Editor’s Note: So, if you own a smartphone or an iPad, you’ll be familiar with the daily update notices where lovely application developers seek to improve their worthy products. Well, digital publishing seems to be working the same way. Herewith, Ricardo Vaughan offers a DIY update to his favourite feline’s estimable tome.
THE TRAILS AND TRIBULATIONS OF NELSON THE CAT (AMENDS)
p.6 final para – please replace ‘for my testes?’ with ‘concerning the irrevocable surrender of my reproductive organs?’
p.9 1st para – replace ‘the lamentable buffoons who alleged to be’ with ‘certain’ so it now reads ‘…continually distracted by the outrageous exploits of certain buffoons within the England Rugby Team.’
p.11 2nd para – please replace ‘the Haka’ with ‘their pre-match ritual’
p.11 final para – please expand 4th line to ‘on or off the pitch’
p.12 1st para – please delete the entire section from ‘Or maybe it was partly due to the Mediterranean lifestyle in Toulon… to …anything else that can be sold on the black market.’
And replace with ‘Hopefully this outstanding servant to English Rugby may one day become coach of England and produce a team of champions on the pitch and gentlemen off it. Though if it were me I would not want to give up the Mediterranean lifestyle in France which I imagine would be slightly more agreeable than life on the Tyneside Riviera.’
p.12 3rd para – please replace ‘JW’ with ‘Gentleman Johnny’
p.13 4th para – please expand to ‘…spear tackled by two catapulted midgets…’
p.13 4th para – please change the sentence from ‘I felt I had run into a miniature Tana Umaga and Kevin Mealamu’ to ‘I felt as if I had run into miniature versions of the fearsome Samoan wingers Tonna Brix and Craig Moltenlava.’
p.13 5th para – replace ‘…he had staggered off to another bar, accompanied by his entourage’ with ‘he had disappeared along with his entourage.’
p.14 2nd para – please delete ‘No wonder she is in the Olympic Team.’
p.14 3rd para – please replace ‘I was soon bored to death by …’ with ‘I was mesmerised by…’
p.16 1st para change the quote to ‘Why don’t you bugga off back home to Pommieland you stupid mongrel cat.’
p.16 2nd para – delete entire para from ‘But every long white cloud… to … most welcome to watch the match with them.’
p.16 6th para – amend to ‘….presumably decided to train for the triathlon by diving into Auckland harbour.’
p.16 7th para – amend ‘the rest’ to ‘some of the other members’
p.16 last para – please expand to ‘Going back to the Albino Blacks’ pre-match ritual…’
p.17 1st para – replace ‘…‘The Caveman’ Sebastien Chabal…’ with ‘the two metre giant Jean-Luc Chasseur des Laineux-Mammouths’
p.17 3rd para – replace ‘JW’ with ‘Gentilhomme Jean’
p.18 4th para – replace delete ‘of misfits’
p.20 last para – please replace ‘(supposedly trendy)’ with ‘retro’ and delete ‘(and was the spit of Morrisey)’ so it reads ‘He wore big, black, retro National Health Service glasses which accentuated his doleful demeanour.’
p21 1st para – please replace ‘Morrissey’ with ‘Professor Smith’
p.23 3rd para – please replace ‘…queried David Attenborough…’ with ‘…queried my ornithologically challenged LHC…’
p.28 2nd para and p.32 1st line please amend ‘e-coli’ to ‘E.coli’.
p.29 2nd para – please change ‘999%’ to ‘9,999.01%’
p.32 3rd para and p.33 1st para – please replace ‘Kate Winslet’ with ‘the most beautiful actress in the world’
p.36 last para – please delete hyphen next to ‘30’
p.41/ 43 #26 – please replace ‘Marie-Madeleine Lapin’ with ‘Aimée Toutlemonde’
p.41/ 44 #27 – please replace ‘Vincent Cassel’ with ‘Mathieu Allezengrève’
p.41/ 44 #32 – please replace ‘Gerard Depardieu’ with ‘Guillaume Taxe de Séjour’
p.42/ 44 #38 – please replace ‘Bradley Wiggins’ with ‘Chris Froome’
p.42/ 44 #39 – please replace ‘Lance Armstrong’ with ‘El Diablo’ (‘an El Diablo’ on p.44)
p.46 (new) #12 ‘Enchanté de faire votre connaissance, Madame. Je m’appelle Oui.’
p.47 (new) #12 ‘Delighted to meet you, Madam. My name is Noddy.’
p.48 2nd para – please replace ‘Twinings’ with ‘Darlinks’
p.54 penultimate para – after ‘Summer has come early. Hurrah!’ please add ‘After two consecutive days of sunshine in England the water authorities up and down the country sprang into action and imposed hosepipe bans with immediate effect.’
p.55 3rd para – please delete ‘…as a tax exile…’
p.57 final para – please delete the hyphen after ‘2’
p.61 5th para – please expand to state ‘an English Lorena Bobbit.’
p.65 2nd line – please expand to ‘Go the Gers. I hate Lennon.’
p.66 after para ending ‘…get together and play football?’ please add a new para:-
‘At least humans exchange pleasant and polite messages on Facebook unlike many of those who use Twitter. Another deplorable trait in humans: socially inept scoundrels who hide behind the anonymity of the Internet to be vitriolic, offensive and ill-mannered. If they cannot say anything pleasant or constructive about someone then why say anything at all?’
Stay tuned for the next action-packed injection of hilarity updates when we release V2.1S
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Worth reading all, Nelson ought to know, for the belly laugh I got finding e-coli to E.coli, It might disturb Nelson’s sleep if he knew how I was affected by the amendation. The rest I have to google and will. I want to know what that cat knows.
ps Doesn’t sound like twittering. I’ve taken to bird watching. Yes, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. Good policy drafting.
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Unfortunately I haven’t downloaded the automated update app into my mind and it ground to a halt when attempting to interpret the semantics. Then I woke up 3 hours later with a headache and a craving for Maxwell spiced mead..
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Ha! I’ve just received an email telling me that I’ve got a new follower!
Oh, by the way, in order for me to get back in, I’ll need to verify the fact. So, perhaps, they’ll know that I have not done so… or they would, if “they” weren’t just a bunch of stupid robots!
And I’ve just calculated my averaged for the complete duration: I’m following around 31 people per day, which only just means, clicking on to their name, mainly because they were either ALP or Greens or other people with similar views.
As for followers (people who follow me, something which I do nothing about) for the whole duration I have 167 followers, the first ever being Julia Guilard!
I also gathered that it is protocol curtesy to follow people who follow you.
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No about the protocol courtesy. I can’t be bothered with Twitter at the moment, but obviously if a pop star followed all their followers they’d drown in tweets. And with the popularity of your website with educational institutions …
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Speaking of protocol courtesy, but more so of curiosity to see what the British Blue has been getting up to lately, I must return to read the article later.
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Yes, pop star. I know what you mean, Voice. I’m being very careful with that part of my twittering so I don’t follow all my followers.
Fact is, I was getting about 10 a day and just followed them. And then there were all those that Twitter itself kept suggesting I followed, most of whom I felt were an affront upon my sensibilities, which confirms my view that the damned organisation is run by dumbed down robots.
Never more than 30 followers a day and my tweets were mainly of the “favouriting” type. Certainly not 100+1000 per day.
It’s a good issue to take up with some ombudsman or other, I reckon. Twitter puts itself out there as a public organisation for people to use. Sets out its rules and then begins to arbitrarily and without warning, suspend its users without informing them of the duration of sentence. Then it receives no mail nor answers any questions.
I saw easier access to govn’t secret services, for Zeus’ sake!
BASTARDS!
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Fucking twitter!
I got into it about four weeks ago. Got suspended the beginning of the second week for committing some technical sin, which, despite their gobbledygook nerdy explanation, I have no idea what it was. I have asked for explanations in English and for them to point out at the errant post. Nope! It seems only stupid robots run the place.
The suspension comes totally out of the blue and one doesn’t know how long it lasts.
Then, two weeks after that, I get another suspension, this time for “aggressive following and or aggressive tweeting” or words to that effect. Again, I looked at their rules and saw that the term means more than 100 followings per day and 1000 tweets per day. I had not done fifty of either, ever! And so, again, I asked them to check that and let me know, using the English language, where those 100+1000 are. And complained also about the sudden death, unwarned type of suspensions they imposed, often half way through a conversation and the fact that one doesn’t know how long these suspensions are for.
To no avail. I got exactly the same robotcrap that they had sent at the suspension, with the added announcement that they have now removed the suspension so I could go bak in.
So, chewing up the very hard and hot rage in my mouth, I responded with something like, unless you explained to me exactly what I’ve done wrong and I won’t be going back.
That was last Thursday, I think. And I kept my word.
In the meantime, I’m still getting notices from various people who continue to follow me; and from twitter who suggest I follow various people…
Fuck Twitter!
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And the horse it rode in on!!!
What an asinine way to communicate anything. Devoid of depth or detail, or even the possibility of them, those 140 characters represent the depths to which interpersonal communication has sunk. It’s Orwellian Newspeak for those terminally distracted by the Murdoch Sewer and the false consciousness of the “reality TV” generation.
There are wars and rumours of wars but the average twit is more focused on X Factor results or “The Next Big Drama From The US!”, which is apparently about a headless horseman. Seems perfect for the twitter generation. No head, no brain!
Twitter like the rest of its social media cohort is just cultural noise obscuring the signal; Soma to keep the dull and disengaged fluffed and ready for the next onslaught of geriatric bile from the old men that rule us.
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Ha! Orwell and Huxley in the one post! Gorgeous, Googles, simply splendiferous -to drop yet another worthy name!
You’re a little unfair of the medium itself, goggles. Its moderators and vast oceans of its users, yes, they are aptly named. Twits. But it allows people to make initial contact, after which they may, if they wish, make further and more profound contact.
In my brief period with the medium, I followed many journos worthy of the title and many thinkers also worthy of the adjective. Then we exchanged links to on line newspapers and blogs which were very interesting in all sorts of diverse and disparate manner. In short, I have found it quite useful.
But, like I said, the whole thing seems to be run by robots and dumbed down robots at that which act arbitrarily and brutally. Suddenly you are suspended for some technical sin which you did not know existed, unwarned and kept in the dark as to the length of your ostracism. The explanation you get -after you’ve been suspended- is incomprehensible and so you are left fuming in the dark. Then you are allowed to complain but first you must to go through a number of loops (all in nerdy argot) and then, nothing happens until suddenly, again with no explanation, you are told your suspension has been lifted.
Both times I asked to speak with a human so that I might receive an explanation I could understand. On both occasions all I’ve got was the same gobbledygook they send me when they suspended me, with exception that on the second time, they had changed the reason I was suspended and again, the reason being expressed in the same incomprehensible argot!
There’s no one there listening or is confident enough to use the english language to tell me what I did wrong and how to avoid it next time.
So I decided that my time and psyche is too precious to be wasted on robots. They would have to replace them with reasonably articulate members of the human race before I get back into it.
I am getting emails every day telling me that my suspension has been lifted and give me suggestions of people to follow, as well as who is now following me!
I refuse to move even a digit in their direction! Not even my little pinky!
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