PAAAR-TAY!!!! Or something.

I had a frightening experience last night. I turned on the TV (without checking what channel it was on) and found myself watching a whole bunch of people renovating someone’s garden. The thing is I couldn’t tell if it was Backyard Blitz, Ground Force, Burke’s Backyard, or Renovation Rescue. It was only when Joanna Griggs put in an appearance that I realised it was Auction Squad.

There are way too many renovation shows on Australian TV.

Anyway it’s been a while since I last made an entry, so I suppose I’d better say what I’ve been up to. A fair bit (for me anyway) all things considered. Much of it to do with Michael and Nat getting engaged, and holding a party to celebrate said event last Sunday.

(Oh, by the way the Waifs won at least three Arias, and 28 Days Later is of course a British film – just thought I should clear that up 🙂

So, when we last left off the fascinating saga that is my life I’d taken a Wednesday off work. In retrospect this may not have been a fantastic idea as it meant having to work two nine-and-a-half hour days Thursday and Friday to get all the changes on www.seasideholidays.net done in time for the weekend. As you can imagine this left me fairly wiped out, and instead of going over to the Galleria Saturday morning I slept in and went over in the afternoon instead.

Why you ask? Two reasons. I’d decided to buy some new clothes for the party, and I needed to get an engagement present. For the present I’d conferred with Ryan and decided to go for booze, specifically Wild Turkey which he assured me Michael liked (he on the other hand went for vodka which Nat likes – always trying to impress the ladies is Rybo 😉

So, I had to negotiate a bottle shop. This was more difficult than you might think because…

a) I don’t drink and am therefore unfamiliar with the layout of such places and can’t find anything without a detailed sector to sector search, and…

b) I was wearing my large, bulky backpack in order to carry everything home and have a tendency to forget I’m wearing it and crash it into things, which can get pretty expensive around wine and liquor displays.

There was also the vague worry that the counter staff might (against all common sense) mistake me for a teenager and demand some photo ID, which of course I do not possess. However in the end it all turned out OK. I found the Wild Turkey with little trouble, didn’t knock anything over and didn’t get carded, although the people in front of me did which momentarily raised my stress levels sky high.

Then it was off to K-Mart for clothes. I have to admit that I buy most of my clothes from either K-Mart or Target, fundamentally because they’re cheap (and because I refuse to wear anything with a label as a matter of principle – I’m not paying an extra $120 for some stupid Nike tick on my jacket damnit). Sure, it makes me extremely unfashionable, but I seriously doubt wearing designer clothes would have the slightest affect on my popularity or sex appeal anyway – they’re both well beyond help 😉

I’d decided to go for a new, slightly more sophicated look than my usual black t-shirt and jeans – namely a Johnny Cash/Coffee-Shop-Waiter type of thing. Black trousers, black button up shirt, I even threw a black tie into the basket just for completeness’ sake. Naturally I didn’t try any of this on, as I have an aversion to taking off my clothes in public with only a flimsy half length curtain for privacy. This was to bite me in the backside quite firmly later on…

So, with my shopping done I had an hour and a half to kill before the next bus (the weekend bus service in this city is appalling). So I went for a wander around – to Sanity, the ABC Shop, Dymocks, but was suddenly sucked in by the massive gravitational pull of a discount book sale on the top floor.

Ah! Discount book sales! Is there anything like them to provoke questions like “Do I really need a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle?”. This one was being held in the shell of a closed down sports-clothing store, the irony of which made it even more enjoyable than usual. I spent the next fifteen minutes wandering from table to table glutting myself on rejects and remainders before finally whittling my pile down to $54 worth (not, sadly, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which was very impressive but fairly overpriced for a “discounted” book).

While waiting at the checkout (behind one woman who seemed determined to have a lengthy conversation with the clerk despite the book-shoppers piling up in a holding pattern behind her and her friend who couldn’t remember if she’d got a receipt for her tarot cards so could she please have another one?) I had time to reflect on why some of the books hadn’t sold first time round. Particularly obvious were two of them 50 Ways to Find a Lover – Proven Strategies for Meeting a Partner and No More Head Lice! – A Natural Solution. Someone would have to be pretty desperate to walk up to the counter in a bookstore holding out either of those. Making matters worse they both had extremely bold and colourful cover art – the words “HEAD LICE” virtually jumped off the cardboard – so you couldn’t just conceal them in a pile of other books and hope the clerk wouldn’t notice. Honestly, who designs these things?

So, heavily weighted down with clothes, books and alcohol I staggered off to find somewhere to sit, which isn’t easy since Westfield ripped out most of the benches and replaced them with body piercing booths, feng shui vendors and nut sellers when they took over the Galleria a few years back. I eventually found one they’d missed (probably because it was concealed behind a table loaded down with discount John Wayne videos) and spent the next half hour flicking through my new acquisitions before heading over to the bus station.

On arrival back home I went to try on my new ultra-cool clothes, which is where I ran into problems. The shirt was fine – fit like a very loose glove – but the trousers… Embarrassment precludes me from mentioning my actual trouser size, but these turned out to be a full 15 centimetres too small, which was odd since in the store they were hanging from a coathanger clearly marked as being my size. I ranted and raved about the infernal incompetence of K-Mart employees for a bit (hopefully the bogans were in downstairs and got a taste of their own medicine) but eventually got tired and watched some TV instead.

Luckily I did have another pair of black trousers that I could wear, even if they were a bit shorter in the legs than I like, so it wasn’t as big a disaster as it could have been. But I’m never going to trust K-Mart again!

At least not on their sizing.

So, Sunday rolled around. I got all dressed in my black attire and examining myself in the bedroom mirror thought I looked quite adequate (when it comes to looking cool, stylish or attractive ‘adequate’ is about the best I can hope for :). I wrapped up the Wild Turkey and waited for my lift to arrive. I’d been fairly smart all up and managed to get a lift with Mum up to Michael’s place in the valley via an art exhibition in Mundaring – curated by Travis and featuring my brother Andrew, currently living it up in Vegas. There was a bit of confusion actually finding Michael’s place because I haven’t been there for several years, and not only had a large limestone wall been built around the house, concealing it from the road, but they’d abandoned said house (at the front of the property) and built a fancy new one down back, above the river (it’s pretty fantastic, only one storey but with fantastic views up and down the river and across the fields all the way to the DOLA offices in Midland).

Fabian was already there, and Ryan arrived soon afterwards (bearing vodka and cranberry juice – most of which he was to consume himself as the afternoon wore on). So we settled down at a table with Fabian’s folks and a ridiculous quantity of snack food, most of which I was to consume as the afternoon wore on 😉

As parties go (and keep in mind that as a Geek I have a natural aversion to the things) it was pretty good. The weather was fantastic (once I changed chairs out of the sun anyway), the music was good and the food was laid on in quantities sufficient to sate a small force of invading visigoths (they’d killed and spit roasted two whole sheep and done in at least one entire flock of garlic breads). The flies were a bit of a problem, but that’s just the time of year and couldn’t really be helped.

Ryan (as usual) provided much of the entertainment, once sufficiently lubricated. His first comedic triumph was to suggest that Nat resembles Joanna Lumley. This provoked much ribbing, although to be fair there are some noticeable similarities. They’re both women for instance, and they’re both tall. Not long afterwards he mistook Don’t Mug Yourself by the Streets for 77% by the Herd (understandable since 77% is angry political hip-hop where Don’t mug Yourself is poppy, British, ‘Geeza’ hip-hop – they’re both hip hop you see 🙂

After some small scale melodrama involving people stealing his chair whenever he went to get another drink (which was actually true, people did keep stealing it) he continued by comparing Michael to comedian Paul McDermott. This wasn’t as funny as it could have been since (particularly with Michael’s current haircut) there is a resemblance, he really should have compared him to Mikey Robins instead. The moment was saved however by Fabian’s dad (who was matching Ryan’s vodkas two for one with beers) stepping in to say he though he’d meant cricketer Craig McDermott.

The best was definitely saved for last though. When the conversation strayed onto the problems facing smokers trying to quit Ryan suggested that the real addictive feature of cigarettes wasn’t so much the nicotine, but the ‘power to hold fire in your hand’ and the ability ‘to blow smoke out your nose’. This was widely regarded as a tour de force, particularly when he started making demonstrative hand gestures. “You see, I’m holding fire in my hand” – holding up imaginary cigarette then taking a deep puff – “And now I’m blowing smoke out my nose” – exhaling heavily through nostrils and waggling fingers to indicate smoke. Fabian’s dad’s description of a boab tree as “a big fat trunk with bugger-all on top” just couldn’t compare.

So, a good time (and obscenely rich mud-cake) was had by all. I got a lift down to the railway station with Fabian (who managed to make about the only wrong turn possible on the five minute drive, seriously confusing Ryan who was following on his motorcycle despite the ridiculous quantity of vodka he’d consumed) and caught the train back home.

So that was my weekend. Last weekend.

Since then I haven’t been doing much. A fair slab of time over the last few nights has been spent recoding the Wyrmlog – again. The new version may or may not be up and running as you’re reading this (if everything is majorly messed up then it’s a fair bet it is active and I’ve screwed something up) depending on how active I’m feeling after writing this epic *g*. I’ve done my best to do away with tables and convert everything to CSS, since I figured out how to get Doctypes working properly while wrestling with the Dyslexia-SPELD website design this week. It’s amazing how easy CSS layout is once the browsers actually agree where to put borders and padding, made my job a whole lot easier I can tell you! Anyway, Wyrmlog version 3.0 should load faster and look slightly better than it’s predecessor, as long as you’re using version 6 browsers (and if you’re not, why not? Are you some kind of robot? And if so, what kind of powers do you have?).

As well as that I’ve been wasting a bit of time analysing the examples of the Dalek language detailed in Ben Aaronovitch’s Remembrance of the Daleks and putting together a webpage on such subject (it was obviously a mistake to start watching those re-runs of Doctor Who – my dormant fandom is suddenly becoming active again). I’ll probably get it finished sometime this weekend and upload it, thus making myself appear even more of a Geek to anyone who stumbles over this site 🙂

Finally, I suppose I’d better post that list of books from Helen’s and Ali’s blogs. The ones I’ve read are in italics…

Top 21:
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

22-100:
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

Damn that’s embarrassing, only 25. And a good slab of them kid’s books. Why couldn’t I have read Ulysses when I was eight instead of The Magic Faraway Tree? That’d look far more impressive 🙂

Anyway, better go. Got cleaning to do. And cooking. Sooner I win the lottery and can live a life of indulgent luxury the better!

Intransigent DNA Influenced Cute Woman of the Week: The redheaded suspect who got killed halfway through this week’s episode of CSI. Who cares if she arranged for a murder, she was pretty! ;-D

Rambling…

You know it’s bad enough that Delta Goodrem was nominated for eight ARIAs, let alone that she won seven of them! For crying out loud! >:-|

Although it’s not all bad news from the ARIAs, the Waifs picked up two, so that’s OK then 🙂

Anyway I had today off work, yey! You see my brother Andrew flew off to Vegas last night at some ungodly hour, and since I intended to go out to the airport to see him off I arranged to have today off, so I could sleep. Then at the last minute he informed mum and dad that he didn’t want anyone to see him off because he hates airport goodbyes. So I didn’t need to sleep, or go to work, which is great. If only every day could be like this!

Why is he off to Vegas you ask? Two of his friends are getting married there. By an Elvis impersonator. Which is kind of cool in a weird American movie way. Actually Mark (ie Buster Stiggs, who’s still working with us) wondered if it’s the same Elvis impersonator who married one of his friends from Midnight Oil* when I brought the subject up. Personally I doubt it. It’s a big city after all. With lots of Elivises (Elvii?). Anyway I almost asked Andrew to say hi to Grissom for me, but I didn’t because…

a) He’d have no idea what I was talking about.
b) If I went to the trouble of explaining the reference, he’d think it was stupid.
c) He’d be right 🙂

So, what did I do with my day off? I spent most of the morning re-vamping a post-apocalyptic play by mail game I knocked up a few years ago and which some of the guys expressed an interest in playing some months back. Basically you control a small number of people and, well basically just have to survive after most of the world’s population have perished in a devestating plague. Very 28 Days Later. I’m so way ahead of Hollywood that it’s scary 🙂

Then I did some long overdue cleaning up, including the bathroom, where the sink is still blocked. It’s actually draining now, after the last vicious plungering I gave it, but I don’t know how long that’s going to last. Then I went across the road and bought some bread. So exciting this life of mine!

Pleasingly (to change subject completely) it looks as if the powers that be have finally decided to do something about the heritage-listed art-deco building next door, which is in the process of being slowly destroyed by vandals and the weather. Well, they haven’t done anything about the weather (not much you could do apart from sealing it in a perspex dome or something), but they have erected a tall metal fence (nicely topped with barbed wire) around it. They put up the first bit (which just ran along the street front) on Monday. I thought this was a bit dodgy personally as you could still just walk through the gate, but now they’ve finished the job and extended it right around the building. So, hopefully this means something is going to be done about restoring the place. Either that or they’re going to demolish it. Hopefully the former.

A Fence! Hooray!
Here’s a photo I took on Tuesday (look at that barbed wire gleam!).

Helen I see is taking the opportunity to cook a caserole because she and Ali are having people round. I know exactly the problem she’s refering to, although I tend to run into it with Dolmio Pasta Bake. This, for those not in the know, is a range of pasta sauces you can buy at your local supermarket. You cook up some pasta, stick it in a caserole dish, pour on the sauce, then bake it in the oven for fifteen minutes or so. Most of the flavours are pretty good (although avoid the cheese and onion) but the jars are huge. So if you live alone and you cook it, you’re eating pasta bake for the next three days. Which is extremely annoying. I usually eat it for two days, then get so fed up with it that the final portion sits in the fridge until it goes off, and then I feel all guilty. *sigh*

OK, I’m gonna go now. It’s time for Wheel!! Of!! Fortune!!!

(Just kidding 🙂

Intransigent DNA Influenced Cute Woman of the Week: That girl with the black turtle neck and Lisa Loeb-style glasses on the train last Thursday 😉

PS: Elliot Smith is dead!?! Since when?? :((

I don’t wanna be a terrorist!!

Well that was an eventful weekend. I not only saw Pirates of the Carribean (cool film by the way, Johnny Depp is hilarious and Orlando Bloom is surprisingly non-annoying:), but tried to do some cartography (which was defeated by the fact that my GPS isn’t great on elevations) and almost got arrested for trying to smuggle a pocket knife into the airport.

Well OK, I wasn’t almost arrested, just looked at very sternly. And I wasn’t trying to smuggle it in, I just forgot it was in my backpack. But I still had to take off my belt and shoes and get glared at, which was fairly embarrassing. Hmmmm.

(We were there to pick up the aunts by the way, they were getting back from their QEII trip)

That’s about all I’ve got to say 🙂

Kebronal tagas mon dolfin holbeshikla!

Well, the server was down all of last night. How about that then?

Anyway yesterday I made a momentous discovery. The Red Orchid does home delivery!!!

WOO-HOO!!!

Naturally I decided to take advantage of this fact (mainly because I couldn’t be bothered cooking anything) and ordered myself up a serve of chicken and crab spring rolls, and squid with cashew nuts. Oh, and a serve of deep fried squid to bring the order up to the $20 delivery threshold.

The squid – both serves – was of course great. The spring rolls on the other hand – well, pretty dissapointing. Dry and unpalatable would be the best description. Naturally I ate them (I paid for them damnit!) but I don’t know if I’ll be ordering them again. I’ll just get the deep fried squid instead 🙂

In other news I’ve decided to follow Helen’s lead and establish my own Nation State (several months late – I don’t even know if her one is still running :). Mine is the Federation of Zurvar Areana. Our motto is “Kebronal tagas mon dolfin holbeshikla” which is of course Zurvar for “On condition it doesn’t frighten the Dolphins”. So far I’ve decided that voting shouldn’t be compulsory, and to start a space program. Could be kind of fun. For a while 😀

Hmmm, nothing else to report. I’ll shut up now 🙂

Nightime Excursions

Friday Night: The first really warm night of the year, combined with removalists working late into the evening. Result? Not enough sleep.

Saturday Night: Not quite as warm, but pretty humid. Also a full moon riding high and shining through the blinds. Result? Not enough sleep.

Sunday Night: A cold rainy day, with thick cloud cover. Low temperatures, no moon, no removalists. So what happens? A car thief being pursued by the cops decides to try to ram them – right outside the building. So the cops open fire – also right outside the building. So then there’s some kind of collision – again right outside the building. Result? Nowhere near enough sleep.

GAH!!

It is an Ex-Pigeon!

Urrgh, that was unpleasant.

There’s been a faint but unmistakably nasty smell hovering around here for the last few days. Normally I’d attribute this to the bin needing emptying, but this particular miasma seemed to be strongest in the second bedroom (which is a good distance away from said bin). It only occured to me today to have a look out on the balcony.

The smell was indeed coming from the balcony. Specifically from a very deceased pigeon which had decided to ring down the curtain and join the choir invisible just outside the second bedroom window. By the looks of things several days ago.

Ack.

Luckily by some fluke of fate I happened to have all the equipment necessary to deal with this situation right at hand. Namely a pair of heavy duty, lined rubber gloves, a painter’s facemask, plenty of plastic bags and a spray can of Glen 20 hospital grade disinfectant. So I suited up (so to speak) and dealt with my ex-pigeon visitor in a highly efficient manner. He now rests in peace, bereft of life in several plastic bags at the bottom of the bin in the rubbish room, and the balcony (and most of the rest of the flat to be honest) smells nicely of disinfectant.

Germ phobic – Me? 🙂

In other second bedroom news, the Bed of Doom is no more! Or at least it’s no more at this address. Dom came around on Saturday and we disassembled it for transport to South Fremantle where he and Rebecca have found an apparently fantastic place to rent (which doesn’t mind the cats). The whole disassembly process went fairly smoothly, and we managed to get it down to the trailer without the caretakers wailaying us for the heinous crime of moving furniture on a weekend. We also managed to get it past the bogans downstairs without incidnent, although they did apparently comment on the quality of the wood. Dom’s theory is that they were interested in burning it.

And speaking of the bogans, they had a major falling out the other night. Not their usual late night screaming match, but a late night sobbing/swearing fest in the carpark. Sobbing by her, swearing by him. It was hard to figure out exactly what was going on, but apparently he was pretty upset with something she’d done. Sufficiently upset in fact to weave the f-word (and variations thereof) multiple times into every single sentance. “Don’t you f****** tell f****** me you’re f****** sorry for f****** f***’s sake because it’s f****** your f****** own f****** fault, f***!!!” for instance, all backed up by her sobbed apologies and professions of love. I did feel kind of sorry for her – whatever she’s done – but I must admit the thought that might be a relationship breaker for them was a somewhat pleasant one. If they have split up then there’ll be no more screaming competitions at 3:00 in the morning. Ah bliss!

Finally, Helen has suggested that the third of the frightening real estate men bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain Armin Shimerman. The truly frightening thing is that he does!! 🙂

Intransigent DNA Influenced Cute Woman of the Week: That Kelly girl who got kicked off Australian Idol. I have never watched an epsiode of that show in my life and I never intend to, but wow, she’s cute. Actually she kind of resembles Alison Mack now I think about it. *sigh* I’m so predictable 🙂

PS: I remember this show! I remember this show! 🙂

Bloody Uppity Genes!

You know it occurs to me that I’ve been mentioning a lot of “cute” women in my posts lately. The waitress at La Porcetta, the accountant over at West Tax, and probably others that I thought about mentioning, and then stopped myself from. While it’s possible that there has suddenly been a massive increase in the number of attractive young women wandering around Perth a much more likely explanation occured to me while watching a particularly fetching comedienne on Rove Live the other week. I reckon it’s down to genetics.

Human beings are (biologically speaking) only meant to live to about the age of 30. In the paleolithic for instance, the average life expectancy was around 28-34. In the Roman Empire the commoners only lived to about 22-25 (the upper classes were another matter entirely). Now, I’m twenty seven and a half (well, twenty seven point six six six continued to be exact) and have never even had the faintest hint of a relationship. So, I reckon my genes are getting itchy.

The problem with evolution is that it takes a long time to happen. It’s only in the last few centuries that better health care and nutrition have allowed us humans to have long lifespans. Our genes are yet to adapt to the fact that we (in the western world at any rate) now tend to live into our seventies. As far as they’re concerned if we don’t pass them on to the next generation before the age of 30, they’ve had it. So, my genes have taken a good look at my pathetically single life and are doing the DNA equivilant of screaming “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!?!?!???!??!!” – the practical upshot of which is that I’m suddenly perceiving any even halfway attractive woman that comes my way as the girl of my dreams.

Well – if my genome thinks it can push me around like that, it’s got another think coming! I’m not going to start making life decisions based on the opinions of a bunch of uppity little nucleic acids! They can shut up and crawl back into their chromosones as far as I’m concerned. I’m the one in charge of this organism damnit!

Right, with that insanity out of the way, onto other business 🙂

Email. I got a great email today. Or at least an email with a great subject line. Imagine my delight when I opened my inbox at work to find – hidden amongst all the spam – an email promising ‘Wight Loss’.

I just about fell out of my chair.

Predictably it turned out to be nothing but a misspelled spam promoting yet another miracle weight loss system, but I was momentarily distracted by the concept that someone (possibly tom@bombadil.com 🙂 was promoting their services to help rid subscribers of those unsightly undead spirits of Angmar just in time for summer. Oh well, I can dream 😉

In closing I should mention that there was a documentary about the murder of Julius Caesar on the ABC last night which concluded (among other things) that he suffered from temporal lobe epilesy. Now, what I want to know is did Caesar ever reported being abducted by aliens? ;-D

(Believe me, if you read Fortean Times you’d be laughing yourself stupid at that!)

(OK, maybe not stupid *g*)

Lord Preserve us from Batfink!

Good Lord I hate Batfink.

What is Batfink you ask? It’s some dark-ages five-minute-an-epsiode cartoon series the ABC have dug up out of their vaults and put on just before Dr Who. It seems to be a parody of the Adam West Batman series – a really bad parody. A bad, unfunny, offensively racist parody.

The hero is some kind of humanoid bat. Where this freak of biological science came from is never actually explained. His sidekick is a buck-toothed funny-voiced Asian man named “Karate”, who’s attempts at both heroism and humour consistantly fall flat. Naturally they live in a cave … (I have to go off on a tangent here and quote one of my favourite lines from The Drew Carey Show – “Batman’s car has a morals clause? He kept a young boy in a cave!” *grin* OK back to complaining about BatFink).

Every single episode features pretty much the same plot. Some unlikely criminal mastermind commits some insanely unlikely crime. We cut to Batfink’s “split-level” cave where he and Karate engage in some spectacularly dull and unfunny dialogue. Then the Police Chief (who looks so like Elmer Fudd I’m surprised the animators weren’t sued by Warner Brothers) calls them up on “the hotline” and lisps the details to them. Batfink orders Karate to get the “Batilac” a volkwagon beatle with really lame wings on the back, and they go driving around for no obvious reason.

Eventually they reach the crime scene where Batfink uses his “Supersonic Sonar Radar” to find the bad guys (this is apparently a sentient animated ‘beep’ that does all his work for him). Once the beep returns and the bad guys are located Batfink and Karate head off to catch them, only to be trapped in some patently stupid fashion. Karate then steps up to free them using his karate. Naturaly as a simple oriental he fails, and it’s up to Batfink to release them, usually by use of his “wings of steel”. Once free they locate the evil doers again who shoot at them. Batfink then delivers the line that any sane viewer soon comes to dread…

Your bullets cannot harm me! My wings are like a Shield of Steel!

The epsiode soon wraps up in some tired fashion (usually involving Karate smashing down a door which lands on top of Batfink temporarily crushing him), and closes with a really lame visual gag, which the entire cast laughs at as if it was Kreskin*No, ‘Kreskin’ doesn’t make any kind of sense in this context, but c’mon, it sounds good 🙂.

Arghh!! Is the ABC that strapped for content?? Bah!

Close Bitnami banner
Bitnami