Ob. disclaimer – these views are mine alone, and nobody else’s

I happened to be in a doctors’ waiting room when Sky News excitedly flashed that they had footage of the Real Stig. People actually looked up to see some handsome chap walk away from the High Court. Then they said “Ben who?”, and went back to their business.

Obviously, I’m not Ben Collins – or Stig 3.0 for that matter – but I’m perplexed as to how many people would want to buy The Stig’s Autobiography, now we know it’s a racing driver who nobody’s really heard of. I can understand he wants to make some money out of being “The Stig” – but surely the money’s in staying gainfully employed by the BBC and BBC Worldwide to walk around in a racing helmet, as opposed to 10 seconds of brief public exposure before he realises that nobody really cares who The Stig is. The fun is in the facade.

Asking why I want to see a photo of said goods does not necessarily engender reassurance that you have the goods on offer to begin with, y’know? Even if you do have a 400+ point feedback rating…

You’re organising a week in which school children are encouraged to go to the cinema and watch films. The campaign is rather laboriously called National Schools Film Week – and you can visit their website at www.nsfw.org.

However, I’m pretty sure that most schoolkids will just giggle at the other meaning of NSFW – which is to today’s generation what the red triangle on the top-right of a film being shown on TV meant to my generation.

So I feel nothing but sympathy for the poor sods who were surfing Chat Roulette looking in vain for a woman to take their clothes off on camera. Then they found one who seemed to turn into a posessed devil woman – of course it turned out to be a scary viral video promoting The Last Exorcism.

If they were really strangers – then they may well be charred for life. Although I suspect that they were actually actors or people paid to surf Chat Roulette for a while – how would you get the clearance rights?

Every summer, Britain seems to get collective amnesia at the first sight of substantial rain. Even now, on Twitter, lots of UK people are lamenting Where has our summer gone?.

This somewhat neglects the fact that less than 6 weeks ago, we were in the middle of a summer heatwave, with hosepipe bans and weather health alerts posted. For days and days it seemed as if the weather would do nothing but bake golden sunshine.

I wouldn’t mind so much, but it happens EVERY YEAR. And without fail, people will come back to work in August or September and lament where has my summer gone. It hasn’t gone anywhere – we had it, and we loved it at the time. Remember?

Anyway, it also makes for the occasional surprise in the rest of your life – like this ad I spotted on my Facebook page, basically begging for a job.

Suffice to say that most of the people that I know who are in a position to hire someone at the BBC don’t have Facebook accounts, as far as I know. Although I dare say the person who placed that advert would find such non-social-media people to be freaks of the highest order…

Like many people who use FourSquare, I often wonder if there’s actually any point to checking in to a location, aside from point scoring and the fact I’m usually bored at a bus stop.

American friends of mine tell of strange legends whereby if you show you’re a Mayor at certain locations, the staff there look kindly upon you and give you a bonus. But I thought that’d never come here.

Until I heard that the West12 Shopping Centre in Shepherds Bush is offering a free SuperShake to the Mayor of that location in any one week. They’re incredibly active on the social media front, what with having a Twitter feed and a Facebook page.

Unfortunately, social media can only go so far. The reality of the West12 Shopping Centre is that it was a slightly dowdy and dying shopping mall even before the heavy big-guns of Westfield moved in opposite. There’s a gym, a supermarket, a cinema and a pub but most of the units are to let and there’s nothing there to draw people in aside from for the basic needs of the week.

So how are companies in the UK actually using FourSquare? Or is it doomed to go the way of the even more pointless Twitter game Spymaster, which at one point everyone seemed to be playing until they all realised it was useless and had no end goal?

Or, y’know, save up for a laptop so I can play Civilisation 5 and Portal 2.

Or a mobile phone since my G1 is going the way of the ghost.

Or just save up for my forthcoming child.

Decisions, decisions…

So what brilliantly cool games can I play with the XBox 360 that I can’t play with my PS3? (which is gathering dust in the corner, alas!)

You’d have thought a website dedicated to business professionals would make it easy to do what you need to do – like leaving a group. But oh no.

You can’t leave a group from your group settings page. Oh no, that’d be far too obvious.

Instead, you have to go to a listing of all your groups, and click on the tiny word that says Actions by each link. And I had to do that by consulting the Help page.

LinkedIn, sort it out!

(Headline courtesy of @suitov)

Omid Djalili‘s opening gambit was to come on and be a generic Middle Eastern stereotype, fulfilling various national stereotypes before turning it all in on itself. And I’d figured if it’s good enough for him, it’d be good enough for me. (Aside from the fact I can’t do impersonations to save my life).

So I was surprised to read on the BBC Arts’ Editor’s report on comedy that Joanne Lau, a Canadian-Chinese comedian, was taken to task on comedy review site Chortle for doing pretty much the same thing in her opening act. And that she’s had to change it as a result.

I don’t particularly remember anyone taking Omid to task for doing the same thing when he started out, and it seems to have worked for him. Any particular reason for this discrepancy?