Synergy. Alliances. Leveraging. Wanky terms, certainly. But powerful tools in today’s competitive environment. Well, so the marketing people with pony-tails and silly names tell us.

What am I on about? Well, this web site, like many others, has a links page. On it you can find references to various other related sites, something which has usually come about because I’ve chatted to the owner of another humorous site, we’ve formed a small two member mutual appreciation society, and decided to swap links. Whether or not this has a huge positive benefit is sometimes doubtful, but it seems like a friendly thing to do.

Cut to the chase, Daniel. A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail that went as follows:

From: Maria Delunas
Sent: Friday, 26 October 2001 05:44
To: request@toxiccustard.com
Subject: toxiccustard.com

Hi,

Exchanging links like this will help bring in more business for both your web site and mine. An added benefit is increased search engine traffic because the search engines rank sites higher that have a good number of relevant links.

Okay, so far so good. Now we come to the fun bit:

Our client carries a vast up-to-date selection of whirlpool bath tubs, faucets, sinks, lavs, steamers and just about anything you can think of for the bath and kitchen.

Please let me know if you are interested in exchanging links. I’ll send you more details once I hear back from you.

What? A plumbing web site wants to link to mine? Right. Makes perfect sense.

I presumed it was some automatically generated letter, a kind of de facto spam sent to anybody linked to a web site (she got the address wrong, after all - it went to the subscription request address). So I wrote back, somewhat tongue-in-cheek:

From: Daniel Bowen [mailto:dbowen@toxiccustard.com]
Sent: Sunday, 28 October 2001 08:51
To: Maria Delunas
Subject: RE: toxiccustard.com

Yes Maria, I would like to exchange links. I can think of few better-matched link exchanges than my humour site and your plumbing manufacturer’s site. Please send me further details.

To my utter astonishment, I got the following reply:

From: Maria Delunas
Sent: Tuesday, 30 October 2001 01:27
To: Daniel Bowen
Subject: RE: toxiccustard.com

Hi Daniel,

The Plumbing Express carries a vast up-to-date selection of whirlpool bath tubs, faucets, sinks, lavs, steamers and just about anything you can think of for the bath and kitchen.

[...]

So by golly, I’ve put up the link, and replied saying I’ve done so. I’ll be interested to see if they really link to me. I have a feeling it may happen, because glancing at their links page, it appears they already link to at least one other joke site. I suspect Plumbing Express are asking for links indiscriminately, but of the completely irrelevant sites they’ve approached, it’s only those of us in the laughs biz who are linking up.

What the hell. According to Alexa
they get more hits than this site anyway, so it might send some traffic my way! Now, what I need is something on the front page to grab the attention of plumbing customers.

Paul Kelly at the Corner

After almost a week of crap weather, the sun came out again on the weekend. My health seems to have reflected the weather - last week I had a cold, and for a couple of days there felt pretty crappy. By the weekend I felt better again.

On Thursday night I was just getting over my cold, and zipped over to Richmond to see Paul Kelly at the Corner Hotel. He did of course put on a great concert, ‘cos that’s what he does. The only downer was not meeting more of the PK mailing list people who were apparently hiding there, despite me wearing the distinctive list t-shirt, and walking around the pub before the show started, trying to get it noticed.

At least this worked with one person, which was just as well as I was there on my own, and starting to feel a bit sad and lonely. But I had a great time, especially as I got to hear renditions of my two favourite songs. Just a shame that since it was a pub gig, there was a moderate amount of smoking. Not an excessive amount by any means, but of course enough to leave my clothes and hair stinking of smoke by the end of the night. Ah well.

Tuesday is Cup Day. Naturally we had an office sweep, my horses being Celestial Show and Kaapstad Way. Tim, who’s running the sweep, decided that whoever gets the last running horse gets their money back, which I think is a nice touch. It should suit my usual Cup luck.

In fact, I dropped past the TAB after lunch, and put three small bets on. Given the cool name, I had to have a few dollars on MayTheHorseBeWithU, and I picked another two at random, not noticing that one I chose was Universal Prince, which is probably not going to run. D’oh!

No matter. A once a year flutter of $10 can’t hurt.

The really good news is that the election campaign is almost over. Maybe then the political parties will stop putting my own bodyweight in junk mail in my mail box. Of course, when it’s all over there’ll be no more Election Chaser, which will be a shame.