Empty Handed

I’ve now received my ‘proper’ Moo Flickr-cards, the set of 100 I ordered and mentioned here. They’re really nice, but I’ve made some errors! The first thing I realised when I got them is that I made some poor picture choices. I think I’ve picked too many shots of the kids. These are good pictures which I like, but they’re not really right for a calling card. It’s not that they’re inappropriate in any way which would see them being exchanged on some dodgy website (with the possible exception of the one of them in the bath, but even that one is completely modest with only their upper halve’s visible). No, it’s just that they’re of my kids! I can’t imagine giving them to anyone who is not part of the family or a close friend. And I can’t really think why I’d want to give such people my calling card. D’oh! Ah, well. The other problem with my picture choices is the format of the cards - think extremely wide-screen and you’re pretty much there (or look at the picture of them to the side there if you’ve got imagination issues). Now, this is not news to me, I knew this when I ordered the cards, as you have to select how the picture should be cropped. It’s just that I didn’t pick well in some cases, picking pictures I liked rather than images which would suit the ratio of the card. To be honest, I picked them in a slight hurry coz I was doing it late at night and was trying to get it done quickly, but even so, I’m pretty sure I would have made some poor choices anyway.

With the benefit of experience, I wouldn’t have picked this one or this one. Basically, if you have to cut something out which is important to the picture don’t use it for the Moo cards! Seems pretty obvious, I guess.

The other mistakes I made were in the choice of text on the back of the card. Here, I made two mistakes. 1) I included a web address, which (doesn’t exist yet, but) is basically part of this site, and would pretty much lead anyone who chose to visit it to this blog. Why is this a mistake? Well, I’m not sure I want anyone I would be likely to give these cards to to know about the blog. Like family, friends, colleagues, associates and acquaintances. Not because there’s ever likely to be anything untoward written about them (but there might be), but because I mingle in different circles in real life, and, although we may not like to admit it, or may think it’s some sort of weakness, we do tend to behave differently depending on the group (well, I do, even if you don’t). Now, if everybody I know is a potential reader of this blog (OK, I know that technically they are anyway) then which persona should I adopt in my posts!? It’s not that I’m taking any great pains to be anonymous, or anything, but it’s just probably a little too extreme to actually encourage these people to find the site. Hmmm. Tricky. This error in itself probably means I will not actually use these cards.

Anyway, mistake 2) is my phone number. No, I didn’t get it wrong per se, it just turns out that I’ve been labouring under a misconception about international dialling. I’ve put my cell phone number down on the card as 00447770 nnnnnnm where my number has the dialling code 07770, so I’ve put down the UK international dialling code in place of the leading 0. This doesn’t work from landlines in the UK. Oops. It’s fine from another mobile (and I store all my numbers on my cell phone in this format so they just work from anywhere), and it would be presumably fine from pretty much anywhere outside the UK, but just not from a UK landline. well, how was I supposed to know!?

So, the pictures are wrong and the text is wrong. Gah, I’m an idiot. On the plus side, the cards themselves are lovely. The format and the nice thick-card with matte finish really help to improve the quality of the pictures themselves, making even my lousy snaps look rather splendid.

Looks like I’ll be ordering some more Moo cards pretty soon, then. At only 20USD they really are a bargain. I may order 2 lots - One set to use as calling cards (no web address this time and a proper phone number) and one lot to give to friends and family just with my Flickr address on, so they can find my photo stream - that set would be nice and safe (and sensible) to have pictures of the kids on.

So, it was my cousin Tim’s wedding on Saturday, held at Moreton Morrell Hall, which is in England, as fine a country as any to have such an affair.

This fine dandy, sporting an excellent, and, I suspect, real, beard, was young Timmy’s best man. Tim took the precaution of having two best men, and I can whole-heartedly recommend carrying at least one spare of everything you may need to rely on. In the end, they both got to do a turn, and quite excellent they were too (the er, second best man was Tim’s brother, Steve).

Being a best man is something I have recent experience of, and I may post a few words about it at some point. Not now though, beers and bed await. I’ll probably add a few more notes and stuff about this wedding also, but, right now, I just wanted to share Tony with you.

More pics from the wedding on my Flickr account.

I’m supposed to be becoming a Godfather to a good friend’s baby son later on this year, but there’s a complication - I’m not religious. Well, I suppose that’s not the complication, as such, after all none of the God parents to my two sons are at all religious as far as I can tell, and that wasn’t a problem (leave aside the moral and logical issues here, for a second - I’m not religious and neither is my partner, but we had our kids christened anyway, giving them non-religious God parents whilst swearing blind to the vicar (or whatever) that we were dead into god an’ that and so were the god parents). No, the real complication is that it’s to be a catholic christening. Now, I don’t believe in god, and I think anyone who does is just mis-guided and wasting their time (no, I probably wouldn’t say it to the vicars face), but at least the catholics are taking it seriously and really buying into it, and I really respect that. The local church where we had the boys christened just didn’t care, or at least not enough to bother asking us any hard questions. Whilst this was, shall we say, convenient for our purposes, I think it’s intellectually lazy and on the verge of morally reprehensible that they let us get away with it. Whilst I really only went along with the xenings for an easy life (and because of The Deal), I actually took the job of choosing the God fathers really seriously, on the basis that if you’re going to do something, do it in the spirit in which it is intended, so I picked people who fit the criteria (all bar the actual believing in god thing) - they should be morally upstanding, sensible, likely to take an interest in the boys development (and bring them gifts!) yada yada yada - rather than just picking someone who would be fun to have a drink with afterwards and then fuck off and never see the kid again.

But the catholic thing is a whole new world - it will be a catholic christening in a catholic country (Portugal) and, until today, I just assumed me being a god father just wasn’t going to happen, and that would have been OK, and I’d have gone over anyway and would still take an interest in the child and care about his upbringing and buy him presents at christmas and birthdays and generally look out for him, so actually being a god father officially, like, wouldn’t really matter. I got to assuming all this because it seemed that, to qualify, I must be a catholic and have taken (done? eaten?) my (the?) sacraments and have one of those big gold things with incense billowing out and, you know, believe in God and stuff. Today, though, I’ve found out that I don’t need to be all that (unlike Rachael Leigh Cook) - all I need is a simple letter from my ‘local’ catholic priest to say that I’m a reliable person. And that’s the main point of this post, really:

How am I going to get one of those?

I’m expecting this to go all sitcom on me.