Wyrmlog

And talking of adds, how disgusting is that Sultana Bran one that mutilates Marvin Gaye’s Heard it through the Grapevine? Blasphemy! That’s the only word for it! Hrumph!!

Well, I said I’d write more yesterday, but I didn’t. This was because I thought I’d be too busy today cleaning up for the rent inspection I’ve got on Tuesday – then, realised yesterday afternoon that the inspection isn’t until Tuesday of next week. So I decided to be all lazy instead and played Civ III 🙂

Mind you, when I say lazy I wasn’t all that lazy – I’d done a shopping trip earlier in the day which involves a three kilometre round walk, the second half of which included carrying $120 worth of assorted groceries. The temperature was 30

OK, I had a busy, tiring week so I’m in no mood to make a proper entry, but I just have to complain about that add for Scary Movie 3 that’s running at the moment.

It’s the usual mismash of tiny little clips suggesting the film is absolutely hilarious (which it almost certainly isn’t) with an extremely happy voice over man at the end telling us all to go and see it because it’s great. What’s so bleeding annoying is that as part of this tired spiel he says something along the lines of…

…come and celebrate this third sequel…

EXCUSE ME? Third sequel? Call me pedantic but wouldn’t Scary Movie 3 be the second sequel by definition?

It amazes me that such an obvious error should slip past all the people who must have looked over the script for the add. Or is everyone in advertising these days only semi-literate? (actually that wouldn’t surprise me at all).

*sigh* I’ll write more tomorrow. Probably 🙂

Am currently pondering James’s proposition of stepping into Helen’s place in their date pact thing. Am not sure of exact details though, Helen couldn’t remember and the apparently circular link on his blog didn’t help much.

Whoops. The link now works. I’m really at a loss as to explain how that happened, I usually check all the links in my entries as soon as I post them. Oh well, even professional web designers (uh… on second thought let’s just say people who do web design for a living – the prospect of being a professional anything is way scary 🙂 are allowed to screw up now and then I guess 🙂

Intransigent DNA Influenced Cute Woman of the Week: The Guardian is coming back soon hence they’ve started playing adds for it – How cute is that… um… well I don’t know the character’s name, but the woman Simon Baker’s character is always getting all worked up about. Yeah her. How cute is she!? 🙂

Ya gotta love episodes of CSI where Sarah makes a pass at Grissom, and he either doesn’t notice or stands there with a look of consternated annoyance because he can’t think what he should do next 🙂

Hmmmm, reminds me of me *g*

Greg also got blown up in last night’s episode, although not seriously blown up, just lie-around-in-a-hospital-bed-for-a-while-making-faces blown up. Sarah also got a little bit blown up, but only needed a few stiches. Then she kicked open a door and pointed a gun at a dangerous suspect and followed up by asking Grissom out to dinner, which is a bit of an odd reaction I would have thought. Oh well, what do I know about the way they do things in Vegas? 🙂

Anyway what you don’t gotta love are sudden train strikes, like the one that caught me (and thousands of other commuters) out yesterday night. I was annoyed at first, although not overly so as the number 28 bus runs from Subiaco railway station almost to my front door. So I lined up and caught it, expecting to get home just before six.

Unfortunately I’d figured without the massive road congestion caused by 15,000 or so stranded train users calling up their friends and family for lifts, and the complete breakdown of the bus service under the load of the other 15,000 commuters that suddenly jumped onto it. So it was 6:00 before the bus even made it into the city. Happily though most of the lemming-like hordes alighted here, leaving just a handful of us to enjoy the trip out to Mount Lawley.

Unfortunately it turned out that (no doubt planning ahead to make my life hell) Transperth decided to change the route of the 28 bus about three weeks ago, “deleting” the part of the route that goes anywhere near Mount Lawley, or indeed out of the city at all (and naturally they hadn’t quite got around to updating the maps at the bus-stops yet). I learnt all this courtesy of the bus driver, who no doubt noticed my “Grissom-hit-on-by-Sarah” look in his surveillance mirror when the bus totally failed to turn north.

He was quite nice about it really, he even let me off between stops.

Anyway, so there I was stranded in the barren wilds of East Perth (just outside the old Mint) at 6:15 in the evening. I had two options. Number one – walk back to the bus station and fight the thousands of other commuters for a place on a bus that may or may not have been going where I wanted it to. Number two – walk home.

I walked home. It took me 45 minutes.

The greatest indignity of it all was just as I got to Mount Lawley railway station a train full of happy commuters rumbled past, the drivers having decided to go back to work just too late to assist me in any way.

You know, there are days it’s difficult to believe that the universe isn’t out to get me.

I was planning to write about cutting my hand on a packet of ham today, but then I checked my email and it turns out I have something else to write about. So, without further ado…

WOO-HOO!!!

Big congratulations to Helen and Rob 😀

Of course on a more personal note I suppose this means Helen and I won’t be going out on that date. Hmmmm, drat *g*. Ali, you interested in stepping in? 🙂

I probably had more stuff to write about, but this way takes precedence. Ummm, let’s see – missed this morning’s partial solar eclipse, saw Andrew’s Las Vegas pics last night, actually managed to get a GURPS game in Saturday before last – although Jean is being deported back to Canada by the evil government so Natalie played his character instead and didn’t seem too freaked out by what Michael gets up to with his geekish friends, bought the special collector’s edition of The Two Towers complete with Gollum statue and watched it (the movie not the statue), spent some time messing around in photoshop combining the most attractive facial features of various highly attractive celebrities because I was bored and I could *g* (the resulting photo-fit was dissapointingly nowhere near as freakish as I expected), and it was the 40th Anniversery of both Kennedy Assasination number one and Doctor Who over the weekend, hooray hooray. I think that covers it.

(I may or may not blog about any or all of these things in greater detail later in the week 🙂

Intransigent DNA Influenced Cute Woman of the Week: Oh who cares! 🙂

Boy did they screw up on Who Wants to be a Millionaire the other week.

The question – Which English county used to have a unique Celtic language?

The answers….

1. Cheshire
2. Cornwall
3. Cumbria
4. Kent

Now, the answer they wanted was of course B: Cornwall, but the point is that Cumbria used to have a unique Celtic language too!! There’s a famous (and almost certainly spurious) linguistic anecdote about it being used for counting sheep for crying out loud! Hrumph!

Happily the guy answering it got it “right”. Otherwise I would have been on the phone to Channel 9 so fast! I don’t know who they’ve got doing their research, but they should be shot (then they can hire me instead 🙂

Continuing with inane commentary on TV, is Monk awesome or what? Sort of like what an American Jonathan Creek would be like if they got that guy from Ghostbusters II and Ally McBeal to play the lead. Ummmm, Peter McNicoll? Something like that. They’ve moved it to Thursday nights too, so it’s on tonight. Yey!

Going to work now. Got more properties to add to Seasideholidays. Arrrgh! It never ends! 🙂

Had a very busy week and weekend and I should therefore have tonnes to write about, but I’m just not in the mood. How about that then?

As a stopgap measure though I thought I’d post this, which I stumbled over a few days ago and found rather amusing. I should add by the way that I was not actually searching for that (even if delightful Ms Lawson does have eyes that I could happily drown in). No one will believe me of course, but I think the point should be made just the same :).

You know the ironic thing is I am actually watching Jamie Oliver? Not nude thankfully, he’s cooking Japanese food and all that hot oil could be quite dangerous I expect. Hmmm.

On a completely different subject CSR’s website and email system seem to have totally collapsed over the last 24 hours. This means that Rebecca has presumably not got my email identifying a song she asked about. I would post the name and artist here, except that there’s every posibility it’s one of those that she downloads from Kazaa because she’s too embarassed to go into a music store and buy it *g*. So I won’t publically humiliate her – not after having a great lunch over at her and Dom’s new place yesterday anyway. Roast beef with salad and roast vegetables. No milkshakes though ;P

OK, I ran out of antihistamines on Monday night and haven’t been able to source any more, so I’m suffering from severe pseudoephindrine withdrawal and better go before I write anything really stupid. It can only get worse from here! 🙂

OK, this is easily the funniest thing I’ve heard in ages (in a very dark way 😉

I was watching the last epsiode of Love is in the Air last night, the recent ABC series on the history of Australian pop music and they did an interview with Vanessa Amorosi. You know, she had a hit back in 2000 with Absolutely Everybody and that horribly sacharine “inspirational” song Shine. (For purposes of illustration I’ll quote a bit of it here…)

You can give your life or you can lose your soul,
You can bang your head or you can drown in a hole,
Nothing lasts forever, but you can try,
Look around you,
Everyone you see, everyone you know is gonna shine,

See? Appalling stuff. Anyway, my respect for Ms Amorosi shot up from zero to – well to a small amount of respect anyway – when she revealed that she wrote Shine during a particularly dark stage in her life, and it wasn’t originally Shine, it was Die!

You can give your life or you can lose your soul,
You can bang your head or you can drown in a hole,
Nothing lasts forever, but you can try,
Look around you,
Everyone you see, everyone you know is gonna die,

Is that like the funniest thing ever? Particualrly since it’s now such a favourite of the “You can do anything if you try!” school of deluded optomists 🙂

Ah, pop music is great!

Continuing with the subject of things that amuse me – this new royal scandal that the palace is covering up. Don’t you so wish the “incident” involved Prince Charles turning into a lizard and eating a baby? That would be so much more interesting than whatever it actually turns out to be 🙂

OK, I’ve successfully annoyed Vanessa Amorosi fans, Royalists and possibly David Icke, so I’m going to shut up now 😉

It’s annoyingly warm this weekend. 32 yesterday, 33 today. And they reckon it’ll be almost 40 by Tuesday. I’m telling you, I seriously need to move to Hobart.

In any case I suppose I’d better say what I’ve been up to. About the only interesting things (apart from major Ben Knapinski Framed Print induced headaches) were catching up with Rebecca who’s just started her new job selling gyprock, and with Andrew who’s back from Vegas.

Both took place after work on Thursday. Rebecca had a work dinner on in the city that evening and rather than drive from Welshpool down to South Freo (where she and Dom are renting) then back into the CBD she sensible emailed me to see if I wanted to meet up for coffee (or in my case hot chocolate) on my way through. This seemed like a good idea to me *g* so we agreed to meet up at the train station at 5:00. I was apparently to watch out for her work uniform, specifically the top which she described as being so offensively yellow I wouldn’t be able to miss her.

As it turned out, she was right. It’s very, very yellow. Fluro yellow. Even from the other side of the station concourse it shone out like a gigantic radioactive highlighter. Apparently it’s so the workers won’t get run over by forklifts while walking through dimly lit areas of the warehouse, but I suspect it also provides protection from any passing 747s, and possibly even the space shuttle. In bright sunlight it could probably strike you blind.

Anyway we headed down to the historically themed Merchant Coffee House (or whatever it’s called, the one with the very historical looking but fundamentally useless electrically driven* and go in my normal clothes as a ‘guy’. Ali has suggested I do the same but claim to be a geek instead, which is an equally good idea. Or I may just go totally left-field and come as something completely insane. We’ll see.

I’ve also been thinking about that whole theodolite thing on and off for the last few weeks. I think I’ve come up with a pretty good design that would be fairly easy to build and operate – at least given access to a few decent tools to shape some parts. The big problem was coming up with a way to keep the whole thing level and get an accurate reading.

I was thinking about multiple spirit levels, but that would have been a nightmare (not to mention the cost). I then realised that if you fixed the protractor onto the viewfinder you could use a plumb line to take accurateGeorge de Mestral and his burdock burs? Anyway an old man with a broken leg got on the train at Perth and leant his wooden crutch against the wall at an angle. I took one look at it and was hit by the realisation that if I extended the forks holding the eyepeice forwards on an angle the plumb line would fall completely clear of tripod with no need for a hole. I immediately whipped a notepad out of my bag and feverishly scrawled down three or four pages of designs – incidentally startling the man sitting next to me who seemed to think I had suddenly gone insane (he may have had a point 🙂

So, I now have complete plans in my head (and notebook) for a homemade theodolite. It’s just a case of finding the time, money and motivation to build it. And use it. Ho-hum 🙂

To finish up I thought I’d transcribe some more lyrics, specifically those of All for Swinging you Around by the New Pornographers. It’s currently my second favourite track off Electric Version, after the mighty The Laws Have Changed of course. So, here goes (as far as I can tell :)…

Oh yeah, almost forgot…

Intransigent DNA Influenced Cute Woman of the Week: Ummmmmm… how about that crack addict leading Nick Kline into evil ways on The Bill last night? Yeah, she’ll do 🙂

I feel like writing, but I haven’t got anything to say. How stupid is that?

Ummmmm I went to the Doctor’s yesterday, that’s something. He gave me all sorts of tests (including an EEG or ECG or EEC or whatever, the one where they hook you up to a machine that goes bing anyway) then told me I need to get more exercise. Like I didn’t know that.

Then I walked back into the city instead of taking the train. I figure that’s enough exercise for me to safely eat pizza for the rest of the week 😉

Oh yeah, it’s the Melbourne Cup today. Yaaaaaaawn.

I’ll shut up now 🙂