Month: February 2002

So here we are. The dreaded 14th. St-Valentines-Day-Massacre Day. The most romantic day of the year. Excuse me while I try to give a damn.

So how did I spend this blessed date? I went to work, came home, translated the Beachboys’ “Fun Fun Fun” into Surfarian (or tried to), then wrote this. Woo-hoo.

It’s been one of those days. The kind where you spend the better part of an hour trawling through hundreds of lines of code only to discover you’ve done something insanely obvious, like trying to assign a floating point decimal into a character array. The kind of day where clients ring you up with what seem to be a simple problem so you promise to have it fixed in ten minutes, then it turns out to be interminably complicated and you have to put up with disgruntled calls from said client for the rest of the afternoon. Only making matters worse is the fact that Dale is off whooping it up on Rottnest, Bevan is having a week off due to a personal bereavement and Naveen headed off around lunchtime to farewell some relatives going back to KL (all justifiable reasons not to be around, but still) leaving completely unqualified me alone to run the office (Want me to debug some code – No problem. Want me to talk to clients on the phone – What you say?).

I can’t prove that all this is down to the nefarious actions of the Archfiend Cupid, but I have my suspicions. It sounds like his work. Depech Mode may think God has a sick sense of humour, but I’d assign that particular attribute to the little bastard with the bow and arrow. We’ve never got on particularly well, and on this day in particular he always seems to put aside a little time from all the flying around and shooting at people to make things just that little less bearable for me. Call me paranoid, but I just don’t trust the little so-and-so. To quote Chris Stevens, he’s “too much of a kidder“.

Don’t worry about me. I’m just bitter. I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow 🙂

Well, regular readers (if any such beasts exist) will have noticed a bit of a change to thegood old Wyrmlog. I’ve finally given in to temptation and gone totally blogger, addingsome self indulgent lists of the books and music I like. I am justifying this by tellingmyself it’s a valid use of the gigantic territories of the whitespace (or indeedgreenspace) that formerly filled the right of the screen when you scrolled down pastthe first page, but am not entirely convinced.

The impetus behind this change is the infamous Stephanie, who has gone and gotherself a Blog. She has kindly linked from this to me, so protocol (not to mention the fact that we’re friends so I’d link to her blog anyway) demands I link backto her. This of course required insertion of a link section, which required a redesign, soI decided to go the whole hog. And here we are. Oink Oink.

So go and check her Blog out. At the moment it mostly seems to be a lot ofcomplaining about the horrors of being an IB student along with occasional referencesto musical theatre, but this is bound to change when she goes off to College. We cansafely assume it will then consist of a lot of complaining about the horrors of being aUT student, but at least (like all her work) it’ll be very well written and entertainingcomplaining 😉

(You’re going to kill me now aren’t you Steph?)

In case anyone was wondering by the way, I don’t actually know Succa, I justenjoy his work. Hence the link. Getting very Canuck oriented this Log. I might as well add a link to Avalon and be done with it.

Talking of Canadians, I’ve recently downloaded a copy of William Shatner’s “Lucy inthe Sky With Diamonds” off his 1968 album “The Revealed Man”. This is possibly themost demented recording ever, easily beating his Star Trek co-star Leonard Nimoy’sbossa-nova “Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” (Bilbo! Bilbo Baggins! The bravest littlehobbit of them all!).

The “song” takes in all the excesses of the saccharine, wholesome, reworked, PatBoone rock hits of the 1950s like “Tutti-Fruti”, but somehow manages to remaincompletely un-musical in the process. Fluttering harps, tinkling fairy bells, dementedstring and horn breaks match up with the female voice choir absolutely murdering thechorus to create a sound similar to that of smashing the Lawrence Welk orchestrainto a muzak factory. As if this isn’t enough you then have Shatner’s “unique”interpretation of the lyric smeared over the top like so much rancidbrylcreem.

Now I don’t know what sort of drugs Bill was taking back in the summer of love, butI’m sure he was taking them in the studio, as he variously moans, shouts, whispers,intones, shrieks, whines and grunts the lyric without even once approaching anythingthat could be called singing. The funniest moments of all are at the end of each verse,where the producers decided to slap on a primitive echo effect. Not only does thismean Shatner’s demented vocals go bouncing around the room like he’s recording atthe centre of the earth, but they completely cap out the frequency range of my PCspeakers, adding an entertaining metallic/static effect.

Needless to say I am completely in love with this entire appalling production, and findmyself wandering around idly muttering things like “MARSH-mallow Pies!!” and”TOWering Over your HEAD!!” then cackling inanely. Mind you this isn’t too muchdifferent from my normal behaviour, so no one has really noticed. Or at least no morethan usual.

Oink Oink.