FW: one for the girls

As part of her working day my mum will sometimes forward me an email that she found funny. Sometimes I find them funny, sometimes not.

She sent me one today that humorously recounts the travails of using a public toilet - the queue! There's no lock! There's no hook so sling your bag round your neck! There's no toilet paper so use a gum wrapper from your pocket! Anyway, all clearly directed to the ladies. The best bit was this at the end, written in Comic Sans no less:

Send this to all women that need a good laugh AND, don't forget to have a mammogram!!!!!! It could save your life!

Indeed. Sure, laugh it up now, but remember your pap smear.

...

I am on holiday very, very soon and everything else is just a distraction.

My Carbon Footprint Is Going To Be Huge

U-S-A! U-S-A! Holidays plans are set and we're going to America. I can hardly contain my excitement. We fly from London to New York, four nights in New York, then fly to Los Angeles. Then the plan is to drive up the coast to San Francisco back down inland through Yosemite National Park and Death Valley to Las Vegas before flying back to London. Woop woop woop. Three weeks worth of strong dollar to pound exchange rate!

Of course my brain is going into over drive. In my head it starts with Seinfeld, Law and Order, Sex and the City then Arrested Development, Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210, then Full House, then finishes with CSI. And don't get me started on the movie references. It's going to be bad enough knowing that I'll be walking the same streets as Detective Briscoe!

I acknowledge the extent to which I may be considered tragic in my tv tastes and I realise I'm lucky I have such an indulgent boyfriend. Although, he was the one to suggest finding the Seinfeld diner! Then again, I was the one to respond that I'd already looked it up and confirmed it is in the same neighbourhood as our hotel.

At Least It Wasn't Slough

I have been in purgatory (otherwise known as an open plan office in Swindon) for the last two days, working my way through endless spreadsheets of data, inputting the red text into a database and counting down the hours til I can fall asleep on the train back to London. It sounds horrible, and it was, but at least it was out of my regular office. I'm so incredibly dissatisfied at work at the moment and I'm dealing with by cultivating the air of a surly adolescent. You want me to order some hospitality for your meeting? I'll do it but I reserve the right scowl, huff and generally act as though I am so much better than this. Tuesday I spent an entire meeting working on expressing my malaise through body language. I think I managed to take some notes but mostly I just focussed on the number of eye rolls, sighs, stifled yawns and how low I could slump in my chair. I am destroying goodwill all over the office.

Note to self: find new job.

To take the edge off I indulged in yet more online shopping. Brown boxes come just after cab companies' business cards and Indian takeaway menus in terms of what gets shoved through our front door. I don't think it's a problem...yet.

Richard and Judy - Pick this!

I've been away from the comfort of flickering screens for a few weeks as my mum and dad were visiting. Hard to spend quality time with the parents when one eye is glued to Calista Flockhart's fish lips mugging their way through Brothers and Sisters.

I managed to cope by reading almost five novels in seven days. I took a few books with me to Santorini but by the end I was scrabbling for the beach reads favoured by ma and pa. I started with a thriller set in Venice whose cover looked disturbingly one of Dan Brown's but turned out to be inoffensive enough. My main sticking point was Emily, the love interest of the young moody detective, a perky but highly intelligent, ex FBI agent turned architect cum undercover investigator all by the sprightly age of twenty-freakin'-six. Ok, maybe it's just a sensitive issue for someone approaching 26 in a job where I don't have cause to remember training at Quantico.

The best beach read was being introduced to Jack Reacher in Lee Child's The Hard Way (one of many, many titles and chosen by my dad). Don't know Jack Reacher? Here's how he was described on in the blurb "Hero. Loner. Soldier. Lover.". How could you not want to find out more? He's the epitome of men want to be him, women want to be with him (so says the blurb of another back cover). Ex military police, razor sharp mind, 6'5", irresistible. I read the whole thing picturing Jeremy Paxman's head balanced on Matthew McConaghey's body. Hott.

The diversion hasn't lasted too long though. Mum and dad are back in Perth and I'm back on the couch, flicking through NSFW sites with Location, Location, Location burbling in the background. That would be two flickering screens at once. It's good to be back.

Hot Spot, Crap Spot, My Spot

I've seen so many famous people recently I could set up a rival to Heat's spotted pages. OK, maybe not Heat's two page spread but I could definitely rival a free commuter paper's celebrity sightings.

Since Cillian Murphy there has been...

• Matt Lucas and David Walliams having lunch (Matt Lucas tucks a napkin into his shirt when eating soup)
• Lea and Richard from BB7 having an early bird Thai set menu, possibly contemplating just how obselete they really are (obselete but they still caught me noticing them. And then rolling my eyes at them)
• David Mitchell from Peep Show on Kilburn High Rd (unsurprisingly, he looked like Mark)
• Nigella Lawson in Superdrug fending off the pleas for help from out of work actor serving her (dude, she's a cook. Let it go)
• Noel Gallagher in Waitrose (I might have stolen that from my work mate)

I promise this - my life IS richer for being in a city where I can buy shampoo behind a lady who's been on the telly.

Let's Get Trivial!

I have a regular London quiz night. I had a regular quiz night back in Perth, a mammoth five round event every Tuesday that always ended with the musical intro round (song and artist) but since being in London it's been a bit hit and miss. The biggest miss was by far the "silent" Great British quiz which was always going to be a loser because a) I don't know anything about anything about trains or football and in a gross generalisation they rank pretty highly in the British trivia consciousness and b) if you can't give a little cheer when you get the answer right, I don't want to know.

This quiz night is a winner. Four rounds of ten questions, a good mix including movies (my undoubted strength) and picture clues.

Last night I covered myself in glory by knowing that the actor who appeared in Alien, Top Gun and Steel Magnolias was Tom Skerritt (weaselly Tom Skerritt). I also knew that Sheryl Crowe sung the theme song to Tomorrow Never Dies and won myself a free drink. It is nice to have somewhere to flaunt the results my mispent leisure time. By far the best right answer we got didn't involve me at all. The picture clue was a blurry photo of a ship with a hole blown in the side. We had to say where the explosion had happened and this how we got it...

"Do you watch Friends? What's that country that Chandler says he's going away to visit?"
"Yemen?""

The ship was blown up in Yemen. One point! Go team!

Becski Got Back...On the Blogging

I get myself a blog and then what happens? The internet connection goes! Goddamn Orange, foiling my ability to write stuff about stuff. As a result I have several half baked posts that were relevant (not to mention cutting and incredibly funny) but I can no longer be bothered with. But I did see Spiderman 3...

Now I didn’t love the first one, I caught the last half of the second one and was glad I hadn’t bothered with the beginning and I just don’t get Tobey Maguire. But No 3 has two of my tv boyfriends in it. James Franco and Topher Grace can get all the big budget film roles they like, they will always be Daniel Desario and Eric Forman for me. Sure, some may think that pigeon holing actors into the first tv roles that made them famous is ultimately restrictive but I have no truck with those sorts.

And while I'm thinking of Freaks and Geeks, where is the UK DVD release? Huh, huh?