Joanne Mallon's Opposable Thumbs

Normal for Brighton

The thing I really like about living in Brighton is that there is often something a bit odd and unexpected around every corner.

Like a man on stilts going into a small house; the school newsletter having an iPad edition; a unicycle parked up outside the library;  a cuddly sperm and egg for sale in a toy shop; a cuddly diarrhoea for sale in the same toy shop. ALL OF THESE ARE REAL THINGS I HAVE SEEN IN BRIGHTON

Every single time you go for a walk in Brighton you will hear someone, somewhere playing the bongos.

So I'm not altogether surprised at this video of the Brighton Christmas lights cockup.

I don't think it's real, but then nothing surprises me in this place

 

Mistakes I made when I started blogging

I have now been writing this blog for 5 years. The done thing at times like this seems to be to slap the ugly word 'blogaversary' on it and use it as an excuse to party on down.

Ever the belligerent fool, I'm using it as an excuse to look at where it all went wrong.

So these are the mistakes I made when I started blogging. I'm still making some of them. I hope this is useful to anyone who is also starting to blog and wants to know what not to do:

• Buggered up the site address
  I mean look at it:   http://joannemallon.typepad.com/joanne_the_coach/ it's an utter, unmemorable mess. Later on I bought JoannetheCoach.com so I have something a bit more elegant to put in my email signature, but it's all a bit half-assed and still makes for a crap hyperlink. When I started our new blog, I made sure to use the easy, simple address Eljae.com - it cost under £20 to do, and it's not even difficult to do the mapping across business that covers up the wordpress part of the address.
• Terrible name
  Joanne the Coach, WTF is that all about? Actually, there was a point to this way back when, in that I used to to write a lot more about my life coaching business. I'm still doing the coaching, it's just that I found out it was more fun to blog about movies and Doctor Who instead. So now I think it's better to have a flexible name that will grow with you. Bloggers who blog under Mummy2cutesypie.com say they also find this issue to be a problem, usually around the time Cutesypie starts shoplifting and growing a beard.
• Didn't reply to comments
  I never used to appreciate comments at all. I totally took them for granted. Now I feel very embarrassed about being so arrogant and am much more respectful of people who take the time to comment. I aim to reply to them all, even the spammers. Interestingly, some bloggers are now turning off their comment facility. Next thing you know they'll be turning off the blog altogether and going back to shouting in the corner of a field.
• No theme, niche or planning
  I still don't do any of that stuff. If there is a theme, it's "stuff I am interested in", and if I can shoehorn in a Doctor Who reference, all the better. I post when I have something to say, so that might mean nothing for a week, then four posts the next week. Apparently that stuff's important if you are serious about your blogging. Luckily I am just in it for shits and giggles, so that's OK then.
• Images? What are they?
  For about the first couple of years, none of the posts had images, mainly because I didn't know how to create, find or upload them. But the trouble with that is that big wodges of unillustrated text can be hard on the eye and lacking in personality. A big help for me has been using the Instagram app which makes it easy for anybody to create nice looking original images. So I didn't really raise my skill levels, it's just that the technology lowered itself to my level. Rejoice, technodunces, our time is now.
• No community involvement
  Whilst I am basically a  loner at heart, I like online communities and hanging around with people I've never met, so I can pretend to be more confident than I really am. I was flailing around by myself for the first few years until there seemed to be more blogging communities springing up and supporting each other. This is why I started doing more parenting content, so I could hang out with the parenting bloggers. They are always either laying golden eggs or having fights so it's kind of like hanging out with a bunch of magic chickens. I like that. Blogging is a lot easier and more fun when you find your own magic chickens to hang out with.
• Too many categories
  Cast a glance down the left sidebar (actually, don't) and you'll see masses of the buggers. Nobody ever clicks on them, not even my personal favourite Bizarre Celebrity Encounters. When we started Eljae, the categories were: Rants; Fiction; Random Wisdoms; Stuff We Love; Reviews; Top Tips and Funnies. What else is there to say in a blog?

I don't believe in regrets - I believe that making mistakes is what makes us human, and learning from mistakes is what makes us intelligent. So, Happy Birthday to you, Blog of Mine. Here's to the next regeneration.

I'm hiring Johann Hari as my spin doctor

When I ran media training workshops, we used to talk about people's fear of being misrepresented in interviews. A certain amount of misquoting is understandable - the written word is never exactly the same as the spoken word.

If you're interviewed, the journalist will take out all the ums and ers and stick your half sentences together to make a whole, so that what you've said can be understood coherently by the reader. If they didn't, all but the most polished (AKA boring) interviewees would come across as illiterate.

And a good thing too, I thought as yesterday I gave a right dog's dinner of an interview. The journalist caught me on the hoof, chucked a subject at me which wasn't especially interesting and which I didn't exactly have a pint pot full of bon mots to chuck at.

Of course, 10 minutes after I'd put down the phone I was living in Soundbite City. I kept thinking of interesting things I could have said, but didn't, jokes I could have made but hadn't. It wasn't my finest hour. Let's hope I'm not quoted verbatim.

Sharks, celebrities and a near death experience - just another typical day at Legoland

 

Well, I never expected this I thought, as I complimented Cherie Blair on her choice of kagool.

Nor this either as an hour later, thanks to Keeley Hawes, I narrowly avoided being eaten by sharks.

*rewind*

So on Sunday we pitched up to Legoland in Windsor for the launch of their new Atlantis Submarine Voyage ride. Like BlogCamp, I had once again dressed all wrong for the occasion, in sandals and a light cardie. It was a gawdawful day, with rain tipping tipping down ceaselessly. But I truly believed the sun would shine. I was wrong.

Cherie, stood behind us in the queue for wristbands, had opted much more wisely for a windcheater, and smirked at my open-toed sandals.

On the ride itself we shared a submarine with actors Keeley Hawes, Matthew Macfadyen and family. A yellow submarine. Somebody should write a song about that.

An extra guest at Peppa Pig World

On Saturday we had a fine family day out visiting the marvellous new Peppa Pig World at Paultons Park in Hampshire. You can read my full review of Peppa Pig World over here at ParentDish.

And as a pedantic nitpicker, what a joy to welcome an extra guest to the trip, as we were joined by the Grocer's Apostrophe:

 

Or is it? I like to think that it's really an unfinished sentence. Help me out here, should it be:

Please don't feed the duck's

a) bill
b) appetite for destruction
c) mind with thoughts of the impending apocalypse

Or something else entirely? What do you think?

In his autobiography, My Wicked Wicked Ways, Errol Flynn claims that as a boy he once fed a piece of fat on a string to a duck. Once it passed through the other end, he fed it to the next duck, and so on until he had a line of ducks on a string. If ever there was something not to feed the ducks, that's it. I wonder if Peppa is aware?

Top 5 stupid Royal Wedding merchandise

It has been a vintage week for stupid Royal Wedding press releases. My favourites included the release for cleaning products, claiming that Wills and Kate might need to tidy up before the Queen pops round ("A RIGHT ROYAL CLEAN UP"). And then there was the message promoting a range of health clobber that Kate may (and equally may not) choose to carry in her handbag. So it wasn't stuff she'd used or recommended or been pictured with. It was just...stuff.

So with royal wedding stupidity season well under way, let's take a look at some of the contenders for stupidest merchandise:

(Yes I know that there are Royal Wedding sick bags, but frankly that is just too obvious)

1. A stupid plate bearing the legend "It Should Have Been Me"
A gift for someone you hate and want to mock. £17 from John Lewis, who have "more than 10 in stock". I'll bet they do..

 

2. Knit Your Own Royal Wedding book
Blame the crafters for this one. Actually I do like the little corgis. This book manages to be both stupid and appealing at the same time. Plus it will keep the knitters off the streets as they try to finish the whole crew in time for *boak* the big day.

 

3. William and Kate death masks
Well, they look like death to me. I find these, with their blank, gouged out eyes, very sinister. But at the same time I'm seized with the compulsion to start a Twitter campaign for everyone in the crowd who turns out to see the Royal Wedding to wear these masks.
Points off to the seller for use of appalling pun: Mask-arade. Thank you but no.

 

4. William and Kate Dress Up Dolly book
The perfect gift for the child of parents you wish to subtly annoy (because they annoy you) without being out and out insulting. Apparently you can use the outfits in this book to "enjoy dressing the pair for every social occasion", so presumably there is a press out gimp suit and mask at the back. You might want to remove that page before you give it to a child.

 

5. A patronising, humour-free commemorative coaster
'Keep Calm, Get Rich and Marry a Prince" - yes, because that's what all little girls aspire to, isn't it? Buy this  for any tea-drinking feminists you want to see EXPLODE with fury. The makers say it's satire, which is a type of insult, and you can certainly see that someone's being insulted by the presence of the likes of this in the world.

 

Special mention to Etsy
Items which didn't make the top 5 but are worthy of a special mention include: this frumpalicious Kate doll and her tramp-like companion; this wackadoodledoo offering (possibly a brooch, or an incitement to treason); these blank-faced icons (the resemblance is uncanny).

and finally, as a bonus, I give you the ultimate in stupid Royal Wedding Mugs. You might think that a mug is a pretty normal kind of souvenir, but look closely and you will see that the producers have done a brilliant job at stupidifying this one. Look closely and tell me - what's wrong with this picture?

 **this just in**

A stupid Royal Wedding fridge Seriously, does somebody get paid to think these things up?

And if you liked that lot, you'll love:

Stupid Royal Wedding stuff for kids of all ages

The Royal Wedding meerkats

 

Blame it on the PRs

I don't mean to keep having a go at PRs, but my goodness, they make it so easy.

On Friday I received an email promoting an event. Lots of other media people got sent it too, including journalists from The Times, Grazia and the BBC. How do I know this? Well, all the recipients' email addresses were left visible in the 'To' field of the message. I started counting how many people had had their contact details exposed in this way, and kind of wished I hadn't, because it came to 294. Come on dudes, even I know how to use the bcc field, and I'm a techno-neanderthal.

Aside from the privacy issues, if you are sending an email to this many people at once, you stand a higher chance of getting tangled up in spam filters. Since ticket sales from this event are raising funds for a charity for people with cancer, I would have thought that the aim was to make it more, not less, likely that media would hear about it. Am I missing something here?

These Foolish Things - Mistakes You Made When You Started Freelancing

Personally, I do not make mistakes. I have learning experiences. I have events which take an unexpected turn. I have appalling feckstravanzas. But not mistakes, oh no.

Though if I did, I am sure I would find it useful to read this feature by Anne Wollenberg about common mistakes freelance journalists make when starting out. You will note that Anne has quoted my evil twin who does, in fact, make mistakes. We prefer not to talk about her. She's making the rest of us look bad.

How To Wreck Your Career in 11 Easy Steps

Getting stuff wrong is nothing to be afraid of, in fact it's to be welcomed.  Making mistakes, like breathing, is one of the signs that you're a live human being.  Of course, the biggest mistake of all is to cock-up without learning, or even worse, to keep making the same mistake over and over again.

So if you're aiming to avoid the kind of mistakes that will kill your career, click here for my thoughts as reported in CareerBuilder.  I'm sure we've all done at least one of these at some time in our working lives.

PS No I did not write the first sentence of the article.  Yes it is kind of odd.  Why 15 months?  Answers on a comment box please.