Archive for November, 2003
A disaster has happened!
“Oh no!” I hear you cry, “what the fuck is it?”
Calm down, and stop swearing. The disaster is averted. It seems that the recording that was made for the BBC Blogday thing was all messed up by a faulty DAT machine. It was all distorted, apparently.
Luckily, a taxi arrived for me at noon today and took me off to BBC Radio Scotland to sit in a cozy studio and do it all again. It was all much easier than standing in Central Station doing it and resulted in less (but still sizeable amounts) of stuttering and tongue-tiedness. DLT I am not.
I had no idea until I had to read it out that my writing style was so averse to full stops. What was I thinking? Thanks to Ms McCrum and the show’s producer for having patience and also for having cups of water.
Bizarrely, I was in a phase of kinda regretting the whole thing. I came in from work recently to find that the answer machine had gone mad and decided to record a bunch of conversations. I really really really hate the sound of my own voice and the answer machine playback made me come over all self-conscious. Imagine what a national radio broadcast will do.
Luckily the fifteen-minute-fame whore in me outranks all that nonsense.
November 28th, 2003
I normally try to avoid linking to news items, but this one is being mailed to me from all sides today and it’s made me want to go and slap someone.
The idea that someone would be offended by the labelling of hard drives (And other electrical components) as ‘master’ and ’slave’ is almost as incredible as the idea that someone would want to ban the terms.
Interestingly, I first read this on Amorous Propensities, which seems to have interpreted the words in a completely different way again by categorising the story under BDSM.
I’ve sent an email to the LA Office of Affirmitive Action Compliance.
Regarding the Master/Slave terminology thing that’s doing the international news rounds at the moment…
Are you out of your Goddam minds????
Sincerely,
etc.etc…
It’ll be interesting to see if they reply.
November 27th, 2003
Here’s me checking my email as expressed in keystrokes and thought…
down down down down down delete delete
delete down down delete delete down down down.
hesitate… open email. viagra. shit. tricked. delete.
down down down down down delete.
close outlook.
November 26th, 2003
The chocolate supply was re-instated twenty minutes later than calculated, but it’s on average 5p less than it was before so I will forgive them.
Terry’s chocolate orange bar (plain) 35p. Fantastic.
Update:
If the Google API service goes down one more bloody time and destroys one of my posts I’m tearing it off the page. Pishy Google pish.
November 25th, 2003
I’m a chocoholic. Not someone who really likes chocolate, although I am, but a genuine chocoholic. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to give it up. The longest I’ve managed is two days without it but a more typical period of abstenance is in the region of ten hours.
My working day usually involves two bars of chocolate. That’s actually quite a lot of chocolate. I decided to give up chocolate last week. I managed a day on only one bar. The following day, I had one and a half. The half bar was finished as I left the office. This is a chocoholic’s way of saying I actually had two bars.
Since then, I’ve somehow managed to go up to three bars a day. I’m starting to get worried about the amount of chocolate I eat.
Today is a hard day though. The vending machines in the office are being replaced with shiny new ones. This means that for today only there is no chocolate vending machine. I have no reserve chocolate. Today could either make me or break me.
As I write this though, I hear that the new machines have just left East Kilbride. That’s a half-hour drive from here. I’m allowing twenty minutes for getting them upstairs and a further twenty for paperwork and setting up of tools. Let’s say half-an-hour for installation. One of the machines is a coffee machine so I’m adding another hour for cleaning of pipes.
Assuming that there will be more than one guy working on them I’ll assume that the stocking of chocolate will happen in tandem with the pipe cleaning and can be discounted. I’m only giving them ten minutes for testing and to get out of the building.
Let’s see… that’s 2h:50m:00s until I can have a bar of chocolate. That’s just after 3:30pm.
No fucking way!
November 25th, 2003
Got my fireworks night photos back today. As it turns out (Or rather didn’t turn out, photographically speaking) I’m no night-time photographer. It was the er… wrong type of film*.
Shaken off my flu though. Still occasionally lapse into coughing fits and impromptu Barry White impersonations, but I reckon that, as a flu, the virus’s heart just wasn’t in it.
The missus is ill now though - not with what I got, but with something completely different. Maybe I can look forward to that blight in the near future.
Roles have reversed though since she has the comfy bed now and I’m the one cowering in the spare room hiding from the germs.
Last night I took refuge in front of the telly while she took refuge in bed. I do feel sorry for her cos she actually had today off work, and she’s in bed with a bucket on the floor instead of er.. not working in a more comfortable fashion.
It seems though, that sleeping on a futon with a cold sleeping bag and lumpy pillows is conducive to scary weird dreams. This was a 3.30am waker-upper…
I am reading my brother’s copy of a Q magazine special. The subject of the special edition is not music, but is a series of articles describing some of the world’s most impressive architecture.
One double-page spread is describing the work of an architect who has built some of the most impressive and unusual bridges in the world. He has, apparently, some unique and unusual bridge design techniques.
I then find myself in what seems to be the Carribean. I am scuba-diving next to one of the architect’s most beautiful bridges. The bridge is entirely underwater - it does not span any land whatsoever.
The bridge has been ‘built’ from a large number of simple wooden boats. The boats are on-end and tied to the bottom by a long rope which joins them together. The rope is fastened to the sea floor at two points and the boats are floating upwards, which gives the structure its bridge-shaped arc.
After swimming along its length for a while, I notice that some ropes are dangling down from certain boats. There are dead men in orange tee-shirts and caps who appear to be glued to the ropes into positions that suggest they are climbing.
I remember thinking that the structure was very beautiful, but when the corpses start to decompose, it will start to look quite the opposite. When the bodies become clean skeletons, then it will return to looking beautiful again.
In the dream I am starting to get scared by the bridge, and have the feeling that I am being watched by the architect.
I swim to the end of the bridge where I find an underwater doorway. I open the door, but a pulley mechanism makes a little evil looking skeletal fugure dance in front of the door. I realise that he is only dancing because the ropes are pulling on his limbs, but he’s scary enough.
I reach out and crush him. When I crush the dancing skeleton, it is only the size of my hand. Then I wake up.
I really must change the wallpaper in that small room because it has shiny bits on it that, in the dark, look like water bubbles and it really did take ages to go back to sleep again.
* - May not be actual reason
November 24th, 2003
Got my fireworks night photos back today. As it turns out (Or rather didn’t turn out, photographically speaking) I’m no night-time photographer. It was the er… wrong type of film*.
Shaken off my flu though. Still occasionally lapse into coughing fits and impromptu Barry White impersonations, but I reckon that, as a flu, the virus’s heart just wasn’t in it.
The missus is ill now though - not with what I got, but with something completely different. Maybe I can look forward to that blight in the near future.
Roles have reversed though since she has the comfy bed now and I’m the one cowering in the spare room hiding from the germs.
Last night I took refuge in front of the telly while she took refuge in bed. I do feel sorry for her cos she actually had today off work, and she’s in bed with a bucket on the floor instead of er.. not working in a more comfortable fashion.
It seems though, that sleeping on a futon with a cold sleeping bag and lumpy pillows is conducive to scary weird dreams. This was a 3.30am waker-upper…
I am reading my brother’s copy of a Q magazine special. The subject of the special edition is not music, but is a series of articles describing some of the world’s most impressive architecture.
One double-page spread is describing the work of an architect who has built some of the most impressive and unusual bridges in the world. He has, apparently, some unique and unusual bridge design techniques.
I then find myself in what seems to be the Carribean. I am scuba-diving next to one of the architect’s most beautiful bridges. The bridge is entirely underwater - it does not span any land whatsoever.
The bridge has been ‘built’ from a large number of simple wooden boats. The boats are on-end and tied to the bottom by a long rope which joins them together. The rope is fastened to the sea floor at two points and the boats are floating upwards, which gives the structure its bridge-shaped arc.
After swimming along its length for a while, I notice that some ropes are dangling down from certain boats. There are dead men in orange tee-shirts and caps who appear to be glued to the ropes into positions that suggest they are climbing.
I remember thinking that the structure was very beautiful, but when the corpses start to decompose, it will start to look quite the opposite. When the bodies become clean skeletons, then it will return to looking beautiful again.
In the dream I am starting to get scared by the bridge, and have the feeling that I am being watched by the architect.
I swim to the end of the bridge where I find an underwater doorway. I open the door, but a pulley mechanism makes a little evil looking skeletal fugure dance in front of the door. I realise that he is only dancing because the ropes are pulling on his limbs, but he’s scary enough.
I reach out and crush him. When I crush the dancing skeleton, it is only the size of my hand. Then I wake up.
I really must change the wallpaper in that small room because it has shiny bits on it that, in the dark, look like water bubbles and it really did take ages to go back to sleep again.
* - May not be actual reason
November 24th, 2003
Went to bed at about 7 last night. Not well at all. Packed myself with Sudefed and paracetamol and woke up twelve hours later. My throat is killing me. The missus spent the night in the spare room in a sleeping bag to avoid the germs.
I know I’m ill through no choice of my own, but I’m feeling quite bad about that, especially as she’s now going around doing housework without me. Plus she made me a bowl of porridge, delivered to my bed.
Tomorrow, a whole bunch of folks are coming round for dinner. It’ll be a big effort involving a roasted chicken and all sorts of stuff like that. It will be the first time either of us have roasted anything, being as we are from a generation who don’t like to cook anything that takes longer than thirty minutes.
Christmas is at our house this year you see, and tomorrow is a practice-run to avoid the unnecessary destruction of a turkey.
I’d help out but y’know.. germs and that. *cough*
November 22nd, 2003
Uuugh. Sore raspy throat this morning. An early indicator of being ill. All in time for the weekend. I’ll be cured by Monday, I’ll bet. Bloody typical - I could so with a day off in bed.
But there are urgent things to be done today at work. So urgent that I have come in to spread my germs to everyone else. I have done this on the irrational assumption that they are doing things vastly less urgent to my own things, and can therefore take the risk of sitting in an office with someone who has a raspy throat.
Everyone is ill, it seems. My sister-in-law, hubby and nine-month old baby are visiting from Ireland and all three of them are feeling sick with the lurgi.
Baby got some early Christmas presents last night though, including a big board that plays music while you draw pictures on it with your finger in psychadelic colours.
I had baby on my knee as I tried to teach her proper use of the toy, explaining the two-point perspective system, and why it suits the landscape format when composing a picture due to the vanishing effects on vertical lines in an image being negligable. I thought it was a good starting point, but she preferred to make baby-fist-shaped splodges instead.
She’ll get it eventually though.
I did risk asking the question ‘So, do I suit a baby on my knee?’ to which the answer was ‘No.’
Thank fuck for that, as they say.
November 21st, 2003
Whatever your opinions on Iraq, Bush, the war on terrorism or Saddam Hussein - everyone has one.
The Guardian this week published 60 open letters to the President and they all make great reading, coming from many different and conflicting points of view triggered by his current state visit.
It’s a huge article, so I’ve quoted bits. Hope you don’t mind…
Unfortunately, the doomed strategy of making weapons of mass destruction the cause of war has discredited the war in the UK. You did better to say frankly that you wanted to remove the Saddam regime which so brutalised its people…
Michael Portillo
…you allowed a British prime minister to be morally finessed by Jacques Chirac… Dear God, that it should come to that…
Sebastian Faulks
You opposed and destroyed the world’s most blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable.
Frederick Forsyth
You have spilled a glass full of tomato juice on an already dirty carpet and now you have to clean up the whole room
Salam Pax
The single human being I most admire in the world right now is Michael Moore. The guy’s a genius.
Bel Littlejohn
There is no way to write this but in anger…
Ronan Bennett
We are by no means an anti-American nation… this is personal. This is about you and your neo-conservative monsters who have illegitimately captured the White House…
Polly Toynbee
I don’t care why you got rid of Saddam, and neither does any Iraqi I know… [Saddam's dynasty] would have carried on mass-murdering and asphyxiating natural freedoms… Although your country will requisition all the oil, the Iraqis are now able to protest.
Aaron Barschak
November 20th, 2003
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