What do you give that special welder in your life who’s in a festive funk and has a head shaped like a balloon?

Why, a Christmas welding cap, of course:

Merry Christmas…

Well I’m off up yonder to that there windy city tomorrow to partake in a Blogging for Business panel at SES Chicago. Thankfully it’s a Tinbasher case study so I theoretically should know what I’m talking about. But it’s certainly felt like a bit of a task trying to condense every single marvellous morsel of Tinbasher zen into fifteen minutes for an audience of American search engine types.

I spent at least three hours toying with various references to whippers, but then decided to drop ‘em (the references - not my whippers). As if my accent isn’t going to trouble them enough without weird Northern English slang mentions of underpants.

Any road, one of the main reasons I’ve never shown up for this kind of thing previously (and it’s not as if folks badger me constantly) is that it costs a bit to get there and put yourself up; and I’m obviously a bit tight.

That’s why my boss at Direct Online Marketing is a top man - sending me off on my merry way with an allowance nonetheless - cheers Justin. And his good lady, Kristin, did a sterling job sorting my flights and booking the hotel. I mean, if left to me I’d have booked myself in to see Chicago the musical. And then we had Deborah and the guys running round BSM HQ taking dubious photos and fixing balance sheets. Thank you.

But I really appreciate all the help from Steph, my dear lady - who’s been coughing and spluttering and hallucinating for most of the week with some flu-like condition - for being my audience and being a great little sounding board.

Still, maybe you shouldn’t trust the opinion of somebody off their face on Tylenol flu and Sudafed.

I’m very much looking forward to this. I hope everybody concerned gets a little something out of it.

So, if you want any slides of the presentation or have any questions, you only need to ask. That is if SES doesn’t have them for some reason.

Although, it’s probably best to ask me over at my day job.

In terms of our marketing, not only am I omnipotent but I also have a certain omnipresence. By this, I mean I track every single email as it bounces about between all concerned parties. More often than not it just means I hold an extra saved copy of an email, but every now and again I’m forced to intervene if something looks a little wonky.

Library Photo of average Nigerian scammer

I’ll let Deborah, who performs sterling secretarial and accounting services from Butler Sheetmetal HQ, take over the telling of one particular instance of such an intervention from a few weeks back. She sent me the following email about some nefarious Nigerian:

Well, it all started yesterday morning when I arrived to start my duties in the meter cupboard.  Matt asked me to ring Michael Odiase to take payment for an urgent job. I read the original email enquiry and it had scam written all over it, but Matt had promised we’d ring back.  So, I rang Michael who told me the normal procedure for making payment was for me to give him our bank details. I told him he’d have to pay by credit card and he said he would have to apply for one! In the meantime I had to go through all the rigmarole of getting a price from TNT to deliver to Lagos to be able to do a proper quote. TNT quoted £1323.00 to deliver to Lagos Airport, but they weren’t prepared to take it from the airport to its final destination. Twas a lot of messing about.  Any road up, I think we’ve shaken him off now. Suppose there’s an outside chance he could have been genuine, but my gut instinct says not.

Anyway, back to deal with more fools and time wasters respected potential customers.

You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for some of our African cousins in some respects. Especially those round Nigeria, Ghana or the Ivory Coast whose major export appears to be the scam. Let’s be fair, your average Nigerian has a worse scam rep than the notorious 19th century confidence trickster, Soapy Smith.

Bad lad Soapy Smith

So let that be a lesson to anybody thinking of pulling a fast one.

Then again, things are a bit quiet by all accounts, so we could do with the work!

Here’s the speech United Mine Workers President Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, gave at the United Steelworkers national convention in Las Vegas this past July.

It’s one of those wonderfully empassioned working class pleas that you don’t see that often in this day and age. In a nutshell, he’s making the case for Barack Obama and against racism.

“We can’t tap dance around the fact that there are a lot of white folks out there” — a lot of them are good union people, he added — who “just can’t get past this idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a black man.”

In the speech, Trumka went on to say that while there are many reasons to vote for Obama, there’s “only one really, really bad reason to vote against Barack Obama. And that’s because he’s not white.”

Just watch it.

His occasional Oliver Hardy-isms are also quite entertaining.

[via]

Welder in Space

Because I’m as dimwitted as the rest of you, my first thoughts on learning that space had some sort of aroma led me to dismissing the concept out of hand. We all know there’s no air for starters and that anyone daft enough to open their helmet for a sly whiff would wind up covering the inside of it with their own explosive grey matter within thirty seconds.

Then again, I suppose it helps if you read an article rather than draw mindless conclusions from just the headline. If we dig a little deeper we find:

“We have a few clues as to what space smells like. First of all, there were interviews with astronauts that we were given, when they had been outside and then returned to the space station and were de-suiting and taking off their helmets, they all reported quite particular odours. For them, what comes across is a smell of fried steak, hot metal and even welding a motorbike.”

Apparently the perfume scientist quoted above is from Manchester and has been approached by NASA to reproduce the same space odour so that astronauts can train their nostrils for the peculiar pong.

And this is what the International Space Station’s Science Officer Don Pettit had to say about the smell after a spell up yonder in 2003:

“Each time, when I repressed the airlock, opened the hatch and welcomed two tired workers inside, a peculiar odor tickled my olfactory senses. At first I couldn’t quite place it. It must have come from the air ducts that re-pressed the compartment. Then I noticed that this smell was on their suit, helmet, gloves, and tools. It was more pronounced on fabrics than on metal or plastic surfaces. It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as ‘tastes like chicken.’ The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation.”

So, the smell we’re looking at is something akin to hot metal, fried steak, and welding a motorbike. How bizarre.

But, help could very well be at hand. Just follow me here, NASA, as I think we may be able to come to some kind of arrangement.

This is similar to the aroma that wafts from Jasper on any average Friday afternoon after the weekly chippy run and he’s got a bit of steak pie stuck in his whiskers. If he happens to do a spot of welding at the same time….BLAMMO - there’s your space scent right there.

Although, if he’s been on the cooking sherry the night before having watched Braveheart, he smells more like a tramp dipped in trifle.

Either way, just give us a bell, and we’ll give your pong police full access at our going rate.