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.
Mantra
You're so pretty. We're so pretty. Show me the money.
You scared the living...
I never claimed I was the smartest man on the planet. Keep that in mind as you read on.
Pix and I have gotten to the stage in our relationship where we can "go" without locking the door. We reached this stage a long time ago. I thought it was one of those unbreakable barriers this side of marriage (that'd be the not-married side) but it actually got a lot easier now that we have our own place.
The next hurdle that was broached was that of even closing the door. Hell, any guy will tell you that it is far easier to just walk in, lift the seat (assuming you weren't the last person in anyway, in which case the seat is already up) and do your business. Well imagine that level of comfort applied to the other kind of business...
So there I was, sat in the dark (hey the door was open anyway), and I hear her coughing as she comes down the stairs. I figure she's going to want to use the toilet and she probably figures I'm still on my PC working on whatever it is I work on... hey, what do I work on? So I quickly decide to stay quiet until she rounds the corner and then...
Oogie-boogie!
Not exactly Clive Barker scary or Elder God fear-inducing is it?
However, for your own sanity and protection though, let me just say that giving someone a scare when they were on the way to the bathroom is a seriously dumb idea.
No, she didn't. But she nearly did.
Babble
Is there anything sexier than K.D. Lang singing Surrender?
Its a crime that Sheryl Crow was given the title track of Tomorrow Never Dies.
I can't believe Sinatra dies at the end of Von Ryan's Express.
Lemon Toast is nice. Wow, where did 2002 go?
War!
Civil liberties trampled! Individual rights revoked! Bombing campaign imminent in Iraq! Corporate corruption and government cover-ups rampant!
So lets talk music.
Every sodding year in the UK there is this big fuss about which song will be the Christmas number one, as if that's anything to be proud of. Here's a quick rundown of the contenders this year... keep in mind we've had such classics as "The Hamster Dance Remix" and "Bob The Builder" in the past... oh yeah, and the Teletubbies. Smug rainbow-colored bastards!
S Club Juniors (the odds of these sploogy germs making it to #1 are non-existant, but they were contenders so I'm listing em)
Although I can more than sympathise with a song all about an unfulfilled crush on Rachel Stevens, its a cover of a shit song, and therefore beyond unmitigated shite (if there is such a place... its probably twinned with Arse-end, USA)
Eminem (again, William Hill doesn't list odds)
I'm loathe to admit that more and more of Eminem's tracks are starting to appeal to me. I guess once I broke through the ego-tripping "I'm white, AND?!" attitude I've actually found the soft pink fluffy center he's been keeping secret all this time behind the hardened outer shell of... white middle-classness
Robbie Williams (no odds listed still, these people were contenders once upon a time)
Catchy tune, decent melody, and... fuck me! Is that Daryl Hannah in the back seat snogging Robbie?! Careful Robbie, she's got a fake fingertip. Could be just like Get Smart with his finger-gun. One false move and she'll blow your brains out for cheating on her with Nicole Kidman
The Cheeky Girls (50 to 1)
So this'll be the silly song for Christmas that record execs hope people buy for their kids and cousins and whatnot because, hey its Christmas and nothing sells like a silly song at Christmas, eh? These are the same motherfuckers who charge you over 100 times the production costs of a CD even after the artist is dead. Dumb song, great video. The girls are from Transylvania, so maybe they don't realise that "touch my bum" is going to haunt them for the rest of their lives
The Touch My Bum game (oh right, cause you *haven't* played it yet?)
Gratuitous link to the site that comes up first on Google for Touch My Bum
Blue and Elton John (16 to 1)
Another cover. At least the original artist is involved. I think I prefer this version... but I'd prefer it even more if Blue all died of a horrible throat infection that caused them to spontaneously spew forth their oseophagus's from their navels leaving Elton to take care of singing HIS OWN FUCKING LYRICS. I live in hope every time I hear the song start up...
Boys Aloud... no wait... One True Voice (5 to 1)
Manufactured pop. Self-confessed mime artists. Covering a sodding Beegees song! And these people are... not... the spawns of Satan? Instead they're second favorites?! Not only are they as manufactured as is humanly possible (well, okay, maybe if they were clones or something that'd kick it up a notch) but the public manufactured them. Or at least all you rabid phone voters believe that you did. What does it say that out of the five of them not one of them is maybe... shall we say... a bit rough around the edges? They're all lookers. None of them are singers. Not that they do anything for me... however...
Girls Aloud (1 to 10 to win)
Yahoo Music has this to breathlessly gush about the song: "There's so much going on in the track that you're practically left exhausted once it's over. It's safe to say that this sounds quite unlike anything else around at the moment."
Bollocks. Plain and simple. Its a decent guitar riff played over a Sugababes rejected track. And on top of that even Pete Waterman says that they're miming it. You're telling me I'd have to plonk down a grand to even make £100 back? Sod that
There's no real contest, it'll be Girls Allowed... sorry, Girls Aloud followed by One True Session Singer's Voice. And all the money goes back to only one soure, the root of all evil.
I suppose I should just be grateful that Las Ketchup and their satanic lyrics aren't in the top ten anymore. And remember kids... there's no one quite like grandma. She's the wrinkly one hunched over in the corner with the faintly musty smell and the cake on her head you have to give a kiss to on pain of death from your mother. And in return she'll give you the Cheeky Girls single.
I've got a little list
Internet grocery shopping has now become such a staple in my life that I was somewhat aghast at being told that I'd have to go out and shop because there were no delivery slots available before Christmas day. Pix is working right up until the end of Eve and I'm off this week and next, so it befalls upon me to shop... oh, and buy the coffee table.
So I walked off to the massive Safeways store in Camden (remember it Mike?) and started off with one of those half-sized carts. The ones that are like only four inches deep. They're the Miatas of shopping carts.
Carrot sticks, no problem. Lemons, no problem. One orange... one orange... shit, bags of oranges. Tear open net bag of oranges, extract one orange. Sorted. Ah. Single oranges available on next shelf. Bugger. Oh well.
Shallots. Shallots. What the fuck are shallots? Are they animal vegetable or mineral? Vegetable, huh? Um... look like small onions... no, those are actually small onions. Fuck no shallots. This is getting tough and I'm only on page one of her list.
Potatoes for roasting. So is that new potatoes? white potatoes? small potatoes? English potatoes? Call her. Yeah, call her. Um, hey honey, what kind of potatoes should I get? Oh right. Cool, thanks.
Dried rosemary, no dried rosemary, only refill sachets. Sod that. Sugar-free jello? Five different flavors. Oh well she can try all five, or mix them up for a fruity cocktail taste sensation. Hey everyone its a bovine hoof derivative with fruit flavorings and no sugar party in my mouth, and everyone... is gonna get really sticky.
Two bottles of Gallo Zinfandel. Isn't that a species from Babylon 5? Mr Ambassador Zinfandel, you're really spoiling us with these fruity jello balls of yours. Fine, two bottles of red. Sorted. Jamie Oliver eat your heart out... no, wait, that's Sainsburys.
Oh fuck me, I forgot to get beef stock cubes and now I'm clear across the other side of the... wait... there's some in that unattended cart right there... and now... there isn't. Woohoo, lucky me, I guess I didn't forget to get those cubes afterall, yay me. Nope, nosireebob, picked these off the shelf myself. What are you looking at kid?
Hrm. Cart filled up pretty quick, better transfer all this stuff into another one... one of those big ones they use for midget-convict prison transfers. Ooooo, banana milk drink mix. Must buy... despite knowing already that I shall hate it. But... is there milk in the fridge at home? Do I call her and ask her if she remembers? Even if she is at work right now? Do I? Don't I? Do I risk it? What if I buy it and there is no milk, it'll just sit there and mock me with its yellow label and unhealthy radioactive glowing liquid inside...
Hey move it lady! Don't make me insert this cucumber where the sun don't shine. Whoops, sorry kids, didn't mean to sideswipe you. That mark will come right off if you rub the flesh for a bit...
Oh look, frozen cauliflower florets, frozen peas, frozen beans, but no frozen sprouts. No great loss, I didn't want them for me anyway...
Why do I feel like Invader Zim these days when I come into contact with the general populace? Meat! I must have meeeeeeeat! Give me all of your frozen meat pitiful earthlings!
Stress
kd wrote a post recently that evaluated her susceptibility to stress this year. I scored pretty high, what with being made redundant at the beginning of the year and everything that followed. And yet, here I am at the end of the year in a far better position that when I started it.
What's the secret?
I adhere to the Tyler Durden philosophy of only worrying about the things I can influence and change. Everything else I just shrug off. I really wouldn't be kidding you if I told you that Fight Club opened my eyes to a lot of things, it remains my favorite book of all time and not because of the violence, or the anarchistic philosophies, but rather because it offers a different perspective to the Gap-wearing Starbucks-drinking Consume, Consume! CONSUME! mantra of today.
I don't wear designer gear, I don't drink in juice bars, but you can if you want to, thats okay by me, just don't look down on me because I choose not to.
Waxing lyrical
With the amazing revelation that the Las Ketchup song has satanic lyrics I thought I'd analyse some other popular lyrics in search of satanic meaning, first off, the Hokey-Cokey:
You put your right foot in,
to the pentagram etched in blood on the floor
You put your right foot out
of joint in some masochistic pain ritual
In, out, in, out,
blatant sexual overtones
And you shake it all about.
"It" refers to the severed goat's testicles in your left hand
You do the Hokey-Cokey,
Hokey meaning "fake" and Cokey being an obscure Babylonian term for messiah
And you turn yourself around.
through hypnotic suggestive possession
That's what it's all about!
Hail Cokey! False messiah and swallower of souls!
Next, how about an innocuous little nursery rhyme?
Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep,
through callous neglect
And can't tell where to find them.
because of the drug-induced stupor she was found in
Leave them alone,
or you'll be brought up on charges for animal abuse
and they'll come home,
because tormented victims of chronic abuse tend to
Bringing their tails behind them
as they can't cut off their little fingers Yakuza-style as penance
What else? Even in modern pop tunes like Enrique Iglesias:
Esta Noche Bailamos
De Noite - da mi vida
Quedate conmigo
"Tonight demonlord Bailamos
Of all the nights in my life
I beseach you to return to me!"
Tonight we dance
I leave my life in your hands
We take the floor
Nothing is forbidden anymore
Our blood-frenzied orgy to eradicate all virgins shall commence!
Don't let the world in outside
Don't let a moment go by
Nothing can stop us tonight
As we consecrate this land to the eternal resurrection of our filth
And finally, to prove that not everything is bad, Slipknot's "Heretic Anthem"
Tell me again how you're tortured
by your secret fluffy love-feelings for me
I wanna know how you followed your orders so well
because I've proud to be your friend
You're full of SHIT
but in a nice way
You had a dream but this ain't it.
so lets work together on a new dream
If You're 555 then I'm 666
I'll move into the house next to you so we can be close
You should be dancing
I had a girlfriend who once tried to convince me that dancing was not glorified foreplay. As if it wasn't the most obvious form there is. Perhaps she was trying to explain to me that dancing does not *count* as foreplay.
Over the past two weeks now, having been to several Christmas parties it has become blatantly obvious to me that I cannot dance. White man got no rhythm. This white boy ain't shaking his thang or busting a groove... or gut... whatever. When I dance I look like Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters dancing with that tall blonde girl. The words "flailing in distress" would apply. (but you're not in dis dress, you're in dat dress...)
Dancing, quite plainly, is a way for people to move their bodies in an appealing way to the opposite (or sometimes same) sex. From the earliest days when man grunted and strutted around a large fire in a very homo "who wants some of this, I've got a club and a wild ZZ Top beard and naughty cave paintings collection" erectus way.
How can anyone claim that dancing is innocent? Its intimate, up close and personal, its all to do with coordinating your body with one, sometimes multiple, others. So, some helpful survival tips for dancing at Christmas parties...
1) Try to forget you have a penis. If you get self-conscious about rubbing against other people then you're doomed to fail from the very start. DO REMEMBER though that there will be other men on the dancefloor. If you start to feel self-conscious then just remember that they look stupid too.
2) For easy poppy tunes, undulate your hips in a lemniscate... okay, fine, a figure of eight. Same thing really...
3) DO NOT lift your feet. If you are a novice dancer, lifting your feet adds another random variable to your flailing arms. Learn to coordinate your arms first before adding in leg movement.
4) When "I WIll Survive" starts, leave the dancefloor. You'll see why from the sidelines. If you are just a casual dancer then you won't ever need to learn the complex hand movements. Also, some form of personal emotional distress seems to be a requirement for the convincing tears on the dancefloor
5) Learn how to spell YMCA. All upper case
6) Don't mouth the words to the Beegees. Sing or do not sing, there is no mouth
7) Don't drink and dance at the same time. You will end up with wet shoes
8) Don't dance while drunk, you may be more succesful than you'd want at attracting attention
9) The Macarena is EVIL!
10) Dancing is foreplay. Follow through.
Revenge!
Among the gifts that were handed out at the agency Christmas party (wow is my mini digital camera shit cool!), my boss's boss was given a portable Nike mp3 player (only 64mb... doesn't compare to my Net MD)
This transparent... egg shaped package. Inside the plastic egg sits the shock-proof rubber-coated mp3 player, guaranteed by Nike engineers to survive a thermonuclear detonation at ground zero on pure Trinitite (see previous post about making up names for shit)
Problem was... none of us could get the packaging off. It was the perfect impervious ova. I broke a craft knife trying to cut through the outer shell and scissors had little effect.
Eventually a nick became a tear, a tear became a gaping rend, and finally the damned thing was open. I've since found a half dozen nicks and cuts all over my fingers and hands from my attempts and the satisfaction of getting it open was quickly dispelled by the request to put some Enrique Iglesias on it. "Cheery poppy tunes please"
So to cheer myself up I included Puddle of Mudd's "She Fucking Hates Me", see how she likes jogging to that...
footnote: Somebody went and registered bulletproofpunk.com, my old domain. Its a spammy search engine homepage now.
Eat Acerbium. Is Good! Yumyum.
I can't stand it when people invent ingredients. You know what I mean, those hair product commercials where they advertise that they now have 100% more micro-corpuscule volumiser elements or now with added Silvershinium. Because obviously we, the consuming public, are too stupid to realise that these are fake ingredients and materials and products.
I mean, like Goretex... I'm supposed to believe that Goretex is real? And Quorn? Quorn is real? Somebody didn't just say "Well shit, its fungus, but we've got no hope of selling people on the idea they're eating fungus, so lets fool them into thinking its actually something cool. Better give it a name that starts with an obscure letter too..."
Which is why I refuse to believe that zucchini exists.
Secret
I've been having a secret love affair with the tall dark-haired, corseted girl who works at No Wear in Camden.
But don't tell anyone, its so secret even she hasn't realised it yet...
Juicy
I went to a juice bar for the first time. Well... the juice bar was part of a grocery store and I was intruiged by one particular drink. Normally I'd stear way clear of anything that even borders on the Gap-wearing, Starbucks-drinking, latest Nokia handset using, gym-membership owning, men's fashion magazine-reading lifestyle into which juice bars belong so wholeheartedly, but this one sounded good:
The Green Machine: Lime, Apple and Wheatgrass
Only... no lime. "I make with lemon, okay?" said the Banana Republic refugee behind the counter with his six different juicing appliances and silly hat.
I'd prefer lime to lemon please
"No lime, only lemon"
Okay then I'll pick another drink... or... actually maybe I'll not bother with a drink
"Wait, I go get some limes from produce counter"
Well thankyou very much, don't strain yourself or anything. And while we're at it, why not replace the wheatgrass with just regular grass and the apples with Quorn.
For a drink called "Green Machine" the guy used red apples. I had a few mouthfuls and the thing was absolutely revolting, I feel entirely justified in loathing the places now.
Juicebars in this decade should be held in the same contempt as mobile phones were in the '80s.
Spicy!
Pix and I spent the day looking for gifts in Camden, found some good ones, but amazingly we spent more on ourselves than on other people (can you imagine? How selfish of us!)
Among the stores that we visited was a shop specialising in all things lighting. Switches, dials, bulbs, wiring, everything you could need. Pix had ideas for putting up a net of fairy lights indoors so we got some. I noticed a massive strip-light panel that claimed it worked effectively against Seasonal Disinfectant Disorder... not sure what that is... maybe people need big bright lights to see that they haven't cleaned the toilet properly or something.
Anyway, eventually we took a trip to The Black Rose/Drag Strip and found the most excellent kitten-eared hats.
Wanna see what she looks like now? That's me on the left.
She looks just like Mittens from The Other Side. Mmmmm, spicy brains!
The kingdom of Acerbia and the natural Jodiverse
In an IM conversation with Jodi she mentioned her boyfriend's lazy eye. That got me thinking...
Is a lazy eye a few steps down from an evil eye? What are the intermediate steps? Does it go evil eye, pissed-off eye, vaguely miffed eye, disappointed eye, apathetic eye, lethargic eye, lazy eye maybe?
Evil eye is as we all know "Hexed! You're fucking hexed and you know you deserve it!" with pissed off eye being "you've brought this upon yourself, so a hex on you, okay?" vaguely miffed eye would be "you really shouldn't have done that and I don't want to do this, but you're hexed".
Disappointed eye I've had before, many times, they're my mother's favorite. Apathetic eye is probably "feh, you know you've done something wrong, I just can't be bothered hexing you" and lethargic eye is all "I know you're there somewhere, and if I could work up the strength to swivel my eye towards you then I'd hex you... maybe..." and lazy eye is just "not gonna hex you, just not gonna look at you either"
Jodi, I ran out of Ritalin...
The Week That Was
I feel really awful, just awful.
I was struck down by the dreaded lurgie on Sunday night and didn't show up for work on the Monday, staying home and instead making this... which you're already seen no doubt.
Tuesday I came into work sounding like Barry White. Frequent requests for Baby Blue Panties weren't the first, the last, the everything of jokes I heard that day.
Wednesday was the AOL christmas party, held at a venue called "Jewel" in Piccadilly Circus, where the walls are covered in mosaic mirrored tiles. The bathroom was a surreal David Lynchian affair, accentuated even further when a midget in a three-piece suit walked in and stood beside me. Don't ask me how he managed to hit the target I was too blitzed to notice. If he'd started talking backwards to me it'd probably have made sense at that point.
On the way out though I grabbed some free DVDs. Yay AOL, those are the sort of discs I'd like you to inundate me with in the mail if you don't mind.
Thursday morning I came in sounding more like Don La Fontaine: "It was a time of much boozing... it was time for a packet of cigarettes... when one man's quest to find the toilet became a crusade, when one woman stood between him and his bed, when one word is no longer enough... Piss Up: The Final Straw"
My throaty growl was of course enhanced further still by our agency christmas lunch. Now, there was none of this pissy Secret Santa shit, the gifts were hand-picked and unique to each person in the agency. A lot of time and consideration went into every gift, it was quite an awesome moment for me when I opened up a microscopic 2.1 megapixels digital camera... totally blown away.
After the lunch and drinks we ended up at a club where they projected movies onto the walls. We arrived midway through Carrie and I managed to last until the end of Shawshank. Again it was surreal to stand in the middle of a crowd of people dancing to heavy breakbeats, mouthing the words along with the silent images on the walls.
Then it was time for a dodgy mini-cab... a fantastic London tradition. The driver does not speak English, does not know where basic areas like "Camden" are and can't tell left from right even when you point in your chosen direction. I'd agreed upon a price before even climbing into the cab... actually, I say "cab" and you should read "Ford Escort with dangly pine tree air freshners, passenger seat right back against my knees, musty smell in the back, no carpeting in the footwells."
At least he drove along the Thames past the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, illuminated in their distinctive tangerine glow.
So why after all of this do I feel awful?
I'll tell you why.
I forgot kd's birthday. I'm really sorry kd, consider this a Happy Birthday, a day late and a dollar short.
Write-off
I wish I had something witty to say today. Last night was the AOL Media party and I had far too many of those cute little green drinks.
Ah, at least I can relax in the knowledge that... what? Oh christ, another party today?
My advice to people? Stay away from the innocent looking drinks. The ones with like a slice of fruit peel on the rim? And if there is more ice than liquid do not be fooled, it will *not* be a weak drink.
Acerbia, home of the lightweight D and his WORST-CASE SCENARIO BLOGPOST
The IT crowd
Obviously our IT department likes to make life difficult for themselves.
We're supposed to be a digital ad agency, we're listed among the top ten in Campaign. If people only knew the truth though...
Apart from the choice few who have G4 Macs with all the trimmings or Pentium 4 Dells with souped-up RAM (like me!) the vast majority of people have really old P2 PCs. These are the people who need glorified typewriters and Internet access. Short of plugging a Speak n' Spell into a phone jack, they need new machines.
So the IT department has cooked up this plan whereby they send the outdated P2s back to Dell and get a whole batch of P4's similar to my own (only not as nice)
In the meantime, what are they giving these PC-only people who are used to two-button mice, Windows, etc?
iMacs
Within a minute of plugging them in there were cries of "How do I save this image?", "How do I maximise this window?" "Where's the file explorer?"
We have an IT hotline, the number is 666, they're not kidding.
Flash-freeze
Rise and shine, campers, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cooooold out there today. It's cold out there every day. What is this, Miami Beach?
Not hardly.
It is *so* cold out there that when I walked into my nice warm agency I swear I could sympathise with Han Solo being thawed out of the Carbonite. And the worst part is that your extremities defrost last, so you just know that he was pressed up against Leia with only one thought going through his head "Christ, I hope she doesn't want sex... my knob's got no feeling in it..."
Also, I'd just like to point out that when I joke that only four or five people read this site I'm not kidding. Before I switched to the EOD tribute design and ditched tracking I had a respectable audience. Since then though I've dropped into relative obscurity, don't believe me? Just check the stats. Do you realise just how niche this site has become these days?
I feel like Yul Bryner in the Insignificant Seven, anybody want to be my Steve McQueen? We can work up from there.
Worst-case scenario blogpost
Was it two Christmases ago that this was first released? Or has it only been one?
I have always felt that the world would be better off if everyone was provided with a manual for the human body.
"Just turned 13? Here you go, testicles, peach fuzz, and your Human Operating System manual. Please be sure to reboot the HOS at least once within every 24-hour period to avoid blue screams of death."
"Just turned 18? Here you go, kids, mortgage, car, and your Advanced HOS manual. Be careful now, that thing between your legs isn't a toy."
How much simpler would life be?
So anyway, it seemed to me that this was almost the next best thing. A book that tells you how best to fall off a building, how best to leap from a moving car, how best to survive an avalanche. Perfect, I can see myself in all three situations.
But come on now, Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Christmas ? Now you're just taking the piss.
Here's an idea though.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Congratulations, you must be a fellow KLF fan! Do you remember how good it used to be in the old days? No? Me neither. We'll just have to forge our own revolution one of these days.
Your adventure ends here, as we dance away until the thrumming pulsating brain-busting beats and the relentless assault of the flashy lights and shouting friends. Nts-nts-nts-nts-nts! Rave on!
This post exists only as a continuation of this one
Britain's culinary contribution to the world
Britain, when you come to think of it, doesn't exactly have a very strong reputation when it comes to cooking styles. Everyone knows and understands Mexican, Italian, and French cuisine, they know that sushi is from Japan, paella from Spain and i comes before e except after c. But when you think of Britain, what does that evoke?
Fish and Chips perhaps? (not even getting into the argument about chips and crisps, french fries that aren't from France and mayo and ketchup issues, y'all can just squidge on out of here with your chip issues)
Toad in the hole? I tell you, I've had toad in the hole and there was no hole and no frikking toad in it, just potato and sausages.
So I have come to the conclusion that Britain's contribution to the world has to be the fry-up, otherwise known as The Full English.
Eggs, sausage, bacon, beans, toast, possibly black pudding (known as "blood sausage" elsewhere in the world) mushrooms and maybe hash browns, but that depends on where they serve it (like if they serve it to you in a pig's trough then you're shit out of luck). Basically you get a lot of meat for breakfast.
Which is fortunate, since Pix is trying out the Atkins diet in the run-up to Christmas. For people who don't know, Dr Atkins saw what other diets were trying to achieve with the points and rewards systems and decided to make the world's least fun diet *ever* (like those CDs that claim to be the Greatest Rock Songs EVER!) by eliminating everything fun. Boring food is all that Dr Atkins allows. Anything that could set off the excite-ometer isn't permitted.
Potato? *beep* Potato no good, can be combined with ketchup.
Chocolate? *beep!* Chocolate no good, too sweet and tasty.
Meat?
Meat?
I can't believe that somebody came up with a diet that encourages meat. As much meat as you can manage. And I thought the French were taking the piss with the Montignac diet that says eat as much cheese, baguette as you like and drink lots of wine. You would say that, you're fucking French, aren't you?!
So now I have dropped all other pet names for Pix and decided to call her Meat Girl. With an evil Mwahahahaha laugh too. And I'm her sidekick... Bloodsausage Boy. Together we shall take over the world. We fear nothing! Well, except maggots. Maybe...
Fresher than daisies in spring
I've envied JadedJu since I made that design (since redesigned). Now I've got my own version of it. Sorry Jill, I just had to.
Only a week later than I had wanted to get it up and live, but mainly because I had professionals helping me this time. One of the advantages of working at a digital advertising company is that I'm walking in the presence of paid pros. That does not of course mean that I'll have been able to take their teachings and immediately apply them to the greater good, so I'm more than happy to receive your criticisms of poor coding, slow load times, etc, just send them to "Ineedabettermachine@ndIsuck.com"
Just kidding. Send them to dave at acerbia.com and I'll do my best to sort you out, after all, I didn't redesign everything from the ground up just to alienate people, look, I even included a links page once more, go visit some of the people on the links page, they're there for a reason y'know. I don't just make little icon thingies for fun.
Everything is modular with room for expansion (I like future-proofing, future-proofing is my friend... not as much my friend as water-proofing, future-proofing doesn't keep me dry during a rainstorm)
And I even included tracking once more, something I gave up on after switching to the last design, so I'll know where my three regular readers were before they came here... ew, Mike, animal porn?
Comments people... look, comments.
Puffin
I had my first cigar last night.
Sat at an agency/client Christmas dinner (scuse me? Christmas dinner?! Its still the first fucking week of December!) I indulged in some very fine Calvados and picked up a Cohiba about seven inches long.
"Just suck on it, don't swallow" was Marc's advice and I would have had some witty reply were it not for the fact that my mouth was full.
After I discovered the trick to keeping the damn thing lit by puffing, puffing and puffing some more I settled down into a steady rhythm and got into the swing of it.
So there I was, sitting in a restaurant in London's Savile Row, puffing on an expensive cuban, sipping a fine smooth calvados from a brandy glass and sharing stories of my days back in the dot.com era (well see, no war stories to tell)... and today my mouth tastes like I've been chewing on coffee grounds.
(you'll have to excuse me that this one isn't very funny, see, I've just never had a cigar before)
We're doomed! Doomed I say!
(Sorry I missed the past couple of days, I have people working hard on sorting out a few coding issues and my design guy is messing me around... anyway...)
We're doomed I tell you!
On my walk to work today I saw a chalked message at the door to a very large corporate head office "Sale of lease: one soul". Smells of doom to me.
Then on the Tube I see the sign that warns that obstructing the doors can be dangerous has been modified to "obstruct the doors, be dangerous" and again I have that stench of doom in my nostrils.
The final straw of course was seeing the eight-pointed eye of chaos in the Starbucks christmas posters. I swear, its there, with small wrapped up packages instead of points, but it is there and that positively stinks of doom! Doom I say!
Oh wait... is it December already? I should have realised, of course. The end of the year is nigh.
Anniversary dinner
The Acerbia Anniversary dinner was held last night, it was something of a rushed job as I was only reminded that the anniversary was due on the 28th by the site suddenly dropping out of existence as the hosting had run out.
That wouldn't have been a problem in the old days of course, back when the editorial staff only had to worry about writing the content and the technical department took care of the hosting and bandwidth problems, artwork took care of all the nifty graphic ideas, the sales department worked out the product placement deals and the call center staff dealt with all the complaints.
So it was with both nostalgic glee and painfull reticence that the dinner went ahead. The entire assembled staff of all three incarnations of Acerbia.com and some of the early staff from the days of Bulletproof Punk met at our old dot.com days haunt, no longer "Dot.com on in" but now "Pedro's Tapas Heaven" and sat down to eat and reminisce.
One or two hitches during the evening were bound to happen, but for some reason this year's anniversary was more fraught with peril than any prior one. Duncan has fallen off the wagon quite dramatically and assaulted one of the waitresses, Gloria suffered abuse from all sides of the table when the entire Sales staff started arguing about just who she had been sleeping with during her time at Acerbia.com and Keith was somewhat taken aback when Brian pulled out a gun and cursed him blind that he'd had enough of being ignored and that he had always been the better staff writer.
Only the art department seemed to behave themselves, although afterwards it became obvious that they had been amusing themselves with matches under the tablecloth.
It was with great relief that I stepped out of Pedro's with my mentor and close friend Alan, the man who originally bequeathed Acerbia.com to me upon his retirement, only to find that he was trying to make a pass at me in the hopes of somehow taking it back from me.
"I know you're about to relaunch you sly basta'd" he slurred "and I wan' in on it. I haven't worked on a website since my stocks in Yahoo went belly up"
Not a chance. It may not be the most famous site on the web, but it is mine and I'll be keeping control of it from now on.