English Over The Sleeve

I had written a whole review on Firefox 2.0b1, but then, well, it crashed…

So you only get the screenshots, I’m afraid.

Overall: nearly the same, but faster and smoother.
One gripe: the x on the tab rather than at the end of the line. If you’re closing several tabs, then the x moves as you shut each tab. So I’m having to learn ctrl-w…

The spell checker is cool, although I hope that there will be an easy way to switch languages without using about:config. (I use the net in English and French, concurrently, so this is rather important for me.)

I will be updating as soon as the final release is shipped. Recommended.

We were walking back after an evening activity one night, and Tim said to me:

“Dom, don’t you have stars in England? I can’t see any.”

“Well, you see, Tim, this is what we call twilight…”

… has been discovered to exist currently in France. Known as guiguitage aigu, this condition is easily recognisable: look for symptoms os total and utter stupidity.

For example, if your mate, after a 90 minutes drive, says in a very small voice that he’s forgotten his keys, and his wallet, then he’s probably suffering from guiguitage.

Or if he gesticulates while speaking, and his cigarette flys out of his hand, then the diagnosis is easy…

Or if he’s smoking in the car, and drops his (lit) cigarette butt over his shoulder - in a petrol station, of course - you don’t need to ask too many questions.

If all these (and more!) happen on the same day, then he’s probably a mate of mine!

Visit Firefox Flicks!

One of my (three) camps had a football theme to it, so we visited Anfield Road (that’s the home of Liverpool FC) - on the 10th of August.

In retrospect, I should probably have known that August the tenth was the launch date for the new Liverpool strip.

The best souvenir you can buy when you visit a football stadium is obviously the shirt. So I had about 20 kids, all clutching a brand new shirt in one hand, and the 50-odd pounds needed to pay for it in the other, standing in a queue that was about 5 miles long. So far, no problem - except that the bus was leaving in 5 minutes. No hope…

So I told them to put the shirts back on the rack and that I’d take orders and buy them for them in the next few days.

I ended up buying twenty shirts in twenty different sizes in twenty separate transactions in the local sports shop. The manager loved me - but the cashier most certainly did not!

On the phone to a town hall:

“Hi, this is macdo here. I’m bringing 50 kids to your town to go to the beach, is that alright?”
“Yeah, no problem. Just send us a written request and we’ll get back to you as soon as the mayor has approved it. It shouldn’t take more than two months.”
“Ah. We were planning on coming tomorrow.”
“Never mind, maybe next year. Bye now!” *click*

So I called the next town down the coast.

“Hi, macdo here. Could we please come and get 50 kids to spend their pocket money in your town, tomorrow?”
“Sure. Will you be wanting to go swimming, as well?”
“Yep”
“No problem. I can fax you an authorisation, or you can stop by and pick it up, or both…”
“Ta love!”

There is absolutely no exaggeration involved in this post.
And it didn’t even rain too much…

One of my kids, let’s call him Henry, was just entering the worst of the teenage years. To prove this, he found nothing better to do than climb the tallest tree on the property.

One of my staff came to me and said “Macdo, do something about this! It’s so dangerous!”

It is dangerous to climb trees, there’s no doubt about it. On the other hand, it’s even more dangerous to cross the road in the town… And is it right to so cocoon kids that they can’t even climb trees?

I didn’t have the heart to tell Henry off. After all, I prefered him to be running round and enthusistically climbing trees rather than moping round wondering when he could watch the telly…

My staff member was outraged. Ah well, I’ll survive that!

With thanks to John, Thomas, Laura, Edward, all 7 Alberts, Peter1, Peter2 and Peter3, Nina, Bastian, Muhammed, Patrick, Lewis and Lewis bis, Nathan, and the rest of the 160 kids who came on my camps this summer, for letting me get home intact.

Over the next few days, this blog will chronicle some of the whacky things that happened.

Please remember that nothing you read here should be taken as literally true: enough circumstances are changed that even the guilty parties shouldn’t be able to recognise themselves. For example, every single name is changed.