Spot the error

As I've been home a lot lately, I've been watching daytime telly and been targeted by the advertisers there. Seemingly, they are more interested in having my cash than in proofing their own adverts.

For a while I've been watching one of those no-win no-fee compensation company adverts and wondering what was wrong with it. The guy reading the script relates how:

"There were a load of kids at the bus stop. I had slowed down but maybe he couldn't see em. He just backed out..."

Now, I may be wrong, but surely the actor reading the script was meant to say:

"There were a load of kids at the bus stop. I had slowed down but maybe he couldn't see me. He just backed out..."

No-one noticed a typo in the script, do you think...!

Have a listen yourself:



Finally Ultralase, a company which specialises in laser eye surgery. The lady doing the voiceover clearly mentions Irish recognition technology. Read that again.

Here's the ad... the sound is a small bit muffled, but on TV it's Irish recognition technology all the way. Could be useful for Immigration, I suppose.


Jonathan Edwards has laser eye surgery with Ultralase @ Yahoo! Video

Why the cat smells marmalade on my leg

I've a head-cold.
Herself has a dicky shoulder.
The weather has been Arctic cold.
This morning Herself knocked over one of our small, cheap, glass salt cellars and broke it into pieces. Bad luck was definitely supposed to follow.
As I'd been promising Herself we'd get one, we bought a small, flat-screen telly for the kitchen today and I couldn't get the thing to tune in until I disconnected all the cables from the grown-up telly and DVD and video player and the digital box and the PC and possibly the service for the whole road. But it tuned in, eventually.
In the meantime, Herself did everything possible to find jobs that would aggravate her sore shoulder.
"Aaargh!" She shouted from upstairs.
"What's wrong?"
"I'm washing the bathroom floor."
I watched the snow on the screen and pressed another button.
"Use the other arm," I said.
There were barely audible murmurings from somewhere upstairs.
There was a twanging, crashing noise from the landing.
"What was that?" I shouted up, as a fuzzy Irish rugby team made heavy work of defeating burly, blurry-blue Italians.
"Clothes horse," came the reply. "I'm putting clothes on the bannisters to dry."
"Use the other arm," I said. "By the way... Did you tell the doctor about that shoulder?"
"No."
"I see."
I fiddled with coaxial cable and started tacking staples into the side of the door saddle. The vacuum cleaner started up somewhere behind me.
"Aaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaa-aargh!"
I stopped tapping, momentarily.
"What is it?"
"My shoulder! I can't finish the hoovering! It hurts!"
"Leave the hoovering then!"
"I can't!"
"Why not?"
"Because it's Saturday. I have to have the house clean on Saturday."
"Okay, I'll finish the hoovering later."
I tapped in some more staples, crawling about on the tiled floor, backing into the dining room and bumping against chairs and one hot radiator.
I hear another "Aaaargh!"
"What....?"
"I'm mopping the living room floor. The bucket is heavy and hurts my shoulder when I pick it up!"
"Use the other hand to pick it up then."
Sweat is dripping onto the floor as I pull cable along behind the radiator, twist it in behind the computer desk and twiddle it under the dining room door into the living room and the TV signal outlet box.
I say:
"Have you taken any anti-inflammatories?"
"No."
I plug in the plug and the picture tunes in on Herself's new early-morning putting-on-makeup-in-the-kitchen piece of telly technology.
I say:
"It's working."
Herself meets me in the kitchen and reaching for a glass of lemonade with her right hand -- the one that is attached to the arm that is swinging on the dodgy shoulder -- she knocks it all over the counter. She says something nasty and starts mopping up the spill.
I pass her the rolling pin. She's going to make a meat pie for dinner if it kills us both.
Opening a cupboard (with her right hand, the one that has the dodgy shoulder) she ducks as a half pot of marmalade sails out and falls to its death on the floor tiles below. Apart from the bits of glass glued together by the marmalade, the rest of it goes into a hundred little pieces that scatter all over the place. A large wodge of peel sticks to the side of my leg. We stand looking at it as it slowly slides down the cuff of my trousers, slithers down my boot and finally comes to rest.
"You know," I say. "It's been that kind of day, hasn't it?"
"Yes," she says, through gritted teeth.
Pastry gets a pounding with the occasional accompaniment of a loud
"Aaargh!"

Marty Whelan's Eurovision comments

Master of commentary, RTE's Marty Whelan, starts the proceedings in Helsinki with the comment:

"Pour more water on me stones, missus."

Hours later, he ends with:

"We never came in this position before."

There isn't really more I can add.

How could you dislike Eurovision when songs like this one win?

I'm looking forward to the harder rock that is Eurovision 2007. Well, not exactly hard rock. Kind of a little tougher than talcum perhaps. I've seen some of the entries.... BUT! Lordi won in 2006, so the general trend in '07 is towards a more rock 'n' roll sound, if not a metal approach. I've been humming Hard Rock Hallelujah all day.

The Irish entry this year is a regrettable one. As Mr Gump said: "That's all I want to say about that."

For our non-Euro visitors, the Eurovision song contest is held annually in Europe where original (and occasionally some suspiciously non-original) songs are performed by representatives of most of the countries of Europe and some of the near east. The original idea was to foster peace and harmony. The event is televised in the participating countries and viewers vote by telephone. Viewers cannot vote for their own country's entry.

Songs tend to be light pop or worthy folk in character. The competition is generally considered to be old-fashioned, staid, and unwatchable. Secretly it has one of the biggest television audiences of the year. Somehow we always seem to be "just flicking through channels" and hit on the programme. The song by Lordi, in the video, above, won in 2006, to the surprise of quite a few people. As the winners, Finland gets to host the programme in 2007.

The competition has become so big in recent years that not all countries eligible to perform are allowed to automatically qualify and effectively two contests exist, the first a few days before the final being a kind of semi-final for countries who scored lower in the ranks in the previous competition. Although politics are barred from the event, some songs seem to have some political messages this year. Also voting for neighbouring countries and political partners is rife and makes the task of smaller countries all the more difficult.

The 2007 event final takes place this Saturday night, 12th May.