Welcome to Acerbia; population: π
This is the archive of the many and fabulous adventures of . Like a hard-bitten son of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius taught to write by William S. Burroughs; continually reincarnated, debated over by intellectuals and literati at cocktail parties the author can't get invited to, the target of scorn and ire from women everywhere, frequently mistaken for a former member of the Warsaw pact, named after the Italian explorer Giuseppe Acerbi, slowly rewriting the Book of Cataclysm, this is postmodern fiction at its most playful and creative.
Low tolerance for fools this morning
I'm working off a bit of a hang-over this morning so I was a bit... impatient when someone from my team came to me and said that he was as confident about his results as Otis Reading standing on top of that thingy cutting through his whatsits with a pair of bolt cutters.
Instead of correcting the wrong bits I should have just thrown the whole analogy back at him. It was Elisha Graves Otis, on top of an elevator in the Crystal Palace Exposition hall in NYC, and he used an axe. Because it would hurt more.
I told him to go forth and cut through his whatsits with a pair of bolt cutters. He took it as an encouraging response.
Profound?
There never needs to be an excuse to use sarcasm as a comeback. As the lowest form of wit it justifies its own existence by being the baseline. Anything higher up that actually requires a level of malicious intent or vengeful desire could be considered uncalled for, but sarcasm is the amoeba of the comeback species and should be anticipated by anyone who makes a dumb comment.
Is that profound or a load of bollocks? I don't know.
Virus checker
An angry client phoned up and asked why our online software was being slow today. He shouldn't have. (I recently bought and read Alan Moore's Top 10 and had just finished the previous post below, for those of you to whom this might sound familiar)
"Apparently, so I'm told, the entire Internet is slowing down today because of a new virus called Rumormill 2.1 (I spelled it out to him, "Ah, an American virus" he commented), its the newer version, one step up from Rumormill 1.0 but using the same base code. I haven't been told what it does to infected computers but I hear its really nasty, I read it on a website somewhere today. Allegedly there's no virus checking software designed to counteract it yet but there could be a cure by the end of today. I'm sorry but there's nothing I can do about it right now."
See, its a jungle out there and I'm living off my wits, my funny accent and trust-inducing voice.
Hair terminology
Its not often that anything will tear my team apart to the very core, or that so many conflicting opinions can be brought to bear on one issue. I noticed that Buff had done her hair up in pigtails.
Nice pigtails.
"They're not pigtails, they're plaits"
"Those aren't plaits, they're braids"
Fine, but why aren't they pigtails?
"Look, y'know Brittney Spears, Oh Baby Baby..."
Yeah
"Those are pigtails"
"No, those are plaits. But they're definitely not braids"
Okay, and Lara Croft...
"Lara Croft, yeah, now those are pigtails. Anna Kournikova, that's just a ponytail though"
"Depends. She's done plaits not too long ago"
"When?"
"Those FHM photos all over the Net"
So when do braids become plaits?
"Don't be stupid, you can't turn braids into plaits, you can turn pigtails into either though. Or bunches"
"Or a ponytail"
"Yeah, well obviously"
Obviously.
"But dreadlocks..."
"Ew! Dreadlocks!"
"And those horrible little rat tails dangling off men's chins..."
The plaited ones?
And we're back to the "you eat bugs" look. I just don't understand. What's worse is that Buffy seemed to be the only person who actually knew what she was talking about as everyone else in that conversation is male! Which is a change from the last time.
Don't forget the airholes...
Although my education has prepared me for a great many things and my own areas of interest have provided me with knowledge that could keep me alive in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust... there are some areas where life experience is lacking. Like... the Post Office.
Pixie and I were unable to attend the wedding of close friends due to illness and we send a telegram instead... okay... to be honest we didn't send a telegram, it was a fax... and even then I think we sent it via a modem, so it was more an e-mail printed on paper really... and it also gave us time to get them a unique wedding gift.
So I've been constantly forgetting to send it up to Pixie so she can present to them an Artisanal French milk urn. About yay high. (for mesurement scales, see Davezilla) With matching tea towel and oven glove already tucked inside. I suspect the urn will be used for storing cookies rather than milk. Today I finally brought it in on the Tube with me, and have just returned from Marlybone Post Office. I think I'll give up being British once and for all though, cause I just didn't behave.
The Post Office is actually a part of Rymans... I don't get that. But I bought a cardboard box I thought would be big enough and a large roll of bubble wrap (yes Pixie, free bubble wrap for you to force the cats to walk across). The box was designed by Rubix. Once the wrapping was off it required deft hands and dexterity beyond the most agile... fine, I'm lying, I tore it. I forgot they allowed children out in public, but they learned a few new words there and then in several languages.
I went and bought some sticky tape. And a pen. See? I'm just not prepared for these tasks. I wrote the address on the box and taped up the ripped flap, then assembled the box as per the universally-friendly diagram in four easy steps... drawn by mental patients with crayons wearing blindfolds. I puzzled over step four for a long, long time... until it became apparent that it was the barcode. According to step three it was assembled.
Amazingly, I had discovered the secret behind Dr Who's TARDIS, as the inside mesurements of the box did not match the outside mesurements, or the ones written on the slip of paper inside the celophane wrapping. The urn wouldn't fit, I added to the nearby children's vocabulary further. Even bending the upper flap over the top wouldn't work. Although very satisfying, for me that is, I can understand why I was getting funny looks after jumping up and down on the empty box.
I bought another box. This one looked like it was twice the required size. I toyed with buying more bubble wrap to pop and keep me sane as I tried making up this new box. To my delight though my subconscience must have been paying attention first time around as this box just fwipped and folded and slotted into shape. I wrapped the white porcelain-coated metal urn in all the bubble wrap. The woman writing out a details slip beside me asked if I needed a hand;
No, I have to wrap him up by myself. He said so in his will. It was how he wanted it to be. I replied.
She finished filling out the slip and joined the queue very quickly. I closed the box up and wrapped a lot of tape around it. The screechy sound of tape being pulled taut from the roll (nothing sounds quite like it... a strange screechy/plastic noise that sets everyone's teeth on edge) brought more general looks of "bloody foreigner" or similar retorts.
I joined the queue a few people behind Little Miss Helpful and the box slipped from my grasp and fell to the floor. Good thing I used all that bubble wrap. The guy in front of me gave me a filthy look as I bent down to pick it up again because it had bounced off his ankle and I rapped the side of the box with my knuckles before addressing the box {gah! bad pun!};
Go to sleep! I'll punch some airholes for you once I've had the postage added!
The filthy look changed to that "you eat bugs, don't you?" look I get so often.
Upon getting to the teller window, I so dearly wanted to answer "Is there anything valuable inside" with "No, just household products mixed together in the right proportions." but said instead;
Just an urn.
"An urn?"
Its much cheaper for him to travel the world this way, I replied. Can I get it first class recorded please? my mother would kill me if he got lost again.
She passed me the stamps and the Recorded Delivery sticker to add to the package before telling me to go along the row of tellers to the strange doubled window part people were deposing letters and packages between. One window opened up to the tellers side, one to the customers. The windows couldn't be open at the same time... I don't know, maybe the tellers were breathing a different atmosphere or something or they were actually working in zero-G.
I placed the well-wrapped, taped, postaged and recorded package into the area between the windows along with the other letters and packages and the Teller said through the two panes of glass (not sure how I could hear her) that I was done and she'd take care of the rest.
"Bye for now, see you in six months" I said through the glass, waving at the package. Out of the corner of my eye, just before she dropped the package into the outgoing mail slot, I saw her lift it to her ear and have a listen. I love screwing with people's heads.
Die Hard Petite
The aircon in my office was broken. That is... until I started typing this post and had to go back and re-edit the first sentence. The manager wanted suggestions and rather than come up with something useful like "fill a bowl with water and icecubes and put a fan behind it" as Pixie suggested to Meg a couple of months back (see "evidence of hotness") I saw this as a challenge.
See, I like to be more bizarre with my suggestions. I suggested we hire a balding midget, put him in a string vest and trousers, give him a water pistol and wedge him into the air ducts. He could crawl around for ages, and then when he found what was jamming the ventilation he could yell out "Yippee-kay-ay Mucky Fanblades" before squirting it with the water pistol.
I'm guessing thats not how the a/c was fixed.
Parlez-vous Anglais?
I am feeling really, really miserable right now because the back of my throat has been raw since... since I woke up in the middle of the night and was absolutely freezing cold. How can heat disipate so quickly? What am I supposed to do? Rig the window mechanism to a thermostat? Hmm... actually...
So I'm sitting, supposed to be sending a nice long e-mail to a nice lady in Paris explaining why everything that went wrong is her fault and all in perfect French and instead I'm going through it again and again making grammatical tweaks and making it sound as unpretentious as I can while discussing whether Tony Kaye's cut of American History X would have been a better way of presenting the story or not (He wanted it all in order, no flashbacks, and less of Ed Norton) with a colleague who has stopped by but doesn't speak french so is no real help at all.
The general unfairness is that in France it is pretty much mandatory to have learnt a second language by the time you finish secondary school. Some people tack on a third language, and some even toss in a dead one for fun. I went to school with people who spoke three live languages and a dead one. So I know that this nice lady in Paris will understand the e-mail if I type it in English, and then I can use words like "perfunctory" and "general apathy of the staff at suchandsuch.com" and maybe throw in some technobabble(™ Brannon Braga) as well...
Chere Delphine,
The lazy sods at www.thisandthat.com got it wrong, wernt our fault. They couldn't be bothered to reinitialise the dilithium crystal matrix powering their server as this has now become such a perfunctory request they didn't take it seriously. As such, a subspace vortex has swallowed all of your information and entailing correspondance and I cannot answer your questions without causing conflicting events in the timestream. So you can see that, my hands are/were/will be tied.
Hopefully this will not stop our companies from getting along, as you need us more than we need you.
Yours (in an alternate reality where we have several children and live on an Eden-style planet)
D.
Heya Babyface
One of the people in Tech decided to bring in their baby boy/girl (couldn't tell) and show it off. I mean... like... you show off your laptop, okay. You show off your new mobile, okay. You show off a wireless keyboard and mouse and plasma screen desktop computer, okay. Give me a few weeks and I'll have the model up from you. (This is known as Geek Athletics) But a baby... it'll take me months to beat that.
Anyone interested? Could we try for one of those super-smart babies that get their PHD aged 13 and doesn't ask "why" all the time?
Seriously though, you see this little miniature human, full of potential, and you're struck by the awsomeness of what the future holds for it. The places this baby will go, things it will see and do, its like a whole Suleiman's bottle of hopes dreams and desires that haven't even begun to coagulate in the tiny mind in that tiny skull...
Has it just shit itself? Ew! Get it away from me!
Nostalgia, by Veidt
Yesterday was just nostalgic hit after nostalgic hit. Not all of them good.
I woke up to the opening number of Bugsy Malone and found myself captivated by it. Although there are far better films, far better performances and far better musicals (I'll get to that later) somehow I was just trapped watching these children singing with the voices of adults in a 1920's prohibition Chicago made entirely for children.
At one point after Fat Sam says something in Italian, and Knuckles queries it;
"You don't speak I-talian?!"
"No Boss, I'm Jewish."
"Then read the translation!"
{subtitles appear on screen, Knuckles looks down} Everything's Hunky-Dory
"Ok, this is good."
How often have I used that joke and not had subtitles appear underneath what I just said? I'd pay for that kind of service.
The clincher had to be a young Jodie Foster, covered in cream pie watching the chaos erupting around her as the final food-fight breaks out in Fat Sam's though:
"So this is show-business?"
I had to act fast to avoid an extra helping of childhood nostalgia by shying away from The Sound Of Music. First person to start singing "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" gets suffocated with a wimple.
But many happy memories were brought back with the 100 Greatest Children's TV Shows on last night's Channel 4. Not so happy memories of scary Stephen-King-esque Pob which my mother will remind me I would request be taped if we were likely to be away on a Sunday afternoon. But that was only to see if he'd get arrested for spitting on the inside of everyone's televisions and if he might just melt away if somebody tugged hard enough on that piece of string he always left lying around.
Bit surprised to see The Herbs at number 54, Captain Scarlet at 51 and Rhubard at 30. I'd have thought these ranked higher. Especially Rhubarb. {sudden bit of head-banging at that awesome music and epileptic fit at the memory of the animation}
I never saw The Banana Splits and in College it came back to bite me, as the four Silicon Graphics O2 workstations were called Fleegal, Bingo, Snorky and Drooper and I had to ask why. For the rest of the year that gap in childhood knowledge kept me from being part of the "In" crowd. Cept... the In crowd didn't go very far after that course and I'm here in London trying to get into one of the FX Soho houses. So... Ha-ha.
For the sake of those of you who didn't get to see it, here's the top twenty;
20: Worzle Gummidge
19: Flintstones
18: Wombles
17: Hong Kong Phooey
16: Knightmare
15: Wallace & Gromit
14: Tom & Jerry
13: Clangers
12: Rentaghost
11: The Magic Roundabout
10: He-Man
9: Dr Who
8: Scooby Doo
7: Rainbow
6: Mr Ben
5: Grange Hill
4: Bagpuss
3: Dangermouse
2: The Muppet Show
1: The Simpsons (and well deserving it is too)
The Paradox Times
One of the perks of being on the Strand late on a Saturday night would be that, against all the laws of known causality, you can buy the Sunday papers from a woman outside Charing Cross station. However, I'm worried that she'll become some quantum singularity, and bring about the destruction of our timeline, and we'll all get blasted into this dark void because she was selling Sunday papers on a Saturday.
Which would be a shame, cause its cool to read the Sunday papers on your way home from a Saturday night out.
Ay-ya-ya-ya-ya-like your coconuts...
Wandering through Camden Market again and my sister and I arrived at the organic foods part down beside the canal tours, there, chopping the tops off green fleshy coconuts (none of those brown stringy hard spheres, oh no) was a mostly naked guy, his arms bulging with muscles that didn't fit onto his lanky frame, wearing one of those flattened conical south-east Asian hats. For three pounds he'd crack open a coconut and give you a straw. The contents were yours to drink.
This would have to be one of the cooler things about living somewhere like London. Where the hell did he get fifty green coconuts?! I'll find out as soon as I work out how they put peanuts inside those monkey-nut shells.
Revenge of the Clones
Although yesterday I went on for quite a bit about the horrors of cloning and the implications of trying to protect DNA as personal property, I'm starting to warm to the idea...
Honey, how about we stay in tonight and order in a Deluxe Abbot and Costello?
If we order the Super Deluxe we get more than just the regular "Who's On First Base?" sketch though.
Okay, what's the guy's name at the cloning agency?
No, Who's the guy at the agency, What delivers the pizza.
The pizzaboy.
Naturally.
No, I think I 'll stay home tonight and curl up with a Mae West.
The guy in the DVD store said it was the latest and greatest new feature. You watch the Shining and on cue Jack Nicholson breaks through your door.
I think Lucas is going too far this time, giving away free Ewoks with every piece of Star Wars merchandise, I don't know how many barbeques I can stand this summer...
Well, lets see, the first guy, the one who told me to open the till, he looked like Richard Nixon. The one holding the gun looked like... Richard Nixon... and the one making sure the customers didn't try anything looked like Charlie Sheen. I'm pretty sure that one wasn't a clone, I hear he really will do anything for money these days.
So anyway, I was standing in line waiting to pay, the cashier was just some cheap Madonna clone, the bagboy was a lop-sided Chris O'Donnell, I had to push my way past a couple of Olsen twins and guess who I met! You'll never guess. Never. It was Keith Chegwin! Yes! The one and only! (In trying to find a URL for Keith Chegwin to link to I had to be careful to pick one that didn't contain the word tw@t)
Yeah, our Juliette Lewis clone has loved that dog since the day we got him. It'll be a shame when we have to get her put down.
I think I'll stop now...
Clone Wars
With the news that a company is offering to copyright DNA I have a few thoughts on the subject...
Actually, the implications of this are so deep that I can't even begin to formulate proper thoughts on the subject. Give me a minute here...
For one thing I don't think that people are making the right assumptions here. Surely to get your very own Brad Pitt you need to grow him up from cloned-DNA-injected-embryo Brad Pitt? Or has the world suddenly created ways of hyper-accelerating the aging process? Have secret tests being going on in key parts of the world like Eastbourne and Ft. Lauderdale?
Are people living under this X-Filesian illusion of warehouses full of asexual 21-year olds in giant clear liquid gel-filled tubes just waiting to be spliced with Christina Aguilera and Ricky Martin DNA? And moving away from the celebrity angle... has anyone thought about the unhealthy obsessions of Ex-partners? The people that are more likely than not to still have samples of your DNA just lying around their houses? (Grow me a new girlfriend from this toe-nail clipping! And make sure she doesn't mind if I go out to the pub six nights a week!) What would stop them cloning up a new copy of you?
Yes, I can understand the people who will fight for the individual rights of a clone, but has anyone stopped to think that DNA does not contain memory or experience? You clone up a copy of Jennifer Aniston, hyper-age her to be a nice fit 32 and six months old... and so what? She's got the mind of a newborn. She can't talk, can't think, she won't respond to anything you say or do (I would guess that would include anything you did in private too, which then opens up the can of worms as to whether she's 32 and a half or a newborn child, which is sick) and you'll have a mute, Jennifer Aniston-a-like that can't look after herself and you're stuck doing her hair.
Dead people. No, I don't see them, but what I do see is that the estates of Elvis Prestley and Marilyn Monroe, JFK... and who's to say, maybe even Hitler, are going to have to get some of those copyrights damned fast. Me? I'd go for a crop of Steve McQueens, Ingrid Bergmans, and Robert Heinleins. Why do I say crop? Because Dolly the sheep proved that complications can arise in the cellular mitosis and you're never going to get it right first time. But then... what if you get several living, if somewhat defective, clones out of one batch? Sure science will narrow down the ratio of failures, but in ten years you could be tossing your spare change into a flatcap in front of a malformed Sid Vicious strumming at a guitar with his three fingers (and I understand he never knew how to play anyway).
Who decides if and who gets the right to come back? For every Humphrey Bogart request there'll be a Charlie Manson, for every Grace Kelly, a Unabomber. At least we're limited to viable recently deceased. What would Ceasar make of the modern world? Do you want a slightly imperfect Alexander The Great serving you at in a restaurant and showing you Gordian rope tricks on the side with your french fries? How would you feel about chasing a hunch-backed Joan of Arc away from your garbage?
I realise I'm focusing a lot on the failures, but how would you feel throwing a cocktail party and everyone has brought along a celebrity date, perfect teeth, perfect body, perfect hair, and the only people who look like they shouldn't be there are your guests. You overhear comments like "Well, I wanted a Mel Gibson, I understand they don't pee on the carpet, how are you with toilet-training your Fay Wray?" or "Somebody told me that he was bisexual, but he's just not interested in me, I'm not sure I want a Keanu anymore. I might trade him in for a Tom Cruise." I'm not sure I want to stand around chatting with the other non-Beautiful People as they chide their pet Emma Thompson for chewing on her costume jewelry. Alright, who brought the Mariah Carey? Take it outside please, you can leave her beside the pool, talking to the cloned dolphins.
Any new technology moves through the usual uses. So we can expect cloned Special Forces soldiers being used for high risk missions (like assassinating the batch of freshly cloned Saddam Husseins?), followed by cloned porn stars, before eventually arriving at what put Pixie off her food today: An unsteady-in-heels naked Cindy Crawford with her skin pigmentation changed to mimic Pepsi packaging designs. A real life Hamburgler walking around trained to ask kids if they're enjoying their McVaguely Contented Meals. A six-armed Fatboy Slim handing out Ministry of Sound fliers and dribbling from the corner of his mouth.
In the world of politics why bother with Ambassadors? Your new head of state can represent his country himself in everywhere in the world with no added drawbacks that the clones have the minds of children, this would be one case where the clones would be perfect copies. What will a world be like when a man's worth is weighed by how much more he knows than the clones rapidly learning the skills they need to replace him? Sure as eggs is eggs, they can be taught and they won't be taught to think about distractions like going for coffee breaks and long lunches.
What happens to all the rejects? The clones that refuse to be taught or trained up? The Jamie Lee Curtis batch that hatched out with male genitalia and the Woody Allens that ended up with all their facial openings sealed shut? (not what I'd consider a defect) What are we talking about here? Giant ovens? Organ farming? Or is it time to go register soylentgreen.com?
The 6th Day didn't even begin to touch on a lot of this. Lack of budget or lack of imagination... or just a strong desire to try and recreate Total Recall?
Sister sister
My sister is coming back over to London, after the day spent going around Camden and the Vermeer exhibition I'm pleasantly surprised she wants to. Although... Camden was fun because I bought her lots of stuff, and Vermeer was made more interesting by us being a tad flippant about the paintings. Like when we finally got to see the Milkmaid;
"Look, little blue hieroglyphs on the skirting board down there in the bottom right corner."
"Probably mice."
"Dutch mice knew Egyptian hieroglyphs?"
"These are Delft-schooled mice of course."
We were not very impressed to find out that Delft is also famous for small white tiles decorated in blue paint. There also seemed to be a lot of church interiors.
"Isn't that the same dog and couple from that painting over there?"
"Yeah, he probably had a band of people he hired to stand around in churches so he could paint them looking natural."
"What, the same two dogs each time?"
"Yeah, like stand-ins for movies. They're not real actors, they just stand-in. Except the dog in this one isn't the same as the dog in that one."
"Well, the original dog probably died. Cramp or something."
She did stun me however at several points. Firstly pointing out how the shadows in a certain painting proved that the comment written by a so-called professional art-critic beside the painting had completely missed the point. Then again by leaning down and looking into what appeared to be just a box with the insides painted, but turned out to be a form of stereoscopic painting if you peered through the eyeholes in the side of the box that were not immediately obvious. She was the first person in the room to do that, after she did, people started queuing up.
People always said to me that'd I'd have to wait until I was older before I'd start appreciating my sister. I guess they were right, this weekend we're going to see Denise Van Outen and Alison Moyet in "Chicago" and then Sunday we'll be at the Notting Hill Carnival cause everyone has to go at least once.
Good grief the comedian's a bear!
I was elated to see Frank Oz on the Big Breakfast this morning. The voice of Yoda! Fozzie Bear! The tax clerk at the end of the Blues Brothers! (okay, movie trivia is my vice) If there is one comic sketch that still breaks me up into fits of laughter after more than fifteen years now its the "Good Grief The Comedian's a Bear" sketch simply for the Kermit grumbling.
(explanation is for the younger 'Net-savvy readers) I used to have this large black disc that you played on a machine called a "deck", yes, sort of like laserdiscs... only this was for music. No, before CDs. Anyway, the way it worked was that this needle scratched around the grooves of the disc and the vibrations were translated into sound.
The record was The Muppet Show (probably worth a bit of money these days... I wonder where it is...) and had all sorts of items, some that worked on vinyl and some that didn't. Gonzo eating a rubber tyre to Flight Of The Bumblebee... sort of worked. Manna-manna didn't work until I saw it for real, then hearing it worked.
To this day I can do decent impressions of Beeker and Bunsen and a wicked Swedish Chef...
Yeeeeeee-shkeeborsh-shkeeborsch-eeeeee-shkeeborsh-shkeeborsch-eeee-bork-eee-bork-eee-de-doo, BORK-BORK-BORK!
Fear not little lady, Serendipity Man is here!
Whoever had a pocket full of Red Kryptonite in North London this morning, you sent my Serendipitous Powers haywire. I missed my train and had an extra ten minutes to wait and then I missed the change at Euston and had to wait another six, and then I missed the bus that would have taken me along Oxford St instead of walking it.
Curse you!
What?
Well, it wasn't a very exciting morning... no, I realise you could have been reading someone else rather than that... oh, fine, I'll spice it up a bit.
Take 2. Whoever had a pocket full of Red Kryptonite in North London this morning, you sent my Serendipitous Powers haywire. As I journeyed to work I noticed a cyclist playing both sides and cycling along roads before then sneaking onto the pavement when it suited his purposes.
I serendipitously tackled the cyclist and knocked him to the ground. He leapt upon me and we fought. My serendipitous strength was failing me however and the fight went badly, I was forced to use a serendipitous eye-blast to knock my opponent backwards but the recoil caused me to knock my head against the footplate of a vehicle. I looked up and recognised the distinctive profile of a Scud launcher, the missile was primed and ready to fire.
As I stood up, steadying myself on the launch controls, I realised that the men standing around us were wearing Iraqi Republican Guard uniforms and the safety catches on their automatic weapons were off. Somehow I had landed in an Iraqi-held part of London, my powers failing me and the battery on my mobile almost out of power; rescue would be a long time coming... I dug my feet into the soft London sand and prepared myself for their attack...
I don't get it...
An advantage to working for an American company is the whole "free fizzy drinks" thing.
But why is the Coke can beside my keyboard always one mouthful shy of empty? Why is my bin overflowing with hollow tin cans? Why is my left eye always twitching and why has my typing speed increased ten-fold?
Why can't I feel my feet?
Come in to my parlour...
During the recent Big Brother/Survivor/Castaway Weakest Link on Saturday I was screaming at the television all but one of the correct answers (what? Nobody is perfect) and my esteem for Nicholas Bateman has gone up in leaps and bounds. So what he cheated at Big Brother and was caught? That's the risk you take when you play and if you're not playing to win then you'll always be a loser.
Funny thing though, I turned away when the National Lottery came on and could hear the woman two doors down screaming out her numbers. She didn't win.
Drop and give me twenty!
The True Stories documentary last night about the current state of the Russian Federation's military "Soldat" was stunning. I was just flat-out shocked at the downturn in the military might of one of the world's former superpowers.
Instead of medals, soldiers are being rewarded with Olympus pocket cameras and small televisions. Bullying in the barracks is met with a strict chewing out and the threat of having your parents called in. Regiments are populated by the Russian equivalent of frat boys complete with humiliating initiations and punishments, some of whom want to go to Chechnya with out-dated military hardware and fight well-armed rebels.
Quite a shock.
All through secondary school, learning about the Cold War, I was never all that impressed with Russia as an adversary. They censored stuff, lived in a rather bad patch of the planet and put people in goulash.
Yes, I discovered later that this was in fact "goulags" and not a human ratatouile.
Now China on the other hand. China scares me in the way that watching the fanatiscism of the Japanese during WWII fighting to the death... yes, China scares me.
My lunch with the poof, the lady-geek and the manager
Let me tell you about my lunch with our gay receptionist.
No, wait, come back, this has Tom Cruise and sex and Star Wars and Harry Potter although not in that order or at all combined. Our receptionist is in his own words a "poof" (although my tongue for some reason locks up when I need to refer to his sexuality... I'm not oppressing him, I'm just not sure anymore what the PC term is) and will wear black Speedos under his clothes just to show people in the office that he goes to the gym.
And the courriers.
And the clients.
He hooks his thumb into his waistband and yanks them up, showing the Speedo logo and looking like a little teapot, which I don't know whether or not is more embarrasing to watch than the IT girl trying to find her mobile but has to count as disturbing office behavior either way.
So we were out on the roof terrace, with all of north London spread out before us, the receptionist, the IT girl and I, when the IT girl says (whereas her idiosyncracy seems to be her phone storage, the receptionist's are his Speedos, mine seems to be a scar on my forehead, shaped sort of like a little lightning bolt, makes me look like...)
"Harry Potter"
Eh?
"I never saw it before, but you look like Harry Potter all grown up. The glasses and the scar on your forehead..."
"Ooo, and the ponytail, very wizard chic, have you considered Brittney Spears' bunches at all? Or Princess Leia buns?"
Yes, I considered Princess Leia's buns for years, but not the ones you're talking about, and the only bunches on Brittney Spears I'd consider were genetically modified.
"Ooo, get him with the double-entendres."
"Shall we just call him Harry for a bit and make fun of him?"
"Yeah alright, lets do that."
Various references to some Hogwarts and Quiditch stuff, broomsticks, arcane knowledge and then...
"So why don't you like Harry Potter?"
This one is easy. I don't like it because so many other people do and my opinion of humanity can be summed up in that one Tommy Lee Jones quote from Men In Black "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." Which roughly translates to "If the general populace likes it, I won't"
Also, the concept isn't even vaguely original. T.H. White wrote the story of Merlin decades ago (my mother is laughing right now because I refused to read The Once and Future King too because she claimed it was so wonderful and Nu is laughing because I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy earlier this year after as much as twenty years of resistance) and Neil Gaiman wrote it better with Tim Hunter in The Books of Magic.
Plus, I'd like to add that they're kids books! I like a bit of substance and depth to my characters, plot and general intrigue. That's why I read comics. Heh
We finally got off the subject of Harry Potter and instead went straight to gays/straights. Everyone has played this and I play a version where even gay people go "No fucking way, you're a fucking liar, he is so not gay, I refuse to be on the same side as Michael Flatley!"
So, Tom Cruise, gay or straight?
"God I hope he's straight. Like Brad Pitt. Bi wouldn't be bad either."
"Honey he is sooooo gay. He had to divorce Mimi Rogers because she was threatening to 'out' him. That's what jealous straight people will do to spoil our happiness. I wouldn't be surprised if Nicole was using the same thumb-screws on him."
Unlike Freddie Mercury who some have claimed killed himself because he was accused of being straight.
But if you think about that for a second... do gays have more fun because they're less inhibited? Would someone consciously pretend to be gay to join in the fun and ensure a following? Look at Steps, they thrive on the Pink Pound. (Carol, that one's for you!) Well, that and the Pre-Pubescant Pound. Lets not even go into the Pink Pre-Pubescant Pound.
There have been instances when Geri Halliwell has played the club G.A.Y. just to launch a new single, I suspect all the Spices have. (Sporty certainly should)
It was during a new round of gays/straights (Keanu Reeves! No way! Yes way! Dead girlfriend! Cover-story!) that the office manager sat down beside us.
"D, has anyone pointed out that the scar on your forehead makes you look like Harry Potter?"
The drunk elephants, the shark bite and the bag full of puppies
Or... how difficult and confusing can it get trying to get into a London club?
Friday afternoon saw the winding down process in full swing. People were around other people's desks chatting, avoiding phonecalls that could add to the workload and generally doing as little as possible when the South African IT girl who hides her phone in her bra produced a bottle of Amarula (not from her bra, which would have been impressive, no, from the fridge along with chilled shot glasses).
Amarula is a cream liqueur made from the berries of the marula tree found only in the Southern hemisphere. The tree is a favorite of the elephants and herds will walk for days to arrive at a grove of marula trees, an unlikely story of drunken elephants reminded me of a story I was told by a friend who had returned from a year travelling in Australia.
Not too far from the house he was staying in was a grove of eucalyptus trees and a family of koalas who dwelled in them. As the year went on they would eat the leaves and swing under the branches quite happilly. The koalas were like pruners, eating the fresh leaves on the outer branches and allowing the younger leaves to capture more sunlight only to be eaten in turn. However, he noticed that they left one tree alone and the leaves were wilting in the sun and growing darker and heavier.
He speculated that the tree was ill and the koalas knew of it, avoiding the leaves for fear of food poisonning. But then, one night there was a feverish scrabbling noise and he watched the entire family of koalas rushing up into the tree and begin gorging themselves on the fermented leaves before tumbling out of the tree giggling, pissed as farts. Don't know if its true, but it makes a great story.
The Amarula shots were a nice start and almost the entire office emptied out into the nearest pub not long after five and the debate arose about where to go next. And how. In trendy companies with no real dress code the Coders and Geeks look very strange talking to the Sales people. The Support people and the Admin people look like flip-sides of a coin and yet somehow we wanted to get into a club.
I can't understand the "no trainers" rule. Surely if you're going to dance the night away you want the most comfortable shoes as possible on? Enforcing a rule that encourages steel toe-capped boots is just asking for trouble. Plus, there's never a shoe-shiner around when you need one.
Anyway, those of us in smart shoes paired off with those in trainers and a plan was hatched. Those in smarts would go in first, then two people would come back out, one with a backpack full of smart shoes. As the smart-shoed people waited in the club in socks and stockinged feet, the people in trainers put on the smart shoes, filled the backpack with trainers and entered the club. Simple, eh?
So what was the second guy for you may ask? He was to distract the bouncers, but the debate arose, how does one distract a bouncer? The answer seemed simple enough. Show off how tough you are. So operative one was picked because they had the biggest backpack and the selection process for operative two became a "my scars are bigger than your scars" contest.
There were some worthy competitors, one guy had sliced into his leg with hedge trimmers, another had a massive electrocution scar from falling on electrified rails, but the winner was my boss, with his "shark bite" scar. It isn't really a shark bite scar, but when he's travelling he tells air hostesses, girls at rental desks, waitresses, any female who'll listen in fact, that his companion is a scuba instructor and they were recently savaged by sharks and look, here's the giant bite-shped scar to prove it, right across my back.
The scar is very impressive, but its not a shark bite, it is in fact from a bus collision. He was hit and dragged along a road by a bus. Which doesn't make it any less impressive, but the shark story does have its flaws, for one thing I'm not convinced he can actually swim.
As I wandered away from the pub, wishing them luck with this plan and feeling glad that I was wearing trainers I felt sorry for the two unsuspecting bouncers who would be entertained with stories of shark attacks and drunk elephants as someone sneaked past with a backpack full of hush puppies and high-heeled shoes.
Tell me about your mother
When its really hot like this and the Tube is even hotter and I find my t-shirt sticking to my back I worry that my sweat is soaking Rorschach blots through my shirt.
See? Some people worry that they smell bad. I worry that the people behind me are getting free therapy.
Footnote: Everything I ever needed to know I learned from comic books.
Nice Tight Slag
I don't go to ebay anymore since, while looking for old childhood toys in the Transformers listings I found a listing for a "Nice Tight Slag" for a little over £20. Turns out that one of those dinosaur Transformers was called Slag and he had tight un-played-with joints.
I'm sorry D, I can't do that
On wednesday the world's most powerful computer was unveiled, at a cost of $110 million and in lovely refrigerator cabinets that take up the equivalent of a couple of basketball courts.
ASCI White was designed to simulate the effects of nuclear explosions, as the real things are now banned... however working out what will happen when they do go off seems to be perfectly acceptable.
This is all sounding more and more like that Classic Star Trek episode where Kirk and crew arrive on a planet where a simulated war demands that the casualties voluntarilly sacrifice themselves in death chambers.
More importantly though, will it run Return to Castle Wolfenstein?
Top Five Dumbest Things D Ever Did And Never Talks About
5) Straight in at number five its an old classic his sister will never let him forget no matter how much he denies it. Yes its the battery acid under the bed. As a young inquisitive child D would sometimes be a bit too inquisitive and once the plastic outer-coating was peeled off that AA battery there was only one thing left to do. This led to strange burn stains under the bed where the battery was discarded and forgotten about until it came time to move out. Perhaps he should change his name to the Acidproof Punk?
4) Number four is one for the sports fans out there. Yes, sports fans, Grape Baseball. With a bunch of white grapes and a long cardboard tube D and his younger sister left funny shiney splat marks across the whitewashed ceiling and several walls of the dining room during a tense nine-innings only to forget to wipe up afterwards. The marks were still there last time he saw that ceiling.
3) Holding steady at number three is the occasion when, upon arriving at a new school, he sat through a week's worth of Latin classes without understanding a word of what was going on only to be told that it was an entirely optional class and if he hadn't been doing it already for the past two years it was too late to start now. Hence his motto "Quidquid Latine..."
2) Another sports one at number two, during a ski trip on the beginner's slope he fell into a snowbank and when the instructor asked what was wrong he said "Y'a de la neige dans mes bottes..." (There's snow in my boots) only to find out he hadn't closed them with the massive catch on the back and they had been loose on his feet. {I did improve a lot after that though}
And finally, the number one Dumbest Thing D ever did was lose over £10,000 of somebody else's money by sending it to the wrong place. While working in the foreign currency department of a major bank as a data entry clerk, D mistyped a sort code and sent the money to parts unknown.
The money was eventually found and D was renamed Nick Leeson by staff.
His middle name was Sullivan?!
When the first track you hear on your Winamp playlist is Mike Post's theme to Magnum P.I. you know you're in the zone...
I'm off down to the marina to see Rick and TC, I think I might have a lead on that case. Get Higgins to call off Zeus and Apollo upon my return!
{leaps into Ferrari GTI and wiggles eyebrows suggestively before leaving the readers in a cloud of dust}
Putting the Science into the Fiction
For a period of my life I would watch one Star Wars movie each weekend. If I was off school sick I could make it all three in a day. Other favorites included Flash Gordon (the 1980 version with the kick-ass Queen soundtrack) and, as I got older, Aliens and Bladerunner.
My initial encounter with what I would later come to consider to be proper Science Fiction was Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, which seemed to thrive on political and social events set in a conceivable future. No laser battles other than horrifyingly brutal conflicts where people were not killed by a flashing red bolt but rather had limbs vaporised off and gaping holes burned through them which is more scientifically accurate. No space stations with planet-busting death rays but rather asteroids flung with planetary inertia were used as weapons.
Space, I soon learned, would not be full of fleets of fighter craft dogfighting for superiority (a realisation I put on hold for two weeks while I played through Freespace 2), but freighter craft moving slowly from one place to another with whatever cargo they carried. Hopefully not the cubic pigs from Space Truckers though. In fact, lets do everything we can to avoid everything to do with Space Truckers except, for Pixie’s benefit, Stephen Dorff, cause in return I’ll be allowed to lust after Sophie Ellis-Bextor {sigh}.
Heinlein, it seemed, had a lot to say about humans in general, putting them in futuristic contexts just seemed to work better than turning to everyone with a political tract and saying “you’re all a bunch of bastards/fascists/automatons/morons” à la Prince Phillip.
The other recurring theme that I found hard to avoid in Heinlein books was… well… the sexual liberation of women thing. I Will Fear No Evil and To Sail Beyond The Sunset seemed to be entirely about encouraging carefree sex. It could get a bit over the top at times especially since the conversations that would go on before, during and after would have very little to do with the sex and could be as outlandish as how on earth Maureen Johnston could get to Boondock several hundred years into the future. (yes, well quite, that’s usually my topic of choice too)
I eventually had to admit that if the book was more than an inch thick it was going to bore me. Around the same time however I diversified with Robert Shekley, Ursula K LeGuin, Asimov and my all-time favorite, Philip K Dick.
Unlike the pre-required reading some Heinlein books demanded, all PKD books had easy to remember reccurances: Telekinetics, Telepaths, Pyrokinetics (sometimes) and Pre-Cogs. The best example of this is Ubik, of which at one time I believe there were five copies, all different editions, in our household.
And thus I arrive at the whole point of this post. Total Recall (From PKD's We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) was on TV on Saturday night and although I have it already on tape I found myself incapable of not watching it. You know it’s a Paul Verhoeven movie simply because the bullet wounds look messy, Michael Ironside loses at least one arm, and Ronny Cox survives multiple gunshots only to die of something else altogether.
Arnie’s acting is awful, through and through. He would never have been a typical PKD hero (or anti-hero if you prefer), I’m looking forward to Tom Cruise in Minority Report though. I understand that the first choice for Deckard in “Bladerunner” would have been Humphrey Bogart himself. Peter Weller did a decent enough job in Screamers (from the short story Second Variety, nothing to do with Heinz) but was let down by the fact that the film didn’t have Phil Tippet effects, a Jerry Goldsmith score and the crazy Euro-frenzied direction that Paul Verhoeven injected into Recall.
Recall’s other strengths seem to lie in the more factual foundations it sets for itself. The mutants created by solar radiation in unsafe domes are credible enough and if you think water and aliens on Mars are far fetched check out the Nasa site and look at the Cydonian Head and the reports from the planet’s poles.
All in all I was once again reminded that Star Wars is not the best Sci Fi has to offer. In fact it isn’t even Sci Fi, but rather Science Fantasy. Films like Gattaca and 2001 are real Science Fiction.
And I think Dan O'Bannon has a hard on for PKD...
Toying with ignorance
When it comes to dealing with technical issues I will admit that my team can very rarely play the occasional prank when they know the person isn't very tech litterate. This will be blog number one in a seven year series...
"And your machine makes that noise every time the error message comes up? Have you tried unplugging your speakers?"
"Are you left-handed or right-handed? Ah, see, the program was written specifically for left-handers. You're going to have to use the mouse with your left hand. Yes, that's why she can work it and you can't, because she's left-handed."
"Do you have any Blue Tooth devices nearby that could be causing a conflict? No? Ask the guy beside you to open his mouth and have a look..."
"It might work if you can locate the image source. For that you'll need to paddle up the data-stream..."
"You're using a Sony Vaio? You'll need to reboot by shaking it above your head..." (thank-you Dilbert!)
"You can find your TCP connection details in the nearest medical cabinet."
"Okay, you can change the language of the documentation if you change your spell-checker to french and then run it through the document. Just click "change all" each time it asks you to. Sure it works for German too."
"To initiate a conference call you'll need to be in your nearest conference centre."
"If you hit back your browser should show you the last page you browsed. Now hit forward and you're back to the present. Hit forward again to see what page you'll be browsing in the near future."
"You need to locate your Rockford Files... if no-one else can help and if you can find them."
"Yes, the Sales department promised me it could be done in a day too."
"If you check the file properties you'll find a very nice two-bedroom in Chichester."
"So the mail isn't in your Inbox or your Outbox, have you tried the Litterbox?"
And my all time favorite...
"Your cookies are kept in a sub-folder called Jar, in the Cupboard directory."
Crisp demands
When did Monster Munch all become the same shape?
I thought it might just have been the random machine at the factory had broken or something and it was just the circle with four legs kind that was available. Where did the circle with two pointy legs, two arms and a long neck go?
I've even tried making the old pointy-legged, two-armed, long-necked guy from the broken bits in the bottom of the packet but I suspect that Monster Munch are all just the one shape now. What a swiz.
My other complaint is that the top corner claims that these Monster Munch have a "GREAT NEW* FLAVOUR" with the small print "*New flavour in UK only, the same great flavour as always in the Rep. of Ireland." So... wait, shouldn't that make the Monster Munch in Ireland Classic Monster Munch? If they both have a different "great" flavour, which is the greater of the two greats? How can I be sure that I'm getting the most out of my Monster Munch eating experience if I'm already down to only one shape of monster?
I'm confused. Should I complain or be glad I'm getting the new flavour?
Now for a limited time only...
A guy on the Tube beside me this morning was reading a magazine called "Extreme Shaolin" and I read part of the article over his shoulder.
It would seem that Finally The Secret Hand-To-Hand Fighting Techniques Of The Shaolin Monks have been released to A Limited Number Of The Civilian Population and that I, or rather he, could Learn The Forbidden Secrets No Western Man Can Know along with a little pictoral of how to... I don't know, looked like mud wrestling to me.
I'm glad he's going to learn the forbidden secrets, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable doing things like that to another man.
This comes just a day after I discovered that I could Live Forever In His Blessed Kingdom On Earth which looked suspiciously like the Niagara Falls hotel resort... with added toucans and monkeys to sort of paradisify it up a bit and overlaid smiling people with (probably alcohol-free) Pina Coladas. The secret to eternal life, it would seem, is To Want To Live Forever... oh and Buy A Subscription To The Watchtower.
What Women Really Want
This morning I was going to be later than usual because somebody had got to the shower before me and was enjoying a long hot shower (and you know who you are) so I figured I'd just wash my hair, which is getting a bit too long and needs washed more and more often, by hanging over the bath in one of the other bathrooms and using the shower attachment.
Footnote: We have three bathrooms. One with shower cubicle, two with baths. One bath has a shower attachment but no wall socket, the other has had the shower attachment removed to stop the girls from flooding the place.
As my regular shampoo was sitting in the bottom of the occupied shower cubicle I had to use the nearest one available... one of Adelle's... some flowery blossomy scented thingy with added hair fortifier to give me body and lift. Hair washed and semi-dried I got ready and left the house.
Once on the Tube, playing Gameboy with my hair down around my face pretty much obscuring me from the rest of the occupants, I was leaning against one of the glass partitions when I heard:
{sniff}
{sniff}
And not snotty I-need-to-blow-my-nose sniffs. But rather I-like-that-smell sniffs. I checked out of the corner of my eyes not wanting to leave Mario at a crucial moment. Nothing.
{sniff}
{sniiiiiiiiiiiiiff}
This went on for at least a minute.
{sniffsniff}
{sniff}
And it wasn't until I heard an almost inaudible "aaaaah" that I decided I'd had enough. I looked up, flicking my hair out of my face, as the guy beside turned bright red when he saw stubble, an Adam's apple and a very, very pissed off me. Not a word was spoken, but I'll bet that's the last time he sniffs at someone's hair without checking first.
My guess is that what women want on the Tube is to be left alone.
Template for an Ally McBeal script
Before starting the loop a totally unrelated demonstration of Ally being the world's worst flake must take place in a horrifyingly public place. The female audience must cringe for the first half of the opening credits and mutter how many years she has set back the independant female collective however they will be entranced by whatever goes on for the next hour. All the men will laugh and hope she does something similar in the next hour but she won't.
1) Invent the most preposterous reason conceivable for a court case. Or check the National Enquirer for details. By the end of the episode Ally and her team of legal masterminds will have won the case.
2) Ally must have at least one emotional dilemma, usually in the form of an ex-boyfriend or lover, coming back into her life. Other possible twists can include her biological clock, former bottom-sniffing fetish or absolute antithesis-for-womankind personality.
3) Despite any problems set up in 2), Ally will tackle 1) along with a selection of other characters from Cage/Fish Lawyers-R-Us including:
- Ling: nothing-amazes-me, will-do-anything-to-shock is harsh and has no conscience. Can be expected to say the deliberately hurtful things.
- The Biscuit: beaten-to-a-pulp-in-school-for-being-a-freak. Nothing is too distracting to be used as a foil for people concentrating on the actual facts of the case as presented in 1). Can be expected to find the emotional loopholes used to not only pull on the juror's heart strings but also tie the ends to building foundations and attach them to the nearest truck for maximum tugging strength.
- Elaine: although not a lawyer she is the nearest to Kramer womankind can get. Makes Ally look secure and confident. Can be expected to make the smutty comments and drool over the men Ally hangs around.
- Cage: otherwise known as "frank" he hasn't the first clue about running a business of any kind and doesn't actually seem to be capable of doing anything useful. Was lucky enough to cop off with Portia De Rossi before she became a twig. Can be expected to say the harsh truthful things everyone is actually thinking.
4) On at least one occasion Ally must make the "I sympathise... but... what you have to understand about the real world is..." face to the client. She must also have an expensive digital hallucination which can only have a tenous bearing to 1) but can involve elements of 2).
5) The court case must be shown at least three times unless there is more than one case going on for the legal firm in which case each team gets at least two segments. The judges are randomly selected from barflies from old "Cheers" episodes although Norm has yet to appear and Frasier has a decent series of his own.
6) Nobody from Cage/Fish Laugh-A-Minute Legal Representation ever loses a case. Or if they do lose then they never actually lose. They still come out on top and only the client ever suffers the consequences. Ally will never be part of even a "lose without losing" case.
7) All broken friendships or arguments are washed away by the end of episode sing-a-long with Vonda Shepherd. Her songs will always have lyrics pertaining to the dilemmas and battles fought during the episode. None of her songs will ever make it into the top forty other than the title track. Nobody works late at Cage/Fish Legal-Outcome-U-Like unless it fits the needs of the plot.
Epilogues are optional and can be used to close a one off episode situation. Any cameo characters can be killed off within this epilogue or alternatively a whimsical shallow feel-good moment can be tacked on in a desperate attempt to keep everyone aware that this is fiction. In case the sodding awful dancing baby didn't.
Welcome to London D
I was somehow reminded that I've been living in London for almost nine months. (other strange reminder: its almost 113 years since the Jack the Ripper killings)
At the interview I had come down for I was told to check out "Loot". "Lute? Like the musical instrument?" I asked. "No," she said, "like the stolen property." So I dutifully went out and got a copy from the nearest newsagents and even managed to convince them it was free... cause it said it was free on the cover. The next day I discovered it is only free to advertisers.
My initial attempts were not as successful as I might have liked. One Russian woman demanded that I come see flat tomorrow, tomorrow at one precisely. Boris, be quiet. Yes, tomorrow you come and see flat. It not my flat, but I be there at one precisely, you not keep me waiting.
I didn't even go.
A decent priced single flat was available in SE1 (I had been told two things, first that the lower the number the closer to the center of the city, and that anything with an S is bad and means south of the river) Elephant & Castle. So I went along for a look. Barred windows and littered streets fitted as standard? Really? No wonder your place of business is beneath a staircase in a subsiding building on the waterfront with cracked walls and a fax machine from the late seventies.
Two house-shares in the Chalk Farm area gave me a good chance to see Camden and realise that it would be the weekend destination of choice and that I had to get something with an N or NW but that Camden itself was not going to be a great place to live. Notting Hill had a house-share with a single female movie producer... and... Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant had just split up... what were the chances... I didn't phone because it was way out of my price range.
The strangest encounter was just after I saw the Elephant & Castle hovel. A flat in Bayswater which sounded nice and within my range. The estate agent's was in Knightsbridge. {warning! warning!} I stepped out of the tube, oriented myself and walked towards the place past Harrods. {warning II! warning II!} When I arrived I was buzzed up and took the stairs up to the office. Inside was barely enough room for two desks and the women behind them.
I was invited to sit down and was immediately told who to write my cheque out to with a laminated sheet of details and conditions.
"eh?"
That was my first clue. My second was that, normally estate agents and agencies have walls covered with flats and houses they wish to sell or rent out. Not this place. This place had leather upholstered chairs and mahogany desks. Folders full of paper were lined in alphabetical order along shelves on wine bottle green patterned walls. Both women were "exotic" (ie: foreign with Eastern european accents).
"You pay us this fee. {points with pen at part of laminated sheet I thought was a serial number} And we in turn put you in touch with the landlords signed with us and they will show you their flats."
I asked her to explain it again for me as I didn't understand. Wasn't this what I was already doing?
"You pay us this fee... {see latest Comic Relief final result} and we organise flat viewings with the various landlords who have signed up their properties with us. You can see as many as you like. They're all nice."
I'm sure they are. But can you explain the fee part again?
"You pay us this fee..."
Yes, I see the nice long string of numbers, reminds me of my mobile phone number. But what I want to know is why would I pay you this? I contacted you about a flat you had listed. You told me to come round to your office to arrange a viewing. Surely I pay the landlord to stay there and he pays you a commission for finding a tennant for him? What guarantee do I have that I'll like any of the places you have to offer me?
"After you pay us this fee {pick a number, any number} you can view all our appartments for the next nine months."
I don't need a place to stay in nine months. I need one within the next week. I liked the sound of the one in Bayswater, why can't I just see that one and if I like it pay you for it?
"See, we don't own or lease any of the properties ourselves. Landlords come to us to find them people to live in their properties. We make our money from them and people like yourself paying us this fee... {if you pay up we'll stop talking about it}"
I excused myself and made a phonecall. My step-father confirmed that yes, some places did work like this and no, it was not worth it. I only bring this up because my nine months would have been up tomorrow...
E-mail Guidelines
To stave off the possible cases of E-Mail Overload Stress Syndrome (or EMOSS) in our offices, some bright spark has come up with a fantastic idea: Template mails. Sounds like fighting writer's cramp with writer's block to me.
This of course came just days after the E-mail etiquette mail;
Email Guidelines
1. If you require action from someone, they must be on the ‘To:’ line of the email.
2. Unless you explicitly receive an APPROVED or similar endorsement of an action or decision that you are proposing you are responsible for your own actions and decisions irrespective of whether you’ve sent an email.
3. If someone is ‘cc:’d on an email then they can assume that it is for information only and no action is required
4. Please do NOT respond to emails where you are ‘cc’d unless absolutely essential
5. Try to keep the number of people on a thread to the absolute minimum. Do not copy to everyone who ‘might be interested’.
6. Apply the following priorities when processing email:
- Emails from your direct colleagues where you’re directly addressed first
- Emails from other colleagues where you’re directly addressed second
- Emails from customers third
- Emails where you’re cc’d last
So thank you vistor XXXX for reading my blog entitled XXXXXXXXX on XX/XX/01. I trust you found the information to be accurate and informative and brought a smile to your face. Any complaints can be sent to the following e-mail address: XXXX@XXXX.com
If you were CC'd on this blog without asking to be, please send a mail to XXXX@XXXX.com with the subject line XXXX to be removed.
Thank you,
And please, I really do mean this sincerely because I will be losing sleep if you don't, honestly, have a nice day.
As the sun sets and the day fades from memory...
With a lovely bunch of grapes and a can of caramelised vegetable extracts I like to ponder my little list of things to do;
- Grow a tail.
- Write a movie script that Spielberg kills Besson to direct and Joel Silver produces without ever showing up on set.
- Invade Poland (okay, bad humor. how about...)
- Invade Paris and evict the Parisians.
- Find a cure for cancer no matter what Denis Leary thinks.
- Kill John Romero and finish playing System Shock 2. Not necessarily in that order.
- Become part of a wandering troupe of comedians who wish to bring about the Second Coming of Python.
- Find a way of telling Aaron Sorkin that he is the greatest political writer ever. Diss Tara Palmer-Tompkinson more often.
- And finally, list the blogs and sites I read down the side beneath the Greymatter logo cause if I don't why should anyone ever link to me?
Death! Death to all!
I will kill the man who created XML!!! I will rip his insides out and let him watch me crush his internal organs between my fingers, gloating at his swollen liver and spraying him with stomach acid... Then if he can still breathe I will beat him to within an inch of what is left of his life with a keyboard.
For every tab in some nonsensical menu I have to click on I will skewer him with a biro, for every time I invalidate my changes by hitting the back button, WHICH IS A PERFECTLY SENSIBLE THING TO DO IN EVERYDAY BROWSING, I will pummel his digits and toes with a filing cabinet and for every XML fault message I will remove a square yard of skin down to the fleshy musculature coating his bones.
No, I hate it, how could you tell? And your little dog too...
More weirdness on the Tube
Well, now that I've realised that people don't like to listen to GBA music on the Tube I will be keeping the volume at zero. Cept, see, I couldn't hear it myself because I had a MiniDisc of Orbital playing in my ears. Sorry folks.
I know I write more than enough posts about the Underground, but trust me, if I'd had blogging capabilities while I was travelling to school every morning on the Paris Metro, there'd be plenty to tell about that too.
So this morning at Euston I got on the Victoria line and was followed on by... well, half of Creation at least (or at times it feels like that in the mornings), and this one woman, very prim, very meticulously made up with her hair set into a three dimensional spread of a Vidal Sassoon catalogue, pulled one of those plastic gloves you get at hair dressers when they're dying your hair, slips it on and then holds onto the overhead bar.
Now... is this normal? Should I be worried about TTD's (Tactile Transmitted Diseases) on the Underground? Or was she just a freak?
On second thoughts... {goes and washes hands}
Home Sweeter Home
I may not have mentioned it before but I live in a fantastic house I lucked out in finding. I moved in when the renovations hadn't even finished so "roughing" it was sleeping in the middle of a 25 square metre room on couch cushions and watching a big TV with bad reception.
The white goods turned up and I don't think I've washed a dish since. The street is quiet and safe with the occasional motorcycle going by but other than that nice and peaceful neighborhood. And then there's the pool out on the terrace...
The ground floor means there's a first floor terrace and the first floor means there's a second floor terrace. Black railings surround this second floor terrace that overlooks the greenery of North London and the lovely apartments across the gardens from us. The first floor terrace isn't safe to walk on though.
Aside: I spent part of last night wearing a builder's helmet performing YMCA for the kids across the back gardens cause they looked bored. Except I kept getting the "C" the wrong way round every time and I had to stop when my dinner caught fire.
Anyway, we have a pool out on this second terrace. I keep telling the other housemates that we need to install a filter, cause I refuse to swim in it unless we find a way of removing the scummy dirt line that marks the height of the water. As such we've discovered the downfalls of having an outdoor pool in this country.
Whenever it rains it fills up beyond capacity and overflows over the guttering along the first-floor roof and we're left with acid-bathing water and streaky windows.
The local squirrels have cottoned onto the fact that this is free drinking water.
There's something unnatural about being in water two storeys up and being able to see London landmarks.
Bugs can't swim.
Aside from all that the only real worry we have is if it gets a puncture. Oh, yeah... the title should really be "paddling" pool.
Who's that girl?
To the girl in the fifties-style glasses on the Victoria line who did a double-take when she saw me in the Code Monkey t-shirt.
Yes, this is the same t-shirt I was wearing when you saw it on thursday, but I washed it over the weekend, so don't give me that look.
Oh, and your hair was a mess on thursday too.
I've never seen a dead body before
Imagine my horror, this morning, when I stepped out of my room and saw two dead bodies draped over the bannister! Oh my God!
I had wondered where Matt and Del had gone and there they were, dead, slung like...
Oh, wait, they're just wet suits. I'll start over.
Imagine my horror, this morning, when I stepped out of my room and saw two smelly wetsuits that Matt and Del had no doubt peed in, draped over the bannister! Oh my God!
I had wondered where Matt and Del had gone and now they'd slung their smelly wetsuits...
Oh, okay, they already washed them out. I'll start over again.
Imagine my horror, this morning, when I stepped out of my room and saw that Matt and Del had a better weekend than I did!
Drunk-lag
My manager is currently on holiday on the US east coast. Keeping in mind there's a five hour time difference its been really unnerving to hear him phoning up members of my team at random intervals this morning and drunkenly shouting down the phone "you're fooken fired!" before giggling like a schoolgirl.
I'll bet Dilbert never had to deal with this.
Warning! Warning! Free food, Will Robinson!
If anyone out there is in the immediate vicinity of the stretch of Oxford Street between Bond and Oxford Circus this afternoon then there was a truck full of boxes of the black Hula-Hoops (are they low-tar? Caffeine-free? Guinness flavor?) parked across the John Lewis loading bays. The guys were filling black bags full of these and passing them to people in Hula-Hoops baseball caps and t-shirts.
Now unless this is some new covert way of shifting drugs/junkmail/synthetic-potato flavored hoops, it looks like free samples of food to me.
So get out there and look hungry!
Flatshare
My old student flat was in a cream-colored building. And what a flat that was. The thing that sticks out most was that this was the first place I ever had an insurance contract for and I remember thinking I wouldn't get caught out with small print so read every little word on it. I spent the rest of the year praying that the place wouldn't be destroyed in an Act of God. How ironic.
The ground floor was Newman's pub (possibly still is) run by the lovely Tracy who one night after locking up came up and threw a bucket of water over me. Cold water. Anything you ever wanted in a barmaid, she was, and better yet, she was able to control my wild and vivacious flatmate Carol. The building had been renovated from the first floor (as in UK idea of first floor, not US) up and was now two floors of flat-shares and a single top-floor flat. I was the second person to move in.
Carol was the next person to move in. Carol had to be the most energetic (with the hinderance of also being very accident-prone), full of life, larger than said life, character I have ever encountered and I dearly miss living with her. As the Pet Shop Boys song goes, we were never bored because we were never being boring. We were bonded in a loathing of the guy in the room between us who was just an obnoxious annoying tit.
All sorts of things went on in that flat, usually until all hours into the morning cause none of us had very hectic timetables (ah, the joys of having open access to your own studio and Silicon Graphics O2's... {sigh}) and stupidly we lived above a pub.
The rest of the flatmates were quite an incredible bunch too, the conservative guy from Bear's Den out on his own for the first time, the guy from the Middle East doing business studies who didn't know who Darth Vader was at first, the student nurse who had the most active sex life in the surrounding area... um... kidding? Sort of. And of course Mary.
Mary didn't quite live by anyone else's rules. She got a bunch of squeezy paint tubes, like the ones you used to have in primary school, all primary colors, and a bottle of Tequila. She drank all the Tequila and then spread the paint around the white-washed walls of the flat. Carole went ballistic and put her fist through one of the walls. A very drunk and apologetic Mary cleaned up under pain of finding out how the wall felt.
For her College course she lay naked, covered herself in leaves and mud in a public park and jumped out at a camera. For course credit she lay under a bush and shook the branches, filming it, to later change the colors occasionally in post production and added a dripping tap soundtrack. She asked me to watch it for her and I was itching to throw her, her videotape and her big pile of leaves out of the window within a minute. Not so much Environmental Expressionist Art as Big Pile of Hairy Bollocks.
She didn't last long and instead we got Susan. Susan was a self-confessed Bimbo and Carol must have felt her dominance as Alpha Female threatened because a cold relationship fell on the flat at times. Susan was the kind of girl who'd tell you she'd run out of beans. But, she did act for me in Dark Coffee so I can't say anything bad about her. Maybe if you ask Carol...
Late night snacks came in the form of the nearest all night garage. They didn't make their money selling petrol I tell you, it was us going out and buying Doritos and Tutti Fruities until five a.m. some nights. The guy behind the counter, and somehow it was always the same guy, probably figured Carol and I were dating or something and I couldn't afford to take her anywhere nicer than the local petrol station...
Very fond memories are attached to that place. The joys of a Digital Media course with all the geeky equipment. A student skive... uh, I mean flat, full of great characters, and a pub downstairs.
Of course... it wasn't until I'd been living there for about a month that the other people on my course, some of whom were locals explained why they never came round to Newman's for drinks after tutorials.
"Man, its a gay pub."
I just thought everyone was very friendly, thats all, y'know, where everyone knows your name?
Rendez-vous with Lullaby
With the news that David Fincher will be working on Rendez-Vous With Rama before moving on to hopefully work on Chuck Palahniuk's break from the inner monlogue/self destructing antihero for the times/nihilistic anti-commercialism format of his previous four books (only Survivor stood out for me but they all still fare lightyears ahead of Brett Easton Ellis, don't get me started on Glamorama... just... don't), there could well be a new 2001 for the post-2001 era.
I remember reading the last two of the Rama books out of four (which was weird because the underlying theme of the species itself is that they do everything in threes, Douglas Adams, eat your heart out) and liking Nicole DesJardins just... well, almost on basic principle that she never really had a choice and was a Ripley Malgré Elle. (roughly translated "Ripley despite herself") The backstory of the two books I'd missed out on was fairly well covered and constantly referred to anyway.
The ecological message seemed to beat you over the head until you gave up and accepted the concussion and fact that we are a bad species. Bad species. {smacks our collective species' wrists} No matter how hard any individual tried they couldn't fight the jugernaut of social ruin. That said... the Rama vessel was hindered from the start with the complement of humans being almost exclusively ex-cons.
Imagine that. Shipping all your unsociables to one place they'd have a hard time getting away from. An alien and inhospitable land far from home... but enough about the Australians.
If I remember rightly the only reason I was reading the series in the first place was that we were all on a family vacation and it was one of the few books available. Other holiday reads include the quite simply awful The Number of the Beast. And the strangely enjoyable Job: A Comedy of Justice. Can you tell my family is 60's Sci Fi litterature mad yet? Anyway, the withered and old Nicole Des Jardins slogs through pain and loss, heart-ache, childbirth, death, more loss, and some really dull patches that proved they were being paid by the word, to discover...
I forget what we discovered. What was the revelation in Rama Revealed? Was it really that important? I seem to remember she dies on the last page though, I was sad to read that part, but she seemed not to mind too much.