The Next Big Thing...

Great video of Katherine Hughes singing the catchy number, Put Your Records On. There's more videos of her in her Youtube channel, and you can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and she has an about.me page too: about.me/katherinehughes (not any more it seems).

Sometimes I Am Easily Amused...

Sometimes I am easily amused and these ads from my local Freecycle group gave me a good chuckle:

Admittedly, the second one was meant to be funny. One hopes.

Sending Up "Tara Medium"

I like to add a little randomness into my life by entering free prize draws (it's great when a DVD turns up unexpectedly in the mail (as half the time they don't bother email to say it's on its way)). Unfortunately, I made the mistake of agreeing to receive "a free reading" from "Tara the Medium" and now I can't seem to get rid of her emails.

Belatedly Googling "Tara Medium" revealed a familiar tale of emails promising an imminent influx of money, if only I cover 'her' expenses: £79 should do it; after no response from me, £69 then; then £49; now we're down to £29. Always accompanied by warning about the seriousness of my problems, and how some mysterious forces are somehow working against me, dooming me to a life of financial misery and bad luck which only she can defeat by performing some "Great Magical Intervention", for the aforementioned donation, and always assuring me that she is my "devoted friend" (so why don't you do it for nowt then?).

Fortunately there's an antidote to Tara's incessant doom-mongering in the form of a blog, gently sending up her many emails (or rather the pages they link to), by a kindly Canadian blogger, named Graeme Perrow: perrow.ca/blog/tara/index.html Highly recommended reading for any others suffering from Tara's touching concerns for their future.

Thank You Hater! -- Funny Youtube Video

Hilarious Youtube video made by Clever Pie and Isabel Fay, and dedicated to all those Internet Haters and Trolls found in comments sections everywhere (Found thanks to @curu on Twitter).

WOW! New Old Computer Game Fun!

Probably my favourite computer game of all time is Commander Keen 4: Goodbye Galaxy -- you jump around a lot, collect things, and shoot anything that moves -- brilliant!  Although, the game is spoilt by the inclusion of an underwater level where Keen becomes so slow, he can't get out of anythings way, and you get eaten by a big, stupid looking fish, so I actually prefer to play episode 5 which is all set on a space station with not a fish in sight.

However, times move on and those old games won't play in Windows 7 (or even XP), until I discovered the delights of DOSBox, which magically brings all those old games back to life.  But still, once you've played them umpteen times, and used the cheat keys to discover all their secrets, the novelty can wear off.  But Keen is not dead!

While I've been busy playing Plants vs. Zombies instead, there appear to have developed an whole community of amateur programmers who've been taken those old episodes of Commander Keen and modified them to produce new episodes!  So now there's hours more nostalgic fun to be had -- just nip along to their official forum to download them: keenmodding.org

Joe Craig's 'Keep Fit for Writers' Video

This keep fit routine has been especially designed for writers (or those who, like me, pretend to be), by Joe Craig, author of the popular Jimmy Coates novels for teens that have been described as "the Bourne Identity for kids" (which seems a good enough reason to read them whatever your age).  So sit back, watch and learn:

......I'm worn out just watching.

Video discovered via Twitter, where I regularly stalk him and other interesting people.  You can stalk me on Twitter @IAmJohnSteele, and stalk Joe on Twitter @joecraiguk