Attack Of The Terns!

☀ by Stewie in Travel and tagged Culture, My Life, Travel | 2 Comments

: The satanist church at Budir… Just kidding, it was Christian

Tour of Iceland: Budir, Vatnes, Budardalur, Blonduos, Glaumbaer, Akureyri

Disaster! We had just been informed that another volcanic eruption had caused a massive glacier to float down from a mountain and take out a bridge in the south of Iceland, meaning that the ring road around the island would be closed for 3 weeks, thereby scuppering our planned circular route and meaning that we would have to double back at roughly halfway around. Then the starter motor didn’t work on our hire car…

After a lengthy delay a replacement car had arrived, so Big Boy and I set off once again, chuckling at having found out that the word for ‘bye’ in Icelandic is ‘bless’. Ahh, how sweet! Continue reading →

Strongmen and Geek Chic

☀ by Stewie in Travel and tagged Culture, Humour, My Life, Travel | 7 Comments

Hallgrimskirja church in Reykjavik

Tour of Iceland: Reykjavik, Golden Circle, Borganes

Another year, another tour, this time to the land of fire and ice, accompanied by a close friend of a whole 6 months, who I have socialised with only around 10 times. But he was up for the adventure, so the plans were made. He will go by the name of Big Boy to preserve his anonymity and with good reason too.

As we went through airport security we encountered flashy new automated scanners. I whizzed through effortlessly, but turned around to see Big Boy looking puzzled. He saw the notice that read “Face down” and wrongly assumed that he should place his face over the scanner, rather than holding his passport there! I just wish more people were there to witness such hilarity. Alas, that was the end of the good humour as we discovered a long flight delay was in store.

When we finally landed in Reykjavik we experienced a disorientating lack of darkness, even at 4am. It just seemed like dusk as we headed through the barren volcanic landscape to the city. Continue reading →

First Anniversary

☀ by Stewie in That's Life! and tagged Humour, My Life | 24 Comments

This month sees the first anniversary of the creation of This Little Thing Called Life. Those eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that there are several posts dating from a few years back, but they were in fact published within the last year and I simply backdated them to when they were originally spawned. I’m pedantic like that.

What started out as Stewie On Life with a few random travel, dating and email hacker articles has evolved to what you see now; a site that is officially ranked 4,276,610th in the world by Alexa.com. I’m nearly lost for words. Never in my wildest dreams would I have expected to break into the top 5 million websites out of, probably, 2 trillion websites currently in cyberspace.

And to all the Canadians out there, I salute you! You’ve helped to make this site 102,809th most popular site in your country. And for that, I can finally forgive your country for giving birth to Alanis Morissette, Celine Dion and Bryan Adams – his song ‘Everything I do, I do it for Stew’ stayed at number 1 in the UK singles chart for SEVENTEEN WEEKS DAMN IT! Continue reading →

Extreme Frisbee

☀ by Stewie in That's Life! and tagged Culture, Humour, My Life | 8 Comments

: I agree – I’ll have a pint of Glory thanks

The sport of Ultimate is colloquially known as Ultimate Frisbee. Probably because it was a stupid idea to name a sport using an unaccompanied adjective. To the uninitiated Ultimate seems like an incomplete sentence. Sorry, I missed that last part… Ultimate what?! You might expect that a sport would be named after its components, such as football, or after the place where it was developed, such as badminton, and quite reasonably so. Of course, Frisbee is a trademarked name, but couldn’t they have mentioned a disc somewhere? And what is so ultimate about it? Certainly the way I play it wouldn’t surprise me to be filed with a lawsuit accusing me of breaking the Trade Descriptions Act. To be honest, the sport that I play is usually just Adequate Frisbee, although sometimes Lucky Frisbee, and commonly Sorry-I-Didn’t-Mean-To-Do-That Frisbee. Continue reading →

Just Too Obvious

☀ by Stewie in Dating Disasters and tagged Culture, Dating, Humour, My Life | 20 Comments

“Oh my God… he just asked me if I wanted to go for a drink. He’s just too obvious!” So says the excitable twentysomething to her closest friend. Well, the police didn’t like it when I waited outside your house to ‘accidentally’ bump into you. And you screamed when I sprang from the back seat of your car with a bottle of wine and two glasses. So what’s a guy got to do to get date these days?

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but what ever happened to the days of boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy asks girl out to share a glass or three of bubbly alcoholic liquid? Am I now supposed to believe that this transparent declaration of interest belongs in a bygone era? If what this girl says is now the widely accepted belief, then I guess that I can stop wondering where I have been going wrong.

There will now follow a period of enlightenment. My behaviour will change from rational and logical interaction with the fairer sex to increasingly confusing and erratic interplay, as I seek to find ways to ask girls out without actually asking the question. Continue reading →

This Little Thing Called Theft

☀ by Stewie in That's Life! and tagged Culture, My Life | 30 Comments

This week I discovered that someone had started a new blog using the same name as mine! Surely this is blatant theft and an infringement of copyright? Er, well no, actually it isn’t. Names are a tad difficult to copyright, unsurprisingly. So why would this bother me?

Firstly, I can’t understand why someone would choose to use a name that was already in use. I think that most people would want to avoid such a scenario. Regardless of the fact that the name bears a resemblance to well-known phrases, or at least has a feeling of familiarity, it wasn’t actually in use before I launched this site. I ran several Internet searches to check the suitability. There are a handful of sites with similar names, but nothing identical. So it was a variation on a theme, containing elements of well used expressions, and certainly espousing a common sentiment.

In a way I initially felt violated. I doubt that this was a deliberate case of theft, as there would be little point in doing so. Continue reading →

Dating ‘Mother’

☀ by Stewie in Dating Disasters and tagged Culture, Dating, Humour, My Life | 15 Comments

: I know how you feel, little guy

Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those Oedipus Complexes that would make Sigmund Freud turn in his grave, twiddling his moustache quizically. It is the tale of another dating woe, from when I had recently moved to London.

There I was, a single man salivating at the thought of what seemed like an endless line of available women, all just a Tube ride away. The world, it seemed, was my oyster. I just had to search amongst the sea of opportunity and grab a shining pearl, whilst obviously avoiding the perils of any non-jewellery producing molluscs, if you catch my drift. But enough of the analogies…

Not knowing where to start, I signed up to Match.com and started the whole ‘getting to know you’ process with London’s finest. With little success. What was wrong with these career girls? Maybe they didn’t actually believe that I was a millionaire playboy with a very big house in the country, his own horse and an interest in polo. It wasn’t too big a lie, I thought. Well, I did sometimes eat mint flavoured polos. Continue reading →