Ever wanted to know who writes what and when here at 7 Reasons? No, neither did I. But I didn’t want to go to school either and I did that. So here are the stats behind 7 Reasons. And they are all accurate, except where I have made them up.
Category: Russian Roulette Sunday
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Russian Roulette Sunday: Celebrity Exclusive
At 7 Reasons we’ve never brought you exclusive celebrity news before, but now we have some. A letter has been erroneously delivered to one of us (the York based one) with exciting details about the private life of an icon of both the large and the small screen.
We don’t know why Bairstow Eves sent this letter to us, as it’s addressed to homeowners in Clifton, York, where neither of the 7 Reasons team live, but we’re jolly glad they did. Here it is:
Dear Home Owner, BUYERS WAITING CLIFTON
We urgently require more properties to sell in Clifton for the following clients who are registered with our office.- Mr T is a first time buyer looking for a property with a minimum of two bedrooms. He will consider any style of house.
- Mr & Mrs H have their property on the market and are looking to purchase a two bedroom house in Clifton.
- Mrs H is looking for a semi or detached property with a minimum of four bedrooms.
That’s right, 7 Reasons readers! This man. Mr T is looking to buy a house in York!
- I pity the fool that sells me a home in the wrong area!
Now we don’t know why the star of the A-Team and Rocky III is looking to buy a property here. It seems unlikely that it’s going to be a second home for holidaying as the letter also reveals that (surprisingly) Mr T is a first time buyer. And it tells us that he will consider any style of house; though presumably he’ll want one with a garage full of odds and ends that he can spontaneously fashion into an armoured car or use to construct an impromptu gun turret.
The letter goes on to tell us that Mr and Mrs H (we don’t know who these people are, they’re not important celebrities like Mr T) are looking to purchase a two bedroom house in Clifton. But wait! Mrs H is also looking to buy a semi or detached property with a minimum of four bedrooms. We don’t know why. Perhaps she’s a brazen strumpet who’s looking for somewhere to house her army of lovers? We just don’t know. We do feel that Mr H should be worried, but mostly we’re excited about Mr T.*
Thank you, Bairstow Eves, for bringing this important celebrity news to our attention. 7 Reasons (.org) will return tomorrow with reasons (unless there is any more Mr T news).
*I have an A-Team duvet cover that needs signing.
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We’ve Moved!
It’s Sunday, so no reasons today. Here’s something different. Last week we brought you a tale of horror and woe, and this week we bring you…a tale of horror and woe, because we have an announcement:
We’ve moved! You may not have noticed yet, but we have. We’ve moved from Gloucestershire to Kent. Strange, the website doesn’t look any different, you’re probably thinking; I can’t see any oast-houses or Dover Castle or France, but I promise you that we’ve moved. We’ve changed our web-hosts from Fasthosts to EZPZ hosting.
And we hope the new web-hosts that we’ve moved to will provide you, the reader and us, the men who have spent many, many, many of the hours that they should have spent writing in the last year trying to get answers from Fasthosts about why our website wasn’t being hosted effectively, with a more reliable experience. As our experience with Fasthosts has been appalling.
In fact, we started monitoring our site’s uptime over the past few weeks, and it turns out that with Fasthosts, our site was working less than 99% of the time. Imagine if you had a car that wasn’t there 1% of the time when you came to use it. Or your house wasn’t there for over three and a half days out of the year, but you didn’t know when that would be, or that the sun vanished intermittently.
And it’s not just that the site would disappear while we were trying to read it; it would also disappear while we were trying to write it, which resulted in an awful lot of lost work. In fact, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time that I should have spent creating stuff and writing for the website monitoring its performance and corresponding with the web hosts.
As a result of the many support tickets that we have raised and the many questions we have asked them in the past year, Fasthosts have properly investigated our downtime twice. And they’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t a problem at their end and that it must be our fault, which is strange as, since we’ve moved the website, it has been working for 100% of the time. Which rather undermines their claims.
It’s not just technical incompetence. A couple of days ago – we disabled the auto-renew facility some time ago – they tried to take money from my credit card to pay for web hosting for the coming year (something they didn’t have permission to do). Fortunately, they have the details of an old card and it didn’t go through.
Anyway, we’ve moved and we wanted our experiences with Fasthosts to have a home on the internet so that anyone thinking of using them and perhaps googling “Should I switch to Fasthosts”, “Are Fasthosts any good” or, “naked web hosting” (people search for almost everything pre-fixed by the word naked) would find this piece and would be forewarned.
Hopefully now, the 7 Reasons team will have less correspondence like this:
Jon,
I fully intended to forward any response on why we’re down to you. But, other than the initial automated (and pointless) response to our first email from Shithosts, there has been none. Nor have they replied to us via Twitter. This is on their webshite:
Websites hosted on 88.208.252.193 will currently be unavailable. Our engineers are investigating. Update: 8:35: Our engineers have found the cause of the issue. However, it is likely that a resolution will require a server rebuild. We will restore all data from a recent backup and will update this page when further information and a completion time become available. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. This issue is presently under investigation:
Our ip address is 88.208.252.3:21so whether this applies to us is a mystery to me, I’ll update you as soon as I hear anything/they bother to reply/I turn up at their offices in Gloucester brandishing a weapon,
Marc.
P.S. Makes me really glad I spent 8 hours working on today’s post now.
P.P.S. Do you have backups of all of the posts that you uploaded yesterday?
P.P.P.S. We were on course to have one of our best Mondays ever yesterday. Before our site disappeared.
And more correspondence like this:
Jon,
The website is working fine. It’s nice here in Kent. Look, I can see deer strolling through the meadow next to the tiramisu farm. Would you like some beer from the perpetual fountain?
Marc.
In conclusion: If you are looking for web hosting. Never, ever use Fasthosts. They’re no good at web hosting, their customer service is woeful, they can’t be trusted with your credit card details and they’re expensive (our new hosting is almost two and a half times cheaper).
7 Reasons (.org) will return tomorrow; I can state with utter confidence.
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Russian Roulette Sunday: Halloween Special
Hi, Marc here. Happy Halloween. Jon and I thought long and hard about what to bring you on el Día de los Muertos and, having considered it for some time we began working on a project early last week. Then things went a bit awry, and we ended up postponing it until next year. So it was left to me to write the Halloween special alone. And, looking into the dark recesses of my soul for inspiration, I came up with a horror-filled tale of woe and dread. Do not read on if you are of a nervous disposition. Or if you are a lover of poetry.1
‘Twas a crisp, moonlit night, and all was still,
yet into the house came a terrible chill,
the creak of a door, an inrush of air,
the muffled report of a foot on the stair.
2
The woman awoke, and sat with a start,
with trembling hands, and a racing heart,
was it her husband, returned from the bar?
Was it a spectre, or a burglar?
3
A rustling sound rose up from the kitchen,
and this resolved her to spring into action,
Shrilly, she called, in a faltering voice,
“Who is that down there, that’s causing the noise?”
4
No answer was given, to her nervous query,
she listened and listened, the silence was eerie,
and so it was, with a palpable dread,
she resolved to get up and stepped out of the bed.
5
She crossed the room swiftly, donning her gown,
tiptoed through the door and prepared to go down,
to discover who-knew-what was down there.
She stifled a whimper and went down the stairs.
6
Breathlessly she crept, along the hallway,
and when she arrived at the kitchen doorway,
she flung open the door, and switched on the light,
and then she received the most terrible fright.
7
She recoiled in horror, and let out a shriek,
she fell to the floor unable to speak,
she covered her eyes and continued to scream,
‘twas quite the most horrible thing that she’d seen.
8
So what was this horror, this terror, this sight?
That haunted the kitchen in the dead of night?
The most hideous thing she ever will see,
‘twas the bone-chilling mask of Jonathan Lee.
Have a great Halloween! Oh, and if you haven’t read it yet, this comes highly recommended: 7 Reasons we Should Trick-or-Treat Ourselves out of the Deficit
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Russian Roulette Sunday: One Year In Numbers!
Wednesday 27th October 2010 marks the first birthday of 7 Reasons. In the past year we have written approximately 2,000 reasons. Which, thinking about it, is 1,993 more than we should have done. We have also had countless guest writers and hundreds upon hundreds of comments. Some good, mostly anti-Jon. All in all, it’s been pretty good. Hopefully year two will be even better. Maybe a book? Maybe a panel show? Maybe we’ll finally appear in Esquire? Who knows. But that’s the future. Today, I want to concentrate on what we’ve achieved.
Right, now that’s done, we can move on. Oh, but before we do, can we just say thank you to everyone who has read 7 Reasons over the last year. And give an even bigger thank you to those who have commented on and/or shared 7 Reasons posts. And then there needs to be an even bigger thank you to all those who have written for us. Saturdays wouldn’t be the same without you. Now let’s hug. Okay, that’s long enough. Someone’s lemon is pressing into my thigh.
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Russian Roulette Sunday: How You Found Us: Part 2
Hello! It’s Sunday again and here’s part two in an occasional series that takes you behind the scenes of 7 Reasons. How You Found Us gives you, the reader, a glimpse into something usually only seen by us, the people who know the password, into the ways that this website has been discovered. This time, we’ve split them into categories. Seven categories (it felt weird experimenting with the number ten last week). Enjoy. And try not to have nightmares.
1. Phrases you used to find us that we found flattering:
funny website
VIRILE MEN
good humour
Epic Moustache
I lust you
Extra large penis
lotharios
2. Phrases you used to find us that we found less flattering:
scary man
FAIL
I dont care
funny faced people
KNOB END
you dirty mind
the scariest mask in the world
3. Phrases you used to find us that we’re sorry we couldn’t help with:
cooking frozen sausages
What time is Blue Peter on
where do women urinate from?
what to do with lemons
who is the most beautiful naked woman in the world?
are oranges gay?
how to wear socks
4. Phrases you used to find us that we don’t know anything about and nor do we want to:
horse sex tube
The Pope naked
PIRAHNA PORN
Margaret Thatcher mask
sex with house
Naked Pocahontas
pictures of socks
5. Phrases you used to find us that are just plain wrong:
Sarah Jessica Parker looks like a foot
reasons for Piers Morgan
the queen paints front door
The Daily Mail
6. Phrases you used to find us that there is no earthly explanation for and that we can’t help with:
pin the sperm on the egg
naked hunting
syphilis fruit
dead squirrels
mermaid found in Haiti
7. Phrases you used to find us that there is no earthly explanation for but that we were able to help with:
the network is down (easy one, our website is hosted by Fasthosts)
Ryan Giggs hiding cupboard (we don’t know why a friend of ours googled this but we do know who she is so we made her one).
7 Reasons will return tomorrow. With reasons and stuff. -
Russian Roulette Sunday: 10/10/10 10:10
It’s Sunday! But it’s not just any Sunday, it’s 10/10/10. And, because at 7 Reasons we’re really quite cool – despite all the tea-drinking and war-buffery – we’ve posted today’s piece at ten past ten. So, at the very moment that this post goes live it is 10/10/10 10:10. And that causes us a bit of a problem. Because we only know about the number 7: We know lots about the number seven, and we know cock-all about the number ten. But we’ve done some research, and here are five things about the number ten. Because it’s 10/10/10 10:10 (which is five of them). I’m sure you get that.
Look! Some Tens. 1. Binary. 10, as a binary number, means 2. The binary way if displaying 10 is 1010. Therefore…er…we really don’t understand binary. And it doesn’t contain the number seven. You can only understand binary if you wear spectacles.
2. Virgins. Virgins, according to the bible, come in tens (Matthew 25:1-13); half of them foolish, half of them wise. We did not learn this by googling “virgins”, by the way. Mary was also a virgin in the bible, making a total of 11, which is also a binary number. In Procul Harem’s Whiter Shade of Pale, there are sixteen virgins. Though I appear to have become become completely sidetracked from the number ten, which is what we’re supposed to be celebrating.
3. Lobsters. Lobsters have ten legs. As do all crustaceans, apparently. Which makes them two better than spiders, and eight better than Piers Morgan.
4. Italian. The number ten in Italian is dieci. The Italian for leader is duce (a phrase which is usually associated with Mussolini. They sound quite similar to the untrained ear. I once left my wife seated outside a café in Milano to finish her coffee and settle the bill while I bought a newspaper. Several minutes later, I returned to find an agitated-looking wife still seated at the table. “I thought you were going to pay the bill”, I said. “The waitress came out and kept saying, “Duce, Duce” when I asked her how much we owed. I gave her a ten euro note and she hasn’t come back with the change yet”, my shocked-looking wife replied. Fortunately we were able to avoid an international incident.
5. Harry Potter. The tenth highest grossing film of all time is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Which is abjectly depressing. And it’s not even the highest-grossing Harry Potter film. It does, however, go to demonstrate that money isn’t everything. And it goes to show that the number ten just isn’t as good as the number seven, so we were right all along.
Normal service – involving a proper number – will resume tomorrow. But not at seven past seven.
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Russian Roulette Sunday: The Words Behind The Words Behind The Reasons 2.
Hello, it’s a Jon week. In terms of Russian Roulette Sunday anyway. In terms of general living, every week is a Jon week. If it wasn’t I’d be dead or something. And no one wants that. Especially Marc. All the reasons and all the lemons would drive him insane. So, anyway, back to today. If you were with us in January, you may remember we took a look at some of the words Marc and I have exchanged with each other in the making of 7 Reasons. Have a read here if you were washing your hair that day. Not only was it funny, it was very easy to write. Which is basically our ideal kind of post. So we’ve decided to do it again. Right here. Right now. Enjoy.“I think it’s fairly obvious, I’m a spaceman.”
“I haven’t done the same, that would be lazy and unhelpful.”
“I am now hungover and not writing furiously about lemons.”
“I may have something sensible to say later.”
“I think camp bingo is like gay bingo. But in a field.”
“Ouch.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
“Canasta.”
“Well done on the lemons.”
“7 Reasons Guy Fawkes Should Have Been Called Lady Spoons?”
“I’d like to point out that a man in Russia found your socks and sandals piece yesterday.”
“If I take the name of York’s most famous son (his birthplace is a four minute walk from here) in vain, an angry mob will probably form outside my door.”
“I shall have an Alka-Seltzer and some lemon juice.”
“That’s £22.50 each per month that we’re not making now. That’s progress.”
“In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have put it straight in. That’s ovens for you though.”
“I’m back! Did you miss me?”
“Would you be totally insulted if I said I didn’t?”
“I was writing about dough balls. It does happen occasionally.”
“The only thing I liked about it was the end. A bit like when my parents used to listen to the Archers at dinner.”
“How about a cat hoverboard?”
“Oh, and Esquire magazine bought David Baddiel lunch today. Have they said anything about buying us lunch?”
“Excuse me a minute, I have a Jehovah Witness shaped problem.”
“I’m not sure it’s totally necessary, but it looks pretty. A bit like Kate Moss.”
“Let me know if you need a lemon.”
“Nice lemon on the sofa. Very funny.”
“Marc. Spiffing. Jon.”
“I have added my thoughts in curly lines that look like sperm.”
“I’ve never liked the French.”
“I tried to write a piece about beards once.”
“I’m like the world’s slowest genius.”
“We are like the tortoise and the tortoise.”
“Something went wrong. I think I shut it too tightly.”
“Photoshopping top trumps cards is more time consuming than I imagined.”
“I’m off to visit the shed.”
“I’m off to the greenhouse of neurosis.”
“I’ve tried shouting at it and that isn’t working.”
“A boy just fell off his bike. I’m laughing. Shall I go and pick him up?”
“That’s like liking Hitler more than Atilla The Hun and New Kids On The Block.”
“Ken, when in doubt, pretend to be a grown-up. It never fails.”
“I don’t have an issue with it. It’s probably the sadist in me. Or the beer.”
“I don’t think you’ve said Zara enough.”
“I hadn’t forgotten that you’re going to Rome, as in my mind it’s a tiramisu-related-event.”
“Bollocks.”
“Is it a cow?”
“It looked funny and I googled it.”
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Russian Roulette Sunday: A Recipe
It’s Russian Roulette Sunday again (and ordinary Sunday too) and we’ve realised something: We’ve never given our readers a recipe before. We’ve requested them when under pressure; we’ve offered general lifestyle advice on how to do food correctly; and on how food should be consumed, but we’ve never been specific about how to prepare it. Until now.
This isn’t our own recipe, it’s one that we stumbled across on the internet while doing something else. But it’s safe to say that we were amazed by it. Flabbergasted. Dumbfounded. It’s a perfectly genuine recipe that features in an advert for the main ingredient and we haven’t in any way made it up.
In the past, we may have created and altered posters and passed them off as genuine, but we did that because we didn’t think that anyone would believe us, and we certainly didn’t imagine that thousands of people around the world would download those posters, presumably to use in essays and school projects. In fact, we feel fairly confident that, as World War II recedes further into history, and internet content becomes ever-more readily-accepted, those posters will come to be seen as genuine, and we – in our usual hapless manner – will have inadvertently caused a revision of history. We’re actually dreading the day that one of our posters turns up in a newspaper, or a book. Anyway, we’ve learned our lesson, and this poster is categorically not one of our creations.
You’re probably feeling a little peckish by now so, Ladies and Gentlemen, discerning readers of 7 Reasons (.org), we present to you, without any further ado…Planked SPAM.
Now, to some people, a meal consisting of SPAM on a plank might seem a little unconventional or unappetising, but rest assured: When you unveil this culinary master-stroke with a flourish, it will be “…greeted with cheers” by your jubilant dinner-guests. The advert says so, so it must be true. We’re not sure what wood the plank should be made from, though pine would probably be nice and fragrant, and less tough than oak. But you can experiment with your own planks, we wouldn’t want to ruin the fun. Let us know how you get on.
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Russian Roulette Sunday: The Trouble With 7 Reasons
Howdy! I’ll give you two guesses as to who is writing this. Wrong! Correct! Yes, it’s me, Jon. Now for those of you who read 7 Reasons on a daily basis (I.E.: Marc) you’ll know that on Wednesday of this week I wrote a rather scathing piece about the modern day Blue Peter. I think it’s horrendous. This belief is not irrational, I did actually watch it. In my piece I criticised a lot of things. The presenters, the props and the theme tune to name just three. Mainly my angst was with the presenters though. I, rather harshly in hindsight, described them as ‘idiots’. I retract that now. They are not ‘idiots’. They’re just ‘playing idiots’. And there is a big distinction. I am sure many have read some of the stuff I have written on this site (Thursday for example) and thought I am an idiot. I’m not really, but I do act like one. For entertainment purposes. My own entertainment.The reason I bring this up, is that one of the Blue Peter presenters, Andy Akinwolere, contacted 7 Reasons about the piece. It was hard to tell if he was annoyed, baffled or frustrated by my words, but I was glad he challenged me. Not because it means 7 Reasons is being read by an ever expanding audience, but because he believed I was wrong. And that’s great. I loved his passion. I loved the fact that he was compelled to say, ‘Oi Lee! What the hell are you on about? You’re wrong. So wrong!’ Or words to that effect anyway. At least, I think he thought I was wrong. Like, I say, it was hard to tell. Either way, after I had got over the rather boyish ‘ooh look, I have annoyed a Blue Peter presenter’ phase, I began to realise what this meant.
Much of my better, and some would say funnier, posts are based around me attacking/belittling/ripping to shreds a person/song/film/book. Janet Street-Porter, Tracy Emin, Owl City and the New Radicals have all faced the wrath of Jonathan Lee. Now the automatic assumption would be that I have an intense dislike of all of those. In fact, the truth is that I don’t. I am fairly indifferent to Janet Street-Porter (unless she talks). I am fairly indifferent to Tracy Emin (unless she tries to convince me that she’s an artist). I quite like Owl City’s Fireflies (despite the lyrics making no sense at all). I am very fond of the New Radical’s Someday We’ll Know (again, despite the absurd lyrics). And that I guess is the trouble with 7 Reasons. Sometimes, unless you are me, you don’t get the irony involved in some of these pieces. Just look at the comments beneath 7 Reasons The New Radicals Should Have Done Their Research Properly. It’s fair to say I am not on their Christmas card list.
Admittedly there is a difference between the New Radicals piece and the Blue Peter piece. One I like, the other I certainly don’t. And I think that’s the point. Despite all the abuse I received about the New Radicals post, I still like it. The abuse doesn’t bother me, in fact I think it’s quite amusing. I guess that’s the sadist in me. The Blue Peter piece though, I no longer like. And when I wrote it, I did. Whether Andy Akinwolere has pricked my conscience I don’t know, though I expect he has. I feel bad, not for criticising the props (balloons instead of rulers?), but for criticising the presenters. As I said before, I am not an idiot, but I do act like one. I suspect (and hope) that the current Blue Peter presenters do exactly the same. All be it for an audience that is twenty years younger than I. Fundamentally, that is what is wrong with the Blue Peter piece. I didn’t take the act of idiocy into account. Just as those who lambasted me for the New Radicals piece didn’t take my act of idiocy into account.
The reason I have written this, is not because we didn’t have any ideas for Russian Roulette Sunday this week, but because I genuinely find it to be an interesting development. As a writer. Only time will tell, but I hope that I will now write more considered 7 Reasons posts. Dare I say it, a bit like Marc.
I can only apologise if you are now bored and were in fact hoping for another film or a picture of Marc’s friend Katey wearing a cardboard cut-out of my face. And yes, one does exist.
Incidentally, I have asked Andy if he’d like to write, ‘7 Reasons You Are Completely Wrong About Blue Peter’. And I really hope he does. Because if he doesn’t think I am wrong, then he really should move on to Newsround now.
