From the Orient

Manchester Derby (3-1 to United) - Choice chanting from the United fans; “Citey are back! Citey are back!”, “Keegan must stay” and “There’s only one Ronaldo”. Did I mention how good Scholes is (must not jinx by putting in Fantasy team)? Wright-Philips looked the only interested Citey player. And Seaman did some good saves, but looked very slow.

Chelski 1 - 2 Bolton - A home loss to Bolton, a runner-up does not make. Unfortunately, this is only a blip, and Man United have lost at home to Bolton in the past. It must be interesting being a Bolton fan. Beating and drawing against the top teams, yet struggling at other times.

Liverpool 1 - 2 Southampton - Liverpool are a team in decline.

Boro 0 - 0 Charlton - Danny Mills; thug or clumsy? Both, probably.

Porstmouth 1 - 2 Everion - Wayne Rooney; wonderkid or thug? You walk in cricket, not football. Strange incident that one. I’m suprised how low Everton are this season, as I rate Moyles.

Newcastle 4-0 Tottenham - Two wonder goals from Robert. That’s his lot for the season then. Newcastle are coming out of their usual start of season gloom. A friend at work is adamant that Butt and Larrsen have signed for them already.

Leicester 20-2 Birmingham - What was Ian Walker thinking about? The penalty area was behind you. Thanks to ITV, I only saw brief highlights for what looked an interesting game. 2-0 to Birmingham. No idea why I’ve gifted Leicester two goals. Maybe I was counting the sendings off (but that was three)

I didn’t see any of the Sunday games, so can’t really comment on them, but it looks like Wolves are going to be the new Stoke City (who I currently hate cos they stuffed Reading 3-0 at the weekend).

There’s Christmas and then there’s Christmas. Do not confuse the two.

Firstly, there is the Christmas for children. It’s the Christmas from your childhood, the excitement, the fantasy, the magic and the delight. It’s also the Christmas that the parents of young children enjoy. You get a second chance for the magic of Christmas to shine, through looking at your children. Of course, parts of it you have to pay for this time, but some of it is still free. Last year we went to a nativity play, on a farm, in a barn with donkeys and everything.

And then there is the adult Christmas. Consumerism, the shopping, the tack, the crap Christmas versions of popular TV programs, Christmas songs (with a few exceptions; Fairy Tale of New York being one), and the carol singers.

Tonight I made the mistake and answered the knock on my front door. I was confronted by three young men, singing half a verse of some tuneless carol song that I couldn’t even recognise. I assumed they wanted some sort of monetary recompense for their efforts. I paid them some money because I am craven. Because three years ago, I laughed in the face of similar looking young men attempting to sing on my doorstep and shut the door on the without giving them a penny. I realised later that they didn’t take too kindly to my reaction and throw a milk bottle at my window. Luckily, only the bottle smashed.

It’s worse than Halloween for two reasons. Firstly, Halloween is only one night and you simply just refuse to answer the door for that night only. With carol singers, you can be aurally assaulted any time from December onwards. Secondly, with Halloween, you can simply give then sweets (or in my wife’s case, oranges) safe in the knowledge that they can’t really demand money instead. (You can also ask for a trick, jokingly, but this is a dangerous gambit because they might not have a sense of humour).

I don’t have a problem with organised “who are giving the money to charity and actually we can sing and know quite a few carols” events. We have an organised event down our street every year (I think it is the Rotary club) when the carol singers flank Father Christmas on a sleigh (or trailer as it is sometimes called). They don’t knock on doors, but you hear them coming and take the children out. Santa gives out presents to all the children, optionally in exchange for cash for their charity.

But, blokes with a bit of tinsel round their necks wanting money so they can go down the pub and do some underage drinking, please note, Santa is watching you and he is not pleased. When you complain that he didn’t get you your Playstation 2, I’ll be laughing at you. And you won’t even know, so you can’t come round and throw anything at my windows.

When you have children, christmas is so much more exciting.

I can’t wait to see him in this. I really debated with myself whether to get the children one each, but in the end one was expensive enough.

Newspaper cuttings is what I’m going to call my linklog/blogmark after the similarity is pointed out to me.

bq. It seems like blogging here is a lot like the newspaper clipping thing they do, but I do it all the time and for anyone that finds this site, where their work is for an audience of one (me).

My mother-in-law sends my wife newspaper cuttings about twice a week (usually from the Daily Mail and usually totally crud) and I take the piss mercilessly. I now feel mortified to realise that I’m doing more or less the same thing.

Gert took some excellent photos of the World Cup Winners.

Note to self: restart link’o'lists now.

If you have thought that closing and moving tabs in “Firebird (the best thing since sliced bread)”:http://texturizer.net/firebird/ has gotten slower recently, and you have “Tabbrowser Extensions (the best extension since sliced bread)”:http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensions.html.en installed, you may want to look at the size of a file called tabextensions.rdf in your profile directory.

Since installing 0.7 this had grown to a wopping 4Mb and presumably the extension accessed this file every time it did something related to a tab. It was full of tabbing history. I’ve told TBE to not save the history on closure ( Tabbrowser Extensions > General > Undo Close Tab > “Save the history of “Recent Closed Tabs” on exit browser” ) and reduced the item history. You have do disable the entension, delete (or rename) tabextensions.rdf, then reinstall the extension.

The file size is a now minute 4k, and closing tabs is so blazingly fast, I wonder how I hadn’t noticed the problem until this week.