Googlewhacking .....?????

I think I'm a little behind the times but have any of you heard of googlewhacking!????

Friday I stumbled across a very odd but strangely compelling program called Dave Gormans Googlewhack adventure ....  now I'm quite a fan of Dave Gorman, I like his style of humour, its not convential stand up but a sort of combination of travel & seeking out with humour! Anyway I digress .... back to Googlewhacking!

For those of you who don't know googlewhacking is putting two seperate words into the google search engine & getting a 1 website hit that contains both words on one page! They must be google recognised dictionary words & the web page must be a proper page not a dictionary page or just a list of words! Sounds so simple ... and on this programme it seemed so ...

I like to play with words so I spent sometime thinking about words that shouldn't appear together on a webpage, I can't believe I let a program get into my head but I was intrigued that something so simple could be so difficult .... can you believe that there are 3940 websites with the words ambidextrous aardvark on ... what on earth are they talking about??? Taramasalata Elephant ....1060 web pages ....why???

As you can imagine by now I'm thinking stop ..there must be much more interesting or important things you could be doing ... but I'm a person who doesn't like to be defeated especially when words are involved ... so I continued .... siphoning alligators ... 10.800 pages ... now I'm a broad minded woman but what are these web sites doing?? How do you siphon an alligator?????

I think I need to walk away before I totally lose my mind to this task .... but if you find yourself just a little bored and fancy a googlewhack & you find one please put me out my misery & tell me!!

Garden visitors...

As I've mentioned I'm a keen photographer. recently i bought a telephoto lens for my digital SLR camera in readiness for our holiday in Costa Rica where I hope to capture some wildlife photos! So I've been practicing on our native wildlife, these are taken through our kitchen window which accounts for the slight haze & lack of sharpness!

It all looks a bit precarious .........

She wasn't impressed with my laughing at her balancing act!!

Being in town we don't attract a wide variety of birds but the sparrows visit a lot we now have a pair of bule tits (who i haven't managed to capture yet) & our opposite neighbours racing pigeons come to have a look too!

Pasty .....

I don’t think I have a strong Somerset accent but my work mates call me “Pasty” , I like to think it’s an affectionate term!!

I of course have pointed out several times that Pasties are from Cornwall & that I am in fact from Somerset but it falls on deaf ears!
I suppose it’s preferably to being called Wurzel … although they do ask if I came to work on my tractor!!!!

Some accents seem to generate a stereotype in peoples mind, I can’t be the only person out there who is nicknamed & teased by their accent!?? It doesn’t bother me in fact I quite like it, it’s who I am & believe me I can give as good as I get, lets be fair the Brummie accent is hardly without comedy value!

To my midland mates all the west country accents sound the same, I can distinguish between Cornish, Devon, Dorset etc but ask me to identify the different Midlands accents … Warwickshire, Coventry, Staffordshire etc and then I struggle!

I suppose our ear attunes to the accents we grew up with or schooled in?

I think with time you can identify other sub regional accents as opposed to just being Welsh, Irish, northern etc …. I know Mr Heron is very good at identifying different Irish accents but he has lived there for a long time now or maybe it’s just a talent!!?

I love the regional accents for such a small Island we have a very diverse range of accents. From the slow Cornish accent to the fast Liverpudlian banter as soon as someone speaks you can generally place them in a vague area of the country!

Am I alone in feeling a little thrill when you hear your own accent coming from someone else when you are both miles from your native county, there’s that instant bond, that feeling that you just want to ask where they are from ….. I often do … I can’t help myself!!? I find that it’s a good opener for a conversation with people you don’t know, most people are proud of their accent & where they come from!

So in a Somerset stereotype I lift a glass of scrumpy cider to the accent – long may it live!