Catching The Rain

Google launches Blog Search

I’ve just discovered that Google has launched its own blog search. Not quite sure how they determine what a blog is to get their data, but I gave up worrying when I rather vainly checked and found that catchingtherain was indexed. For a sample search i also had a look to see who has been blogging about Chinglish and you’ll see there are plenty out there.

Positively seconds of fun to be had.

Does the punishment fit the crime?

I was amused (first time it’s happened in ten days, hence no posts lately!) to read this story about an undeniably very odd chap who likes to check out people’s physique it would seem. As a result, he has been convicted of harrassment and as part of his punsihment he cannot visit “St Helens, Warrington or Widnes without the permission of either the chief constable of Merseyside or the chief constable of Cheshire“. So what exactly does he have to do to seek such permission? Give them a call? Email them?

Anyway, if you don’t like people feeling your biceps then at least there are a few parts of the country where you know you’ll now be safe.

Lookout knockhead, this is Chinglish

As a collector of silly signs the BBC piece Beijing stamps out poor English struck a chord and gave me much amusement. The Chinglish photo pool on Flickr is a real ‘must see’. And if you wondered where the tile of this post came from, see this one.

Global warming - now it’s getting serious

Sea levels are rising to alarming levels, species are threatened with extinction, but if you read the latest news stories it’s getting even worse:

• we will now have to mow our lawns all year round
• deadly moths are invading the UK (OK, maybe not)
• there’s a deadly witch doctor’s plant sweeping Britain (can we see a ‘deadly’ trend developing?)
• and even the computer companies are trying to make sure that their chips have a zero carbon footprint (I wonder if McDonalds will follow suit?)

But now the final, devastating piece of news….

• shirtless workmen have been seen putting up the Christmas lights

And all this because of global warming. It’s worse than I thought.

You’re taking the pee….

Actually these are fantastic. Can you imagine going for a pee in Kew Gardens and coming across one of these brilliant ‘Art Urinals’?

Email amnesty?

One of the departments where I work has announced a cunning plan to hold an email amnesty on Friday. They say that they’re not going to read or send any emails that day, because it apparently reduces the time they spend doing their work and “potentially alienates us from colleagues”.

Instead we have to either call them (some of us reckon many of them have been employing a permanent telephone amnesty for years now, so that won’t work) or ‘pop in’. We may even be made a cup of tea. That’ll help them get their work done. No, seriously, it will. It’s been working for ‘us Brits’ for centuries.

So, apart from making copious cups of tea (and no doubt the consequences of loss of productivity due to increased loo breaks), their solution is to abandon perhaps the most significant development in communication in modern times. And what exactly do they think will happen? Well, I can have a guess. On Thursday those of us who have read their announcement and taken it on board will bombard them with anything we think we might need from them before the end of the week. The other 99% of the organisation will carry on as normal and just keep sending. So on Monday they will just have twice as many emails to read and act upon. It’s a bit like what I call ‘holiday syndrome’, where you spend the week before you go away doing twice as much work finishing off everything you know you have to do before you go away, you then go away for a week, and when you come back you spend a whole week working double hard to catch up what you’ve missed. Net effect, you’ve done an extra week’s work!

They say that if this day is a success they may make it a monthly fixture. How exactly are they going to measure success, and success for who?