Great stapler scam

Phone scams as old as phones I suppose. Padlock a clear message. But why is a Twitter scam warning also illustrated with a stapler?

Ah yes, I remember the great stapler scam of the 1960s. No one with an office desk was safe. The scammers got in using Trojans and viruses. It was chaos, what with the technology we had then. All those giant wooden horses jamming the corridors. All that coughing and sneezing. Everyone knew someone who’d had their thumb stapled to a desk top.

Those were the days when we talked of the imminence of the paperless office and shorter working hours. But still, if it weren’t for optimism, we wouldn’t have progress. Ludicrous optimism at that – we’ve lived underwater for millennia, but hey, let’s try climbing out and breathing air ... if we pull bits of fur out of this animal and tangle them up, they’ll make a long thread and if we tie the long thread into a really complicated knot, we’ll end up with a pullover ... etc. Beautifully random and in the grand scheme of things it works so well.

My book is out there

Wow, my book is on the front page of the publisher's website. If someone hadn't mentioned it, I'd never have thought to look. It's been popping up in all sorts of places for a few weeks now. Initially, it kept appearing on financial websites or those 'Guard against fraud' type sites. All because it's called Like False Money. I can't believe I never saw that interpretation of the title, but I truly didn't. I was using the comparison with the way counterfeit money gets into circulation and is then tendered in good faith by honest people. Now I'm worried about people buying it expecting to learn how to protect their assets from fraudulent transactions. Well, not that worried if I'm honest (which I am). More of a worry is noone buying it because then I might not sell number 3.
Anyway, it's up there on Hale's front page

Lunch with Val

Congratulations to Val Wood, outselling Jeremy Clarkson and Peter Kay with her new novel, Rich Girl Poor Girl in the local Waterstone's.
More to the point, she gave us - me, Linda, Ann and Sylvia - an excellent lunch today, complete with bubbly, loads of writerly gossip, all the inside stories on ... I'm not allowed to say any more.
Quote of the day from a 90 year old writer 'Romance is not dead at 65'. So we're all looking forward to getting there.
Well done, Val.

Sorry, my Facebook friends – not a hope

Here's what I said in 2012: I originally wrote this blog about Facebook in 2010, but as it remains relevant in 2012, I'm updating it. OK, and now I'm updating it again.

I used to be a FB incompetent, not really understanding how it all fitted together. I cyber-shook hands with new friends, replied to messages and joined in the good causes that I thought worthwhile. I use it much more now. I've attended some incredible online events just recently.

But I was never able to take on Facebook as another dimension to life. I didn’t have the time and I still don't have the time. I have a blog, a website and twitter (and a Facebook page) - none of which I update as often as I should. I have a busy non-virtual life, too.

What I said back in 2010 was that I was not signing up to the virtual farm game. Not ever. I’d seen people using up real worry over their virtual turnips and had always had enough to do here with the real farm. I recently noted a stack of invitations to join something similar, or maybe the same game in its 2012 guise. I'm afraid the message remains the same.

And now here we are in 2013, with a great tsunami of games invitations pouring in - no virtual turnips in sight, just multicoloured doo-dahs and tempting glittery adverts. I didn't have time in 2010. I didn't have time in 2012. And I still don't have time in 2013. If I ever find the time, rest assured I will use it to do the things on that long list of things to do if I ever find the time. Guess what, to date there is not a glimmer of a Facebook game even on the furthest reaches of that list.

So, sorry my Facebook friends, there was no hope of tempting me into anything like that back in 2010 & 2012. And there's even less hope now.

La Scala organisers go mad

Organisers of La Scala short story competition go wild. Sponsorship from tea bags to baseball caps; insurance to polo lessons. Hard cash too.

At £200 for first prize, it’s going to attract quite an entry. I said I’d blog about it, but I doubt I’ll be noticed under the avalanche of publicity and events they are putting on.

I nearly blogged on serious topics today, having caught the news earlier, but when it gets to the point, I just don’t want to. I deal with the serious stuff in the day jobs (well, some of the day jobs) and blogging time is for trivia and the lighter side of life.

There’s an easy conclusion to draw there – that those who blog the serious stuff spend their work hours on trivia, but that’s clearly not the case. Easy conclusions are all too easy to draw. People do it all the time. Far easier than objective thinking.

My experience leads me to hypothesise that those who work in suits go to special events in jeans and vice versa, but there’s nothing there from which to extrapolate into blogging serious stuff or not.

La Scala and its competition – unashamed trivia – is linked from my home page. www.pennygrubb.com

Sweet as pie

I read a blog at the weekend about the clichés that make people stop reading a book and throw it at the wall. The one quoted was fat people who move like lightning. I hadn’t stopped to think that one through before, but I suppose I will next time I come across it.

I don’t tend to throw books over clichés. If I’m going to throw books it’s more likely to be over injustice, crimes against humanity, misplaced apostrophes...

There are no particular clichés that really get my goat.

Why goat? What is the origin of that one? I can find two: the less likely that it comes from the use of goats as companions to nervy racehorses and thus getting someone’s goat would spook their horse and so annoy them. The other is that ‘get’ is used in the sense of ‘bring out’; thus brings out the goat in me, presupposing that I act like a goat when annoyed. Not sure about that. It isn’t usually annoyance that makes me want to eat everything in sight.

Here’s one – sweet as pie. It doesn’t enrage me, but it stops me. What sort of pie – steak and ale, chicken and mushroom, meat and potato? Is sweet the right word? If the intention is to signify sweetness, is pie the right word? Even apple pie doesn’t do it for those of us who prefer fruit pie to be tart and fighting back. Why not something unambiguously sweet – honey, sugar, fruit pastels?

Bald as a badger is another one. Why not bald as a train or a pencil-sharpener or a rock? Why something with hair, for heaven’s sake? Oh, OK, apparently it’s bald as a coot, though I’m sure it’s badger in this part of the world. A coot isn’t much better. No hair, but plenty of feathers. Black and white. There’s the key. Not hairless bald, but pie-bald.

If inhumanity gets my goat and humanity gets my vote... Does that make goat the opposite of vote? There’s an election coming so I’m going to use it that way. That’ll be just sweet as pie-bald.

The wedding fair

It’s a damp grey day to start a blog, but it’s bright enough outside and the hens have started laying, so they think winter’s over.

D and G went to a wedding fair today. Just to get ideas they said. We’re hosting the whole thing here. The fair turned out to be a huge crowd in a tiny room, no clue what was going on. They asked the people at the back but they had no idea either.

The receptionist suggested they fight through the crowd to ‘ask the women with buckets’. Instead, D stood on tiptoe and peered over the massed heads. Three trestle tables, motley collection of anonymous stuff, something going on, but impossible to tell what. The three women with buckets turned out to be from the charity that had organised the event (loosest sense of the word organise) and were insisting on a quid per person from anyone who ventured near.

D and G took the view that you can get in the finest of wedding fairs for free, and they had no interest in seeing what you got for a quid. So they left, had lunch in subway and bought a suit at H&M.

D tried on the suit to show us. Then we persuaded George to put his on too. They look like a pair of gangsters. No one will dare make trouble at this wedding.