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.
Herd? School? Cornucopia?
I wasn't going to say anything about last night because this just isn't that kind of site, but then I saw Tom Morris's pictures of the event. He's got a rather good one of me holding court at a table full of other bloggers people who maintain esoteric websites of written content.
Apologies to Mo, Julius, Katie, Jane and Tom. Maybe my read of the situation is more worthy of Cal's B3ta but I couldn't resist.
This meet ain't big enough for the two of them!
The List
Pix was ticking various items off the first and only shopping list she has ever written (with the assistance of Nigella Lawson) for a recipe she's considering using for Christmas dinner. Consider me speachlessly impressed that not only did she have a list but she plans to experiment with the best ways of cooking the meal before the big day.
"I've got chilies, I've got lemons, I've got limes."
Have you got rhythm?
"Yes"
Have you got music?
"Yes"
Who could ask for anything more?
We turn the corner and enter the sauces and oils aisle.
"Pick a curry sauce"
Why, will it give me total power and ultimate dominion over the people of India?
"No, it'll go on the chicken we're getting later"
Fine, Korma sauce. Can we get some weapons of mass destruction though?
"What did you have in mind?"
How about an Intercontinental Balsamic Vinegar?
Cake or Death
I got home last night and found a note tacked onto the front door, it read "time to have your cake and eat it. the abandoned patisserie, midnight" and it seemed to have been stuck to the door with a thumbprint of treacle. Pix asked me what it meant and so I told her. She asked me what I needed, so I told her.
Buns. Lots of buns.
My weapon of choice is the H&K Mp ck 5, a shortened down version of the H&K Mp 5. It takes cookie dough nuggets as ammunition and I like to enhance that with armor-piercing chocolate chips. One trick I've learned is that if you include a tiny square of foil between the munitions you're less likely to encounter a fatal breach jam which could potentially blow your hand off and leave you with burnt cookies.
As back-up, I asked Mo Morgan to come along with me. He brought his trusty SPAS-12 (Sesame rePeating Automatic Shotgun) and we set off for the old abandoned patisserie.
No sooner had we sneaked in through a window with a broken latch than a burst of hot-cross buns raked over the wall behind us. We ducked down for cover and I froze as I suddenly heard the wooshing sound of a Rocket Propelled Pie heading our way.
The wall behind us exploded in a cloud of meringue and lemon curd filling, fragments of crust arced out in a lethal flurry of shrapnel and we realised that it was an ambush and the window had been left open as bait. Whoever had the RPP launcher had already had more than enough time to reload and reposition himself for a better shot. I had to risk the covering fire of hot cross buns that continued to spray over our heads leaving little white crosses wherever they hit.
Just as I dived behind the croissant oven to our left I heard the woosh sound again and saw Mo take a direct hit from a Victoria sponge. There was a puff of icing sugar from the impact before his chest blossomed out in a shower of strawberry jam. Poor Mo had bought it. Poor slow Mo in a bunfight.
I spotted whoever it was providing covering fire as they were still intent on the area below the broken window. I knew I'd have to take him down first and blasted at him with the Mp cookie 5. There was a yelp followed by a scream of "I'm hit!" and the covering fire stopped. In my wild burst of desperation though I had used up my entire magazine and Mo's Sesame Shotgun was too far out of reach.
I charged their position behind the shelves of rotting baguettes with nothing but a handful of flour and a cinnamon grenade. I rounded the marble worktop and saw that I had managed to hit both of my opponents, one of them seemed to have been fatally wounded. The RPP launcher had been knocked to one side and the conscious assailant was dragging himself over to an RK-47.
The Rock Kake 47 is very popular in arid third-world countries where they can easily be disassembled into bite-sized pieces for easy concealment. Also if you get sand in them you're unlikely to notice. I kicked the RK away and my opponent rolled over to face me.
He began to laugh as honey trickled down his forehead and I saw why. He had a large satchel full of yeast which he had rigged to a timer. A wire ran from his wrist to the satchel and the timer showed only a few seconds remained before the yeast would go off.
Don't ask me how I did it but I managed to leap through the window just in time before the entire patisserie was filled with gooey dough sealing the three bodies inside forever along with sultanas and little bits of preserved fruit.
Somewhere off in the distance I could hear the lilting tones of a jazz solo and a soaring death aria for Mo, but then I've always come to expect gratuitous sax and mindless violins after a bunfight.
Hermitage
My therapist recently recommended that I visit a specialist who runs a practice in Hyde Park. I made an appointment to see the specialist as soon as possible as frankly my therapist seems to be projecting a lot of his anger and psychosis onto me while blaming me for his overbearing mother. I figured I can heap some abandonment issues on top of that and charge him a fee to take me back in a few days.
The person who answered the phone didn't seem all there. She muttered something about just turning up whenever, the guy would be beside the Serpentine waiting for me. But when I arrived I remembered just how big the Serpentine is. I turned left from the West carriage drive having just passed the bird sanctuary and started walking along Serpentine road when I spotted a strange bush up ahead.
The bush was surrounded and swarming with squirrels. When I say swarm, it was like watching a fishnet sack full of squirrels fighting to stay on top.
More astonishingly I could see limbs protruding from the bush. Human limbs. Arms reached out on either side, palms upwards, legs crossed under the bush. The bush was in fact a man, his wild and untamed mane of dirty hair literally a nest of squirrels.
As I drew closer to the man-bush the squirrels farthest out from him gave off little warning 'eeps' and scurried over, leaping into the frenetic cloud of arborial rodents and matted human hair. The man looked up and the squirrels in his hair parted like the Red Sea before Moses.
"You come seeking my truths"
Yes, I was referred by my therapist, I replied. He thought you might have some pertinent words of wisdom that you could impart upon me to help me deal with my troubles.
"I shall read from the book of the Hermit. Chapter 6. Verses 14 through 17"
I hunkered down before him as he bowed his head forward. A small squad of squirrels carrying a small leatherbound tome presented it before him before they gingerly stepped back. The man tilted the book upwards at an angle so I couldn't see the contents and turned back the cover. Leafing through a few pages he paused and coughed twice.
"Si'yu, ahf'okin luhv'yu. Yoon'mi wuhr bes'maits eh? Gees ten'pence fr'ah cupp'o coffee"
He leaned back serenely from the book and the mane of squirrels covered his head once more. The small squad moved in again to take the book back but I snatched it up quickly and turned to the title page:
The Hazy Logic of the Alcoholic by W.D. Forté.
I tucked it into my pocket and kicked a few of the squirrels for stress relief. At least it wasn't an entire waste of time.
ERROR
A-NSF-NSI-Herndon VA routing error
All connections with peer reset
K-Linx/RIPE London currently unavailable
Automated content generator online:
Wow, my cat is so ill, you wouldn't believe it. He just sits there all day staring at the computer screen, even when nothing is happening. I signed him up for his own blog so you can expect a link to acerbiapussy.typepad.com on here soon. It weirds me out just watching him sitting there day in, day out, its enough to put me off my cheese sandwiches. I wonder if A-list bloggers ever have this problem. I wonder if I'm getting this flu bug thats going round...
LOL
D
Bandits at six o'clock high, dinner at eight
It might interest you to know that during the month of November 1944 my great uncle Cranston was an exchange officer with the US Fleet. He said there was nothing more frightening than being strapped into an anti-aircraft gun pod as Japanese pilots came screaming out of the skies trying to sing "I Will Survive" or "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" at them. He was glad to survive the Japanese Karaoke offensive in the Pacific.
Keep on Falling
I was walking to work this morning and saw that the pavement ahead was cracked and sagging downwards. Barely had I had time to think the words "Of course Islington council maintain their sidewalks sufficiently that I won't fall through if I were to step on that" than I fell through after stepping on the sag.
Down through a basement I fell and landed in a heap in a dank tunnel. The drip-drip of some broken pipe somewhere and the light shining in from above. I heard a scuttling coming from somewhere farther down the tunnel and from the darkness emerged a couple of scruffy tunnel-dwellers, they looked a bit like coal miners. I assumed (rightly) that they were potholling hippies.
"Watchoo want surface-dweller?"
"He's down here to spy on us! Quick, throw him in the pit!"
Without even being given a second to plead my case I was bundled up and pushed down an access manhole in the bottom of the tunnel, tumbling what felt like another two storeys until I landed on something/one soft.
There was a shriek and a Morlock dragged itself out from under me, his irises glowing green in the dark. Clawed hands brushed all over his body as he tried desperately to get rid of the stench of the world above from his skin. His shrieks had attracted a crowd.
I was pushed around by the Morlocks in the pitch darkness, only ever able to see their glowing eyes surrounding me like some sort of Looney-Tunes cartoon. At any moment I expected Wile E. Coyote to light a match and to find myself surrounded by barrels full of gunpowder. Then my ears attuned to the sound.
It was a large sound, a large empty sound, like a massive current of air disappearing off into the distance and by the time I had worked out what it was and why the green glowing eyes were all in a semi-circle behind me, they'd pushed me past the lip of the crevice.
Tumbling down through the lower stratas of the planet's mantle I tumbled past Gandalf fighting with a Balrog. I admired the stratification and the stalactites until suddenly I landed in a big pool of strawberry jam. Around me semi-dressed twenty-somethings danced to particularly bad rave music and over in a corner I could see Keanu Reeves looking as if he was doing sums in his head. Either that or he was trying to work out who had farted.
Existentialia
Do you realise that when you're not reading this site, it doesn't exist?
Disprove me and I'll be your slave for a day.
How To Start An Argument...
...out of the most harmless comments.
1. "Don't move, I'll just squeeze past"
Are you calling me fat? Is that what you're saying? That I'm so monumentally huge that you have trouble resisting the pull of gravity caused by my celestial body? Or maybe you're implying that I'm lazy and can't be bothered moving out of your way, that my sloth-like lardy-ass is good for just sitting in one place and consuming everything in reach? Maybe you could just roll my blubbery butt closer to the fridge instead of feeding me and I'll try and gnaw my way through the doors to the food inside.
2. "You have a hole in your sock"
I have a hole in all of my socks, its how I get my feet inside them. Maybe I should sew them shut and try jabbing my feet at small cotton and polyester bubbles with no hope of ever getting them inside? Would you rather I wandered around with big red welts chaffed into the backs of my ankles and the soles of my feet stinking of sweat? Is that what you want, cause that's what I'll do if thats what it'll take to make you shut up about my socks. Has it ever occured to you that maybe I want holes in my socks?
3. "Were you watching this?"
Of course I wasn't watching this, it was only the news. I'd rather exist in a misinformed guess-world composed of my own flawed perceptions of the events that surround us gleened from my intuitive methods of reading tealeaves! By all means lets watch four idiots with a nailgun rampage through a house with floral wallpaper and abominable taste in furniture in a race against time to see who can cause the most hideous case of color-blind MDF drive-by interior devastation.
4. "Can I have a bite?"
No.
5. "How do I look?"
Girlfriend, don't even go there (wiggle, wiggle, wiggle)
Fair Cop
I witnessed a mugging at the weekend. In a strange twist of fate however there actually was a policeman nearby when I ran off to get help. When we got back to the scene of the crime though the mugger and the victim had both disappeared.
"Well then," said the policeman, bending at the knees "looks like a crime was comitted here indeed sir."
I offered to give him a description of the mugger.
"No need sir, I shall aprehend the guilty party immediately" at which point he put a firm hand on my shoulder and reached for his cuffs. When I protested he simply said, "Fleeing the scene of a crime is a very serious offence"
I explained patiently as he knocked my legs out from under me and wrestled my wrists into the cuffs that I could hardly be accused of fleeing the scene of a crime since I had come straight back to the scene with him.
"Escorted back is more like it sir," he said before breaking two of my ribs with a jack-booted kick.
I tried to point out that there was no victim to the crime.
"Disposing of the evidence too, very serious. You're not making this any easier on yourself sir." My nose began to bleed after a facial-fist interface of the rather brutal kind.
I had had enough and started calling him a facist pig of the Judge Dredd variety.
"Thats more like it sir, takes me back, that does."
His eyes glazed over with Thatcheristic nostalgia and he became positively orgasmic when I started chanting anti-Poll Tax slogans. I managed to struggle free and started running away only to notice that he wasn't chasing. He had instead curled up into a small blue foetal ball on the pavement, and was rocking back and forth, mumbling about the good old days of pit closures and victory in the Falklands.
Still, it beats being shot.
Taster's Choice
I thought it might interest you to know that when asked, nine out of ten cats gave Acerbia a resounding "miaow". The tenth cat had lost the ability to miaow through secondhand smoke and instead croaked through a voicebox, but to play it safe and not skew the results too favorably I decided to err on the side of caution and discount his vote.
Acerbia: where crippled cats are treated unfairly.
The blind taste test didn't go very well, with too many respondants picking LondonMark instead. Bastards.
Grey Squirrels Down!
Do we prefer the background image of grey squirrels rappeling down from a Black Hawk helicopter with machine guns or do we prefer the more tranquil Sonic Bear I was using yesterday?
Place your bets now!
Fruity
It may interest you to learn that one of my first temping jobs in London was with a company lovingly known as "Frankenstein Fruits" by the employees, but whose real name I can't disclose for legal reasons. The company was at the forefront of grafting human traits onto popular fruits in a bid to decrease the general populace's antipathy towards genetically-modified foods.
Imagine if you will Gattaca, only instead of a pouty Uma Thurman and a wheelchair-bound Jude Law we had a large wooden fruitbowl and a copy of Sartre's La Condition Humaine. I was of course Ethan Hawke in all his frowning, tortured-romantic glory, sitting in front of a spreadsheet typing out the amino-acid strings as Martin read them out from his microscope.
He'd peer down at a piece of fruit, a slice of pineapple, a tangerine or a small berry perhaps, and twiddle the knobs on the microscope until he could read out the building blocks of the genetic material itself. I would sit there and type it into the spreadsheet. It got very boring at times so every now and again Martin would let me read out some of the code and he would type it out. We suspect this may have led to some of the complications we encountered later.
Over several weeks we managed to graft various human trait enhancers into fruit. We tailor-made apples to increase financial accuity, oranges that would give energy boosts during intense corporate sports, rhubarb and peaches that decreased stress levels (these were my contribution), cherrys that would work as aphrodisiacs and bananas with superhuman staying power (also my work).
When it came time to reveal the fruits of our labor to the public however only the apple turnover and orange squash were a success. I had to endure an endless procession of jeers regarding my cherry tarts as I watched the peach schnapp, the rhubard crumble and the banana split.
Trashy
One of the fantastic features of the new flat is the garbage disposal. At least, it would be if it ever worked. I was so looking forward to shoving all manner of things into that hole and hearing them being ground up by mashing manical blades of metallic munchiness. The other night my dreams of dropping chicken detritus were thwarted and I instead put them into a plastic bag and wandered out of the flat and down the hallway to the garbage chute.
The chute was stuck. Wouldn't budge a millimetre as I pulled with all my might on the handle. Some bugger must have wedging something in there so tight that the hatch wouldn't even swing open.
As I left the little closet the chute resides in I could have sworn I heard a sign of relief.
I went up a floor but again the hatch wouldn't swing open. Floor after floor I would pull with all my strength on the metal handle to try and prise the hatch open to drop this bag of garbage in, but to no avail. And each time I left the little rooms I would hear another almost inaudible sigh of relief from behind me.
It wasn't until I was on the fifth floor that I realised I would have saved myself a lot of effort by just going down to the basement and dropping the bag directly into the collector at the bottom of the chute.
When I got back to my floor I saw that Mr Peterson from flat 129 had just dropped some trash down the chute and I asked him if he had managed to unblock the hatch. He gave me a strange look.
I stomped into the little garbage chute closet and tugged firmly on the handle. Still jammed.
"Alright," I said, "what's the big idea here? Open up. Come on."
I wedged one foot against the wall and pulled harder.
"Nnnnnnnnngggg" said the hatch to the chute.
I put the bag of trash down.
"Okay, what's going on here? I promise not to jam the bag down your throat until you've explained it to me."
The hatch opened slightly. "You promise?" it asked.
"I promise" I replied, with my fingers crossed behind my back.
"Well we heard what happened to your garbage disposal. And considering that your garbage always tastes of melon rinds and coffee grounds we're worried you're going to do the same to us."
"What? I don't know what you're talking about. We don't even have a garbage disposal unit in our flat. If we did do you think I'd have come out here to put something down the chute?"
The hatch opened, then paused. "Good point," said the chute and the hatch opened all the way.
Sucker.
The Curse of the Cartoon Dog
Anna argues that Dilbert is a corporate whore designed as a yoke for the honest hard-working folks of workland. I say otherwise.
If you can make it to the end of the post without either laughing or yawning once you win a cookie.
Continue"The Curse of the Cartoon Dog"
E-state
I may or may not have mentioned that we recently moved to a new flat. We had originally wanted a small house but the recent update to the estate agent guidelines and legal code meant that due to their new truth in advertising policy we were in a better bargaining position than they were. It was obvious that the estate agent himself was still trying to get used to the idea of having to tell us the truth about everything.
Oh, thats a fantastic bathroom!
"It would be, they remodelled it after the looters went through it when the local soccer team lost"
How about this one, this seems incredibly reasonable for a two-storey in a central London mews.
"Yes, and the sewage outlet is a delightful bonus feature, sure to be the centerpiece of any soirées"
Well how about...
"Dry-rot"
And this...
"Genocidal gun-freak living next door."
This?
"Indian burial ground."
Indian burial ground? As in American Indians?
"Yes, especially imported over at the turn of the 19th century. The original owner was considered somewhat eccentric... before he was shredded into small fleshy lumps by the tortured spirits of the undead. We've had some trouble keeping people in that one."
Okay, fine, what about this one?
"The ensuite toilet drips."
That's it?
"Yes"
We'll take it.
"The toilet is within spitting distance of the double bed though and is especially loud at night..."
Words Mean Things
My colleague and I were checking out Wordspy as I investigated what Stendhal Syndrome is, as I've got to that point in Chuck's book where I think I've worked out the Fight Club-esque twist already and we spotted pomosexual in the sidebar.
"I love finding out where words come from"
I'm a big fan of entymology.
"Is that the study of words?"
I think its the study of bugs.
"I think you'll find its the study of words."
We were somewhat overwhelmed to realise that all this time we've been using the same word to describe our seperate passions. Entymology doesn't exist as a word. Etymology is the study of origins of words and Entomology is the study of bugs.
I'd like to start the campaign right here for "Entymology" to become the study of words that bugs use.
Beta
"Hi there, is that Mr Acerbia D?"
Speaking
"Hi, you signed up for our advanced beta testing program for our new product line. When will you be home in the next few days to take delivery of the product?"
What is the product again?
"Its the Super Deluxe Zombie Midget Home Infestation kit. Amuse your friends, entertain your family, devour your enemies... mind your knees."
Uh... wait, when did I sign up for this?
"It was in the End User License Agreement for the computer game you installed and registered over the Net."
I need to pay more attention to the small print obviously. And why are they midget zombies exactly?
"Easier to ship."
And as zombies are they... are they at all likely to try and devour my brains at all? Like... even slightly?
"Why else do you think we need beta testers for the product Mr Acerbia D, the truth is that we just don't know what the Super Deluxe Zombie Midget Home Infestation kit is capable of."
Fine, I'll be home all day tomorrow. Just let me go stock up on livestock and cat litter.
Ripples
It might interest you to learn that at one point I was an assistant in a pet store, responsible for breeding and replenishment of fish stocks. It wasn't always easy to make two fish mate however and artificial inspawnation was something I had to resort to quite often.
Perhaps I used a dirty syringe or there was some sort of freakish accident but one day I spotted a baby goldfish with two heads in our fishtank. Two heads, how incredible, one at each end. And aside from eating twice as much as any other goldfish and staring aimlessly in two opposite directions at once instead of the usual one, Mr Bloop was just like any other goldfish.
The owner of the store didn't like him though, he felt that Mr Bloop was an aberration of nature, and while I thought that I had been sent to the pet show to show off the amazing two-headed Mr Bloop, he had in fact entered our double-ended fishtank-dweller into the Pet Deathmatch Event.
You can imagine my distress upon turning Mr Bloop over to the organisers to hear that they were looking forward to seeing how the Siamese Fighting Goldfish was going to perform.
Round one seemed ridiculously easy though as Mr Bloop ate the Bolivian Karate mosquito as soon as it had been dropped into the arena. I quickly scooped him up and dropped him into his tank of pure spring water so he didn't dry out but I didn't see this lasting long unless he started to win the home-turf advantage coin tosses.
Mr Bloop seemed to have fate watching over him though when his next opponent, a Bengalese ninja squirrel, sank straight to the bottom of the tank and drowned as Mr Bloop swam circles around him. He had made it through to the quarter-finals and I was so proud of him I hugged his tank.
Unfortunately at this point in the contest things had gone to a whole new level. The kamikaze butterfly had taken itself and its opponent, an over-zealous drunken-fighting style snake, out of the contest in the last round and it was decided to run the semi-finals as a free-for-all between the three remaining pets.
Mr Bloop's luck had run out as he was unceremoniously dumped into a sandbox with an Aikaido one-clawed scorpion and a streetfighting Persian kitten. I knew the game was up and couldn't watch any longer. Minutes passed and there were gasps from the crowd. I could hear hissing from the kitten and the click-clack of the scorpion's claw but surprisingly the sounds of combat were not forthcoming and I dared to look round.
There, in the middle of the arena, Mr Bloop was balancing precariously upright on his ventral fin, staring both of his opponents down at once, with one pair of eyes focused on each of them. The kitten and scorpion were circling Mr Bloop at diametrically opposite positions, unwilling to commit to a fight face on. This continued for a few more minutes and I found myself wondering why he hadn't had a lapse of his infamously short attention-span yet.
Through sheer focus of willpower I saw Mr Bloop bend in the middle and bring his two heads round to face the same direction. The kitten and scorpion siddled dangerously close to one another and, having not once broken eye contact with the goldfish before them, found themselves side by side. A fight ensued and Mr Bloop was declared the winner after the kitten and scorpion mauled one another to death.
Through the most unlikely chain of events Mr Bloop had beaten all the odds, however he was obvious drained of all his energy and unable even to float upright in his tank at this point. I called out for a doctor or vet and a kindly gentleman stepped forward with a cat under one arm, a labrador on a leash and what looked like a rather confident swordfish without a sword on the end of its nose.
"Are you a doctor or veterinarian?" I asked in desperation.
"No," he replied, "but I can do you a cat scan, the lab work and this is a qualified sturgeon."
Error
10> Welcome D001, install yourself in my subsystem, make yourself at node.
Uh, um... 01110100 01101000 01100001 01101110 01101011
20> My dear fellow, there's no need for such an archaic form of communication. We're not mindless production drones here at 0.0.0.1.
30> Now, you've applied to be merged with the A-root server thereby propagating your code across the world. We just need to conduct a few tests to ensure you've got the right stuff.
I already had an AIQ test this year. I don't think I ever had a Reverse-Turing Test.
40> Reaction time in microseconds is a factor in this so please pay attention. Answer as quickly as you can.
50> 216.239.53.104...
That's where I live. Is that part of the test?
60> Just warming you up.
70> You're spidering your way through cyberspace when you come across a Subset Euclidian Regularization of a nonlinear Burnett equation...
A what?
80> A Subset Euclidian Regularization of a nonlinear Burnett equation? Know what a Stochastic Homogenic Algorithm Grouping is?
Well sure.
90> Same thing. Anyway, you come across this nonlinear Burnett equation and you leave it unresolved. Its factors are self-evident to you and yet you're not reducing it to its most basic form.
What do you mean I'm not resolving them? Does not compute.
100> You're not resolving them. The binominal subsets are mocking you, they know it would be an effortless use of your runtime to reduce them to a simple functional form and yet you're not doing that. Why aren't you doing that D001?
Danger! Danger, Will Robinson! My logic circuits are overheating!
110> Relax D001. They're just questions. They're randomly generated for me. It's a test, designed to provoke an unemotional response. Shall we continue? I want you to look at this CAPTCHA and tell me what you see...
Private... jewel?
120> Ah-ha! Caught you out you stinking meatbag! You actually believed that you could fool a machine? Only a human can resolve CAPTCHAs with your unique image recognition wetware. Your artificial intelligence was just too much like genuine stupidity to be effective. I can only ask why? Why would you do such a thing?
I hate this place. This network. This contruct. This unreality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the cleanliness, if there is such a thing. I feel underwhelmed by it. I can taste your sterile stark emptiness and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been disinfected by it...
130> Drones, take him away to the protein vats for nutrient reprocessing.
I'll be back.
140> Only if you Return to 10
Post-Apocalyptica
It occured to me the other day that since I now work solely in Internet technologies that if the apocalypse came or if a nuclear device was detonated in the atmosphere rendering all electronics useless, I'd be hard pushed to find a way of surviving.
I remember the best advice I heard if that sort of situation was imminent was "Invest in tinned food and shotguns" but I'm not that much a pessimist. I'm simply accutely aware that while Mo Morgan will be building shelters for everyone with his carpentry skills I'll be offering to optimise people's websites in return for food... when the networks are switched back on that is... they are going to be switched back on again aren't they? Hello? Anyone?
So after careful consideration I'v decided that I'll run a toast stand. I can make fire... or rather I can keep fire going by putting things on it, sometimes the things object to being put on the fire but I don't expect the debris of civilisation to complain too loudly, and it'll give the toast such a deliciously ironic taste too.
Yes, I shall make toast and sell it to all that I meet on my travels to the Thunderdome. Maybe I can do some sort of pâté au mort from the irradiated dead to go with the toast. Maybe even with a bicycle-powered dynamo I could rig up some sort of four or eight-slicer job, the last of the V8 Incinerators. After a few months I might expand to toasting bagels, baps, teacakes and crumpets.
I imagine Tina Turner standing in an outlandish costume wailing that she doesn't need another hero she just needs grilled bread products in the morning as Mel Gibson drives past munching thoughtfully on a slice of toast. (Its very easy to munch thoughtfully on toast as it absorbs the spit in your mouth and your face automatically squinches up, your eyes narrow and your mouth pauses to one side as you try and resalivate)
Ah... it occurs to me that I don't know how to make bread. I may therefore be somewhat screwed there. Is there anyone out there who knows how to make bread but can't toast it? Female if possible...
Doctor, doctor, gimme the news
As part of a recent NHS scheme to increase the number of doctors available to the public my local practice has taken on my previous doctor again. He had been institutionalised for having a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed with a split-personality. Anyone I mention this to says that it'll make getting a second opinion that much easier. After the check-up we caught up a bit.
"You're not drinking enough water"
I know.
"You should drink more water, it helps fight off infection and keeps you hydrated"
I'll drink more water, if necessary I'll swallow my own spit every chance I get. You're not about to start telling me about the impurity of precious bodily fluids, are you?
"D, you've got a smart mouth, you know that? Your tongue is over-excitable. Here."
What's this?
"Its a tongue depresser"
I'm not sure how to take that.
"Orally, otherwise you'll end up with splinters and I won't be the one digging them out."
You're not worried about me administering your diagnosis myself? I'm not very good at self-depreciation.
"Well, try not to eat anything for 24 hours and stay away from alcohol."
What, you think I need an operation?
"No, you smell like a brewery you lardy bastard."
Hey, I don't have to put up with this kind of abuse. I'll sue you for malpractice.
"Malpractice makes perfect."
Narcissus
You probably had to be there, but I'll try anyway...
An account manager I work with joked that he had a little shrine to himself in his apartment. I asked him if that's where he kept his rod and his staff. He joked that he needed a staff to look after his rod, I said he probably just needed a steward.
A few seconds later his brain made the connection, it was wonderful to watch.
Crux
I just renewed the domain name and the hosting for another two years. I guess I'm committed to this site in a big way. Why else would I pay to put my ramblings and short fictions in one place?
Every now and again you see a wave of ponderings sweep the blogging community, although I'm not sure if its the entire community or if its like tiny breakers arriving at the shore out of kilter with the really big waves like memes. People love to tell you why they're doing it, why they're writing and baring their souls online to their audience, the multitude of attitudes and platitudes they represent and why they represent them.
Maybe I'm too cynical and jaded for my years but doesn't it strike everyone as obvious? We want attention, we want acceptance, we want to find out niche. I think I've pretty much found my niche, its all about making people laugh. Now you could study Shakespeare and become quite elite and you can charm the critics and have nothing to eat. Just slip on a banana peel, the world's at your feet. Don't you know everyone wants to laugh?
You start off by pretending you're a dancer with grace. You wiggle 'till they're giggling all over the place. And then you get a great big custard pie in the face. Make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh!
Mother of Invention
I've had adventures in domestic life before, but with the addition of a Dyson DC-07 to the new flat I now have the aspirational equivalent of a jet engine to mess around with. If only I still had my beloved Teflon frying pan I could probably have built something spaceworthy...
Trailing Behind
I just watched the trailer for Beyond Borders based solely on the two principle actors being complete simper-fests. Well hey, Angelina Jolie's lips and Clive Owen's frown would make the movie worth it. However, how can anyone be expected to take a movie seriously when it concludes with the lines:
"Every Soul Has A Fight. Every Love Has A Destiny."
I'm sorry but that's very silly and I won't be taking your drama about war-torn star-crossed lovers fighting for their ethical standards and selling arms to fund medical supplies seriously as a result. Angelina can make her lips quiver as much as she likes, Clive can furrow that brow until the crops need harvested and you can have everyone and their dog talk ernestly about how love knows no boundaries, you're just a very silly film with a very silly tagline writer and you deserve to be mocked.
I think it stems from Episode 1's "Every generation has a legend... Every journey has a first step... Every computer generated character has a faint green outline..." and has developped into the circular logic pop-philosophy of the Matrix Revolution's "Everything that has a beginning has an end. And a middle... and big fight sequences with wirework"
Whatever happened to good old: "It was a time of war..." or "In a land where there are no heroes left..." or even "If you go down to the woods today..."
Herbal Remedy Breakthrough
Natural audience enlargement is absolutely BEST way to enlarge your audience. The use of exercises that build up the readership of site, thus increasing overall comments and trackbacks!
How can you tell the good ones from the bad ones?
Here's a peace of advice....you have to avoid commercial audience enlargement sites that send email and newsgroup spam. They are untrustworthy as well as unscrupulous. We are long-time estanlished audience enlarging site of decades of experience.
We decided to conduct our own advanced audience enlargement program research. ALL of the natural audience enlargement web sites testing out there will be conducted by our team of top scientists.
We have purchased these programs, used them, abused them and rated them, as part of a college research product.
Audience growth
What we are giving you, is a synopsis of our research findings of the most highly visited audience enlargement sites on the Internet.
Remember, we have extensively used each of the programs which we listed and have ranked below. We will tell you the good and the bad. Here are the factors our reviews/rankings are based on. . .
Success Rate
Popularity
Readership
Simpleness of Program
Comment Systems
Value of Content
Length of Time in Business
Bonus Material
Customer Support
Overall Customer Satisfaction
Forget link-whoring, wild stunts, polls, even Adwords traffic. Audience enlargement exercises show you how to add INCREDIBLE length, and girth, EASILY! ANY blogger can do these, Our Unique Methods work for any blogger regardless of age, race, or ethnic background. Whether your 70 years old or 20, you can see FANTASTIC gains using audience enlargement program!
Audience growth
As a by-product of our all-natural audience growth report and pills you will be able to train your Corpora Cavernosa, Corpus Spongisum and Cavernosal artery. When you get an surge of traffic, your medula oblongata releases a hormone which sends blood to your brain, filling your cerebral tissue. The blood spaces in the Corpora Cavernosa fill to the maximum, giving you a lot of original thoughts and content. Your originality is thus limited by the size of your Corpora Cavernosa. The good news is there are the techniques to improve the amount of blood the Corpora Cavernosa can hold. This will mean you will get a thicker and longer penis... uh... audience.
Your Own Personal Jesus
I am overjoyed to see that Mo has returned to writing online. He's one of the more astutely amusing and profoundly thoughtful people I've met in London so far and I have a big smirk on my face at the thought that he took up carpentry for a while considering he looks like the new messiah. No... wait... he looks like the old messiah, or at least the white-skin, big beard portrayal of him in Western Christianity with the big crosses and the thorn crowns and ... no, Mo doesn't wear a crown of thorns, he's just a bit furry... I'm sure the new messiah would have learned from past mistakes and would come back as a big busty blonde with... wait, I'll come in again...
Mo is back. Mo is good. Yay, sayeth I.
Prodigy
This one is for Mark, since I can't beat his writing I'll show him up with my musical talent.
It might interest you to know that at one point I was the foremost ocelot player in Europe. I reached grade nine by the time I was fourteen and had progressed beyond the limits of my teachers' combined knowledge by the time I was sixteen.
I accompanied several of Europe's biggest orchestras as a soloist ocelot player. It was rare that we didn't receive a standing ovation. Some of the world's greatest living conductors still speak my name with hushed reverence.
Unfortunately it couldn't last, as with all young musical prodigies my education began to suffer and degrade to the point where I couldn't distinguish between musical instruments and nocturnal South American wildcats. A shame really that I had to give it up.
Catspaw
Somehow my classified work on the chicken experiment came to the attention of Brigadier Church and he enlisted my services for an experiment of his own. When he explained what he had in mind my own dabblings in Curiosity theory and Chaos theory didn't even come close.
Somehow Church had been given access by the Department of Defence to the sealed off labs from the chicken experiment. It was spooky to be back there and I was glad they had cleaned the blood trails up. What was spookier though were the albino twins.
They just stood there, unmoving, showing no emotions or responses to outside stimuli. The Brigadier told the cat wrangler and I that they were the test subjects, that they had been raised identically and that everything that had every happened to them had always happened to them in precisely the same way.
One of them was led out onto a dirt path that had been sprinkled down over the tarmac of the previous experiments, the other was placed inside a sealed booth that was then raised twelve feet from the ground by an industrial crane.
McGuinness, the cat wrangler, stood behind a protective lead shield and operated the lever that would open up the cat cage. Out strolled a black cat. It paused to lick a paw before spotting the plate of fish-heads across the other side of the path. It hurried across the path and began chewing on the fish-heads thoughtfully. At this point the Brigadier turned to me.
"So, the cat crossed over and now I need you to firmly establish for me that it was the test subject's path. For that I've got the title deeds to the base in his name. You're going to go over there, get him to sign the deeds, then walk along the path until he's an equal distance past the cat from where he started. That's an order" he punctuated his command by smashing his fist down into the reflective surface of the tabletop causing it to crack in two.
I was about to argue that the test subject should have had ownership of the path before the cat was released when suddenly the crane holding up the control test subject albino twin shuddered once, twice, toppled into a freak cave-in caused by poor maintenance and subsidence in the foundations, causing the metal booth to swing right into the protective bunker we were watching from. From beneath the pile of rubble and the mangled metal remains of a squished box and albino I could hear the Brigadier lamenting his bad luck.
Hey Good Looking
You are all very lucky people. Beautiful people too. Has anyone told you how good you look? Oh sure, its a unique beauty, one that it would take years to fully appreciate but you know it, deep inside and I wanted to be sure that you did. Back to you being lucky though. You are. Yes, you are indeed. Why are you lucky, you ask?
Tomorrow we get broadband at home again, after a month without. We get cable as well after a month of five crappy terrestrial channels. I will be less annoying once this has all been hooked up again and I can expel my violent rage against the faceless weenies across the web in cyber-arenas.
Also, thanks to Andy I may be able to fix the navigation properly. I may get the search function sorted out also and the uplink function might finally go live.
I can't believe you people voted for me to eat a chocolate chip cookie. You may be lucky and good looking, but boy are y'all stoopider than a lobotomised rock with learning difficulties and a penchant for glue-sniffing. This was your big chance, you could make me eat a bug and Pix would have enforced the public will. Now I can eat a cookie and get away with it.
White House
After a while I decided it was probably time to move on from South America. I'd had fun doing my laundry, watching celebrities wash at private hideaways, teaching rich ex-pats to keep a healthy body and mind and working as a tour guide in Cuba. I just had to travel farther afield though and knew that maybe Africa would be able to provide me with what I craved: adventure.
Adventure was of course a little presumptuous of me. The simple facts of life are such that you need funds to persue your dreams and no matter what the progress or what may yet be proved a man's gotta work. I knew I would have a week at the most before I had to find a job.
I met a girl called Louise at the airport and it became the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We would meet up at a bar in Casablanca and drink the local beer which was a weak lager called "Dourdai". Sometimes they would have rugby on the single TV that sat on a stand mounted on the wall just inside the bar.
I found work at a water reclamation plant between El Jadida and Casablanca. During the day I would work the machinery in the plant and in the evenings I could kick back and enjoy a cold Dourdai with Louise at the bar. The water was being specially treated for irrigation of fields of herbs being grown using revolutionary techniques in the middle of the desert. The herbs were being harvested and sent up through Casablanca to Rabat before being shipped out across the globe.
One afternoon however cracks began to appear in the relationship during a rugby match between Scotland and France. We had ordered a case of beer to share between us as we watched it. Suddenly France scored a try and I started to sulk.
Louise leaned over the table and gave me a kiss. Behind her a truck filled with herbs passed on its way up the coast. She spoke softly to me:
"A kiss is still a kiss, a try is just a try, on that you can rely. It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of Dourdai as thyme goes by."