This is an enchanting occupation, with several variations:

1) Take the loo roll in your teeth, carry it away, and hide it.  Particularly entertaining if the person fails to notice it’s absence.

2) Take the loo roll and drop it down the stairs, then chase it round the house unwinding toilet tissue for the person to roll up again.

3) Take the loo roll and ‘kill’ it, then disembowel it with your hind paws, so that tissue confetti decorates whole house and the person must vacuum. Pretend abject terror of vacuum-cleaner, and hide under the couch.  Cry piteously, and pretend you can’t get out again.

4) Take the loo roll in teeth, and run past the person, forcing them to chase you round the house in order to prevent variations 1 to 3.

The loo roll having been removed (again) from her clutches, Spook is now entertaining herself by hiding her toys in my shoes.

A kitten’s work is never done.

LOL is the most overused TLA (Three Letter Acronym) in the history of the web. Every chat-room, message board and comments page is full of thirteen-year-olds, and people who spell like thirteen-year-olds, posting “OMG!!1! WTF??? LOL LOL LOL. PWND!!! most pwnd in teh wrold of FAIL!!!!!!” or worse: LOLOLOLOLOL. Laughing-out-loud-out-loud-out-loud-out-loud-out-loud?

LOL is a lie. If something actually made you laugh, I know you typed ROFL or LMAO   These acronyms still have value, signifying something genuinely, and more than ordinarily, funny.

LOL, to me, says “Mildly amusing, made me smile slightly, but actually fairly generic, and I’ll forget it as soon as I hit the stumble button.”  Honestly, when was the last time you laughed – actually laughed, not LOL’d – at something on-line?

I hope you’re not LOL-ing the LOL-cats. *Shudder* The original may – may – have been funny, and creative. They have spread to become the cockroaches of the web, with their uninspired photographs, un-funny messages and gratingly poor spelling. Their proliferation (and only that) renders them more obnoxious than “I can haz bucket?”.

Frequent misuse of LOL is often found to be associated with the use of  pwnd, fail, OMG, excessive smileys, multiple exclamation and interrogation marks, and obnoxiously bad spelling.

In comparison, LOI is understated, and underused. Rather than being an inconsistently capitalised LOL, LOI is the acronym for ‘Laughing On the Inside’.  It’s more honest than LOL. It says, “I found that funny, but it didn’t crack me up laughing.” or “That really made me smile.” It is appropriately used where you wish to express your amusement and appreciation, and still be genuine.

Type what you mean.

A week or so ago I foolishly left my MP3 player on the bookshelf, and, not considering that I am now the proud parent of a hyperactive kitten, left the earbuds dangling down over the edge.  The next morning when I got out of bed I immediately stepped on a small hard object that gave way with a crunch.  One of the ear buds.  The other was never found (I think she ate it).

This was one of those times when you dearly wish that cats understood English.  There I am, in my underwear inspecting my savaged MP3 player. Sharp kitty teeth have snipped through the wires effortlessly.  Spook comes bounding up to me in joy and hugs my leg – her signal that I need to pick her up and cuddle her.  I would have yelled at her if there was any chance of her understanding why.

Never mind. I rooted through my junk box and salvaged a pair of old earbuds off a CD walkman I’d forgotten I still had. This time I stowed the MP3 player securely in my bag, with the earbuds wound round it.

An hour later, I returned to find that Spook the Avenger had struck again. My bag had been knocked off the table, and it’s contents scattered across the living-room floor.  Picture Spook lying on her back in the centre of a swathe of  destruction, displaying her fuzzy spotted tummy and waving her paws in a display of kitty-cuteness.  One of the earbuds is half-severed. The other is in my shoe.

I bought a new pair of earbuds, and much to Spook’s disgruntlement, my bag now lives on a coat-hook far above her reach.

I thought that this was the end of her fascination with electronics, but no. Yesterday I awoke to find that during the night,  Spook had chewed through the powercable to my wireless router.  Following online advice, I have now rubbed soap on every exposed cable in the house.

Spook: 3, Consumer Electronics: 0.

]]> http://lostinthecrowd.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/spook-the-avenger-destroyer-of-consumer-electronics/feed/ 0 lostinthecrowd http://lostinthecrowd.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/msbratax/ http://lostinthecrowd.wordpress.com/2008/07/11/msbratax/#comments Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:10:12 +0000 lostinthecrowd http://lostinthecrowd.wordpress.com/?p=5 ]]> The issue:

M&S charges £2 more for a bra sized DD or over than a smaller bra. The Busts 4 Justice protest group claim that this is an ‘unfair tax’.

M&S respond that the higher price is due to the extra material needed for larger bras.

Protestors say that this isn’t a consistent policy – for other clothing you pay the same price, whether it’s size 8 or size 20.

Full article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7501911.stm

My question:

Does anyone believe that the additional two square inches of material and padding in a DD bra costs M&S £2?

The bras are probably manufactured in some third-world country for 50p each. The real reason M&S is charging more is that they can. There are two factors that feed into this:

1) Larger sizes of bra are less readily available, so shoppers have less choice.

2) Quality is more important for larger bras. Ladies, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. A bigger boob requires better support, and a better fitting bra to prevent back-ache.

For the smaller sizes, M&S is competing against the supermarkets, and so must price more competitively.

Basically, my life currently sucks and I want to rant about the things that annoy me, share the funny things that inspire me, and generally inflict my opinions on an uncaring world.