I just received this spam scam and almost just chucked it. But I thought the last line merited further examination:

From Mrs Naomi Solomon

No[204 Rue Des Martyrs Cocody
Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire

ATTN:
DEAREST ONE OF GOD

I am the above named person from Kuwait . I am married to Mr Anthony Solomon who worked with Kuwait embassy in Ivory Coast for nine years before he died in the year 2004. We were married for eleven years without a child. He died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days.Before his death we were both born again Christian. Since his death I decided not to remarry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which the Bible is against. When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of $2. 5 Million (Two Million Five Hundred U.S. Dollars) in the bank here in Abidjan in suspense account.

Presently, the fund is still with the bank. Recently, my Doctor told me that i have serious sickness which is cancer problem. The one that disturbs me most is my stroke sickness. Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to a church or individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein. I want a church that will use this fund for orphanages, widows, propagating the word of God and to endeavour that the house of God is maintained.

The Bible made us to understand that blessed is the hand that giveth. I took this decision because I don’t have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians and I don’t want my husband efforts to be used by unbelievers. I don’t want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly way. This is why I am taking this decision. I am not afraid of death hence i know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the bosom of the Lord. Exodus 14 VS 14 says that the Lord will fight my case and I shall hold my peace.

I don't need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health hence the presence of my husband relatives is around me always I don't want them to know about this development. With God all things are possible. As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the bank here in Abidjan . I want you and the church to always pray for me because the Lord is my shepherd. My happiness is that I lived a life of a worthy Christian. Whoever that wants to serve the Lord must serve him in spirit and Truth. Please always be prayerful all through your life.

Contact me on the above e-mail address for more information, any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing another church or individual for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I Stated herein. Hoping to receive your reply.
Remain blessed in the Lord.

Yours in Chris Jesus
Mrs Naomi Solomon.

I wonder if Chris Jesus is in fact related to, I'm assuming, Christ Jesus?

Hello there. Remember me? My name's Dave. I'm still Barely Awake - some things never change. But lots of others have.

Until March 3, I was a journalist. Working as a designer, most of the time, right enough, or coming up with headlines that people wrote in to complain about ("They'll be Russian to come to Scotland", about a tourist board's plans to invite some Russian dignitaries over, was my personal favourite). Now I am using some of my redundancy money to set up a web design, programming and content management business along with a colleague and friend from the paper. In fact, it's up and running already. It's called fuzzylime and if you think you've heard that name before, it's probably because you have.

I've made various scripts and suchlike under that name in the past, but now it's time to embrace the lime-filled future. Fuzzily, I suppose.

So anyway. Given that my job is now the web, I feel it would make sense for me to post here more regularly. Especially as I can justify it as work-related time! Here's hoping for lots more posts, preferably complete with stupid pictures as and when I find them. In fact, here's one to start:

Coincidentally, that hat belongs to my new business partner. I think it suits her better, though.

Oh. Hello. Still here? Poor you. Hope you haven't been waiting too long. I'd love to say I've been too busy to blog, but the truth is I just forgot for a while. Sorry 'bout that.

Incidentally, the fact that I am blogging again has nothing to do with the fact that I have an Italian assessment to do and am desperately trying to put it off. OK? Just so we're clear on that.

Cool. So now we've cleared that up, and got the Happy 2008 formalities out of the way, a quick update on what's going on...

1/ My flat still isn't finished. This is a combination of my fault for not chasing people, and the fault of non-showing-up-for-weeks-on-end tradesmen. Mostly their fault, in fairness, but still. It's very close to being done, and more than live-able in, so I'll settle for that for a few weeks more.

2/ I am working dayshifts this week! I am learning about a wonderfully exciting (!) new system that's meant to be coming in at work, so I can then impart this knowledge to my colleagues. This means 10am starts, and more excitingly, such things as lunchbreaks at lunchtime and finishes in the early evening, allowing me time to go out! I am, in fact, writing this paragraph in Beanscene... I'm just that excited about the whole thing.

3/ I want to go back to Australia. That's not really going on, I just thought I should mention it.

4/ I am learning Italian. I may have mentioned this, I probably haven't mentioned the difficulty I am having finding any time to study it outside classes. The only thing I can currently remember from the past few weeks is "how is the watermelon?" - which, just for reference in case you need it, is "com'e l'anguria?". That e should have an accent above it, but I can't figure out how to do that on my laptop. Hey-ho.

5/ I went to a party dressed as "the sheriff of stationery village" from the Mighty Boosh. This mainly consisted of my sticking post-its, paperclips and Pritt Stick to a shirt in the most hastily conceived party costume ever. Looked good though, until I lost my sheriff's post-it note badge, complete with star, and wrote myself a new one (I had pens stuck to my person too, you see) which said simply "I am a sheriff ". Yes, complete with web-style smiley. Had a two-day hangover after those exploits.

6/ I have web work to do. As in, stuff that will make me money. I am also putting this off, for no apparent reason. I did spend 12 hours on it on Saturday night/Sunday very early morning, in fairness, so I reckon I'm due a couple of days' break.

7/ I got woken up this morning by the power box across from my flat catching fire...

8/ The island on the Great Barrier Reef which I visited was featured on the telly last night, in the very good series "Tropic of Capricorn". I mean, they were being all serious and examining the threat to the ecosystem from global warming or climate change or something, but I simply watched and shouted: "I've stood there! My room was just round that corner!" and so on.

9/ Erm, to be honest I can't think of anything else. I'm sure there is more but I've procrastinated long enough and it's time to start writing some Italian. It may be difficult to crowbar any mention of watermelons into 100 words of describing someone, but I'll give it my best shot...

It has been pointed out to me - apparently by my blog itself, which has gained the ability to write and form sentences as well as having a personality - that I haven't written anything for a while, despite the fact that I've actually got some stuff going on which is worth writing about. I can't remember the last time either of those things happened, so let's get remedying them so I can at least have posted something else before 2007 ends.

Right. First things first, Australia. It was utterly amazing. There aren't enough superlatives in the world to describe the place and the stuff I did. It was a struggle to drag myself away from one incredible experience to go and take part in another. In fairness, this is probably partly because it was a very expensive trip - it was worked out that everything I did would have cost about £8000 for 10 days. That includes business-class flights, ridiculously nice meals and a host of crazy things which I never thought I'd get a chance to do. Luckily, I wasn't paying, hence my being able to do all these things.

My first destination was Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef. It's a bit of a trek to get there - I reckon I spent 36 hours travelling from leaving my flat to arriving there - but it was well worth it, between the snorkelling on the reef (I saw a turtle), the huge, clean beaches which were practically deserted (apart from birds - there are 300 people on the island at a time, and 70,000 of our flying friends, all of them very noisy), the ability to just jump into the sea for a swim whenever I fancied - and in December, of course - and the sunset wine cruise on the reef, complete with the Glaswegian boat captain who tried to persuade me that a move to Australia was the best idea ever (and I'm now starting to agree with him, actually).

I got stranded on the island by a tropical storm the next morning. Nobody has any sympathy over this when I add that I was meant to be getting flown off by helicopter (that's how I got there). Strange, that. Anyway, eventually got taken off by boat over rather choppy seas, having run through the pouring rain to get there, about five hours late. That meant that I got basically no time to explore Brisbane, which was a shame. But I saw the main street, main square, a random anti-Aids concert outside the hotel and a very tasty Italian restaurant where I sat in the corner and wrote up the first half of my trip for the paper, accompanied by wine.

The other half was basically on Kangaroo Island, off Adelaide (south coast for those of you whose geography is worse than mine). It's a total wildlife haven, so we spotted koalas, rare birds, wallabies, scary snakes, loads of seals and of course, kangaroos (of which I had my picture taken with one, which was fab). I also got to go swimming with dolphins, which was the second-most incredible experience of my life - the most being the coral reef swim, I reckon. The trip back was quite impressive, too, as we were on a speedboat and belted across the waves. I very much wanted to do that again.

Our flight back to Adelaide was awesome, too. The island's airport has two gates - metal, they are, on to the runway itself. The check-in desk eschews all the usual security guff to say "hi, how are you, did you enjoy the island, oh don't worry about your bag being way over the weight limit". In fairness, they could afford to give me a few extra kilos, owing to there only being seven passengers on the plane. We were led out to it by the captain and the world's smiliest stewardess spent the entire flight (when she wasn't either doing the safety demonstration right in front of the group of us or serving the in-flight snack - a cup of water and a Mentos) chatting to us.

I liked Adelaide, too. Had a bit of time there, got to see the shops (didn't buy anything tho unfortunately), a couple of nice bars and an excellent restaurant which won a restaurant-creation reality TV show on one of the networks out there a couple of years ago and is just stupidly posh, to the extent that your entire dinner is explained to you when it's put down in front of you. I ate duck. Nice, too.

Return home was a bit of a nightmare. We were late leaving Melbourne (we had to fly back via there) and then we got held up in Singapore owing to some tube loading our plane with the wrong cargo, which was too heavy meaning we couldn't fly. We then missed our slot to fly over Afghanistan so we were 90mins late into London. That should still have given me time to make my Glasgow flight - got in at 7am, it wasn't until 8.40 - but then the marvellous Heathrow staff took 50 minutes to get my bag from the plane to the conveyor belt, and then the Heathrow Express proved much less than an express owing to a points failure. I got in at 8.15am. The gate was shut. Changing to the next flight would have been £195. I chose not to pay that and got the train the next day (for £38!) after a very enjoyable night with Iain and Suja bumming around Kensington and Earl's Court.

Right, so that's the very concise version - the full one should be in the paper and is about 3000 words, but doesn't include mentions of flights being missed and suchlike.

The pictures, for various reasons, aren't on this site. Instead, you can see them at www.bennettsweb.co.uk/oz/

Oh. And I only watched Neighbours twice while I was out there. Libby is back! Yay!

OK. Half-way done. The flat is tantalisingly close to being finished off. The decorators are now done (though they have to come back owing to one of my walls being rubbish and growing a crack every time I turn the fire on) and my last door is going in tomorrow. That just leaves a bit of finishing-off stuff in the kitchen and bathroom and getting new sockets put on and lights up, new curtains and so on. It's been a struggle to get here - especially in the week when the decorators were starting at 8am every day and I was at work until almost 1am - but I'm really pleased now it's so close to being finished off. I very much look forward to not taking advantage of it at all by getting up and then lying on the sofa watching telly all day.

Here be pics:

I can't do my zeitgeist this year because there's so much spam on the interwebs now that I can't distinguish what are proper links in the first place. D'oh. I'm still willing to bet that the phrase "curly dave's happy hour" would appear in it at least once, though.

Wow. 1200 words before I write this bit, that's impressive. Especially given that I'm writing this on my laptop in the coffee shop with a battery which has been threatening to die since I got there. I best not tempt fate any further, plus I have to buy dinner and do a few other things before I head into work (boo).

Plans for 2008:
- Move to Australia
- Move to Australia
- Erm, Move to Australia

We'll see.

Merry Christmas and to all a good night!

I am delighted to say that yesterday I found there is another really rather good coffee shop just down the road from me, making it much handier than my regular haunts of Offshore or Beanscene.

Not that there's anything wrong with those places, right enough... in fact, I was in Offshore on Saturday night. The guy even looked up the name of an artist who had a show on there a few weeks ago which I liked, which was very good of him; and I finally picked up a loyalty card (it only seems fair).

In fact, this place is even closer than my favourite cafe/bar that is Jellyhill, which is all the way up in Hyndland and serves rather nice (if expensive) wine as well as rather nice (and less expensive) coffees.

No, this one is called Oscar & Holly's, and is skulking down in Broomhill, right on Crow Road. It has the disadvantage of closing really early (6pm weeknights, 8pm weekends) but on the plus side it is practically next door to me (5mins walk tops), as well as making nice drinks. They seemed to have exceedingly good cakes (albeit not from Mr Kipling) too, although I was trying to be healthy and not eat them. That, plus the fact I was still ploughing my way through my free Galaxy bars I picked up as part of some ludicrous promotion at Buchanan Galleries on Saturday.

So yes, if you happen to find yourself that bit further out of the city, pop in to Oscar & Holly's and admire the bright colour scheme while trying to decide whether the baby in one of the three pictures they have on the wall is, in fact, crying his eyes out.