If there were three of me I might have a chance at getting everything done I need to but as it is …

More posts soon.

Take the title of this post. I bet you all thought “Oooh photoset of a nice bit of skirt”. And why shouldn’t you. If you’re looking for titillation and like a girl in a sharp suit getting a bit frisky I’m not judging you. In fact I’d probably be more than happy to take a peek myself. What you got was some bloke on his high-horse about the dumbing-down of the media.

Because let’s face it, snappy terms suitable for sound bites are not the best way to communicate ideas. They reduce language to a barrage of staccato syllables intended more for their ability to shock/amuse/stick in your memory than to accurately describe a concept, person or thing.

Journalists use them for two reasons. One being because it’s easy to do so, the other because we respond to them like Pavlov’s dog. The mention of some phrases has us metaphorically (or literally) salivating in anticipation. They work.

Take “sex blog”. AlexSuze is a sex blog. It’s an adult blog. It’s also just a blog, a place to have fun and, as with this post, a place to have a bit of a rant.

Saying “sex blog” categorises us along with everything from the “pinkest” or Mills and Boone type blogs where an ellipsis conceals anything more than a peck on the cheek, to full-on commercial porn sites in a blog format.

Adult Blog is almost the same.

We are also sex toy testers. That should make for some juicy copy in the tabloids. But as we haven’t been “outed” yet maybe even that’s not shocking enough any more. Or perhaps we’re just not “important” enough, LOL, and who decides that.

The headlines for us would be a bit difficult to write don’t you think?

“Couple in stable relationship have great sex life and enjoy blogging, scandal!”

“Average people in suburbia thinking about sex – Shock revelations”

Is sex/adult blogging still the zeit geist? Maybe not, but if there’s a slow news day coming some editor is going to start sniffing around for an easy to digest sensational story. Just who will they pick on?

I think we ought to invent some skeletons in our cupboard just in case. Hehehehe.

Firstly Comcast. We recently took over a site, the previous owners emailed the members (get that, members who had signed up of their own volition) to tell them that we were the new owners. One of the recipients was on Comcast and their email bounced, the failure report saying that their server thought we were spamming them. I emailed Comcast and within two hours they had unblocked us, no quibble, nothing. A simple explanation from us and the problem was resolved.

Now, the blackmail. SORBS (if you’re not aware of it) is a system that blocks spam email by blacklisting IP addresses. If at some point in the past (the IPs do expire if they’re not reported in a certain length of time) your mail server’s IP sent spam then all organisations subscribing to SORBS will reject your emails. Even though it wasn’t you who sent it. Good huh! And how do you get yourself removed from the list … you send them $50, yes this is used for charitable (predominantly anti-spam) causes, but surely that should be optional?

SORBS is an ill-conceived system and shouldn’t be used, except in concert with other ant-spam measures. Rejecting an email based purely on SORBS is wrong. It penalises well behaved organisations for sharing servers (unwittingly) with bad ones. It’s just plain stupid as it doesn’t fully take into account shared Ips.

Spam is a blight on the Internet and needs to be tackled by prosecuting spammers to the fullest extent of the law, but relying on SORBS to sort it out is like trying to stop a truck by driving another truck at it. There is no good outcome.

I don’t expect anyone to be reading this post so I’m talking to myself here. Odd but that doesn’t bother me. We get thousands of visitors each day on each of our other sites, so this is quite intimate/lonely delete as applicable LOL.

The reason for not posting of course has been a distinct lack of time due to the development of our new site A-Rouse.com and the expansion of our activities outside blogging into journalism. Well we call it journalism, we hope everyone else think it qualifies.

So for now I’ve added a link to the new site on the side bar and I might even add a few images to brighten this place up a bit.

My little refuge online, is still alive, despite evidence to the contrary.

It’s like a children’s TV presenter swearing or, naming no names here, taking drugs. It’s not just out of character it seems so wrong as to jar against your instinctive sensibilities. Take today’s Big Brother’s Little Brother (yes another BB reference, sorry). It was presented by two comedians whose most famous gig was a show on BBC childrens channel CeeBeebies “Big Cook Little Cook”. As you can imagine, on that show there was no innuendo, smut or swearing. So to hear them using the F word, talking about sex and doing nob gags is both incongruous and and funny.

Strangely I had another similar experience at work today. One manager who I have worked with for about eight months swore during a conversation with me. Not to me, or about me, but he swore and it seemed odd. Odd because I’d never heard him swear before, had always avoided profanity and is rarely angry or stressed.

So I’m thinking here … why can’t we have an official “Be Yourself Day”?

We all get to talk bout things that are on our minds, frankly, openly and without fear of subsequent recrimination. We can use whatever language we want, dress how we want (cast off the work suite or the dumb-looking paper hat and badge with “Hi I’m Alex, pleased to serve you” on it).

We could talk about sex, swear at customers, better yet swear at managers hehehe (no they aren’t all deserving of a gob full, just a choice few).

We could all get our problems out in the open and dispel any misapprehensions others have about us. It wouldn’t all be negative, surely, perhaps you’d get compliments from people who you’d least expect to be complimentary.

Yeah, like we’re all going to take kindly to our faults pointed out by everyone around us and the next day forget all about it and not want to drop an Acme brand anvil on your detractor’s heads as they walk out their front door the next morning. In all seriousness I know it would lead to riots.

Hmmm, I started off thinking that it would be nice to talk about some issues openly, now I’m realising that I wouldn’t want to listen to some people’s fantasies.

Perhaps we should just all realise that each of us has a different face for different situations and a different image to project that we feel is appropriate to those we find ourselves amongst at the time.

So much for that bright idea.

©2007 Alexander, more of my ramblings and other stuff at alexsuze.com, or drop by my MySpace Account. 

Hopefully the meteorologist’s prediction of another 50mm of rain at the weekend will be inaccurate and those affected can begin to recover from the disaster.

So there it is, in a nutshell. I can read about something, see it on TV, talk to someone with first hand knowledge of the thing. But unless I have been through it I can’t truly understand the emotions that accompany the experience.

It’s like love, no Love, the one with the capital ‘L’. Funny but in English we only have one word for love. Oh yes, you can embellish it with qualifications and caveats but you have to use the same word for loving your siblings, parents, partner, friends and even your favourite flavour of crisps. How can one word be expected to convey the texture and hue of such a varied, personal and subjective range of emotions, thoughts and chemical stimuli that weave themselves together and manifest themselves as the love between two (or more) people?

You have to experience Love to know what it is, and in doing so you expose yourself to the possibility that its potent magic may cast a spell over you that may bring as much grief as it does joy. If it doesn’t hurt it isn’t Love, it’s love or lust, or something less substantive. And I don’t mean hurt because something has gone wrong, like being rejected, dumped, spurned or having your love unrequited. Love can grab your heart and twist it, take your breath away at the thought of the object of your affections. It can happen when they walk in the room or the smile at you when you wake in the morning.

So to have one word to describe something that can only be experienced may I suppose be an honest expression of English’s failure to do justice to the concept. A form of self-imposed New Speak that would have had O’Brien smiling a smug smile.

Love is one of those concepts that will never be quelled by a language inadequate to describe it though. It’s too strong, too inherent in our nature as human beings. Even if the lads and ladettes of the nightclub scene choose to ignore and deny its existence it’ll get them eventually … and if not they’ll spend a lonely old age regretting that they chose to ignore Love’s potential to make them whole.

Funny how one thought leads to another isn’t it.

More accurately of course it’s I who have changed. I’m more mature, perhaps more cynical, but most definitely more aware of opportunities outside what I used to consider was my career for life. I don’t believe a job for life exists any more, but a career or career path, developing over time as an industry’s needs change, that is still possible if you have the right mindset.

I’ve been lucky, only made redundant once, out of work for about four months in the last 15 years. Long term unemployment is not an option for me. Aside from the financial aspect, i.e. I’ll do anything to ensure I keep hold of the house and stuff I’ve worked hard for, being out of work would send me bonkers. I can’t imagine doing nothing, not striving to create.

There’s another thing. Despite my job being office based, it’s hugely creative, something that many outside my profession don’t realise. Looking in from the outside they perceive a job that looks mundane, grey, technical and boring. What they don’t realise is the ingenuity and left-hemisphere work that goes into what my colleagues and I do.

This is why I’ve taken to writing so readily. At school I was never good at English. Writing was a struggle and creative writing was a chore. This is odd because my imagination is vibrant and alive.

So what’s this post about? Nothing and everything I think would best describe it. It’s a statement of where I am at the moment and therefore about nothing I don’t know already. But writing it has me me realise that I have a good starting point to get my arse into gear and get motivated into doing something more than I have already. I’m proud of the blog Suze and I have created, and enriched by some of the relationships we’ve forged, but there’s more to do.

Onward and upward.

Paris Hilton is out. Yes after receiving a six week sentence, cut to three weeks before she stepped inside a jail cell, Paris Hilton is out after just three days.

Why? Was she innocent and not the recidivist drink driver and fugitive from reality that we all thought she was?

Well, we don’t know. But apparently non-specific “medical reasons” can act as a get out of jail free card these days.

Or maybe it’s because SHE’S SO F**KING RICH THAT THE LAW DOESN’T APPLY TO HER?

Then again I suppose that it’s hardly likely to stop her re-offending now is it? She so far removed from reality that she didn’t even realise that being arrested, charged and convicted for DUI, then having her licence revoked meant she ISN’T ALLOWED TO DRIVE A CAR?

But don’t worry she’s going to be confined via electronic tag to a multi-million dollar mansion for 40 days. That’ll teach her a lesson? I mean the swimming pool is probably smaller than the one in prison

And I thought the penal system in this country was arse about tit.

©2007 Alexander, more of my ramblings and other stuff at alexsuze.com, or drop by my MySpace Account.

DH’s latest creation is a skull, titled “For the Love Of God”, see this story (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6712015.stm). It’s on display at the White Cube Gallery (http://www.whitecube.com/). It is undoubtedly an amazing object, platinum and 8,601 diamonds.

I have an idea  … I guess it’s a joke, I mean a piece of art with that intrinsic value must be a fake right? I mean there are people starving in the world and this thing has a price tag for the prospective buyer of £50 million. So I’m guessing that after he’s taken his expenses out and bought a new car, good old Damien is going to give the rest away to the needy? Right?

Now that would be a redistribution of wealth that I could relate to.

©2007 Alexander, more of my ramblings and other stuff at alexsuze.com, or drop by my MySpace Account.