Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
In the Isles of Japan,
There’s a place called Tokyo,
That’s where we wanna go,
To get away from it all…
Bodies in their pods,
Temples to the Shinto Gods,
We’ll be falling in love,
To the rhythm of a taiko drum,
Way down in Tokyo…
Matsudo, Machida
Oo I wanna see ya!
Yao, Yokahama
C’mon pretty mama!
Kyoto, and Edo,
Baby why don’t we go?
Down to Tokyo,
We’ll get there fast and then we’ll take it slow!
That’s where we wanna go,
Way down in Tokyo…
This is hilarious!
If David Cameron must ban anything, let it be Warhammer fantasy games
But even more hilarious are the hopeless Aspies* in the comments who can’t seem to grasp the idea of satire, or who can grasp the idea of the satire but are so in love with the hobby that it deeply wounds them to see it maligned so!
(* I’m an Aspie, so I get to call other Aspies out)
Goddamn I love codeine!
That sounds good doesn’t it? What I actually mean is that my shoulder (which has been problematic for years) has really been playing up for the last couple of days and making my life a misery. I popped into the pharmacy this morning, bought some codeine and now I can actually use my left arm without feeling like someone’s been hammering nails into my scapula.
Now of course, I’m being careful. Codeine is one of those drugs that you don’t mess around with. It actually only does what it does because your body metabolises it into morphine (assuming you have the correct genes of course – some individuals lack the requisite enzymes and hence codeine does nothing for them), and we all know how badly that stuff can mess you up. I also have what is commonly referred to as an addictive personality type, so I’m generally reluctant to break out the serious medication without carefully watching what I do with it. But hey, for now my pain is relieved and I’m a much happier chapie.
(I’ll let you know if I feel any sudden urges to wrestle octopuses…)
Oh yeah, new heir to the throne and such. Boo! Hooray! Boo! Hooray! Call me when you’re finished…
I know temperature isn’t as simple as marks on a thermometer. I know buildings in the UK are built to retain heat, while ours are built to repel heat. I know acclimatisation, habit and even wardrobe have a big effect on how people perceive the weather. I know people are genuinely suffering. But despite all this I can’t help but snort with laughter on seeing headlines like…
Send workers home if temperature hits 30C, say MPs who fear heatwave will cause accidents and deaths
Seriously – if we sent people home at 30C here in Perth, nothing would get done from August right through to March.
Also, the definition of a “Level Three Heatwave” makes me have to bite my fist to avoid bursting into fits of giggles…
Level three is triggered as soon as the Met Office confirms that threshold temperatures have been reached in any one region […] the average threshold temperature is 30ºC during the day and 15ºC overnight.
Here, that’s not a “Level Three Heatwave” – that’s unexpectedly mild summer weather where the days aren’t too hot and the nights are cool enough to sleep comfortably. In the heights of summer when a high pressure system is stalled in the Bight we’d kill for temperatures like that!
Cross-cultural hilarity aside, stay indoors and keep cool Britons. And look after those hedgehogs!
From that august and trusted news organisation, the ABC…
A picture of the future of music? Imagine the son of the founder of Motown Records shouting wiggle wiggle wiggle and shoving his crotch into a human face – forever.
There once were some Cultural Attaches,
Who suffered most terrible heartaches,
When the wind rushing through,
Caused them to cough,
And detached – one by one – their mustaches,
Speaking as a veteran Dungeons and Dragons player and Dungeon Master, I can confirm that this is exactly what game sessions are like…
I can’t count the number of times I ordered my players to murder small children!
I’d like to get back into it, but I can’t find my sinister robe anywhere. Additionally the cost of candles these days is ridiculous.
Today’s Google Doodle (commemorating 66 years since whatever the hell happened at Roswell happened) is fantastic. It took me a little while, but I figured out how to recover all the alien’s ship parts and send him safely on his way.
I particularly liked the reference to the legendarily awful E.T. computer game 🙂
For a sadder look at Roswell, here’s the Pixies…
One of my work colleagues has been extremely ill this week. He’s come into the office for a few hours this morning and informed us that on Monday night he was so delirious that he hallucinated the characters from Animal Crossing trying to sell him sleep.
In terms of my own health I spent a couple of hours in hospital that same night with the same old anxiety attack masquerading as a heart attack symptoms that I know and love so well. I was pretty sure it was just an anxiety attack but the problem is that no matter what I may think intellectually, the anxiety (and symptoms) won’t actually go away until I have some kind of medical confirmation that there’s nothing wrong and I’m not actually going to keel over dead.
Now I’d be happy with a simple ECG, but they have this annoying “duty of care” concept in the health system and wouldn’t let me leave until a couple of blood tests came in, so I was stuck in an observation ward for a couple of hours when I’d much rather have been at home looking for horses in Minecraft. But hey, whatever.
Two interesting observations. To calm me down (although frankly after my ECG came back as normal I was perfectly calm) they gave me a diazepam. This is apparently quite popular as a recreational drug – I can’t imagine why as all it did for me was make me feel unpleasantly disorientated, give me a headache and get NoFx’s Creeping Out Sarah stuck in my brain. Since alcohol makes me feel the same way (with the exception of the bit about aging Los Angeles punk musicians) I rather suspect that my autistic brain just isn’t wired up in such a way to enjoy getting high. Eh. No great loss.
The other observation is related to evolution. Goosebumps are often mentioned in science texts as an evolutionary relic of the time when humans had fur. When we get cold, we get goosebumps because our bodies are trying to fluff up our fur to trap a layer of warm air. This obviously no longer works, except – as I have maintained for years – in my case it does work, because I am hairy enough for some air trapping to take place.
She asks me why, I’m just a hairy guy…
It’s not anything that will stand up to even a slight breeze, but if the air is still I can warm myself up a degree or so by switching on my goosebumps (I have some slight conscious control over them).
As X-Powers go it’s not going to get me hanging out with Wolverine any time soon, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being one of those normal people.
The reason I mention this is because in order to attach the various sensors for the ECG they had to shave some patches of my chest hair. And stomach hair. And side hair (I’m hairy high and low, don’t ask me why, don’t know…). Ever since, I’ve been acutely conscious of exactly where they did this, as walking down the street I can feel those areas as cold patches, even under a shirt and coat.
Weird huh? Who would have thought a nice, modern gentleman such as myself could rely so heavily on left over parts from the apes and monkeys.
