Funny Quote of the Day is by far the most popular page on the Pisstakers site. How annoying that the easiest to come by material attracts the most attention.

I jest, I am not annoyed, just saying that compared to writing real material, it was a doddle to compile a list of funny quotes that I found around the internet, in real life and on TV.

My own favorite is

If we were meant to be vegetarian, why did god make animals out of meat. Why not tofu? (Dan Nainan)

If you want thousands of people to continually call by and spend a few minutes perusing your blog, why not add a funny quote of the day page yourself, there is always room on the 'net for easy-to-read gems.

At a time when oil has hit $122 a gallon, some one still has the nerve to pump out an article warning against dumping your gas guzzler for a lean mean hybrid machine!

According to this (exxon?) sponsored post, owners of 30mpg cars would spend about $1700 a year less on gas than owners of a 15 mpg truck. This sounds all well and dandy and what can possibly be wrong with buying a fuel efficient run around - until you get to the premise of the article - that you need to sell your brand new truck, eat the depreciation AND spend $22,000 to acquire this hybrid car.

Now, of course the wheels fall off being efficient, and on that basis, $1700 savings at the pump only partially offset the overall cost of changing cars. So, there is no incentive to being socially responsible, as you were.

Except that instead of beating your head against a wall of stupidity and throwing money endlessly into the gas tank of a spanky new truck, how about this. Keep your truck for posing at the weekend, and spend $3500 on a second hand Japanese car that you can drive in the week. That way you break even financially by end of year one; from your low down sedan seat, you get to see just how stupid and overkill most trucks are for driving around town; and you can be fuel efficient.

Sorry to be sensible and all, Messrs Exxon and co. but who can afford to think the same old ways that got us into this gas dependent mess? Not me.

No doubt we will revisit the argument when oil hits $200 a barrel. Till then, happy driving.

I have noticed a lot of resistance to change, which surprises me, considering we are all so well educated, open minded and exposed to new ideas these days.

Resist the iPod

I remember loads of resistance to the iPod, with critics saying it would never take off because ALL it did was play MP3's. I suppose we expect the latest new thing to be ultra complex and have loads of bells and whistles and flashing lights. Perish the thought that we give up the fiddly and unreliable electronic device we already can't make work for something simple that does work!

Resistance in Germany

Talking electronic gizmos, a friend of mine was a big shot with Mercedes Benz and he said they met with constant resistance from suppliers whenever they asked them to produce new state-of-the-art components. It seems crazy to me that any high tech manufacturer would shy away from advancement, but there you go! Vorsprung durch Zwang? Progress by force.

Resistance from painters

I know a little bit about paint, and the construction industry, a domain that embraces the whole idea of resistance to change.

When I was working as a painter in the UK, I used to do a lot of research into new materials. I was a great fan of the Dutch, who are the masters at house painting, and so I gravitated towards paint from Dutch conglomerate Akzo. It was easy to get a perfect finish using their basic oil undercoats and gloss paints and fillers, and I raved about it to colleagues, but to almost no avail. There was a lot of lunatic reasoning against change - saying that it was best to stay with what was known; that the price of the known brands was right; that customers would think they were being gipped when contractors turned up with paint from a company they had never heard of. Whatever.

I was a lone voice banging my head against a wall, but thanks to millions invested in marketing, Akzo did change the minds of painters, convincing them to change paint and get an advantage so they could make money more easily. It makes you wonder why they bothered helping such curmudgeonly old bastards.

In fact I was talking to a tech guy from Akzo and he said they had many products in mainland Europe that would not be available in the UK for years, because, not surprisingly, the island mentality market wasn't ready for them. You get the product you deserve.

Conclusion

It is hard to criticise people for not wanting to change, especially as I have just retrograded 50 years by getting a wood, not fiberglass boat, but it does annoy me when people stick with the same old same old, despite new options. Do you often come across Luddite mind set and scratch your head? Or do you think there is too much change going on for our own good anyway, so change is not a good thing?

Change a habit of a lifetime and resist the urge to not comment...

A wise man was telling me a couple of gems to help us get through family life.

Never let the sun set on an argument. Great idea, but if I lived by that maxim, I would get to sleep once every two weeks.

When your first daughter is born, go and talk to a tree for 15 minutes. Repeat this tree-talking ritual every night for 13 years, by which time you will be ready. (This sort of reminds me of a school teacher I once had, who said that kids are great, as long as they are born at 18.)

And then he finished with a story about a friend who had lost 2 wives. The first wife died from an overdose, and the second from a fractured skull. That bitch wouldn't swallow the pills.

Got any more?

After so little action on the blog, I thought I better save some face and go through tidying up my site. For grins I updated my About Page.

It was quite enlightening to see what I was thinking about a year ago. (What was I thinking!)

Aim of the blog

I was all fired up to write like a satirical loony in order to attract 10000 visitors a month to The Pisstakers. I wanted to host a stable of funny guest writers and develop an all-round mega blog too. Oh well.

The reality is, I am currently the lone contributor, so I haven't exactly created a one-stop funny shop. On the other hand, working alone, I surpassed my aims for traffic - attracting 16000 visitors a month and a useless PR5 rank. 1 out of three ain't bad.

(The one big lesson I learned btw, fellow bloggers, is that little quantity and poor quality researched posts are the way to go!) The Valentines Day Sucks post is a case in point.)

Bio

Then there were the 8 things about Ed. to deal with. On reflection I was pretty happy with the the old list, and seeing as I haven't done much wild stuff in the past 12 months, I just tarted the octo-bio up a bit.

(As I look around the half wrecked boat I am sitting in at the moment, I can't help thinking that if this thing ever floats again, the list of achievements could be worth updating at some stage. Time will tell.)

That was my homework last night. What does your About Me page say? Anything, something, nothing?

I received an email from a friend, telling me to stop buying gas from Exxon and Mobil. I trashed it, not because it is a bad idea, and not because I am a gas junky lacking in community spirit, but mainly because this type of email is spam.

The email contains a fairly credible suggestion to save the world from $4 gas, ie boycott Exxon and Mobil for a year rather than stop buying gas for one day. What's the problem with that idea? Nothing much, but if you scroll to the end of the email, you will see a link to a 3rd party site. This site will benefit from the same numbers of eyeballs alluded to in the anti-gas email (if 10 friends of 10 friends get the email, and before you know it, 300 million will get the message.)

Ironically, in this case, you get taken to a Used car site.



I picked up on this trend when I received a circular begging for help to find Madeleine McCann, the little English girl missing in Portugal last year. Some one managed to get their link included on the end of the email message that went international, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they got a lot of click-throughs on the back of honest folks spreading the word about her sad predicament, bastards.

So, to raise awareness of this sort of subtle spam, what I suggest is that you forward this Pisstakers article to 10 friends, tell them to forward it to 10 friends, and before you know it, 300 million people will know never to forward anything to anyone, ever. That should make people think twice about using the internet to communicate!