Category Archives: amusements

They're Clearly Meant for Each Other

From online news service Ananova:

Couple divorce after online ‘affair’

A Bosnian couple are getting divorced after finding out they had been secretly chatting each other up online under fake names.

Sana Klaric, 27, and husband Adnan, 32, from Zenica, poured out their hearts to each other over their marriage troubles, and both felt they had found their real soul mate. The couple met on an online chat forum while he was at work and she in an internet cafe, and started chatting under the names Sweetie and Prince of Joy.

They eventually decided to meet up – but there was no happy ending when they realised what had happened. Now they are both filing for divorce – with each accusing the other of being unfaithful.

Sana said: “I thought I had found the love of my life. The way this Prince of Joy spoke to me, the things he wrote, the tenderness in every expression was something I had never had in my marriage. It was amazing, we seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriages – and how right that turned out to be. We arranged to meet outside a shop and both of us would be carrying a single rose so we would know the other. When I saw my husband there with the rose and it dawned on me what had happened I was shattered. I felt so betrayed. I was so angry.”

Adnan said: “I was so happy to have found a woman who finally understood me. Then it turned out that I hadn’t found anyone new at all. To be honest I still find it hard to believe that the person, Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things to me on the internet, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years.”

Zen Mischievous Moments #133

Today’s Daily Telegraph reports on Clive James interviewing himself at the Edinburgh International Books Festival. The article includes:

Did we know, he asked, that by decree, no rank below Major could wear make-up in the Romanian army during the war – a gem first divulged to him, incidentally, by Anthony Powell.

Full article here.

[With thanks to Julian Allason]

Zen Mischievous Moments #132

From “Feedback” in New Scientist, 04 August 2007

Calendar chaos

[X] was, sitting at his computer, when the calendar window of his Microsoft Outlook office program started scrolling uncontrollably back through time. He watched, helpless, as it zoomed back through two world wars, past the Great Reform Act of 1832, the French revolution and American independence – stopping only in the 1760s when, he guesses, a frantic IT worker somewhere in the bowels of the famous London building he works in must have fixed the network glitch.

Naturally, [X] was intrigued to see how far back in time he could personally make Outlook’s calendar go. Trying to view even earlier dates, he got stuck at All Fool’s day 1601. Putting this into a famous web search engine revealed no special event in history that day. It did, however, provide a link to a “rather weird” website devoted to the work of a genealogist named John Mayer at www.arapacana.com/glossary/mb_mn.html. This notes that “Outlook provides a series of perpetual calendars covering something less than 2898 years, from 1 April 1603 to 29 August 4500,” but that users can manually scroll back to 1601.

Feedback’s further searches suggest that 1 April 1601 was declared the beginning of time by the authors of the COBOL computer-programming language …

Oh and for the geeks amongst you, Outlook 2003 will also let you schedule meetings during the missing days, 3-13 September 1752, when British Empire changed to the Gregorian Calendar.

One is left with just one question: Why?