Month: July 2002

How to create a convincing impression of the Apocalypse in your own home…

Set up your clock radio to halfway between the local alternative and local religious fundamentalist radio stations. Get the alternative one to play Tom Waites and the religious one to play a fire and brimstone rant about hell and damnation just when you set the alarm to go off. Wake up in confusion and horror at 5:30 in the morning at the bizzarely ominious cacophany coming out of said clock radio…

Tom Waites: Grrrrrr rumble-rumble Alice! Grrrrrr growl!
Preacher: ConDEMED To the FIRES of HELL and DAMNation!!
Tom Waites: Arrrgh!!! Grrrrrr! Grumble mad-hatter HOWL!!
Preacher: Where the FIRE burns on the LAKE of SULFUR!!
Tom Waites: Grrrr! Rumble-grunt growl!!

Now that wakes you up quickly!

Hmmmm, they got the coal miners out. Good.

Well, not a lot has been going on here in Wyrmworld. I’ve been recovering from the labyrinthitis and going to work, that’s about it. And this weekend I’ve been doing all the cleaning I should have been doing while I was sick. Fun.

So I’ve decided to fall back onto something I’ve been holding in reserve for just such an occasion, and will now ramble on about amusing email addresses.

A few months ago one of our clients (who for no particular reason I shall refer to as “Bisby”) asked us to go through and “de-duplicate” their email database. This is a fancy way of saying “remove the hundreds of duplicate entries we put in by downloading the database, then re-uploading it without deleting all the original entries”. As we (foolishly) assumed that no one would ever be this stupid, we hadn’t actually programmed in a way to do this automatically, so Bevan and I had to sit there for a good three hours clicking a list of duplicate email addresses to remove them. To make matters worse Dale hadn’t bothered to actually check how many duplicate entries there were before phoning up and telling us to do it, and blithely told Bisby it would only take about twenty minutes. So we ended up charging 20 minutes for six man hours of work, which left no one very happy.

However as I waded through my section of the list I started noting down some of the more amusing email addresses to keep myself from going mad from boredom. And it is upon these that I now plan to ramble.

(To preserve privacy all the addresses here have been altered to point to the fictional “example.com”. If you really want to contact any of these freaks though, you could try pointing them at some of the more popular free web-based email systems and probably have a good shot at getting through. But you didn’t hear that from me 🙂

Some people use their email addresses to announce a strongly held personal belief, a creed or mantra they live their life by. I can sort of see the point of this, although you have to wonder if cabbageisevil@example.com and committment_sux@example.com do. It could be worse though. Not content with a simple descriptive email address, some people seem determined to inflate their egos. You can’t for instance tell me that bigger_than_ben_hur@example.com, huey_the_legend@example.com and jem_the_superhero@example.com are particularly modest folk. manwiththemojo@example.com may be excused for his excess, only however if he can prove that the mojo is in fact in his possession. A much more realistic self assessment I’m sure is that of ben_the_smeg@example.com.

Rhyme and alliteration are perennial favourites. blerkenderken@example.com may or may not mean something in German, but it sure sounds amusing. As does jiminijumanji@example.com, which may belong to an obsessive Disney/Robin Williams fan. persephonespride@example.com shows us that race horses have now joined the information revolution, as have some of their by-products, as evinced by crispy_dung@example.com.

Talking of the animal kingdom, it always offers some creative opportunities. parrothead@example.com for example. Or crazyflyinggoat@example.com who may or may not be a friend of holyflyingcows@example.com. Similarly hairy_chested_brute@example.com may be associated in some fashion with hot_beastie@example.com. big_ugly_bug@example.com however is probably on their own.

Still on the subject of animals we come to m_horsepower@example.com. While it is possible that there is a Mr or Ms M. Horsepower out there, I think it’s more likely that the owner of this address is having us on. As is onetonrat@example.com, the largest examples of rats known to modern science coming in at two or three kilograms maximum.

frog_brigade@example.com. I like this one. I have a vision of Wehrmacht soldiers pinned down in a foxhole in France. One of them peers tentatively over the edge and recoils in horror yelling “Achtung Sergeant!! Es ist die Froschbrigade!!!“. Sure enough, the British Special Forces Frog Brigade jumps into view, mounted on their giant armoured frogs! The Nazis flee in terror, their lines in disarray! C’mon Spielberg! Saving Private Ryan II!

Ahem, continuing down the list we come to a possible member of the Frog Brigade in pearl_frog@example.com. Although it is possible that this address belongs to a woman called Pearl and unfortunate to be born with the family name Frog.

Continuing study of the Bisby database reveals that the gothic contingent is well and truly alive on the web. This is evinced by such addresses as buried_alive33@example.com, dark_silence69@example.com, sacrificemysoul@example.com and leprosy_head@example.com (it’s slightly frightening that at least 33 people out there want to be known by the epithet “buried alive”). On the slightly more sophisticated side of Gothicdom we encounter lord_penteguire@example.com (to be fair the good lord may not actually be a goth, but with a name like that what are the odds? He might as well have called himself Hecubus).

And of course where you have goths, you have sci-fi fans. Although Bisby seems to have attracted some rather peculiar examples. droid_hurter@example.com for example is probably not the kind of person you’d want to meet down a dark alley, be you a droid or not. Given that Pluto is a frozen iceball, drummerfrompluto@example.com can be safely assumed to have possess non-human biology. As does (we presume) nitronium_blood@example.com. To the best of my knowledge nitronium is not yet an accepted entry on the periodic table, although research continues.

I leave the final comment on all of these addresses to one remarkably sensible Bisby subscriber. getalife@example.com.

I’m back. After the better part of a week writhing in a personal hell (where I roast in my shell*) I’m finally well enough to write again. And email people. And generally resume my life.

So, what was the cause of this break in transmission? A little disorder called labyrinthitis. My in-depth study of this medical phenomenon has lead me to a highly scientific conclusion. It sucks. Like really sucks. Given the choice of having labyrinthitis again, or being locked in a prison cell with Britany Spears for a week* I’d be heading down to the old jail house without a moment’s hesitation. It’s that absolutely horrible.

So, what exactly is it? Glad you asked…

OK, the ear works like this. Sound waves go moving through the air, then get gathered by the excitingly moulded contours of your outer ear, and channeled into the ear canal (that place you’re not meant to stick cotton-buds/q-tips despite the fact everyone does). Here they impact on a thin piece of skin stretched across the canal, called the tympanic membrane, or (for the scientifically uninitiated) ear drum. The vibrations of the ear drum cause a tiny bone, known (for obvious reasons) as the hammer, to bang against another tiny bone called (again obviously) the anvil, which is connected to a third tiny bone known as the stirrup (not quite so obvious, but it actually looks like one you see). The stirrup is connected to a thin membrane at the end of the cochlea, which is a fluid filled organ that looks like a snail shell, and is coloured bright blue in all the cheerful anatomical charts you get to look at while sitting in the Ear/Nose/Throat Specialist’s waiting room (it’s actual colour remains a matter for conjecture).

This rather complicated arrangement acts to transfer the vibrations from the air to the fluid inside the cochlea. These vibrations travel through the fluid, and (here’s the clever bit) depending on their frequency and amplitude (pitch and loudness to all you unscientific folk) penetrate to different depths within the spiral. Lining the inside of the cochlea are millions (OK, it could be merely thousands, it’s been a while since I’ve checked Grays Anatomy) of little hairs, each one connected to a nerve. As the vibration passes these hairs, they vibrate, stimulating the nerves and sending signals to the brain, which interprets the different patterns of signals as different kinds of sounds.

Now, all of this doesn’t have a heck of a lot to do with labyrinthitis, I just can’t pass over the opportunity to blather on about science. Anyway the bit we’re interested in are a few extra loops (called the vestibular system, ooh fancy) that poke out of the top of the cochlea. Nature in her infinite economy elected not to let a good fluid filled snail shaped thing go to waste (after all, how many of those are there available the body?) and added these extraneous loops to act as a sort of spirit level for the body. The movement of the fluid within them tells your brain which way is up and which way is down. In addition they also take care of telling you which way you’re moving, how fast you’re moving, and exactly what forces are working on your body mass (or at least head) at any given moment.

Now this is a very elegant and efficient system, except when some kind of infection causes these loops to become inflamed. In this case your entire sense of balance, movement and momentum go totally doolally, and you start stumbling around uncontrollably and throwing up, the conflict between what your vestibular system and your eyes are telling you causing severe seasickness.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last week. Stumbling around and throwing up. Fun.

It’s one of those strange medical coincidences, up there on a par with the humerus* giving you a “funny*” feeling when you bump it, that labyrinthitis (hence called as the cochlea plus the vestibular system are called the labyrinth) leaves you completely disoriented and confused, as if actually lost in the famous maze of Daedalus. It’s only a small compensation that don’t have to worry about stumbling over a minotaur*, although your mood does become similarly monstrous over a few days of putting up with the disorder. About the only Ariadne’s thread available is antibiotics.

Not that the first doctor I saw actually gave me any. He just proscribed some sea sickness tablets and told me it’d get better eventually, which wasn’t much of a comfort. Happily* though the infection then spread to my middle ear, and the second doctor (after pronouncing that my left ear looked “crap”) gave me a whole bunch of big white tablets, which seem to be clearing everything up quite nicely. I’m still dizzy, but nowhere near as much, and I was actually able to not only cook a proper meal last night, but eat it as well, which given that I’ve been living on irregular gulps of packet soups, chocolate cookies and vanilla ice-cream* in between bouts of nausea for the last week, was a major relief.

All this illness has of course exempted me from Jury Duty. I did go in on Monday, and got to the stage where they sit you down in a court room and draw names out of a ballot box to see who’s going to be on the jury, however my name wasn’t drawn out. Just as well really, all things considered. The case didn’t seem all that interesting really anyway, just someone accused of insurance fraud. I was meant to go back in on Thursday, but was too busy throwing up. I’ve got to get my medical certificate off to the Justice Department today, otherwise they’ll probably fine me.

Anyway I’m getting dizzy again, so I’m going to go and sit quietly. Yes, that seems like a good idea.

* Being locked up with Britany Spears for a week may not seem like too dire a punishment at first glance (nudge nudge wink wink say no more), but keep in mind that whole virginity thing, and the fact that with nothing much to do in a prison cell she’d probably be tempted to pass the time by singing. Now you see the true horror of the situation.

* Funny bone. Get it?

* ie: Extremely painful. Medical students are all sadists.

* Or for that matter David Bowie.

* Relatively speaking 🙂

* All I could actually stomach would you believe? Things are much better now, but I still can’t eat cheese.

deathly ill… labyrinthitus…. whole world spinning 24 hours a day….. nausea….. can’t keep anything down…… drugs not working…. going back to bed now…..

So the Silmarillion is boring eh? The youth of today, I don’t know. No appreciation of high mimesis. Shocking 🙂

OK the Ainulindal