A cautionary word offered from my painful experience…. If Excel asks if you’d like to save changes on your spreadsheet before you close it… STOP…. look at your file name and make sure it’s not the file you’ve just spent hours entering your new buget figures into before you say no!
This was my Thursday afternoon. 
Despite resolving not to get sucked into it after the opening night, we’re still tuning in to Celebrity Big Brother. The task on Sunday night was for the housemates to sort themselves into order of how famous they are. They had two minutes to decide and arrange themselves and this is the order they chose:
Michael Barrymore
Dennis Rodman
Pete Burns
George Galloway
Traci Bingham
Rula Lenska
Jodie Marsh
Faria Alam
Chantelle
Preston (from Ordinary Boys)
Maggot (from Goldie Looking Chain)
The inclusion of Chantelle (the only non-celebrity in the house) at number 9 won her the right to stay in the house, since she had successfully convinced the housemates that she was more famous than Preston and Maggot. After the party had died down the housemates were discussing who they thought was actually more famous. This got me thinking, so i decided to use Google to see who had the most search results and below is the outcome:
“George Galloway” 1,180,000
“Dennis Rodman” 872,000
“Traci Bingham” 647,000
“Jodie Marsh” 357,000
“Michael Barrymore” 116,000
“Rula Lenska” 95,900
“Chantelle” + “Big Brother” 60,500
“Pete Burns” 56,600
“Faria Alam” 43,000
“Preston” + “ordinary boys” 22,400
“Maggot” + “Goldie Looking Chain” 1,130
(The “quote” marks are to make sure that results aren’t skewed by including other instances of the same surname (like Barrymore which, without the quotes, gives 4.25 Million results because it obviously includes Drew, John, etc)
I know it’s not a very scientific way of measuring celebrity status but it was fun to do!
It’s Christmas and instead of The Great Escape, we watched Chicken Run. A great substitute with lots of nods to the classic live-action film. I’m a big fan of animation, and Aardman are one of my favourites, but it was sad to think that all of the props and characters from the film are all gone, following the fire at the Aardman warehouse in Bristol earlier this year.
I’ve been looking at software that I might have a play with in the New Year, once our studio is empty of packing boxes, called iStopMotion . I plan to combine my clay/modelling hobby with something a little more technical, so we’ll see how that goes!
This inaugural blog entry is named in honour of this guy who has a knockout tablet recipe on his site and is my blogging inspiration. It’s also a little topical, given my initial subject.
