Wyrmlog

Could this war get any more ridiculous?

And so it looks like the war is begining. And of course John Howard is scuttling along in George Dubya’s shadow, nodding and drooling like the lab assistant in a Frankenstein film. “Yes master! Of course master! Whatever you say master! slobber“.

Anyone who thinks this war isn’t about oil is being naive. Oh sure it could be about liberating the Iraqi people – but in that case why didn’t the powers that be liberate them years ago? And it could be about stopping Iraq from supplying Al Qaida – except no one has actually shown any evidence to suggest that Iraq does supply Al Qaida. And maybe it could be about weapons of mass destruction – but in that case you’ve got to wonder about a country with the world’s largest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction ordering other countries that may not even have them to disarm. This is all about oil, and how the petroleum worshiping, environmentaly dismissive, “we won’t play nicely with the UN unless we can set the rules” Bush administration can get its hands on as much of it as possible.

And why is little Johnny Howard so enthusiastic about it all? Free trade. It can hardly be a coincidence that Australia is negotiating a free trade agreement with the States, and that they’ve been rather reluctant to come to the party until recently. Oh Johnny’s going on about our international responsibilities and how he thinks this is best for our national security, but honestly – how can a small, comparatively poor nation on the other side of the planet be any kind of serious threat to Australia? Anyone with a brain in their head can tell that it’s exactly the opposite – an attack on Iraq will just provide fuel for terrorism, specifically terrorism against the US, the UK and us. It’s all political game playing, and ordinary citizens are in the firing line if it all goes wrong, which it almost certainly will.

Good luck to everyone. The ordinary citizens of the United States and UK, my friends in both countries, everyone here in Australia and most of all the women and children of Iraq, the people who always suffer the most from warfare, no matter how much the politicians say they’re going to try and ‘minimise’ civilian casualties. Heads down everyone, this could all turn very nasty indeed 🙁

PS: On a final note, during the last Gulf War the Allied Forces bombed and blew up numerous museums in Baghdad – destorying priceless artifacts – and ran a specialty line in dropping “bunker-busting” bombs on ancient mesopotamian ruins because their “specialists” couldn’t tell the difference between an underground bunker and a Babylonian ziggurat in a satellite photograph. How much more of the collective archeological heritage of humanity is going to get wasted this time round?

Busy busy busy.

Which is again why I haven’t been blogging. Or emailing people. Which is consuming me with guilt, so everyone (Ali in particular) should expect at least something over the next few days. Although Rebecca is staying for a few days, so we’ll see what I have time for.

Anyway, a few quotes I found amusing…

From a Spam – Australia’s very own Ultimate Safe is a totally new concept in personal, relocatable high security. The Ultimate Safe is virtually indestructible, being able to withstand incredible abuse – even attacks with a hammer!

Surely not attacks with a hammer!?! Good Lord! I mean – it must be made of metal or something!! Wow!!!! What a breakthrough!!! 😉

From our esteemed Foreign Minister Alexander Downer – Australians in Iraq acting as human shields have made their protest clear but it is now time to come home.

Kind of missing the point of human shields there Alex, doncha think?

On a completely different subject if you’re looking for a laugh, check this out. It’s the “Paranormal Gallery” section of the About.com paranormal site. Image after image after image of processing faults, overexposures, simulcras, reflections, jpeg compression artifacts, dusty lenses and wobbly-camera-hand-syndrome induced light streaks that people are convinced show spirits, demons, angels, “orbs” and all sorts of other paranormal weirdness. Really makes you wish that people would learn a bit more about how cameras and the human eye/visual cortex actually work eh? Having looked through the entire archive I can only find four images that defy photographic explanation and look worthy of further investigation.

Best quote – “When I got the picture developed, there was an orange and black bolt of fire-looking thing. It seemed to be striking my younger sister in the head. This was not there when I took the picture.” No! Surely not!? 😀

Finally, there’s a reporter for the ABC News called Lisa Millar. I find this very amusing 😉

Ah, another long break between entries. I could make all sorts of excuses, but honestly I just haven’t felt like writing. I put it down to a heady mixture of depression at being yet another year older, and alternating boredom (at having nothing to do) and panic (at suddenly having way too much to do) at work. That kind of thing can wear even the most enthusiastic blogger down, let me tell you. And I’m hardly enthusiastic about anything these days 🙂

But things have worked out well today, because we’ve got an immune system impaired kid on work experience, and I seem to have come down with a mild cold (in the middle of a heat wave, typical me). Normally I’d down a handful of demazin, panadol and Allen’s Butter Menthols and just get on with it, but since this kid (the son of a major client) is hanging around the office, it wouldn’t be a good idea. So I’m taking a day off. Joy! 🙂

Oh yeah, another reason I haven’t been blogging. The heat. Hottest March on record so far. Saturday was about 40, Sunday the same and Monday, well. I went across the street to get some lunch at about 12:00 and couldn’t believe how hot it was. There was a wind gusting down Hampden road that felt like it was coming out of an oven – literally. It was just like the blast of heat you get when you open the door to check on your crumbed chicken breast. When I got home and checked the news it turned out that it was the hottest day in four years, at just over 42 degrees. Yikes! Tuesday was mildly better, at 38 or so but very humid, and today has been a positively freezing 29.

So yeah, with those kind of temperatures who can be bothered writing? It’s a struggle not to just lie on the floor sweating. Ack! I’ve been living beneath my evaporative air cooler – in fact it’s entirely likely my cough is a symptom of incipient legionaires disease.

Anyway, the major event of the last few weeks was my 27th birthday. I went over to Mum and Dad’s for a family dinner. I could harp on about that, but all you really want to know about is what I got isn’t it? 🙂 OK, from Mum and Dad one of those Map Mystery jigsaw puzzle things, which looks really interesting if I ever actually have the time or space to assemble it. From Andrew and Travis a copy of Californication, which I’ve been meaning to get my hands on for like years. From the aunts a box of chocolates, a bottle of champagne (they got me champagne for Christmas as well, they seem to have terrible trouble remembering that I don’t actually drink) and $25 (which I’ve already blown by ordering an extremely stupid card game I’ve had my eye on for some time from good old Warehouse 23 :). So not a bad night presents-wise.

Since then I’ve got a wall clock from my Aunt in the UK, and a DVD copy of Memento from Rebecca, which rocks because I’ve been meaning to see it for ages (you know, the one where Guy Pearce can’t remember anything so the entire movie runs backwards – or something :). I might watch it this afternoon actually if I run out of things to do. Which is unlikely since I have to clean the bathroom. *sigh*

Hmmm, apart from all that nothing much has been going on. Well, apart from nightmares at work building this site. No, your connection hasn’t dropped out, it’s just a really really crap site that looks like an accident in a metal foundry and takes forever to download. And (not wanting to sound pompous and no doubt failing miserably) I’m good at making sites download fast (when I want to 🙂 so you can get some idea of just how crap the design of this monstrosity is. Happily the designer who forced it on us has since gone out of business – you can see why 🙂

OK, gonna go now.

PS:What the????????????

Readers of the UK’s ubiquitous rock magazine NME have voted the Pixies’ Doolittle as the second greatest album of all time!

Damn straight 🙂

Feeling old and depressed (turned 27 on Friday – only 3 years to 30, gah!) and have hence retreated to my cave. This happens every year, I’ll be fine in a few days 🙂

Over and out.

Well, with the exception of yesterday’s rant it’s been a while between entries. I put this down to two factors. Number one is the fact that Dale is back from Rottnest and making us actually work which leaves me too tired to make entries during the week. The second is that I had a very busy weekend last week, which prevented me from making an entry on Saturday or Sunday. But this weekend has been fairly relaxing (with the exception of a major clean-up which I’m still in the throes of), and so here I am.

The main reason for the business (in the old sense of the word busy-ness, don’t tell me you never learn anything reading this blog!) was Katie’s birthday. Saturday was spent finding a present for her (I’m going to quote fairly extensively from an email I wrote to Ali yesterday now, not something I usually do but why write the same thing twice? 🙂

The first order of business was to get some money to buy the present with. I usually get paid in bank cheques, which I can instantly cash at the bank down the road from work, so I do most of my buying of things with cash – my bank accounts are things I use for paying bills and buying online. But as that week Dale had been away and couldn’t sign the cheque, I’d been paid with direct deposit into my Bendigo Bank account. This was fine, except it meant that I had to go to Bayswater to get my hands on any of it (OK, I could go to an affiliated ATM or buy stuff by EFTPOS, but then I’d have to pay transaction fees and have to remember my PIN number, not things I can really be bothered with). I also had to pay my rent, another thing I usually do with cash but couldn’t that week.

So I caught the bus to Bayswater, and arrived outside the bank about 8:45, at which pointI remembered it didn’t open until 9:00. Drat.

So I sat outside and tried to figure out what I’d get Katie. Andrew (my brother for those who came in late) had mentioned she’s learning Italian and so suggested I get something along those lines. I had no idea what though. Just as the bank opened I decided that I’d have a much better chance of finding something in the City rather than the Morley Galleria (where I was initially heading), so altered my plans accordingly.

My banking business went rather smoothly (with the exception that the teller obviously thought I was insane for getting them to transfer money for rent just once) and I caught the same bus back in the opposite direction, which dumped me quite effectively in Northbridge. I walked across into the city and headed for the discount book stores in the hopes of finding something “Italian”.

However on the way down to Murray street mall I passed the new “Crazy Clarke’s” next to Myer. I probably don’t have to explain that “Crazy Clarke’s” is a discount store (discount stores are always run by insane people, reasonable people set up antique stores instead). I would have walked straight on past but sitting in the window was a framed print of M.C.Escher’s Hand met spiegelende bol. Escher is my favourite graphic artist and I’d been intending to get some prints of his work for ages, so against my better judgment I went in to see if they had a copy of Dag en Nacht.

They didn’t. Or at least they may have but there were about four hundred framed prints randomly piled on the shelves and I wasn’t prepared to search through them all. I was going to leave empty handed, but the only way out was through the checkout and I’m always paranoid that if I try to slip through a checkout without buying something I’ll be arrested as a shoplifter (hey, I don’t mock your neuroses! 😉 so I decided I might as well buy the print anyway. Which I did. Now I’ve just got to find somewhere to hang it.

Anyway then I hit the discount bookstores. The first one, in the old bank at the east end of Murray street mall didn’t contain anything in the least bit Italian, but it did contain a lot of maps and books on vexillology, and I only managed to escape with some of my money intact by a supreme effort of will (I still bought four of them though :).

Next stop was the store in the old Boanes building at the other end of the mall. Unfortunately it had completely vanished, which left me rather annoyed as I’d managed to find a lot of bargains there over the last few years. This left only one discount bookstore in the city for me to try and find something Italian in. The one in the old Angus & Robertson’s on Hay Street. So I headed up through Picadilly Arcade and hung a left.

Much to my continued annoyance, this one had shut down too. I prowled up and down the mall a few times to see if any new stores had opened up, but none had. So, admitting defeat discount-wise I changed course to the new Angus & Robertson’s back on Murray Street.

On the way however I spotted the city branch of Elisabeth’s Second Hand bookstores. So I dashed across the road (neatly dodging a large truck) and started browsing.

Nearly inevitably I didn’t find anything Italian. But I did find a copy of Thor Heyardhal’s Aku-Aku which I’d been looking for for years, and a 1923 guidebook to Torquay and South Devon, which I bought because it was cheap and would give me something to talk to Ali about *g*.

So then it was on to Angus and Robertson’s. I ended up buying a quite interesting illustrated guidebook to Italy, on the basis that Katie might visit the place when she’s learnt the language well enough, and a gift voucher on the basis that she might not and the guidebook therefore wouldn’t be a very good gift. Then I went across to Forrest Place to join in the anti-war rally which I’d heard about on the radio they were playing in Crazy Clarke’s.

OK, I’m going to break for some politics here. Our esteemed Prime Minister John Winston Howard is currently completely kow-towing to George Dubya and promising him anything he wants in regards to Iraq. He’s dispatched a whole load of our troops to the Persian Gulf, without a debate on the issue in Parliament, and despite the fact that about 60% of the population don’t want us involved in a war with Iraq without a UN mandate, and about 20% don’t want us involved at all. In common with the rest of the world there were vast protests around the country that weekend (100,000 in Melbourne for instance, the largest since Vietnam) and Saturday was Perth’s turn. In the end about 10,000 turned out here in Perth, the largest protest in over 30 years and not bad for a sprawling city of only two million.

Oh, and John Howard’s reaction to all these protests? First, in complete defiance of theevidence of his own eyes he said that he “doesn’t think the people have made up theirminds about the issue yet”, and then he followed that up by condemning the protesters foroffering “comfort” to Saddam Hussein. Yes. Well.

Anyway I attended the rally. It wasn’t too bad. The speeches went on a bit long, particularly from a member of the Kurdish association who apparently decided to give us a full history of the Middle East since world war one (his particular beef was a conspiracy theory that the ‘Imperialistic Powers’ deliberately divided the region up in such a way as to cause the current conflict and allow them to seize all the oil. Sorry but I don’t buy that. The Imperialistic powers weren’t that a) smart or b) patient. They deliberately divided the region up in such a way as to cause conflict right away so they could seize the oil then – the Arabs getting uppity, throwing them out and creating independent nations was an unplanned complication). The best speaker was easily the leader of the Socialist Alliance who summed up the issues quickly and concisely and who’s oratory was so good that he totally got the crowd on side. He managed to get the biggest cheer of the whole event by saying “we have to tell the international community that the Howard Government does not represent the wishes of the Australian people in this issue!”, which doesn’t sound like much, but it took about two minutes to quiet the crowd down.

As I said the speeches did go on a bit long, but at the Murray street end of Forrest Place they were made bearable by a bunch of musicians who started up before they were all finished. First of all a rogue trumpeter started randomly blaring out a Spanish fanfare that had the crowd starting around in concern that Zorro might be swinging down on us on a rope. Then a bunch of drummers started up and, well, ten or so hyperactive drummers with everything from bongos to bases pounding out really catchy rhythms at ear pounding levels will always catch a crowds’ interest more than some guy dissecting the Catholic doctrine of “just warfare” on a stage that 90% of them can’t even see.

Not long after this the march began. They were only marching around the city block, which seemed a bit weak really, you’d expect a march on Parliament at least. I declined to take part I’m afraid – it was a hot day, I was carrying far too many books in my backpack, and my Escher print was proving a bit of a hazard in the stationary crowd – if I’d tried to march with it I probably would have taken someone’s eye out. So I caught a train home instead.

Sunday was spent preparing for the party, washing and ironing clothes, wrapping the present and so on. Happily the event was taking place at a Café/Restaurant in Mount Lawley, only twenty minutes or so walk away, so transport wasn’t a problem. I walked up there on time and managed to be about the third person to arrive. Katie loved the book (or at least claimed to, which is the main thing 🙂 and overall things went pretty well. I had a very tolerable time, which is a quite acceptable outcome for a person who’s not really in to socialising, particularly with a bunch of people I don’t really know.

In fact things went very well because I actually managed to meet this great girl named Clare. She was bright, and witty and flamboyant and seriously into Monty Python (to the extent of knowing exactly which skits were on exactly which video tape) and just really fun and well, frankly, very very attractive. She also kept breaking into spontaneous song (with a really good voice, apparently she’s a drama student) for no reason at all, something that I think there should be a lot more of in the world (chiefly because it would mean I could do it too 🙂

(And OK, to be honest there was a reason she kept breaking spontaneously into song – she’d had a couple of vodka shooters before coming, but still 🙂

Anyway she basically had me completely enchanted for the entire evening. There was only one problem – she was there with her boyfriend (c’mon, you mean you didn’t see that coming? ;-). He was also witty and bright and flamboyant and into Monty Python and breaking into spontaneous song for no reason at all. Frankly the two of them were so obviously meant for each other that even if I was the kind of person with the skills (not to mention complete lack of scruples 🙂 to consider breaking them up, I wouldn’t do it because to do so would be going against the forces of nature. So I just enjoyed her performance and concentrated on my stuffed tiger prawns instead.

So, all in all not a bad evening.

Anyway that’s why I haven’t written anything in a while. I’ll probably write some more over the next few days responding to things other people have said in their blogs. Maybe 🙂

As the KLF say – Over and Out!

OK, please bear with me while I vent my spleen 🙂

From the GTP Guestbook…

We are not the ‘Mickey Mouse’ outfit here. The Mickey Mouse outfit is [client], who rather than apologising to the customer and trying to find what actually went wrong, just fobbed them off with a completely bull**** explanation (an explanation putting all of the blame on us by the way) and then didn’t even have the courtesy to inform us of it. And then the customer, rather than contact us to complain, goes and puts this message in our guestbook – making us look like a ‘Mickey Mouse outfit’ for anyone passing by.

We did not ‘not pass the order on to them’. The system is completely automated. An order is placed, it goes into the order table and is there for the client to process. An email is sent to the client, telling them there’s a new order, and just in case that email gets lost for some reason, an additional email is sent to them each day the order remains unprocessed. And even if every single email gets lost somehow, all the client has to do is put aside two minutes every morning to go and check their orders, something that you’d think someone who was serious about running a web-based business would be doing anyway.

If there’s any ‘Mickey Mouse’ outfit involved, it’s [client]. They bought the company off of the original owner (who was brilliant by the way, he ran the website properly, had regular promotions and competitions and was increasing his profits ridiculously on a monthly basis) and have pretty much ignored the website since. No website maintenance, no special offers, no competitions – they even have the gall to call us and complain when they receive an order for products they no longer stock, because they can’t be bothered to put in the effort to keep their database up to date. Sales and profits have collapsed, and [client] has gone from our flagship site to an embarrassment.

So, what happened in this particular case? Well, given that there’s no order from ‘Graham’ in the order table (and never has been) it’s quite obvious that the weak link here is Graham himself. It seems most likely that he went through the order and checkout process, then got to the final summary page that presents all the details for final inspection and completely failed to click the large prominent button marked “SEND ORDER THROUGH SECURE SERVER”.

The fact that he stuffed up should have been blindingly obvious to him anyway, as the site clearly states that the customer will receive an email confirming their order as soon as it’s sent, and if they don’t receive one they should contact us immediately. Apparently Graham found this all too difficult to understand.

Putz!

Anyway, we removed the entry from the guestbook. We would have contacted him to clear the whole mess up and exonerate ourselves, but Graham declined to leave an email address with his entry. So he can frankly go and [expletives deleted for the sake of common decency].

OK, now that’s out of my system, I’ll vent my spleen on another issue. Shane Warne. For those not in the know he’s an Australian cricketer who’s just been banned from competition or a year for failing a drug test. And everyone seems to be very upset about it.

Time for a bit of background for those unfamiliar with the game. While many fans would shoot me for saying this, on a world scale (that is compared to every other sport humans play) cricket is actually almost the same game as baseball. A ball is thrown by a bowler/pitcher at a batsman/batter standing in front of a wicket/catcher. If they hit the ball they run between creases/bases to score points for their team, although if the fielders hit the wicket/them with the ball while they’re not at a crease/base, they’re out. If they miss the ball, it may hit/be caught by the wicket/catcher. The chief differences are that in cricket there are two batsmen on the field at a time, there are only two creases and they’re pretty close together, if the wicket gets hit by the ball the batsman is out, and there’s not limit to the number of points scored by running between creases – the batsman keeps on batting until he gets out (there are some other differences but if you’re that interested go read Wisden’s). So that’s fundamentally cricket.

Anyway Shane Warne is our best spin bowler – many would say the world’s best spin bowler. And now he’s been caught using a prohibited substance and been banned from playing for a year. And the nation as a whole seems to be in an uproar about it.

The substance in question isn’t a performing enhancing drug, it’s a diuretic that could be used to mask performance enhancing drugs. Warne’s explanation is that he took it accidentally in a diet pill while trying to lose weight. And I for one believe him. He’s had a perfectly clean record to date, and frankly I think he’s too smarter an athlete to mess around with drugs. So, do I think he should be let off and allowed to play? Hell no!

It doesn’t matter that he broke the rules by accident, he still broke the rules. OK, the diuretic wouldn’t have helped him perform and it was all an innocent mistake, but too bad. As a top level athlete he should be double checking everything he takes to avoid exactly this kind of problem. He didn’t, and now he has to pay for it.

Some may say it’s not fair. Well, how’s this for fair? We let Warne off because it was all just a mistake. Then along comes another athlete who’s caught taking the same drug. He claims it’s all just a mistake, and we let him off too. But, he’s actually been taking steroids or testosterone or some other performance enhancing substance, and using the diuretic to mask it. So the drug cheat gets off scot free.

Masking substances make it impossible to say whether an athlete is clean of other more serious drugs or not. This is why – despite the fact that they don’t enhance performance -they’re on the banned list. And this is why any athlete caught taking them for any reason – even by innocent mistake – must be punished. Warne knew this, and he stuffed up, and now he must suffer the consequences, even if it means the end of his career.

As for the people making a fuss about the penalty, grow up! We can’t have one set of rules for people we like, and another for everyone else. Would they be making the same uproar if some other, more obscure member of the Australian squad was caught in the same way? Unlikely. Or what if a Pakistani or South African player failed a drug test due to diuretics? Hell no! Oh there’d be an uproar all right, an uproar of people demanding the maximum penalty for the ‘drug cheat’. Well, this situation is no different.

And Warne should grow up as well. He’s already come out saying he’s going to appeal and poutingly whining that he’s a victim of ‘anti-doping hysteria’, which is a very responsible statement about the problem of drugs in sport isn’t it? You knew the rules Shane, now admit you screwed up and accept your punishment like an adult.

And that’s my two cents 🙂

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine!

Well, it’s not actually the end of the world, just the day before Valentine’s. And I don’t feel fine, I could actually use a good lie in. But, apart from that (ie: not at all) the lyric is appropriate.

I actually don’t feel too bad about the looming 14th. I think this is because Dale is off on his yearly Rottnest vacation, meaning that Bevan and I have been able to do pretty much whatever the hell we want at work without him breathing down our necks. In Bevan’s case this has involved bringing his own Linux box in and networking it to the rest of the office computers (I have no idea why he seems happy messing about with it so I’ve let him be). I’ve been doing “development” work, which is programmers code for just mucking about and entertaining oneself by writing programs that may prove to be useful to the business at some point in the future. Maybe. I tell you, it’s as good as a holiday.

We have been doing some real work mind you. In my case, mainly sorting through Dale’s email each morning. It’s axiomic that the longer you have an email address, the more spam it attracts. And if you’re foolish enough to sign up to marketing websites or reply to spam, you get even more. Dale’s email address has been around since 1996, and well, when it comes to the promise of marketing information, he tends to click before he thinks. So he gets between 100 and 300 emails a day, of which maybe 8 or 9 are actually valid. And it’s my job to sort through them.

It’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s actually fairly interesting. With such a large volume of spam coming in, even over a period of four days you can actually spot patterns and trends as they emerge. For instance, the Nigerian bank account scam. On Monday and Tuesday Dale received numerous offers from various Government officials and relatives of deceased Nigerian dictators, offering him millions of dollars in misplaced moneys, illegal slush funds and embezzeled investments. On Wednesday morning the flow dwindled, as if the Nigerians were gearing up for a new assault, and sure enough that afternoon one came in from Benin. Then this morning (the Nigerians apparently having got their new Eastern HQ set up) three appeared claiming to be from Taiwan! Fascinating stuff. I can’t wait to see where they come from tomorrow.

But, on the subject of the end of the world (the first paragraph, remember?) I just have to comment on the Let’s look out for Australia booklet that arrived in my (and everyone else in the country’s) mailbox the other day. This is the Government’s response to terrorism, a booklet telling us all to “be alert but not alarmed” and listing things to look out for like people filming Government buildings or packages left unattended in public places. All fair enough I suppose, but there’s a section in the back saying what you should do in the event of an attack. The section on chemical, biological and nuclear attacks pretty much goes…

I mean, honestly!

Hmmm, Ali got attacked by a tick. That’s no good. Actually I wasn’t even aware they had ticks in the UK. I mean we have them here, I picked up two at Joondalup TAFE alone, I’ve still got a lump on my leg from one of them in fact, but you don’t really associate blood sucking parasites with England’s green and pleasant land (#and was the hory Ramb of God! In Engrand’s preasant pastules seen!#). Well, you learn something new every day.

And still on Ali, she’s decided to quote Mark, quoting Helen, refering to me, in an attempt to create a “long complicated conversation meandering across blogs”. What can I do but continue the trend? 🙂

Right, this next bit could get slightly confusing here, I’m quoting from one blog which is quoting from another which links to another. Right, okay, so on Mark’s Blog he said:

So anyway, what did I have to add to this whole little blog conversation? Well, not much really, I just thought it’d be interesting to have a long complicated conversation meandering across blogs. Though I am interested in how Mark was interpreting the heh.

Well, I chose to interpret the “heh” as a bitter, humourless laugh of despair at the innocent folly of the elderly and their simplistic interpretation of relationships in this, the fractured and post-modern 21st century; but that’s just because I like rendering things as dramatic as possible *g*. I suppose it could be sarcasm, but to my mind sarcasm is far better expressed with a hearty “Hah!” than a trailing off “heh…” – of course that could just be an Australian thing.

Anyway, got to go now. This is my complicated TV night with ER, Charmed, The Dead Zone and Scrubs all on at almost the same time. I have to get the VCR set up 🙂

Someone stole the roof off the railway station!

It was there this morning, and now it’s gone. Typical of the powers that be to remove it in the middle of a heatwave. It’s not like anyone actually needs shade at the moment or anything. Hrumph!

I watched the first episode of Skithouse (Channel 10’s new sketch comedy show) last night. Not bad all up (the fact that it features Corinne Grant, on who I have to admit a bit of an ongoing crush no doubt helps :). But there was one skit in particular that almost had me in hysterics. This probably says much more about my state of mind at the time than about the sketch, but I’m going to talk about it anyway. So there 🙂

Two plain clothes cops are looking through a one way mirror at a suspect in an interrogation room. “He’s not cracking” comments one. “Yeah” says the other “I think it might be time for a little ‘good cop/bad cop'”. “You sure?” asks the other “Yeah”.

Cut to the interregation room. The door bursts open and in leaps the first cop. He’s dressed all in black, has a sweeping black cape, little devil horns on his head and a big twirly ‘bad-guy’ moustache. “MWAHAHAHA!!!” he cackles “You’re in my POWER now!!! NOOOOObody can save YOU!!! MWAHHAHAHA!!!!”. He sweeps his cape around dramtically and desmonstrates a number of over the top villanous poses and facial expressions.

“PLEEEEAAAASEEE don’t hurt him!!!” wails the second cop, staggering in through the door and collasping against the wall, one hand held to his throat and the other extended pleadingly. He’s dressed all in white, and has a halo of silver tinsel held over his head on a piece of coathanger wire. “PLEEEEEASEEE!!!” he wails even louder. The bad cop laughs mockingly at him and continues sweeping his cape menacingly, glaring at the suspect and waggling his eyebrows.

The good cop turns away in horror and staggers across the room as if his heart is breaking. He collapses onto the suspect, who is by now looking extremely startled. “PLEAAASEEEEE don’t hurt him!!” he howls, clasping the crim to his chest with one hand, and stroking his hair with the other. “HE’S JUST A LITTLE BOYYY!!!!!!!“

OK. Maybe you had to see it 🙂

PS: Wow! This is Wyrmlog entry 100! Too bad I didn’t find something more edifying to write about hey?

PPS: Here, check this out. And this. That should raise the tone a bit 🙂