I heard this on the TV while I was doing the washing up earlier.

"In the UK, women spend an average 35 hours a week doing housework, whereas men only spend 5. What I want to know is, why are women so slow at it?"

Hehe. On another tack, I laugh every day at Calvin and Hobbes, which I get delivered by email. There’s two ways of looking at it – for me, it used to be a cartoon about a kid (Calvin) and his pet tiger (Hobbes), which pretends to be a teddy bear whenever adults are around. Now I reckon it’s about a mentally disturbed kid (Calvin) and his attempts to project his alter-ego or somesuch onto a teddy bear (Hobbes). Still, it’s really funny, and the three-weeks of strips detailing Calvin’s time-travelling attempts to avoid homework have been really great. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with even vaguely the same sense of humour as me. That, along with Dilbert and Peanuts, keep me smiling.

It’s that sense of impending doom again. After setting up my printer last weekend, without having to do any reinstallation, and without the old spewing sheets of crap when you switch it on, my suspicions were raised. After all, I’ve got a rather important deadline coming up, and there has to be some sort of time-consuming computer related problem to really annoy me. It usually happens. This time it’s my venerable monitor, which I’ve been contemplating replacing for about three years now. It’s starting to intermittantly switch on with the top half of the screen black, a really bright line across the middle, and the bottom half working fine. And I don’t like having to thump it to get it working again. I’m tempted to say there’s a problem with the vertical scanning magnets, but that would be ignoring the true cause of the problem – the upcoming deadline. I really, really don’t need this kind of thing at the moment.