I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Occasionally Asked Questions

“Groovy mother”...? Are you a mother?

No, although I am undeniably groovy. My dangly parts are in my shorts, rather than in my shirt, so gestation is rather out of the question.

The site name originates from a banner I made, back when I worked for [Anagram Of Panties]. I was working on a fairly dull healthcare project for a state government. The team working on it was a group I still consider to be the greatest team I’ve ever worked with – sharp, funny, and a blatant disregard for normality. I made a banner that hung outside our team area that proudly boasted “MCSYS: The grooviest bunch of mothers ever to chum up in the name of Managed Care”.

(This was followed by a neighbouring team printing a banner that said “Yeah, MCSYS.. But Who’s Your Daddy?” Oh, the japes we had.)

I quite like the term “groovy mother” (which was, at least subconsciously I think, inspired by the famed Jools Holland “groovy fuckers” debacle), and over time performed such acts as changing my email address in the corporate mail server to groovymother@sapient.com.

So one time when I was buying a couple of domain names a few years back, I chucked groovymother.com into my metaphorical cart, and this is where I’ve been blogging since April 2002.

(For the longest time, I rather innocently had no idea that anyone would be confused and think that I really was a mother. When this was pointed out to me, I slammed my avatar onto the homepage. Hopefully that bearded image should cancel any misapprehensions sharpish.)

And what’s an “arsecandle”?

Ah, that originates with the great Chris Morris.

In a sketch in the first episode of his seminal TV series Brass Eye, there is the tale told of a crazed man harrasing a local cow who is his landlord.

VOICEOVER: Ted Maul
TM: “But last June out of nowhere, anti-cow slogans started appearing on the sheds.”
(SLOGAN: “Cowe gonna Be chopps”)
TM: “The text specifically designed to undermine the cows’ confidence.”
(SLOGAN: “DONT LOOK OUT COW” – a train is pictured travelling towards a cow)
TM: “Local press caught whiff of a weird-one when the vandal shot his paint straight at the cow in the form of words like “twat”, and later “fucknut” and “arsecandle”, as the campaign plunged into overdrive. Next came a wave of sick attachments – cow attached to a filing cabinet -”
(A cow chained to a filing cabinet is shown)
TM: “- cow attached to a Mini engine in a shopping trolley.”
(A cow chained to a shopping trolley, Mini engine inside)

For whatever reason, the word “arsecandle” stuck with me — it’s just a lovely evocative combination of sounds from an obscure throwaway gag.

To this day, I still use “Arsecandle Industries, Inc.” whenever I had to fill in a form which requires a company name.

Why doesn’t your Atom feed link directly to sites you link to?

It does. Your feedreader’s just not showing you. In accordance with the Atom best practices, my feed includes a permalink here on groovymother.com, in addition to the page I’m linking to. If your feedreader is only showing the former, pester the author and ask them to fix it to show “related” links too in accordance with the Atom standard.

Where did you make your avatar?

That was created many moons ago with the Gorillaz avatar maker

What is the air-speed velocity of a…

Oh, don’t be so tedious.


About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.