Oh dear, it’s been a week. Still, when I try to blog every two days and fail, I still blog a lot more than when I try to blog every month and fail.

I mentioned in passing that one of the little projects I’ve got on at the minute is making improvements to my email/admin system. I imagine you found that utterly uninteresting and have absolutely no desire to learn more. Well unfortunately for you, it’s the main thing I’m doing at the minute, so I’m going to tell you anyway.

When I’m not drawing, a fair chunk of my time is spent writing emails and performing other tedious administrative chores. Much the same as in any job, I suppose, but when your entire job is done on computer, and when a lot of the little jobs you’re always doing are very repetitive, and when you’re always looking for ways to do your job more efficiently, and when you’re the kind of person who likes writing bits of code, you find yourself thinking, “I could automate most of this". That’s aim number 1. The other problem with all that boring admin stuff, as well as the time it consumes, is the fact that all that time is spent chained to my desk (which, incidentally, is the same desk I’ve had since I was about 8. You’d really think my boss would get me some more modern office furniture). In theory I can deal with my emails from anywhere, but more often than not, dealing with them means updating one of the documents stored on my PC, or attaching a file stored on my PC, so in practice most of them can only be dealt with on my PC. By various clever means, my super new admin system will let me do those things dead easily from wherever I happen to be.

So the future, as I picture it, looks something like this: I’ll get out of bed in the morning, do the day’s drawing before lunch, then in the afternoon lie back on a sun bed on a cruise liner or Caribbean beach, sipping a piña colada and dealing with my emails. I suppose, realistically, it may not be possible to do it on a Caribbean beach every day - some Caribbean beaches have terrible wifi - and I have no idea what they put in piña coladas but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like them - but as a last resort there’s always the sofa, and nothing really feels like work if you’re doing it on a sofa. That’s why my ultimate goal is to work in the quality control department at MFI. In the meantime, I’ll settle for writing emails in the living room.

That wasn’t really worth waiting a week for, was it?

We went into London to see The Ladykillers! It was great!

Of course the best bit was the trailers at the beginning, where the actors from all the plays run around the West End and perform ninety seconds of their show at every theatre. First Jean Valjean staggered on and wheezed out a couple of verses of One Day More, then some guy dressed as a warthog gasped a bit of Hakuna Matata before collapsing into the orchestra pit, and finally half the cast of Starlight Express rolled on and merrily belted out the title song without a care in the world, and I understood why Jean Valjean had been wearing the universally recognised ‘why can’t we do our show on roller skates?’ face, and why the cast of Starlight Express had been wearing the universally recognised ‘you might give yourself a heart attack racing around the West End every night, but on the plus side, you don’t have to be in Starlight Express‘ face.

OK, that didn’t happen. But The Ladykillers really was jolly good.

It’s been 4 days, I’m getting slack. Can we pretend I blogged on Saturday? Even better, can we pretend I’ve blogged every day for the last six years? Splendid, we’re back on track then.

Having spent a few years living up north, it’s nice once again to be a stone’s throw away from our nation’s capital, with its west end shows and magnificent architecture and bad Charlie Chaplin impersonators. So having been down here for nearly six months, you’d really think I’d have visited said city by now. Well, I haven’t, but I am tomorrow! Thanks to a tweet from Graham Linehan - writer of Father Ted, The IT Crowd and, more to the point, top West End hit The Ladykillers - drawing attention to a special offer whereby all tickets for tomorrow’s performance of top West End hit The Ladykillers could be purchased for the bargain price of £20, we’re going to see top West End hit Cats! I mean The Ladykillers.

I really should make the most of our proximity to London before it becomes too mired down in Olympic nonsense. The only real benefit of the Olympics, so far as I can see, is that everyone’s been banging on for so long about the Olympics in twenty twelve, now that it’s come people might actually start calling it twenty twelve, and put an end to this ‘two thousand and’ nonsense. ‘Two thousand and eleven’, incidentally, was the longest name for a year since, so far as I can make out, One Million Years B.C. And that was ages ago.

And finally, a literally HILARIOUS joke I made up in the chatroom, which seems to have unexpectedly developed a new lease of life. Come in and say hello!

“My dog’s got noo noos.”
“How does it vacuum its teletubby house?”
“With the aforementioned noo noos.”

You had to be there.

Well so far I seem to be just about managing to do a spot of blogging every couple of days, though now, for the first time since this effort to reinvigorate my blog began, I find myself unable to think of anything to write about. Ahh, that old, familiar feeling.

There are so many I composed in my head during the Lean Years, but never got round to typing up. If only I could remember them, they’d keep me going for months. I was going to do one over Christmas that would have been a sort of White Christmas parody where it kept alluding to arbitrary, irrelevant things - Where the jellies wobble / And cobblers cobble / And watch The Kenny Everett Show, that sort of thing - and then at the end I’d have said something about that’s what you get for using Bing, and everyone would have laughed uproariously, and instantly got the joke that Bing is both the name of the man who sang White Christmas and an ineffectual search engine, and I wouldn’t have had to explain it like I did just there at all. It would have been hilarious, as you can well imagine.

Hmm, maybe it’s quite lucky that I’ve forgotten all those unwritten blogs.

It’s Valentines Day, and the latest hit love song is on everyone’s lips. I’m talking, of course, about Elvis Presley’s Teddy Bear (Let Me Be Your). Yeah, I’m down with the kids.

It’s a very fine song. My favourite bit is where it goes:

I don’t wanna be your tiger
‘Cause tigers play too rough
I don’t wanna be your lion
‘Cause lions ain’t the kind
You love enough.

See, educational. I do think, though, that Mr Presley has missed a trick. How much more naturalistic trivia could he have worked in? If you’re reading, Mr Presley - and I see no reason to suppose he isn’t - perhaps you’d like to consider adding some of these verses at your next pop concert:

I don’t wanna be your maggot,
‘Cause they get used as bait.
I don’t wanna be your panda
‘Cause lady pandas never
Want to mate.

I don’t wanna be your dolphin,
I’d rather live on land.
I don’t wanna be your emu
‘Cause I’ve seen what Rod Hull does
With his hand.

I’ve got a visitor coming this weekend, which probably means this is my last opportunity to blog. And since I’m determined to stick to my plan to post something every couple of days, I better had.

Er… I know! Golden Girls update! Betty White, the last remaining Golden Girl, is still very much alive. She is now 90 years old and her career, since I started these Golden Girls updates back in 2005, has had something of a resurgence. To quote Wikipedia, “her continuing cultural relevance is reflected in the numerous television and film projects she has been a part of", though oddly I don’t seem to be credited for that. See, that’s the trouble with Wikipedia. Unreliable.

My goodness, it’s half past one on a Friday afternoon, and I’ve finished my work for the week. That never happens! What a splendid opportunity to bash out a little blog.

You remember Google Wave? It was a sort of cross between email and a forum and Facebook and Twitter and smoke signals and notes in bottles and every other form of communication known to man. Or something. I didn’t really understand it. I’m not sure that anyone did.

And now, on Google+, there’s something called Google Ripples. I have no idea what that is, but I like to imagine, as the name suggests, that it’s a sort of lesser version of the Google Wave principle, and I like to imagine that it, too, will fail, in the hope that it will prompt the following line of reasoning:

“Right, so we tried Google Wave, and that failed, and we thought maybe that was because it was too confusing, so we tried a simpler version with Google Ripples, but that failed as well… so maybe… it wasn’t… confusing enough?”

And this, I hope, will lead to the development of GOOGLE TSUNAMI, a site where you log in, and are presented, indiscriminately and in real time, with every post made by anyone anywhere on the internet, at such speed it’s impossible to read a single word. I never used Google Wave and I don’t really use Google+, but I would definitely use GOOGLE TSUNAMI. I bet they’re working on it.

(I’ve now looked up Google Ripples and it turns out it’s something totally different. And yet I still hope.)