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.
Braga This
With the clocks being set one hour forward for British Summertime I noticed an interesting increase in the number of rather well-to-do Chelsea folks out and about on the King's Road as I tried to make my way home.
It occured to me that the laws of time don't apply to these people. If it is light, it is time to shop, if it is dark then it is time to put on what was bought during the bright time and spill expensive drinks all over it.
I think I'll try and engineer a couple out on one of these Chelsea socialites and one of those people who take up the entire armrest in the cinema (you know the one, they stare straight ahead but they know you're pissed off at them) or perhaps one of those people who stand just those few inches too close to you to talk to you. So close in fact that you're getting a headache from your eyes trying to focus on them. Neither of these types of people are subject to the laws of space.
So with one parent who isn't subject to time and another who isn't subject to space I conclude that their offspring would be a perfect candidate for time travelling.
by the way, British Summertime means that it is brighter for one extra hour, it does not mean that the rain stops
Under Pressure
Likely to be a light week for postings this week, at least until we're past the start of the new month/quarter/financial year and I've managed to justify the masses of money I've spent.
I had co-planned quite an elaborate prank this year but lost the spirit for it when it became obvious it would make a better TV show than April fools joke. My co-conspirator had better be working on that book idea we came up with...
I don't wanna lose your love
Just what is it that you want to do?
We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do!
And we wanna get loaded.
And we wanna have a good time!
And that's what we're gonna do. (don't wait baby, let's go!)
We're gonna have a good time. We're gonna have a party.
Games Nation
I decided to try and encourage Pix to get back into computer games, as she'd wanted a couple of games recently. View results
The name of the place has been changed and the saleperson obscured to protect the guilty
I just know that Bill is going to be the only person to get this... but anyway.
Finding The Funny Again
Geekman tried to convince me that he is less funny than I am in an IM chat last night. See what you think.
AcerbiaDave: I need a new job if only to put the funny back into my site. I feel like I'm just humoring people who come see it these days.
MightyBoredGeeK: Hah! I think I lost the funny sometime in 99'.
AcerbiaDave: ha! I lost the funny way back in the 80's! Man there were some dark days back then... blogging wasn't even called blogging, it was called "e-mailing" and you only ever had an audience of one.
MightyBoredGeeK: 80's? Pshaw. Doctors had my funny removed when I first exited the womb! And I was banned from ARPANET.
AcerbiaDave: my father was treated to de-funny microwaves causing his sperm to be the least funny sperm ever to exist and I wasn't allowed to even look at anything by Texas Instruments.
MightyBoredGeeK: My great grandpa was put in an anti-funny concentration camp in Slovakia. I'm banned from even being struck by lightening. Too much like using electricity.
AcerbiaDave: I've traced my family tree back as far as the 13th century when my family name was Not Funny and back then we weren't allowed to make smoke signals for fear of communicating with the outside world.
MightyBoredGeeK: In ancient Athens, my family wasn't allowed to eat bananas. Might lead to humorous situations, you see. And all their tongues were removed.
AcerbiaDave: Back in Biblical Times my forebearers were given an eleventh commandment; Thou shalt not be funny, and their eyes were gouged out to ensure they couldn't see if there was anyone nearby to gesture wildly at.
MightyBoredGeeK: My forefathers were present when Moses dropped the tablets and they were slaughtered almost to a man for fear of attempting to make a joke about it. They were not allowed to grunt.
AcerbiaDave: My family's earliest cave paintings were censored and my ancestors burnt to a crisp for fear they would draw more funny cartoons. Then their ashes were trampled by bison in as unfunny a method as possible.
MightyBoredGeeK: When the earth was a boiling mass of molten lava and the first protoplasmic lifeforms were formed in the depths of the oceans, my ancenstral spooge was hunted down and eaten by every other gelatinous mass in a desperate attempt to salvage humor for the future of all living things in existance. We were smothered and genetically banned from ever communicating.
So which of us was less funny?
Dropkick Fido
I've been diagnosed with accute miniyapyapcynophobia. I now reserve the right to kick any dog that is less than a foot tall.
Yes, even puppies.
Splash
During a particularly boring informal meeting being held in our comfortable "green area" so called because the couches are green and the area is bright and spacious, I noticed that the light was reflecting through my glass of water onto the floor.
These are called caustics. The light is refracted through the layers of glass and water and split out into rays and shades and patterns that distort with the movement of the water as you move the glass around. At certain angles you can actually see the imperfections of the glass as they're magnified and projected onto the floor. It can become very captivating to watch...
None of my colleagues saw this of course. They just watched as I poured a glass of water onto my shoes.
Welcome
If you're coming here from the superlative New York lifestyle site Gawker, welcome. Perhaps you'd like to check out other creative projects I've whiled away my spare time on over here including the truth behind the Kate Winslet GQ covershoot. Otherwise there is plenty to read. I have a deep-rooted loathing of Anna Wintour ever since I read How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, a must read for anyone interested in the NY publishing jetset.
If you're coming here from A Small Victory, also, welcome. I like war, war is good, it promotes economy and technology and I have a certain fascination with war, almost a morbid fascination you could say. Sometimes I just like to play devil's advocate and point out the Catch 22-esque paradoxes that war will cause to arise.
If you're one of my regulars... hey, how you doing, you gonna leave a comment now that I've removed the clunky obscure graphics? Alternatively you can gaze at the title graphic and zoom in (just right click on it) to see the details in the background.... ah... boobies.
It started so innocently: redux
Ah-ha! I see that Gert is trying to steal my top spot on Google for "it started so innocently". You bastard! So here for your amusement is the zombie shopping story which by rights should remain at the top of the pile.
My girlfriend and I got past the standard "domestic saturday shopping trip" thing very quickly after she moved down here and we now enjoy the evolutionary leap forward that is on-line shopping... however... sometimes we just have to go out into meatspace and shop, and sometimes the cupboards can get a little more barren than they should so we went to the supermarket.
Unfortunately being among all these other people just wandering around looking at shelves full of products like sedated Hindu cows caused me, in a moment akin to Dawn Of The Dead, to spontaneously become a zombie.
For the rest of the afternoon I trod with heavy limbs and arms partially outstretched, eyes closed to crescent shapes, mumbling "brains" every chance I got.
"Grab me one of those would you please?"
To which I would reply "braaaainnns"
"How about this sauce to go with some chicken?"
To which I would reply "braaaaaaainnns"
By about the sixth aisle she'd given up trying, we wandered around together, she'd point and say "brains?" and I'd reply "brains". I was reminded of the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter credit card commercials that claim that only 7% of communication is verbal, well today 100% of our communication was zombie.
We got to the check-out;
"brains" she said to me, and in turn I replied "brains". The woman in front of us was too busy reading about Callista Flockart to care.
We got home and went to dump the groceries in the kitchen and get started on dinner;
"brains?" I asked to which she craftily replied "brains"
So I chopped up the chicken and she heated the skillet and set to work cooking. It wasn't until I opened up a tin of refried beans and started scooping what has to be the closest equivalent to dog food humans have onto a plate that the hillarity of what I was doing struck me.
"Brains" she said and I couldn't have agreed more.
So if you and your partner are having trouble getting through the daily drag, try being zombies for the day, it really does lower you to the level of the people you're out shopping with.
Originally posted here on 02/16/2002
Char
Tea. What could be more essentially British than tea? There's an art to making tea I learned from Douglas Adams. Still makes tea taste like distilled weeds but my sister seems to appreciate a good cup of char every other minute... its a drug, isn't it? I managed to escape the country during those formative years where you're all put on Earl Grey drips and forced to sniff tealeaves, right? Not that coffee is such a huge leap up the scale, its just soggy ground up beans.
Read the rest over at Troubled Diva, you can be instrumental in making me more British and less like a bastardised Yank
Its Not About The Oil
As I sit here eating my way through a bag of pistachios I suddenly noticed the byline "product of Iran" and it occured to me that there is one theory the conspiracy theorists haven't shoved down our throats yet.
That this is about revenge.
Oh no, not for the Al Queda link, or the "He tried to kill my daddy" reason. Let me explain...
In 1953, in return for American support against a nationalization movement Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi promised a continuous supply of oil from the Gulf. His regime was oppressive and brutal, millions of his oil-earned dollars were spent on bulding up an arsenal of military hardware, but as any government will know, without popular support you will eventually crumble. On January 16th 1979 (I remember the date because it was two days before I was born) the Shah fled Tehran and the Ayatollah came to power using the nation's hatred of the U.S. as fuel for calls for terrorist acts against western citizens and countries.
In November of that same year the famous Iranian embassy hostage crisis began and continued for 444 days (some would claim that Reagan's Presidency was guaranteed by the outcome of the situation) and in April of 1980 the Iranian embassy in London was also overrun by Iranians. There's footage of the SAS storming the embassy available here. Pretty cool.
Facing hostility from a now envigorated ally and ex-supplier of massive quantities of oil (my parent's '67 Mustang shows that it was designed in an era of low gas prices with its terrible fuel consumption ratio) the US turned to another local of the Gulf, someone who came to power roughly around the time the Shah disappeared.
Saddam.
He was happy to sell oil to help build up his own armies and fund his quiet sabotage of Iran, both reasons that pleased the west greatly (see, revenge conspiracy theory). In fact one of the reasons why the last Gulf War had no coverage of the "heroic" french fighter pilots is that... they'd sold the same Mirage fighter jets to Iraq and both shared a similar radar system that would have had the allied anti-aircraft systems blasting french fighters out of the sky. No great loss I'm sure you'd agree.
For eight years a war raged between the two sides, with over $1 trillion spent on a mini arms race between the two of them with the west supplying both sides (hey, guns don't kill people, people kill people). Eventually Iraq seemed to be gaining the upper hand and Iran agreed to a UN resolution of truce. Iraq and the west were still friends, he was behaving himself and not bothering Israel at all.
Then we went and attacked his own people with chemical weapons left over from the Iranian conflict. Then he tried to buy a really big fucking gun from Gerald Bull (fortunately Mosad killed Bull and UK customs impounded the final parts of the barrel). Then he set his sights on Kuwait. You know the rest I'm sure. So the theory would probably be that this is us punishing Iraq over a prolonged period for turning their attentions away from a "bad" nation like Iran who deserved a war waged against them for defying the west and towards a "good" nation like Kuwait who were already an ally of the west.
The only thing I don't understand is, after we've liberated the Iraqi people, why don't we go liberate the Iranians too? And while we're there can we bring back a lot more pistachios, I just ran out.
Dick Luc Picard
I would like to think that I had some doing in influencing Heather to create a Dick Cheney Cruise Missile Cyborg Death Machine animation that also managed to fulfil two of my three criteria for the perfect fantasy (sorry, you lost out on "large-chested women present") with Wil Wheaton being given what he deserves and a politician actually being funny.
But she credits some other guy who seems to be her boyfriend or something... so I guess I'm relegated to lowly fanboy admirer-from-afar status.
Kamikaze
When I was much younger I was afraid of the dark. To be fair though, I had no trouble with the dark, it was not being able to see the aliens or monsters that scared me. I had a high bed that had previously been the top half of a set of bunk beds so there was close to two cubic metres of space underneath, which is plenty if you're some minor spawn of Cthulhu.
I had a routine that went like this. Say goodnight, go upstairs. Climb into bed. Clutch covers tightly around neck (cause monsters can't attack you if you don't have any limbs showing). Listen to the cracks and groans of the floorboards and ceilings. Hear parents going to bed. Go get one.
Obviously this got a bit tiresome for my mother and step-father and I remember the night my step-father banished all fears of monsters forever. He came in and sat down on the edge of the bed and calmly explained how houses cool down during the night because they expand with the heat during the day. Everything was patiently explained and the chances of monsters somehow materialising under the bed were rationalised away.
Then, to strike some common ground he told me about how, as a child, he'd been scared by those stories of fanatical Japanese soldiers living on some Pacific island, refusing to believe that the war was over. He would stay awake, scared of a Japanese soldier charging into his room with a fixed bayonet, so my fears weren't irrational, just highly unlikely.
He left the room. Lights out. You know those cartoons, when the light goes out and all you can see are the whites of the character's eyes? That was me. {blink, blink}
For the rest of my childhood I lay awake in bed at night and worried that a Japanese soldier with a fixed bayonet was about to come charging into my room. I never went to my parents for any more words of comfort.
originally posted on Bulletproof Punk 10/16/01
The Art of Acerbia
I know you're out there, I can hear you breathing. How do you like the new title graphic? I just wasn't happy about all the empty white space in the last one. Right click on it and select "zoom in" to see some of the finer "points"
Do you realise you're probably one of the first people to see this? I'll bet no-one else has even thought about linking it from their site...
Cats and Dogs, Living Together
What is going on in the world?! Michele suddenly likes Fred Durst and Statia is telling stories about flashing her inlaws and her vibrating bedroom companion!
There might be a connection between these posts, but what could it be?
Let The Beer Do The Talking
Cyborg Asbestos Saddams and Matrix-stylee moles over at Troubled Diva.
Worm Your Way Out
I think my secret identity is safe. I was just asked if you could get viruses from these new "blog" sites.
I said yes.
Torture
One of the guys I work with is a big fan of Radiohead and other assorted maudlin-rock bands (woe is me, woe is me!!) and I asked him a few weeks back if he had any particular bands he really hated.
He said he hated the cheery tunes of The Beach Boys more than any other band, that the optimism and sunshine-filled white-teethy tunes made him want to puke.
So we've all been enjoying everyone's various Beach Boys compilation CDs over the agency stereo system. Its amazing how many of them there are! And no two have the same track listing or play order. And everyone knows all the words and tunes, its just like the end credits to There's Something About Mary where we all sing along...
...if a small thermonuclear explosion is detected on the banks of the Thames then you'll know that maudlin-rock boy couldn't take it anymore.
When your agency MD sends out an e-mail linking Dear Raed, maybe it would be a good idea to stop blogging from work before I'm found out...
Creativity Abandons Me!
I knew this was going to happen. I've slunk into a slump, which is just what you want when someone has asked you to guest blog on their site while they're away in Europe cavorting with rampaging wildebeets... yes, I meant to make that typo... I imagine giant herds of wildebeets staining the savannah purple, rolling ever onwards worried that a vegetarian lion might come take a bite out of them.
Oh, nevermind, the muse seems to be back and all it took was a silly typo.
By the way, you will stop me when I get a title graphic up that everyone likes won't you? I'm still dabbling in using vector graphics for maximum results and minimum download times. You all probably don't care much what this place looks like so long as it doesn't look like Wil Wheaton dot net.
Or read like it.
Oo! A cheese sandwich! Shall I eat it?
And because I can't find any other way to post about this, here's a link to sublimiminibable artwork in a comic book! Sex! Lots of Sex!
Field Rations
Especially for Robyn (because all the others so far have really been for Michele)
Helping Traditional Media...
Entry: embed
Function: verb
Definition: implant
Synonyms: bury, deposit, dig in, drive in, enclose, fasten, fix, hammer in, impact, infix, ingrain, inlay, insert, install, lodge, pierce, plant, plunge, press, put into, ram in, root, set, sink, stick in, stuff in, thrust in, tuck in
...because CNN needs to find a fucking thesaurus
Weekend Warriors
Somehow I suspect that the first of these three is not just something I made up...
Episodes 1 - 3
Episodes 4 - 6
Episodes 7 - 9
Episodes 10 - 12
Great Blog In The Sky
I discovered Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon for the first time today after years of skipping past it in my parent's CD collection. Now I want a copy of The Wizard of Oz to test the theory that it syncs with the movie.
Apparently its not the only album/movie combo around. I wonder if I shouldn't experiment myself with some of my favorite albums and movies... any suggestions?
Close Order Drill
All I have to do for inspiration is sit and watch CNN with the sound off.
Episodes 1 - 3
Episodes 4 - 6
Episodes 7 - 9
Quit Bugging Me!
Miguel has moved from Feral Living to his new domain, Metamorphosism. He's barely been gone for a week and already his former homepage has been haxxored by some mischievous little shit (highlight the page with your mouse)
We'll be spicing Meta up this weekend and getting The Bug back on his feet. In the meantime you should be enjoying the eccentricities of a man who lives with robots, cats and a tortoise. Haven't you heard? Miguel is the new Greg Knauss.
The Mess Hall
I had a business dinner with a former US Marine reserve officer and ex-Navy pilot who now both work in the Internet technology sector. We went to Roger Moore's son's restaurant Hush which is ironically enough located near New Bond Street. The food and drink were superb and my only complaint would be the creepy bathroom attendant who spent the time I was washing my hands stroking the neck of the faucet... is that some sort of coded signal meaning complimentary handjobs are available or something?
There's something different about officers living civilian lives, although neither looked out of the ordinary, the Marine went through the motions of stripping a phantom M-16 (which we obviously didn't have at the table) with his eyes closed, and the pilot told stories of carrier operations during Operation Southern Watch flying A-6 Intruders. I was glad to have a broad knowledge of military terms and operations by this point.
We crashed a club and joined a private function "for Collette", I was introduced to everyone as Devon and spent the whole time partying it up, getting free drinks and asking everyone where they knew Collette from. Luckilly I avoided the embarassment of asking Collette where she knew Collette from, but I must have talked to everyone else there and built up an elaborate layered story of how I knew her pieced together from all the info I'd gathered.
But then we left. Devon returned back to being just D. Staggering through the streets of London, the ex-pilot, now drunk on bourbons, told us of his collection of aerial photography of things that never happened officially (including stuff in Somalia and Mogadishu) and the Marine started challenging people to shout out numbers and he'd shout back the General Order it corresponded to. I of course was perfectly well behaved. Honest...
...but I have decided that civilian officers are some of the most fun people to go drinking with and will have to make a point of doing so again
Catch 22 meets Apocalypse Now
When I stumbled bleary-eyed into the living room this morning to see Pix ironing my shirt despite the fact she was up until some ungodly hour working on important stuff she said to me "We started bombing Iraq at two in the morning last night"
Still not quite awake I replied "I didn't hear a thing"
To answer Michele's comment (which I wrote, but nevermind that, Carolyn Keene got away with it for decades) I'm pretty ambivalent about this war. I know we'll win and I hope very few people have to die before a ceasefire can be called and some sense of stability can be returned to the region. I also don't want to be blown up because we were all so focused on Iraq that we forgot about the terrorists.
"Do you ever think about quitting?" Gary asked.
"Sometimes."
"Me too. Sometimes. Guess that makes us chickens."
"Maybe. But we do go fly, don't we? That's got to make up for feeling chicken."
"Yeah, I guess it does." He paused. "And when I'm flying the assaults, I start feeling brave, almost comfortable, in the middle of it all. Like a hawk, maybe."
"I do, too. When I'm in the middle of it. But times like now, I'd quit at the slightest excuse. So what am I? A chicken or a hawk?"
"You're a chickenhawk." Gary smiled.
- Robert Mason, Chickenhawk
Drop And Gimme 20!
The ideas are still coming faster than I can turn them into strips...
Geek Jealousy
I may have been superceded as head geek in my company... I'm not sure yet. For the past nine months whenever somebody had a problem within Excel or Powerpoint or with their PC or the boardroom viewscreen (our 6x4 foot videoscreen) they'd come to me and I would either solve the problem on the spot or find the solution (with Google. I love Google, fluffy-wuffy Google, even if you persist in refusing to give me that job I'm qualified for)
But this morning one of our trend analysts instead asked an account manager. My geek reputation is in tatters. My geek confidence is ruined. I feel like only half a geek.
Oh but they'll pay, yes they will. They'll pay dearly for this affront to my geek pride. GEEK RAGE! Watch as I reformat your hard-drive and switch your keyboard and mouse plugs around! Fear my guerrilla-tech warfare methods!
Front and Center!
The Amazon Sale Now On! No, Off!
Amazon.co.uk Temporarily Closed because they missed a few zeroes off from some of their prices. PDAs for £6 apparently... wonder if they'll honor those purchases?
Wait... this is the sort of "I'm first to post about this!" geeky shit I really hate about blogging... in the same vein as "something happened that I had nothing to do with but I'll write with authority about it anyway" bullshit artists. Next thing you know I'll be posting cat pictures.
The Blurb
Excerpt from a press release for a product I was working on in a very indirect fashion a few months ago:
"(product) 2 is a lot like (product) 1, only it’s (product) 1 on fire, going 130 miles per hour through a hospital zone, being chased by helicopters and ninjas, and the ninjas are all on fire, too."
And if that doesn't make you want to buy it, nothing will.
Heavens To Betsy!
"Gosh! We're late for our meeting!" said one of our project managers as she stood staring at her wrist as if her hand had been chewed off by rabid wolverines.
I had to pause for thought, not because I cared about being late for the meeting, they all tend to blur together (there's the ritual exchange of cards, the problems understanding the wireless keyboard and mouse followed by the PowerPoint presentation and finally the bit where the presentation is done and nobody wants to be the first to say "are you leaving now then?") but because it struck me as odd that anyone would still say "gosh!"
Surely the English language has evolved to the point now where a mere exclamation of "gosh!" is as effective at highlighting the severity of a situation as painting a warning on your toenails and wearing socks.
Cries of "my goodness!", "deary me!" and "oh dear!" just don't do the deed. You need something slightly stronger like a "damn!" or "oh hell!" and failing that something like "fuck!" or the more colorful variations like "fuck-a-doodle-doo" and "fuck-a-duck!"
It's really a sliding scale and unfortunately we keep shifting the goalposts as people become more and more immune to the effects of words like "damn!". I don't even say "damn!" when I stub my toe anymore. I now subscribe to AngryWhiteGirl's method of combining swearwords with tools for such charmers as "Motherfuck-wrench!" and "Cunt-spanners!" Just imagine Ned Flanders saying it and you'll realise how far down the language evolutionary scale this has gone.
Oh wait... I'm still late for that meeting! Gosh!
Bunch of Flowers!
Damn you Jimfo for redesigning!
Now I need to change the sodding icon...
Hooha!
This could become a regular feature, or not, depending on how long Iraq lasts against how long my imagination lasts (but considering I have 23 pages of ideas for this already, Iraq better hold out!)
Based on nothing more than my own naive understanding of current events I present:
73E comes from 73 Easting, as in the battle of. An engagment between an advance scouting troop from the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment and elements of the elite Tawakalna Division of the Republican Guard. With some twelve tanks and twelve armored personnel carriers Captain McMaster routed a larger defensive force and destroyed over thirty Iraqi T-72s. It is now considered a textbook example of how to engage and pursue an enemy force.
The Dead Pool
Now taking bets on how long Iraq will last against the US/UK forces. Several factors to take into account:
- in the past 12 years the RAH-66 Comanche stealth scout/attack helicopter has come into service
- the M1A2 heavy armor upgraded main battle tank is now the rule, not the exception
- Iraq's armed forces are made up of volunteers, reserves and antiquated equipment that wasn't destroyed last time around
Leave your guess in the comments window (thats the keyboard icon for those of you who don't understand obtuse navigation) in the following format:
Name, Blog, Minutes, Seconds.
Gawk At This!
To all you people coming through from Gawker from the Harvey Weinstein article, they've compressed the graphic down to such a size that you can't make out Bob, Harvey's brother, as Salacious Crumb, the Kowakian monkey-lizard. (I've a certain fondness for the little guy, I even have a Beanie of him atop my monitor... Salacious, not Bob Weinstein that is)
Here it is full size, with Gwynnie on the left. You just have to promise not to eat up too much of my bandwidth, okay? Good Gawkers.
D Goes to WAR!
One of the downsides to listening to a Minidiscman and reading a book all the time on the Tube is that I tend to miss the important announcements like "We are evacuating this train, please take the next one"
So it was that I was the last to off onto the now rather crowded platform from what had already been an over-crowded train. There on the platform, acting like a waterbreak that the waves of humans detraining were forced to wash around was the biggest, fattest black woman that could fit in a Tube train and she wasn't budging for anyone. So I stood in front of her.
Let me just take a second here to describe just how large she was; she would easily have taken up two seats and swallowed the armrest between them whole with her massive ass.
Now I'm of the belief that the London Underground is all just a very polite shoving match. You can become closer to a complete stranger on the Tube in the space of a few minutes than you can to someone you've been dating for a month. You can deduce what deodorant they use, toothpaste (if any), if they dye their hair, if they have dandruff, if they need to blow their nose if they forgot to shave (male and female) and so much personal information that you just want to seal your ears with music and avert your gaze to a book.
But when the polite shoving becomes impolite, I'm quite prepared to take it all the way.
The next train arrived, stacked. Two people got off and Asszilla decided she was the woman to take their place so she stuck a sharp (surprisingly for her weight) elbow into my chest and another into the woman beside me, parting us like the Red Sea.
"I don't think so" my mouth said, I didn't hear myself because the music in my ears was too loud. I pushed Tubcat back towards the throngs of people on the platform and the woman and I boarded the train instead.
I felt a rough shove against my back and turned to face Monstro who blurted out "don't push me!" to which I replied "well don't push me, bitch" (again I have no idea whose words those were) but the fact remained that I was on the train and she was not, plus she didn't seem too inclined to try her luck muscling onto a train carriage that now contained someone she had just pushed. So she stood there and the doors closed and I smiled at her as the train departed the platform.
I put this down to having watched American Beauty at the weekend and deciding to take some affirmative action and positive control of my life. Don't push me around, I'm a man on the edge and I'm ready for war!
Boing!
I've just realised that every time I drop down into my ergonomic office chair (yes drop, I don't just sit, I drop) I say "boing!" even quietly under my breath, even if people are watching or talking to me, even if I was in the middle of saying something myself.
God only knows why...
Delink Me And Die!
You know what I can't stand? Those people who apologise for their server crashing and the readers being unable to see the scintillating content. Servers crash all the time. Go down your Blogroll or list of links and I can guarantee you that at least one will be a dead link.
Which brings me to another pet peeve... links.
Its a wonderful thing to find a URL you don't recognise in your stats or on Blogdex or Technorati (Blogdex is missing a lot of stuff these days though) and scour through the page to find what they're saying about you. But so what if you delink me?
I'm certainly not going to bitch at you, or stalk you or come back and post bitter comments on your site. So your tastes changed and you found someone new, its not like we were in an exclusive relationship or anything. We don't have kids to share or a mortgage to keep paying. I'll keep my CD collection, you keep yours.
I do icons of the people I like to read. Sometimes weeks will go by without me clicking the link, sometimes hours, sometimes I know the URLs by heart or use the autocomplete thingy in IE to do it for me, but basically I wouldn't expect Warren Ellis to write me a letter if I decided to stop reading Global Frequency (which I won't cause it rules, but Mek was a bit shite)
Which reminds me, I could do with updating the icons and any broken links... maybe I'll remove a few, would that annoy you?
I'm Not Bitter
At first I was going to try for this year's Most Bitter About Not Winning A Bloggie... but I can't work myself up to be as bitter as I was last year. Last year was a joke, WW didn't deserve squat for what he'd actually done in the space of a few weeks. On the other hand, Dean has been a source of constant entertainment and has put so much back into the community that I can't actually bring myself to be nasty to him for winning.
I had banners planned where the Cardigan Industries guy is maimed, shot, squished with a large Monty Python foot or sucked down into a demon dimension... but I just can't bring myself to finish them.
Well met sir, you deserved to win.
On the other hand if you don't vote for Michele as Biggest Whiner For Being Delinked (the category must have been made with her in mind) then you just haven't been paying attention, have you?
Cat Fight
One advantage of being an insomniac is that you get to see the what's on the fringes of television during the wee small hours. Last night as I was watching Animal Cops on the animal channel, I saw an advertisement for Monday's episode of The Animal Psychic with special guest John Edwards.
Can't this guy get messages from his dead pets himself? I guess this should put to rest any doubt about either one of these two as far as authenticity is concerned. However, I wouldn't miss seeing this for all the tea in China.
Sonya: She's telling you not to worry. She's fine.
John: Who is the "B" name? Someone with white fur that has a "B" name?
Sonya: Uh, that 's your cat Bootsie that we're talking to. She says she liked to sit in the window.
John: And who was thirsty? Did she have something like cat diabetis? She didn't like getting the shots.
Sonya: She says she didn't like getting the shots from you.
John: Hey, that's what I said!
Sonya: Hey, that's what I said!
John: Stop it.
Sonya: You stop it.
John: Shut up!
Sonya: You shut up!
John: Your cat is telling me she wants you to shut up.
Sonya: She's your cat, not mine.
John: She's with someone older who was there to greet her, covered in a thick coat of black hair?
Sonya (weeping): Oh my god! Daddy!
Monday 3/17/03 Animal Planet at 8:00pm EST. I'll be there.
Simply Not Cricket
Sports journalism is turning more and more into desperation blogging every day... either that or the Grauniad's been hacked.
Although lets face it, if you had to write about the world's most boring sport in depth you'd go nuts too.
Return To Google
It's been almost a year since Google turned me down. I wouldn't have thought too much about it except that Big was on one of the movie channels last night...
"feh, coincidence, a movie about a kid working in advertising who understands that the key is to have fun, coincidence"
A little later on Sweet November came on and I watched it for a variety of small reasons, including Mig's obsession with Charlize Theron, my love of San Francisco and how funny it was to see all the dot.com product placement considering that the movie must have come out after the bubble burst but was filmed at the height of the craze...
"feh, movie about man in advertising who has no social graces being taught the true meaning of happiness in a dot.com era, coincidence I say! Coincidence!"
And today I find that Google have another opening I qualify for and have already spent the last nine months doing to some degree.
Dare I try again?
Dum-de-dum-de-dum
When singing along to a song playing in the background whilst sat at a table with some of your work colleagues, be sure not to miss your cue when the second chorus starts up and you forgot you already sang verse three. They may tolerate you singing along quietly but the second you fuck up they'll set the verbal beatdown tiger on you.
Get The Hell Off My Spread
With news this morning that Britain might quit the U.N. entirely and go it alone with the US in a war against Iraq (cause y'know we need to bomb people to justify this massive army we have in proportion to our population) I feel that Tony Blair should maybe do his best Denis-Leary-mimicing-John-Wayne drawl and tell those crusty Euro-crats
"Take the Commonwealth too, we don't fucking need 'em!"
(its confusing, isn't it, you can't tell if I'm pro or anti-war, can you?)
New Sensation
CNN calls us cutting-edge, the Grauniad thinks some of us better mankind, Google buys Blogger and we're still unsure as to what it means, Reverse Cowgirl (love that logo!) is in talks to turn her site into a TV show and Extreme Milk is all in our face product-placement stylee.
I have a report on my desk about this "emergent" technology called blogging and a post-it asking if this new technology could be harnessed for our client's purposes. I find myself on the brink of a crisis of conscience. Do I embrace that blogging is no longer a niche activity and is "going corporate" or do I protect it and advise our client to leave it well enough alone.
God knows I wouldn't mind being sponsored by Omega, Aston Martin and Mont Blanc to write for the more intellectual audience (and you know you are, you're reading this, what more proof do you need?) and yet... I have a fond spot for blogging. Its a personal thing where you make friends not customers. I do however have this whole Patrick Nagel Eighties-Corporate thing going for me style-wise... (total coincidence, I didn't know who he was until Jessica mentioned it)
I'm not sure what to do and I'm not even sure I should be blogging this, but then, that's what blogging is, right? Maybe I should run a poll... what do you think? Do I sell you all out to The Man and become infamous? Or do I remain obscure but able to sleep at night?
Eh?
When I was fifteen I went to an Aerosmith concert in Paris, it was June 6th 1994, I remember the date because Steve Perry made a comment about good cloud coverage for the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings. With three friends we made our way right up to the stage and rocked right up against the barriers.
The next day in class (yes it was a school night, I had cool parents) all four of us were deaf and mute. It took a day before anyone's voice came back and I can remember some time around the end of the 90s I eventually got rid of the ringing.
Well after last night's gig it somehow came back.
I'm sorry but you'll have to shout any comments from now until I can hear properly again.
Other strange afflictions caused by attending concerts and gigs would include:
- bile coming out of my nose after drinking far too much cheap lager
- being used as the human ashtray
- actually seeing Billy Joel life-sized
- sitting in the disabled people area watching Radiohead. Damn those guys can rock. Radiohead too.
- standing in the middle of a gay club (blissfully unaware) belting out the words to Better The Devil You Know
- french-kissing... sorry, freedom kissing a french girl (Whoops, I meant freedom girl) I'd only just met and never saw again
- thinking at one point in my life that Genesis was cool
- filling in all my fingernails with a black marker pen
How about you?
Lets Roll
At one point in his non-fiction book Armored Cav, Tom Clancy tells the true story of a unit of M1 Abrams tanks that were part of the 24th Mechanized Division's push to the Euphrates River during the Desert Storm.
One tank became stuck in a mudhole and the others continued on as the crew stayed with their stranded Abrams. Suddenly three Iraqi T-72s charged over an embankment towards them, one of them firing a high explosive (HEAT) round which hit the M1 but did no damage.
The M1 crew returned fire and destroyed the first T-72, by which time the second had fired upon the M1 with another HEAT round. This second direct hit on the M1 did no further damage and the M1 retaliated with a single Sabot shell which dispatched the second T-72 as neatly as the first. The third T-72 ran for cover behind a sand berm.
Switching to his Thermal Imaging Sight, the M1's tank commander spied the heat signature of the Iraqi tank through the sand berm and destroyed the third and final enemy tank by firing through the berm.
Eventually another unit of M1's arrived to secure the stranded tank but when it was discovered that the tank would be going nowhere it was decided that the M1s would destroy the bogged down Abrams to prevent the Iraqis from capturing any of the vital electronics and the secret behind the Chobham armor plates that protect it.
Two direct hits with 120mm armor-piercing shells caused no damage. A third penetrated the ammunition storage bays and despite triggering a chain-reaction detonation amongst the remaining shells, the specially designed compartment vented the explosion upwards and away from the vacated crew compartment. The fire suppression system immediately put the fire out.
Finally an M88 recovery vehicle arrived to tow the M1 out of the mud, it was taken back to base and the turret was replaced. The M1 was back in action shortly afterwards.
It may have armor that was designed in England, a gun and ammunition that was designed in Germany, it may be built in Peru and get less than half a mile to the gallon, but never let it be said that the U.S. doesn't have the best fucking toys in the world.
I Touch Myself
It looks like my guests may have their own places to go back to now... Jill, Susan, Miguel it was a pleasure to find weird content on here that I didn't remember writing myself... that usually only happens after I've been sniffing the whiffets. The tie that binds the three of them together is of course that I redesigned all of their blogs at some point or another. Jill's is still one of my favorites and I would steal it back in a heartbeat.
More good news is that I've finished tooling around for the moment and I'm back to writing again, the Flash bug having passed on to someone else...
Pix and I just got back from a gig in Leicester Square. A friend of ours was on stage with her all-girl rock band (its the way forward, it really is) and we found ourselves at the forefront of the crowd with her taking pictures for their website and me worrying that I was blocking the view of the short guy behind me. Turned out however he was one of Pix's work colleagues and totally blind. Which went some way to explaining why he spent half the gig at a ninety degree angle to the stage. Better accoustics that way I'd guess...
Accoustics be damned though when a rock chick starts belting out a hard-rock cover of the Divinyl's "I Touch Myself" she's got my full attention. I swear... at one point she was talking to me and only me...
Why aren't there more songs about female masturbation? And if there are, what are they?!
Fuckstix, Utter Fuckstix
Let me just break this self-imposed silence while the house-guests are quiet and point out one rather pertinent point...
DEAN ALLEN ISN'T EUROPEAN OR AFRICAN!
This message is brought to you by the I'm Even More Bitter This Year Than Last Year So Gimme A Fucking Anti-Bloggie, Bitch campaign in association with Solonor's Global Blogging Conspiracy
Choose Your Own Adventure
Well done, you are obviously at peace with yourself. Why are you bothering to read this site then?
Your adventure ends here for you have attained Nirvana.
This post exists only as a continuation of this one
Relaxing
At lunch today an attractive woman told me how much she would enjoy getting a facial every week, and my brain shut down.