OERO GOODNESS

I've been looking at the stats for my blog, and was surprised to see that the most viewed blog post ever was the one about getting Oreos for Christmas 2009 (a whopping 908 page views).

Really?

I don't claim to be the world's greatest wordsmith, but I thought I'd written more poignant and heartwarming stuff in other posts.

Maybe it was the combination of Christmas and Oreo that flagged it up in people's Google searches. Maybe the suits at Nabisco/Kraft have people tracking every Oreo mention that comes up on the web. Maybe it was pure fluke.

Either way, I've discovered what keeps my readership happy. If they want blogs about Oreos, then so be it. Who am I to question the masses?

So, as I get my thinking cap on and think about what Oreo articles I could write, here's a cheesy 1980s US TV ad for an Oreo variant that proved too unhealthy - even for Americans. Enjoy!

Birthday Card Fun

Here are the pick of the funniest birthday cards I got this year...

NUMBER PLATE FOR FERTILITY DOCTORS

This car was parked outside the fertility clinic we are currently attending.

I'm not joking.

You'd think, though, that there would be better options for a personalized plate such as: SP3RM, 5PERM, F3RT1LE or ZYG0TE. Maybe they were already taken by the other BMW-driving fertility consultants and S4ERM was the last one left...

GREAT COMPANY NAMES No. 347

This sure did make me chuckle when I saw it.

Separate hot and cold taps is a stupid idea

This was once pointed out to me by a bunch of foreign students who were on an 'orientation' training weekend that I was teaching at. They couldn't understand why we had separate cold and hot water taps. Surely, they argued, you don't want either your water scalding hot or freezing – you want it somewhere in the middle.

They had mixer taps everywhere on the continent, apparently, which seemed to make perfect sense. Perhaps it's a hangover from our colonial past, or some weird puritan approach to water taken by whoever was in charge of the water board back in the 1950s. Or perhaps we never actually thought about mixing hot and cold together.

Of course, I've have actually seen mixer taps in Britain. They aren't exactly new – but it's surprising how much we still rely on the old way of doing things.

Above is a picture of the sink in our local library.

It was refurbished about three years ago, which just shows how modern and forward thinking our councils really are...