Happy New Year!

Happy new year!

Rather horrifyingly, I've had a very productive evening and this is actually the third blog post I've written (four if you count a guest post), hopefully meaning that at least for the next week regular and maybe even vaguely interesting blog posts will be published.

Today marks the last day of my Christmas break before I return to work, and it's been a nice break, with plenty of unhealthy food and alcohol consumed (and I still have a good amount of alcohol to work through!)

Now for me (and quarter of a million other people in my locality) 2017 has a particular relevance to us, because 2017 is the year that Hull becomes the UK City of Culture.

Hull, a city and port in the North of England, I would venture to say has not always attracted the highest of opinions.  I myself was not a great fan of Hull, until I met my wife, and she introduced me to the more continental parts of the city (which I didn't realise existed).

Hull does have its good points, some decent museums and art galleries, places to visit, shopping centres (although it does have a tendency to open new shopping centres which simply drag the custom away from the other centres, making them struggle), and in the Avenues where I reside (aka the HU5 commune) it's quite pleasant and on good days almost cosmopolitan.

Unfortunately I was away from the city for the launch of the city of culture year, which I'm led to understand consisted of quite a few fireworks, but there is now supposed to be an entire year of events in and around the city. If you're looking for somewhere new to try, you might want to check out the Hull 2017 website and the events calendar.

I'm determined (at the moment anyway) to try to do more creative stuff this year, I don't feel that many of my blog posts are the best that I can do, so I'm hoping to do more and better quality.  By all means, I'm always interested in guest blogging (both bloggers on here and me blogging elsewhere) and any ideas for meet ups, collaborations, and so on, both on my blog and on my YouTube channel, are welcomed. Stay tuned!

Google Trends across the world

Happy 2016!  To all of my readers (thank you to each and every one of you that comes here, I do really appreciate it!) I hope that this year treats you well. I'm planning to do more creation of stuff - writing and videos - and I also want to collaborate more with other creators (if you have an idea, let me know)

2015 having come to an end, I discovered Google Trends the other day, which is quite cool - it was linked to on the main Google homepage a week or two back, and started off talking about what were the most searched for things in 2015, but I found that you can use Google Trends to see what is popular in other parts of the world.

For example, in Ireland they want to know how to eat pomelo and how to draw a minion, while in the UK people are more interested in how to get rid of brain freeze (perhaps they've been eating frozen pomelos).  In the UK - and Canada, for some reason - people are asking "What is a penny black stamp" (I'm disappointed in you people from the UK - it's a penny postage stamp, and was the first adhesive stamp made), however in the US they're asking "What is a lunar eclipse", which I'm also surprised at, maybe it's the term "lunar" instead of "moon"?

Meanwhile those crazy people from Holland (aka the Netherlands) are asking what is glamping.

Interestingly one of the most searched things in New Zealand is "what is the time in New Zealand" which fascinates me - do they not have watches or mobile phones with the time there?

Finally, South Africans want to know "how to smoke" while Australians are trying to find out how to tie a tie (and also make pancakes)

Finally, just one word of guidance for anyone not from the UK who is a fan of Downton Abbey - if you want to look like an absolute genius, go look up "pernicious anaemia" - when it gets to the finale you'll look amazing if you already know the answer.

2015 is coming...

So you read this, 2014 is either about to end, or has ended. (that pretty much covers everyone, except possibly for Doctor Who)

How's your year been?  Apparently this year I was going to lose weight and hit the gym, which didn't really happen (give or take maybe half a dozen pounds).  So, I've got a bit of a list for the next year:

• Lose weight - I'm aiming to get down to 15 stone, through those wonderful things, diet and exercise.
• Play more tabletop games - I want to try to organise to at least play board or card games once a month, I love playing tabletop games, it's an inexpensive way to have fun with friends and family, so I'm going to try to sort this out.
• Increase views of my blog and videos - I did set myself a challenge of 600k blog views by the end of the month (looks like it'll be about 573k) and 14k video views (and I'm on 13,415) so they haven't quite got there.  I'm struggling, as I suspect many people do, with engaging readers.  By all means, if people have any suggestions as to blogs or videos that they'd like to see, or maybe they'd like to do a guest blog/vlog, let me know.

Longer term I also have the following ambitions:

• Learn to swim - no, I can't swim.  Neither can I ride a bike, but I have a car so I don't see that being a big issue. However there is a possibility that I could drown, and a car would be particularly unhelpful in a drowning situation.
• Study at Oxford or Cambridge (preferably Cambridge).  I'm not talking actually going there, as much as I'd love to, but perhaps a distance learning or online course, or even a short residential course (they do concentrated weekend courses on subjects).  I am a bit of a snob perhaps, a lot of people that I admire studied at those universities and whilst I can't see myself being able to get there to study a full degree or anything, some sort of study programme at one of the two would be great.
• Visit the USA and Canada.  Over the last few months I've been doing a lot of reading about these countries, and I would love to visit them, perhaps on some sort of long holiday (2-3 weeks maybe).  There's so many places in both countries that I'd like to visit that I can't see us doing everywhere in one trip, but perhaps we could break it down over a number of years.

Do you have any plans for 2015 or new years resolutions?  Drop me a comment and let me know.

I should say that I will be doing my 2015 predictions video imminently (possibly tomorrow morning if I get chance, otherwise it'll be New Years Day), so if you do have a question about your 2015 that you want including on the video, do let me know asap, get it in the comments.

And before I finish, New Years Eve is coming!  I've done a video of advice, covering phones, taxis, and even signing Auld Langs Syne.  Be warned - if you listen carefully near the end you can hear a child counting monsters.

Happy new year!

Happy New Year!

Happy new year, one and all.  I hope 2014 brings you all of the things that you want.

I wasn't keen on 2013, I seem to remember from the last new year.  I didn't like it as a number, I think it was the '3' in it, as I was quite happy with 2012.  But that is all behind us, and we venture forth into a new year!

To celebrate the coming of 2014, I made a video of predictions - a group of people very kindly submitted questions for answering (special thanks to Scott Tumilty, Geek & Sundry Vlogger for his), so if you really want to know the answers to the deep, life-changing questions... this video isn't for you.  On the other hand if you want to know if I'm going to buy someone else a bacon sandwich, check the video out.

Don't worry about the glow in my eyes, it's purely down to the mystical powers of the Pyramid of Mystery, and not bad lighting.  Honest.

New years resolution?  Well for me, to lose weight.  I'm not going to worry about it this week while I'm off work and the house is still full of chocolate, but once that's out of the way, I'm hitting the gym again.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have an unfeasibly large marshmallow to eat.

Told you.

At this time of year...

...why do we do such strange things?

Eat pate - not paste out of a jar, but pate out of a pack.  Because pate is posher.  And what is the difference between pate and paste?

Lumps.

Pate has lumps in - sorry, texture, I mean to say "it's textured".

Textured with little chunks of fat that gross you out despite the many other things you've already engorged on over the Christmas period.

But you still eat it.

Eat too much chocolate - for eleven months of the year, there isn't such a thing as too much chocolate.  I could happily devour one of those large bars of Cadburys in a single sitting without batting an eyelid.  But at Christmas?  Suddenly some kind of "chocolate limit" kicks in, and despite the piles of tasty-looking Roses and Quality Street sitting there, all I really want is a cracker.

Weird Digestive Crackers - speaking of crackers, what is the deal with those strange digestive-type crackers that you get in boxes of crackers?  They're like a digestive biscuit, and kind of sweet which really messes up the taste explosion of the cheese piled upon it.

Weird digestive cracker AND lumpy pate?!?

Ring people at midnight - this doesn't happen so much now that I'm getting older, but we ring people at midnight on New Years Eve, to wish them "Happy New Year".  This is often made more difficult by the fact that one, or both, parties may be at some kind of social event (be it a party at home, a night club, or a bowling alley) so hearing someone on the phone isn't easy at the best of times.  And because so many people are ringing or texting "Happy New Year" all at the same time, the phone networks crash.

Ringing people at midnight is odd, isn't it?  If anyone rang me at any other time of year at midnight, I'd assume someone had died or was in hospital, or at the very least had got the wrong number and really wanted a pizza delivering asap.

Eat Danish Butter Cookies - I don't actually mind eating them that much, but I wouldn't buy a tin myself.  Except at Christmas, when one (if not two) tins of butter cookies appear in the house as if by magic.

Gold Chocolate Coins - At any other time in the year I could see myself struggling to remove a minute piece of chocolate from a foil casing, because I eat stuff that's bad for me.  But when do we get them?  At Christmas.  When the house is already full of chocolate and other sweeties.

Mmm. Sweeties.

You can always tell that you're out of all other chocolate when you start on the gold coins, and when you do resort to the chocolate coins you'll start with the biggest ones, the ones that look like a big two euro coin, because you get more chocolate for the effort spent penetrating the foil.  But all too soon you end up with just a stack of small, old five pence sized chocolate coins left, and the misery that settles around you as you work your way through these builds up to replace the depression thrown off at the beginning of the holidays.

While I'm blogging, I have a new video uploaded to my YouTube channel - my son loves counting and spelling songs, so I made a counting video, and used a xylophone to provide the tunes.

And Rocked. Out.