Met up with Hobbits. Walked forty miles. Skinned a squirrel and ate it.
Still no Internet.
Author: Purple Wyrm
No TV and No Beer make Homer Something Something…
Got home on Friday night to discover that my landline was dead as the proverbial doornail. No internet all long weekend. Frankly it’s amazing I’m still alive.
Apparently Telstra are going to fix it either today or tomorrow. So they say at least. I ain’t exactly sanguine.
I did get some… stuff done though. Pictures will be posted when my home connection us back up and running, and my brain has recovered from going cold turkey.
How to Live with Introverts
This (by one SchroJones) is pretty brilliant (click to embiggen)…
Not only is it amusing and accurate, it has the ability to provoke entertaining levels of RAGE!! on Reddit – mostly from extroverts who either take offense at the idea that they’re stealing people’s energy, or who like to read a book now and then, therefore define themselves as introverts and hence are upset that their self image is under assault by a more accurate definition.
Dagnabit!
Just took an extended lunch break to add a page for This is Jinsy to TV Tropes only to have TV Tropes eat it.
Dagnabit!
(Later: Went back and redid it this evening. Behold its majesty!)
Meanwhile, in Westeros
Finished A Dance with Dragons this morning, which brings me totally up to date with A Song of Ice and Fire. I hope Jon is alive, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Guess I should watch the TV series now…
Currently Making my Life Hell…
Imagine, if you will, that you’re a mechanic. Not the world’s greatest mechanic by any means, but a decent mechanic who earns a decent wage fixing and tuning cars and trucks.
One day you get a call from someone wanting you to come out and tune up their car. So you hop in your van and drive out to their address. On arrival however you discover that it’s not a car.
It’s this….
Before you have time to react, the Captain whacks a hat on your head, says “Welcome aboard! You’re our new Head Engineer!” and drags you down to the engine room.
Which looks like this…
Mistaking your look of horror for one of mere concern, the captain says “Don’t worry, the manuals are right here…”
You pick up one of the decaying books at random and open it. Every single page looks like this…
The Captain continues “All set? Your tools are over there…”
“…and we think the forward port engine is about to fall off. Have fun!”
Through strenuous effort (and a lot of desperate banging on random pipes) you manage to keep the ship in the air. You even manage to accommodate some of the crew’s requests, such as restoring the air conditioning and halting the gradual detachment of the starboard mess hall. Buoyed by your apparent competence the crew send in a flood of new requests for things such as hot tubs and mood lighting, some of which you can manage and many of which you have to ignore.
Making matters worse, through all of this the Captain insists on a weekly meeting at Airship HQ in Zurich. Once a week you have to fly to Zurich and sit in a small room staring at a list of requests and upgrades. After about an hour the meeting is declared a success and you fly back to the airship to continue banging on pipes.
You find yourself entertaining thoughts of sabotaging the engines, or at least ignoring the more desperate maintenance tasks so the ship will fall out of the sky and (as long as you survive) you won’t have to deal with it any more. But your professionalism wins through, you take a deep breath and get on with tightening a valve that you think will correct the water pressure on deck three. Maybe.
Attention Ladies and Gentlemen
This is what happens when you don’t close your tags.
That is all.
Down at the Office…
Coworker: Ruby 2’s out!
Me: Wasn’t that a Stones song?
Meanwhile in Rome…
Sometimes the mind comes up with something that one knows is awful, but nonetheless must be created and shared – because it’s the only way to get it out of one’s head. With that in mind, I present this abomination…
I’m so, so sorry.
On Spiegeltents
People will tell you that ‘spiegel’ is Dutch for ‘mirror’, and a spiegeltent is hence called because of the mirrors used to decorate it. This is untrue.
A spiegel is a cross between a spaniel and a beagle. The breed was developed in Belgium in the late 19th century and became famous for its ease of training and ability to howl in tune. Choirs of spiegels toured Europe in tents and these ‘singing dogs’ were a major attraction of the age.
Spiegel choirs fell out a favour during the rise of fascism in the 1930s, and the last of the touring companies folded at the start of the second world war. Today only the tents remain.
(Went to the Perth Fringe Festival last night with Rebecca. We ended up seeing Face the Music, which was fantastic – highly recomended. We also saw the Spiegeltent, but without the dogs we judged it not worth paying to go in…)
