The Ludlum Pastiche

This past couple of weeks I have been mostly reading top but dead adventure writer Robert Ludlum's famed books 'The Bourne Identity' and 'The Bourne Supremacy'. Partly because I haven't read any books for a dashed goodly while and also just to see what they were like - clearly the 1980 Jason Bourne wasn't going to look like Matt Damon and shoot people expertly in the middle of Waterloo station whilst being chased by secret CIA operatives who are highly-skilled in manipulating ubiquitous electronic devices. I've also not yet got to a part where Jason Bourne kills someone in the face with a hardback, but perhaps that is later than the point which I have reached.

The reason I mention all this literary consumption, dear reader, is to explain all of the funny blog post titles. As if you hadn't noticed, you keen-eyed superfan you. I love all those cheesy titles from yonder that these days only cause charity shop bookshelves to sag and smell of papery damp. The Geneva Convention. The Fire Exit. The Conspiracy Theory. The Bus Stop.

I love a good old book. Giving a sick cancerous old person who was abandoned as a puppy and needs a loving home 50p in return for a gnarled paperback with suspicious stains is but a perk of the system. When I lived in Germany there was hardly such a thing as a charity shop, you only found second hand shops in larger cities. It's almost a uniquely British thing to send all your old crap to a shop up the road where you'll go and buy someone else's old crap in aid of people you don't know. That'll be The Victorian Legacy...

The Grass Illusion.

The thing about quality is that perception is everything. You don’t know that the grass is greener until you’ve been over to the other side. Just as the one-eyed man is emperor in the land of the blind, so in the land of the unfortunate Janet Street-Porter is a sex queen.

Take a real-world example – on the way down to almost Gatwick airport yesterday to learn about the wonderful world of Toyota’s hybrid powertrains, my car was wonderful – responsive, yet comfortable, perky when it came to overtaking manoeuvres on the motorway and just comfortable enough to not need a chiropractor riding in the back seat. On the way home, it had transformed into a complete crapwagon.

Why? £97,000 of Lexus. I had a quick sit in the back of the LS600h, a hybrid superwagon for captains of industry. I allowed the seats to massage my back and used a remote control to switch my own personal television on and put the sunblinds up on my window. I got in the front of the car and after six or seven minutes of trying to work out how to get the thing started I realised it had been on the whole time and glided away in super-stealthy battery mode. I had a go in a two tonne Lexus SUV and an incredibly sporty mid-size hybrid executive saloon. All designed to cosset, comfort and empower an admittedly wealthy driver.

My £500 Volvo sports car that was built by some Dutch people 16 years ago never really had a chance. On the way home it was loud and uncouth – the clacking from the road sounded like a rollercoaster being pulled up a hill, I had to work the gearstick like a straw in the bottom of a frappuccino to try and find some power from its wheezy Renault engine whilst cursing its arthritic controls that seem designed specifically to target the cartilage in your knee joints.

The Tautology Confusion.

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The Schmap!! Link

Ooh, get me. Not only am I now a published writer (the internet doesn't count) - as in last month's edition of CAR magazine, which you can still probably buy a copy of if you rush to WHSmith's in Thurso - but now my other prodigiously creative talents as a photographer have also been recognised as you can see from this link here, where my photo of Warwick Castle has been included in the clearly quite reputable 'Schmap!!' guide to the environs of Birmingham.

It can only be not very long before my capacious abilities are snapped up by the highest token in a vicious but good-natured bidding war. Seriously - all sealed offers accepted, grab me while I'm cheap.

The Burnett Deliverance.

See what I did there? I thought I had myself a post all lined up for this morning and I didn't. I'm like one of those news people who stands there looking vacant - "And now let's go to Sam Burnett for more details" - "Thanks, Sue, it er...was just a normal day for...er...residents of this sleepy village...before, er..."

I don't ever want that to happen to me. Mercifully I've never been in the position where my mind has gone totally blank, except for that one time when I was in a German literature exam at university all those years ago, but that was because I hadn't read any of the books, it wasn't because I was nervous.

But there's a useful default for the British to fall back on in times of hardship: the weather. Isn't the weather nice? I dropped my dear mum in town just half an hour ago so she could meet up with her lovely friend Chris for breakfast at IKEA and let me tell you, the weather was stunning in Coventry. And that's all I really have to say about that. "Thanks, Sue, the er...residents of this...er...mild-mannered midlands city were...er...just expecting another overcast day, but...er..."

The Moleskine Conundrum.

"That’s right. I was analogue, we all were. In the late 1970s if you held a kid too close to a magnet they would go blank and you’d have to start all over again."

Look, see? See? See what Cliff did? Damn, that's a funny guy. Read the whole post.

Done? I am also a stationery guy. Never stationary, though. I love pens, paper and all sorts of crap. I love writing letters, it connects me with a literary past - I feel like a man of words and letters and craftsmanship. In fact I don't merely write letters, I correspond. Even if my correspondence is done on bits of paper decorated with tulips I bought in a sale in a bookshop in Marburg.

I used to have a typewriter in my room too - writing letters to penfriends I'd found on this burgeoning, blossoming internet. My friend Ashley I've been corresponding with via paper and pixels since 1998 - I've known her longer than I've known most people - she's oddly one of my oldest, longest and newest friends. I used to start writing a book on the typewriter, because that's the sort of thing it felt like one should do with a typewriter. I arranged my desk how I thought a writer's should be - boxes to organise things, plenty of paper and utensils on hand.

There's such a lonesome glamour to writing with your stationery, there's a romance about jotting in your moleskine notepad that nothing else can hold a candle to. Although candles and romance do go nicely together. I had such an existential crisis when I first got my moleskine (I'm on my second now) - what to write in it? Words that were honourable enough to hold their own in a cahier costing nigh-on 13 quid? I soon realised that it wasn't the words that gave it all the sense of occasion, it was the sense of occasion. Celine Dion could fart the national anthem and it's still fairly likely to be world-class entertainment, because it's in her blood. If she was a 180-page leather-bound notebook, she'd be a moleskine. Celine Moleskine.

The Elevator Assignment.

The lift at work was broken on Sunday, so I got to stand in the freight lift for 90 minutes pushing the buttons and making sure that people didn't wander into the compactor by accident. It was a highly technical job, for which only my unique blend of qualifications, academic achievements and work experience were really suited. I stood by the door, waited for people to come into the lift and then I pressed the buttons. I make it sound easy - I made it look easy. But then that's the real gift in any difficult job - I make all of my work look effortless and breezy, whereas there is grit, stamina and a whole lot of brainwork going into my not insignificant efforts.

I was speaking to someone who trained as a hairdresser the other day (speaking to them the other day, this person spent years at hairdresser school) who told me the first rule about hairdressering is not to mention religion and politics whilst chatting to the customer. This person also told me their mother put her false nails right through the boil on an old lady's head, so I couldn't be quite sure of the provenance of this information, but it stood me in good stead for my lift banter. Rule 1: no religion or politics on the 15-second ride to the only floor people were allowed to go to. Luckily I was in the only part of this magnificent building, this cathedral of commerce, that had windows, so I could comment on the weather, sticking my head out of the lift every five minutes just to check nothing had changed.

Some happy chap, a colleague, came into the lift for a ride (clearly too lazy to take the staff stairs). "Oh, the lift. Are you enjoying yourself?"

"It's very technical," I said, waving at the number of buttons behind me.

"And boring too," he observed.

"It has its ups and downs," I noted wittily.

"...yes, literally!" he added superfluously a beat or two after it might have been funny. Yes, happy chap, literally. I thought that was a given when I said it - a double meaning, if you will. Normally this wouldn't have irritated me, but I had thought this up on the spot. Sometimes you come up with a good line and you wait ages to shoehorn it awkwardly into an exchange - if it flops, it flops, c'est la vie.

But this was a highly contextual and very funny moment. Ruined. I felt dejected as I went back up to the next floor to reload.

My secret to successful blogging.

There comes a moment in a blogger's life - it might just be one day, it might be a whole series of days. It might be a whole series of weeks, or months - when that blogger looks at his or her stats and realises that basically all of their visitors are themselves. It's like standing in the middle of a room on your own with a cup of tea and calling it a party. In many ways this is the lonely lot of the writer - one writes, it gets published in some form of another, and that is it. It's a conversation of sorts, a vague interaction, but no real interaction. There's no talking back, unless you work on a magazine's website in which case there will be 17 comments by home time but that's just three crazy people who have their cats or children as profile pictures arguing with each other.

And I'm not fishing for compliments here - I hate fish - just tellin' it like is, keeping it real. We tell ourselves we don't care, but we crave the attention. There's no other real reason I would write these things for a whole series of years - people are often incredulous when they talk to me about my blogging, or my twittering - why would I want to share things so publicly or open myself up to such ridicule or something and whatnot. I know people who blog and I know people who don't - it amazes me the people I've known who have started blogs, they've started twitterising and they just haven't had the stamina to get through it. They last weeks. And here's me, plodding along, talking to myself in my own party. With a cup of tea.

Why have I carried on whilst my compatriots have fallen by the wayside? Aside from my high level of basic talent and obvious appeal across a wide range of discerning, humourous consumers, it's pure ego. That and having a lot to say about nothing in particular. Or rather nothing to say about a lot in particular. And that's my secret to successful blogging.

The night.

It's late. Very late. It's the silence that hits you first, the way that things are amplified, the sound of your just being there much louder than it is when it isn't late. You notice the clock. It's not a tick, it's something louder, clackier, more urgent. A bossy cuckoo comes out every 30 minutes. He's loud too, there's an arrogance and pride he has in his time-telling abilities that means he doesn't tone it down when it gets this late, he's out, loud and proud. But only every 30 minutes.

I like the light at this time of night - it's softer, more absorbent. I'd like to say like a good toilet roll, but that would be an inappropriate parallel to draw at this moment in time. It would ruin the flow, the pathos. Then again, some things are too good not to put in, pathos be buggered. Things are yellower, oranger, at night. Indistinct, blurry around the edges. There's a blurry indistinctness in your mind as well - you don't feel as alert and ready to roll. There's a short period in the day, a narrow window, where you're like a ninja. But it's not when you've just got up, and it's not when you've been ready to go to bed for hours.

The traffic rumbles past, every car obnoxiously high-revving, every pedestrian yelling. You can hear someone snore upstairs, a rhythmic, acoustic catarrh. That clock still ticks. The pop bang of the radiators, a police helicopter that hovers over dodgy neighbourhoods, irritating but comforting. And there's your laptop, if you happen to be writing a blog post. There's a satisfaction in the tapping of keys, the internals glow with sound.

It's a good time, the night time. I've never been much of a morning person, and that's not to say I'm a night person, because I'm getting old and should really be in bed by half ten, but it's a romantic, pleasant time of day. People get busy in the mornings, but then they get busy in the evenings. People come alive when they finish what they've been forced to do, they become free, they morph into themselves. The night time is when our selves come out to play.

But sometimes they just like to sit and listen, to the silence, and the bloody cuckoos.

The Other Blog.

I don't want you to get upset, but there is another a blog in my life. In the interests of openness and transparency, I just want to let you know what I've been talking about over there. There's ALBOWIEB and there's EISE, two individual things, separate entities with different identities. There's also the occasional post on Carchat, the collaboration blog for car journalists, designers, students and enthusiasts across the world, which I'm simply honoured to be a part of. Not as honoured, of course, as having you read this right now. Makes me so proud.

My other blog was supposed to be about my course, about cars and all the dull stuff that entails that I wouldn't write on here. It wasn't great, I've hardly written anything on there since October, but I'm getting into my stride, figuring it all out. I've got a few things coming up that are quite fun, I've got my dissertation, I'm applying for a job - they should make for something interesting. We'll be OK.

Recently I wrote on Everything is somewhere else about whether Ferrari should get in trouble for their F1 car's livery, what with cigarette advertising being banned.

Yesterday I wondered why the Nissan Micra has to be so boring...

Today I'm wondering all people worry about in politics is potholes.

A panic attack.

Can you believe it's the 14th May already? We're basically halfway through the entire month already. We're basically halfway through the ENTIRE YEAR already. I think I'm coming down with a mid-year crisis as I hyperventilate my way through this post. I know I was just saying that ooh it's great it's May the year is just beginning the first few months are rubbish and that aren't they, but goodness. June? I'm not ready for June. Not ready at all. We're almost into the second half of a year that hasn't even really got going yet.

And I'm going to be 26 in a couple of weeks. Into the second half of a decade that hasn't really got going yet. My twenties? What have I got to show for that? Your life is like writing your name in the sand at the water's edge. It's fun, and then the bloody sea comes in and wipes it all away. My pre-life crisis is the undercurrent of my blogging exploits, it always has been, for the last five years I've been doing this. But five years? Should that crisis not have passed by now?

When I think of things I've done, they were fun, formative frolics, but the problem with life is that you don't know where you've been headed until you get there. You look back mid-journey and it's just a mess of half-finished projects, dead ends and misdirection. Don't get me wrong, that's part of the charm, but it's also part of the utter dismay. Please June, if you've got any heart, hold off for a load more weeks.

Fetching post.

I frequently get annoyed by poor choice of words on signage, bad grammar and all kinds of shocking abuse of the apostrophe. It doesn't take a lot of effort, you know? It makes me sic, as it were. Yesterday's three offenders were:

The ice cream van outside university that had 'Beware child' written on the back, as if it was some priestly benediction. It was in a typeface as well, not the shaky scrawl of a half-cut Polish entrepreneur.

The lunch place just up the road from the heinous ice cream vendor with a sandwich board outside commending their delicious 'paninies', and to add further insult to gross injury there were also 'panini's' for sale inside. This is the sort of thing that would have you dragged out the back and shot in Singapore. Did you know in Monaco it's illegal to walk around without your shirt on? In Dubai it's illegal for an unmarried couple to kiss in public. Children might crave structure and discipline, but so do adults. I say what this country needs is a little hand chopping. That would sort out your grammar soon enough, no?

The other thing was when I was downloading a picture sent to me by Carolan. I was on my phone, minding my own business - it was a pleasant surprise, getting an email from her - I wanted to enlarge the photo, which meant downloading it. 'Fetching attachment', said the display on my phone, alongside one of those ridiculous throbbing circles that shows you something is happening somewhere on your electronic device. 'Yes, it is rather', I thought to myself.

It's not that I'm a grammar nazi - a mild fascist at worst perhaps - because I do understand that not everyone has great standards spelling, but when you put yourself out there, have a product with your name (probably spelt wrong) on it, you have to have higher standards. Advertising panini's in your shop makes me think that it comes with a free side salad and a bad dose of the shits, I'm not coming in the door. It's odd that even though we share a common language with people across the globe we can still not have a clue what's really being said - fetching attachment? It drives me mad thinking about it. It's not like going out to get some milk, I'm looking at it, it's there - nothing in my phone has to pop out for ten minutes whilst it finds the rest of my emails. But clearly wherever my phone was put together (America, I'm looking at you) that is a proper expression.

I think about language and I think about the marvellously awful Celine Dion and Luciano Pavarotti duet 'I hate you then I love you'. And yes, that is about as good as it sounds.

Even more David Cameron poster fun.

I am a niche superstar.

This morning, at a time veering dangerously towards one o'clock, saw the third installment in my new but mercifully brief career as a political talking head on Christian radio. It does seem on the surface to be a slightly odd situation, but please let's suspend disbelief and accept that there might be good reason for me to be talking about the implications of a Lib Dem coalition on a late night phone-in, because the funny thing right now is not that I was on there (which is mildly funny in itself, but quite a short post).

Besides, I've always been a firm subscriber of the truism that those can, are usually busy. This is how I have got ahead in life, by never being busy when everyone else is.

Anyway - there I am, listening away and trying to maintain concentration, because I know that the moment I drift away and start fixating on how big my ears are in the graduation photo my mum has put on the living room wall (as I am wont to do when in the living room on my own and the television is off) the presenter will charge at me with some obscure point made by Bruce from Bexhill and I shall blither. There I am, listening away - and the presenter reads out a text message.

"'Why are we only talking about politics? It has me reaching for the off button.' Matthew in Devon, why haven't you turned the radio off?"

"I have - I'm on my mobile, it's quite a weak signal."

I started to guffaw, but the professional inside of me warned the phone was still live. I am a consummate media performer - I stifle my chuckles and decide to blog about it instead.

Couch politicos.

If there's one phrase that really gets my goat, it's someone prefacing what they're about to say with 'I'm not being funny but...'. It usually means that they are about to say something that is anything but funny. It usually means that they think they are funny but they really aren't. I mean, we British are nothing if not subtle. If you have to flag up whatever you're about to say, then clearly you haven't mastered the art yet. 'I'm not being witty, but...'

It's like when cars were first invented and you had to have some bloke go ahead of you dressed like a piece of fruit, or somesuch. When vehicles were hitting heady speeds of several miles an hour you needed an off-duty horseman of the apocalypse to let people know.

This was basically my sole thought yesterday, before I was rudely vegetablised by political events. I coined a phrase (I know it's louche to say to, but I want credit when the whole world starts using it) the other day - couch politico - which is basically all the folks like me who are stuck to the sofa watching rolling 24-hour news channels at the moment.

And goodness, I'm constantly breathless. I don't think any part of my body is getting adequate oxygen. After a night's sleep and some television-off detox I think I might even be able to think about something again.

No news would be great news.

Election, blah blah blah, hung parliament, blah blah blah. I mean, that's the political commentary out of the way - what I want to know is, what happens to the worms? Everyone had worms out during the election, trained to jump this way and that and show how well the parties were doing. No-one cares about the worms now. Who has use for worms? Perhaps they could be deployed in wider society to give a running wiggling display of how the service is in your local chip shop, or the driving standards on the bus you're riding on. These initiatives would be a valuable use of the worms' skills and would stop them having their benefits taken off them by the Tories in two weeks when they haven't found jobs.

It's all a bit confusing, all this horse play. You know - you think you've played your part in the process, you've been interested in politics for all this time and then there's this drawn-out four weeks of campaigning and electionising, bombardment with leaflets and a battle of the wills. You finally get to the point where you can stick your paper in the box and tell them all to sod off...and then this. The work is never-ending - I simply don't have the energy to sustain all this interest and keeping up with the 24-hour news, you know. I'm knackered enough as it is just having stayed up all election night watching the results come in - I've got friends working in the political sphere and they must be half dead by now.

My plea is simple - sort it out, chaps.

Some excitement.

It's been fun, having an exciting week. Seriously. Last week was so dull the highlight was pulling a hair out of my arm that had been growing under the skin. I kid you not, it was a centimetre and a half long. My life is that terrible at the moment. I am reading the Bourne Identity at the moment, I suppose that has amused me enough. But this week. Ah, this week. A new month, a general election, spending half a day with a celebrity (nay, a legend) - this week has been much more fun.

Because it's May, obvs. New month, new rules. But today (just in case you hadn't noticed) is the election. I like this no man's land day - the padding between what has gone and what will be. We don't know what the future will hold but we have sealed our fates. Would we vote differently knowing how everyone else had? Maybe we should get running totals, that would surely have an impact. What we've got is like a sealed bid auction - I have no idea whether my vote is a waste of effort or not.

As I write I am agonising over when I should go to the ballot box. Sooner, or later? There's soonest and latest as well. I could get up early and go at 7am, I could just go during the day like a normal person, or I could go at five minutes to 10pm. I suspect there will be a queue of slightly mental people at 7am, and I like the idea that my vote could seal the deal at the end of the day.

It's neither here nor there at the end of the day - my constituency is not in the air. But the results...there's the fun.

There follows a party political broadcast by a Liberal Democrat.

My fellow Americans. We face in front of us, just there, an historic opportunity the likes of which history has never seen before and will in all likelihood not see for at least another four years. The opportunity for real, and lasting change. By which we mean three years of lasting change and then it'll all go quiet ahead of the next election.

I say to you, fellow peoples of this fair isle (but only if you're voting, otherwise you can just skip along now sonny) - embrace this opportunity for change. Don't vote for small change and don't vote for chump change. Vote for the best kind of change - not swapping a pound coin for a bag of 2ps at the seaside, no, the change offered by the Liberal Democrats. Gone are the sandals and old people - this is a party of coolness, young people's issues and Floella Benjamin. This is the party that makes it alright to wear yellow again, unless the weather is hot, in which case it's not advisable because it attracts the flies.

This is the party of fairness - and by fairness we mean shifting policies so that they benefit poor people instead of rich people. Sure, we all think we're going to be rich one day, but we're poor now. Poor in spirit, in intellectualastity and poor in pocket. Vote the party that will give you £10,000 before it sticks its grubby governmental hands in your wallet and starts helping itself. The craziest thing about these common sense ideas is that no-one has thought of them before - why should someone working 25 hours a week on minimum wage even be paying tax?

The reason that none of the other parties has ever thought of this before is because they all copy the Liberal Democrats. Nobody reports all of their great little ideas, so they are ripe for stealing. One important manifesto commitment is that all new political party pledges be put through the plagiarism software that millions of students subject themselves to every time they submit an essay. And in these straitened times of recession and famine, why not cut out the middlemen completely? Voting the Liberal Democrats into government would cut millions of pounds of taxpayer money being spent on paying staff to change the words around on Liberal Democrat policies to make them sound more conservativistic or labourish.

And finally, my favoured Britizens, when you come to cast your vote - why not think of the looks on their happy little faces when Liberal Democrat MPs wake up on Friday morning to find they have the keys to Whitehall departments waiting for them? When you come to vote on Thursday, the joy of this election is that anything goes - and everything must go. If it all goes mammaries up in a few months we can blame it all on the zeitgeist and send the Tories in to do whatever it is they've been in training to do since they were all children.

But shove must come to push, and at moments like this the saying goes that it's better the devil you haven't given a try yet. Vote Liberal Democrat on Thursday May 6th.

God bless you all, and God bless the United Kingdoms of Britainshire.

It May be.

So May, eh? I'm glad that's here. I don't think the first few months of the year count, you're warming up your tyres, you're just getting going. May is the real start of the year - the chill is out of your bones and you feel like you've got to grips with things. You can write the date and be reasonably sure that you'll get the right year. That's progress.

For however many reasons, I really don't like winter. I'm not a fan of the dark and the cold - some people are, and that's nice, because we'll always need folks to grit the streets or present the news when it snows a lot. I like wearing coats and scarves and drinking hot drinks, but these are things I am perfectly happy to do indoors.

No - this is where 2010 really gets going. It's why we have a bank holiday just because it's the first Monday in May, a tacit recognition of all the crap months we've had to go through to get here. Knowing my luck the snow will come back next week, but did you hear that just then? That was a starting pistol.

I drive 90 minutes for dinner.

A week last Friday I went to London for dinner. That's right - for dinner. I was meeting up with some of my friends from my time last year, old chums, folks I've not seen for almost a year since I swept out of our final dinner to sprint across central London and catch my train out of Dodge with 40 seconds to spare. Apparently Jayne cried in the toilets, bless her, but not just because I'd gone. Lovely toilets though, dinner was in a London club, so there were little towels and small bins to toss them into when you were done dabbing your doigts dry.

All irrelevant details, but part of the sugary frosting on my delicious cake, as it were. I went to London for dinner. It was north London, so there was no dicing with Subarus full of gang members or trying to dodge tramps as I drove through Lambeth. In fact north London was a much leafier kettle of fish - fancier, more accessible. As you tipple off the end of the M1 you're in green suburbanite country, nice houses with on-road parking, semis that would set me back a lottery win and a light mortgage.

I was trying hard to look cool as I glided along in my turquoise Volvo, cursing my low-slung driving position as I stared up the exhausts of oversized 4x4s. I was firmly in the territory of luvvies, yummies and monies. I swear Lord Winston soaked me with his hosepipe as I drove through Crouch End and on my way down to Finsbury Park. Simon Pegg lives round the corner. My eyes were on another Simon, as I passed a train station. Four-eyed funnyman (I'm not being racist, it's alliteration) Simon Bird off the Inbetweeners was chatting to some thickset tall man and carrying a folding bike. I doubted my eyes at first, because I was creeping about in heavy traffic, and people always look different when they're not on the telly. Bigger, perhaps.

But he spoke, and my ears did not deceive me. I grabbed my phone, to take a picture:

Alas, all you can see is the top of the fat bloke's head. Still, dinner was lovely.

An outstretched hand.

I thought I would take the opportunity of a quick break at work to say hello. I know I've not been blogging a lot (at all) in the last week or two, but it really gripes my ass when people moan that you've never been in touch, because it takes two people not to communicate.

There are at least 300 million people in North America I never email and they don't complain. It's like that thing that you only know someone's staring at you if you're staring back at them. I know some people who treat it like a competition, not talking to you.

Well, you know? Sometimes people are just busy. Months will pass and I don't realise. You're reading a book on the train and you're not paying attention to the cows passing the window - but it doesn't make you a bad person, it's just the way things are. I bet the cows don't take it personally.

But I've got some things to say - before I didn't and now I have. I don't like it when I have nothing to say, because it makes me feel like less than I am - I always have something to say. I'll save those things though - never say something in one post where three will do. And back to work.