‘Mirrackullous Chai-neese Chork’- N.B. Post contains strategic misspellings

Tango’s remade that balls-bouncing-down-a-San-Francisco-street ad with fruit. In Swansea no less, and if the website mentioned below isn’t some kind of viral marketing scam, then they’re more upset about it than the usual goings on round Town Hill, like joy-riding, drug-dealing and armed assaults…

The Community At Large » Tango Bravia Commercial

Ok after reading this paragraph the Swansea site’s a hoax:

Meetings

Our next meeting will be happening on Sunday, April 9.

The main topic will be the launch of the Swansea North Yodelling Club. We’ll be taking on our friends from our twin city Güttstag Nord, Austria. We hope this is the start of an annual event celebrating two nations with great choral heritage.

We hope to see-oo-ee-oo-ee-ooooo all there!

Everyone is welcome to come. If you’d like to attend a meeting but haven’t done so before please read the Contact Us section of our site to find out how to get to St. Martha’s Parish and what’s expected of those who want to participate.

Why not learn how to yodel before you come?

I’ve just realised all my entries are looking very much the same as the ones exactly a year ago. This time last year I rang me nanny to wish her a happy St David’s Day. Can’t do that this year cos of the prohibitively expensive international calling rate. So mum, dad or bethan, could you pass on my nationalistic wishes, thanks. I spoke to nanny (and grandma) on Skype on Sunday though, so that’s a start. With the whole webcam/ video conferencing thing no less. The average age of a skype user definitely peaked that day…

The picture is me in me (old) manu chau t-shirt and goes in tandem with my cars that resemble where they’re parked Flickr set. Brits whose clothes resemble where they’re slouched…

Sita’s off to Tequila this avo and Arandas on Friday. I thought I’d be able to meet up somewhere with the tour but apparently not. She’s strangely apprehensive about the whole thing. Personally I’d love to do a 4 day tequila tasting but i suppose we’re just different in that regard… what else? erm…

Oh yeah, Pat’s become a new slave owner of a beautiful dog, Devlin. There’s some photos round K’s website. He looks like a character. Get him on Dogster and we’ll corral him with Atticus… or at least give him a bone. 🙂

Sorry to keep posting about BASTARD national organisations, but I really have to vent somewhere. Feel free to skip to the happy-go-lucky post below about our holiday snaps from France last year rather than this lengthy diatribe…

So we got a decent tax refund this year two days ago. Unfortunately today we received a bill from the auditors for more than that amount for the year before. We went to H & R block- a national tax preparation franchise where we go and pay over the odds for tax stuff specifically to avoid all this crap. Last year I’d done a few web design projects so it wasn’t a straightforward joint filing for both our jobs but a fully-fledged small business affair. We spent over an hour itemising purchases like cameras, motherboards, software, scanners, even petrol and travel expenses to file. At the end of it we still had to pay a grand or so to keep the US in missiles and border patrols. Anyway. Today’s letter says we didn’t declare our earnings for the business. So after unearthing our documents from last year from the bowels of the garage we went over the forms we sent in through H&R and there is no record whatsoever of all this stuff we did. Even the W2s aren’t there. So we might end up having to pay $1300 dollars extra (which we can ill afford) unless Watsonville office can find all our stuff that they lost.

I’m extremely pissed off with all this. They’d better ring us up with news that they’re sorry, they’ve found all the forms they never sent, they’ll pay whatever they need to because of their gross incompetence. I’m a bit doubtful though, because we have no evidence whatsoever that we went through all this last March. It seems like the woman who prepared our forms doesn’t even work there anymore, and we don’t have her name because she put Richard someone or other on the forms. Arrgghhh. Repito, Arrgghhh.

Thanks for bearing with me… have a link to CuteOverload for fluffy animals as an antidote to the venom contained herein…

And possibly caffeine too… Anyroad, so as I mention above I didn’t sleep well last night again, whether it was Scrabble on the PDA whilst I half watched Clear and Present Danger or the afternoon coffee in Plaza Terranova or the book I’m reading that I don’t want to like but actually do, who knows? All I know is that after waking up with a mosquito in my ear far too many times I stumbled into the bathroom sprayed my head with repellent, shoved some earplugs in and put my head under the pillow and the persistant little bugger still kept coming at me. Enough of that… anyroad the lack of sleep and relative inaction today led me to to something to wake myself up a bit and that means getting the gee-tar out. I was recording stuff in Audacity then overdubbing and I thought, sod it, i’ll video it and sing and everything, and, though I’m regretting this already, here’s me YouTubed doing my battleworn rendition of Jarabe de Palo’s La Flaca, all about some slim young lady who boozes it up in La Habana without putting on the pounds… All mistakes in lyrics, pronunciation, chords and general appearence are entirely deliberate…

Available for weddings, quinceaeras, bah-mitvahs, etc… I’m here all week, folks…

Via Newark…

I finally managed a new minor film review (in the sidebar if you’re using a decent browser), and I’m trying to get back into my blogging groove, but I’ve got a fair bit of “chamba” on at the minute- translating movie scripts, site updates and getting my head around a WordPress e-commerce site.

This is also a test post to see if I can get a LightBox plug in going. Sorry if it screws up the RSS feed as I might need to keep editing this entry.

Yay, it appears to work. Click on John Craven to see another John in a balloon. Make sure the entire page has loaded first mind for the full ajaxy fun.