Category: Old and Uncategorised

OK, no real updates for months and months. This is entirely my fault as I will attempt to explain below. If you don’t feel like an in depth explanation of what the hell is wrong with me, please feel free to skip down to where I start carrying on about Harry Potter in my usual flippant and idiosyncratic style.

Anyway, why I haven’t managed a proper update in ages. The problem is, frankly, one that affects every aspect of my life and at times I’m sure makes me an extremely frustrating person to deal with. It’s one of motivation – a serious issue with the things that motivate me to actually do things instead of just sleep all day.

Normal people out there seem to be motivated by a variety of things. Money, praise, prestige, concern for their fellow man, a sense of personal achievement, power, doughnuts and the promise of more doughnuts, etc. I on the other hand am not moved by such thing. The only things that get me up and going, and making an effort are Guilt and Terror.

Guilt over not doing things that I think I have an obligation to do, and Terror at what would happen if I didn’t do the things I have to do.

Work for instance. I get up in the morning and go into work not because I love what I do (actually I do love what I do – mess around with computers – but I’d like to do it on my own terms for my own goals rather than for eight hours a day, five days a week for idiot clients), but because the company (by which I mean my boss and my fellow workers) gave me a job and put up with me on a daily basis. Hence I feel obligated to go in every day whether I really want to or not – and would be consumed by guilt if I didn’t.

From the terror angle there’s the terror that if I didn’t go in I’d lose my job, have no way to pay my mortgage and end up out on the street. So this combines with the guilt to drag me out of bed, into the shower and out the door every morning – even though most days I feel like phoning in and asking Bevan to tell my clients where they can shove their updates.

So I spend my days riddled with guilt about the past, and terror about the future. Cheery eh? Well it gets worse.

If for some reason I don’t quickly deal with something that’s making me guilty, the guilt continues to build until it reaches a threshold beyond which the sheer gut-churning horror of it is just completely unbearable. So rather than deal with the horror face on I find myself avoiding it, generally by pushing it out of my mind entirely, and things tend not to get done.

And worse than that it’s contagious. If there’s something I’m avoiding thinking about because of the monstrous guilt associated with it, I can’t think about anything related to it either, because that’ll remind me of it. So I end up with these great trees of related projects and ideas that I can’t think about or complete because even thinking about them for a second feels like a hard sharp kick in the gut.

Real word example – Abandoned in Perth. While I was in the UK (not long after setting up the site) I got an email from a girl back in Perth who was doing an arts degree based around urban exploration and abandoned sites. Once I got back we exchanged quite a few emails on the subject and she even ended up including a few bits of my emails in a performance piece she put on at the Verge. Then (not long after I explored the South Fremantle power station on her recommendation) she sent me an email which I was too busy to reply to for about a week. Then something else happened that meant I didn’t have the time to reply for another week and a half – by which point my guilt over ignoring her had hit the threshold and I couldn’t deal with it. The reply never got written and she (understandably) didn’t write again.

But – because the site and urban exploration in general now bring all of that guilt rushing back – I haven’t even been able to think about doing any updates. And so the site is essentially dead. Well done me.

(By the way, if you happen to be reading this Alexis, I’m sorry.)

Now, no doubt all this is some kind of well defined anxiety disorder that I should probably seek treatment for. The problem however (apart from the fact that without guilt and terror to motivate me I would happily stay in bed all day and lose my job) is that there’s only two types of treatment for this kind of thing. SSRIs and CBT.

SSRIs are Selective Seretonin Re-uptake Inhibitors, or (to put it in English) Prozac. I have been on Prozac in the past – for about four months back in 1999 – and while it did make me feel a lot more relaxed and happy about life it had some very deleterious side effects. For a start my IQ seemed to plummet by about 50 points*As a side note my IQ is up around 150 normally so if my estimate of the impact is correct, then me on Prozac equals the average person on the street. If this is the case then I can see why the world is in such a damn mess most of the time.. I just couldn’t seem to think properly. And on top of that I had absolutely no motivation to do anything. My days consisted of getting up, having breakfast, pottering around the house achieving nothing, having lunch, pottering, watching some TV, eating dinner, watching some more TV and going to bed (I was unemployed at the time, God knows what would have happened if I’d been working).

CBT on the other hand is Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which is a technique of monitoring one’s thoughts – suppressing negative ideation and such – until the monitoring becomes automatic and you don’t have to think about it any more. A nice idea, but I’m far too deeply cynical for it to have the faintest effect. The whole thing reeks of sticking one’s head in the sand and whistling a happy tune while Rome burns (to recklessly mix metaphors). It’s making believe that things are wonderful so hard that you delude yourself into thinking they are wonderful, even when they’re not. And my brain won’t let me do that.

So, fundamentally I’m screwed.

In any case that’s why my weblog and assorted websites (Abandoned in Perth, Tales of the Geek Underclass, the Beginners Guide to Zurvar etc) haven’t been updated in ages. I’m hoping that doing a public mea culpa like this will relieve enough of the guilt for me to get back to them. Or at least make me sleep a bit better at night 🙂

So, onto other subjects.

I finally got around to reading Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince yesterday. I was planning to wait until it comes out in paperback but the temptation got to be too much. That and I’d been inadvertently picking up spoilers from time to time, and decided I’d better read the damn thing before I figured out the entire plot. So I bought a copy while killing time at the Morley Galleria (I’d set off a bunch of cockroach bombs and couldn’t risk going home for two hours without poisoning myself) and ended up staying up until midnight finishing it.

That Snape eh? You can never figure out what he’s up to. I’m still not entirely convinced he’s gone back to the dark side though, even if he did do in Dumbledore. I mean Dumbledore could well have been fatally poisoned anyway and Snape just decided to give him a quick and merciful death while scoring some major points with Voldemort. If he’s actually dead that is. He could be – J.K’s a good enough author to kill people off when necessary without pulling rabbits out of hats to save them – but if Dumbledore did make a reappearance it wouldn’t surprise me.

On top of all that there’s some other stuff I enjoyed. Like Tonks and Lupin. That’s sweet. I have to admit to falling for Tonks a bit*Insomuch as one can fall for an entirely fictional character. back in Order of the Phoenix, so it’s nice to see her get together with someone. Then there’s the opening chapter which very neatly sums up the exact relationship between the Ministry and the Muggle Government. We get a whole lot more information on Tom Riddle – including what the heck was going on with his diary, and Moaning Myrtle (always one of my favourite minor characters) puts in a couple of appearances too. So it’s a pretty enjoyable read all up. Moreso than Phoenix anyway, which (Tonks not withstanding) could have stood to lose a few chapters.

Still on the subject of Harry Potter, Ryan and I went and saw Goblet of Fire the other week. He actually wanted to see the Narnia movie, but I still haven’t got over my sense of betrayal from figuring out what the Narnia books are all about and am refusing to see it by way of protest. There wasn’t much else on so we ended up going with Goblet. I quite enjoyed it, although (even with all the stuff that was cut) it was still a bit long. If anything about it disappointed me it was the Quidditch World Cup – there’s all the build up, the teams fly in… and then you’re back in the Weasley tent with it all over – what the heck was that? I dunno, maybe I’m just a Quidditch tragic (I can’t stand sport – watching or playing – as a general rule. But if Quidditch was real I would so be into it *grin*)

I don’t know what Ryan thought of it, he’s never read the book and if I’d never read the book I would have been confused as hell. A lot of the establishing detail was left out, presumably because they needed to cut as much as possible due to time constraints and anyone going to see could be presumed to have read the book. But still – a movie should really be able to stand on its own I think.

Oh, and Cho Chang has a Scottish accent. How about that then?

After the movie we headed up to Fabian’s place and hung out till midnight not doing a heck of a lot and then dropped into the Fast Eddie’s at Morley for an extremely late dinner around 1:00am. A good night, and probably the latest I’ve stayed out in ages (I’m very sad aren’t I?)

Hmmm, there’s tons of other stuff I should write about, I mean in the last six months two of my best friends have got married (not to each other, I’m talking about two separate weddings – and have probably just mortally insulted their spouses by suggesting they’re not my best friends…) four of my best friends have got married and I haven’t said anything about it – so expect some wedding round ups shortly. I’ve also (thanks to one of said best friends who’s best friend status is currently undergoing review as a consequence *grin*) just got involved in something… well something different anyway which I may or may not write about at some point in the future. It’s all a bit of a pain at the moment to be frank, not because of what they did, but because they managed to screw up what they did in a very clever and intricate way that I now have to sort out, but I’ve done what’s needed and hopefully it should all run smoothly from here. Hopefully. We’ll see.

Anyway that’s probably the most I’ve written in months so I figure I should go and have a lie down now. Staying up until midnight reading Harry Potter can really take it out of you *grin*)

Favorite Beatles song: Very hard to pick, perhaps “All My Loving”.

Favorite solo song by a former Beatle: “Watching the Wheels” by John Lennon.

Favorite Rolling Stones song: “Ruby Tuesday”.

Favorite Bob Dylan song: “Hurricane”.

Favorite Pixies song: “Alec Eifel”.

Favorite Prince song: “Little Red Corvette”.

Favorite Michael Jackson song: “Billy Jean”.

Favorite Metallica song: “Master of Puppets”.

Favorite Public Enemy song: I have virtually no knowledge of Public Enemy apart from that they did a very good job of frightening white, middle class Americans some years back – something for which they should be applauded.

Favorite Depeche Mode song: “Blasphemous Rumours”, naturally.

Favorite Cure song: Either “Wrong Number” or “Lullaby”. Or perhaps “Friday I’m in Love”.

Favorite song that most of your friends haven’t heard: Ye gods, ask a hard one why don’t you? I’ll say “The Jeep Song” by the Dresden Dolls for now.

Favorite Beastie Boys song: “Body Moving”.

Favorite Police song: Either “Every Breath you Take” or “Message in a Bottle”.

Favorite Sex Pistols song: The immortal “Anarchy in the UK”, natch.

Favorite song from a movie: “The Ruby Rap” from the Fifth Element 🙂

Favorite Blondie song: “The Tide is High”.

Favorite Genesis song: Every song I think is by Genesis turns out to be by Phill Collins, none the less I shall say “Invisible Touch” – if only because the chorus is so uninteligable you can have enormous fun singing “She seems to have an invisible tonsure”

Favorite Led Zeppelin song: Don’t really know much of their stuff really. I’ll avoid the cliche of “Stairway to Heaven” and say “Kashmir” because it has such a cool riff.

Favorite INXS song: Has to be “Don’t Change”.

Favorite Weird Al song: “Smells like Nirvana”.

Favorite Pink Floyd song: “The Turning Away”.

Favorite cover song: Right at the moment “Six Months in a Leaky Boat” by Little Birdie, although that will no doubt change once I hear some other good cover.

Favorite dance song: Depends on what is meant by “Dance”. If it’s referring to the so-named (and generally completely banal) genre of the early to mid 90’s, then about the most telerable example was “Rhythm is a Dancer” by Snap. If it’s being used as a term for electronic/club/house/etc in general then it’s a toss up between “Last Train to Trancentral” by the KLF or “1990’s – Time for the Guru” by Guru Josh, which is electronic music extended to its ultimate (and quite ridiculous) conclusion 🙂

Favorite U2 song: “Angel of Harlem”.

Favorite disco song: Either “Ma Baker” or “Rasputin” by Boney M. Actually make that anything by Boney M.

Favorite The Who song: “Baba O’Reilly (Teenage Wasteland)”.

Favorite Elton John song: I can think of plenty of his songs but consider most of them to be mild background noise as opposed to music. Hmmm, “Crocodile Rock” maybe because of the extremely silly chorus.

Favorite Clash song: Undoubtedly has to be “London Calling”.

Favorite David Bowie song: I can only choose one?! Either “Ashes to Ashes” or “Modern Love” I guess.

Favorite Nirvana song: “Lithium”.

Favorite Snoop Dogg song: If I ever willingly listen to a Snoop Dogg song I hope someone ‘busts a cap’ in my head.

Favorite Ice Cube song: Ditto.

Favorite Johnny Cash song: C’mon! You all know the words! “Ahhh fell in tooour burnin’ ring o’ fiii-urr!”

Favorite R.E.M. song: Another tricky one. Either “What’s the Frequency Kenneth” or “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight”

Favorite Elvis song: “Suspicious Minds”.

Favorite cheesy-ass country song: “Love is Like a T-Bone Steak” by the Sensitive New Aged Cowpersons 🙂

Favorite Billy Joel song: See Elton John. I’d either have to go with either “The Longest Time” or “Uptown Girl” – which is actualy really well constructed musically once you get over the fact that it’s “Uptown Girl”.

Favorite Bruce Springsteen song: “The River”.

Favorite Big Audio Dynamite song: “Rush”. It should be noted that this is the only song of thier’s I even know.

Favorite New Order song: It’s a huge cliche but “Blue Monday”.

Favorite Neil Diamond song: Humiliating as it is, I’ve always had a soft spot for “Sweet Caroline”.

Favorite Squeeze song: I hate to expose my ignorance, but who???

Favorite Smiths song: Either “How Soon is Now” or “The Light”.

Favorite Tragically Hip Song: I’ve heard of them, but don’t know any of their music.

The African Mountain Gorilla (Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla) is a large, hairy primate mostly found in central Africa and Carteret New Jersey. It can be distinguished from the more numerous American Lowland Gorilla (Gorilla Gorilla Lindbergii) by its darker pelt, more thoughtful expression, powers of psychic invisibility and passion for basketball (the American Gorilla prefers football or hockey).

The chief notable feature of the Mountain Gorilla is its aforementioned ability to become invisible at will. This power is estimated to work upon roughly 97% of the human population and is put to a number of uses. Those documented include escaping from predators, trapping food, shoplifting, avoiding photojournalists, stalking, disappearing spookily into the mists and operating “haunted house” rides at funfairs. Its most common use however appears to be unobtrusively attending basketball games. It has been estimated that Mountain Gorillas are present at over 60% of all high school and college basketball games in New Jersey, with major games in other states attracting a more sporadic turn-out due to the difficulties the average Gorilla has fitting into airline seats.

The presence of these Gorillas goes unnoticed by the majority of attendees, who are succeptable to the invisibility suggestion. The remaining three or so percent who do notice the Gorillas either write them off as some kind of college prank, drug induced hallucination or visitation from God, or merely keep quiet for fear of ridicule (there is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that certain narcotics may reduce the effectiveness of the invisibility power, however until properly organised double blind tests are carried out it cannot be ruled out that such drugs merely cause vivid hallucinations of Gorillas that aren’t actually present).

The increasing problem of Gorillas being caught on camera while attending televised games has been dealt with by advances in digital image processing, which allow an editor (usually – although incorrectly – refered to as a “Monkey Cleaner”) to remove Gorillas from the footage in real time. Claims that unusualy ugly human attendees are also removed from broadcasts remain common, although unproven.

Most Mountain Gorillas are perfectly capable of speaking English. They remain silent because of what humans would do to them if they found out.

I was woken up in the early hours of this morning, not (as I was a few weeks back) by some idiot bashing on the door under my bedroom window, repeatedly informing the world in general as loud as he could that he was “Going to party like it’s 1999!!”*This is 100% true. The people who live below me are sociopaths., but by the following poem rattling about my head, which I can only presume I composed whilst sleeping…

There once was a CSI Sidle,
Who hunted down folks homicidal,
She worked in the lab,
But seldom looked drab,
And her intellect never was idle,

Kublah Khan it ain’t.

But honestly, what in the name of all that’s sane and holy goes on in my head when I’m asleep? Composing limericks about characters from CSI? That’s pretty damn deranged. To be fair I’d just watched the season finale of said show (the one where Quentin Tarrintino does the world a great favour by burying George Eades in an airtight perspex box*I jest – Nick may not be my favourite character but I don’t bear him (or George Eades) any particular malice.) but that’s no excuse! I’ve never composed poetry about any other TV shows in my sleep. Sheeze!

(I did say on Friday that over the weekend I was going to write about what I’ve been up to – well that sort of fell through after a very frustrating Saturday which I may or may not write about tomorrow. So there! 🙂

The title says it all really.

If I may be allowed to make a plea in my defence I would like to put my general slackness down to work. It’s getting towards the end of the year, which always means a rush, and we’ve also been building a new whiz-bang Checkout process which is the kind of thing that just eats up your entire week. And we’ve got a massive backlog of work anyway because Dale went slightly mad a few months ago and booked in a lot more than we could actually do.

To deal with it I’ve been going into work early and doing one or two extra hours a day. Which is nice for the hip pocket but doesn’t really leave me with much energy for anything else. I have been up for a few things though, which I hopefully will write a bit about over the weekend. But not today, because I’m still at work (although I’ve taken myself off the clock so as not to defraud the company by having it pay for my half-arsed blogging) and it’s almost time to go home.

Two things I will comment on however are that the ABC has put Daria on again (on Friday Afternoons which is one reason I’m keen to be off home), and that there are a number of other really excellent TV shows on at the moment. Or rather there were because a few of them finished before I had the energy to write about them. Ho hum.

Sea of Souls for instance was very good. For those not aquainted with it, it’s a somewhat creepy drama featuring a team of parapsychologists working out of Glascow University. Now naturally this sort of premise runs the risk of being a complete cliche (cue X-Files theme), but I think the actors and scriptwriters did a really good job with it. Actually it reminded me a bit of Mysterious Ways (if you chopped out the requisite feel-good endings, made it all a bit more serious and boosted up the budget that is) – I mean a university Professor investigating the paranormal with the assistance of an enthusiastic young grad student*OK, I admit ‘enthusiastic’ isn’t exactly the first adjective that springs to mind to describe Miranda (apart from when watching the surgery channel at least), but she was enthusiastic on the inside! 🙂 and a dyed in the wool skeptic – it doesn’t take a genius to see the similarities (there are also some obvious similarities to the Koestler Parapsychological Unit at Edinburgh University, but I’ll leave that kind of thing to the lawyers 🙂

Anyway I only saw the last four epsiodes (dealing with reincartnation and muti killings), but they were really good. I wish I’d watched it from the start.

Also catching my interest at the moment is P.O.W, which is (obviously enough) set in a Nazi P.O.W camp during World War II (that is to say a P.O.W camp run by the Nazis, I can’t see anyone watching a show set in a camp for Nazis – at least not anyone I’d want to hang around with anyway). It’s sort of like a somewhat less rose tinted version of The Great Escape extended into a series, or a serious version of Hogan’s Heroes (if a guard caught you digging a tunnel in this camp they wouldn’t run away yelling “I know noTHING!” – they’d shoot you). It’s rather reminiscant of Changi actually, minus the various fantasy bits. Anyway what particularly impresses me is the camp Commandant, Dreiber. The scriptwriters and the actor (who’s name completely escapes me) have done a great job (in the episodes I’ve seen at least – I’ve missed a few) in making him somewhat sympathetic, without taking any of the easy options. It would have been very easy to set him up as a brutal Nazi monster, or alternatively as a good guy forced to follow orders because he has no choice, but they’ve managed to create a loyal, patriotic German (and Nazi) who isn’t on the whole such a bad guy. He generally sticks to the Geneva Conventions for instance, shows some concern for the prisoners’ welfare and treats the Allied C.O. with a measure of respect due to his rank. Of course anyone attempting to escape will be shot, and you get to see the frightening side of him when one of the prisoners turns out to be Jewish*Not brutal or vicious or fanatical – he just so obviously regards him as a nothing., but he’s not the stock Nazi usually portrayed in these kind of situations.

Thanks to sixty years of TV and cinema we’ve all got used to the idea of the Nazis as monsters (and let’s not forget there were plenty of them who were) but it’s interesting to see such an intelligent and convincing portrayal of the kind of Nazi who would have made up the bulk of the organization. Not a raving lunatic, or a fantical warrior pledging to die for the Fuhrer and the Sacred Aryan Blood, but an ordinary person with certain beliefs going about their life and military duties in a certain way. If you ask me that’s a much more mature – and frightening – depiction of what went on in Nazi Germany than a thousand bellowing stormtroopers.

So yeah, P.O.W. Check it out.

Going home now.

Here’s an interesting bit of rambling from that most entertaining of linguists Tenser, said the Tensor. Or at least it’s interesting to me because of a rather stupid activity I was forced to partake in way back in the good old days of 1989.

Back in that first year of high school the year eights were subjected to a class called ‘Music’. This wasn’t any kind of conventional music class – we didn’t get to play any instruments – and neither was it a singing class – that was ‘Singing’. No, this was sitting around in the room at the back of the gym, listening to tapes while being yelled at by a nun. There was so little educational content involved that I strongly suspect it was nothing but timetable filler to get the year eights away from the rest of the staff for a while.

In any case one of the endlessly stupid activities we had to do in ‘Music’ was learn about beat. Any decent curriculum seeking to teach kids about beat would invest in some bongo drums and let them at it, but this kind of creativity wasn’t allowed by Sister Lynn – after all, drumming reeks of paganism. No, we had to march in a big circle around the room in time to a tape apparently (to judge by the whole jingly-jangly-fuzzy-wuzzy-Barney-the-Dinosaur ‘feel’ of the recording) aimed at 6 year olds. And join in.

The words we had to chant?

(When repeated over and over ad nauseum while marching around the room in a circle the “right” and “left”s should fall on the appropriate footsteps. You do a little skip on “woopsidoo” to reset, otherwise you’d end up on the wrong feet the next time round – just so you know).

The parallels to the Gingerbread jingle are obvious.

As is the effect this bizzare activity had on growing minds – it’s 16 years later and I still recall the damn thing word for word!

Some months ago while on the train to work I had a sort of day-dreamy vision thing. Nothing particularly unusual about that except that it was particularly cinematic and sort of stuck in my head. It was of a man, dressed in a long black coat, with a somewhat grim expresion on his face walking out of an urban underpass on a rainy night. As he steps out into the rain he gestures sharply upwards with his arm (while continuing on ahead and not looking around, as if he expects this to work without checking) and the falling rain immediately reverses direction shooting back up into the sky. He continues walking along – grim, but completely dry.

After thinking about this for a while I decided that it was clearly a scene from a movie – a Neil Gaiman (or maybe Douglas Adams) type movie about ancient gods still living in the world today. And that was that really. I spent a bit of time idly trying to figure out which god – I ended up deciding it was someone Greek – but after that I basically forgot about it.

Then the other night I see a trailer for that new Russian flick Nochnoy Dozor (that’s Night Watch for those whose Russian ain’t up to scratch). And in the middle of it there’s a scene where a guy is crossing a road (in an urban setting, at night) and (with a sharp gesture of his arm) nonchalantly throws a bus over his head.

Now OK, there’s no underpass, the guy isn’t dressed in black, and it’s a bus – not rain. But there’s something about the shot that somehow’s just like what I saw. And from what I hear about the movie it is a bit Neil Gaimanish…

So, what does it mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe that I should go see the movie. I dunno. It’s just really freaky that’s all.

(Hmmm, on the subject of Neil Gaiman, Selma Blair’s right – she does look just like Death.)

Well how about that? They’ve interupted Frasier for a live telecast of the Mary, Frederick and the new baby walking out of hospital in Copenhagen. I mean really.

(For those who came in late, Princess Mary of Denmark is from Tasmania and hence the new Danish Prince is half Australian. I like that – Europe exiles her criminals halfway around the world, and we come back and RULE THEM AS KINGS!!!! *grin*).

Aha! Maybe we might finally get some kind of closure on the 1840 storyline now…

You know, I’m thinking that I really have to buy a ring.

No, I’m not planning to propose to anyone and neither am I considering a George Costanza style ‘pretending to be married to attract women’ scam. It’s because of a somewhat painful situation that has arisen at the office – a situation that can only reasonably be solved by means of jewelery. I am talking of course of that most pernicious of physical phenomena, static electricity.

Not that long ago Dale got an ergonomics expert to come in and assess the office – apparently on the grounds that she’s a member of some kind of business group he’s in and therefore cheap. After some poorly concealed gasping in horror at our work environment she proceeded to explain how everything we were doing was wrong and we were all going to end up as bitter, hunchbacked old men with osteoperosis and no hair because of our chunky old CRT monitors and far too comfortable chairs. She also made us do a variety of highly unnatural stretches and told me to get rid of the ‘clutter’ on my desk because it was bad feng-shui*Oh, all right she didn’t, I made that up, but she did say I should get rid of it because no one likes working in clutter, which I though was terribly presumptive of her.. Then she handed out some photocopied brochures on ‘Good Work Practice’ and fled before our dangerous working conditions could give her the plague.

Now that’s the kind of thing you have to put up with in business, fair enough, and at least it meant we could sit around looking attentive for an hour or so rather than working, but Dale seemed to take it all rather to heart. Hence a few days later he went out and bought me a new chair*Bevan’s was actually assessed as OK by the ergonomics lady, and presumably Dale feels that he’s unlikely to sue himself over unsafe working conditions. . This was purchased at enormous expense from an ergonomics centre and was specially designed to properly support and protect the human body – which would no doubt explain why for the first two weeks sitting in it I was in a state of constant agony. My bones eventually reshaped themselves however, and it is now quite comfortable – even though my feet do seem to have turned inwards for some reason.

But – and here we find the crux of my case – comfortable as it is, sitting in it seems to generate absolutely massive amounts of static charge. Whenever I get up to use the facilities, or answer the phone, or wave my arms wildly in horror at the suggestions of a client I shoot a large, crackling electrical discharge into the first metal object I touch, or even pass within a foot of. And the longer I’ve been sitting the stronger the discharge is. The phenomena is so consistent that I’m begining to suspect there’s a miniature Van de Graff generator hidden in the gas lift mechanism of my oh-so-ergonomic chair (either that or I’m turning into that guy from The Misfits of Science).

I wouldn’t mind it except for one fact – static electrical discharge hurts damn it! OK, sure a small spark is nothing to whine about, but we’re not talking about small sparks, we’re talking about great pulsing gouts of raw electrical energy shooting out of my fingertips without provocation. So, obviously I need a ring.

Why you ask? Because if I was wearing a ring of suitably conductive material I could earth myself by tapping it against any convenient block of metal, and because the electricity would be arcing from the ring and not my nerves it wouldn’t hurt! (And also I think it would look kind of cool :).

So yeah, on the lookout for a suitably conductive (and cheap) ring.

There’s plenty of other stuff I could blog about, but it’s 4:59pm on a Friday and I’m still at the office, so I thought I’d finish up with some inane comments about Dr Who instead.

Thoughts on watching Dr Who: Arc of Infitnity

1. From certain angles that ergon thing is damn creepy.
2. With that new haircut Janet Fielding actually looks kind of cute (even if she still sounds like Pauline Hanson).
3. Time Lord interior decor just gets worse doesn’t it?

Thoughts on watching Dr Who: Snakedance

1. It’s Martin Clunes! And he can’t act!
2. Neither can Janet Fielding for that matter – or maybe hamming it up unbearably is one of those ‘physical signs’ of Mara possession?
3. “Look at me! Look at Me!” – Kath and Kim or the Mara? You decide.

Thoughts on watching Dr Who: Mawdryn Undead

1. Mark Strickson is way too old to portray a school student – even an alien one.
2. Without his moustache the Brigadier just isn’t the Brigadier!
3. The Black Guardian may be the most powerful negative force in the universe, but that’s still no excuse for carrying on like the top-hatted villain in a Victorian melodrama – “I am evil! The Doctor is good! Mwahahahaha!” – I mean really!

OK, I’ve finally figured out what’s been going on for the last few months. Why I haven’t had the energy to do much (including emailing people and making weblog entries), why work has been such a drag, why even getting out of bed in the mornings takes a major effort. I’m depressed damnit!

Now, that may not seem like particularly good news – but actually it is. Up until a few days ago I felt like my entire life was in the toilet, which isn’t much fun. Today I still feel like my entire life is in the toilet, but I know that it’s because some neurotransmitters in my brain are malfunctioning as opposed to my entire life actually being in the toilet. And I know that those neurotransmitters can be fixed. So I have that most precious of luxuries, hope. Which at least makes it a little easier to crawl out of bed each day 🙂

So it’s Saint John’s Wort, healthier food and more exercise until I pull myself out of it.

I could go to the doctor’s and get some SSRIs (that’s Selective Seretonin Re-uptake Inhibitors in case you’re wondering – better known as Prozac) I suppose, but the last time I did that (back in 1999) it pretty much scuppered my brain. Oh, I felt a lot better, sure, but my IQ seemed to drop by about 40 points and I couldn’t write anything to save my soul (the main reason regular updates to the Tales of the Geek Underclass stopped so suddenly) or code. So I stopped taking it and’ve been fine even since. I’m hoping the Saint John’s Wort and other measures will have the same effect without turning me into a lobotomised drone, otherwise I may have to go back onto the pills for a while. Which would suck, but what price mental health?

So, if you don’t hear from me for a while, that’s my excuse 🙂

In other news England have won the Ashes for the first time in about a billion years. Well done to them. The mainstream press seems to be treating this as a disaster on the scale of New Orleans, but frankly we’ve had it coming for ages. Anyway, anything that annoys Shane bloody Warne is fine by me (I’ll await deportation for un-Australian activities shortly shall I? 🙂

Personally (in addition to mainlining herbal medicine) I’m rewatching Season One of Battlestar Galactica. I went into town on Friday night intending to buy a DVD of Firefly but couldn’t find one, so I bought Galactica instead. It’s just as good the second time around, which is to say utterly fantastic. I haven’t got all the way through yet, but I’m enjoying it immensely – probably way too much actually since I find myself with a strange desire to call people who annoy me ‘toasters’ to their faces and to mutter things under my breath about the Lords of COBOL (maybe you say they spell it with a ‘K’, maybe I say they spell it wrong 🙂

I also indulged myself in a DVD copy of Resurrection of the Daleks which is famous for being the most violent Dr Who story ever recorded, reputedly featuring more on screen deaths than The Terminator. Sadly I neglected to start counting until the last episode, but in that 23 minutes or so there were at least 16 on screen shootings and/or blowing-ups (only counting humans, you could boost the figures a fair bit by adding in exploding Daleks) which averages out at almost 0.7 violent deaths per minute (or in other words great entertainment value! *g*). If the same figure applies for the other three epsiodes (which to be honest it probably doesn’t but still) then we’re looking at a total body count of over 60 people! Mary Whitehouse must have had kittens.

Anyway, I’d better go and watch some more of the milkiest Battlestar of all! (linguistic joke, don’t be ashamed you didn’t get it – in fact you should be proud 🙂