There is more to the humble spam folder than missed opportunities and utter junk. Exactly, there’s missed junk opportunities!
Ladies and gentleman, may I kindly introduce to you this email…
I admit, it’s not the easiest to read on the photo. Let me detail it below:
HiAeb I am glad to know your demand for the tissue market. We have specialized in providing customized tissues for more than 8 years, and have provided sources of supply for many domestic companies. We are eager to expand channels and we are eager to cooperate with you. Samples will be sent to you for evaluation. Thanks, and best wishes
Ms Luo (General Manager) Chengdu Dixuan Trading Company
I know! Cutomized tissue paper?! Where have these opportunities been in my life? In my spam folder, that’s where!
Oh my, I think I’m getting giddy with all the possibilities. “Expanding my channels” – I can see it now, my face in toilet cubicles up and down the country. No, not the country, THE WORLD!!
I’ll be quite honest with you, I can’t think of anything much better.
Or, I could do as my email provider recommends and just delete the email, or, do nothing and let my email provider automatically delete it for me. (I’ll let you guess which I ended up doing.)
And people say I excited over nothing…oh hey, a shiny bit of foil blowing down the street!
Back when I was living in London I had the absolute pleasure of attending the Tate Modern’s critically appraised exhibition Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy. It ran between 8th March – 9th September 2018.
I didn’t attend “1932…” until late on, days before it was due to close. Why? Because I’ll be honest, Picasso had never really been my bag. I appreciated his reputation and there’s no denying Guernica is a masterpiece of political demonstration, but otherwise I just saw the man as someone who took a lot of credit for not a lot.
Don’t shoot me.
In the end, it was a little voice inside my head that urged me to go, that I’d only regret it if I didn’t. (Also, because at the time I could get in for £5. Minor detail.)
I’m so very glad I went. For one, turns out the man is just as trigger happy on the paint brushes as I am on my blog. In one year he produced over 100 works of art (mostly of his mistress). Secondly, some of his work isn’t too shabby.
Don’t get me wrong, I still had questions. Most of my secondary school art projects were on par with Yellow Belt.
And yet God knows, you never saw my Art teacher praising me as the Second Coming. I took a snapshot and sent it to my Mum, she still insisted I keep the day job.
So what has all this got to do with socks? Well, sometime after the exhibition I was browsing the wonderful world of Far Eastern shopping when I came across some socks printed with the iconic painting The Dream.
I’ll spare you my cobble-dash description on this painting but yep, the way he painted the face is intentional (classic playboy Picasso). More information here.
Short story, shorter, I found a pair of socks online depicting this masterpiece (or, as the sellers called them, “style #3 sleeping lady”). Don’t ask how or why, it’ll be easier for us both. Neither did I enquire as to the copyright, given the same people were also selling “magic man” socks of Jesus.
12 million months later my socks arrived, looking something like this:
First observation – no way in hell were these made for a ladies foot-size 5 (EU 38). Definitely men’s socks. But still, the print detailing was alright and the image had been flipped. Without disclosing the price, (*cough* 99p), you get what you pay for.
I couldn’t wait to try them on.
Then I looked down…
Because the socks were bigger in size than expected, I’d had to pull them up higher, and because my calves are the size of tree trunks, the print was stretched-out even more.
Far from looking mellowed after a bit of artist lovin’, Marie looks genuinely pained from having her face stretched to that of a horse. And let’s not even go there with where that places Picasso’s perceived manhood.
Oh well.
I’m still gonna wear them though. I mean, Picasso socks! How cool is that?!
Lin Biao was the Deputy Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1966 until 1971 and was instrumental in laying the foundations for Mao Zedong’s Cult of Personality (fuelled by “The Little Red Book”). This Cult became a dominant feature underpinning the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.
Ironically, the Cult and Lin’s subsequent rise in power deeply unsettled Chairman Mao, in fact Lin would later face severe criticism from within the ruling Communist Party for being the sole cause behind the reckless cultural destruction inflicted by the youthful Red Army in the 1960s.
By 1971 Lin had fallen from favour, putting him and close supporters at risk. After an alleged assassination attempt on Mao failed, Lin was in the process of fleeing China that same year when his plane crashed just off the Russian border, killing all those on board (including his family). It was reported nationally at the time that this was due to his plane running out of fuel, however due to the nature of Lin’s political decline and the secrecy of the Communist state, the true cause of death is still speculated to this day.
Huh, now we know. So, tune in next year for another edition of “Born on this Day”!
(Oh, and happy birthday to me too.)
**
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I was watching The Great Hack the other day. In essence it’s a documentary looking at how third parties, specifically Cambridge Analytica used data on individuals to shape public opinion, even going as far as having an influence, if not complete control, political votes and elections across the world. See the full trailer here. It’s unnerving stuff, mind Facebook and social media aside, thanks to the growing popularity of my blog a Google search for my name (which used to pull nothing linked to me at all), now gets this:
(Contrary to some of the images in the top 14 I am still alive.)
For the most part these are images coming from this blog (public), Twitter (public) and LinkedIn (public). Further down my Instagram profile starts cropping up (public by choice, my account is a laugh a minute). Seeing a theme? I don’t have a problem with it, but it’s interesting that Facebook doesn’t seem to factor when it links to my very public Facebook page for this blog.
Watching The Great Hack I felt fairly confident that Facebook or other sites couldn’t possibly be harvesting my data or at least not harvesting it to any great use. During the run up to the Brexit referendum in 2016 I saw no specific content linked to the vote and right now I’m getting a number of adverts for razors, shaving foam (a bit harsh Facebook) and Laughing Cow cheese. I didn’t like Laughing Cow cheese when I was five years old, why would I like it as some kind of snacking cheese now?! Hand me the brie, real girl’s gotta eat.
So I went to bed that night thinking I was safe, only to have a weird dream…
**
Dream squiggles
It was a sunny day in Stratford (Upon Avon), I think it was a Saturday. I came across two European school kids with a Tesco trolley down Henley Street. And we were outside a Costa and WHSmith (which is nuts because Costa and WHSmiths are no where near Shakespeare’s birthplace which happened to be a couple of doors down from where we were). The kids wanted to find a Boots store so I told them to try the Costa instead(?) for whatever it is they wanted, I think it was souvenirs. And I told them they had to cover the shopping trolley in fake tan(?!) so the three of us were desperately trying to cover this Tesco trolley in fake tan, but oddly enough the tan kept spilling through the gaps.
Then my sister, India, said “Alice, we need to photo this trolley” in a really aggressive way, like I should have known this already. Suddenly we’re on a South Devon cliff edge, facing into Coleton Fishacre gardens (which is nuts because their box gardens are located no where near the cliff edge, duh Alice!) But we needed to photo the trolley and get one of the kids in shot as well (the other child I think went off to Starbucks in the meantime). And then the child said he was going to push the trolley, with the fake tan, off the cliff and he started dancing around the edge even though there was a skull and cross bones sign right there. I was yelling to India to hurry up and photo the trolley because the sharks were coming and I didn’t have the right insurance(?)
But India was too busy debating the colour of jelly fish with some National Trust members in the shop. And I kept yelling “the pirates will take the trolley!”
I woke up at that point and spent the next two minutes convinced that the whole thing had happened and that the National Trust were going to send the police to my house. Nothing screams a woman who is old before her time more than someone genuinely concerned over the wrath of the National Trust.
Interpret that dream analysts!
**
(And this is why data harvesting doesn’t spook me, because I just hand personal, unnecessary, insights to the world on a plate.)
Things Escalate Quickly When you Buy From the Chinese
With this in mind I was on Wish the other night. Wish is a shopping app, owned by an American firm, but a site which is filled with sellers based in China offering items for sale at supposedly lower prices than UK shops. The catch? Delivery takes forever and additional postage charges hike up the overall price.
On Wish you can buy clothing…
…building materials…
…Cat harmonicas…
…And this…
It really is the ‘anything and everything’ shop of the internet. Never do you go onto Wish looking for a specific item because nine times out of ten you won’t find it and the tenth time you’ll have also bought an aquarium tank for fish you don’t own.
I was having a scroll through when a particular image made me stop abruptly. I opened it up to get a better look at the product.
Now those who see me often enough will know I like my dresses, I wear them pretty much every day. If you’re wearing dresses in the United Kingdom then you’re going to be getting through a lot of tights. But never have I stood in a shop and found myself wondering “hmm, will these stand up to having a cat thrown at them?”
And then, because I’d opened up one listing which featured tights, Wish quickly directed me to another.
‘Tights’ isn’t even mentioned in a product which opens with ‘Pineapple socks’. Again, I’m not really sure if the Chinese know what people are looking for in hosiery.
Then Wish went a bit mental. Because by now the data harvesters of the web had clocked on that I was looking at a particular type of product but not buying. Never had I been bombarded with so many options for all the things I could do with (or in) a pair of tights.
This one:
…this one reminded me of a classic clip from the mockumentary Summer Heights High where Mr G delivers a performance to his class dressed in a bag (skip to 1:17).
And then the concept of hosiery tights translated into something a lot darker than I expected. I mean, with ‘pineapple socks’ at least the app understood part the requirements of tights, that they were everyday items. Mind, I don’t know what kind of algorithm I would think I’d class this as ‘everyday wear’…
My feed was suddenly full of things which, quite frankly, I didn’t want to be seeing whilst watching Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday night with my dinner.
And I’ll be honest, this was the tamest screen shot I could get. The terribly photoshopped cat says it all:
I showed my friends what my innocent click had brought about. “Sure” they said, “sure you accidentally got these kind of tights as recommendations…”
Needless to say the app has now been very much deleted and left me defaulting back to the safe and security of making purchases from places where the website/shop assistant won’t instantly suggest I visit Ann Summers. That said, given the products from Wish are coming from Asia it now means governments now have more than enough information to completely own my soul and do goodness knows what when I’m a mega famous superstar (why are you laughing?)
Me posting this I hope will prevent that, after all you can’t blackmail what’s already common knowledge, err, I mean what’s already fake knowledge.
Ruddy Chinese.
Bonus Content!
Want to read another crazy dream I had? See the screenshot below from the first draft of this post. I kept it because I found it rather amusing how the dictionary function on Chrome suggested the correct spelling of Zuckerburg was Beefburger.
Originally drafted in August 2019 for later publication.
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My Housemate's a Mermaid 