I am awesome - I have proof

I am in the process of adding a soft top to my 'Sunday Jeep', a CJ8 Scrambler. Here it is, filled with von Stalkers. Back to the plot. For those that care, it's a 1982! Plot starts here. I bought the top for $200 on EBay and it's black and has windows and brackets and doors and handles and all that good stuff...anyway during this process I needed to ensure that I had all the brackets in the right place so I looked up the manufacturers website but inadvertently spelled the name incorrectly.

Now any good websurfer knows that this could be fatal, one slip and you're in popup overload (Dave??) but I was fortunate enough to land on the manufacturers website at a page that outlined that I had made a spelling mistake - I had spelled 'BESTOP' as 'BESTTOP'. It was quite amusing to see that there was a specific landing page for this type of error on the 'BESTOP' website...and this page was RIDDLED with issues; spelling, grammar, punctuation.. (the corrected page can still be found in this manner)

So I wrote to them, informing them of their many errors, here is my email:

Idea: This is perfect! I entered besttop in search engine and came straight to a site thanking me for finding you - it made particular mention of spelling:"Whether you spell Bestop: Best tops, or Besttop, it doesn't really matter. What matters most is that you found us. We don't mind the
misspelling-- besttop -- we're simply glad you found bestop.com." However I continued reading and found a few you should change for yourselves ....after all you wouldn't want to mock the general public now would you...

3rd paragraph: "If your looking for the best Jeep tops" ..... your should be you're

4th para: "it make no diffrence to us" - clearly it should! difference, difference, difference

5th para:"a complete line of soft top" should that be a plural top as in tops?

5th para: "For Jeep (CJ-5, CJ-7 and Wrangler vehicles" you started parentheses before the CJ5 and never ended them...

5th para: "fully illustrated installation instructions sheets," should be instructions or instruction sheets but not both plural. In fact that whole sentence is too long and confusing..here's my suggestion to change "Each of our products comes with fully illustrated installation instructions sheets, an in-product catalog, and an installation video in some Jeep top kit applications, and all products are covered by an industry best rated warranty: a full one-year factory warranty." to "Each of our products comes with fully illustrated installation instructions, an in-product catalog, and each product is covered by an industry best-rated warranty: a full one-year factory warranty. In some of our Jeep packages, we even include a helpful, step by step installation video."

Para5: "If your looking for " If YOU'RE

Why did I write all this? I own a CJ8, use and love your top! Just wanted to see if all my hard work proofiing you mmissppelledd page would earn me a snap repair kit ;) Happy days! Feel free to write back and say 'don't be ridiculous or thankyou', whichever!

And their reply:

Thank you for contacting Bestop, Inc. You're awesome! We had such a good laugh here at Bestop because my Boss wrote that web page. He claims he was being "tongue & cheek" with the misspellings and grammar, but we know the truth. :^)

We are very glad you found us and you'll probably always remember from this point forward that Bestop is spelled with only one "T". Meanwhile, I learned that I need to follow up and check on grammar, spelling and punctuation.

Believe me, we put a lot more effort into the manufacturing and quality of our products than our spelling indicates, but I'll work on getting the spelling up to par.

As a thank you, I would like to send you out something for your efforts in getting us on the right grammatical track. If you could forward me a shipping address, that would be great.

Thank you!
Digital Marketing Coordinator
Bestop, Inc.

So, it seems I am awesome, but then you already knew that didn't ya!

Eleven into five hundred and thirty don’t work

I’m a foreigner…an English one at that - 45th generation Roman – supporter of my country and my country’s allies. So it came as a major surprise when, returning from my delightful skiing jaunt in France, I was hauled, along with my 10 year old daughter, away from the regular passport control / Immigration check to a room at the end of the yellow line – “Denmark II”.

Denmark II is a roughly-square room with a row of small glass walled rooms at one end (the back, really) numbered sequentially, 1-8; 5 or 6 rows of hard plastic chairs, their backs facing these rooms and, at the front three desks supporting the weight of a printer, three computer screens and the elbows of three government agency officials clad in dark blue shirts over turtle neck shirts. Two of the three officers were women - one Hispanic, the other Afro-American. Their conversation consisted mainly of a new diet that seemingly they should have been on around the time they started to walk. They were upset that it was already past 5 o’clock – they’d been on duty all day, don’t forget, and had need of a supervisor’s signature.

Various comings and goings of various other officers were interspersed with the odd, stern shout out of ‘MY-OR-ELL-ETH HOR-HAY-TA” or "Foong-chee Waaaaa" (no I don’t speak Spanish, Cantonese, Haitian, Portuguese, Maian or Mandarin) at which point people (I assume with names like Whorehater or Waaaaa) would stand up, look behind them to see if the call came from a special sound proof torture booth or the front desk and that’s it. Stand. No other visual clues were given…the two big (ok they just ate well - continually) girls hid behind their monitors, the raised eyebrows of the ‘victim’ serving as a sign that they wanted to come forward and admit sins.

With well-timed reluctance on the part of the government agency yahoo (I’ll call them GAY for short), the victim was motioned to again. An entertaining and seemingly endless supply of victims brought forth work and gainful employment to the GAYs. We, victims that is, were clearly outnumbered – it appeared that the GAYs had so little to actually do that I overheard conversations about cake, diets, the game, a promotion opportunity and the woman in Torture Booth 6, the teeth of that guy on the end…and so on. There certainly was something rotten about this Danish room.

Anyway why have I started this monologous soliloquy? Because I was there…you see I was given a visa to work in this country – without which I have to leave within 10 days…I don’t get to crawl over border quality, barbed, razor wire…. they don’t allow us to do that at the airport – and it lasts for three years. The visa, that is. So, when and if you want to stay for longer, you ask for an extension. They give it to you, if you’re nice… I gots myself one of them….it lasts till Oct 2006.

The funny thing is (this is a précis of a quote, contemporaneously noted)…having left the Western Hemisphere (now anyone show me that on a world globe!!!) and committed a ‘meaningful departure’ then my extension authorization doesn’t allow me to get back in the country…it only allowed me to stay here when I was here. But where is the Western Hemisphere? Well it includes Mexico and Canada. So what if I were to have traveled to Canada would I have this issue? No. What about Mexico? No. What if I went to Mexico and then left the Western Hemisphere? Grey area but OK really. And Canada? Same. So the fact that I departed US soil for Europe instead of other Western Hemisphere Soil for the same destination and chose to fly to US soil first before these other contiguous countries caused me a 4 hour delay and a missed flight.

There’s more. The horror, the horror… We had a choice at this stage – go back to England, make an appointment at the US embassy in London (2 weeks typically), hand them my passport along with Evie’s, wait a couple of days, go back to London to collect the passport with super shiny visa sticker and return.. OR it seems in this Elevated Significant Risk of Terrorist Attack Era, money also works (not that terrorists have access to such resources…but I digress). So with a click and a cha-ching of my shiny all American credit card, the immigration folk saw fit to take $265 for each passport I had with me, a whopping $530. I figure they took two photographs (they had them already but they thought they’d take them again), 4 fingerprints (two of mine and two of Evie’s), and completed 2 forms about why there were charging me this money. In return I was given one two inch by one inch receipt, two non-reclining rear seats on a completely full plane, and a bad taste as to the efficiencies and bureaucracies in any ‘massive’ system.

So, my friends, I think the math is easy; 11 into $530 don’t work.

Green tea beats wine any day!

So this is my first blog entry, my first day replying to others comments and snapshots from their not-so-mundane, daily lives.

I got to thinking "what might be interesting" and didn't get far but I continued (to think) and decided to share my holiday detail. To do this I guess I need to explain some history of my family - medical history.

For the last 8 years, maybe more, my father has sufferd from CLL, chronic lymphatic leukemia. As it has got worse, so he has undergone varying degrees of treatment including 'chemo', pills, hairloss etc.... however last year, in fact toward the end of '04, news was very bad. If I fast forward through the apprehension and tears, we arrive at last January, 2005, when he was cleared to travel across the European continent and go skiing - just one last time. I decided I wanted to share that time-stamp, along with Evie and so traveled there... for one last time.

Well that was last year...but this year was a different story, November '05 brought bad news, a huge jump in bad results for my father. He had actually booked the trip for two weeks in January.... but the doctors asked him to come in for a check one week before his trip to see how his blood cells were doing. Considering the results were bad, we were braced for bad news but were not only satisfied with the results, we were all - doctors included - astounded at the results...it seems that for the first time in certainly his history, the 'bad' cell count went down, a reversal in decline. Or is it a reversal on the rise? Either way, it has been attributed to drinking green tea, two cups a day.

Now I enjoy a drink, or two, a glass of red is always welcome. But I think I shall start on the tea.

Cheers Dad...keep on drinking