Today was the annual Village Flower Show - the day of the year where you walk around charity stalls, wonder exactly how safe/unsafe Guyatt’s fair is this year and how long they can keep the same rusting rides running, sweat it out in the tents looking at row upon row of exhibits and of course meet all the people you only see once a year at the Show.
This year I entered a few photos and I won a couple of prizes:
I got a Second in class 220:
220. Photograph - any subject - black and white
and a Third in class 228:
228. My favourite Holiday Photograph - colour
Here are my other entries:
224. Photograph - people - colour
225. Photograph - places - colour
226. Photograph - animals - colour
232. Three photographs to illustrate a Theme - mounted on one piece of card, titled on front, overall size 360 sq ins, eg 20″x18″ or 30″x12″
I’m off to celebrate with my substantial cash prizes…
I’ve finally got around to implementing the much requested Recent Comments RSS Feed (see button on the left).
Let me know whether it’s working for you.
This is one of many behind the scenes changes I’ve been making to the blog code over the last few weeks: It seems that the guy who originally wrote the software doesn’t have time to update it anymore, so I’m having to do the modifications myself.
Features in the pipeline include XML-RPC pings, better spam control and removing some of the redundant HTML code, but these are again behind the scenes things you’re unlikely to notice (unless things go wrong)!
Diet Coke tastes horrible. Fact (ish).
Everybody prefers proper fattening Coke. Fact (dubious).
There are millions of bottles of Diet Coke left undrunk each year. Fact (totally not one).
It’s much more fun to play with Diet Coke than drink it. Fact:
(Edit: Apparently the embedded video has been causing some problems with several people using IE, so I’ve changed it to a link): Click here to watch
Coca-Cola rots your insides. Fiction.
Video courtesy of eepybird.com
Apparently there are 83 other people called James Salter in the UK.
Around the world there are even more, including a famous author. I know, I keep getting fan mail for him. Surely it wouldn’t take people long to have a quick read of this here website and find out whether I’m who they think I am before sending me their heartfelt thanks for my wonderful work that so comforted them while they were laid up with the flu (and please could they have an autograph).
Then of course there are the semi-regular e-mails I get from (I’m sorry if it’s a stereotype but it’s a 100% record so far) Americans thinking they’ve found their long lost friend/service pal/frat brother. You’d have thought the jamessalter.me.uk might hint that they are e-mailing someone in the UK and I may not actually be who they think I am. (All e-mails are of course replied to with due courtesy, but I’m starting to get fed up).
I’m shocked at the willingness some people have to provide all their details to me in an e-mail. I get their address, their wife’s name, their occupation, where they went to school, all sorts of personal stuff. Probably more than enough info if I was determined enough to steal their identity.
My name isn’t as common as John Smith, so when people bash james salter into Google they probably think it’s a sure bet my site belongs to the person they’re looking for. However, if they took a little more time to look carefully either at the website or at the Google’s result count (currently almost 3 million pages), they’d notice it wasn’t as unique as perhaps they thought.
I often have a problem finding an available username on sites like Yahoo! where other James Salters have beaten me to it. After trying all sorts of combinations of jamessalter, jsalter, j.salter, j_salter, etc I usually end up with something stupid like ja_salt38. (If anybody’s got any ideas for a more unique/original username for me they let me know).
So to all who come here in search of a James Salter: Please note that I am not:
- An author, although I have had several pieces of work published
- A filmmaker, although I do collect old Super8
- Your old frat brother/traveling buddy, although I do go on trips
In summary, take a few moments to find out whether I’m really the person you think I am before clogging up my inbox. Not that the guilty parties will ever read this.
A little earlier today it was 06/06/06 06:06:06
Just to beat Margaret to it, on the 8th July it will be 08/07/06 05:04:03
Tom pointed this out to me:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4750193.stm
Apparently soon I’ll have my own personal solar panel for a sex machine - yee hah!
Watch out ladies - the hair is growing thin…
