Firetop

Today is the first birthday of the new look Firetop website complete with blog entries, one year ago I was at Wimbledon spotting celebrities like ‘Nana Moon’ and Rob Brydon, this year it’s far too wet to enjoy the queuing. Furthermore Suzie_Q seems to be displaying early labour symptoms this morning, which could make June 28th a birthday of a different kind next year! So what exactly has the blog achieved in the past year? Surprisingly a few unexpected interactions from those at the centre of a article topics - a celebrity chef, Virgin’s commercial director, the Marketing Manager of Internet World, a developer at Eyewonder, not to mention many unknown people who have solved their Microsoft credit card bill mystery. (more…)

For as long as I can remember, my mother-in-law plays Gala Bingo in Crawley every Sunday evening. Occasionally my wife has attended too - leaving me free to work or Xbox. Yesterday with Suzie_Q at 39 weeks and getting too large to walk or travel far, play sports, or generally exert herself, I was asked to go to bingo with them too. Since there is little else Sue and I can do together besides watch TV, and I couldn’t have my wife sitting alone in the no-smoking area of the bingo hall (an almost empty area), I put my usual apprehensions to one side and threw caution to the wind. By the end of the night I was no wiser as to what makes so many fat, miserable, old people spend their wages on such a pointless and unenjoyable activity full of moaning, groaning and smoking. They would all be better off betting on sensible and entertaining things like horses and football. (more…)

This morning Suzie_Q and I were up relatively early (for us) and so we headed down to the breakfast café on the corner of West Street. You can always guarantee yourself satisfying full English there (if they’re actually open). Upon arriving in West Street I noticed that there were signs up announcing ‘West Street Festival - Today, 10am to 5pm‘ - “How exciting” I thought “A bit of entertainment for us”. At 10am when we left the cafe with full bellies there was very little sign of a festival; one or two of the ‘always empty’ antiques shops had some coloured bunting adorning their shop fronts, at the end of the street a woman beneath a gazebo selling what looked like straw hand bags - and that was it! (more…)

Suzie_Q started up a baby blog a few months into her pregnancy, I’ve steered clear of commenting on too many baby matters other than at scan time (and I didn’t even mention the 34 week where baby looked like a Tuscan Raider). As the time nears for Junior’s arrival (due in eleven days) I thought I’d cover the main impacts of pregnancy from the male perspective. Of course it can never be as painful an experience for the man as the woman; I’m not carrying around an extra two stone of weight on my stomach (yet…) and won’t have to give birth - exposing my privates to a room of strangers, but there are implications for us blokes. (more…)

When you own cats you have to expect to receive your fair share of interesting outdoor gifts. Bella, our youngest cat, began life outside by bringing in interesting leaves (holly) and strange pieces of plastic packaging. These days, having cleaned out the mice in the neighbourhood, she has begun to bring in birds. On Friday morning at 3am she brought in a blackbird which sat still in shock as she pulled feathers from it one by one. Fortunately for the blackbird this activity woke me up and forced me to investigate - sending Bella away so that the poor creature could be put in a darkened box until the morning. When 9am came Suzie_Q and I took the bird over to Wildlife Aid in Leatherhead. (more…)

A couple of years ago somebody telephoned Firetop and claimed that the children’s books I’d allegedly sponsored were now ready for collection and they wanted payment. When I confronted them with the fact that I hadn’t ordered them, they said somebody else at Firetop must have done… to which I was able to reply - ‘there isn’t anybody else at Firetop’. The lady on the phone threatened to take legal action and I wished her the best of luck after she said that she was from Child Protection UK Ltd of Denton, Manchester (she even phoned back to say she’d made a mistake and they weren’t a registered company - hanging up and swearing when I started reading out the address). Since then I have gone on to blog about this experience and it led to a lot of feedback from other victims of similar bogus calls involving ‘sponsored books’ for schools. (more…)

Whilst chatting about last night’s semi finals in the official Eurovision chat room (sad I know), a French guy ‘FrenchFrog’ (he had a sense of humour) told me my surname was an old Celtic Britanny word for ‘fish’. That’s not an explanation I’d ever heard before, usually the genealogy books trace it back to ‘pescod’ - a seller of peas - a street being named Pescod Street in Windsor. However, ‘FrenchFrog’ pointed me in the direction of a book called ‘Les Aventures Extraordinaires de Peskett‘ by Pierre Péron. (more…)

Hot on the heels of the global warming cause debate, today I discovered Neal Adams’ animations of planetary surface expansion. These animations demonstrate his theory that all the continents of the Earth were once joined in a land mass which covered the entire surface of a much smaller Earth (1/4 of the current size in fact). Water existed in shallow pools over much of the Earth, but it’s only the expansion of the Earth’s size over millions of years, and the subsequent creation of new surfaces, which has caused there to be any oceans. Adams hypothesises that the bottom of the ocean is only between 70 to 180 million years old. He also expands his theory to apply to all planets of the universe, including their moons. If you’re interested in that sort of thing take a look at Neal’s ‘New Model of the Universe‘ online videos; they’ll certainly challenge the geology theories you were taught at school! (more…)

Whilst reading BBC online today I thought I had accidently entered the BBC’s archive from 1998 but it seems not… apparently the Beeb’s ‘Spencer Kelly’ has just discovered that webmasters have it in their power to alter search results in Google and Yahoo!. Known professionally as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for over a decade now, I’m not sure it warrants an article in 2007 pointing out what it’s all about. Furthermore we certainly don’t need misinformed editors suggesting that the industry is full of ‘cheats’ or founded upon ‘dirty tricks’. SEO is about understanding the algorithms and weights that the likes of Google place upon a website’s access, content and link popularity - that’s all, nothing ‘dirty’. What’s next Spencer an article about the ZX81 or Commodore 64? (more…)

I popped into Marks and Spencer on Saturday and whilst paying for my goods spotted a leafet on the M&S Ethical Fund. On closer inspection of the leaflet I discovered that Ethical Funds are about as Ethical as unlimited broadband is ‘unlimited’ from many suppliers. On the face of it M&S is offering a rebranded Jupiter Asset Management service which sees investments avoided in companies with a poor environmental record or involved in the arms trade, gambling, animal testing / fur, tobacco and pornography. However, the small print says ‘A company that derives over 10% of its turnover from any one of these activities will not be invested in’. So it should really be called the M&S Almost Ethical Fund - as part of your money could go into those industries. (more…)