The Ramblings Of Lizmundo - Office Plants, Jingles And More Kids Sites!

Hello again, take a seat and I shall tell you what has been happening in the world of Lizmundo. Well, last week was pretty eventful, Thursday I had the wonderful experience of one of my bosses singing a jingle to me. We've been trying to think of jingles to use on GBK radio which is a lot harder than you might think. So here is what I had to listen to: (you need to read the next bit with the jungle book tune in mind) "I'm the king of the sign ups, Yeah! the Cyber VIP, I spend my days monitoring the site and that makes me happy, keeping kids safe on GBK is what I'm here to do, I check their face by webcam, so I know who is who.........doo..be...doo I want to verify you whoo whoo, I want to check and see, who you be, it's freee eee............" I best not make comment on my boss's efforts, incase he reads this, but I'm going to try and get my creative juices going and think of a better one, but it's hard, especially when you keep thinking about other company's jingles in the process! Like this one for a skip company "Just call A Lewis Skip Hire, skip skip skip hooray, just skip the rest and try the best, and call us up today!". It has definitely been fun though, even if my boss a little cringe worthy :-)

Said boss has also given me a peace lily. I haven't named it yet.

The pretty addition to my desk

As you can see, it's very pretty but I am concerned that I'll accidently kill it. I'm hopeless with plants. I always buy them with the best intentions but they never last, just ask my venus fly trap! Hopefully it'll be different on this occasion and I might be like this with it:

Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz with his Peace Lily

I've been feeling quite old, and learning that kids don't just use acronyms like “LOL” (laugh out loud) anymore like I used to when I was younger. I've been keeping an eye on the blogs published on our website, which is one of the features that seems to be quite popular amongst the members. They blog about typical kid things you'd expect – boys, girls, football and Justin Bieber (One Direction are also really popular), but they also use a language I'm not familiar with - mostly acronyms. One member has talked about her “BBFAL” on her blog. Now I know that “BFF” stands for Best Friends Forever, but BFFAL??? Luckily, on this occasion she's included what her acronym stood for (it stands for Best Friends Forever And Life just incase you were wondering). Normally I have to search our list we keep for these sorts of things but i have to add to it by searching online as they seem to make new ones up all the time! I have to check they're not outsmarting us! I could list a huge amount of acronyms for you to refer to but they'd only make new ones up again!

Phoebe (not her real name) has also named some other site she uses in her blog – Quizzaz. I had never heard of this before in my life so I had to Google this too!

Quizzaz as the name suggests, (well, after you see the website, it's head slappingly obvious what it is) is a website where members can create quizzes for anyone to answer. I came across one which was titled:

“Don't take this quiz or you'll be scared”. So I clicked on it.

Question one:

“why didn't you listen!!!!!!”

• Because my mommy told me I could
• I like fear
• Because I LOVE your quizzes
• Because I'm ugly – hmmmm....

Question three:

“What's your fear?”

• The Dark
• Gay People – charming!
• *is off*
• NOTHING

After you click through the answers, the quiz will give you a result. Mine was “Gustav Shafer -
It's Ok But You Should Be Scared Anyway”.

I don't know what this means. I don't even know who Gustav Shafer is, anyway, there are lots of other quizzes on there, most of them contain swearing and other subjects which can in-bed themselves inside childrens' minds, things that they shouldn't need to worry about. For example, another quiz was titled - “what weight are you?”, the results would tell you if you were super skinny, skinny, perfect, quite fat or obese.

These quizzes are created by the members of the website so could potentially contain anything, and it doesn't seem as though these quizzes are checked to see if they're appropriate for their audiences before they are posted on the site. I joined the website to see what sort of filters they use but there were no restrictions on age to join and there weren’t any visible guidelines as to what you could/couldn't post.

What sort of message is this sending to the youth of today? That you should be scared of gay people? and you will be called fat based upon your answers to a quiz? Lovely :-(

So, that's my thoughts on Quizzaz anyway, and what I've been up to lately. I hope you also have a good week too. I will be looking into more websites this week and I will share with you what i find out.

As you can tell, I'm a bit disconnected with today's kids so I want to try and stay in the loop!

Mumsnet soon, they have a good filter in place to check bloggers before they get posted, so fingers crossed they'll like my posts!

Thanks for reading, be back soon!

@Lizmundo