Jimmy Page’s Trousers

I’ve got a nice extension to the Wordpress software that runs this place. The extension allows me to indulge my insecurities by telling me how many people visited each day or week or whatever. And, by subtracting that number from six billion I can tell, approximately, how many people didn’t visit me on any given day.

Anyway, one of the other things it does is tell me where people visited from or where they were referred from. It seems that a number of people stumble across the place through Google (or other) web searches. As I can see what the person was originally searching for when they found me, some of them sometimes catch my attention. I thought I might share them. In no particular order then, here are some of the searches through which I was found in the last week or two.

Note: Because of my blog title, more than a few searches for the eponymous hero of our piece show up. It’s usually standard fare but I did like:

• Jimmy Page caught with cocaine.
• Jimmy Page pants price.

In non-Jimmy Page related searches however,

• Gay Byrne radio show theme tune.
• Drinking tea twinings everyday tea residue.
• Black scum inside kettle.
• Podge and Rodge situation.
• Inadequate men lyrics.
• I’m intrigued by the motives behind someone searching for Punishment Trousers.
• And, in a completely unrelated search (from a different country no less) Short Trouser Punishment. I feel I may be missing a new fetish to add to my collection of perversions.

Lastly, in the last fortnight, I’ve also had two separate people find me through searching for the words, Mika is shit.

I caught myself humming as I headed from my car towards work. I had tossed an obolus to Charon for passage across the car park and actually caught myself humming. This is a disturbing turn of events. I’m worried that my brain, unable to cope with the magnitude of how much I despise my job, has began the process of ‘making me mental’. I’m worried that this could escalate (or maybe whatever’s the opposite of escalate) into madness. Humming on the way to this place is not a good sign.

Perhaps even more disturbingly however, is what I was humming. Hold The Line by Toto. Where did that come from?

Altogether now… Daaaaauuunnnn. Dau-Dau-Dau-Daaaauuu.

Black, black, black. Bleak, bleak, bleak.

That’s how I’m feeling today. Not only has the working week begun again but I’ve had a row with Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers. We just seemed to get on each other’s neves yesterday and culminated it with a row. Well, I felt that it was a discussion but I’m relatively sure she’d disagree. Now we have to individually decide who’s going to be the grown-up and break the, seemingly interminable, silence first.

I don’t care much for the whole spousal argument thing. It’s partly because the logical, debatey side of me gets frustrated at the fact that these arguments rarely rely on logic or debating ability. It’s mainly, however, because I dislike the pre and post-argument bits. The argument itself is, relatively speaking, ok. It’s no picnic but compared to the bits before and after, it’s easy-peasy. You can just get on with the actual argument but the bits either side really suck. The ’storm-clouds gathering’ build up with sullen silences and terse one-word replies to any questions sucks aplenty but even worse are the post-arguement deep, deep silences. Silence like you can see in one of those wildlife programs about the deepest oceans with weird-looking fish scavenging on whatever dead and decaying matter manages to sink all the way down to their dark domain. Silence like you would have in space, where nobody can hear you scream (unless you’re on a space ship in which case they can). I’m no good with the silence. It eats at me. Gnaws away at me like those fish I mentioned a minute ago. Sort of. Long story short, it’s shit.

Should I apologise and get on with things? While I’m not 100% sure what the argument was actually about, I think that it wasn’t my fault (although, again, I feel my other half will probably disagree). I know, of course, that this ‘fault’ thing isn’t quite so black and white though. Should I be grown up? Ah shite, I hate this. Men aren’t equipped for this sort of cold warfare. We’re no good at it.

Back to work on Tuesday. Illness abated enough to be unable to avoid it any more. It’s still shit. And I’ve been invited to an all-day workshop on something that I know nothing about. When I called the person in charge of the workshop to ask what my input was expected to be, she told me that my (new) boss had put my name forward. She said that she’d invited one of my colleagues - let’s call her Ms. Neverhere - to the previous five workshops but that Ms. Neverhere had never bothered showing up. It was therefore necessary for her to escalate this to my (new) boss who, in his wisdom, nominated me to go instead.

You have to admire that sort of incisive leadership. Rather than tell Ms. Neverhere to get her shit together and do her job, he fobbed it off to me. This shit is Ms. Neverhere’s job and she has the knowledge to contribute whereas I know nothing on the topic and can’t contribute in any meaningful way. Doesn’t matter though. It’s the ‘Ignore All Conflict And Hope It’ll Go Away’ school of management - a popular one in these parts. Still, he’s young and inexperienced in such matters. It’s his first managerial role (bless). He looks like a small boy dressed up in his dad’s suit and has insufficient facial hair. He is very keen and eager but too dolphin-skinned to take seriously.

Ms. Neverhere is an unusual case. True to her name, she is never here. Apparently she asked if she could work from home for the summer three years ago (to accommodate school holidays) and she never came back. She shows up twice a month for meetings that she can’t get out of and leaves again directly afterwards. She’s so opposed to actually coming to work now that since she moved house a couple of months ago, she’s getting up every day and driving to her sister’s house to logon to work because her broadband hasn’t been connected yet. She’s successfully managed to ‘hand over’ a number of her tasks although everybody is pretty mystified as to what she’s doing in their stead. I reckon her aim is to get rid of all work and to just log in each day before going shopping and continuing to be paid. I have to admire her plan to be honest - I just don’t like being the henchman that has to help carry it out.

It’s like a little soap-opera here. Only it’s even more depressing than Eastenders.

Mainly from watching the music videos and trailers on Channel 6 in the morning from my sweaty, sick-bed before they start showing repeats of programs I’ve already seen somewhere else.

• I could be brown, I could be blue, I could be something, something, something. I could be hurtful, I could be purple. Why don’t you like me? Why don’t you like me?
  Not my words. The words of current pop sensation and pointless tosser, Mika. How shit is he? Very shit. Very shit indeed.
• Jesus, Lily Allen is really, really, really annoying and incredibly untalented. Incredibly untalented.
• There’s some 12 year old kid with the (quite) apt name of L’il Chris with some psuedo-rock song. Slightly more apt would be Very Annoying Yet Also L’il Chris.
• There really are many more awful bands/singers that have somehow managed to blag recording contracts and enough backing to make a video. I despair.
• Christina Aguilera has some astonishing breasts in that black and white video where she wanders around in a nightie. And, as a plus, she hasn’t gone mental like Britney. They’re not my cup of tea however, because…
• I quite fancy Donna from That 70’s Show but still really love Willow from Buffy.

Also, The Magnificent Ambersons was on telly yesterday at quarter past eight in the morning. Cool. Today however was something with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Not so cool.

Not the closer from Physical Graffiti, but my condition. Had to go to the doctor’s on Tuesday. Bronchitis, don’t you know? Unpleasant. Painful. Spent the last two days in bed and would have spent today in bed too had not Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers called to say that she forgot to bring her mother’s day cards with her and could I post them. Doesn’t she know I’m sick? Now I have to get out of my cosy bed and drive to the postbox (because in typical fashion, there isn’t on within half an hour’s walk). Arse!

I think I’ll get a Danish when I’m out. I haven’t been eating brilliantly in the last few days so maybe a tasty pastry can persuade me.

Wow. It looks like my plan to become King Of The Bloggers is bearing some fruit. It seems that the way to succeed in blogging is to leech off the hard work and success of someone far more popular than you. The mere mention of Twenty Major in the last post has (inadvertently it must be said) caused some sort of techie-style ping-back link for me to appear on his site. This has triggered a slew of curious/nosey visitors to my own humble abode. Far in excess of my normal numbers.

All I had to do was to hang around with the cool kid and I became popular through association. I’m sure that he’ll have me smoking and throwing stones at buses soon but so be it. Peer-pressure misdemeanours are a small price to pay to bask in his reflected glory.

The more astute of you will have noticed that I haven’t included a link to Twenty’s site from this post. I’m playing it cool. Don’t want to come on too strong, you see, lest he notice the geeky kid hanging around and organise a fight in the playground.

Hurrah for successful coat-tails.

Incomunicaaaaaado (to be sung in the whining tones of that Fish bloke from Marillion).

It appears that a vast chunk of the Irish blog network has ground to a slow. Thanks to the actions of NTL, I and many, many, many other users of their fine broadband service have been unable to get to any blogger.com addresses for a week. This means that any NTL customer that wants to visit and read a blogger.com blog or who hosts their blog there and wants to update it is unable to do so.

While we here in JPT HQ, having many redundant circuits with diverse routing and a failover to a tin-can on a string, are unaffected in the blog updating stakes, I was unable to read any of the great thinkers hosted on blogger.com over the weekend. And, any of those great thinkers who happened to be with NTL were unable to update their blogs. That is, of course, assuming they even tried through the champagne and cocaine-fuelled haze that they no doubt found themselves in after the gala event that was the Irish Blog Awards (I didn’t attend - there was some mix-up with my invitation and anyway, it’s all gotten too political).

The upshot of all this… Very little in the grand scheme of things. I’m slightly inconvenienced but can use my work internet connection instead (and there’s precious little else to do in work). Many others are more affected than I however. Twenty Major himself has experienced the joys of trying to get something useful from NTL and is likely rocking back and forth while hugging his knees and repeating “why won’t they call?” over and over. Don’t they know who he is?

Me, I intend to use this time to rise, unopposed, to be King Of The Bloggers. People with nothing else to read will come here instead. Bwaaaahhhh haaaa haaaa. This is the dawning of the age of the Trousers. Soon, The Lovely, Lovely Gráinne Seoige will be asking after Jimmy Page’s Trousers on her topical chat show. Then, I will make her my wife (I’ll obviously need to discuss it with Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers but I think she’ll be ok with it).

My star is in the ascendency. Nothing can stop me. Nothing except NTL fixing whatever they’ve broken and what are the odds of that?