A break from all the deranged screeding :)

As observant readers may have noticed I’ve made a few changes around the place over the last few days. For instance rather than just redirecting to Space Net, www.wyrmworld.com is now a domain in it’s own right (finally). Which explains why the page you’re reading with your grape-like eyes now has a URL of www.wyrmworld.com/wyrmlog/. No more frames or redirects or other stupidity, hooray!! πŸ™‚

This sudden change is down to the fact that I finally got around to getting the server guys to set me up some webspace on the company server. Free, quota unlimited company webspace! Hmmm, I suppose I’ve really got a good reason not to get fired now huh? Well, as opposed to not getting paid any more obviously.

In any case over the coming weeks Wyrmworld will gradually migrate it’s way over to the new address, leaving nothing but a horde of redirect pages and dead links over on Space Net. Then after a while I can look at dumping them completely and getting an ADSL account with someone else – if I decide that it’s worthwhile that is, which it probably will be.

Oh, and of course I’ll be setting up some new email accounts (probably this week) then dropping my old spam riddled space.net email like a gun. I’ll also be doing my best to keep my new address completely off the web – thus avoiding the spam issue completely. I hope πŸ™‚

Anyway I’ve also been making some changes to the Wyrmlog itself, as can be seen by the large white boxes down there. Inspired by something I saw on someone else’s blog (sadly I can’t remember who or I’d give them full credit) I’ve set up some funky looking styles for quoting with.

For instance, if I wanted to quote from a book I’d use my new quoteBook style. Let’s say for the sake of argument I was quoting Steven Pile’s Book of Heroic Failures I would do it thusly…

Few broadcasters have given more unalloyed pleasure than Lieutenant Commander Tommy Woodroofe. He leapt to public prominence with his now famous commentary on the illumination of the fleet at Spithead in 1937.

Before the broadcast the Commander had joined in celebrations with slightly too much enthusiasm. The result was an exquisitely incoherent talk punctuated by pauses of anything up to eleven seconds.

And were I to quote the good Commander himself I’d use the quoteQuote style (for quoting things people actually said)…

At the present moment, the whole fleet is lit up. When I say ‘lit up’ I mean lit up by fairy lamps. It’s fantastic. It isn’t a fleet at all. It’s just… It’s fairyland. The whole fleet is in fairyland. Now if you’ll follow me through … if you don’t mind … the next few moments you’ll find the fleet doing odd things.

[lengthy pause]

I’m sorry I was telling some people to shut up talking.

[The fleet turn off their lights to shoot rockets]

It’s gone! It’s gone! There’s no fleet! It’s… It’s disappeared! No magician who could ever have waved his wand could have waved it with more acumen than he has now at the present moment. The fleet’s gone. It’s disappeared.

[pause]

I was talking to you in the middle of this damn [cough] in the middle of this fleet and what’s happened is the fleet’s gone and disappeared and gone…

ANNOUNCER: That is the end of the Spithead Commentary.

[Half hour of unscheduled dance music]

Or maybe I wanted to quote a website, then quoteWeb would be employed…

When the English ships full of troops were in sight, a foppish tart by the name of Paul Revere rode through all the towns screaming at the top of his lungs until he was arrested by the constable for disturbing the peace, and is remembered by the Beastie Boys song of the same name.

If the web was a Blog, then of course quoteBlog would be appropriate…

I can’t really think of anything to blog about, it’s not like I’ve been doing anything exciting. Maybe I should do something exciting. I can’t even think of anything exciting to do though, can’t be bothered, oh well, I’ll stick with the apathay and general laying around playing on the computer.

Ali

Lyrics have the special quoteMusic class…

Arrivederciby Shivaree

Arrivederci I’m cutting my hair,
Tell Fish and Tracy the weather’s fair,
Been eleven hours we’re on a dare,
Arrivederci to my old chair,

I’ve been told that the old who bargain and save,
They get sold for the gold on the little kings grave,
So goodbye to screamers and goodnight Irene,
A salty whisker won’t hurt anything,

…and so on and so on. Obviously I’ve gotten way too carried away with this, but what’s new? πŸ™‚

Next on the agenda is getting those pop-up comments to work again. I’m trying to think of a new and funky way to do this that doesn’t rely on opening new windows and such – ideally a tooltip kind of thing. I’ve got a few ideas but need to develop them fully.

Then I guess I’ll come up with a nicely styled replacement for the old music and reading sections. Oh, and the links to other people’s blogs I suppose which should really be a much higher priority because after all they’re linking to me aren’t they? Or they were last time I checked.

Hmmm, never ends does it?

Oh well, back to transcribing the deranged Foxtel related ravings of that guy on the train I guess…

Actually hang on, I must mention a great link Stephanie put me onto. It’s a page that displays the last 30 images uploaded to liveJournal…

http://www.dreamwill.net/ljimages.php

It’s a magical gateway into the human peepshow that is the web! πŸ™‚

(It should be noted that people upload all sorts of stuff onto liveJournal, including porn and – even worse – 30 meg digital photos of inane things like sports cars and 1930’s telephones that hog your bandwidth to the exclusion of everything else until they’ve fully downloaded – so be warned! πŸ™‚

OK, really going now.

Continued Dispatches from the ‘Insane Screed Department’

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

AND A MESSAGE TO “MANAGEMENT”

“You will go to jail for everything you’re putting me thru (sic). When your ‘superiors’ find out (and I know you have superiors) you’ll regret putting me thru all this. How long do you think these ‘participants’ will go along with this, once they realise that I actually really do get held down and needles stuck in me? That actors taunt me to a point of breaking, over and over? Then they’ll realise I get antisocial for a reason. You can’t fool people forever that this ‘program’ is justified. I will get out. Even with all the bad ‘footage’ of me. How long do you think that will delay you going to jail? And I’m telling you, ‘you will go to jail‘. You’ve used and abused me way too much, for too long. Do you think it’s too late to ‘arrange’ an unfortunate ‘accident’ for me? You can still ‘arange’ it right? One small problem. Now that I am so close to seeing my children for the very first time. That I am so close to starting a genuine life. Do you think anyone could possibly believe that I’d ever harm myself? I don’t think so. This ‘program’ is about to end. Whatever happens it’s because you ‘arrange’ it all, or let it happen. You will all go to jail you absolute m_____f_____g c___s”

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

From the ‘Insane Screed Handed out on the Train’ Department

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

Someone please get this past ‘Management’ to Mr Murdoch

OPEN LETTER TO RUPERT MURDOCH

Dear Mr Murdoch,

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

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

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

HE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE JUST SAID

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

A____ realise:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.
Yours sincerely.
A____ ________

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

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

Kim Deal Loves Us – Every One

It’s 9:23am on Tuesday the 29th of June and rather than being hard at work in at the office I’m sitting in front of my computer at home waiting for a plumber with a stopwatch to come and time how long it takes for water to dissapear down my drains. This somewhat surreal exercise is the latest in the longrunning saga of the totally screwed up drainage that plagues the lower floors of the building – the strata company apparently deciding not to fix the problem, but at least to find out exactly how much of a problem it is.

Somewhat ironically Charmaine at L.J.Hooker (apparently Josie decided that my ongoing requests for a working bathroom sink and Rebecca’s continuous demands for the strata fees to be paid on time were just too much trouble) got a plumber out to fix my bathroom sink two weeks ago, so everything is draining pretty well. Or at least draining, which after a good four or five months of no draining at all counts as “pretty well”.

Now I could be at work – I could have left a key with the caretaker – but I decided to take the morning off instead. I was planning to take the whole day off, but there’s just too much work to justify it. And I forgot that I had a meeting over at the Alzheimer’s Association yesterday morning which pretty much meant that I only got a half day’s work done on Monday. So as soon as the plumber has been and gone I’ve got to iron some clothes and drag myself into the office. Bah!

Ah well. At least I got to sleep in a bit πŸ™‚

Anyway for wont of anything else to write about (or at least wont of anything else I feel like writing about πŸ™‚ I figured I’d mention some songs I’ve been listening to over the last few months. Normally I would have put these in the music section, but I haven’t got around to putting the music section back in yet after the great Blog Disaster. So I have to put them in here instead.

OK, let’s see… (I’ve been scribbling them down on a piece of paper and now have to try and decipher my handwriting)… OK. First of all Wasted and Ready by Ben Quelar (if indeed that’s how he spells his name). Nothing too important to say about this one except it’s mildly catchy and the chorus is great to sing along to. Looking Good by Frenzel Rhomb – very sharp lyrics in this one, very tightly written with regards to rhymes and meter. And quite funny in an extremely dark way.

Mighty Little Man by… uh… that guy from “Blue’s Clues”. Really great song with a kicking chorus. The Begining of the End by Gentle Ben and His Sensitive Side. Apparently these guys are from Brisbane but the lead singer (presumably Gentle Ben himself) sounds so like Jarvis Cocker that it’s not funny. I mean if you took the bit where he says/sings “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” and played it to 100 Pulp fans, at least 92 would identify it as a Jarvis sample. Uncanny.

Of course I can’t talk about recent musical releases without mentioning the first new Pixies release in 32 years (as one website I read put it – 12 years is a bit more accurate πŸ™‚ Bam Thwop. To be frank I didn’t really like this when I first heard it (blasphemy! :). Much too poppy and inane. But it’s grown on me since. I guess I was expecting some kind of opus like Debaser or Letter to Memphis, but when you think about it they’re hardly going to release their strongest material first up. And also it’s a Kim Deal track which means it’s going to be different to most of the rest of their catalogue anyway. It actually works a lot better if you think of it as a Breeders track with the rest of the Pixies sitting in as guest musicians.

Anyway as I said it’s grown on me a lot. When you ignore the lyrics and actually listen to music it suddenly sounds a lot more like a Pixies track – that distinctive barely-in-control guitar sound is right there. And the insane organ break in the middle isn’t like anything I’ve ever heard on any of their other tracks, but fits right in as the kind of thing you’d expect the Pixies to do. When you consider the song in those terms it suddenly sounds a whole lot better.

So, my final conclusion on Bam Thwop? A big thumbs up πŸ™‚

Anyway it’s now 10.00 and there’s no sign of the plumber. I suppose I’d better iron those clothes anyway. *sigh*

Thoughts on Watching “Doctor Who: The Curse of Peladon”

  1. The guys responsible for King Peladon’s costuming managed to pre-empt the complete New Romantic movement by an entire decade
  2. AAA-GAAA-DOR! DOR! DOR! Push the statue crush the Doc, AGA-DOR! DOR! DOR!…
  3. What the heck happened to Day of the Daleks?

(Work’s still insanely busy and I spent much of today fighting a migraine – so still no energy for a major update *sigh*)

Inane Historical Rantings

Yes, yes, it’s been ages I know. This is down to two main causes, the immense amount of effort required to keep the business running while Dale’s in the UK, and illness. I won’t carry on about work because it’s all too disheartening (Dale’s finally struck upon an advertising policy that works meaning that we’re totally flooded), but I will talk about the illness a bit, because I’m sure you all want to hear about my suffering at the fickle hands of contagion.

Overblown metaphors aside, basically I had the flu. That is to say that I reckon it was the flu, Ali is more sceptical. Working from the basis that all guys are pathetic wimps who horribly exaggerate even the slightest illness or injury she’s decided (from the vantage point of the other side of the planet *g*) that I merely had a cold. A “death cold” perhaps, but definitely not the flu. Well, I could prove her wrong with a brilliantly stated series of counter arguments, but I’m not going to dignify her scepticism with the effort. So there. Nyaaaaa! πŸ˜‰

(I could provide counter arguments. Lots of them. Honestly! πŸ™‚

So what else has been happening between being horribly overworked and deathly ill? Well there was the transit of Venus a few weeks back, and a bit of a thought provoking co-incidence regarding said transit that I shall now elaborate on for the education and general edification of all πŸ™‚

The transit occurred on June 8, which here in Western Australia is Foundation Day. I’ve often made humorous comments along the line that this is a holiday celebrating a woman cutting down a tree, which is entirely accurate if slightly duplicitous because it’s not the actual tree felling that we’re meant to be celebrating, it’s why the tree was cut down. Said innocent plant – bothering no-one by going about it’s daily tasks of transpiration and photosynthesis – was hacked down as an impromptu symbol of something-or-other at the official founding of the Swan River Colony in 1829 – the Swan River Colony of course becoming the State of Western Australia 72 years later at Federation. So June 8 is the official holiday celebrating just how wonderful this great state of ours is – or is at least supposed to be.

(For the sake of accuracy I should state that the Swan River Colony wasn’t the first British settlement in WA, people had been living at Albany for two years previously. They just didn’t have the sense to cut down a tree and make it official.)

Now, anyone with a particularly agile mathematical mind will have noticed that 2004 is 175 years since the auspicious tree-lopping, making this particular Foundation Day the centre of a whole lot of extra Government hooey on just how wonderful we are. There’s was a specially designed logo, some TV adds attempting to show just how far we’ve come since the 150th anniversary (judging by the footage we have actually come a fair way – skin tight white t-shirts, horrible pseudo-afro-hair, and weedy singing by children’s choirs are no longer thought a good idea for a start), and probably an official website if I can be bothered to track it down. But what interested me is the fact that a transit of Venus (a very rare celestial phenomenon) should occur on not just the anniversary of the founding of our State, but on such a significant anniversary too.

Why? Let’s follow the links…

Why was the Swan River Colony founded? Well, technically because a bunch of British people had got fed up with Britain, wanted to make a fresh start elsewhere and happened to read a report (by a certain Captain Stirling) saying that the Swan River on the west coast of Australia would be a good place to do so, having a pleasant temperate climate, abundant fresh water and fertile soils (excuse me for a second HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!! Sorry, but Stirling must have been suffering some kind of brain fever). But the real reason (i.e. why the British Government decided to allow them to do it) was to claim the land for the Crown and keep it out of the hands of the dastardly French.

The French had been sniffing around the west and south coasts of the continent for quite some time and the British were terrified that if they established a colony somewhere there’d be no way to get rid of them. The east coast was safe, there were British colonies all over there, but the west was completely un-settled (apart from 60,000 or so aboriginies – but they didn’t count having neglected to ceremoniously chop down any trees). So setting up some kind of British colony on the west coast was imperative, otherwise the British would have to share the continent with the French (and it was bad enough having to share Europe with them).

So, it’s entirely reasonable to say that the Swan River Colony was established on the west coast because British colonies already existed on the east coast and the British attitude to unsettled coastlines was “gotta catch ’em all”. In that case we must ask why were there British colonies on the east coast?

Two main reasons. One: To get rid of all those pesky criminals (i.e.: poor people) and uppity Fenians who were clogging up the Thames and causing a danger to navigation in their prison barques. Two: To stop the French getting a base in the South Pacific (do I detect a pattern here?). When the decision was made to set up new penal colonies in the South Pacific the best place for them was judged to be New South Wales (which at that point meant the whole east side of the Australian continent – the west generally being known as New Holland) it being in the right part of the world, fertile, well watered and abundant (excuse me for a second HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!! must have been that brain fever again). And probably most importantly it was a possession of the British Crown.

So, why was New South Wales a possession of the British Crown? One word. Cook.

Captain James Cook that is of course. In 1770 he’d sailed up the east coast and claimed the whole damn thing for Britain. He’d also just done the same thing for New Zealand, being (brain fevers and tendencies to name newly discovered lands after places they in no way resembled – South Wales for instance – aside) a fantastically skilled navigator and explorer. He’d just been to Tahiti and was taking the long way home on the back of some secret orders from the Admiralty to see if there really was any kind of gigantic southern continent down that way. It turned out that there wasn’t (or at least it was a lot further south and much smaller and ice-bound than everyone had hoped) but he did manage to run into Australia (literally in the case of the Great Barrier Reef).

So, the British decided to establish their colonies on the east coast because Cook had been there and claimed it for them on his way back from Tahiti. So, what was he doing in Tahiti? Well (and here’s the clever bit…)

OBSERVING A TRANSIT OF VENUS!

Yup! Cook had led an expedition to Tahiti for the purpose of observing a transit of Venus as part of an elaborate plan by the Royal Society to figure out just how far away the sun was (possibly to see if they could get a ship there to colonise it). Without that transit of Venus Cook wouldn’t have been in the neighborhood, Australia wouldn’t have been claimed for Britain, the penal colonies on the east coast wouldn’t have been established, there would have been no need to grab the west coast as well and Western Australians wouldn’t have been celebrating the 175th anniversary of Foundation Day under the slightly attenuated light of the 2004 transit. Ain’t history wonderful? πŸ™‚

So, did I see the transit? Sort of. The 8th was a Tuesday so as is tradition (the tradition being to grab as many long weekends as is humanly possible) we had the Monday off. So on the day of the transit I was stuck in the office. I did manage to leave early by being deathly ill and managed to make it home about midway through. Any plans to drag out my telescope though (to project the sun onto a screen – I’m not an idiot) were stymied by a massive bank of rainclouds that completely blotted out the sun just as I made it across the road to the building. Bah!

So, I watched the transit via an Austrian webcam.

I did however get to see the transit with my own eyes. While I was waiting for a train at Subiaco I noticed that there were rainclouds coming in, so I made a point of looking right at the sun. Only for a fraction of a second (again, I’m not an idiot – or at least not a complete idiot πŸ™‚ and of course I couldn’t actually see anything, but if my eyes had been able to focus and if such focusing wouldn’t have burned out my retinas then I would have been able to see the transit. So I reckon that counts πŸ™‚

I was going to write more, but my inane historical rantings have worn me out. And Treks in a Wild World is about to start and last week the traveler was Megan McCormick – so obviously I’m hoping for a repeat (even if the chopped down half-hour format means more time is spent on the destinations and less on the travelers, boo! πŸ™‚

To quote the KLF, over and out!

Repainted Bathrooms Rock!!

Another week, another general lack of entries. This is mainly due to the fact that Dale has taken 8 weeks off to go to the UK, and left me and Bevan in charge of the office (so far we haven’t quite managed to sink the business, but it’s early days). I’ve been doing a lot more work than usual, and work that involves actually talking with clients. Face to face. It’ll be a miracle if I get through it all without a complete nervous breakdown. Or at least without developing some interesting new facial twitches.

I have of course been taking refuge in TV, such as Charmed. Not a bad episode all told. Not a great episode, but then Charmed hasn’t been great for several seasons. Let’s see, what happened? Oh yeah, Leo seems to have departed for good, Piper’s found out that Chris is her son and Gideon’s turned out to be a bad guy. Hmmmm, wouldn’t have thought he’d have time for it what with running a distinctly Harry Potteresque magic school and traveling around the world leaving Bibles in hotel rooms (sorry, that was uncalled for *g*). Oh! And Rose McGowan’s dyed her hair back to black, which is great – I was getting bored with the whole redhead/blonde thing. How long it’ll stay that way is anyone’s guess though.

I was also going to say something about a much appreciated upswing in the number of brunette science chicks on TV at the moment – except that it looks like Neela might be leaving ER next week. Well that sucks. Oh well, at least there’s Abby on NCIS to comfort me – although it is on a bit late for my taste. And I suppose there’s that scientist on Jake 2.0 which premiered on Friday night (I haven’t managed to pin down a name for her yet).

Is it just me or does Jake 2.0 seem a lot like a revamped version of Now and Again with a younger, hipper cast? Does anyone except me even care? πŸ™‚ You’ve got to love nanotechnology though, it’s great. You can use it to justify any kind of ridiculous plot you like. What I want to know is what happens when someone tries to hack into Jake’s central nervous system via a firewire link. Have they installed a firewall? A virus checker? And who takes care of updates and resubscription services? πŸ™‚

I’d better leave TV for now (noooo!!! noooo!!!) and talk about what I got up to the Thursday before last, because I promised Rebecca I’d post this photo…

The Fiery Cake of DOOM!!!!

…and she keeps bugging me about it *g*. What is it you ask? Well read on dear reader, read on!

It all comes down to floors. Specifically the floors in the unit. Rebecca managed to get a really good deal on wooden flooring (I accidentally typed “Woden flooring” there, I wonder what that would be like? Lots of muscular shouting and ravens I expect πŸ™‚ and is going to upgrade the scungy lino in the living area and carpet in the hall with it. Yey! In order to accomplish this however she needed to get someone in to measure the place and figure out the exact square meterage.

She arranged this for Wednesday of three weeks ago. The plan was she’d come over about 6:30pm with the flooring guy and get the measuring done, then we’d go out for dinner at the Red Orchid (that is her and me, not her and me and the flooring guy ’cause that would just have been weird).

Unfortunately the flooring guy called up at the last minute to say he couldn’t make it. So the whole thing was rescheduled to Thursday of the next week. No problem (for me anyway, for Rebecca I can imagine it was extremely annoying).

So, all this was going to plan until early in the week when she realised that the Thursday in question was in fact Dom’s birthday and it wouldn’t be particularly birthdayish to leave him home all alone while having dinner with me. So, Dom was added to the party. No problem (for me anyway, Rebecca was quite embarrassed about it πŸ™‚

Then the actual day rolled around. Just to make sure there wouldn’t be any further problems Rebecca phoned up the flooring people (I could name the company but then I’d have to be careful about what I said and that’s no fun) and asked for confirmation that the appointment was going ahead. They replied by saying that they didn’t have any idea what she was on about, and just who was she anyway?

It emerged (no doubt after a fair amount of yelling) that “Steve” (not his real name, although I am willing to say that it’s the same as that of a recent movie πŸ™‚ had moved to another branch, and not left any messages about appointments and such. They suggested rescheduling for a week later. Given that she’d already rescheduled for a week Rebecca decided instead to yell at them until they sent someone around – which worked remarkably well.

So, on Thursday evening she and Dom came around to wait for Steve’s replacement to show up. Of course since it was Dom’s birthday Rebecca insisted on bringing him a cake -or at least a chocolate brownie. She also insisted on sticking 26 candles into this rather small brownie (it ended up looking like a startled porcupine) and was just about to light them up when pseudo-Steve arrived to measure the floors.

Dom – not wanting to explain what a candle festooned brownie was doing sitting on the table – hid it on a kitchen shelf for the duration of pseudo-Steve’s visit. Which was over rather quickly as he was actually very efficient. Once he left the brownie was rescued from exile and the lighting commenced.

This took a while as 26 separate candles had to be lit. Also Rebecca started from the outside in, meaning that the remaining center candles had to be lit while trying not to burn one’s hand on the ones at the edge. As the combined heat output and updraft from these was fairly intense it took a bit of doing. But in the end they were all blazing away, and she insisted I take a photo before Dom blew them out.

So I did. She also insisted I posted said photo on the Wyrmlog, hence its appearance above.

With that over we ate the brownie and went out to the Red Orchid, stopping for Gelatos on the way home. Not a bad night all told.

Rebecca and Dom are over here again today, painting the bathroom. I didn’t ask them to do this, they just decided to do so of their own accord. That’s the nice sort of people they are *g*. Actually as I type they’re out to lunch with some distant relatives of Rebecca’s, but they’ll be back soon to keep going (two thirds of the room have been painted, this needs to be finished and then the cupboards put back in). Then I’ll have a shiny new bathroom with fashionable blue stripes, yey!

Unfortunately I won’t be able to have a proper hot shower for a few days because the paint apparently doesn’t like steam until it’s fully dried (stupid wimpy paint). But we’ll be going out for dinner tonight, so I suppose that makes up for it πŸ™‚ We haven’t decided where we’re going yet, but it probably won’t be the Red Orchid – we’re all Red-Orchided out.

In other news Ali has written to me in defence of the acting talents of Matt LeBlanc. I won’t try and argue with her, as my experience of Mr LeBlanc’s portfolio is limited to Friends, Lost in Space, and the Logies a few years ago. He’s great in Friends but his performance in Lost in Space was fairly limp and dull (of course the entire film was fairly limp and dull, so maybe that’s not entirely his fault). His showing at the Logies (where he played “Special International Guest Matt LeBlanc”) however was not particularly convincing either. His part seemed to be made up of some desultory conversation with Darryl Sommers about his pet dogs, then a not particularly convincing shout of “Australian TV Rocks!!”. The scriptwriters should have been shot πŸ˜‰

But seriously folks, I don’t have anything against Mr LeBlanc and wish him total success for his Friends spin off show Joey (even though we all know it’ll probably be as well received as Jason Alexander’s Seinfeld spin off George).

Ummmm, don’t know that there was anything else I had to say really. So I’ll shut up then. Yes.

PS: Well, Helen says she liked Matt LeBlanc in Lost in Space, and Joey is apparently doing fairly well. No accounting for taste I suppose ;D. But seriously I thought Lost in Space was a film with great potential let down by unimaginative scripting and characterisation (and that darned monkey thing). If it had been written better then maybe I wouldn’t be so hard on Mr LeBlanc.

PPS: There was a weird JSP problem on the server yesterday evening which was causing the ‘white screen’ effect Ali mentions on her blog. That’s the first time I’ve seen it, but Ali seems to suggest it’s happening a lot πŸ™

Once upon a time there was a little girl in Portland who produced parts of entangled photons…

From this week’s New Scientist

…But the perturbative theorists deny there is anything wrong with their techniques, and say that the experiementers’ extrapolations are wrong: once they cool their films close enough to absolute zero they will see that they become insulators. Of course, you can’t disprove this line of argument, since you can never reach absolute zero. “Welcome to hell”, says physicist Gergely Zimanyi at the University of California…

Ghost in the Machine — Bruce Schechter

Well, it made me smile πŸ™‚

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