The brother who speaks my language

It doesn’t matter how many months - or, lately, years - it’s been since I’ve seen my older brother Gordon, we always greet each other the same way.

One of us will say, “Hi, how the fuck are ya?”

The other will say, “fucking great, man” and we’ll give each other a bear hug.

Then we’ll step back and the next thing one of us will say is Well. That was never five minutes just now.

Anyone witnessing this or any other exchange between the two of us could be excused for thinking we’re more than just a little bit daft, because if each of us has his own particular set of quirks and foibles, stir Gordon and me together for a while and a whole lifetime of slang, sayings, even our own rhythm and cadence kicks in, and nobody else really gets it.

One of the main things we get into is adding the suffix -age onto everything. Length, for example, becomes footage. So to ask, “how far is it to…” we would ask, what’s the footage to get to….

It can sometimes get to ridiculous extremes. Damn, I’m hungry. I need some foodage, and maybe some drinkage too, at which point we silently call a truceage and cut out the crappage before we drive each other around the bendage.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of it stems from late-1960s to mid-70s pop culture and television, which coincides from the time Dad bought our first TV ’til Gordon left home to go to university.

If someone’s having trouble opening something, we’ll say really fast just jiggle it a little, it’ll open. Try it. Justjiggleitalittleit’llopen. It’s from an episode of I Love Lucy.

Greetings can also be Hey Goob or Hey Goobah, which comes from Gomer Pyle, USMC. From goober we get goobernatorial, a play on the real word gubernatorial, which as Canadians we always found should refer to something stupid anyway. How goobernatorial is that?

If we’re playing a game and it’s the other’s move, we’ll say itchy goom, something our Dad mis-heard when we were telling him we were watching the TV game show It’s Your Move.

Have some crispy french fries, cousin Cesspool is a set phrase we throw in when offering any type of food to the other. It comes from a misunderstood TV commercial for Crisco Oil.

If we see or hear something stupid, idiotic or just a little weird, one of us will say eww, ginchy. Ginch is a derivation of that classic Canadian slang term for underwear gaunch.

To ask the time we’ll say time diddehhh? - drawing out the second syllable for some reason. We can also ask the time in French, but instead of the simple Quelle heure est-il? we’ll say Quelle heure est-il maintenant ou pas? adding the nonsensical now or not? at the end.

We also invert many things so that they sound French, but aren’t. A CD player will be a player de CD, a paper bag a bag de paper, a hockey stick a stick de hockey and so on.

To say excuse me we say Scoozay-mwah, see-voo-play, that is all my French to-day.

To offer milk to the other we say Would you like some Millek with your Fillem? I was the one who introduced that, because I had a teacher in Grades 6 and 7 who used to prononce film as the two-syllable affectation fill-em.

A helicopter is not a helicopter, it’s a hobbidy-cobbidy, a knife is not a knife, it’s a kaniffy, McDonald’s isn’t McDonalds it’s Flap-doodles but the latter is more Gord’s and I just adopted it.

If you noticed the Monty Python reference in That was never five minutes just now, that’s just scratching the surface. We both know the entire repertoire inside-out, dragging up snippets of skits and sometimes whole monologues to fit various situations. If death comes up on the panel the high point of the Dead Parrot sketch will be played out, if one of us says Could be the other will say, Could be, could be taken on a holiday, and any reference to Christian religious ritual one of us will start reciting the monologue of how the Lord sent an Angel to comfort Victor for the weekend, and entered they together, the jacuzzi.

Here endeth the lesson.

Well, not quite. Because if all this stuff and nonsense has you thinking we do it because we have nothing at all to talk about and it’s just filling dead air, that’s not it. We know how much is too much, had tons to discuss and argue over and contemplate and laugh about, and had been doing for an entire week despite my being ill for half of it, before he left yesterday for London and then home.

Dammit Gord, great funnage. Sorry I was such a wreckage when you got here. See you this fallage.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

99 + 1 too many things about me

One of the things that used to hold me back from starting a blog was the thought of having colleagues read it, slide on over to me and say, hey, you are one bizarre individual… Then one day I said what the hell, I’ll start a blog, and they can read it all they like. I just won’t reveal too much about me.

Now after a year or so of posting, I figure they know as much as you do, so here goes:

1. See that photo at the top of this blog? Add a bunch of overhead cables and telephone wires, and that was our family’s view out of the front window when I was growing up.
2. When I was born, I was driven home from hospital in a banana box placed on the floorboards of an old Austin.
3. My elder brother wanted me to be a girl. I know because he wrote that in a letter to my mother right after I was born. I don’t hold it against him.
4. Had I been born a girl, my name would be Fiona.
5. I’m glad I’m not a girl.
6. My earliest memory is of me standing up looking through the bars of the crib, that same brother coming in and saying, “there he is.”
7. I don’t know if that was a dream or not, but I can see it clearly.
8. I was only three years and eight months old when JFK was shot, but I remember where I was and what was going on around me.
9. I’m the youngest of four children.
10. My sister, the family’s first born, was killed in a level crossing accident when I was seven. She was 18. Damn that Canadian Pacific Railway anyway.
11. They say she was like my second mother, constantly taking care of me as a baby.
12. I have always missed her. 
13. Not for what might have been, because my memories of her are vague, but for what never could be.
14. For the past six generations, my family has been afflicted with a hereditary skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa.
15. I consider myself to be very lucky, because I don’t have it, nor can I pass it on.
16. We didn’t have a television until I was nearly eight. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for holding out that long.
17. I grew up during the Vietnam war.
18. I’ve been fascinated with that country my whole life.
19. I started delivering newspapers when I was eight. I’d often read ours before starting the route.
20. The Canadian town I grew up in was a one-company mining town. Anaconda -  an American company - owned it.
21. I was skipped a grade. I did the first half of Grade 3, then was moved over to the other side of the room to do the second half of the year in Grade 4.
22. School mates were angry at me because they thought I’d deserted the gang.
23. I also had a terrible time adjusting, because all of a sudden I had to write with a pen, and didn’t know how.
24. I was an overweight kid from the age of eight ’til 12, when I made a conscious effort to lose weight. It worked.
25. Perhaps too well, because when I hit Grade 8, skinny and a year younger than the other boys, I was picked on.
26. Don’t worry, I’m over it.
27. I first went skiing when I was 10 years old, and hated it. I went another couple of times that year, and hated it even more.
    Then the next year, I went skiing again, and was hooked.
28. I am still absolutely nuts about skiing.
29. Photo break:
30. 
31. I wish we lived closer to the Alps.
32. I have a deep scar on my chin from a skiing accident when I was 12. Back in the day, they used to have so-called safety straps attaching your ski to your ankle, so that when you fell and the skis released, the ski wouldn’t flit down the hill and impale someone. I fell badly and my ski whipped around, smashing an edge into my chin.
33. That happened on the Harmony Bowl at Whistler, back when a lift ticket cost a kid like me all of four Canadian dollars.
34. Blood everywhere, six stitches.
35. I spent a year ski instructing at Cypress Bowl, one of the three areas close to Vancouver.  The job’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
36. We used to spend hours either playing street hockey, Canadian football, soccer or baseball until it was so dark, it was dangerous to play.
37. My first real girlfriend had an identical twin. They were beautiful girls, always leaving me at a loss for words not only for that, but because I couldn’t tell them apart when they greeted me.
38. Then on January 27, 1977 at precisely 4:20 pm Pacific time, I kissed one of them.  After that, the difference was unmistakable.
39. I learned to drive in a 1972 MGB, but I have fonder memories of a 4-door 1970 Plymouth Satellite.
40. The first three years I had my driver’s license, I was in five accidents. I haven’t been in once since.
41. If you don’t know what I mean by real girlfriend, then don’t ask.
42. I used to run around in the BC coastal rainforest behind our house from the time I was old enough to be let loose out the back door.
43. It was like a forest village, with a stream to catch frogs and make dams, great hiding places under old stumps and logs, a clearing to play little games of baseball, a hill for a lookout, and patches of huckleberry, salmonberry and blackberry to plunder as Spring slowly ripened to Summer.
44. When I arrived back from my first long trip away from home - a year-long jaunt with a backpack through most of western Europe, Egypt, Israel and Turkey when I was 20 - I discovered they’d clear-cut my forest playground to put in a fucking trailer park.
45. First day back from that trip, one of the first songs I heard was, “The Rodeo Song.” Its first line, “Well, it’s 40 below and I don’t give a fuck, got a heater in my truck and I’m off to the rodeo” didn’t make sense to me.
46. It made me wonder if I was coming back to the right place.
47. I miss Canada a lot, but I think it’s mostly nostalgia not for the place, but for the careless days of youth.
48. I can speak French and German fluently. I prefer to play Scrabble in French, though I haven’t for a while.
49. I sometimes dream in German.
50. The first five words I learned in Cantonese were five, four, three, two and one in that order.
51. I have an extremely good memory for places and dates.  That skiing photo was taken in February, 1992 at Owl’s Head, Quebec.
52. I can be very self-deprecating. That’s a good thing, because it puts me in some good company.
53. I love learning new things, even if some of them are unpleasant.
54. For example, I had to learn the hard way the meaning of narcissistic personality disorder.
55. I don’t have narcissistic personality disorder.
56. I dislike crowds intensely.
57. I have no superstitions save one: I never write anything in red ink.
58. I have climbed to the top of two of the three pyramids at Giza, Egypt. They say you’re not allowed to do that anymore.
59. In the winter of 1980 - 81 worked as a ski patroller at Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights, Israel.
60. I paid my way through university and for that backpacking trip by working for the Canadian National Railway at a job that doesn’t exist anymore thanks to the fax machine, a device now overtaken by email.
61. Thanks to that job, I know what it’s like to live in pretty well every town between Prince Rupert, BC and North Battleford, Saskatchewan.
62. I used to work for Overwaitea Foods packing bags and stocking shelves.  One day, the manager came up and asked me to start stocking the frozen food section.  As I was doing the job he came up to me again and said, ”the reason I’ve asked you to do this is we’re serious about training you for management, and this is the job we give everyone who’s starting out in that direction.”
63. Feeling horrified, I looked up at him with a bag of frozen peas in my hand and said, “Well, I’ve registered for university in the fall.”  He looked disappointed, and two hours later, I was packing bags again. 
64. I was robbed in Nice, France in 1980. Two years later, I was robbed in Cannes.  Watch your stuff when you’re on the Côte d’Azur.
65. When I started scribbling things down for this, my goal was to have 100 entries in the list.
66. I believe the secret to boring the crap out of everyone is to tell them them everything, so I’m going to stop here.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Views of a London long weekend

Since the weekend was already a week ago, better wrap this London thing up with a few photos.

Our friend Douglas works hard for the money, and on a Friday night, he likes to nip around the corner to the local for a beer or two and have a bite to eat. We joined him. After dinner, the ladies bid so long, so the two of us ordered a couple more, then a couple more. Sometime toward the end of our evening we got talking to the people at the next table, who were laughing a lot and taking photos of each other One asked if we’d like to have our photo taken. Sure! Just don’t put it up on some website or some BLOG. So they took our picture. Then I asked if I could do the same.

I told them that I have a blog, and that I was going to publish it. They were OK with that, so I gave them this address. Hey guys, I hope the rest of the night was fun.

(Guaranteed not photoshopped.)

If you’ve got time in London to do some touring, but not much, at least check out the Tower of London. Sure it will cost you five times more than what Ryanair claims their tickets cost to get in, but once there, you could spend the whole day poking through crannies and getting lost in corners. We took the tour, offered free once you’re in. Hang around the entrance, and if you spy this guy, make sure you take a tour from him. Name’s Kevin, and he’s an absolute scream.

Douglas lives at the London studios where Alfred Hitchcock shot many of his earlier movies. It’s been recently converted to residential and offices, but the great director’s legacy lives on. This sculpture dominates the central courtyard. Not sure what the watch symbolises, but then again, I may just be exposing some cinematic / cultural illiteracy or complete laziness to go looking on Google for the umpteenth time today. Sometimes, I just like to keep a little mystery in life.

We dropped by St Pancras station, the new terminus for the Eurostar train via Channel Tunnel from Paris. It’s stunning, and even on a Saturday, swarming with people. I’d love to have seen it when it was dirty and gritty.

Canadian readers will get a kick out of this one. We all knew the guy was a crook, and now he’s finally in prison. But why did they waste all that time with a trial? He already came with a warning label, and you can find it within a shout of Buckingham Palace at the Canadian war memorial there, just inside Canada gate.

The Millenium Bridge is one of my favourite spots in London. I know, not very original, but there’s something about the way what looks from afar like an almost impossibly flimsy thread of steel has become such an important link between two of the most iconic sites in the whole city: St Paul’s on the one side, the rejuvenated Tate Modern on the other.

The Tate Modern’s turbine hall is stunning even when it’s empty. Right now it mostly is, save for a crack running the entire length of the floor. It apparently took weeks to install, and it’s interesting to look at up close, but I don’t know. It left me rather cold.

I’m putting in a shot of the same space a year ago. I tell you, whizzing down those slides was one hell of a lot more fun.

Our lives are intertwined with Hong Kong. It’s where I met my wife and where my daugher was born. It’s also where I met Douglas, who began as a colleague and remains a friend. We gravitated to Chinatown, not because we were hungry for barbecue duck or pork, but to re-live in some small way the atmosphere of what to us is so familiar. It also reminds me of Vancouver, because the sights and smells are to be found there too.

Actually, I lie. I would kill for a place in Hamburg to get decent barbecue pork. We bought a box of it and ate it like candy on the way home.

Saved the best for last. I don’t post photos of my wife or daughter, but the swirls of colour on this one somehow work. Happy accident.

© 2008 lettershometoyou
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Memories of Hong Kong on a trip to London

One of the things I used to love about living in Hong Kong took place only about 100 or so metres above it.

Back in the day, the city’s airport used to be a short taxi ride from downtown. The largest planes in the sky would fly west over the waters of Victoria Harbour, turn a half-circle to head east, then descend low through the teeming warren of streets of the Kowloon Peninsula, nearly scraping the six-storey buildings as they screamed past.

On the final approach, after the landing gear had been lowered, the plane would make a quick slicing arc to the right as it passed a beacon, before finally landing on a strip of landfill in the bay. Though there had been fatal accidents over the years, it was a tribute to piloting skills and maybe a bit of sheer dumb luck that in all the time Kai Tak airport was in operation, not one plane landed on top of all those people living just across the road from the start of the runway.

I was sitting in a window seat my first flight into Hong Kong in January, 1994. I’d been told about the landing, that I was in for something spectactular, but I never expected to see what I did. Through the evening darkness, I looked out the window at the buildings slipping past and suddenly in a flash appeared a figure seated at a kitchen table, the glowing blue light from a television set reflected off a pair of glasses like two flickering orbs. It was there and gone in an instant. By the time I tried to see something similar on the next apartment, we were past them and on the way down. I used to love that ride, and on every flight in hoped the winds were right so that would be the approach we’d take.

Why did I think of this on the way into London?

Because once past the motorway wasteland and into the outskirts, sitting on the bus from Stansted airport on the way to Golders Green tube stop I became fascinated with the scenes laid before my window as we drove by. I saw the silhouette of a man wearing a turban, a bedroom plastered with magazine posters, a dining room with an old-fashioned chandelier, a man getting up off the sofa, a shadow creep across a ceiling, curtains ranging from bedsheets to lace.

Whether it was some form of drive-by voyeurism or mere curiosity, I found myself compelled to keep looking, craning my neck to get the shortest of glimpses, somehow trying to peer beyond the mundane to discover something special, discern from that glimpse what sort of life they must live.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Snowdrops and crocuses, heralds of spring

Sometimes you have to get out of town to see what lies ahead.

Snowdrops and crocuses,

Heralds of Spring

Snowdrops and crocuses,

The birds will sing

When all the world is bare,

Springing up here and there,

Blossoms of beauty rare,

Heralds of Spring.

It’ll still take about two or three weeks for them to appear in Hamburg, but in London they’re already out. These were spotted this past Saturday in the park alongside The Mall near Buckingham Palace, their quiet voices of light and colour reminding us that greenery will soon return to carpet the land. I was so thrilled to see them, I stood up, turned around and sang those lines out to my wife, my daughter, and my friend Douglas, whom we were visiting.

They always come back to me every Spring.

If the words sound a bit sing-songy and child-like, they should. In what I now recognise to be merely an early training exercise for that 1970s Village People hit YMCA, Mrs. Fairburn had her Grade One class (spot me if you can) stand by our desks and act out the words as we sang, drooping our arms and hunching forward for the snowdrops, standing on tip-toes and reaching up to the ceiling for the crocuses.

So unexpected to come across them midst the hurried, sometimes frantic bustle of London. But that’s what I like about visiting cities. Not so much the layers of history at the Tower of London, the grandeur of the Tower Bridge or the hulking immensity of the Tate Modern, but the little details you come across and only take notice of because you’re visiting.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Buy, sell or hold in a market stacked against you

Own shares? Wish you didn’t?

There’s something unseemly about talking about money. These days people are more likely to spread details of their sex lives around the globe than talk honestly about how they feel about personal investing, savings or money itself. But like sex, some seem to need it more than others, it’s hard for most to get by without it, and a little more from time to time never hurt.

But with all the news about a panic interest-rate cut following stock market dives around the world on fears of a U.S. recession, because Joe Average American can’t pay his mortgage, because unscrupulous bankers lent money they never had to people who didn’t read the fine print on mortgages whose payments were set to explode months later and doom them to default, mortgages which were then bundled together and sold to suckers investors half-way around the world who also never bothered to read the fine print and didn’t know what they were buying into anyway…

…when you factor in sky-high oil prices coupled with a possible collapse of the shrinking U.S. dollar, it helps to step back, cut through the crap and gain a little perspective on what’s only the latest in a long line of financial crises born of greed and swindle.

One of the things I used to do as a way to make a living was cram myself into a van along with a driver, soundman, cameraman and technician, spin through the green hillsides of the Hong Kong New Territories, past stinky tofu and joss stick hawkers and through a long, dirty tunnel into Asia’s Manhattan to interview stock brokers and company analysts on daily matters financial.

Then I’d go back through the tunnel to the bureau, cut the best two quotes, lay a bunch of wallpaper footage of stock market traders talking on the phone, people buying things, and of course lots of money - people counting out money, bits of change falling out of pockets… well, not quite that bad….

…but anyway I’d put together a little package, gussy it up with little tidbits of what was happening in the markets around Asia and the world, add a few items of business news, go get slapped on so much make-up I’d put a corpse to shame, plunk myself in front of the camera and then try to look and sound like I knew what I was talking about. Sometimes, I even succeeded. It was a great job, paid the rent and then some on a Hong Kong shoebox apartment, and I even got to learn a thing or two.

Like for instance:

• Nothing personal if that’s your line of work, but they’re all full of shit. Next time you see Gordon Gotbucks up there on CNBC Squawkbox blabbering on about where the Hang Seng is going to trend for the next fortnight or next year, throw a brick at it. Can ol’ Gordo predict the next September 11? The 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan? A civil war in China? These things have and will move markets up or down, but the thing is, nobody can predict the news.
• All they want is your money. Because at the end of the day, whether you’re buying, selling or watching it melt before your eyes, you will always pay a fee to whoever is doing the buying and selling. With online trading the fees have been cut to a fraction of what they used to be, but there are more playing the game. It always will be the oil that greases the skids and keeps them fat and happy on their yachts. Sure, you will always be given the line that stocks outperform over the long term, but I have yet to see an investment fund brochure that didn’t have a caveat at the bottom in fine print: past performance is no guarantee of future returns.
• The game is stacked against you. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I do know there are honest people in the business, but the fact of the matter is that insider trading is what makes the markets go ’round. I had colleagues ask me to give them hot stock tips. When I said I didn’t have any, they didn’t believe me. What? Aren’t you getting any inside dope from them? One of those colleagues, btw, is now anchoring on a well-known financial news channel.
• If you’re reading this on a computer, you’re already rich, you’re just trained to think you’re not. The finance industry has a vested interest in making sure you know that someone else has more money than you do, you should envy him for it, and adjust your portfolio accordingly. Step back. If your pile is small, count your blessings. If it’s large, look where you could spread it around to do some good. Just remember to keep receipts to deduct those donations at tax time.

Oh, and a precious few tips gleaned from some of the sharks:

1. Never catch a falling knife. Translation: never buy shares in a company whose share price is falling.

2. Sell everything when you start to hear cab drivers and fitness instructors giving investment advice.

3. Buy the hell out of the market when there’s blood on the streets.

Only three? Hell, two of them contradict each other. Seriously, I know very little about this. I was only a business reporter for four years. That’s where the cynicism comes from, I guess.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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Black and white and shades of decay

A while back I took the little red-haired girl into downtown Hamburg, stopping on the way to finally explore this huge, hulking mass of concrete about a mile west of the city centre. We must have ridden by it a hundred times already in the ten years we’ve lived here, but never went for a look inside.

It was built during the war and used to be a bunker. It’s one of many scattered throughout the city, most of which are now painted over and dressed up to blend so easily into the surrounding streets, you can go by them every day without noticing what it was originally built for. But this one is not only so much bigger than the others, it sits alone at the edge of a huge empty lot. You can’t miss it.

It was designed both for air raid flak defenses and as a bomb shelter for residents, completely self-contained with its own water, power generation and sewage removal systems.

Local legend has it that the British occupation forces wanted to level it after the war, but gave up after a few attempts to crack the two-metre-thick walls. Others say the concrete didn’t actually set to its hardest state until the 1970s - four decades after its construction - a claim I can neither verify nor refute, and neither can they, I bet.

Today it’s stuffed full of music stores stuffed with all kinds of musical instruments, but I liked just walking around inside, poking into corners and opening doors we probably shouldn’t have, wondering what it must have been like to scurry like rats into bunkers like these from a hail of bombs that over two nights in the middle of summer 1943 killed 50-thousand people in this city alone.

I wanted to climb up to the top of the staircase to see if we could go out onto the roof, but my daughter was having none of it. I could tell what was bugging her. It was kind of creepy walking through creaky old metal doorways, down dimly lit corridors and up spiral staircases of cold, bare concrete, and I wasn’t helping matters much with my off-track mutterings of the folly of man, the use of fear and demonisation of the enemy in preparation for war, how some people rightly or wrongly compare what’s happening in the United States of America today with what happened in Germany before things got really crazy, how some people today speak of Muslims - yes, the boys and girls sitting beside her in school - the way Hitler used to talk about the Jews, the concept of forced labour and its use in building the structure we were standing in, another enduring reminder of the extreme lengths human beings are willing to go in the pursuit of killing each other.

All she wanted to do that day was to hang out in the sunshine near the lake, and here I was dragging her through a bunker giving a rambling political science and history lesson. I can’t wait to take her down south near Munich to Dachau, and try to explain the unexplainable.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: For a fabulous collection of b&w photographs of old industrial sites and urban decay, visit telefunker, a photoblogger from Belgium.

Blogging into the Guinness Book of World Records

Lorelle over at Lorelle onWordPress has challenged bloggers to come up with a list of world records bloggers could break.

I don’t often feel compelled to respond to these things, but this one might be fun.

Besides, it’s been one hell of a long time since I’ve set any records.

Nothing close to Guinness Book material, but back in high school I managed to overcome a chronic state of laziness and sloth to set school records in the 200- and 400-metre sprints, advancing to the BC provincial finals in the 400. The school had been around for a few decades by then, so I figure I’d done pretty well. That is, until the next year, when both records were shattered by twin brothers, coached by the same teacher who trained us so well the previous year. Thank you, Mr. Hotston.

I came in last in the provincial finals race down in Vancouver that year, but in true Canadian fashion, I can still claim some victory: I had to beat out several others in heats to qualify for the final, ran a personal best of just over 50 seconds, and the CBC broadcast it live, so everyone in my home town saw me on TV. That was fun.

But Blogging yourself into the Guinness Book of World Records? Let’s see.

1. Deepest post. Submarines and oil platforms not permitted.
2. Highest post. No hand-helds, must be on ground.
3. Fastest post. Probably the space shuttle?
4. Longest post in shortest length of time.
5. Most posts in one 24-hour period. Minimum 500 words per post. Any language. No blogthings, no youtube, no plagiarism. One link minimum, one original photo per post.
6. Most posts in one 24-hour period without using your fingers, toes or voice software.
7. Greatest number of comments made in one 24-hour period.
8. Blogging marathon. One five-minute break per hour. Last blogger to fall asleep wins. Tea and coffee permitted. No energy drinks.
9. Greatest number of scrapers, sploggers and spammers kicked in the butt in one 24-hour period. That one I’d love to try.
10. Longest time spent staring at a screen logged into WordPress with a milk bottle balanced on your head while enduring the psychotic warblings of Mr. Bungle.

Better stop there. Quite honestly, I’m sure this post won’t set any records either.

© 2008 lettershometoyou