Well, it had to end sometime

My streak of Shrewsbury Town wins came to a shuddering halt yesterday as they contrived to lose a dire game 1-0, to Bury. My record at the New Stadium is still Seen 5, Won 4, Lost 1. But I had hoped to make it a season unbeaten. I guess the only way to do that is to not go!

The Town have a new manager but seem to be as rickety as ever at the back. Bury had at least four very good chances to score caused by simple balls over the top which somehow eluded the new "experienced" centre back, Graeme Lee. In League Two jargon, "experienced" obviously means "slow".

Town missed a couple of sitters too - the guiltiest party has to be Ben Davies who somehow failed to get a shot on target which really should have been buried. I was sat right behind him on the shooting angle and I still can't work out how he missed. But even if those chances had been converted, Town could still have lost 6-3.

As bad as it was to see my first defeat at the New Stadium, my cousin Mike, who'd come over from Birmingham just to see the game, saw his unbeaten run of Town games come to an end with the first Town defeat he'd ever seen live. His run stretched back to 1984. That's 28 years without seeing Shrewsbury lose. Until yesterday.

Glossing over

Having taken a few days off work and not gone away as planned, I set to painting the woodwork in the bathroom. It's a job that's been waiting to be done for two and a half years now. And it's finally done, except the paint ran a bit and needed touching up this morning and the whole house stinks of drying gloss paint, and I managed to get white spirit into a cut on my finger (youch), and we can't shower until the paint dries a bit more.

But at least when the whole house smells of paint it's not such a worry that you might be stinkin' it up as one of the great unwashed!

The wrong question

Sometimes in life I end up asking the wrong question. Like last night when in our midweek church group we watched a BBC film called The Wedding about the first civil partnership in Northern Ireland. It followed the two women involved in the run up and showed some of the protests against it.

Yet again some Christians seem to do their damnedest to appear like primeval shoutey buffoons, but as they were holding up placards protesting against "Sodomite marriages", it got me thinking "How would two lesbians actually practice sodomy?"

IMHO if you're going to wave placards and shout abuse, then at least the placards should make some sort of sense.

Life is Mootiful

Check out what my buddy Matt has been up to at Life is Mootiful!


(and this was one of the ideas I came up with for him to use...)


At some point we're goign to have to sit down and discuss royalties!

Ageing

On Saturday I stopped by a collectible toys place and bought myself a 12" figure of Boba Fett for the collection. (I now have 16 different Boba figures, and two Jangos.)

What struck me was the figure belongs to a range I still regard as the 'new era', except it hit the shelves back in 1996. That's 12 years ago. There are Star Wars fans like my buddy Adam who weren't even born then.

Suddenly I felt a bit old.

Big shout outs

I got a complaint from Roger the other day that I hadn't been blogging enough. He'd even checked at home to make sure it wasn't just the delayed cache on his office machine. Now, that's dedication! (Of course it also tells me that 'El Dodgerino' as we call him reads blogs in work hours - tut tut!). So, hello Roger, you're one of the stars of this blog post!

Also my sis-in-law Abz is on the mend after snapping her achilles tendon. She told me the other day that she was catching up on my blog and liked my ideas about what to write on her plaster cast.

And finally a big shout out to Matt, who hosted his birthday party for us all today in coffee break. We all got goodie bags and there were two parcels to be passed around. So we'll forgive him the Thomas the Tank Engine theme and say 'Cheers, mate, hope you had a good evening too!'

If you occasionally swing by this blog and think you deserve a shout out, leave a comment!

Ceylon tea

My current brew of choice is Ceylon tea from The London Tea Company. It's fair trade, and delicious (and I got it free because it had just gone out of date.)

The only problem is it tastes so nice once I've downed one mug, I immediately want another one - even more so than usual.

I tried it out on Clare and Tom today and they both agree it's pretty good.

Apparently

Work thing. (So if you're googling me because you're reading my CV, don't hold this against me - you know who you are, potential employers!)

I used the word apparently on a web page and was asked to change it because I shouldn't be so cynical. I wasn't being cynical when I chose that word; I was just in a hurry.

And the person who asked me to change it didn't ask me directly. They asked someone else who asked someone else who asked me. So three people had to take time out to 'fix a problem' and I ended up so far removed from the original complainant there was no way I could explain that I wasn't actually being cynical, it was just a word on a web page.

Now here's the thing - if the complainant had said 'Jon, change that word', I'd have done it. But they decided to waste other people's time, because they assumed I was being cynical and subversive.

And apparently it was too much to check whether their assumptions were true or not...

Phew!

Cathy went to the opticians yesterday and told them how her eye seems to have been 'flickering' of late. She was referred to eye casualty at Heath Hospital and so I took her up there today.

We both felt apprehensive in case it would mean another op (she had one about 5 years ago). But after a good, long peer into her eye, the optician said there was nothing to worry about. Of course, now she has to wait for her super-dilated pupils to get back to normal. But at least she's home!

Interesting side note
I don't often ascribe things to supernatural intervention, but yesterday the optician said she could see lots of pigment floating in her 'eye jelly'; a condition they refer to as 'tobacco dust'. Lots of people prayed about the situation lats night, and today the optical consultant said he couldn't see any pigment, even though he was using the super-duper hospital equipment to look into her eyes.

An answer to prayer or just an interesting occurrence...?

Not walking on sunshine

I was due to be interviewed this week about freelance theology, but unfortunately I got bumped. It's Eurovision season and the programme director managed to line up Katrina from Katrina and the Waves instead.

I'm now on indefinite hold.

Phony science

"Here comes the science bit..."

I've become a bit of a fan of Bad Science dot net, where recently they discussed how 'Brain Gym' use nonsense 'neuroscience-speak' to hawk their snake oil wares.

That works in regular marketing too. Recently I've been jotting down science-sounding words from shampoo and make up ads because I'm sure they're getting more frequent. Here's some sci-marketing mumbo-jumbo designed to trick you into buying fancy hair soap:

"light-reflecting booster technology"
"protein pearls"
"penta-peptides"
"next generation pro-V formulation"
"enriched with neutrilium"

It's all very canny. We want technology and formulations and to be part of the next generation. And the main reason we want all that is because we're idiots and we think we're worth it.