Topsy's Head

Would you believe I just added the 80th department to the LWA US Shopping Mall?! Like the little girl in the story, whose head just grew and grew, so the department store seems to be expanding in all directions!

Meanwhile, back in the physical world (oh, I do go there occasionally - when there's a power cut and I can't get online, for example :-) politicians in Britain are talking about banning the oldest profession and I wonder if they have lost their minds altogether. Banning alcohol during the Prohibition, with a capital P, in the United States simply spawned an increased quantity of drinkers (humans have a tendency to rebel) and a nightmare underworld full of madmen with machine guns and illegal hooch brewers in the hills around every city.

Some radio presenter implied that it was incumbent upon all good Christians to stamp it out. I wonder what Jesus Christ would have had to say about that. Doesn't it say in the Bible that two of his closest lady friends were in that very same profession?

Don't get me wrong - I am not saying that these things should not be regulated, for the sake of the ladies involved, their clients and the society around them, but trying to stop the profession from existing altogether can only bring about worse problems than exist already. Apart from the fact that the profession exists because the consenting adult people on both sides of the deal want it to, I would love to know what makes some of the women that decry it so vehemently think that it is so different from marrying a man and expecting him to support one, even when there are no children who need one to stay at home? Is having an exclusive deal with a single man, to whom one would never admit that one wanted his money, so much more morally righteous than having lots of clients with whom one is completely honest about what is expected?

What would I know? Less than most people, I suspect. My life has been blessed by endless opportunities to earn a living with other assets than my own body but I have been to plenty of places where many women had nothing else whatsoever with which to earn enough money to feed the children whose father had simply vanished when he became bored with his responsibilities.

Why are politicians always so much more interested in stopping things from happening than they seem to be in making better things happen and accepting that the bad things will fade away if enough good things are being created to keep people occupied?

Speaking of keeping oneself occupied: I made some banners so other sites can link to us if they want to and I notice that the most popular one, so far, is the one I like best too. It says: "Just Windows Shopping, Honey".
I put a few free classified ads online too and I would have taken a couple of the paid deals on offer, except that I wasn't offered a payment method that I could use! Pity, because one deal was less than $4 for three months and another was $11.99 for a whole year! That's about the level of investment I can afford at the moment! Don't laugh!

The nuisance of the week was when I tried to transfer part of the money it had already taken three weeks to get from my bank into MoneyBookers across to PayPal and was told that 'for '
security reasons' it is not possible to transfer money from MoneyBookers to PayPal or PayPal to MoneyBookers! As MoneyBookers is British and I am advertising an American Mall on American classifieds sites, it doesn't come up as an option which is a shame, because it is just as quick for someone in the USA to get their money as for anyone in a large numer of countries and it is a heck of a lot faster too.

Well, visitors are starting to find their way into the Mall and discovering that everyone gets the red carpet treatment wheher they are buying or just looking and, for fun, I tried putting LWA US Mall into Google.com although I thought it might be a little early yet, to get a mention, Imagine my surprise when it came up at the #1 slot! On the other hand, I then went on to put my home site address in, including the www. and it didn't show up at all although it had always come up at #1 before! Hmmm...

Now I am busy putting little treasure chests in different departments.... Closed ones are full of special offers and hot bargains and the open one will reward the first person to find it each day with a small prize from one of the 1000+ merchants whose stores are represented in LWA US Mall so far.

I know it shouldn't really make a difference whether a merchant is a small business or a household name but I can't help getting a little more excited and feeling proud when another big name approves me as an affiliate. Partly because it says I am doing something they like the look of and partly because it means my visitors really will be able to find everyone who is anyone, conveniently gathered together.

Yesterday I launched my trademark 'minimallist' page which has little logo banners from as many of the merchants as I could convenietly obtain one from, ten across and sixty down, so anyone in too much of a hurry to stroll round the 2D departments can go to the list and quickly find the store they want, unless it is one of the ones I haven't managed to add yet, of course. That was a lot of fun to do as well. In fact, whether the Mall is the success I hope it will be or not, I will have had so much fun creating it that I won't mind half as much as I do about the project I spent half of last year on, for a client who ended up not being able to pay for my time.

I have ended up owning a website I don't really want and a domain name that has been soured by the fact that he owed a lot of people money by the time he disappeared! The only thing I salvaged that is worth having is the host server package that does not expire until 2008 and I will use that to put MarineZine on, or maybe the malls, depending which needs a new package first. Still, that's only less than $200-worth - hardly worth months of my time and effort!

Never mind! That is behind me and I have a good feeling about 2006 already...