Sorry for my creative angst this week! (or how an anagram I tweeted went mad!)

(click on the image to enlarge)

I had a bit of a rant on twitter this week when my creative angst perhaps got the better of me when I saw one of my tweets repeated over and over again, word for word without crediting me. Here’s the story, including how someone tracked me down out of the blue because of it.

Generally when I tweet a joke I get perhaps half a dozen retweets, i.e. exact reproductions of my tweet with my name preceding the message. This joke “The male fox has one mate for life. If she dies he stays single. The female, on the other hand, gets a new one. Usually in my garden at 3am” was a recent exception to the rule when it got 17 retweets - nosebleed territory for me!

So, maybe you can, or maybe you can’t imagine my frustration when following my tweeting - Coincidentally, an anagram of Osama Bin Laden is “Lob da man in sea” - last Monday, the same day the news broke about his death, that whole tweet of mine was, during the course of the following week, reproduced word for word, comma for comma, speech mark for speech mark, not ten or twenty or even a hundred times, but literally thousand upon thousand.

The first few were straight retweets where my name was shown as the originator, but very soon it seemed to turn into a cut and paste free for all with people simply taking the whole tweet and failing to mention where they got it from! And, just to rub salt into the wound, someone informed me later in the week that the gag had been aired on a popular tv show the previous evening!

Now, I am not so naive as to assume that no one else in the world thought of the same anagram (see below an explanation about how I came up with it). It's quite possible a few people did, but this Google timeline http://lpr.st/m2aSrN shows quite clearly that I was the first person to put the gag online and that many have since simply copied,not just the anagram, but the whole tweet verbatim without crediting the originator.

It's no biggie at the end of the day (though I am reminded of the recent fuss over celebrities claiming their jokes are sometimes nicked by other people) but one fellow anagram fan, a certain Judson Pewther from New York, having seen that my tweet had been reproduced word for word a phenomenal number of times without credit, took it upon himself to track me down. I received this email message from him earlier today:

I stumbled across your anagram of "Osama bin Laden" on the Web, while searching for an anagram of "Osama bin Laden buried at sea." I did a Google search for the exact words "Lob da man in sea" and saw that Google estimated over 7000 results. Looking at a few of them, I couldn't figure out how to find the real author. Anyway, I agreed that the anagram was very funny and worth repeating, so I posted it at the Usenet newsgroup alt.anagrams, explaining that I didn't know who originally created this anagram.

However, tonight I tried searching some more, and found a website where you were complaining that 1000+ people had re-tweeted your anagram without giving you credit, and where you provided a link to a Realtime Google search showing that you were the first to tweet the anagram. So I added another message to my thread at alt.anagrams, giving you due credit.

How flattering that he empathised with my creative angst and went to all that trouble to find me!

Now, some people have said you can't claim licence over an anagram and that anyone could have come up with a funny line using the name Osama Bin Laden. That is true to an extent, but to me, the difference between finding a funny anagram i.e. Adolf Hitler = 'Fart? Do I hell!' and a topical one that actually has relevance to a news story, is crucial.

To this day I remember the perfect example of an anagram that hit the spot when Nigel Lawson was the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the country was going through a recession. The anagram was ”We all sign on” – it entirely summed up the state of affairs at the time. It was simply fortuitous and opportune. You can’t always make a funny and topical statement. The best anagram I can get from David Cameron is “Random advice’, and you try making ‘Nick Clegg’ funny. Gideon Osborne? (that’s his real name before he changed it to appear more street wise) Slightly better - “Go soon, inbreed” – sound advice but no cigar winner.

The name ‘Osama Bin Laden’ throws up an astounding 71,793 anagrams which in itself doesn't make matters easy. Clearly I could not have trawled through all of them and indeed, even if I had had the time, the likelihood of getting the exact phrase would be remote. Anagram servers are great but they don’t generally deliver the results as actual sentences. What's more, 'da' is not even recognised as a word by anagram servers. So, what I did was an advanced search for anagrams containing the word 'sea' just to see if it was possible to get a topical joke. Even then the line didn't come up in the 693 results. I did, however, spot the word 'lob' contained within a few of the results and, with a bit of jiggling around and using 'da' as in 'you da man' I eventually got the line I was looking for. It just happened to be topical and described what actually happened.

If I had opted for another of my shortlisted options, ‘Amen, Sandal Obi’, or any of the other possibly slightly funny but not topical combinations, I doubt my tweet would have been repeated more than my usual half a dozen times. And that, at the time, was the reason for my creative angst. Sorry!

You can't put a price (or a tax code) on love

Prompted by the recent furore over tax breaks for married couples who stay together, here's my take on things based on my own painful experience.

Marriage is only a good thing if both partners in it are happy. Full stop. Staying together for the sake of the children is something some choose to do, but inevitably it will lead to bitterness further down the line when the realisation dawns upon both people that they have lost many years of their lives staying in an untenable relationship and living in misery. That and the fact that they are probably too old to find another partner. In the meantime however, their children will have fled the nest without thanking their parents for the constant bickering and air of misery about the house they had to endure for all those years.

I was in an unhappy marriage over twenty years ago. We argued about anything and everything. My wife's intense jealousy was out of control and eventually drove us apart when I started questioning my own sanity on an almost daily basis. It was a huge wrench because I had a daughter of 4 at the time, but heartbreaking thoughit was for me, I couldn't take any more of the daily stress that existed betwen me and my wife.

When we split up I lost everything. The house, contents, everything. I was broke and living in a single room in a house share paying out one and a half times what I earned every month until the divorce came through. But you know what? I had at last regained something that you couldn't put a price on. Something I hadn't had for years. Peace of mind and sanity.

It took a long time to get back to normality, but I was fortunate enough two years later to meet someone who was right for me (so often we don't know what's right or wrong for us until we have experienced the wrong) and we both agreed, having come from bad relationships, that we would never settle for second best again. i.e. if we constantly argued or plain didn't get on, we would part.

20 years on and two children later, we're still together and happy. We've had our ups and downs, sure (and some truly stressful ones at that) but compared to my first marriage, it's no contest. Indeed, I often wonder what would have happened had I stayed in that first, miserable, marriage. I would never have known the happiness I have today, that's for sure.

Put simply, life is too short to live it in misery. Change is the biggest obstacle people fear. They would rather stick with what they know, even if in their heart they know it's not right. But you know what? Sometimes, when you're feeling so miserable that you just don't enjoy the prospect of the day ahead, it's worth enduring the stress of splitting up and facing up to the unknown that lies ahead, because the chances are there is a better life around the corner.

Would I have stayed in my first marriage for a few extra bob in my pay packet? Not in a million years. As The Beatles once said, money can't buy you love. The government's notion that a tax break for married couples will make the world a more harmonious place is totally ridiculous.

I'm not a believer, but....

...here's a thing. Today, it's three years since my brother died after a very swift illness. I don't tend to dwell on these things, indeed I only realised it when I looked at the calendar. I then spent a few quiet moments remembering Paul.

Anyway, when I went downstairs there was a letter waiting for me. One that I hadn't noticed on the doormat yesterday and which my wife had now put aside for me. I opened it to find a letter from my mother. She had enclosed an article that my father had written and submitted to Punch magazine. It's a humorous piece of about five pages of double spaced A4 paper. I started to read it with interest and two very random coincidences occurred.

Firstly, the story he had written contained the surname 'D'eath' - the very same surname as my neighbours, and secondly, he had used the word 'concatenated' - a word, which, up until two days ago, I had never seen or heard anyone use (indeed, call me ignorant for a writer, but I had to look up its meaning!).

Now, you may think that perhaps he knows the surname of my neighbours and the fact that the same word cropped up twice in 3 days having avoided me for a lifetime is just the way things sometimes happen, and I would agree, were it not for the fact that my dad died back in 1972 and that article was written possibly over 40 years ago.

As I say, I am not a believer - I haven't been since my father passed away far too soon all those years ago, but part of me likes to believe that today of all days, as I think of my dear departed brother, that maybe they conspired to send me a sign to comfort me and tell me that everything's alright.