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.
Feh
I need a break. I really do. For two days now I've struggled with trying to write some conspiracy-theory post with charts and graphs and things regarding Google's plans for World Domination and how it would affect the Blogging community, all from a digital media perspective... and yet... who cares?
I don't have anything near the audience required to break a mock scandal and recently I've just been feeling pretty unloved in real life anyway so... feh, who cares?
Talk amongst yourself, I need a break. I amassed some links, make of them what you will.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=related:news.google.com/
http://www.metafilter.com/comments.mefi/23794
http://www.knitwitology.net/knitlog/
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2786761.stm
Punchline
Douglas Adams tells a story through two of his characters in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish with Arthur and Fenchurch sitting in Hyde park together. (At least I think it was Hyde park... might have been Regent's)
It's quite an enchanting story and surprisingly enough turns out to have been based on a true event in Douglas' life that he recounted to the people at Embedded Systems in 2001.
He concluded by saying that he found a great deal of pleasure in knowing that somewhere out there was a man who could tell the exact same story but didn't have the punchline.
When I was thirteen I was a somewhat precocious child (I was being raised in Paris with ambassador's sons and daughters and high-ranking ex-pat executive's children) and had picked up other people's jokes... I drove my parents nuts by slapping my forehead and saying "I coulda had a V8"...
...without ever knowing what the hell it meant. To this day I still have no clue.
Coffay?
There was a cereal bowl full of instant coffee granules. There was a bottle of cold milk beside it. I added a spoon.
I don't know where the bowl came from but I am perversely hoping that someone will see the scene, recognise the scenario and attempt to pour milk into the bowl.
Consider it my own little white mouse maze.
Hair
Pix wouldn't tell me where she was going last night, she just said she'd be back in an hour. Sure enough an hour later she returned with her hair cut.
"What do you think?"
I know that men as a gender fear this question because there is NO right answer to that. If you explode into goddess-worship then you're accused of being sarcastic, if you play it cool then you're uncaring and undeserving. So I sideped.
"Can you explain to me just what good will come from having had your hair trimmed? Basically... what are the fringe benefits?"
I know, I'm an ass, Melly tells me all the time.
Big words
Your Meedja wank-words for the day are:
"contextualise"
"bandwidth" (if used to describe free time)
"segmentation"
"point & click"
"constrained"
Anyone caught saying any of these words within the next twenty-four hours must be given a super atomic wedgie (remember kids, that's over the head and hooked under the chin) for the sake of all mankind. Working together, with me on the inside and all of you loyal hard-working grassroots, salt-of-the-earth folks out there, we can eradicate this menace to humanity once and for all with the judicious application of underwear torture.
Silly me similie
What she said: "This is a delicate project, we're taking baby steps"
What I said: "Lady this baby was put to bed months ago and I'm the only one who remembers what he even looks like"
I love twisting people's similies around
Call waiting
At the start of every trip to the cinema I am forced to sit through the Orange "please switch off your mobile phones" commercial. Why is it annoying? Well because at first the ringing is coming from the right, then the left, then behind you, then... the message shows up on the movie screen and two hundred people reach for their phones at once. Occasionally someone laughs at how clever this is as I sit gouging my eyeballs out with my ticket.
I have a semi-loathing for the mobile phone. The ringtones in particular. There is no tune, no single jingle or song that I could possibly want to hear to let me know that I have an incoming call. The only time my phone rings is to wake me up in the mornings as a makeshift alarm clock. Any other time it is set to vibrate.
Yes, vibrate. I like the vibrate function, its discreet and silent and just a little bit kinky. If the phone isn't in my pocket its in the foam rubber chair on my desk. If its not on my desk then its on top of the PC case and... shit, that incoming call just restarted the machine.
At my agency we had what was called a "Sin Bin", meaning that if your phone rang continually whilst you were away from your desk then the offending mobile was locked away in a locker and the offender was charged £5 to charity to retrieve it. Wasn't such a success when you consider that the worst offenders run the agency. So for fear of being fired we put up with the ringing. And the ringing. And the ringing. And the ringing. And the ringing.
Until one of us reaches a breaking point
"Find that fucking thing and smash it up!"
"Take the battery out!"
"Switch it off."
The only time the mobile is safe is if it has been sealed away inside a purse. There are just some places a guy won't venture. We don't know what could be in there and we value our hands too much.
Which is why, if you ask me, the best way for terrorists to disguise any nuclear device they hope to detonate in central London they should hide it inside a giant ringing purse.
Made from real lemons
Was it really inappropriate of me to ask if the frozen Linda McCartney meals were made from real Linda McCartney?
Thought so.
I can hear the ocean
I need a vacation so bad it's starting to fuck with my head.
It got to be so hot in London today (good ol' bipolar British weather) that we had to crack the windows open for the first time since I joined. The sound of cars driving past on the warm tarmac on the street below coupled with children playing in the park across the street and the occasional seagull (we're right by the Thames here) has got me having those delusions again that I'm actually sitting at a desk on a beach...
I could be doing this job anywhere in the world... why am I in London?!
The First Taste
Imagine discovering that someone you strongly disagreed with had secret hidden talents and was actually quite good at their job.
Imagine discovering that Jerry Falwell was actually a first-class speaker and promoted hope in humanity... yes, okay that might be asking a bit much. Imagine instead that Sean Penn turned out to be a decent actor.
Are you with me in this fantasy world so far?
Right, now imagine that you have never actually seen a Sean Penn movie. You've spent most of your life hating him for what he appears to be in the media, for his opinions and social faux-pas, his uninformed babble and general contrite... I'm getting distracted here.
A few weeks ago Pix and I went to a new music showcase to support a friend who is lead singer and guitarist in an all-girl rock band. They make Pink look tame. Anyway, before the showcase started, Pix and I found ourselves thinking that the background music was pretty damned good.
It got to a point in the evening when we just had to know who it was, and rather than use Shazam (duh, didn't even think of it at the time) we had our friend ask the sound engineer.
Turns out we're closet Fiona Apple fans. I can't stand Fiona Apple she always has that strange intense stare in interviews and comes across like she's a fanatic without a cause...
but when I hear songs like Criminal, Get Gone and First Taste... well gosh darn it, if it weren't such a newbie blogger's tactic I'd be posting lyrics, but as Peter reminded me not.so long ago, we can't all be undersexed Ani DiFranco-quoting Brit bloggers.
So Long And Thanks For All The Comments
I'm reading The Salmon of Doubt and finding it to be a bittersweet ending to a very long relationship with Douglas Adams. When I was eleven or twelve I read through the first four parts of the Hitchhiker's trilogy, maybe six months later I read through them all again. When the fifth book was released I read all five in a row. I may have done so a second time before I was eighteen.
In one short piece that was salvaged from his hard drive, Douglas Adams explains that the inspiration behind The Restaurant at the End of the Universe came from listening to Procol Harem's Grand Hotel and I can totally understand what he was talking about. So I decided to listen to the top ten pop tunes in the charts today to see what I could come up with...
The Breakfast Bar at the Dawn of Mankind
The Bagel Joint at the Crucifixion
The Doughnut Shop of the American Revolution
The Soup Stand on the Eve of the Second World War
The Ice Cream stand on the shores of Omaha Beach
The Snack Cart on the Corner of Dealey Plaza
The Bistro at the Turn of the 21st Century
The Starbucks on the Surface of the Dot.com Bubble
Sorry that's all I got
Squeak!
During the 1950's, in an attempt to discover whether circumcision was an effective method of lowering the risk of penile cancer scientists would dip mice in horse smegma...
Let me just pause for a second and have a think about that... you're a mouse, running through the occasional maze, getting cheese, doing your thing and then suddenly you're picked up by your tail, carried over to a large basin full of strange pasty white liquid and dunked in. Repeatedly.
So by scientific reasoning we discovered that penises and mice were completely unrelated?
Scottish Cat Talks!
I made a cat talk. He tells a joke. It is worth the plug-in download, I promise you.
Needs speakers or headphones or something, otherwise you're just looking at a cat which seems to be chewing its bottom lip.
(only available for the next 14 days, sorry folks)
Meedja whore
Sitting in the front seat of a cab rushing through Chelsea and Kensington on the way to a client meeting talking on a mobile phone and eating chicken Chow Mein with chopsticks as we weaved through traffic I suddenly had a pause for thought and that thought was...
...you fucking meedja wanker...
AcerbiaStartBlogPost(_
After yesterday's Short Short Posts and the resultant self-referential post that arose from the initiative, coupled with Michele's threat to start using BASIC I sat down and bashed out a very easy Visual Basic program that will read blogs, condense the content down to the key values and deliver timely and efficient reports straight to your inbox.
Sub ReadingAcerbiablog( _
strAcerbiaName As String _
)
Dim qinfo As New ACBQQueueInfo
Dim q As ACBQQueue
Dim msg As ACBQMessage
Dim strMachineId As String
' Obtain the newest posts since last visit.
On Error GoTo ErrorHandler
strMachineId = MachineIdOfMachineName(strAcerbiaName)
find cookie (spywareAcerbia.onlineactivity.tracking)
' Set the format name of Acerbia blog.
qinfo.FormatName = "MACHINE=" & strMachineId & ";BLOG"
' Open the Acerbia blog.
Set q = qinfo.Open(Access:=MQ_RECEIVE_ACCESS, _
ShareMode:=MQ_DENY_NONE)
' Read the first message in the Acerbia blog.
Set msg = q.Receive(ReceiveTimeout:=1000)
Check cache = keywords.sexrelated(sendReportTo dave@acerbia.com)
' Read the remaining messages in the Acerbia blog.
Do While Not msg Is Nothing
MsgBox "A post was removed from the Acerbia blog."
Set msg = q.Receive(ReceiveTimeout:=1000)
Loop
MsgBox "There are no more posts. The Acerbia blog will be closed."
q.Close
Exit Sub
ErrorHandler:
MsgBox "Error " + Hex(Err.Number) + " was entirely your fault." _
+ Chr(13) + Err.Description
If Not q Is Nothing And q.IsOpen2 Then
q.Close
EndIf
End Sub
You do of course have to hack your Microsoft Outlook .exe file to implement this, hope everyone's cool with that.
Doh!
Note to self, remove felt pen from hand before smacking forehead from previous stupid action with hand.
This sort of stuff just spirals down into anarchy... and Jackson Pollock-style sketches on my forehead.
*today's posts are brought to you in association with the Stacy Tabb "We Love Short Short Posts" initiative
Short and Sweet
I asked a friend who has more time than me to read through all my favorite blogs and give me a quick Reader's Digest version but he came up with a three page document. I passed that on to a friend and asked her to work out the prevailing themes and summarise them into one page. The page I got back was pretty full so I had a third friend do bulletpoints of all the best blog posts out there this week. The bulletpoints wouldn't fit on single lines so I had someone condense that down to what I figure must be the epitome of the last 7 day's blogs:
"The"
*today's posts are brought to you in association with the Stacy Tabb "We Love Short Short Posts" initiative
Number 2
When standing at a urinal, men will talk boisterously to one another. When sitting in adjacent cubicles however men will not cough to reveal who they are and move their shoes away from the partition so they can't be identified.
Reason: holding your pecker makes you feel more manly than sitting in a prone position.
*today's posts are brought to you in association with the Stacy Tabb "We Love Short Short Posts" initiative
Money talks
After paying off more than $100,000 in invoices this morning with the nonchalant blithe flick of a wrist, why do I still have trouble calling up Visa and paying my credit card bill?
*today's posts are brought to you in association with the Stacy Tabb "We Love Short Short Posts" initiative
There is no spoon
There seems to be a fine line between heating coffee in a microwave and C8H10N4O2-bomb testing.
*today's posts are brought to you in association with the Stacy Tabb "We Love Short Short Posts" initiative
Coalesce! Damn you!
Somehow Toren must have predicted my debacle last night as I tried to cook a beef Wellington dinner for Pix from a Leaping Salmon meal kit
This should have been forewarning enough for me rather than finding myself standing in the kitchen screaming into a pot of Madeira wine and butter "Fuse you motherfucking ingredients! Fuse!"
Leaping Salmon is wonderful and I'm likely to try them again sometime in the near future. Their recipes come with all the right amounts of ingredients, so rather than "chop two onions, no not like that you gimp! Like we would have if we were doing it" they read "insert pre-chopped onions from plastic tub." This is my kind of cooking.
But on the plus side we watched the latest Eddie Izzard DVD, Circle. And I can't agree more with him when he says "Never put a sock in a toaster."
Words to live by.
Sock it to me baby
This is going to be a general mishmash of thoughts going around my head, stuff I have to write down somewhere and you people lucked out in that respect.
Of the 90 Scuds fired at Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War 1, less than ten of them were ever brought down by Patriot missiles. This contradicts the claim by US Officials that 100% of all Scuds fired were shot down.
The reason Saddam survived the first war was because a joint decision was reached among the Arab nations' leaders that the Allies could have their bases in Saudi Arabia providing they did not target Saddam directly with special forces or assassins. That didn't stop the Allies from targeting command and control centers even when evidence pointed to the fact that some of these installations were in fact air-raid shelters for civilians.
I dropped a black sock on the floor from the washing basket last weekend. I wanted to come up with something funny about it but all I could murmer was a forlorn "Black Sock Down! I say again, we have a Black Sock Down!"
This weekend Pix picked out a black sock from the washing, a wool sock, really comfortable and warm especially in this cold weather we're having here in the UK right now and told me it was an awful sock. I told her not to be fooled by the socks that I got, I'm still Jenny from the block.
Some people confuse war with regime change, the removal of a despot with a war against a country that has more than suffered enough. Bombing Iraq is not "bringing democracy to the people" its blowing them up.
North Korea unashamedly admits to seeking nukes. Iraq has been under sanctions and international scrutiny for the past twelve years. At their prime the Iraqi army lasted six days followed by six weeks of retreat after a decade-long military build-up and prolonged conflict against Iran. Were we to go to war with them again they'd last all of six hours, thats going to make a lot of people look very foolish when they have a population of 20 million to look after again.
Somebody please tell me that there's a Pacific battle group heading over towards China and North Korea. I'd hate for The Forgotten Nuclear Power to remain in the shadows when we seem to be pointing the finger at every nation with a shitty human rights record and a passing interest in nukes.
All this talk of war and socks... its getting me down, my love...
The Good Ship Royal Kingdom
All seems quiet enough here on Air Strip One, also known as the USS United Kingdom (CVN-66) London, GB, also lovingly referred to as "The Bitch What Spawned Us".
A few scares earlier this week what with a guy smuggling a grenade into the country, some suspects who happened to live relatively close to a flight path being locked away and some suspicious looking liberals being beaten with large objects to shut them up...
Our CinC is up in arms that people want to protest tomorrow at all, what he fails to realise is that this is likely to be the last time many of these people come into London after Mayor of London (which I suppose would make him chief of the watch if I were to continue the Air Strip One joke) Ken Livingstone starts his Congestion Charge ($8/day to drive into London)
In other news the ship's mascot died recently. We would all be distraught by this only we couldn't tell her apart from the rest of the flock. As such we're all on Condition Goldenrod, with a chance that if things calm down we can go back to Condition Taupe by Monday.
Lockdown
Well I feel much safer knowing that we have a nimrod watching over us here in London.
I Can See!
Last week I went for a long overdue eyetest. Today I picked the new glasses up.
Its like a veil has been lifted from my eyes. Like I was squinching and now I'm now, I once was blind and now...
What the fuck? Everything's crystal clear, sure, but warped ever so slightly. It's like living at a 3 degree incline from everyone else. I'm walking along pavements like I was drunk. I have the headache to match.
Still its nice to see clearly, I'd forgotten that an ampersand was not in fact solid blobs of black with a tail but had spaces inbetween.
I was worried I was going to end up like Donald Pleasence in The Great Escape. I was secretly ferreting pins away ready to drop at a moment's notice. "Look, I'm not blind, I can see that pin at my feet... Ouch!"
She's not a tart
Last night I saw The Crying Game for the first time. I had missed the first ten minutes but quickly picked up what was going on from the Irish and (awful fake) English accents.
Pix noticed what I was watching and eventually realised I was seeing it for the first time.
Jody dies, Fergus goes to London to find Dil and falls in love with her.
I could see Pix watching my reactions as Dil came on screen, wondering if I knew or not.
"She's pretty nice," I said and noticed her eyes light up "when does she get her cock out?"
"I thought you said you'd never seen it before!!"
Well I haven't, but does anyone know of The Crying Game as anything other than "that movie where the chick gets her knob out on camera"?
Two complaints thought. One, although it was amusing to conduct a conversation through a third party, especially one as talented as Jim Broadbent, was it really necessary to conduct every dialogue in the third degree?
Secondly, the people reviewing the film on the IMDB seem to have either been bored by the movie or missed the point entirely. Jody was having his revenge from beyond the grave knowing full well that Fergus would fall in love and look after Dil through guilt. Surely the dream sequence of Whitaker coming towards the camera in oneiric slow-mo only to walk away at the last moment when the sticky wicket is revealed shows that?
But then, I'm the one who argues that Kevin Spacey isn't Kaiser Soze, so maybe its just me.
Life of D
The trouble with reading a book that everyone else wants to read but hasn't gotten around to yet is that you are continually deflecting other people's expectations and opinions and finding yourself analysing whether or not you truly are enjoying the book...
"That's supposed to be really good"
"I haven't read it yet but everyone tells me its fascinating"
"I bought a copy but haven't found time to read it yet, are you enjoying it?"
Let me share with you the reasons that swayed my opinion: It won the Booker prize with a panel of judges I agree with (winning the prize means nothing to me if I dislike the judges) and it has a very, very nice cover that I can glance at while working and feel every so slightly more relaxed. The scanned image doesn't do it justice.
Hey Mr DJ
Judge Jules is in our agency today. He's a DJ... except... how ofdten would you actually recognise a DJ when you saw him? Other than Fatboy Slim that is... and maybe Lisa Pin-up
I'm going to be spending the whole day wondering which guy hovering around is Judge Jules... is it the school teacher guy? Is it the trendy young guy? Is it the studious-looking guy in pin-stripe? Is it... is it the blonde woman in slacks? The website uses such blurry photos I can't be sure.
Duck!
The rules of "Project Stalling" are simple.
1) If you cannot find something wrong with the project you must add to it pulling on all available resources and getting as many other people involved as possible until it breaks down again
2) If you can find something wrong then you can pass it back to the person who messed it up and have them add to it until it breaks down again
3) If the project is ever completed you lose. If anyone is fired because the project has not been completed, you lose.
I'm getting really good at this game.
All's Fare In Love and War
I remember the last time I visited Florida, coming out of the airport terminal into the oppressive humidity and there before me was a long taxi rank of Yellowcabs.
So it was with this burst of nostalgia that my colleagues and I surveyed the rank of Hackney cabs in the West End this morning.
"Are we getting a cab?"
"No, look, the one at the front is one of those purple ones, the drafty ones that have shitty suspension. Lets wait until someone takes that one and then we'll take the comfy modern one behind it in the queue"
So we waited. And we waited. Each of us taking turns to invent some quick errand he had to run to kill a few more minutes. And still the shitty purple cab sat there at the head of the queue until eventually as in so many situations, the time vs. money equation won out.
"Here, give that woman a fiver, tell her to take the cab."
Hey Punk
Sometimes I forget I lead this double-life. My secret identity as a blogger slips every once in a while when I talk endlessly about memetics or smirk and say "that'd make a good post", so when I looked up expectantly during a client demo when the tech guy mentioned that the fake profile they were using was "Joe Bloggs"* and said "these days, who doesn't?" I simply explained it away as insanity.
That's my secret identity. I'm secretly insane.
*Joe Bloggs is a generic name used in the UK in the same way that John Doe denotes an anonymous identity in the US
I Am The Law
Godwin's Law states that as a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. This is the critical mass point in any online argument and does not count if triggered prematurely simply to end the argument.
Similarly, I want Acerbia D's Law to state that in any argument between a man and a woman, the words "you're on the blob, aren't you?" trigger that same thermonuclear reaction and the argument melts down into recriminations and unresolved issues.
With thanks to Seki for explaining to me why this would be a stupid thing to say
Excuses that have never worked for me
You're welcome to try them yourself though if you want:
"I stepped into a temporal vortex on Friday evening that dropped me back here now on Monday morning. I want two days off to investigate the phenomenon."
"My dog didn't just eat my report he almost choked on it, I had to perform the Heimlich maneuvre on my beloved Fluffy. He's okay now, just a bit distressed by the whole thing and I reckon that after a few more days he'll have forgotten about the whole incident."
"Bleep"
"I set my watch back instead of forwards by accident. I thought that was how you made sure you were always early."
"I was replaced by my evil clone while you weren't watching. Go away or I shall taunt you."
"I'm not wrong. You are."
"Its Monday, give me a break."
How Many al Qaeda Suicide Bombers Does It Take?
I guess this means that they've had to change the color of the lightbulb in the war-room in the White House?
Roll on the lightbulb jokes!
How many hawks does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two. One to change the bulb and the other to restart the gasoline-powered generator.
How many UN weapons inspectors does it take?
Why should we change the bulb? We see no evidence that the bulb has blown
How many Presidential advisors does it take?
We can't risk changing the lightbulb, it worked for us before and we don't want to screw up reelection
How many al Qaeda suicide bombers does it take?
Bang
Gotta go to work...
The process of an underpants gnome:
1. Steal underpants
2. ?
3. Profit
Just as soon as I work out 2, I'll be unstoppable!
I Just Can't Get You Out Of Your Pants
I ain't buying them unless she's been in them.
More Squirrels!
Here at Acerbia we love squirrels. We hate the episode of Blackadder where The Shadow continually shoots squirrels out of the trees (eep! eep!)
"Bastards! I hate them with their long tails and their stupid twitchy noses."
Well screw you, go hang. Anyway, B3ta have been looking for the new kittens, and I say the new kittens are squirrels! (althought the monkeys are a close second)
We love squirrels, lots of squirrels.
Dead Squirrels (uses same image as the above link, we must have swiped it from the same place)
Highgate Squirrels "the rodent equivalent of a multiple orgasm with a big bushy tail"
Juggling Squirrels "IF YOU'RE WITH SQUIRREL-JUGGLERS INC. THEN YOUR SQUIRRELS ARE JUGGLED CHEAPER THAN WITH TOSS-A-SQUIRREL UK"
Clarity
I had to see an Optometrist today after months of stalling and headaches. The short story is that in the eight years I've been wearing glasses my eyesight has degraded from 0.5/0.5 to 0.75/0.75 which is an incredibly small amount for such a long period of time but it has had a noticable difference in the past six months.
So if thats all you want to hear then I'm a-okay and getting new glasses next week and there we go. You can fuck off now.
...
Oh fine then I'll tell the funny story, but after this week this'll become a subscriptions-only feature
During the eye test the optometrist asked a bunch of silly questions. "Do you smoke?", "Is there a history of diabetes in your family?", "When you slaughter a goat and wrench its heart out with your bare hands, do you then summon hellfire?"
After leaping through his trivial hoops of... trivial trivia... he had me wear the silly plastic things.
"Can you see better with this lens... or with this one?", "Can you read the fourth line of the chart for me? How about if I poke you in the eye?", "Close your left eye, pat your head and rub your tummy for me"
Afterwards he had some nice conclusions for me.
"The good news is that your eyesight has only slightly degraded in the past eight years, the bad news is that you have a stigmatism."
Well that would explain the gushing blood from my palms and the sore gut...
"Your eyes are slightly rugby-ball shaped"
Hey, your breath stinks and you need a haircut, do you hear me complaining?
"The good news is that the twitching in your right eye is just a trapped nerve"
Well good, because the gun store said I'd have to pass background checks before I could bring an M-16 to work.
"And you can come in and collect your new glasses one week from today"
Who said that? I've gone blind in the time it took you to measure my face.
Then I had to choose the special options I wanted with my glasses.
"Steel frames?" Check
"180 degree hinges?" Check
"Anti-glare coating?" Check
"Anti-scratch coating?" Check
"X-Ray vision?" You bet your ass. And can I get laser targeting sights with that please?
This time next week I'll actually be able to see what the hell I'm writing and stop relying on Google's Blog-o-matic function...
D8?
Text message sent to a female colleague by a potential suitor looking for a Valentine's date:
"Dating, Mating, Flaking or Hating?"
Wow, I'll bet that technique works as well as "ASL" does.
You've Got Squirrels Mate
Living so close to Regent's Park means that we see quite a bit of city-dwelling wildlife.
For instance, on a late-night snacks run to the nearby Sainsburies something dark and ominously-canine trotted across the road heading towards one of our neighbor's gardens.
Is that a dog?
"Its a fox"
Don't be silly, foxes don't live in London
"Its a fox"
Sure enough it trotted past us, all foxy-like with its foxy face and tail and everything, disappeared into the bushes.
I wonder what it eats
"Squirrels most likely"
Pix has some sort of love/hate relationship going on with the squirrels in our neighborhood. She buys bags of nuts for them and throws them out in great handfuls that arc gracefully through the air and drop on the grass with the patter of tiny nut projectiles. Then she leaves the bag on the window sill, visible to the squirrels, taunting them, hoping one of them will take a leap and brain themselves on the glass.
I lie in the dark sometimes expecting the bonk of a small arboreal rodent/transparent surface collision.
Not So In Love
Love, widow of Nirvana star Kurt Cobain, was held on suspicion of **erk** leaving a loaded shotgun and copious amounts of coke in her LA house on the night of Kurt's death **erk** and endangering the Virgin Atlantic flight from Los Angeles.
Asked how she felt about her treatment at the hands of the airline she said: "I have been flying British Airways for a long time and I will continue to do so. **erk** And by the way I am 100% guilty of causing the death of my husband, yessireebob I am, and I've been raking in the money from royalties ever since, you fools. **erk** This is my second time on Virgin and my first time wasn't so great either."
The Usual Paraphenalia
Currently sitting on my desk:
- Telephone
- Mobile phone
- Brand new media messaging phone, unused, untouched, unwanted
- Empty coffee mug
- copy of the Financial Times
- Robert A. Heinlein's The Door Into Summer
- stapler
- the little Internet handbook to coding HTML
- Foo Fighter's One By One
- A 500g jar of bolognese sauce
- A 16mm film canister, empty
- a Wilson Junior baseball bat
It didn't seem weird until somebody pointed it out to me, why did I need a baseball bat? The answer seemed obvious enough to me. Sometimes its the only way to get results.
Deep Core
With news that cinemas have been urged to pull The Core trailer from their trailer reels due to the insensitive nature of the content in the wake of the Columbia explosion... there was me thinking it was more to do with the fact it looked like a massive pile of shite.
Oooo, Bad Taste
I wrote last week about Channel Five and its promise to show a blockbuster movie every night. Well tonight's movie is Con Air, its on right now.
In one scene Nicolas Cage goes into the belly of the plane and finds a convict who has frozen to death in the undercarriage. Writing a quick message on his chest he throws the body out of the plane. A few scenes later the body smashes into a car and a cop calls John Cusack with the following message:
Local cop: I got a problem with a corpse.
Larkin: Yeah?
Local cop: Yeah, fell from the sky. I don't think he's an astronaut.
Now is it just me or is that really bad timing? Seriously...
Why are you here?
What?
No, voting finished on Friday. If you think I'm busting my ass entertaining you for nothing now that voting is closed you can sod off. Go on, sod off.
I'm not some dancing monkey here to entertain you. Go on, get off my land!
Come back in March when they announce the winners and I either sulk or rub it in Francis' face.
Things my girlfriend and I have argued about
I wanted some French toast (its not French by the way, whoever came up with that ridiculous name?) so I asked Pix if she'd make me some.
"Check the bread"
I took the special bread-checking crystal with me. Waved it a couple of times over the unopened bag and reported back.
Bread is not mouldy enough to warrant concern.
"Expiry date?"
Two days ago
"Nope, we'll go out and get some more bread"
I don't want to go out, I have things to take care of here. I'll make it myself.
So I went upstairs and started making it myself, somewhat ineptly.
"Get out of my kitchen! You're doing that all wrong! Fine, I'll make it"
So I patted her on the rump as I left. I say patted... there was quite a swing to it and a resounding crack when my open palm connected...
She came at me with an egg whisk. An electric one. Slotting the whisky thingies into it as she approached. The only weapon of defense I could find was a pair of socks I had taken off the night before...
She held the electric whisk out and switched it on. Nothing happened. Ha! I held the socks in her face and sidled around her and away to freedom.
Of course... if she poisons the French toast then she gets the last laugh. And it will be poison... not because of mouldy bread or anything silly like that.
This post is dedicated to the memory of David Van Queef O'Fluegen who died of acute food poisoning on this day. As it turned out the bread-checking crystal lied to him.