Well, after receiving nearly 600 spam comments in 2 days I’ve decided to give Akismet a go. Ever the cynic, I’m still not publishing comments until I’ve had chance to vet them, especially after reading Phil “Squash” Sim’s comment on the plugin’s effectiveness.

With a bit of luck I’ll be able to kid myself that the lack of comments around here is due to over-zealous anti-spam measures.

Thank Christ for the British Weather, that’s what I say. Us inhabitants of This Sceptred Isle might get pissed on for nine months of the year and sunburnt to crispy cinders for the other three, but who cares when it’s such a useful weapon in my everyday struggle with social awkwardness?

Picture the scene: I come out of work, coincidentally at the same time as someone with whom I’m on nodding terms. It takes a few minutes to walk to the car park where we both are. We’ve literally stepped out of the building side-by-side. We’ve already said “Hiya”, so we can either walk to our cars wreathed in uncomfortable silence; part ways by varying our speeds so that one of us can pretend they normally work at a pace normally associated with Olympic race-walkers while the other suddenly develops an interesting limp; or somehow develop the opening gambit into a conversation.

(Sound familiar? I hope not; if there are other people out there like me then it therefore follows that the odds of me getting into such a situation are vastly inflated, and call me selfish but I’d rather inflict situations on people than be the inflictee. Is that a word? Well, it is now anyway.)

So anyway, I can’t bear the silence so I blindly leap into a conversation on the one thing everyone has in common: the weather. Isn’t it nice today? Typical, isn’t it, how it was tipping down at the weekend but it’s lovely and sunny now? I hope it stays like this all week, but knowing our luck it’ll be raining again come Saturday! And so on and so forth.

Success! Three minutes of silence filled and a potentially awkward situation averted, and all thanks to the British Weather. I fucking love you, BW.

Maybe it’s the fact that I haven’t been posting recently but tossr has been bubbling along nicely with a relatively small number of spam posts received in the last month-and-a-bit. However, since posting last night there’s been a sudden explosion in the number of V1agra-vending comments I’ve received. Is this happening to every blog out there? Or am I the only chump manually checking each comment before publishing rather than letting a plugin like Akismet take the strain?

So, why no tossr for the last few weeks? Simple: Big Brother. That’s right, I took the decision to place the site on hold while team tossr takes nightly hits of televisual opiate from Endemol’s metaphorical crack-pipe. So, with only one more night to go things should hopefully settle back to normal and as of Sunday you can look forward to that daily feeling of disappointment when you read the latest post and think “Oh, is that it?” — a bit like today, in fact.

Still, did you see BB last night? They didn’t half give Aisheiylieiyine (or however she spells it) some stick for the hanging offence of not taking a task 100% seriously. It’s not her fault everyone else was so earnest about the whole thing; witness Nikki’s determined Lemmiwinks-style Journey to the Centre of Dickie, which was so successful that we will no doubt see them both leave tonight in a double eviction.

Meanwhile, Glyn donned a suit which in his mind surely takes him one step closer to the political domination he oh-so-badly desires. He’d certainly be one of the more predictable politicians the country has seen; his policies of forcing the English to learn Welsh and keeping the English out of Wales represented the English-hating Welsh part of his personality (which by my calucations is approximately 91.6%), while he will no doubt represent his utter hatred of anyone older than him by introducing the radical policy of Carousel in order to prevent the mandatory games of Spin the Bottle from being ruined by those pesky non-participating oldies.

Finally, the first sign of trouble in paradise manifested itself when Pete whispered in the diary room that he disagreed with Nikki over how bad Aisheiylieiyine’s speech had been; Pete thought it had been alright while Nikki treated it as a vicious smear campaign, designed to rob Pete of his rightful place as King of BB7 and to rob Nikki of her rightful place as Keeper of the Royal Credit Card. The hatred and contempt Nikki held for Aishei… for Ash manifested itself in the form of a slightly creepy game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, where Nikki gently but deliberately ambled towards a whispering Pete and Ash with the intention of finding out just what her Special Little Baby could possibly have to say to her. One got the feeling that, had they turned round, Nikki would have gazed up at the ceiling and whistled nonchalantly until they turned back. Would she have been able to convince them that she hadn’t been creeping over with one ear cocked? I’m not sure. Nikki’s acting ability is something that’s confused me for quite some time; is she really that self-absorbed or is it all an act? If she is acting, why the hell is she doing it so badly? Is it to fool us into thinking she isn’t acting? It’s like some brain-meltingly complex quadruple- or quintuple-bluff. I’ve decided not to spend my time thinking about it and have instead adopted the attitude that either way, she’s a pretty hateful character. It’s a lot easier than trying to determine her authenticity and the end result is pretty much the same.

So, hopefully it’ll be back to normal on Sunday — unless I get dragged into the inevitable brace of follow-up shows. Hopefully I’ll be able to stay strong and resist. Hopefully.