Sigh.

For once, my blog's come in useful in a way other than its usual functions of a moaning board, a social networking hub and a place to put silly jokes, stupid opinions and random pictures of puffins.

It meant I was able to check with one click and a bit of scrolling that yes, the last Twice-Yearly Landlords' Inspection was on 29th September last year; and although it only felt like about six weeks since then, the letter that popped through my door this morning warning me that the next one is next week is exactly on time.

At risk of repeating myself for long-time readers: this is part of the rental agreement on my lovely little house; ostensibly it's to check I'm not damaging fixtures and fittings or putting their [sizeable] investment in the property at risk, but tidiness and cleanliness are part of it too. It's become a nice little ritual whereby I'm always given a week's warning so I can raise my housework level from its normal "hygienic, but looks like a bombsite" to at least a kind of "everything in a nice neat place" and hide any clothing, footwear or 'personal entertainment' items which are none of the landlord's business.

The letter has asked if they can attend next Monday morning, but I'll get this put off to at least the Wednesday for work reasons.

So as usual over the next week or so I'm going to get my pinny on and get all domestic…

artist's impression: may vary from actual appearance.

As usual, my instinct in these things is to place an Amazon order to "bribe" myself – or at least to provide a reward for myself once the inspection is out of the way. Two books and the latest First Doctor set have duly been ordered. I'm not sure it's the best way to self-motivate, but it works for me.

Today's Big Question: How do you motivate yourself for things that are a right pain in the brown starfish to do?

As you'll see from just below the top of the right-hand column, I've added a new page to this blog: Fish's Reading List 2009. I want to keep track of what's been passing before my eyes this year, just to see if it's as many [and as expensive] as I think it is.

Comments are open over there, so feel free to make suggestions or request exchanges/BookCrossing.

Milly is doing a cultural studies experiment with regard to clothing. Pop over there and take part, won't you?

And a silly thread on a forum elsewhere, by several hands including my own, produced the following utterly wrong facts about puffins:

The puffin is a small black and white bird with a brightly-coloured beak, which lives between Paraguay and Albuquerque. It was first bred by Nicholas Parsons in 1641 when he successfully persuaded an eagle to mate with a lobster.

Puffins are usually placid, quiet birds, but have been known to form gangs and hang around shopping malls in hooded garments. Their patron saint is David Lee Roth.

Puffin communication was thought to be elementary, consisting of a series of small quacks, but in 1955 Dr. Dre discovered that they have a rudimentary system of sign language, which can express a large range of emotional and mental states from "Where's the Anusol?" to "My pancreas is in Ealing".

The Puffins' professional US football team narrowly missed out on the 1924 Superbowl, when they were beaten 28-26 in overtime by My Granny And Her Tea-Cosy.

Perhaps the most famous Puffin ever was Roseanne Barr.

Puffins make their nests in worn out rubber-neckers and since their diet consists solely of 'I can't believe its not butter' and cheerios they are often found in bins around the back of Asda.

Despite their colourful appearance, puffins are well known to struggle with humour, especially satire. This does not deter them from becoming stand-up comics though and puffins can regularly be seen being bottled off at The Comedy Club and offered cheerios as comfort food after particularly bad performances.

During WWII a team of puffins single-handedly sank the Bismarck and deciphered the Enigma code using only a complicated mode of communication based on tapping their bills on empty tubs of margarine.

Most well-known high street stores now stock puffin brassieres, after an edition of Newsnight highlighted how the shocking sight of puffin mammaries was causing otherwise law-abiding individuals to commit arson. These come in pink, black, blue, green, red and Marmite.

The BBC once almost went into meltdown when the ten o' clock news was invaded by puffins wearing nothing but blue ties and protesting against the Afghan invasion of Tesco. Moira Stuart was afterwards kept in a secure unit for 7 days in which she was fed on a strict diet of polyunsaturated red stripe and could be heard mumbling the word 'seabird' for quite some time in BBC corridors. She was temporarily replaced with Natasha Kaplinsky, for which heinous crime the British public took against the clown-like birds and resulted in the destruction of numerous puffin nests and an embargo on cheerios which still continues to this day.

While their traditional dwelling places are up on high black cliffs the Puffin community have now settled in Dover harbour. The local council is in shock at this sudden influx of "funny folk" and will put legislation on the number of dwellers per flat.

A recent codicil to Jackie Collins' will means that after her death 50% of profits from her bestselling "novels" will go to the charity Caring For Puffins Who Have Overdosed On Cheerios And Are Now Quite Scary. [The charity's trustees are three scorpions and a wasp on top of a herring.]

Puffins have an income on the side by selling their guano when it has aged for 12 years. It is said to produce intense smelling, colourful blooms of a spectrum out of this world. In Britain the volume sold in 2008 was up by 7% from last year. Buy shares now and profit from rising sales numbers in a garden loving nation such as the UK!

The "artist" Tracey Emin once drew a puffin by squirting mayonnaise onto a sheet of glass from a height of three miles. It subsequently fetched $400,000,000,000,000 at auction, and now is permanently displayed in the ladies' toilet at Brnik Airport, Ljubljana.

Sugar Puffs are a bi-product of the puffin rendering industry.

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I upgraded the blog's software to WP2.3 yesterday. This means nothing to those of you who don't have your own WordPress installation, except that it's added tag functionality. [a quick hat tip to this fine post for much good stuff on adding tags to a WP theme]

On the front page, on the sidebar on the right, is now a tag cloud, so you could automatically find all the posts on one particular subject.

For example, if you were Kyu, you'd click on the "puffins" tag, and lo and behold you'd get all the posts pertaining to puffins.

Which now includes this one:

I hope I've got the kind of things that should be tags right, but feel free to shout if you think I've missed something important.

Although it does gall me how "laziness" is now seen to be one of my top tags…

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Good news from the weekend: in a couple of weeks' time [subject to simultaneous dairy diary space] I get to have a day out with a certain gorgeous personage at London Zoo.

I've blogged before about how although I don't particularly like the idea of caging animals up for human pleasure, there's no other real way to get close enough to them to be able to see the animal kingdom for what it is: a whole different, and fascinating world. Brilliant as they are, David Attenborough films can't quite do it justice: you need to be able to smell the animals.

It should be remembered, though, that there's much more to non-human life than just the fluffy and attractive animals we'll be seeing.

At my first school, I was forced along with all the other kids to sing "All Things Bright And Beautiful". Fair enough, I guess, for an Xian school: though as soon as I started thinking about it, it seemed to me like a very one-sided view of "creation".

Let's face it: if you're going to take credit for the beautiful and graceful forms of life Рthe ring-tailed lemur, the fruitbat, the puffin, the Kate Bush Рyou've also got to take the blame for the nasty, shitty lifeforms: spiders that live under the toilet seat, the Ebola virus, the candir̼ fish, the Paul Daniels.

There was originally a picture of Paul Daniels here [with the caption "intelligent design, my arse"], but I decided it was too upsetting for a Monday blog. Have some lovely puffins instead [source].

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Talking of lower forms of life: Louis Theroux – The Most Hated Family In America, about the "GodHatesFags" cult. I sat down to watch this last night, then switched off after about seven minutes.Not in anger at the BBC – I understand and support what must have been the motive behind making such a show: give the froggers enough rope to hang themselves, and surely they will. [And, according to those who were brave enough to stay watching, they surely did.]It's just that I personally didn't want to watch it, in the same way that I don't want to watch "50 Greatest Police Chases That End With Some Guy Having The Shit Kicked Out Of Him", or people having nervous breakdowns on Big Brother. At least this programme has a point, though, unlike those two.

The lesson I take from this, as from all insane bigotry, is that it's not something you can pander to [see Church of England]: you have to confront it – not with fists, but politically, with reason and rationality.

But of course, to be able to argue for rationality, you have to already behave rationally yourself, which is where most of our current politics falls down…

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Bumper stickers: Today's drive up the coast convinced me that I need to have one made for my rear bumper. After some deliberation, the text I decided on was this:

…which would be great, but it's too long: the driver behind would be too busy reading it, and would plough into me when they didn't notice my brake- [stop-] lights.

So I then came up with this alternative text:

…which definitely has the advantage of being shorter, but doesn't quite get the whole subtlety of the message across.

Can anyone suggest a suitable wording somewhere between the two?

Today's Good Stuff:

- At 8am the guys from National Grid Gas woke me up with a knock on my door to say I was reconnected, and could they light my central heating boiler to check it didn't get any air in it? No problem, said I, and now my house is warm again! There's still a few houses in town without, but they should be finished by the end of today.

- Today's Independent came with a free postcard:

- There was an inch of snow to clear off Priscilla this morning, but it hasn't affected transport or anything. For once it was almost fun to scrape it off.

- I've just updated this blog to the latest WP2.1, and it seems to have gone off with no problems at all: please tell me if you notice anything odd. [Well, okay, that should be "anything odder than usual" ].

- Today at smalltowndropin it was the monthly meal for everyone, and this time I could actually eat it: vegetable lasagna and garlic bread, followed by apple strudel with custard. Yes, that's right, you read right, I actually ate some fruit.

- I'm about to take a nap with this on my earphones.

- The Tuatara lizard is, thanks to conservation programs, no longer as endangered as it was a few years ago.

A fright when I woke up this morning; instead of my usual Independent, the newsagent scrawled No Indie Today on a copy of the Daily Mirror and stuffed it through my letterbox.

For those without a working knowledge of English newspapers, I offer these similes; it's somewhat like going to the "S" shelf at your library and finding that Will Self, Vikram Seth and William Shakespeare have been replaced by Dr. Seuss¹ and Sylvester Stallone; or finding that your favourite restaurant now has their food supplied by McVomits.

So I had to brave the blustery wind and rain to get a proper newspaper in order that I could do a decent crossword over my first cup of coffee. They aren't the same in the cheaper papers.

To give examples, the Indie clues will run along the lines of "Is after apartment in outskirts of Birmingham for ceremony [7]"², whilst a typical Mirror clue would be something like; "Household pet. Three letters. Anagram of ACT. First letter is C. Third letter is T."

This "brain aerobics" is what I do instead of going to the gym in the morning. It's cheaper, less sweaty, and there's no need to wear a leotard…³

Oh, and whilst we're discussing letterboxes; a bouquet to Royal Mail – a parcel I sent to NYC on Thursday arrived safely yesterday. [Yeah, two working days! Normally it takes longer than that if you're just posting it twenty miles down the road to Garboldisham....] Hope the other one is just as fast…

This is my latest obsession; an updated version of an old classic. If you like beating the crap out of garden gnomes, it's the game for you…

As if I didn't have enough obsessions already….

shoenotes:
1 Unfair perhaps – if I were to list my favourite books of the 20th Century, "Fox In Socks" would go way above much so-called literature, for sheer invention and delight. [Unfortunately the planned adult-literacy sequel, Cocks In Socks, never found a publisher...]
2 Answer: baptism [apt. is, put in B........m]
3 Not that it would stop me.