Life and Associated Annoyances – Page 21

Fun Fun Fun

In which our hero is accused of crimes and opinions most vile…

Well yesterday was a fun day. I’m sitting happily (well, sitting at least) at work when I get a phonecall from a woman in some distress who launches into an emotional tirade about how I’m trying to destroy her business, drive her out of town and ruin the livelihoods of numerous indigenous artists. After some confusion I discover that she’s objecting to a photograph I took of her store and posted to my Flickr account along with a wry comment about the pun in her business name (something along the lines that such puns should be outlawed).

(I’m not going to link to the image or name her business, if you’re really interested you can go poking around my Flickr account until you find it yourself).

She also posted a lengthy and similarly enraged comment to said photograph (and sent a very similar email) alleging that I’m some kind of racist who hates Aboriginies and Aboriginal culture.

After getting over the shock of this accusation I carefully wrote a reply explaining my viewpoint on the matter – that a humorously intended comment about puns in store names does not equate to an attack on the store involved, and that race had nothing to do with my comment at all. I also altered the name and description on the photograph to make it less likely to come up in connection with her business and to remove any criticism about the pun – not because I think I was in the wrong, but as a general gesture of good will.

I’m happy to report that she followed this up with an apologetic reply implying that she (or someone at the store) misread my comment and thought that I was saying that stores selling Aboriginal artefacts should be illegal, as opposed to groan-inducing puns (which really shouldn’t be illegal anyway as they give people like me something to complain about, and where would be without that? :). So the whole issue now seems to be laid to rest and everything is good.

It was an interesting few hours though, wondering if my website and personal details were going to end up on some kind of racism watch list. But hey, all’s well that ends well.

Just Some General Ramblings

Exactly what it says on the box

What a week.

Katie’s dad’s funeral was on Tuesday, which was… well funerals are never really fun or anything, by definition they’re pretty awful, but as funerals go it was fairly good. Even though we had to hurry off quickly afterwards which made me feel like a right bastard 🙁

We had a big meeting/conference at work on Thursday with a consultant on how to overcome some of the ‘challenges’ the company is facing. It was a good exercise, mostly he just asked us a bunch of questions and wrote down the answers – he’ll be getting back to us with some recommendations shortly. Should be interesting.

Veteran actor Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell passed away. My generation are most familiar with him as ‘Gramps’ in the Late Show’s Charlie the Wonder Dog, but he appeared in over a hundred different productions including Catweazle and Thunderbirds. He’s apparently getting a state funeral, which is richly deserved.

Yesterday we all went to the polls to vote on Daylight Savings. Once again it was roundly defeated, which is a nice kick in the face to the politicians who forced a three year trial on us with the assurance that once we’d experienced it, we’d love it. D’Orazio has commented that he’s very disappointed and that it would have been better if the Government had just brought it in without a referendum – but then he’s always had problems with the concept of ‘Democracy’.

After voting I cycled over to the Belmont Brickworks because I’d heard that a housing estate was being built around them. As it turned out the rumours were somewhat exaggerated – the housing estate is in fact merely being built near them and the works remain in splendid isolation. I took a bunch of photos, which can be seen on my Flickr account, then went on to explore the artificial island at Ascot Waters. Despite it being a mild, sunny day I had the entire place to myself – with the exception of a couple of stray dogs.

Then it was dinner at the Phi Yen with the family and my aunt who’s over from England. The food was excellent as usual but I swear every time we go there it gets louder and louder. We were also visited by a cat that apparently slipped through the door unnoticed when someone when in or out, and wandered from table to table until the staff noticed and evicted it 🙂

So yeah, a busy week all up. Hopefully the one ahead will be a bit more sedate.

Another Status Update

Games, Trains and Toilet Fame

The game on Sunday went pretty well. The players floundered around like freshly landed fish until I gave them some fairly hefty shoves in the right direction, but they seemed to enjoy it. I finally got to play out the big climactic scene that’s been in my head for a good seven years (ever since I came up with the adventure in the first place) and it seemed to go over fairly well – even if it was consistently interrupted by Fabian’s character threatening to shoot everyone ;D

I also managed to score a mention on Worst of Perth with my infamous tale of the Fasta Pasta toilet DVD (definitely NSFW). It seems to have been accepted fairly well by the community, even getting a few songs composed about it in the comments.

Finally I stumbled over this site last week and have to say that it’s one of the best designed (in a visual sense) sites I’ve seen in a long while. If I wasn’t happy with the hideous visual hodge-podge of Wyrmworld I’d seriously consider appropriating the colour scheme, if not actually stealing the layout wholesale. Well done fellows! Well done!

OK, that’s it.

Late 2010

Um, yes. N-Scale Limited’s layout. Um. Nothing to see here, move along… 😉

Futile Boasts

The photos are up on Flickr!

I’m still too busy to make any kind of proper post, but I’d just like to say that I cycled 14kms yesterday and climbed to the top of Reabold Hill and didn’t die!

Hooray me! (place as much sarcasm on that as you feel comfortable with)

Here’s some music…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXn1320YH8s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIvF_ZBE6es
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIWRYwCGEF4

If All Else Fails, Your Coworkers Are Edible

Status updates and more on the Quornimal

I’m probably not going to have much time to blog over the next few weeks as I’m preparing for the next session of my infinitely prolonged Wild Southwest roleplaying campaign (there you go Helen – a chance to catch up! :). In the meantime however I’m finding The Worst of Perth highly amusing – it’s well worth a read (if you live in Perth, don’t know if anyone else would enjoy it).

News of the Quornimal continues!

Photographic Numerology

The numbers! They all line up!

I’m slowly working my way through the photos I took on my trip to the UK and posting the best ones (or at least some ones) to my Flickr account. This isn’t as easy as it might sound because in a fit of abstraction I forgot to reset the time on my camera on arriving at Heathrow, and as a result all my photos are timestamped seven hours later than they were actually taken.

(Hmm, did I blog about this before? Mind like a…. one of those… straining…. things)

Anyway I’ve had to go through them picture by picture correcting the EXIF data which is annoying in the extreme and taking quite a long time.

The reason I mention this is I’ve spent this afternoon fixing up the photos I took in and around Avebury on September 9th. That is to say the 9th of the 9th 2004. And what’s today’s date? the 4th of the 4th 2009. Spooky! 😀

In other news I happened to run into Lyndah on the train yesterday. For those coming in late Lyndah is a friend (or possibly ex-friend – long story) of my brother’s who I had a devastating crush on for years and years (I’m much better now, thanks for asking). Anyway we had a semi-decent chat (I’m not great at small talk, we don’t have a great deal in common, my hearing is dreadful in noisy environments – particularly in my right ear, and her left ear was blocked after going swimming) and, well, that’s about it. We had a chat. I guess this is notable because back a few years ago I would have been a gibbering mess in her presence. Hooray for personal development! 🙂

OK, I’m going to bed now. I’ve got a new mattress which – although it stinks a bit, presumably still outgassing from the factory – should vastly improve my posture. Or something. Well, it certainly won’t hurt it anyway.

You Load Sixteen Tons…

woooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrkkkkkkkk

Just worked a 10 hour day, and I’ve got another one lined up tomorrow. Just to make the point that I’m not abandoning the “try and write something every day” thing.

In the meantime, try this… (not by me by the way – just so that’s clear)

FRIEND OR FOE?
RISE OF THE MAC-
HINE OR BEGGINING
OF THE ANIMAL
FARM

The Hideous Horrors of Home Hygiene

Why can’t we just eat out of a trough?

Oh! How I hate to wash up in the morning,
Oh how I hate to wash up at all!
But the unkindest cut to date’s,
When I run out of cups and plates,
You’ve gotta wash up!
You’ve gotta wash up!
You’ve gotta wash up this morning!
You’ve gotta wash up!
You’ve gotta wash up!
You’ve gotta wash up today!

I composed this charming ditty some years ago when once again faced with a gigantic heap of cutlery and crockery piled up on my kitchen sink. It is based (of course) on Irving Berlin’s Oh how I hate to wake up in the Morning which itself is based on the traditional reveille of the US Army.

(Irving Berlin, there’s an interesting fellow. Coming from a poor and Jewish background (in a time when being Jewish was a major social disadvantage) he managed to create a career as America’s best loved songsmith. He fell in love with a non-Jewish girl whose wealthy father was scandalised at the thought of her marrying not just a Jew, but a working class Jew, and sent her off on a round the world cruise in the hopes she’d forget about him. Irving kept in touch with her via letter for the whole journey and wrote Always one of his biggest hits for her. They got married almost immediately on her return. Irving was pretty much persona-non-gratia with his in-laws until the stock market crash of 1929 when his wife’s father lost huge sums of money and found himself heavily in debt. Irving was still pulling in cash hand over fist despite the economic collapse (or perhaps because of it – it can be argued that the worse things get the more people need songs) and paid off all his debts, refusing to hear a thing about being payed back. From that point on he was a welcome member of the family. Or at least that’s the story I heard. But I digress.)

The reason I detail this rather awful parody of an American classic is that, once again, I find myself confronted with a sink piled high with used plates. This is because (as the song suggests) I hate doing the washing up. I hate spending time on a menial and slightly disgusting chore when I could be doing other far more interesting things. Which means that I tend to use every bit of crockery and cutlery I have (eating my dinner off saucers is by no means unheard of) until I completely run out and have no choice but to buckle down and do it.

Now yes, I could get a dishwasher, but frankly I’ve never liked them. They’re big, noisy, use criminal amounts of water and (in my admittedly limited experience) don’t do a terribly good job anyway. You have to wash down the plates and cups and things before putting them in, and then have to finish the job by manually scrubbing off tough stains and dried food bits that the machine missed. This is frankly not very efficient, and I won’t have a bar of it.

So I am once again doomed to spending the next forty minutes or so with my hands submerged in soapy and increasingly filthy water, trying to find drying space for the huge piles of cups, knives, forks and plates that have accumulated in my kitchen for the last week. And once again I will promise to myself to do the washing up on a nightly basis. And once again I shall immediately break that promise and start the whole process over again.

I’m gonna need a bigger sink.

The Curse of the Pine Nuts!

Communist infiltration of my taste buds.

For about the last year (as part of a half hearted health kick) I’ve been buying my lunch most days down at the local branch of Edens Salad Bar. This is one of those places where you make your own salad or roll by selecting foodstuffs from a buffet like arrangement and as a consequence of doing all the work yourself pay far more than you would for a pre-prepared meal. But hey, the ingredients are fresh, you get exactly what you want and they seem to have a policy of only employing extremely cute and friendly girls to operate the counter, so I’m not complaining 🙂

Eating at Edens has introduced me to an extremely delicious and previously completely unknown culinary treat – the Pine Nut. They have these in a large shaker and for the past year I’ve been liberally dosing every roll or salad I make with them. Which has been fine – they’re meant to be quite good for you – and has presented absolutely no problem of any kind at all. Until this week.

The pine nut shaker was getting a bit low, so they topped it up. However instead of the large, yellowish pine nuts they’ve been using, they’ve switched to smaller, browner ones. This may have to do with the economic crisis, pine nuts are after all pretty expensive. This didn’t bother me at first but as of early this week I’ve been struck down by the Curse of the Pine Nuts! Oh the horror!

I quote from the source (and destination) of all human knowledge, Wikipedia…

“The eating of pine nuts can cause serious taste disturbances, developing 1-3 days after consumption and lasting for days or weeks. A bitter, metallic taste is described. In general, a minority of pine nuts on the market present this problem. Though very unpleasant, there doesn’t seem to be a real health concern.

This phenomenon was first described in a scientific paper in 2001. Since the article, experiences of the phenomenon have been reported by hundreds of people worldwide (US, Canada, South Africa, Finland, Iceland, Germany, and many more).

The pine nuts involved typically contain triglycerides formed by 16-18° unsaturated fatty acids. No contamination with pesticide residues or heavy metals was found.

Some of the pine nuts involved were imported from China. However, in many countries packaged pine nuts are not required to state the country of origin or the species, and thus it is impossible to conclusively link the effect to a particular species or source country.”

My taste buds have been assaulted by the horrors of (presumably) Chinese pine nuts! I am cursed with a bitter, metallic taste that affects everything I eat! Oh woe is me!

I’m swearing off Pine Nuts until they switch back to the big, yellowish ones. Hopefully the effect wears off before the weekend when I’m heading out to dinner (twice!) for my birthday.

Anyone who tries to hug me will be shot dead…

Some general updates

Every week I like Miki more and more. Mind you, she’s been my favourite FreakAngel ever since her first appearance, it’s just that the more we see of her the more my initial opinion is confirmed.

Of course Kait is growing on me too.

I do have to ask though – in the last frame is that a tentacle?!

OK, enough FreakAngels (except to say that the Google Earth file has been updated).

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and put Abandoned in Perth out of its misery. It’s been sitting in a state of abandonment (how ironic!) for almost five years, and I while I’ve been taking photos of plenty of derelict sites I just haven’t had the time to process them all and get them up.

I haven’t abandoned the concept however, as almost all the photos from the site (and a whole lot more) are now up on my Flickr account. Flickr makes everything so much easier, so expect the Abandoned in Perth collection to grow and grow! (Assuming that is that I can find more places to photograph).

OK, that’s all for now.

(Ah! It’s art!)