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!)
Category: Life and Associated Annoyances
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.
Dachshund Antibiotics II
About this time last year, while recovering from a badly failed holiday and probable scrub typhus, I made a post titled ‘Dachshund Antibiotics’. This was a somewhat lame pun based on the fact that I had been put on doxycycline for the typhus, and ‘doxie’ is American slang for dachshund. “Doxie-cycline” therefore equals “dachshund-antibiotics”. See?
(I said it was somewhat lame…)
In any case, my blog is apparently now quite popular among people looking for antibiotics to give to their wiener dogs – I get several of them a week in my referrer stats. Not an anticipated consequence of my pun, but an interesting one.
Anyway the reason I bring all this up is that I’m back on the doxies as a result of a case of bronchitis which has resisted two rounds of amoxicillin, even when supplemented with super-duper clavulanic acid (guaranteed to kill the trickiest of amoxicillin resistant bacteria!). I feel like hell, am coughing like an infant at a homeopathic vaccination clinic and am only at work today because we’re in the middle of a heatwave and the office has better aircon that my apartment.
Hopefully the doxycycline will cut in before my skin combusts.
Bronchial Adventures
Well, this is fun. I’ve had a dry, itchy cough since before Christmas. This week it decided it would be better accommodated by my lungs, moved downwards and turned into bronchitis. On the plus side I’ve got a few days off work. On the downside my body seems to have decided that the best method to get rid of the infection is to get rid of my lungs entirely, and is attempting to cough them up on a regular basis.
I’ve been to the docs (happily I had booked an appointment to get the dry, itchy cough looked at before it went feral on me) and have been prescribed rest and a five day series of antibiotic pills the size of twenty-sided dice, so I should come up smiling on Tuesday morning.
In the meantime I’ve been working on painting my Cyclops Demolition Vehicle and watching a rather good documentary on H.P.Lovecraft up on ABC iView, so all’s well that ends well (assuming I do end up well – if not, I’ve got a repeat script on the giant pills).
Oh yeah, this is new. I bought a copy of the Game of Thrones board game. Hopefully I can introduce the guys to it soon, so Fabian can wipe the floor with us all. I’ve got a half a mind to try playing as the Starks, as it looks like an interesting challenge… I’ve also read my way through the first three books, and am now onto part II of Storm of Swords. I found Part I hard going at a few points, but it picked up at the end and I can’t wait to see just how awful the Martells turn out to be (just about everyone in Westeros is awful, it’s merely a matter of degree ;))
That’s it for now. Got some coughing to do…
Internet Famous! (For a certain value of ‘famous’)
Well, that’s a turn up for the books.
I posted my Gaunt’s Ghost Lego project to Reddit. Next thing I know Dan Abnett himself is calling me ‘a very, very fine human being indeed’.
Brutal! đŸ˜€
This Cannot be Borne!
The minimum temperature last night was 27.7 degrees. I think we can all agree that this is ridiculous and something should be done.
I suggest sending a fleet of tugs down to Antarctica to snap off a bit of ice shelf and tow it back here. We can then hack chunks off of it and helicopter them up into the hills. The easterlies will turn nice and cool, and the runoff will go straight into the dams. It’s a win-win situation!
Get onto it Premier! I command you!
Daily Greets
This is Jinsy is one of the most fascinating things I’ve seen on television in quite some time.
I eagerly await the next episode.
On another subject entirely – first day back at work, 100% cloud cover, crippling humidity, predicted maximum temperature of 39 degrees and thunderstorms. When did I get moved to the Singapore office!?
(Note: We don’t have a Singapore Office)
Excuses, Excuses…
I know I promised a review of The Hobbit, but we’re currently on the sixth day in a row with temperatures exceeding 37 degrees, so brain no working good so much not yus.
In the meantime here’s some Lord of the Rings content to tide you over…
Baktunomania!
So, tomorrow is the end of the world! Woo-hoo!
I can tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow – nothing. That is to say plenty will happen, but none of it will be any different to any other day on planet Earth. Sure, a cycle in a calender is coming to an end, but so what? Someone’s calendar is always ticking over. What makes the Mayans so damn special?
B’ak’tun come and go – after all they only last 394 years. Did the world end in 1617? Was human consciousness lifted to a new level in 1223? All evidence points to no. I ain’t holding my breath this time around.
And sure, you can claim that the end of the 13th b’ak’tun is special. That each ‘world’ lasts 13 b’ak’tun and then ends. The problem with that is that it’s an entirely modern idea based on fundamental misinterpretations of Mayan thought. There are only two Mayan inscriptions that even mention the end of b’ak’tun 13 – one of them merely notes that it’ll happen one day, the other says it’s the festival of an almost completely unknown minor god. That’s it. No prophecies, no predictions, absolutely nothing to suggest that the commencement of b’ak’tun 14 will be any different to any other point in human existence.
The end of the 13th b’ak’tun is upon us. The world won’t end, or be transformed, the human race won’t be wiped out or redeemed, and things will carry on into the 14th b’ak’tun just the same as it ever was – except that new age con-men will need to find some other way to sell books to the gullible (I’m guessing something to do with Nibiru).
I’m still going to take the opportunity to post this though…
I Have Some Complaints
The old depression is absolutely killing me at the moment. I’m dragging myself into work, but spend a lot of the day just dully staring at the screen trying to remember what I’m meant to be doing. Not good, not good at all.
In any case, I have some complaints…
Westpac – it’s pretty impressive that you were able to find, let alone hire Bonnie Tyler for your latest ad, but seriously, what kind of maniac would play Total Eclipse of the Heart at a wedding? It’s a song about a relationship crashing and burning! You might as well play Deutschland Ă¼ber Alles at a Bar Mitzvah!
Treechange – I hate that word. I don’t know why I hate it, I just do. With a passion. If you ask me, Sigrid Thornton has a lot to answer for.
All over the news this morning is an artist in Queensland who’s using roadkill and maggots to make paintings. Any fool who thinks this is newsworthy has obviously never hung out with artists.
The Twelfth of the Twelfth Twenty-Twelve – Oh woop-de-do. Some numbers have lined up. Let’s all strip naked in the street and party. If we used base 8 or something this would be a day like any other.
That’s it. Maybe some caffeine will cheer me up.
