Tag: seven reasons

7 Reasons to Pretend to be a Pirate

1. It’s cool. Whatever you do, there’s nothing that’s cooler than dressing up as a pirate. Being a poet is cool but people don’t dress up as poets. Being an architect is cool but people don’t dress up as architects. Being a deep sea diver is cool but people don’t dress up as deep sea divers. Probably one of the coolest things you can do is be in a really good rock band. Look at Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, they were a great band. They dressed up as pirates.

2. Avast. Pirates say “Avast” a lot, we’re not sure why. They preface many of their sentences with it. “Avast below”, “avast, ye scurvy dogs” and “avast, me hearties” are all commonly used pirate phrases. Saying “Avast” is fun. You can even improvise your own phrases. If, for example, while dressed as a pirate, you enter a room to discover your then girlfriend facing away from you and bending over, it is acceptable to exclaim “Avast behind!” Just make sure that you don’t trip over your own cutlass while running away.

3. Black eye-patches. Black eye-patches are great. When you’re a child that gets grit in your eye, you get given a white eye-patch. White eye-patches are surgical-looking and conspicuous, and you feel really silly wearing one until your eyeball heals. If your parents are thoughtful enough to get hold of a black one for you though, you can pretend to be a pirate while you’re at school, thus earning the envy and admiration of your classmates…and teachers.

4. Equality. Pretending to be a pirate is an equal opportunity business. While boys are pretending to be Blackbeard, Bluebeard, Yellowbeard or (ahem) Gingerbeard, girls needn’t be relegated to the role of pirate wenches. There’s a grand tradition of women pirates, from Lady Mary Killigrew through Charlotte de Berry to Anne Bonny, budding girl-pirates have loads of great role-models to look up to. Girls can’t be cowboys or spacemen, but they can be pirates.

5. Shanties. Sea shanties are brilliant. They’re tremendously evocative and a lot of fun to sing. You can’t sing sea shanties when you’re not dressed up as a pirate though, people will look at you funny and tell you to stop. They may even try to lock you away. We’re fairly certain that you’re not dressed as a pirate right now so, if you don’t believe us, stand up and sing this aloud.

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum

Drink and the devil had done for the rest

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

The mate was fixed by the bosun’s pike

The bosun brained with a marlinspike

And cookey’s throat was marked belike

It had been gripped by fingers ten;

And there they lay, all good dead men

Like break o’day in a boozing ken

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Wouldn’t that have been better if you were dressed as a pirate?

6. Required. Pirates arrrr cool.*

7. Costumes. When else does a straight man get to wear frilly shirts, tight trousers, thigh-high leather boots and flamboyant hats? Never. Unless they dress up as a Highwayman, and that would be silly.

*It is the law that you use this joke whenever pirates are mentioned.

November 29, 2009
7 Reasons Not to Have Children

1. Toys. There are toys everywhere. If you have children, you have to get rid of your toys and replace them with stuffed animals and pushchairs.

2. The Zoo. Adults don’t take other adults to the zoo, they only take children there (a lot). If you don’t have children then you don’t have to go to the zoo. This is a good thing as zoos are expensive and alternately boring, terrifying, disgusting and smelly. You can see far more interesting animals acting naturally in their own environments by watching David Attenborough documentaries from the comfort of your own sofa. You can eat a sandwich while you do this. Would anyone want to take a sandwich to the zoo? Of course not, a monkey would probably throw its poo at you while you were eating; a monkey in a cage that has nothing better to do. Who wants to visit the animal prison? Not me.

3. Sport. Sport’s a lot better when you don’t have children. If you participate in a sport on a regular basis then your spouse will rarely come to see you, and will take little interest in your performance when they do. This is good, as you can exaggerate your sporting prowess in years to come. When you have children, however, they will often get taken along to matches. This is bad, as children can be observant and cruel. If, for example, you turn out for a rugby team and are particularly injury prone, then having children is a very bad idea. They stand on the sidelines watching you make your return to the team after a lengthy lay-off and, ten minutes into the match, when you break yet another bone (the collar-bone, for example), they exclaim “Christ! He’s the Evel Knievel of Seaford Rugby Club”. In years to come they will complain that they spent most of their childhood weekends in the Casualty Department waiting room while you went for stitches or to have a broken collar-bone/arm/ankle/ribs(3 times)/nose(monthly)/shoulder treated. For the next twenty-five years or so their resentment at their lost childhood will manifest itself as a series of reminiscences at family gatherings whenever you mention your sporting career. “Was that the match when the nurse gave us chocolate?” one of your children will enquire, “No, it was the match when the ambulance crashed into the van” another will reply. Children are so cruel that they may eventually write about it on a website.

4. Butt-Power. A small child will jump up and run to the centre of the café you’re dining in and, thrusting his right arm heavenward, shout with all the volume he can muster, “Butt-Power!” for no apparent reason. The other customers will all turn to stare at you, the parent. This is embarrassing.

5. Money. Parents often complain about the costs involved in owning a child. We’ve all witnessed first-hand how expensive children can be. In the supermarket, harassed, distracted parents pushing a trolley full of the weekly shopping often miss several of the items that their mischievous progeny surreptitiously add to the trolley. Nuts, biscuits, jam, cotton wool balls, muffins, string, children don’t care what they’re putting in there, they’re just “helping”. Let’s say they get away with £5 of extra items per week, multiply that by the fifty-two weeks of the year and then multiply it by the eighteen years until they are grown-up. That’s almost £5000 pounds worth of stuff that you don’t need. That’s a lot. That’s 5000 lottery tickets you could have bought.

6. Hair loss. Each generation grows successively taller, so your children are probably going to be taller than you. This means that they will be able to see your bald spot. They will draw it to everyone’s attention and call you “Baldy”.

7. Harry Potter. If you don’t have children then you don’t have to have anything to do with Harry Potter. You don’t have to see the films, you don’t have to read the books, you don’t have to play the computer games, you don’t have to queue for hours outside Borders in the rain waiting for the latest edition, you don’t have to know anything about witches, warlocks, muggles, fairies or quidditch, you don’t have to talk total guff. No children: No Potter.

November 27, 2009
7 Reasons to Run Away and Change Your Name

1. The CIA. You are the co-author of a British-based humour website which gets an alarming number of page hits from readers in Arlington, Virginia (the home of the CIA). This scares you.

2. A Fable. Your name is Alan Lupus. You live in a small, unremarkable seaside town in a semi-detached house on the cliff-top. You have formerly had many close friends and been on good terms with your neighbours. For the last three weeks, however, you have been plagued by a recurring vision that seems to you to be completely real. You have seen it several times, all at different times of day. You look out from your living room window and see that a large, heavy buoy has broken free from its chains near the harbour entrance and, floating around unsecured, is causing a danger to shipping. Every time this apparition has appeared, you have frantically roused your friends and neighbours who have rushed down to the harbour to secure the buoy and prevent catastrophe. On all of these occasions they arrive to find that the buoy is safely moored outside the harbour entrance and everything is normal. Your behaviour has caused such a stir that the story has been printed in the local paper and the townsfolk have now begun to point at you in the street. You are being persecuted by your neighbours and former friends. You have brought shame on your family and, thanks to the story in the local paper going viral on the internet, you are notorious. You realise that your only hope of leading a normal life again is to run away and change your name. You are the Wolf who cried “buoy”.

3. Superb Pseudonym. You have devised the alias Fernando Manchega. Pleased as punch with your own cleverness at having devised a non-de-guerre that contains elements of your own name and one of your favourite cheeses, you run away to start a new life in Belize taking your wife, Mrs Manchega, and your cat, Ignatio Peregrine Constantine Manchega, for company. You are confident that no one will be able to track you down.

4. Jordan. Having been introduced to Katie Price you have unaccountably made a good impression. She is now pursuing you with amorous intent. Run man, run!

5. You Have A Dream. Your name is The Great Alfonso. Your father is a circus strongman and your mother is a bearded lady. You have been born into the circus business and your parents are adamant that it is your calling. Since childhood, however, you have harboured a secret ambition and, in the twenty years that you have been a circus performer, this dream has begun to haunt you more and more. You have now reached the stage that you find circus life unbearable. You realise that, for the sake of your sanity, you must act to fulfil your desire. You run away to join the accountancy firm of Baker, Foot and Slee.

6. You are rightly reviled. You are Jan Moir.

7. Sex. You are a trusted and long established Member of Parliament. The publication in the News of the World of your sexual peccadilloes (which make the previous week’s headline that involved a rocking chair, a gymnast and a spotted-winged fruit bat seem tame,) have caused a hubbub in The House, a furore in Fleet Street and a hullabaloo in your home. Your constituents are appalled, your colleagues are outraged and your wife is murderous. You may have earned the admiration of contortionists and broccoli farmers everywhere but this is not enough to save your career or your reputation. It is time to run away and change your name.

November 25, 2009
7 Reasons You Shouldn’t Wear A Tie

1. It causes a rash. When you’re the cool kid at your school, people expect you to do things differently, to be a bit rebellious. To subvert convention, you wear your black, orange and electric-blue striped polyester school tie with the thin end at the front. This means that you have to tuck the thick end into your shirt. You spend four long years at secondary school with a painful rash on your chest. You are cool though.

2. It hampers nudism. If a nudist dons a tie, he ceases to become a nudist, he becomes a weirdo.

3. It is disrespectful to Alan Hansen. Have you noticed something about football-pundits? They all wear shirts without ties. All of them, on every channel. They stopped wearing them at some point in the ‘90s. We believe that this was a football-pundit gesture of solidarity with Alan Hansen whose tie, along with his shoelaces, had been confiscated for his own safety when his “You’ll never win anything with kids” statement was disproved so emphatically and publicly. This is also why they never show the pundits’ shoes.

4. It can be dangerous. Ties can be dangerous, especially around the office.

Having been lured into a bedroom in an Austrian palace by a scantily-clad Jennifer Aniston, James Bond has been hit over the back of the head and knocked unconscious by her unseen accomplice. When he regains consciousness he finds himself in a nondescript office. He is bound at the wrists and ankles. He is seated and flanked by two burly henchmen. He faces the bad guy who sits behind a desk on top of which Bond can see a red telephone, a large rubber-band ball and a paper shredder. The henchmen take hold of him under the arms, pull him to his feet, and drag him to the front of the desk. One of the henchmen inserts the end of Bond’s tie into the top of the paper shredder which springs to life instantly, slowly dragging Bond inexorably toward it. Shocked and intimidated, his tie tightening, with beads of sweat visible on his brow, Bond enquires, “Do you expect me to talk, Bronzethumb?” The bad guy replies, “No Mr Bond, I expect you to tie-die.”

5. It causes moustaches. Hairy-chested lotharios can’t wear ties. They need to wear shirts – preferably yellow – with several buttons undone to expose their hairy-chests and large gold medallions. If lotharios were to wear ties, babes wouldn’t be able to ogle their chest hair and their gold pendants that depict an almost life-sized St. Christopher. Consequently, they would bed fewer chicks and would be forced to grow a Tom Selleck style moustache to demonstrate their rampant manliness instead.

6. It is phallic. It looks a bit like your penis. It points to your penis. Do you really want to draw attention to your penis?

7. It is unhygienic. Ties catch food. Everyone drops food on their tie. If they weren’t wearing ties the food would land on their shirts, which would be good. Then they could just put the shirt in the washing machine and get a clean one out of the wardrobe. Ties are usually made of silk and are always dry clean only, so people don’t remove them after a jam spill, they just rub at them for a bit with a damp cloth until the stain is less visible. The food stain eventually gathers bacteria and people go through life wearing bacteria-harbouring ties. What do people do before they arrive at the meeting? They straighten their ties. What do people do when they arrive at the meeting? They all shake hands. What do people do after the meeting? They become ill and die a hideous tie-bacteria inflicted death. What they don’t do at any point is take their ties to the dry-cleaners. Nobody does. Ever. You don’t either.

November 23, 2009
7 Reasons That Christopher Walken is Great.

1. Hair. Christopher Walken’s hair is amazing, it’s thick, lustrous and full. It’s always slightly odd though. It’s never styled in a way that anyone would choose to have their hair done. Have you ever heard anyone ask their hairdresser for “a Walken”? Of course you haven’t. To strengthen his hair, he pulls it for ten minutes per day. Christopher Walken’s hair is strong. And weird. Christopher Walken’s hair is probably the only thing that can beat Chuck Norris in a fight.

2. He’s funny. Christopher Walken is hilarious. Watch this.

3. The Deer Hunter. Christopher Walken is amazing in The Deer Hunter, managing to outshine both Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep – he even holds his own when performing next to John Cazale, which is the best any actor can hope for. He looks like an angel in the early stages of the film, which makes his eventual descent into despair and ultimate disintegration all the more poignant and harrowing. He actually spat in De Niro’s face in one scene, which came as quite a surprise to a furious De Niro. That’s brave. Christopher Walken is so good in The Deer Hunter that they should have given him more than one Best Supporting Actor Oscar for it. At least three…no, four.

4. He’s a betty. It’s beginning to look like 7 Reasons(.org) has a bit of a man-crush on Christopher Walken. We should point out that ladies like him too. We have shown this clip to ladies and ladies have told us that he is a betty, which is a good thing, apparently.

5. Bond. In View to a Kill, Christopher Walken was the best Bond villain ever, playing a Nazi-eugenics-created psychopath who, when he wasn’t giving drugs to horses or sleeping with Grace Jones, spent his time cruising the San Francisco Bay area in his dirigible, hurling businessmen into the sea. During filming of View to a Kill, Roger Moore had to have his hair thickened every day. Christopher Walken did not.

6. The Watch. Pulp Fiction is a fantastic film, containing many fine actors and performances. Here’s how Walken totally steals the show during his four minutes on screen.

7. Delilah. We genuinely believe that this is what goes on in Christopher Walken’s head.

November 22, 2009
Special Guest Post : 7 Reasons Why I Won’t Write A $15 Blog

Sometimes at 7 Reasons(.org), we like to look at what other people are writing, especially when they’re using the same format as we are. We were delighted to find this piece by Carol Tice via Twitter. We were even more delighted when she agreed that we could post in on our website. We just hope you don’t expect writing of this standard every day.

Recently, I had a disturbing week looking for freelance writing gigs. I concentrate on applying for jobs where one of my areas of specialized knowledge is required, because I know there’s lots of lowball pricing for general topics. Surely, they can’t get a student, Third-World resident, or wannabe writer to write about arcane legal areas or variable annuities, so rates there should still be a living wage – or so I thought.

One week, I applied for several legal writing gigs. Two of them got back to me. One paid $20-$40 per 400-600-word article. The other, an agency which claims it has more than 200 law-firm clients, paid $15-$30 a blog. This second guy had called on the phone and was clearly serious about hiring, unlike the many flaky email nibbles I get off resumes I send.

After I informed him that I did not work for remotely those rates and hung up…I thought about it a lot. I wish I had kept him on the phone so I could have asked this recruiter some questions.

Questions like, “Are you serious?” and “Is that even legal?” and “Do you actually find qualified people willing to write legal content at those rates?” and “Don’t you feel ashamed to be offering what will work out to less than the minimum hourly wage (more than $8 here in Washington State) for a very specific writing skill that requires years of experience?”

He let me know his current team was “pretty maxed out” – yeah, I’ll bet. More likely that was code for “It’s really hard to find anyone who can do this work competently at these rates.” To which I say, good.

I thought a lot about this call because for a tiny moment, just an instant really, I considered taking this gig. Legal is easy for me…OK, I’d have to work a LOT of hours to make it into anything like a living…if each blog took an hour, it would take me all day and night to earn something like my normal hourly rate…but this firm has a lot of clients I could connect with. Maybe I should take this and hope to build the account into some better-paying work.

Then I snapped out of it, and wrote this:

7 Reasons Why I Won’t Write A $15 Blog

1. I’d rather quit writing. If that’s all I’m going to make, I’d rather go out on the lawn and play Frisbee with my kids. They’ll only be young once. If I can’t really pay the bills writing, I should pack it in and enjoy life.

2. I won’t be part of the problem. I won’t contribute to the current downward spiral in pay rates by accepting insulting pay. If I accept this kind of work, it reinforces the idea that high-quality content on specialized topics can be obtained from professional writers at one-tenth or less of what was, until recently, market rates. I refuse to be part of the problem.

3. Low paying work begets more low-paying work. Say I worked for this legal content sweatshop, and managed to convince one of their clients to work for me directly. Even if the connection helped me land other clients and I cut out the middleman, I’m doubtful the wages would be appropriate. Any client I got through my association with this low-payer would likely also want to pay me joke wages. Once customers have the impression you’re cheap, it’s hard to convince them that you’re not.

4. I’d rather get a day job. At those rates, I could make more money as an assistant manager at a fast-food place, and work on that novel in my off hours. So if it comes to it, I’ll do something else to pay the bills. My creativity will be fairly compensated, or I’ll earn money another way. I type fast – I have made a living as a secretary in the past, and could again.

5. I want to take a stand. I believe we’re at a turning point in the world of online content that requires taking a moral stand. Thousands of scam operators have flooded into the marketplace, hoping to get writers to write for peanuts and then either resell the work for much more, or sell ads against them and make much more, or sell their whole Web site to someone else and make a killing – all off our backs. What they’re doing is morally wrong. So my basic sense of decency and justice demands that I resist exploitation. Accepting low-pay assignments may pay a few bills in the short term – emphasis on a few – but in the long term it will foster more exploitation. That’s why, for the sake of our vocation’s future, it’s important to refuse.

6. I have good-paying clients. I’ve been afraid to say this out loud for fear of jinxing it – but I still have some very good-paying work. Contrary to what you may have heard, there are still magazines and corporate accounts out there that understand that writers who freelance need to make an appropriate wage, or they’ll soon leave the vocation and be unavailable to create the content clients need to keep growing. Maybe there are fewer of them, but I know they still exist. That knowledge makes it easier to turn down slave-wage gigs.

7. Market forces will raise rates in time. As the economy improves, I believe the pool of good freelancers who can deliver sophisticated, quality content is going to shrink dramatically as many find new jobs. Then rates will naturally be driven back up as it becomes harder to find qualified writing help. I know writers who are already getting jobs in other fields. The fact that Demand Studios recently announced a plan to offer some of its writers health care is a sign that we’ve hit the saturation point. These sweatshops are struggling to attract the talent they need, and that their compensation is going to start to improve.

While professionals from other fields who want to write articles to market their services will always be around, and won’t care how little such articles pay… there aren’t enough pro writers who’ll take these rates to go around. So rates are going to rise.

I believe this is not a new normal – this is a momentary market glitch in our industry that’s taken root due to the downturn. Meanwhile, people are not going to stop reading quality publications, and companies will still need to communicate clearly with their customers in the future. The economy will recover, most content-mill writers will probably get jobs and leave, and rates will rise.

The only way to stop the exploitation is for professional writers to say “no” to insultingly low rates. I’m willing to be the first writer to publicly stand up and do that. Will you join me? If so, sign the petition on my Web site and pledge never to work for less than $50 an assignment. The first step in bringing more power to writers is to organize.

Why $50? That’s what I got paid per article when I first started out in 1999. Rates shouldn’t be lower now, accounting for inflation. So I think that’s a good cutoff.

Who knows? Maybe Lance Armstrong or Amazon.com (have you seen their mill, Amazon Mechanical Turk?) would improve their pay rather than face public embarrassment over their rates.

If we pull together, we could create that public pressure. Maybe the number of clients for these mills could be decreased if we raised public awareness of the situation. That would grow the pool of better-paying markets for freelancers to approach on their own and lessen the profiteering mill owners are currently able to do off writers’ labor.

Want to quit the content mills and learn how to make a good living writing? I mentor a maximum of three writers a month and teach them how to earn more. Also hoping to complete my e-book shortly on this topic, Make a Living Writing — if you’re interested in a copy, email me and I’ll put you on the list to get a notice when it comes out.

Carol Tice is an experienced reporter, copywriter and blogger whose work has appeared in Entrepreneur magazine, the Seattle Times, and many others. Contact her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @TiceWrites. You can read the original posting of this article – and some very interesting comments – here, and check out more of her work here.

November 21, 2009
7 Reasons You Should Wear A Tie

1. It’s Smart. A tie creates a good first impression. Whether you are are going for an interview or taking that rusty bike to the skip, you should always wear a tie. It is much easier saying goodbye to the rusty bike with a tie on. It feels more like a funeral.

2. It’s Sexy. As Jennifer Aniston aptly demonstrates for us, a woman in a tie can be quite lovely. You turn up to an interview like that and you will get that job. You better just hope they don’t give you a complimentary pencil sharpener. Where are you going to put it?

3. It’s Fashion. You may not have heard about it yet, but 2010 is going to be the year of the tie-pyjama combo. That’s right, people are going to start wearing their tie in bed. It’s going to be the ‘must do’ activity so you should probably start now. Pyjama parties will never be the same again.

4. It’s You. The way you wear a tie says a lot about you. Just think of Rambo. The colour also says what type of person you are. Blue indicates a caring and humorous nature. Red shows passion and fire. Black denotes serious intent. Yellow with green dots suggests colour blindness. So remember, ‘Whatever message you want to get across, say it with a tie’. (That’s a great line and now the copyright of Jonathan Lee).

5. It’s Food. A tie is the only piece of clothing that it is acceptable to be seen chewing on. It is to apparel what the biro is to stationary. And of course you are not actually eating the tie, you are just sucking out all the nutrients. It is much healthier than a Snickers bar and does count as one of your ‘five-a-day’.*

6. It’s Useful. Why do you think James Bond always wears a tie? It’s because he never knows when he is about to be attacked. (Between you and me, I don’t know why he just doesn’t read the script. That way he could catch a different cable car than the bad guy. But anyway, he has a tie so it doesn’t really matter I suppose). James Bond and bad guy are in the same cable car. Bond left his gun under some French fancies pillow so he is both unarmed and knackered from all the fancying. Suddenly the cable car comes to an abrupt halt because bad guy’s mate has pressed the ‘off’ button. Bad guy whips out his gun but before you can say, ‘Bloody Hell Girlfriend! Bond is in a spot of bother here.’ Bond has electrocuted bad guy using the latest iPhone app and is whizzing down the cable hanging onto his tie. Genius.

7. It’s Clever. The tie was invented for one purpose and one purpose only. Everything else you have read are simply unforeseen bonus features. The one reason a tie was invented was because it is very clever at covering up jam stains on your shirt. Everyone drops jam on their shirt in the morning and it always lands right in line with the sternum. That can’t be covered with a jacket. A tie is your hero. And in the unusual occurrence that the jam stain is just off centre, well you wear a crooked tie.

*This is a lie.

November 20, 2009
7 Reasons to go to The Cinema

1. You are a basketball scout. Where better to find abnormally tall people to play in your team? They’re always at the cinema, usually in the seat immediately in front of you.

2. Gauge your normality. When, during the scalping scenes in Inglourious Basterds, the rest of the audience are gasping, groaning, covering their eyes and looking away while you’re grinning and thinking, “Cool!” you learn that there is probably something wrong with you. And by “you”, I really mean me.

3. Bladder testing. Have you ever worried that you have a weak bladder? Go to the cinema. You’ll soon realise that it’s stronger than you think when you have to stand up to let the same man through three times during a ninety minute film. Obviously, if you’re the man went to the loo three times, you have serious bladder problems, please stay away from the cinema.

4. Be cool. In my experience, there’s nowhere better to discover the latest, most fashionable, ringtones than when watching a film at your local cinema. Going to the cinema helps you to stay down with the kids. Innit.

5. Sound. Cinemas have the most amazing surround sound systems, with speakers mounted everywhere and subwoofers the size of Highland cows. The sheer mind-boggling array of whooshing noises in the cinema is worth the admittance price alone. And that’s just low-budget independent art films. Hollywood blockbusters have ninety times as much whooshing and the full panoply of rumbling too. All the way from deep rumbling that makes your stomach hurt through to slightly less deep rumbling that makes your teeth hurt. Brilliant.

6. Popcorn. Popcorn costs a small fortune, has the texture of polystyrene chips and the flavour of a cardboard box. It is served in a bucket. How superior do you feel when watching your fellow cinema-goers consume it? It’s a shame you can’t bottle that feeling.

7. Peace and quiet. Sometimes it’s hard telling people to stop talking, that you’d just like some peace and quiet. Saying “I don’t care what happened in the office, please stop bothering me with the minute by minute account of your day” makes you appear mean and there are often recriminations. If you take that person to the cinema, someone else will raise their finger to their lips and say “Shh!” so that you don’t have to. It’s always woman in her fifties that does this. No one knows why.

November 19, 2009
7 Reasons For 7Reasons.org

1. Enjoyment. We’ve been running our 7 Reasons blog for a while now. We really enjoy it, and other people have been enjoying it too. We want to keep on enjoying.

2. The name. The blog was called 7reasons-sevenreasons.blogspot.com as this was the best name we could get on Blogger. That’s a seriously rubbish name, it’s totally unmemorable and we want to make a 7Reasons.org mug. If we’d made a 7reasons-sevenreasons.blogspot.com mug it would be huge and useless for drinking coffee from. Its size would mean that it was only suitable for the sort of unsophisticated chap who thinks that drinking an enormous quantity of tea is a good idea.

3. Help. 7 Reasons is basically a self-help guide, so people deserve to find it. The catchy new name should help them do this. It’s help (non-self).

4. Blogger. We had quite a few issues when using Blogger as a host. We would often discover that when we viewed our meticulously crafted posts on the blog, that they had been re-spaced and re-sized, that the font style had changed with bold type often randomly added. We found that undoing this was rather tricky and time-consuming. We also found that it was often difficult to log in. On the day that we launched the blog, for example, neither of us could log in to post our debut list. This sort of thing was unacceptable and we hope that with our own site we can eradicate this sort of issue. In fairness to Blogger, I should point out that their services are free and that the co-authors of this website both continue to host their personal blogs there.

5. New Stuff. Now that we have our own site, we have a huge scope for new functions and features. We’re going to be tinkering and adding new stuff as we go along. We’re not sure what yet, but it will be new and it will be stuff. We’d love to hear suggestions.

6. Email. Our old email address was, like the old site name, large and unmemorable. Our new email address is [email protected], which is a vast improvement. Consequently, we expect to receive more emails from readers, with their suggestions for topics, for website features and functions and (we really hope this happens) complete 7 Reasons lists. We know that you’re erudite and funny, we read the comments. Why not have a go yourself?

7. The World. Hitler wanted to take over the world, we do too. We see this as the next stage in our quest for world domination. 7 reasons that Marc and Jon should run the world, there’s an idea…

November 16, 2009
7 Reasons To Like Doors

1. The bedroom door. No matter what age you are, whether you share it or are its sole occupant, your bedroom is a private place to do private things. Whether you are a teenage boy practising your faces in the mirror, a thirty year old man playing World of Warcraft on his computer or a fully grown woman singing-along into her hairbrush, your privacy is protected by the door. If it weren’t for the door your siblings, parents, children, housemates and curious pets would be free to spectate on, or join in with, your bedroom activities. Hurrah for the bedroom door.

2. The bedroom door. If there were no doors then your parents’ bedroom would be open. There is nothing that happens in there that you should have to witness. Nothing. Not ever. Never. No.

3. Locks. If there were no doors, there would be no door-locks. They deter burglars, vandals, squatters and perverts from entering your house. Also, the ability to retain keys is what separates us from the animals, and from my friend Rachel.

4. Slamming. Slamming the door on your way out is like adding an exclamation-mark to a furious exit; without doors you’d have to shout “pow” or kick the wall. This wouldn’t be as effective and you might feel silly.

5. The Doors. Without doors, The Doors would have been called The, which would have been rubbish. It would also have confused fans of The The – and me.

6. Knocking. If there were no front doors, there would be nothing for the pizza-delivery-man to knock on and many Americans would starve to death…eventually.

7. The wardrobe door. If there were no doors, your wardrobe would be open and the contents would be visible. Is there a more effective way to repel a new lover than letting them glimpse the saggy jogging-bottoms and moth-eaten, bobbly cardigan that you wear around the house? Without the wardrobe door, your new suitor would be able to see the future and you would be single forever.

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November 13, 2009