Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

I’m sitting here having a good lounge around, and despite feeling very tired, I can’t seem to summon up the energy to go up the stairs and into bed. Instead, I’ve been doing a bit of messing around on the internet. Browsing randomly, and watching You Tube, and generally lazing about. And in doing so, I’ve come across this: a story about a deer, which decided to wander into a hotel.

It begins, quite humorously, I think: “A video has been released of a deer wandering into a hotel lobby in China on Tuesday” – but then, just when you’re picturing a beautiful deer on an incredible mission, perhaps tentatively sipping its drink, or wandering around in a timid manner, it explains, very abruptly, that it was then shot.

I suppose it’s the quickest, easiest, and safest way to deal with such a situation. But I still found it quite funny how abruptly the theme of the piece changes. Perhaps I’m just tired enough to find humour in some strange things.

Regardless, I hope the adventurous deer is now safe and sound back in its favourite forest.

Today has been a wonderful day. It was NFL at Wembley for the third year running, and my second in a row. When you are watching the Patriots, you know it is going to be a fantastic display of football, but they were also playing the Buccaneers, who, quite frankly, are terrible. So I was quite surprised to feel so excited, heading to the game.

It might have been seeing all the different jerseys and shirts on display, dotted about the various stations, and flooding onto the train. All sorts of colours, all sorts of teams, as people showed their support of the sport itself rather than a specific team. Perhaps it was the energy of an excited kid on the seat to my right rubbing off on me. He was bouncing up and down, and calling out every team he saw with tremendous glee. It was his first game, and he was loving every minute of it.

On the other hand, perhaps it was the fact that I had the opportunity to watch Tom Brady and Randy Moss play. I knew that if Moss caught one touchdown, he would move to second place on the all time receiver list behind Jerry Rice. I knew that Tom Brady is already being considered one of the best ever, and so long as he stays healthy, he still has a long career ahead of him.

Whatever it was, I was excited. And I had an absolute blast. It was great seeing old friends, and drinking together, and chucking a ball around together before heading in. It was wonderful to watch the pre-game warm-ups, seeing the players catching balls, and the quarterbacks demonstrating perfect spirals. It was brilliant, all of it.

I’m looking forward to next year already.

My usual Friday news browsing once again turned into a Saturday news browsing, but nevertheless there are a number of interesting stories in the news today. Interesting, and curious, and for different reasons.

First of all, in a piece that I find at once strange but also quite funny, a man has been arrested for being naked in his own home. How can you be arrested for beingf naked in your own home?

Apparently he had just rolled out of bed, and had decided to head to the kitchen for a cuppa. A parent and their kid walked past, saw everything, and were unsurprisingly a little bit shocked. But how can this person get arrested when he is in his own house? I very much doubt he was putting on a purposeful show, as the police seem to be hinting at, because if he was there would be no denying it. And why were the looking into his kitchen in the first place?

It’s quite strange how the law works sometimes. And speaking of the law, here’s quite an amusing piece. It is about a chair that has been dubbed the drink-driving chair. It is motorised, runs on a lawnmower engine, has a very intriguing steering wheel, and it looks like a very comfy drive indeed. It’s been seized from the previous owner, who was a great many times over the legal limit, and is now set to be auctioned off by the police.

And yes, I am currently just envisioning myself driving along the road in a sofa car. Perhaps not with the drink; I wouldn’t want to lose the car to auction, and I certainly wouldn’t want to get an 180 day jail sentence, but it would be a lot of fun to kick back and zoom along. At the top speed of 20 mph…

I think it is about time I write a little about my work, and about my office. It’s only fair really, considering I had the cheek to moan about it a few weeks back; about the moving around, about the cleaning up, and the updating. I wrote about how I hoped it would be nicer, when it was all done; I hope things would be able to run a bit more smoothly. And thankfully they do! The mission was a success. Things have been updated, and they work – and they work very well.

On the work front, a lot of this new smoothness can be chalked up to the business broadband. We had initially been worried that, with quite limited business sdsl availability in our area, we wouldn’t be able to go for the ideal internet connection, but in the end it worked out. The new internet is not only a lot faster than our previous one, but it doesn’t seem to disconnect as much either. There were times before where you could be working, and out of nowhere, and apparently for no real reason, you would get cut off. As long as I haven’t just jinxed it, it seems to be the case no longer.

Our telephones were also updated, which was almost as needed as the internet fix. Mostly this is because our phones were the most out of date things in the office. Probably even more out of date than Jack’s Tottenham shirt, which is yellow and very, very dated. Now our phones can do all sorts of fancy stuff. It is a little bit like these voip phone systems that you can get, and can do a lot more than just serve as a telephone. Fancy stuff.

Tomorrow is the big day. Wembley. The NFL, over here in England. So there is a lot to look forward to, and I’m growing more and more excited by the minute.

My friend called earlier today to tell me about a car crash he had suffered earlier in the week. He wants to claim whiplash insurance compensation before the weekend. Essentially, it sounds as though someone drove into the back of his car at the traffic lights in town. He was slowing to a halt, and the car behind somehow hadn’t realised the lights had turned red, and just trundled into the back of him.

Thankfully it looks like everything is in place for the insurance stuff to be sorted out. The man who crashed into him was more than helpful, which is good to hear. But that reminds me, there is an article here that claims a significant amount of people don’t realise their options when it comes to things like this. I stumbled across it the other day, and I must remember to send it over to my friend – he would hate it if I informed him afterwards that he missed out on an accident claim or something.

I’m not entirely sure when I’ll get to see him next, though, because he was going to come to the NFL game at Wembley this week, but he has just dropped out. When people live all over the country, the problem is that you rarely get to see each other face to face. I’ll have to have a dig around to see if I can find his email address, I suppose, although I can’t remember ever getting it off him.

And now there are only a couple of days to go before the game. I’m beginning to look forward to it quite a lot. There was an article in The Times about Tom Brady, and it just reinforced that he and top target Randy Moss will be two players who it will be pretty fantastic to have seen play, after they have retired. Yes, I’m looking forward to it quite a lot!

Apparently Michael Crabtree could start in the San Francisco 49ers upcoming game against the Houston Texans. Of course, if this had been announced earlier in the year, before the season started, it might not have been such interesting news. Crabtree was widely considered the best wide receiver in college football over the past two years; some even considered him to be the the best player in the entire 2009 draft.

Yes, prior to the beginning of the season, it would not be surprising to see him in the starting line up. It might even be expected. Coming a quarter of the way into the season, though, it is very interesting news.

Crabtree only signed a contract at the beginning of the month, making him, by a very long way, the last rookie to sign with his team – 5 games into the campaign. He hasn’t played for the 49ers yet. And the team has been looking good, too. They’re off to their most successful start in a while, beginning the season 3-2, and they currently sit atop the NFC West. Josh Morgan, whose spot Crabtree will be taking, has had some success, too.

The team is coming off a bye week this week, and their players have been allowed to travel home to be with their family – all except Crabtree, who remains at the practice facility getting up to speed with the offense. And poor old Morgan has had to stay behind to help him learn the position. He is literally teaching the man who has walked in and taken his position.

A low blow, perhaps. And an interesting move all together: it shows other players that you can hold out and not suffer any consequences. But then, it is Michael Crabtree we’re talking about here. He is one of the most explosive, prolific and hyped players to come into the league since Reggie Bush.

I think if I were Mike Singletary, I would play him too.

I woke up quite early today; I was up before the rest of the house, in fact, which is a real rarity at the moment. So I spent half an hour or so looking at mortgage news. It might sound a little boring, but it’s something that I quite like to do, every so often, just to keep abreast of how things are looking in the climate we find ourselves in. And there are some handy sites out there for just that sort of thing; you can sort of glance over the main headlines without needing to spend too much time reading anything.

There really was some quite positive stuff to read as well, which is always good to see. For example, there is an article here suggesting that mortgage rates are rising – indeed, rising for the first time since August, which is good to see. It might be a “small move”, but baby steps are always going to be needed with something like this.

I know that if I were in the market to sell my house, or in the mood to be selling any property at all, I would be pleased to see news pieces like this. I’d be starting to smile, I think. It is a good sign, because although there have been a few of these incidents, where things start to look good momentarily – often they are just that: momentary. Hopefully here, things can keep moving forward.

Now, it is time to kick back, relax, and watch a bit of the NFL, I think. Currently Tom Brady is on track to break the single game passing touchdown record. Unless they take him off, of course, which they probably will do considering the horrible conditions they’re playing in. I’m not usually the biggest fan of the Patriots, but when you have Brady in your fantasy team, having him throw 5 touchdowns in the 2nd quarter becomes slightly more exciting.

If you’re not familiar with the UK theme park scene, there are basically two main theme parks in the UK: Thorpe Park, and Alton Towers. And the former has had some curious business going on, according to this article.

I must admit that, when I first saw the headline, my first thought turned to the idea as an idea for a story. But then I suppose most things do nowadays. This, though; this would be the perfect scene for a Graveyard Book style story, and I didn’t really click on expecting to find anything too serious. Perhaps someone had been spooked by some kids messing around; had been subject to some strange prank. But no, it seems that managers at the park are so scared that they have called in somebody to perform an exorcism.

It sounds like, for whatever reason, employees were fiddling around with a Ouija board on the Saw ride, and afterwards a number of spooky things started happening: lights flickering, footsteps being heard despite no one being there – that sort of thing. It all sounds very fishy. I haven’t been to experience the ride yet, but wouldn’t flickering lights be part of what makes the ride scary in the first place? I find it strange (but quite interesting) that the suits have deemed it necessary to try and exorcise any demons or unwanted spirits.

I’m quite tempted to take a trip there and check out the ride to see if it’s still even spookier than usual, although I suppose by now Rev Fanthorpe has sorted it all out. I suppose it’s possible that one or two of these spirits from the alternate dimension escaped his cleansing, though.

I usually like to scan the news on Friday to see if there is anything interesting to write about, but this Friday I ended up heading to Colchester for my friend’s birthday, playing drinking games, and sleeping on someone’s sofa. It was a fantastic time; like being a student all over again, but I’ve had to delay Friday’s news stories until today. Already, there are quite a few that seem interesting, too.

You will notice that there is a theme to these pieces, although the two of them are still very different. The theme that they share, though, is motherhood: they are both slices of what makes the bond between mother and child unique and magical.

A heart-warming story, to begin, I feel. A story about a mother, who has woken from a coma after hearing her baby’s voice. Quite moving, no? But then, what about this: a newborn baby fell through the toilet of a train, landed on the tracks, and survived. The mother promptly jumped out of the window (people thought that she was committing suicide, and I suppose that would be my initial reaction, too), but it later turned out that she had pulled a James Bond move and rescued her baby.

On one hand, we have the power of voice; the power of that connection between mother and child. And on the other, that connection, that bond, is demonstrated in incredible fashion. Perhaps they should consider moving mother’s day?

I have not had the best of days today, and it was made worse by a phone call I’ve just had from BT. Let me just say that it really annoys me when you get called by your service provider about deals and offers. When I was at uni, it was Virgin – they called me on a number of occasions about some sort of package where I could get television and phone included, whereas I only had the broadband. The thing is, it is rather easy to cancel broadband when you finish the year and move out – but the phone, and the TV is another matter. And then you have to consider the fact that there is always a minimum contract agreement, which would go on far longer than my tenancy.

It might sound pathetic, but it just annoys me. Being called by BT, with them offering me some supposedly fantastic deals on their new BT home phones, it annoys me. I have been using BT here for a while now, and they have been okay. The internet is sometimes quite slow, we sometimes get stung on the occasional phone bill, but for the most part they have been okay. But that doesn’t mean I want to get called about new phones. If I want new phones, I can shop around for them myself.

There are so many specialists and websites, and shops out there – places like this telephone system website – that make it so easy to get that sort of thing anyway, that now more than ever you don’t need people selling you things down the phone. It’s the same with internet. You have telecoms and the like, but more than that, you have television adverts, you have the internet in general: you can use the internet to research the internet, and find the deals you want. If you want sdsl internet, you can research and get sdsl internet.

So rather than go through the process of turning them down, I simply hung up. And after the day I’ve had today, it felt quite good, too!