A wise man was telling me a couple of gems to help us get through family life.

Never let the sun set on an argument. Great idea, but if I lived by that maxim, I would get to sleep once every two weeks.

When your first daughter is born, go and talk to a tree for 15 minutes. Repeat this tree-talking ritual every night for 13 years, by which time you will be ready. (This sort of reminds me of a school teacher I once had, who said that kids are great, as long as they are born at 18.)

And then he finished with a story about a friend who had lost 2 wives. The first wife died from an overdose, and the second from a fractured skull. That bitch wouldn't swallow the pills.

Got any more?

After so little action on the blog, I thought I better save some face and go through tidying up my site. For grins I updated my About Page.

It was quite enlightening to see what I was thinking about a year ago. (What was I thinking!)

Aim of the blog

I was all fired up to write like a satirical loony in order to attract 10000 visitors a month to The Pisstakers. I wanted to host a stable of funny guest writers and develop an all-round mega blog too. Oh well.

The reality is, I am currently the lone contributor, so I haven't exactly created a one-stop funny shop. On the other hand, working alone, I surpassed my aims for traffic - attracting 16000 visitors a month and a useless PR5 rank. 1 out of three ain't bad.

(The one big lesson I learned btw, fellow bloggers, is that little quantity and poor quality researched posts are the way to go!) The Valentines Day Sucks post is a case in point.)

Bio

Then there were the 8 things about Ed. to deal with. On reflection I was pretty happy with the the old list, and seeing as I haven't done much wild stuff in the past 12 months, I just tarted the octo-bio up a bit.

(As I look around the half wrecked boat I am sitting in at the moment, I can't help thinking that if this thing ever floats again, the list of achievements could be worth updating at some stage. Time will tell.)

That was my homework last night. What does your About Me page say? Anything, something, nothing?

I received an email from a friend, telling me to stop buying gas from Exxon and Mobil. I trashed it, not because it is a bad idea, and not because I am a gas junky lacking in community spirit, but mainly because this type of email is spam.

The email contains a fairly credible suggestion to save the world from $4 gas, ie boycott Exxon and Mobil for a year rather than stop buying gas for one day. What's the problem with that idea? Nothing much, but if you scroll to the end of the email, you will see a link to a 3rd party site. This site will benefit from the same numbers of eyeballs alluded to in the anti-gas email (if 10 friends of 10 friends get the email, and before you know it, 300 million will get the message.)

Ironically, in this case, you get taken to a Used car site.



I picked up on this trend when I received a circular begging for help to find Madeleine McCann, the little English girl missing in Portugal last year. Some one managed to get their link included on the end of the email message that went international, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they got a lot of click-throughs on the back of honest folks spreading the word about her sad predicament, bastards.

So, to raise awareness of this sort of subtle spam, what I suggest is that you forward this Pisstakers article to 10 friends, tell them to forward it to 10 friends, and before you know it, 300 million people will know never to forward anything to anyone, ever. That should make people think twice about using the internet to communicate!