The Fleeting Fame of Threadworms ...

Time for another episode of Life in Ole Yurrup, and I suppose we might as well start off with a bang - as it were: the search terms hall of shame. Hungary and India (an honourable third place goes to Brazil, looking for "Hello Kitty" which they're not going to find here) seem to be the main sources, which makes me wonder exactly how they occupy their free time over there.

So, lifted with some discretion from Blogger, and not necessarily in that order:

	big rose beef
	latex hentai
	enema time
	if you strangle yourself does your face bloat
	spanking kids site:blogspot.com

Number 4 is perhaps an honest question, posed out of intense (if rather morbid) interest - could also, on reflection, be someone panicking and wondering if their perfect murder disguised as auto-strangulation might not come unstuck due to the victim's face being bloated - or not. Although why Google thinks that I might have the answer rather escapes me. But numbers 2 & 3 are definitely insulting. And I can make neither head nor tail of number 1. What sort of question is that?

And for some really strange reason, this seems to have become the blog of reference for threadworms. Why this should be so is totally beyond my admittedly limited comprehension, and I have to say that it doesn't really worry me: anyone who winds up here looking for such things will find only factoids, these being facts which are not, strictly speaking, true.

Such as that the threadworm grows to 30m in length, is bright pink, goes "Bloort" when tickled and, should you ever get a cut on your abdomen or, gods forbid, in an armpit, you'll soon find out if you have them as they are attracted to the light and will come swarming out, possibly suffocating you as they slither all over your prostrate body.

(This last factoid is, in my experience, particularly good for relating to small children of a nervous disposition. But not at table, please.)

But honestly, who goes googling photos for pictures of  "threadworm eggs" or "dead threadworm"? Come to that, who googles "diesel powered nose hair trimmers"?

I've spent happy time with that WD hard drive, poking around on forums and turning over the mossy stones of the intartoobz, to discover that mine is not an entirely unknown problem. It may happen that, for reasons best known to itself, your drive may go autistic: Windows sees it as a hard drive (alas, the Fedora boot USB that has saved me on several occasions does not) but will not mount it as such, because it thinks it's unitialised.

So on the principle that it can't do too much harm I tell it to go ahead and initialise the sucker, at which point I am informed that it's read-only, so stiff luck there. Tried a couple of data recovery programs, all of which gave me nothing but sector read errors: maybe the thing is cooked after all. A b'stard, although there is not, as the Frogs say, "mort d'homme": it was only TV series, after all. But it still kind of makes me wonder if I shouldn't go back to 9-track tape for my backups.

And on top of that, it's still bloody frikkin frigid. The high today was -3°, which in my opinion is about 20° too low although, on the plus side, it was at least sunny. And without that vicious bise. Still time for comfort food though: forget la grande cuisine, want hot heavy calories. Which goes some way to explaining why we scarfed down tagliatelles with cream, bacon, onion and blue cheese sauce tonight. (Sadly, when I went looking, it was to find that Jeremy had - at some point in the preceding 24 hours - finished off the rest of last night's dessert, as well as the last of those diots, so I was bereft of blackberry torta della rose. Life can be so full of disappointments.)

Truth to tell, I am getting to the point where I firmly believe that once you've managed to get your kids out the door, you should never let them back in. Except on strictly defined occasions, under armed watch, and for pre-arranged periods: three days at Christmas, for instance. Otherwise you're just asking for trouble. It's rather like having worms: an autonomous parasitic life-form that sneaks out at night to empty the fridge. But at least for worms, you can take pills - can do that for kids too, but unfortunately it's not retroactive.

It has been drawn - forcefully - to my attention that today is the 30th anniversary of my marriage. Thinking to shift the blame I asked Jeremy what he'd bought us as a present: I suppose you can imagine the answer. "Oh, didn't know. Wasn't invited." True enough, but still ...

Whatever, it's still thirty years we've been together, with ups and downs, as will happen - but we are still together, which might be just a statistical blip but if so it's a happy one. I for one am not complaining.

Had an unexpected house guest for a couple of days: Stacey rang on Monday night to say that all her heating seemed to have gone off and the house was cold, so we persuaded her to come over on Tuesday. Of course the chauffagiste couldn't come until Wednesday, and when he did turn up it was to suck his teeth reflectively, in the manner of tradesmen everywhere if they're preparing to let you have the bad news, and then say that the circulator pump for the geothermal heating had died, and there seemed to be something broken in the backup gas burner, he'd see what he could do for Thursday but wouldn't hold out much hope, just can't get the wood these days ...

And as it turns out you can't: the manufacturers of the geothermal system and the burner have both gone out of business, so spare parts might be problematic: maybe some time next week. Whilst waiting it's about 3° inside her house, so she's definitely better off elsewhere. (And just to stick the cerise firmly on le gateau, she wailed "and I unplugged the microwave and now it won't turn on, and I can't turn the fridge off" ... not a good moment.)

Although it's starting to warm up. Sufficiently so that it snowed on Wednesday - not too heavily which is good, as I had to head off to Monthey at the arse end of lac Léman on the Thursday - and right now, Friday midi, we're luxuriating in a positively balmy 6°. This should continue, if it doesn't I shall be highly annoyed.

Whipped through Carrefour to pick up a few necessities for the chili con carne that's tonight's meal (I know there were plenty of tortilla chips in the pantry, but as Jerry's back with us that sort of thing tends to disappear and does not turn up on the shopping list in a timely manner) and came across something I really should go back and get a photo of: a rather strange-looking electric massage pillow. Unfortunately it resembles nothing more than a pair of fake boobs made by an extremely amateur potter, and seems to have flashy LEDs implanted randomly in it, for what purpose I cannot imagine.

Cunningly avoided the autoroute this morning - the first chassé croisé of the holidays, where one lot's headed up to the slopes whilst another lot's headed down - and although the départementales were a little better that's still not saying a lot, so it was about midday before I'd got everything done and could consider a well-deserved and reviving glass or two.

Which leads us to another excerpt from the Beckham Diaries, as once we'd frightened some old ladies away from their table and installed ourselves, Bryan explained to me that the reason we were drinking alone - or at least, bereft of feminine company - was that Ken the rich Australian had sent her a plane ticket for Bristol, which she quite reasonably took as an invitation, and used it.

So we were sitting there glumly reflecting on the perfidy of humanity in general, and more particularly that part of it which happens to be female when Bryan's brand-new smart-phone (with which he's not yet really come to grips, but that's another story) emitted a discreet belch to indicate the arrival of a new text. Which went, more or less, as follows -

"Hi guys, he chucked me out because I wouldn't sleep with him: changed my flight, now arrive at Geneva at 20:10, after the last train for Chambéry. Help? Beckham."

This is of course, as I opined to him, the problem with having pets: you just can't leave them by themselves for any length of time in case they get into trouble, and if ever there's a mess it's you that has to clean it up.