Monthly archives: March 2007


Help Citizens Advice

The Citizens Advice Bureau is a registered charity and relies on volunteers and donations to keep running. I checked, and the local CAB is only open on Fridays for advice, probably because of a lack of bodies or cash. I’ve thought about volunteering before, I have some experience with their system, albeit, many years out of date. If I can ever get my life organised enough I’d like to become an adviser or support staff. Failing that, I think I’m going to donate something when I finally get enough money to do so.


Photobox

For those of you in the UK wanting prints of my photos without the shipping costs and hassles of getting them from the States, there is now a Spinneyhead photobox gallery. It doesn’t print in as many formats as Deviantart, but it is closer to home.

I will endeavour to have the same photos on each of the sites providing prints, art such as the Frightened to Death by Fairies stuff will only be available on Deviantart. At present Photobox has a couple of images not yet uploaded to Deviantart.

I will try to take, and find on my backup disks, more images to make available as prints.


Twikker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twikker
Twikker is the Rag Mag of Sheffield University, and may be the longest running Rag publication.  What struck me about the wikipedia entry was the thrill of recognition.  I’ve got, or at least had, a copy of the D’Israeli covered 1991 mag.  I have more important things to do tonight than go through my Big Box of Memories(tm) trying to find it again.


Sleep soundly now

spy something begining with S…….

On candystripe legs the spiderman comes
Softly through the shadow of the evening sun
Stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead
Looking for the victim shivering in bed
Searching out fear in the gathering gloom and
Suddenly!
A movement in the corner of the room!
And there is nothing I can do
And I realise with fright
That the spiderman is having me for dinner tonight!

Quietly he laughs and shaking his head
Creeps closer now
Closer to the foot of the bed
And softer than shadow and quicker than flies
His arms are around me and his tongue in my eyes
"Be still be calm be quiet now my precious boy
Don’t struggle like that or I will only love you more"
But it’s much too late to get away or turn on the light
The spiderman is having you for dinner tonight

And I feel like I’m being eaten
By a thousand million shivering furry holes
And I know that in the morning I will wake up
In the shivering cold

The spiderman is always hungry…

Lullaby – The Cure


Blood from a stone, money from a bank?

Using the templates at this Telegraph page I’m asking my bank to refund me the excessive charges levied on my account in the last six years. With a little help, I really screwed up my finances in 2001. Not my banks fault, I know, but their charges- particularly the ones for unpaid Direct Debits which were often larger than the sum of the Direct Debit itself- helped keep me in debt. It’s almost as if they wanted me to stay hovering around my overdraft limit so they could carry on charging me, safe in the knowledge that they’d claw this money out of me when I got a job and took my account back into the black.

Anyway, I’m claiming back well over a grand. We’ll see how it goes.


Lightbulb denial in the Daily Mail

Cheaper bulbs have some of the problems attributed in this article to all Compact Fluorescent Lights, but to pretend they all do is as lazy and shortsighted as they’re accusing the politicians of being. Better quality CFL bulbs (the ones from Philips are highly recommended) light up as fast as incandescents, have a pleasant colour and, even with normal switching on and off, last far longer then old style bulbs. And they pay for themselves within a year in normal useage.

Most of the people I know have houses lit with low energy bulbs and not a one of them has ever commented on problems fitting the lights. Now that everyone else is into CFLs I’m thinking of moving to LEDs, which are even more efficient.

As for China, so what if they’re not making changes right now? They will in the future. If your neighbour told you they hadn’t fitted smoke alarms, would you endanger your family by removing the ones in your house?

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Denial begins with a lightbulb

Cheaper bulbs have some of the problems attributed in this article to all Compact Fluorescent Lights, but to pretend they all do is as lazy and shortsighted as they’re accusing the politicians of being. Better quality CFL bulbs (the ones from Philips are highly recommended) light up as fast as incandescents, have a pleasant colour and, even with normal switching on and off, last far longer then old style bulbs. And they pay for themselves within a year in normal useage.

Most of the people I know have houses lit with low energy bulbs and not a one of them has ever commented on problems fitting the lights. Now that everyone else is into CFLs I’m thinking of moving to LEDs, which are even more efficient.

As for China, so what if they’re not making changes right now? They will in the future. If your neighbour told you they hadn’t fitted smoke alarms, would you endanger your family by removing the ones in your house?