Hey, one of the doggies I liked won runner-up for Best in Show at Crufts. Way to go, “Penliath Shooting Star.”

UK Survivor: Man, it’s starting to get ugly. Helang, who last episode suffered a team-dividing tie vote at Tribal Council, continued their downward slide. Ular, on the other hand, are bonding as a team and look to be unstoppable. The highlights of the third episode:

• The lines are pretty clearly drawn in Helang. It’s the three “old” members (Andy, Jayne, and James) versus the three “younger” members (Adrian, Charlotte, and Uzma), with Simon riding the fence and playing up to both groups. They all play nicey-nice when they’re together, but as soon as they separate they start slagging each other off. Personally, I’m rooting for the old folks. Charlotte and her beeatches just really get on my nerves.
• The reward challenge involved five members of each team balancing on a log and trying to spell out words with letters on the T-shirts they were wearing. Ular was much better at it, and they won four tins of baked beans and equipment to spear fish. As Mick noted afterwards of Helang, “They seem to have lost…their leader. They looked totally shot away.”
• Back at Helang, I thought I noticed a funny glance between Charlotte and Adrian. And when I checked the BBC site this morning, surprise! They were having an extra-marital affair! And you thought that Colleen and Greg thing was exciting. We actually have people goin’ at it in the shelter!
• The immunity challenge was even more embarrassing for Helang. The teams had to dive down into the sea and carry a heavy chest all the way up to the beach. Helang was still near the beginning when Ular set their trunk down at the finish line.
• On Tribal Council day, Simon horrified some of the squeamish members of Helang (Charlotte and Uzma, again) by drowning some rats he caught. Then he cooked ’em and ate ’em. Hey, go Simon. Do whatcha need to do.
• Charlotte revealed that she, Uzma, and Adrian have a voting alliance. They don’t say who they’re going to vote off, but it’s pretty obvious that Jayne’s in their sights.
• At Tribal Council, the most amazing thing happens. After Charlotte and Adrian have voted for Jayne, Uzma gets up and votes for James. I turned to Snookums: “WHAT? I thought they had an alliance? Is she just so dumb that she messed up the names?” To which he answered, “I think she’s been spending too much time sniffing the kerolene.” HA!
• So anyway, Uzma’s gone. She seemed pretty happy about it, though. I thought her post-partum BBC article was pretty hilarious. She predicts that Charlotte is going to win it all. Uh-huh. Uzma, just because Charlotte was the pretty, popular girl who deigned to hang out with you, that doesn’t mean everybody else is in love with her too. She wouldn’t last one Tribal Council with the members of Ular. Uzma also claims that she was voted out because of her aversion to eating the rats. As opposed to, say, her complete and utter uselessness. Whatever.

Thursday should be pretty interesting. Helang need to get their collective ass in gear or they’re going to be in poor shape for the tribal merger. One more defeat and stick a fork in ’em, they’re done.

Warning over coloured shades. And here I thought the only problem was that made you look like a wanker.

Open UK Apple Stores now, demand 66% of users. Count me in!

Congratulations to my sister, who got married this weekend… to Pete Sampras.
 
(Seriously, go to her site. That’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.)

I’ve been playing my new album while blogging. Just now I thought to myself, “I didn’t know Pearl Jam had a song on here!” But when I checked the list, it was Creed. *sigh* What clones. Reminds me of when the first Stone Temple Pilots album came out and my ex- called them “Stone Temple Vedder Pellets.” On a positive note, though, I’ve been rocking out to Wheatus’s “Teenage Dirtbag”. How did I miss this song? It rules.

I’ve got two tickets to Iron Maiden, baby…

Toploader also had me dancin’ (in the moonlight). My image of them as a band straight out of the 70’s isn’t helped, though, by the fact that everytime I see them on telly I think to myself: “When did Hyde from ‘That Seventies Show’ get a rock band?”

New Poll: Ahh, there’s nothing better than a good weblog scandal. How were you affected when the truth about Kaycee came out?
 
Results from the old poll: R.E.M. won by a landslide! It was, like, 100 to 7. What, you don’t believe me? Too bad! My site, my call. Live with it.

I totally forgot that Crufts was this weekend! I just caught some of the final rounds while waiting for my stuffed pepper to finish roasting (yum). In case the name escapes you, Crufts is the “World’s Greatest Dog Show” (their words). If you’ve seen “Best in Show“, you know what I’m talking about. They take it so seriously! It’s awesome to watch, if only for the unintentional hilarity of it all. The best part, of course, are the names of the dogs. I jotted down a few from the “Pastoral Breed Final” I just saw. (Those are the dogs that originally herded animals, so it’s like German shepherds and border collies and stuff.) A selection:

• “Penliath Shooting Star”
• “Otterswish Bernadette”
• “Zottel’s You Don’t Fool Me”
• “Freelancer Frosty Moon Over Corydon”
• “Tamarch Maggie May of Tolorock”

Seriously! You can’t make stuff like that up. Too insane.

Adventures in Shopping
I don’t even know where to begin. Okay, yes I do. This morning my plans for the day were: go shopping and buy some more shorts/t-shirts for our trip next week (for some reason I’ve got, like, NO summer clothes anymore), pick up this album I’ve been wanting, go to the gym, and pick up some food for dinner. Simple.
 
So on my way into Hammersmith, walking through the park, I was thinking about the possibility of my sister coming to live in London and all the BUNACers that I knew when I first came over. Most have gone home to the States, but there are a couple that might still be floating around. I suddenly thought of this Canadian guy Adam that I had last seen *literally* over a year ago. “I wonder what he’s up to,” I thought. “Too bad I don’t have his number or even his last name.”
 
So I do my shopping. Some observations:

• Apparently nobody’s going to be wearing shorts this summer. Seriously, I had to search just to find some to try on, and they were all butt ugly. Apparently the fashion gods have decreed that it’s going to be a very sweaty summer.
• Okay, men, I know you call them “3/4 length trousers”, but really, who are you kidding? They’re capri pants. Yeah, I wear ’em, but at least I call ’em by the right name.
• I’m getting really, really tired of this Madonna-USA-glittery-acidwash-rodeo girl look that’s taken over all the shops.

Okay, ranting aside, I did manage to pick up some cool stuff. So I stopped off at one last shop, Primark, before heading to the gym. Primark is kinda like Filene’s Basement or something. Everything’s £4 and it looks like it was just taken off the delivery truck. I found this kickass pink T-shirt that says “goddess” on it that I had to have. When I went to pay for it, though, I suddenly realized that all my other shopping bags were gone. I ran all over the store, which was packed, frantically checking everywhere I had been. I finally went to the customer service desk, where (THANK GOD!) somebody had turned them in. I guess I left them in the changing room. Bless the honest English.
 
So I left Primark thinking that I should get to the gym before anything else weird happened. I started off down King Street, and immediately I noticed that a guy walking in the opposite direction looked an awful lot like my friend Adam I mentioned before. I literally did a bigtime double-take and then flagged him down. It was him! I know it sounds stupid, but the sheer coincidence of it completely blows me away. And not only did I randomly run into him, he lives clear on the other side of London and was only in Hammersmith to visit friends. So, yeah, it’s a city of, like, six million people or whatever, and I randomly run into someone I haven’t seen in a year five hours after thinking about them. And if I hadn’t lost my bags in Primark, I wouldn’t have passed him on the sidewalk. PSYCHIC, I TELL YOU! PSYCHIC!
 
Anyway, that’s my adventure. I just had to tell somebody.

John – it’s a hoax. I saw this story when it first appeared… on April 1st. (The date on the left is just the current date.)