Category: Old and Uncategorised

Believe it or not I’m in London. In an internet cafe/Subway store in Tottenham Court Road. This is my fourth day here (not in the cafe, it’s my second day in the cafe 🙂 and so far I have made the following observations about life in the English capital at the start of the 21st century.

1. London drivers are insane. I mean seriously insane. If someone drove like that in Perth the police wouldn’t try to pull them over, they’d open fire.
2. It’s extremely difficult to get a decent orange and mango juice. On the rare occasion I’ve actually been able to find anything labled “Orange and Mango” it’s turned out to also have banna, apple and even stranger things in it which means it’s not orange and mago and doesn’t taste like orange and mango. And I’m not just talking about small bottles, I can’t even find cartons in the supermarkets (or at least in the local Sainsbury’s which to be honest is the only place I’ve looked).
3. There do not seem to be any rubbish bins in central London. I spent a good part of Saturday afternoon wandering the streets near the guildhall looking for somewhere to dump a not-orange-and-mango juice bottle and had to give up and take it hme with me.
4. Edmonton (where I’m staying with my Uncle) is not a good part of town. It’s rather like the Jasmine Allen estate off The Bill, but with shorter buildings. The local market looks like something out of James Cameron’s Dark Angel – minus anyone as good looking as Jessica Alba. The local police station is all barricaded up, obstentiously for renovations but I suspect this is just a cover so the bobbies can hide from the locals.
5. English notes are still made of paper. This means that when you carelessly shove them into your pocket they get all crumpled up and have to be flattened out before you can use them to buy anything – unlike Australian polymer notes that just pop back into shape.
6. There are Starbucks everyehere. I always thought those gags about Starbucks in The Simpsons were exagerated. They’re not
7. The tube (underground railway system for those not in the London know) is pretty quick, clean, and efficient, but the stations (particularly the big multi-line ones) are like rabbit warrens. And all the pedestrian tunnels are one way, so to get around from platform to platform you have to follow all the arrows or have security guards descend on you with batons (all right, probably not with batons :). I changed trains from the Picadilly line to the Central line at Holborn the other day which involved going down a tunnel, then another tunnel, then into another tunnel, then up some stairs, then down another bendy tunnel, then down a sloping tunnel, then up the other side of the sloping tunnel, then down another tunnel, then down some stairs and then through another tunnel and out on the platform. This was in the middle of a mass of hurring people – I seriously felt like we were all rats in some kind of maze 🙂
8. The British branch of Burger King (Hungry Jacks to us Aussies) cannot make a burger to save their lives. I had one yesterday when no other cullinary option presented itself. I had to open the burger to see if there was any meat in it – there was but it was completely tasteless. And you’d think that you couldn’t mess up fries, but somehow they managed to make them like eating hot crunchy cardboard. No detectable flavour at all.

That said I’m having a great time 🙂 Just went to the British Museum to see the Rosetta Stone and Sutton Hoo finds which were impressive – but nothing on the central courtyard. The building was constructed as a big square with a large courtyard in the middle. For the millenium they decided to plonk the historic reading room of the British Library (which was being rebuilt elsewhere) in a specially constructed block in the middle, then roof the entire courtyard over with glass. It’s incredible. You step out of the already large rooms of the museum into this gigantic dazzling white space (the walls of the museum have been cleaned up and the library shell and courtyard floor are marble) which just completely smacks you in the face. It’s HUGE. Then when you’ve come to terms with massive expanse, you walk across it into the reading room, and get smacked in the face again because it’s so massive as well! It’s one of the most incredible spaces I’ve ever been in in my entire life 🙂

I’ve also done the Museum of London, Victoria Station and taken lots of photos around Battersea Power Station.

(If this is cut off suddenly it’s because I’m out of time on my machine 🙂

Man the last week has been busy. I finished work on Friday, and have spent almost all the time since (apart from a few snatched hours playing Civ III) either preparing for the trip, or moving all the furniture out of the loungeroom so Rebecca and Dom can lay new flooring while I’m away. This latter task was not easy given that…

a) The loungeroom is rather big
b) I own a whole load o’ crap

My bedroom is now a furniture packed cave with just enough space to crawl through and reach the bed. The second bedroom is worse.

Anyway before I depart (my plane leaves for the UK tomorrow, I’m leeeeeaving on a jet plane, don’t knoooowwww Stop it!!!) there are a few things that need mentioning.

One: Congratulations Rebecca and Dom! I won’t say what about – I presume they’re telling people but I’d want to be sure first 🙂

Two: Beowulf is great. I could carry on and on about it but very few people seem to have as great an interest in the Anglo-Saxon language as I do, so I’ll spare you all *grin*. However I would like to highlight one particular passage (talking about the dragon) that I found quite amusing…

The reason I’m quoting Mike Skinner, and not just quoting Mike Skinner but one of his more annoying tracks (I mean Original Pirate Material had some good stuff but this latest album… OK, Fit But You Know It is kind of catchy but the rest of the tracks seems to consist of him whining about losing

Well not quite anyway.

It’s amazing how much work it takes to organise an overseas trip. Combine that with an attack from the death cold from hell last week (Tuesday and Wednesday spent shivering in bed unable to speak with laryngitus) and it’s no wonder I haven’t been keeping up with log entries. But I’m marginally better now, so I’d better apologise for all the things I’ve missed over the last week or so…

Rebecca – I’m really sorry I missed your birthday. I was planning to send you an email from work, but of course wasn’t actually at work. I was also pretty much out of my head on cold medication and feeling truly wretched, so couldn’t even summon the togetherness to crawl out of bed and go online for a few minutes. Sorry 🙁 I do have a present waiting for you though 🙂

Helen – I’m also really sorry I missed your birthday. I knew it was coming up but in my pre-trip/post-death cold confusion it sort of slipped my mind. I checked my email for the first time in a few days last night and got your email – so I’ll write tonight and get everything sorted out.

Stephanie – I only got your email last night as well, so I’ll get a reply off to you tonight. I’ve got most of the site saved, I need to double check on some files, so don’t pull it quite yet.

Ryan – Ditto on the email. I was online Sunday morning but was feeling anti-social after a frustrating day of trip related shopping – so even if I’d got it I probably wouldn’t have been up for the movies. And even if I had been in a really gregarious mood I don’t know that I’d want to go and see Vin Diesel 🙂 I’ll get something sorted out before I head OS though – I think Hellboy opens this week so we can get the guys together – if Fabian’s back from Europe.

The Bishop – Sorry I stole those silver candlesticks but I needed the money to start a new life free from my convict past.

OK, I think that’s enough apologies for one day 🙂

Ummm, reading Beowulf, listening to Destroy Rock and Roll by Mylo, watching Regency House Party which is easily the stupidest thing on TV at the moment and as such is hilarious.

Exibit Number 1

Exibit Number 2

http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/throwing_tables/

Your Honor, the Prosecution rests!

Irony: Clicking on a link about Tim Berners-Lee recieving a knighthood and getting a javascript error.

(Dale’s back from the UK now so my life – including the frequency of my blog entries – should soon get back to normal 🙂

I’ve decided that I have D.I.Y. Stigmata. Not “Do It Yourself” in the sense that I gouge holes in my hands and feet every Easter and run around shouting “Miracle! Miracle!” until I collapse from blood loss, but in the sense that any time I do anything even remotely handyman oriented I end up with bloody cuts gouged into my hands and fingers that I can’t remember inflicting! I mean if you tear a large strip of skin off the base of a fingernail you’d think you’d notice, right? Not carry on blissfully sawing or nailing until you notice the blood everywhere. But no! Not me!

So I figure these mysterious cuts have to be hardware engendered stigamata of some kind. I start doing some woodwork, and spontaneous bleeding wounds open up all over my hands. Probably that dratted gypsy curse again. Hmmm, I should probably write to Fortean Times about it or something.

Actually talking of Fortean Times there was a report I found particularly amusing in this month’s issue (that is to say the May issue, it takes a while to get out here). Well actually there were a few (like the archeologists in Fife who carefully excavated part of a ‘Viking settlement’ only to discover it was a 1940’s era sunken patio and the great deal of excitement over an ‘alien antenna’ deep under the south Atlantic that turned out to be a sponge) but this one was a real stand out. I quote…

Well, I suppose they could have been a satanic dramatic group, but still 😀

Actually it reminds me of a similar story dating from the SRA panic in the UK some years back. A woman accused her neighbour of being a satanist after seeing “strange black robes” and an “inverted cross” through his window and hearing “strange occult music” coming from his house. These turned out to be (in order)…

1. Ecclesiastical garments, her neighbour being the local vicar
2. A kite hanging on a coat hook
3. Holst’s Planets Suite

Honestly! 🙂

Anyway what I’ve been doing handyman-wise is cutting up some sheets of particle board (I’d do my particle board/Particle Man gag here, except I think I did it the last time I mentioned particle board so now it’d just be old). This is in aim of two projects. The first is making a Labarat board – Labarat being a chess like game I’ve invented for my entirely fictional Zurvár language/culture (hey, do I give you grief about your weird hobbies? 🙂 Anyway I’ve made the pieces, now I just need a board to play it on. I figure I’d better actually try a few games before publishing the rules on the Zurvár section of the site – you know, to make sure it actually works. Anyway more news on that when I get the board all painted up (which will take a while).

The second project is a display piece for my Lord of the Rings models. This was inspired by the quite remarkable model of Helms Deep (or more accurately the Hornburg – Helms Deep is the valley, the Hornburg is the fortress – just poke me with a stick if I’m boring you 🙂 the guys at Games Workshop put together as a gaming table. I was planning to do them one better and build my own version that’s more accurate to the novels, but after much messing around with rulers, calculators and Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas of Middle Earth (an excellent book for the Tolkien Fanatic in your life – although try and find an older edition before she went slightly nutty and started including all the stuff from the History of Middle Earth series) I realised that this would require a board at least twice as big as the one I had (not to mention the fact that storing it would be a nightmare). So I scaled my plans down to building part of the fortress, and then scaled them down further when I realised how much work even that would take. So now I’m just going to model the main gate and some of the battlements on a reasonably sized base which will provide a convenient place to stick what models I actually get around to finishing.

On that point I decided to splash out and buy myself another large model (after the one of Sauron Ryan got me for my birthday – which is assembled and undercoated but not painted yet). So I got a cave troll (with spear). He’s all built and looking not bad so far, although the painting is going to take a while. I’ve made a few customisations to him too – mainly because I have a habit of mixing up too much green stuff when filling gaps. So we’ll see how that turns out (not well probably 🙂

I bought said troll on Thursday, which I took off work to go and pay for my plane tickets. Because I forgot that the banks don’t open until 10:00 these days (lazy so-and-so’s) I had an hour to kill over at Morley, so I got my hair cut. I got a somewhat different cut this time around (being sick of looking like some throwback to the sixties), a fairly short short back and sides. It doesn’t look good, but it doesn’t look any worse than usual either so I count that as a win. I may get it cut again before going to the UK, or I may just let it grow out. I haven’t decided yet 🙂

Anyway I eventually got enough money from the bank to go and pay for my tickets, so my plane seat is booked! Scary stuff !

Ummm, was there anything else I was going to mention? Almost certainly. I suppose I could comment on the death of Ray Charles, which I was going to do when he actually died but didn’t have the energy. Ummmm, well it sucks that he’s dead, obviously. And the weird thing is I can’t get used to the idea that he is dead. He always seemed like such a remarkably alive person somehow – for him to be dead just seems ridiculous. Bah 🙁

I guess I’ll sign off with some more songs that have been catching my attention lately, since I still haven’t fixed the music section. Let’s see…

1. Ready to Wear – Felix da Housecat
2. Hair – Lazaro’s Dog
3. Take me to the Hospital – The Faint
4. Nearer than Heaven – The Delays
5. Wicked and Weird – Buck 69
6. Lifting the Veil from the Braile – The Dissociatives
7. Passing of Peace – Catalyst (Coolism Remix)
8. I Love Total Destruction (Soldier in Love) – The Nectarine Number 9
9. Mass Destruction – Faithless

OK, I’m done. Go and make your own entertainment!

PS: What? I missed international kissing day?! There was an international kissing day and I WASN’T INFORMED!?! (need I point out that all the preceding should be read in tone of extreme sarcasm? 🙂

PPS: Kevin Sorbo?!?!? I’m sorry Mark but it’s definitely time for an intervention!

PPPS: I should obviously read Ali’s blog more often 🙂

PPPPS: Get well soon Rebecca!

Me, today….

“Which is why the government’s building a new coal powered fire station!….. You know what I mean!!”

😀

(I could use my new quoteQuote class for that, but that would just be pretentious 🙂

“An Open Letter to Rupert Murdoch” by “A____”: PART TWO

‘Actors taunt me to the point of breaking over and over’ – must have been watching Two and Half Men. Part three coming as soon as my eyes recover from reading all that tiny, tiny, tiny printing!

“An Open Letter to Rupert Murdoch” by “A____”: PART ONE

Someone please get this past ‘Management’ to Mr Murdoch

OPEN LETTER TO RUPERT MURDOCH

Dear Mr Murdoch,

You should know that this whole program was exposed to me by convicted drug dealers N.S. & his son John, employed within your ‘Management’.

Your immediate attention is required when the reputation of Foxtel ‘Management’ becomes so highly compromised. How people like these were employed to ‘influence’ me and my environment, and continued to be employed even with ongoing drug charges, is just unbelievable. I see a problem when this whole “program” has the full cooperation of the police department, yet convicted drug dealers have positions within ‘Management’. And what are they doing now? Unbelievably still trying to get involved in my life. Something is very, very wrong when I change residence, the home phone rings and unbelievably it’s John. After I tell him that I never want anything to do with him (something that I’ve done repeatedly in the past), I ask “How the hell did you get this number?” (there was absolutely no possible way)

He replied “Er… Well…, if you want I can just lose it.”

HE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE JUST SAID

“Well, I know that outside this program there would be no possible way to get this number from just thin air, but here, since my drug dealing father is in ‘Management’ and wants me to appear on screen with you and continue ______g, exceptions are made. Hey, we don’t need to play by any rules whatsoever, we’re in ‘Management’. Just try to forget that my dad actually told you that we’re f_____g your girlfriend, ____y. Hey A____, we needed you to go psycho, so we could get some real bad footage of you. Until then, things were made nice for you, and with a nice personality people were starting to object to you being totally used like this. So we arranged certain scenarios. Remember J.Q____y? The coffee you had 25 minutes before was laced to the max. J.Q____y really did almost run you off the road twice, but you didn’t actually start ramming into him. That’s what we were expecting. So we had him follow you and almost crash into you a third time, and harass you till you totally snapped. You never had a clue that we had you totally drugged, did you? Even we thought we added to (sic) much “_____” when we saw how totally crazy you got. We got some real bad footage of you there, and we actually play it now and again to get people to not like you. And we had actors absolutely everywhere, even so called friends “disrespect / abuse / provoke / assault / publicly beat” you as much as possible, day in, day out. By the way, that footage was never shown, so in the eyes of the public ‘it never happened’. After weeks, and weeks of this we ‘conditioned’ you into the most antisocial person known. So much so that no-one, and I mean no-one, cared about you anymore. Who the hell’s going to help you get out now? (how’s that for ‘strategy’. We couldn’t stop people (that liked you) from trying to get you out, so instead we ‘conditioned’ you so bad that people didn’t like you anymore. Now no-one’s going to help you. Lawsuit avoided.) From all this ‘conditioning’ you ended up saying things… well… people just didn’t know what to think about you? We know what your intention was, you became ‘aware’ and was (sic) trying to get out. No point trying to explain yourself to actors A____. You haven’t done anything we can lock you up permenantly for. But it’s OK because here, with everyone lying to you, you can’t take any legal action anyway. Now would you like us to ‘arrange’ people/’girls’ to ask you for drugs, and we can ‘arrange’ random people to offer/supply you, just like we ‘conditioned’ you? Hey, if the girl wants it, you’ve got to ‘provide’, right? And you make money too. Don’t forget, there are sexy, ‘willing’ girls involved here, just like a long, long time ago. Temptation like that we know you can’t resist. Girls, good times and entertainment. Hey, A____, did you know we’ve fooled everyone around you to think that’s how things are for you still. they have no idea how much you seriously want out. That’s why they all smile for the cameras while you’re desperately trying to inform as many people that you want to start a genuine life, and see your children. And as for the police? Hey, here in Perth we tell the police what to do. We’ve got senior police to ‘facilitate’ this whole program. The drugs, the violence you experience, the forced ‘escorts’ from them, everything. It’s all ‘facilitated’. Now you’re handing out pamphlets. How pathetic A____, if anyone even indicates that we should end this what must be a real nightmare for you, every skeleton in your closet is also in our videotape cabinet, and we selectively show them too. Just 30 seconds of ‘footage’ of you at your very worst and hey, people don’t care what happends (sic) to you. And those very, very few people that actually believe in ‘human rights’, they take a little longer, but in the end… Well let’s face it, you’re still here aren’t you?

A____ realise:

• ‘Your life will go exactly the way we in ‘Management’ dictate it.’
• ‘We’ve told everyone that your (sic) ‘unstable’ so now no-one even takes seriously anything you say (or hand out) whatsoever’
• ‘As for a wife or a genuine family it will never, ever happen’
• ‘You will never ever see your children’
• ‘You and your children will die with everyone lying to you just like thoughtless zoo animals in pretty suroundings’

So stop trying to get out. You’re here for the ‘Corporation’ till death. This is how it’s going to be. You will smile for the cameras, tell jokes, pitch ‘particular’ products, take/deal the drugs, and shut up about Foxtel. There is absolutely no other option for you. None whatsoever. We decide who you can interact with, not you. We will put you on screen every day, (even if you don’t co-operate, we’ll just play nice recordings from the past and no one’s ever going to be any the wiser.) And we’ll keep convincing everyone that this ‘program’ is totally justified. Now shut up and conform to the ‘program’.

And not one single person will ever be honest with you for the rest of your life. This will all continue until you die, just accept it.”

Mr Murdoch I think you realise from what I’m communicating to you, that I am fully aware of my situation.

Find out who employed N.S. & John because whoever did is probably still accepting drug money from them, for them to continue what they do.

Make sure that I’m no longer still subject to harassment from these or any other drug dealers whatsoever?Please do something because because there is something definitely very wrong within ‘Management’.

I sincerely do not want to be part of this program, and I would very much like to discuss a solution to this whole situation.

I have my doubts but still hope this message has reached you unaltered.

Thank you.
Yours sincerely.
A____ ________

‘You and your children will die with everyone lying to you just like thoughtless zoo animals in pretty surroundings’ – Wouldn’t that just look great on a t-shirt? Tune in tomorrow for more on Foxtel, Rupert Murdoch and ‘Management’!

PS: I think I dislocated my jaw today – I was eating a chocolate bar and a particularly large piece of nut filled chocolate got wedged between my upper and lower teeth right at the back of my mouth. I bit down hard to crush it, and my right jaw joint went sort of “click-click” as if popping out then popping back into alignment. It works fine, but it’s been hurting like heck ever since. Typical eh? 🙂