[diana] public or private property

If there was ever a public figure who even admitted she was Queen of People's Hearts, it was Diana Spencer of the House of Stewart. So the outcry over the non-inclusion of the public at the memorial service seems justified:

Penny Junor said: "If it is a personal family occasion why have Elton John and Cliff Richard been invited? A family occasion could have been held at Althorp or in the chapel at Windsor Castle rather than in the middle of London. People will turn up because they want to see Cliff Richard, Elton John and the princes."

Whilst understanding the wishes of the princes, who have always been quite private in their leanings, do they have the right to deny the people access? How far do family wishes trump national interest?

[pet focus] progress report

Delighted to be able to say that no less than 6 more pets have been submitted for the:

2nd Pet Focus

... coming up this evening around 19:30, London time but let's not rest on our laurels. We need more pets! So please send the photos to:

jameshigham@mail.com

... until 15:00 today, London time.

[not gay] only a little bit, occasionally

Republican US Senator Larry Craig of Idaho said today he was not gay and had made a mistake in pleading guilty to disorderly conduct after his arrest at a Minnesota airport men's toilet.

"I am not gay, I never have been gay," he told reporters in Boise, Idaho, and apologised to the people of Idaho for what he said was a "cloud" over Idaho because of the incident. "I did nothing wrong," he said.

Some wag also put words in his mouth, "All I did was play with another man in a public toilet cubicle and they call me gay. And it's entirely untrue that Matt McCoy and I ever met in a Des Moines carpark."

Incidentally, Senator McCoy has an interesting CV: Active in the Boy Scouts of America his entire life, his love for children can be seen from the photo and he is a parishioner of St. Johns Lutheran Church.

Just the sort of man to entrust your child to.

[stupidity] there's a little bit in each of us

The thing with stupidity is that there is always someone looking down on you, thinking you are just so limited, at the same time that you're having a good laugh at some other klutz.

It's a dangerous occupation.

However, Bill Bryson [Notes from a Big Country, Black Swan, 1998] is right when he says there's an awful lot of it about. Maybe it's the dumbing down of education, maybe it's the high-death diet the west eats, maybe it's the water. I think it has something to do with clubbing.

See what you think as I hand over here to Bryson:

Here, for instance, is the actress Brooke Shields, without any help from grown-ups, explaining to an interviewer why you shouldn't smoke: 'Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life.'

Well said, Brooke.

Bryson was a little before Denise's time but I'm sure she would have earned an honourable mention.

And here is the singer Mariah Carey getting to the heart of Third World troubles: 'Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.'

Whatever is the stage beyond the mind boggling is the stage I reach each time I read that quotation.

It takes the form over here of swaggering about, nodding sagely and mocking gutturally whilst gesticulating with flailing arms and highlights the most pressing need for the truly stupid - the need to find someone even more stupid than themselves.

And yet, one can't help but feel that they're happy in their wild animal luxury and one last thing - we are, none of us, getting any younger and intellect … well … well it does sort of drop off, you know.

I think that's what I was trying to say.

[calling all pets] anyone out there?

The Beagle Boys humbly ask:

Is no one out there going to feature us tomorrow evening in the Petfocus? 'Cause, you see, James only has two entries and surely someone has a pet he or she loves whom you'd like to see featured in the Super Petfocus on Wednesday? No?

Peter Panda adds:

Hey guys, I don't mind lying around all day like this but I'm waiting for you ... waiting for your photos. Send pics of your dearest pet in all his glory [or hers] to jameshigham@mail.com.

Petfocus Wednesday

[scheduling breaks] life or death situation

Chronic lateness has been put down to everything from lack of sleep to ego.

I've previously posted on the absolute necessity for sleep, why schedules fail and scheduling "buffer" breaks. Three answers came from clients today:

1. the fear of wasting even a few minutes to the point of leaving at the last minute;

2. perfectionism and the inability to delegate;

3. trying to cram as much in as possible - this can be related to greed but not always.

Case 1

Take "A", a businesswoman and mother who's running a balancing act 24/7. She knows that if she leaves the office at 11:30, she can get to me unstressed but if she leaves at 11:33, it causes all sorts of problems.

Couple this with the need to justify the moments spent in the car by doing two or three other jobs "on the way", thereby satisfying someone else [who?] that time is not being wasted. Trouble is, pulling the car over and thinking: "I'll just pop in and …" hardly ever takes account of reality.

It is never "just a minute", as the old lady fumbling with the change in front of you drags that out nicely to six or seven minutes and the vague youth behind her adds another two minutes.

Having given yourself this task and feeling a failure if all three jobs aren't done, you try "on-the-road" task N2 but this involves going onto another street and then there is a traffic jam.

So, eight minutes late for your appointment, having failed in one of the jobs and stressed out from hurrying on the road and answering five calls on the mobile during this time, you plonk yourself down in the armchair and Higham says: "Relax!"

If you had a system of delegation, you'd have farmed out those jobs last evening [nothing's going to change before next morning] and everyone will know what he has to do. You very politely and gently extricate yourself at 11:25, promising to deal with all matters the instant you return to the office and somehow, by not caring about time, the road seems to open up before you.

This is no accident - everyone else is rushing so if you don't, you create spaces in the traffic you wouldn't ordinarily see and the result is either that when the unforeseen traffic jam comes up, you still get there with a minute to spare but if it doesn't eventuate, you get close to McDonalds seven minutes early and can drive through and get a salad and tea.

Case 2

I asked "C" on Saturday why she couldn't switch off her mobile phone even for fifteen minutes.

"I'd lose business."

"What if everyone who deals with you knew you had an important meeting at 16:30 and couldn't be contacted for 20 minutes? Surely they'd phone after the 20 minutes."

"Not all."

"Then do you want such people as partners? Aren't they going to bring you grief in the long term?"

She's now repetitively stroking her hair. "You don't understand, James. Often it's something I want myself from them and I have to go to meet that person - there's no time."

"Why can't you do a quick calculation and if you know it will take you 20 minutes, ask the potential partner if 45 minutes is OK? Then use 12 of those minutes sitting in a café, with a tea or coffee, going over your thoughts and the last 8 watching the wall TV or staring into space."

"I can't do that."

"Why not? Are you frightened to contradict the partner so early in negotiations? Do you think he really thinks you're a lazy person? He doesn't know what you have on your schedule - so schedule in a buffer just for yourself. A little victory for the day. Or is it something psychological in yourself that every minute must be accounted for?"

Smile.

"Tell me, C, if you suddenly found yourself with a spare 7 minutes, could you flop down on the divan and wickedly do absolutely nothing, would you fill it doing two or three of that backlog of jobs that you and no one else knows how to do or would you get to your next appointment early?"

Smile. "Could you lie on the divan?"

"Yes and plan out the rest of the day."

"But that's not lazy."

"Relaxing enough to give yourself thinking time is never lazy. It's staying sane."

Lastly

Christine O'Kelly has an item on e-mail obsession and how it eats time. While I agree it is good to have a system, all clients today disagreed that you should only check once a week.

My method, for what it's worth, is to keep two windows going - my site and Google Reader and the other my e-mail on the whole time I'm online. A pop-up lower right tells me if anything has arrived. When offline, I lose all interest in people contacting me and concentrate on the client.

I stay in dial-up because it prevents people from interrupting me plus it's cheap. Don't know if that's the best way but it works for me. for now.

[blog tactics] most annoying ones

Chicken Yoghurt's very own cartoon which I stole from him because it quite frankly said what I was thinking.

Just had a comment dropped on my last post: "Hi, I'd like to do an interview with you."

Many of you have possibly had this as well.

My reaction is that it is spam and have blocked it. Even if it is legit, we don't know this person, he's asking personal details and for what? There are a number of departments of state doing this under the guise of blog surveys.

For me, if:

1. The comment is obviously unrelated to the post;

2. It contains a request for you to go to another site whose url is provided;

3. He doesn't take your e-mail and personally e-mail you,

then this is spam.

Pop-ups. There are pop-ups and pop-ups. Rotten Tomatoes works with them as its way of operating and they're OK to me because I solicited that info and it was given in pop-up form.

Sometime back I ran a survey through Surveymonkey and a pop-up appeared top left of screen. Though less obtrusive there, it still annoyed more than a few people who chose to respond to the survey through the traditional channel.

Worse are the pop-ups which obscure the text and require you to click a box to remove them. Never do that, as you are legitimizing them by that click. If that happens to me, I give them thirty seconds to go whilst I'm in the kitchen and then I click out of the site if the pop-up is still there when I return.

Memes annoy me. They were once fun but have become a pest.

Blog Awards have mushroomed out of all proportion and many are emanating from professional and semi-professional sites generating them to spread across the web, not for any legitimate feeling between bloggers.

Though I really appreciate the thought when the ladies send these to me, it would be better if they had designed them - I would proudly carry such an award from such a person. I notice one blogger still carrying my green award I designed. Thanks for that.

Let's face it, a thousand things annoy me so I'm not the one to ask.

What things annoy you on the web?

PET UPDATE: Still only two entries to tomorrow's Blogfocus.

[important notice] calling all pets

No, this is not Hilary Clinton and I have to tell you it's not a very funny joke. Hilary shows no reptilian characteristics whatsoever and it would be simply actionable to call her one of the lizard people.

Wednesday is Blogfocus Pets Evening Part 2.

What would be nice from everyone not featured in Part 1 is for you to send a piccy of your darling pet [it need not be a dog, cat or lizard] plus your site url or name, before midday Wednesday to:

jameshighamatmaildotcom

Please make the size about 300px or more, in JPEG form. I'll run the Blogfocus on contributions received and if there are fewer than eight, then I'll re-run other shots of pets from Part 1.

UPDATE: Two entries so far. Anyone else want?

[next pm] here he should be

Thunderdragon, who currently has some woes of his own, has posted, under Gun Control:

There is no doubt that David Davis has scored a significant goal against Home Secretary Jacqui Smith with this open letter.

Have I not consistently said and continue to do so and I think Iain Dale is right on the money with this one, that the very best talent the Tories have is sitting right beside the current shadow PM?

But no one listens to me.

The man can run rings round the opposition and most certainly the powers that be that I blog against [plus Labour] would not want Davis anywhere near the controls. Better to have a malleable puppet like Blair and Cameron.

As Leo Amery said in 1914 but it is still pertinent today:

For twenty years, he [H.H. Asquith] has held a season ticket on the line of least resistance and has gone wherever the train of events has carried him, lucidly justifying his position at whatever point he has happened to find himself.

David Davis for PM and Boris Johnson for London. That's all.

[erudite bloggers] three examples

When a blogger titles his posts:

Here they come, a-clucking and a-flapping ...

or

My new favourite word Anthropogenic, in which he writes:

I'm convinced! I'm convinced! Back to the Middle Ages, everyone! Back to when everyone was nice and nobody hit anyone and nobody died, ever, and everyone had enough to eat and was warm and cosy all the time and we used to make our own entertainment and get change from sixpence... I think I am having one of my funny turns, Nurse... and all because because we weren't using oil. Yay!

or Campaign for national Stop Beating Your Wife Day ...

and Slave traders of the world unite ...

then he has to be something special. When a blogger writes:

In times of insanity, it's good to know that there are rational minds to light the beacon of reason for rudderless souls such as I...

and includes titles like All-Change At The Department Of Vengeance, writing:

Dirty Barry Thorpe MP vowed today to exterminate red tape in the revenge process and crack down upon activist nay-sayers. Addressing a baying, drunken mob, the new Minister for Vengeance promised a more streamlined system which would cut the interval between accusation and execution to a maximum of five minutes...

...or Befuddled Egyptologists Struggle With Unfamiliar Hieroglyphics

… then he also has to be something special. When a fearless blogger courts disaster with:

Liverpool is to be European Capital of Culture in 2008. One must charitably suppose that it is culture in the anthropological sense...

to which Dearieme asks:

European Hubcapital of Culture?...

then follows up with a Francis Galton quote:

Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, ‘good, medium, bad’, I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper, torn rudely into a cross with a long leg […] I used this plan for my beauty data, classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent...

he is, in fact, a blogger of the first order. All three of these worthy gentlemen I shall not attempt to emulate, only admire from a distance.

When I compare this to the sentence I keep harping on about ad nauseam, as a prime example of all that is poor in blogging today:

No it's not a monster - it's a f-ck off big grey cloud. But hey ho. The wind and rain make the sea look more picturesque and wild 'n all that cr-p...

... and chuckle at the wry observation of one correspondent last evening, who noted, concerning a currently popular blogging philosopher:

How did [he] recently describe a friend? He would not say in two sentences what he could put into 50...

...I then give silent thanks for the likes of the worthies further up the page and others whose turn of phrase and capacity for wry observation, coupled with a wicked turn of phrase, places them at the very head of the Blogostocracy.

Just one man's opinion, of course.