The Observer | Magazine | Q&A: The Agony Aunt

Q Boys have willies. What do girls have? This is a serious question and I’d like an answer – soon (well, at least before they reach puberty). I have two-year-old twin girls. We’re potty training at the moment and they know the name for all their body parts, bar one. Vagina is too technical, and fanny – though I don’t mind the word – some people think is rude. As a child I used willy, but others tell me this is only for boys and will cause confusion.

This letter was sent in to Mariella Frostrup’s agony page by a friend of ours, after we’d been discussing the important topic of what our girls should call their ‘willies’. Now that they’re going through potty training this is a more important topic than one would initially have thought – especially given the propensity to shout whichever term you decide upon across restaurants, parks or friends’ houses…

‘Willy’ is a pretty coy term, but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalently asexual equivalent for ‘girl willy’. Whatever our views, Mariella’s answer is pretty superficial: if we’d needed a thesaurus there’d have been no need to ask her.

Then again, I’m not even sure why Leslie did ask her…? A bigger mystery, imho, than our current problem with ‘naming conventions’.

[inpo] in no particular order

Just managed to get a my del.icio.us feed into the right-hand sidebar included as a nicely displayed feed.

I first saw this on Giles Turnbull’s site and wondered how to achieve the same effect. Giles’ weblog (and his delicious posts) are a must-read imho and it made me realise that there are only two important things you need to know about someone online: what they write and where they browse!

Anyway, thanks to reading the source on Giles’ page I realise that there’s a javascript feed from delicious and that you can pull and format it. The line of code can be seen in the HTML source.

It seems to have picked up the CSS and looks fine. I hadn’t expected that (!) but since I’m working this out as I go along I think I’ll leave well alone.

UPDATE: 2008-03-25: my site’s changed, Giles’ has changed, but there’s now an easy way to generate the script on the delicious site: https://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls

The Letterbox Factfile : E-consultancy.com

Quoth e-consultancy:

Interesting study on direct mail (particularly for email marketing vendors) with lots of facts and figures on B2B / B2C mailouts over the past ten years.
Inlcudes detail on open rates, response rates and overall volume of mail sent in consumer and business sectors between 1993-2003.

Manon, Alice and Eliza climbing in the recently-trimmed hedges in Jesus Green.

At the Columbia Road flower market on Sunday with Josie and her son Franklyn, a moment’s happy rest as Franklyn is “bookended” by Manon and Alice. They’re sitting on Jessie’s doorstep. The V3’s ‘astigma-cam’ is at its milk-bottle-best here. Memo to self: get better camera in next phone!

nowEurope: European Software Directive Defeated

Succinct round-up of the position on the European Software Directive by Greg Kirsh, a NowEurope.com contributor.

Google seeks RSS ad patent | The Register

Fantastic. Yet more protectionism of the blatantly obvious. I’m surprised that no-one’s pulling up the prior art from, say, campaign management and tracking in the mail outbound email systems. All of the major players offer the ability to encode each link so that you can track who clicked what, where in the mail, for a given offer code etc etc etc. Just because this is to be delivered by RSS rather than into our inboxen this is to be a new invention?

As an advertiser, I can only see this increasing costs. As a customer I simply await an ad filter for my news reader.

That cynicism aside I’ve noted that a number of feeds already include adverts – mainly where the site has an existing ad engine. These mainly seem to relate to alternatives or add-on sales. There’s a possible benefit to having in-feed ads that can help support blogs or other non-commerce sites. In the same way that Google’s ad inclusions can give a useful amount to highly-trafficked and well-converting sites, I can see how my RSS habits (i.e. skim through the feed, hardly visiting the sites any more) would reduce that revenue.

If ads keep chasing us like this then using the web will become evermore complex and demanding of the ‘humanoid’ common sense filters. Could even be as demanding as, gasp, talking to other people one day…

Per Bloomberg.com and Silicon.com

The BBC’s take gives a balanced view with some useful background.

It’s a relief that sofware and business ‘methodology’ patents are off the agenda, the price paid is the retention of national patent offices. The confusion and administrative burden placed upon companies to manage their EU-wide intellectual property must surely be frustrating and racks up the overall temperature in the protect-and-defend mentality in many large company’s legal offices.

Pity that there can’t be people who focus upon harmonisation and reducing red tape, and a separate lot who look to new laws… It seems that combining these approaches simply supports the ‘no change because we can’t agree’ result.

10kg of egg. Yes, Ten. Kilogrammes. Best Belgian chocolate.

So, there I was in Selfridges in Manchester looking for a little Easter pressie for the girls. The chocolate concession is in the basement and I remember thinking as I walked past the display that the egg in the centre was one humungous slab of chocolate.

Anyway, I proceeded to spend ages looking for the smallest chocolate offering possible (rationale being that we don’t want to get the girls hooked on chocolate, but wanted to give them a treat. Hmmm). The shop assistant was really nice and helpful, given that it’s a bit of a pain having someone in a chocolate shop making a fuss about buying chocolate…

Anyway, as I paid for the £6 of tiny chocolate chickens and she asked if I wanted to be entered in the free draw for the Mighty Egg. I just knew that I’d won, don’t know why or how, and so offered to take the egg with me there and then to save admin 🙂

Later that evening, in London at home, I recounted the feeling of ‘general luckiness’ that had filled me – to much mirth and piss-taking all round.

I put this to the back of my mind and for the next two days felt just generally happy and lucky. Made me think that being lucky and feeling lucky must be the same thing. Same, apart from piles of winnings, eggs, cash etc. Existentially the same, therefore 🙂

Anyway, on Friday I got a call saying that I’d won the egg!

🙂

Collecting it, getting it home (needed to put the seats down to fit in the car!) and then staring for days in shock… We gave every visitor as much as they could eat and carry, but it’s still taunting us…

Now I just get teased for using up my supply of luck on an egg, rather than a ‘win the ferarri’ competition or doing the National Lottery…

Next time 🙂