Who doesn’t love "corporate social responsibility"? Yep, CSR, that token greenwash effort a lot of companies try to pretend that they actually care about yourself and the environment nearly as much as they care about the bottom line.

As such, it wasn't that surprising to be sent the following email, anonymised a bit in a vague attempt to prevent the source from job-loss.

Merry Christmas, dearest readers - or Happy Holiday Season if that's your preference. Either way, get opening, eating, celebrating and the rest of it.

The Poorhouse felt an extra level of celebratory antics coming on when a letter popped through the door recently from those bastions of the obesity epidemic: McCains. It stated in black and white, amongst other things, that the Poorhouse was a winner. Check it:

The Poorhouse is constantly disappointed by only receiving a few hundred emails a day offering either "enlargo" or better yet some intricately complex - yet plausible - offer to give him a billion pounds in return for ooh, a mere few hundred of them or so. In advance. Yes, the money hasn't come through yet, but it's only a matter of a few more sendings of identity and moderately large sums of money to Nigeria away I'm sure.

Luckily, the physical doormat was also crammed with spam the other day - the finest of which is portrayed below.

The Poorhouse is no stranger to the odd flutter, laying down bets a plenty around the place and more recently playing a decent amount of casino blackjack - however, that's fine when you can use mathematics to guarantee a profit. Scams such as the UK National Lottery are held in much lower regard - there being a reason why it is often termed "a tax on the stupid".

Some, it might seem, more stupid than you might even expect.

Media empires and their hard hitting scandals huh? Unlike, it would seem, much of the rest of the blogosphere, the Poorhouse quite likes the BBC now and then. However, it turns out that it too is rotten to the core. Yep, in recent times flagship wholesome children's sticky-back-plastic send-us-milk-bottle-tops lovely programme Blue Peter is mired in scandal.

Take a look at that cute-as kitten on the right. Ahhh. Who would have thought that its very existence would have caused Richard Marson, ex Blue-Peter editor, to be sent home and suspended from his job. And all because the 8th Blue Peter kitten (favourite toy: plastic drinking straw) there had the wrong name.

Anyone who, such as, has the internet - be it in US America, the Iraq or elsewhere - will no doubt have seen, such as, this but anyway...check out Lauren Caitlin Upton - Miss South Carolina - attempting to win the "perve on pretty teenagers who are way too young for you" competition that is Miss Teen USA.

The Poorhouse was feeling desperately....well, poor last week so going through the nooks and crannys of Internet offers to try and get some free cash in. One triumphant site that helped out was Mirror Bingo. Yep, it is bingo (which the Poorhouse enjoys as though it was paint drying) but it has a good intro offer on which is risk free...actually risk free this time too!

To nearly quote Numb3rs, "we all use websearch every day". So why not try and win stuff for doing so? Get down to wabbadabba, sign up and search up to 15 times a day and if you're especially lucky you'll instantly win something nice - Amazon vouchers or cinema tickets at the moment. Best of all people do actually seem to win now and then.

It's probably not quite a heavyweight Google alternative but in that it's powered by Yahoo you might even get some decent search results for your trouble. Be kind enough to sign up by the links here and for every prize you win, the Poorhouse will get a little something too in no way to your detriment. Whoop yeah! There's even a toolbar or a Firefox quicksearch box available for it if you decide to go overboard with excitement.

There's "geeky" as in dull articles about needlessly complicated computery thingymajigs you might see around here, and then there's geeky that needs full on worshipping, like that of Mr Banks and his entry into the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest.

Yep, this is a competition where one designs the worst-possibly coded, most-confusingly written, least intelligible - but still functioning - program in the computer language C with severe restrictions on code-length. In 1998 it was 1536 bytes. A byte, iPod kiddies, is 1/1073741824th of the size of a "gig". So Banks wrote a graphical flight simulator.

Britain, for some strange reason, is due to host the Olympics in 2012. Hence now is the time to start dreaming up ridiculous sports that we might have a chance of winning a few medals at. For those whose mind immediately goes to the world of speed mobile phone "texting" (or as Neighbours recently termed it "ess-emm-ess-ing"), well it is a contender but there is already competition out there.

For, dear readers, a couple of days ago it was the US National Texting Championships.