A Topical Ed Miliband Cartoon

New optimism this morning. Yesterday I installed a new plugin to this blog and it claims to track my RSS feed. I thought literally nobody picked up my feeds but now I see it's even more popular that reading the site through a browser. Oh, I know many of the hits are bots working for news aggregators. I also know that simply because my stuff appears in people's feed readers doesn't mean they actually read my words. But it feels oddly better being unread by thousands of people that being visited by just a few hundred.

***

This morning I faced a mild dilemma. What do you do when SPAM isn't SPAM? The Chinese are clearly a clever people and are adapting their tactics. I've been hit by their SPAM for months and I've been able to delete it all without hesitation. This morning, however, I found this comment waiting for me:

Love your full scenery shot~!
Welcome visit me back http://ecinfant.blogspot.hk/

The problem is that it's not entirely SPAM. Whoever left it, looked at my post long enough to spot that I'd included a panorama shot of Sherdley Park in St Helens and, clearly, the people of Hong Kong trawl the web looking for panorama shot of Sherdley Park in St Helens... I'm not sure what I can do if the spammers start to read my blog. It's my nightmare scenario.

***

As you can see, I don't have much time to write so I've quickly narrated last night's cartoon. It's eight minutes of my usual nasal waffle (I always sound like I have a cold, which is probably to be expected because I do always seem to have a cold). Today's brief rant is about UK politics and Nigel Farage and my difficulties with drawing Ed Miliband's face.

1400 Pounds

This just dropped into my inbox and gave me a momentary fright and even shorter delight.



Like millions of people, part of the crap I’ve had to endure this week was submitting my self-assessment tax form. It’s always a sobering thing to do: weighing up how little you've earned from all your labours. So when something like this appears, it's quite natural for your sphincter to give an involuntary contraction and your heart to leap up one nostril.

Sadly, it didn't take me long to spot that it might not be a totally legit email. I have to say that whilst I admire the effort these spammers go to make their work look like the real deal, complete with all the official graphics, I’m pretty sure that Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs know the difference between pounds weight and pounds money, and they don’t generally go issuing tax refunds in ‘lbs’.

My refund is apparently 1400lbs but of what, I’m not entirely sure, though I have my suspicions.

The Monday Carton

‘Dear friend! Lovely day! Glad to hear that you're in the market for cartons…’

This was the first email in my inbox this morning and it made from grim reading. Needless to say, I’m not in the market for cartons. I’ve never been in the market for cartons. For some inexplicable reason, cartons don’t excite me on a Monday morning.  Oh, you could say that I’m just a carton denier or perhaps I’ve never been with the right carton. You could even argue that I must have some deep latent love for cartons that I’d want to blog about it. Perhaps this email exposes the great carton lie I tell myself every single day.

‘Damn it, man!’ you should cry, while grabbing my lapels and slapping me around my face. Yes, you would need at least three hands to do that but you’re gifted and you like to make your important points impressively. ‘There’s nothing wrong with a man expressing his love for cartons. Some of the greatest men in history have been secretly in the market for cartons. What about Gladstone, Ghandi, Ulysses S. Grant? Nobody looks on them differently because they enjoyed the company of slatternly cartons. There’s nothing wrong with expressing your love for a good carton once in while.’

And indeed there is not. And perhaps if the circumstances were right, I would be in the mood for cartons. Perhaps dressed seductively, their pouting cardboard lips irresistible, they would be irresistible and I would succumb, possibly up to three times a night and sometimes even rinsing them out. And frankly, given my recent luck, I might have a better chance if I was I’d gone in for some carton competitions, rather than cartoons.

But alas, for the carton producers of China's Hebei province, this will have to remain my secret. Perhaps one day the world will be ready for a man to express openly his love for a carton but until that happy day, these emails will have to be stored in a safe place, such as the trash folder.

Random Thoughts - The Uncensored Parts

Okay, I ballsed this up. I originally wrote the piece called 'Random Thoughts' and included these two addition thoughts which I decided to delete before I posed the article. However, stupidly, I forgot that I'd already set the article to post itself. Hence, there are two posts called 'Random thoughts'. These two additional thoughts were just me being self-pitiful, and I apologise that they were published. It's true that I'm getting a little jaded by the web but this has been true for a very long time. I probably don't mean half of what I say here but I'll keep them to show that I can be a monumental prat.

• I’ve decided to stop leaving comments on other people’s blogs. Not out of any personal malice on my part but it’s bad enough leaving comments on a blog and it going completely ignored by the blog owner who can’t even be bothered to say, ‘Thanks for the comment.’ But, on four or five occasions now, I’ve written comments that the blogger just hasn’t bothered to publish. And they weren’t short comments. They were lengthy but positive comments that had taken time and effort to write. I’m not sure why this happens. I guess you can’t peer into another person’s heart and figure out their motives. Whatever their reason, they’ve accomplished one goal. They have one less reader and there’s now more cynicism in the world.

• On the subject of cynicism and comments, I’m also considering closing the comments on this blog. It’s becoming evident that few people ever wants to leave any feedback and the only comments that do arrive tend to be SPAM. Again, I find that my general faith in the world increases. Other than my Frank Lampard post which is very popular in Nigeria, most of my traffic comes from people looking for 'Warrington Prostitutes' or '3D Porn'. And here I was thinking there might be some intelligent beings on the other end of this blog; scientific types, studying DNA or the universe, who might enjoy what I do. I’m beginning to think my audience consists of penis stranglers clutching their Nintendo 3DS in the vague hope they’ll find something fleshy and peaked popping out of this blog to satisfy their sick bastard urges. Thoughts like that are the stuff of dark dreams that usually end up with me  closing the blog entirely and focussing my efforts elsewhere… I don't feel that bad yet but some days this whole enterprise feels very wasteful.