Way Up.

This fabulous novel is about two very different women. The first is Stella a woman who seems to have everything except the perfect job. The second is Poppy a spunky pink-haired twenty-something hitchhiking across America looking for the next big thrill.

These two narratives run simultaneously next to each other; hand in hand like two friends in the park. It takes a rather skilled writer to pull this off and Paige does it with flair that is salt-and-peppered with humour and awkward moments.

It was a tad bit unsettling being thrown from Cape Town to hitchhiking through America, and it took some time trying to adjust myself to here and there in a matter of pages. However, you do get used to it and - in fact - you can't help but start wanting to know what happens next with each character. This is a true Paige Nick tale of different women carving their own way through their lives and taking responsibility for it – or at least, that’s what I took away from it.

So pop into your nearest bookshop or click the buy now button because this is the perfect beach read! Paige Nick will swallow you up and spit you out while you clutch your belly and laugh.

Thank you Kelly. And thank you dear readers, who are still here and didn't click off to find some decent porn after you realised in the fourth sentence that I was talking about my book, and there was no sex, smutt or meme's to be found anywhere in this post. :) 

A lightbulb moment

Great design gets me every time. Alongside being a definite word nerd, I'm a design nerd too. So when I got one of these from Consol, it was a real light bulb moment for me. 

It's called a Solar Jar. And it's a clever little fucker. Basically the lid is a solar panel, so you leave the jar out in the sun for a couple of hours. We left ours on a windowsill and that worked too.

Then when night time comes you simply connect the circuit by closing that little metal circle magnetty thingy to the circle on the lid, and voila.

It lights up, just like that. That's my little Jacket, one of my very favourite little people in the whole world.

He says things like, 'hurry, there's a tiger over there in the bushes.'

and 'quick, that's a pterodactyl over there, you hold the light, I'll get a sword.'

He was super impressed by the solar jar too, and thought it was magic. Which it sort of is. 

If you get a lot of them and hang them in a tree in your garden it's quite spectacular.  

It's just clever, smarty-pants design that's not only beautiful, but functional too. I'm going out to get a whole horde of them to hang around my garden all summer so we can catch Pterodactyls.