Wyrmlog

Prairie. Thanks Helen 🙂

Well it’s been a long while hasn’t it? This is down to a number of factors…

1. Rebecca staying for a few days and dragging me out on healthy walks and things rather than letting me sit at the computer and lay down more layers of cholesterol 🙂
2. My working day and night on the aforementioned (I think I mentioned it?) role playing campaign set in a post-nuclear version of the south-west of the state.
3. I’ve had a killer of a cold for the last week.

But I’m writing now. More or less.

A consequence of not writing a decent entry for so long is that I’ve got a lot to write about. So lets get into it.

THE QUIZ NIGHT: Yes, Fabian’s Dart/Bowls club quiz night rolled around again two weeks ago. This is the same quiz night that I’ve attended for the last two years, and I’ve complained bitterly about each time due both to the absolutely inane questions, and the absolutely inane markers (who think the Statue of Liberty is on Ellis Island, and consistently forget to carry numbers while adding up). Well, this year things were much improved, because…

A) The questions were actually decent this time, with no mention of either elephants or Hercules (they did ask about the Greek Goddess of Victory, but it was a valid question about shoe manufacturers 🙂

B) We won! Yey!!

Yes! We finally got our due and left the opposition limping and weeping in our wake! Ha! About time!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!! 🙂

Excuse me while I recover from my temporary megalomania….. OK, thanks, I’m fine now.

So we won, which was great. But the prizes, well, they were a bit weird truth be told. They’d obviously gone around to local businesses and asked them for… well anything they were going to throw out I suspect. I ended up with…

• A large plastic box that I’m currently using as a recycling bin.
• Three cans of Solo. Fabian gave me his three so I actually ended up with six.
• A throwing ball thing, you know like a football with wings that you throw to people. I gave it to Fabian for his son Jayden in exchange for the Solo.
• A jar of Salsa.
• An economy bag of sour cream and chive chips.
• A box of water crackers.
• Two stubby holders. One from Dulux Paints, the other from Carlton Breweries.
• A sparkly party whistle thing.
• A set of lacy padded coat hangers.
• The most ridiculous terra-cotta thing ever made.

I include here a picture of the most ridiculous terra-cotta thing ever made, just so everyone can appreciate just how ridiculous it is.

So, what’s it for you ask? It’s for hanging off the side of a pot plant. What does it do? Just hang there, apparently. I completely fail to understand the purpose of this 🙂

The strange thing about all this was that a girl at the next table was absolutely desperate to get her hands on my coat hangers. As I wouldn’t be able to sleep with such monstrously feminine things in the house *g* we came to a quite equitable agreement where I handed them over in exchange for a floppy hat, two more cans of Solo and a proposal document for building a Formula One race track just outside the city (like I said, the prizes were weird 🙂

So yeah, that was the quiz night.

REBECCA’S VISIT: As I said, Rebecca was down for a few days. We actually managed to pack an awful lot into them.

On the Friday afternoon we went for a walk along the cycle path down by the river. Our basic aim was to mock the various tiny houses that are being built down there, particularly the ones where the owners seem to think they’re living in a Tuscan villa, rather than a cramped little shoebox. Our secondary aim was to get Rebecca some fresh air after her hellish stinking hot hour long bus trip from Fremantle, for much of which she was stuck sandwiched between her huge backpack and a man so obese that he could have happily taken up two seats on his own. Which probably isn’t really his fault, but still, you wouldn’t want to sit any closer to him than necessary would you?

On getting back from that we proceeded to walk into Mount Lawley where we had dinner at the Red Orchid, the same place we did last time Rebecca and Dom were in town. This time we sat inside, and were served by a very sour young woman who we decided was either a vegetarian who was disgusted at us for ordering meat, or an art student who was disgusted at having to lower herself to actual work. Or maybe both. In any case I took the plunge and had the crocodile. It was surprisingly like slightly chewy chicken. Once we finished up there we walked up to the Astor and had ice-cream at the Gelare place before walking home.

On the Saturday we went into town to look for MP3 players. At the first place we tried, the Myer Megamart, the sales assistant told us that we wouldn’t have much luck finding any solid state units in Perth, because there wasn’t much demand for them. We refused to believe him and went looking elsewhere.

We should have believed him. After four or five hours tramping around the entire CBD we managed to track down two solid state MP3 players. Two. And neither of them were very good ones. Is it just me, or does this seem really really stupid? Surely Rebecca and I aren’t the only people in Western Australia after the things? Sheeze!

Anyway we had lunch at Croissant Express (I can highly recommend their BLTs by the way) and went on to do some less technology oriented shopping at the David Jones foodhall, which is apparently shutting down because it’s unprofitable. Which sucks, because it’s possibly the best place in the universe to go for a browse. I mean the food they have down there! It’s nuts! And they’ve got a live piano player entertaining the shoppers too (not actually in the foodhall mind you, on the next level up – it just impressed me that’s all 🙂 Rebecca practically went into retail/cooking ecstasy -living in Kalgoorlie doesn’t give you much in the way of creative cuisine options apart from roo-meat and feral goat. She limited herself to some feta cheese and insanely expensive (but insanely good) chocolate though. And some cards. And a pen. And maybe some stuff I’m forgetting 🙂

Anyway once we’d finished there we headed back to the Megamart, since they had hardback copies of The Order of the Phoenix for $22.00, the cheapest price we’d found. For the last few weeks all over the city there’d been big signs warning everyone to pre-order their copies or miss out, but we couldn’t walk ten feet without tripping over big piles of the things. On the news that night they had footage of people lining up outside stores for hours and practically beating shop staff to the ground in order to get a copy, and then said everywhere was sold out within minutes, but I don’t know where they got that idea from. From what Rebecca and I could see every store in town had massively over-ordered and couldn’t shift the damn things 🙂

Anyway, back at the Megamart I purchased a CD stand since my old one is overflowing. The funky orange one I had my eyes on turned out to be $250, so I decided to be slightly less funky and get a $50 one instead. Then we caught the train back.

OK, I should point out at this point that Rebecca has a plan. A plan for me. This involves my getting a place of my own, a driver’s license, a car and a girlfriend, preferably all before I turn 30. To this end she insisted that we look through the property listings in the newspapers at Croissant Express (getting a look of sheer evil from a bearded street person – who was reading one of them and seemed to regard the other as his personal property despite the fact he wasn’t reading it at the time – in the process). It turned out that there was a unit for sale in the local area in my price range and it was being offered by the Real Estate company just across the road from the Gables. So it was a pretty foregone conclusion that we were going to stop in there on the way back. The Agent was very enthusiastic and gave us a list of other properties in the area which we decided to check out either that afternoon or on Sunday. So then we came home.

That afternoon Rebecca went off to see her friend Tammy and get the latest updates on her spawn of Satan boyfriend who I seem to recall is named Tim but should actually be called Beelzebub the Opportunistic Bastard Exploiter of Emotionally Vulnerable Women May a Large Truck End His Days Soon. I busied myself assembling the CD rack and sorting out my CDs. Here (for purposes of general edification) I include a photo of how the nicely ordered collection currently looks…

Snazzy no?

Anyway once Rebecca got back we had a stir fry and watched Momento, which she’d given to my on DVD for my birthday and much to my shame and embarrassment I hadn’t got around to watching yet. I really should have, not only is it a totally kick-arse film but it also features Carrie Anne Moss and Jorja Fox (Jorja Fox, you know, Sarah from CSI? 🙂

Anyhoo, on Sunday morning we went out for a walk to look at the properties. The first one turned out to be down near the river amongst all the ones we’d had so much fun mocking on Friday. Happily though it didn’t look particularly mock-worthy. It actually looked very nice, based on what we could see through the insanely tight security. The next two were in the same block, and while I had some idea of where to go, we ended up getting slightly lost. In a burst of serendipity though we emerged from the back streets not only on the correct road, but standing right outside the very building we were looking for. Sweet.

The final block we were looking for was across the railway line, so we stopped in at a supermarket to get drinks before continuing. The block turned out to be pretty run down and insecure though, so we decided not to bother about getting an inspection – despite the fact it was very convenient to the local fetish-clothing/bondage-equipment store 😉

It was starting to rain at this point, so rather than walk back we decided to catch the train. Unfortunately we just missed one and it being Sunday the next one wasn’t due for another half hour. So we sat around on the freezing, wet platform which seemed to have been designed specifically to provide absolutely no shelter against wind and rain whatsoever -possibly to discourage loitering. But we ended up back home relatively dry.

The rest of the day was spent just hanging around until it was time to call a taxi to the airport. There was a bit of confusion over this, since the taxi that turned up was from a different company to the one Rebecca had called, so we assumed it was for someone else, and the driver eventually drove off in disgust. So she had to call another one and deal with the dispatcher who seemed rather irate that we were too foolish to figure out that a Yellow Cabs taxi would obviously be working for Swan Taxis. It worked out in the end though, although we did make the disturbing discovery that Swan Taxis can tell your physical location just from your phone number via some arcane phone-tracing matrix-like technology – obviously not the people to make prank calls to 🙂

So, Rebecca went off to the airport, and since she’s been emailing me from her work, presumably got back to Kalgoorlie in one piece *g*. All in all it was a very enjoyable three days, even if I do have to go and buy a flat now 😉

VIDEO CLIPS: I think I said I was going to talk about some video clips. This is because a few weeks back I happened to catch some of Rage, and amongst all the dismal repetitive R&B and auto-lobotomising pop there were actually a few really entertaining clips. So, I thought I’d bore everyone by carrying on about them.

First of all is Gay Bar by Electric 6, the same people who (in collaboration with Jack White from the White Stripes) brought us the truly deranged Danger! High Voltage a while back. As it turns out their new song (and associated clip) is even more deranged that this previous effort.

It opens on a cartoon of the White House. As the music gets going we zoom in to a window, where a silhouette of a figure in a stovepipe hat can be seen. We then cut to live action where, sure enough, one of the band members (I presume, it could just be an actor, I don’t know) is sitting behind a desk dressed as Abraham Lincoln.

“Girl!” he announces seriously “I wanna take you to a gay bar! I wanna take you to a gay bar! I wanna take you to a gay bar!” He stands up to reveal that although he’s wearing proper 19th century garb on his upper body, his legs are bare except for a pair of spangly boxer shorts. “Gay bar!” He points right where an identical Lincoln in boxer shorts appears, “Gay bar!” he points left and another Lincoln appears.

We cut to a fairly staid looking 19th century room/hall. In the centre are the three Lincolns dressed in shorts and singlets with towels around their necks (but still in stovepipe hats), pumping away on exercise bikes. “Let’s start a war!” suggests the central Lincoln “Start a nuclear war! At the gay bar!” he gestures right and several Lincolns on various bits of exercise equipment appear. “Gay bar!” he gestures left and more work-out Lincolns materialise, “Gay bar!” even more Lincolns appear, lifting weights and working on rowing machines.

The clip continues in a similar vein with ever increasing numbers of Abraham Lincolns engaging in a variety of highly cliched homoerotic activities such as pole dancing, weight lifting and climbing ladders in skimpy tool belts, all while wearing stovepipe hats. It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve seen on TV in ages, and therefore (naturally) I think it’s fantastic. 🙂

Although for some reason they beep out the words “war” and “nuclear war” with whip cracks. Hmmm, weird.

The second clip that caught my notice was for the Herds’ 77%, which for those not in the know is a scathing hip-hop/rap song attacking the Howard Government’s policies on indigenous affairs and refugees. The clip involves a cardboard cut-out John Howard having a number of “adventures”, including waking up one morning as an Aborigine and being beaten by the police, and finding himself suddenly turned into an Afganistani refugee and being abandoned in a detention centre. The only slightly disappointing thing about the clip is that it’s not true 🙂

In a similar vein No-FX’s Franco Un-American is another politically motivated video clip done with cutouts. It has some great images, the one that particularly sticks in my head is a map of Iraq dripping with blood which drains into a petrol can and fuels up a number of giant American SUVs. The appearance of Michael Moore and a map of Australia are just bonuses 🙂

Finally I wanted to mention the very surreal and creepy clip for Radiohead’s… well to be honest I don’t know what song it is, one of the new ones off Hail to the Thief I presume. In any case it features a man staggering through a very dark and creepy moonlit forest stumbling over a number of strange little tableaus involving woodland animals. Such as a tiny house built into a tree root which contains two mice wearing fezzes and quilted dressing gowns sitting by the fireplace in rocking chairs and smoking cigars, or a banquet attended by rabbits and hedgehogs, or a cat wedding. All of the animals are stop motion animations like the old Wind in the Willows TV series – in fact I’d swear the entire clip was inspired by the series, it could almost be the Wild Wood the guy’s stumbling through.

Eventually he comes over a bright, white, glowing coat hanging in a tree. He puts this on, then notices some shoes sitting in a fork of the same tree, which he proceeds to don as well. The crows sitting in the tree then attack him, and he goes racing through the forest, pursued by them. His flight is in vain however, as he’s suddenly transformed into a tree. It’s all very weird and creepy and doesn’t make any sense, but wow, it looks good 🙂

So yeah. Those are the clips.

THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS: Is The Laws Have Changed by these guys the catchiest song ever? Or is it just me? 🙂

OK, going to go now. I’ve got to go inspect some of these properties. Rebecca wants me to post images of them here so people can vote on which I should buy. Don’t know if I’m game to whip out a digital camera and start photographing people’s homes though. Or leave such a major life decision up to the kind of weirdoes who wander around the net for that matter 😀

No offense ;-D

Um yeah. It’s been mighty quiet on the prarie lately…

Is that how you spell prarie? Doesn’t quite look right to me for some reason. Hmmmmm.

Anyway this is really just an entry to say I’m in the middle of two weeks off from work, and as such I’ve just been sleeping in and lazing around the house and so on, so have little to write about and even less inclination to do so *g*. Well, that’s not strictly true, I had a rent inspection on Wednesday and Rebecca’s coming down for a few days (she’ll be here any minute in fact – or hour more like since the trains aren’t running and she’ll have to get a bus), but apart from that not much has been going on. Well, there’s been a few things, OK, but I’m not going to write about them now, that clear? Good!

I will direct everyone here though. It’s a stupid little online test I whipped up to see how well YOU (my loyal readers) know ME (your semi-loyal intermittant writer). So go ahead! Find out what you know about me! And what you don’t! In percentage form! Can you stand the excitement?!? 😉

Course you can. It’s only a stupid test 🙂

I’ll write a proper entry, including full details of my quiz night success and observations on currently charting video clips soon 🙂

Here’s something to while away a few minutes with…

http://www.celebmatch.com/bestmatch.php

Type in your birthday and it tells you what celebrities you’re most compatable with, based on the science (ack! cough! hack! wheeze! excuse me 🙂 of biorythms. Apparently. As it turns out I’m 100% compatable with recording artist Pink, which is nice to know. However I’m only 54% compatable with Neve Cambell, which is slightly disapointing *g*.

OK, I’m going to work now.

Helen, I have sent you a long reply email, with a whole bunch of attachments. Just in case you’re reading this and were wondering.

Of course with your current email problems I could be lying completely. You’ll just have to wait and see 😉

We get some odd calls at work.

Probably the oddest was a few weeks ago, when I answered the phone with the standard “GTP Internet Commerce”, only to be asked (by a rather tough sounding man who I’d guess was in his mid thirties) “Are you running buses to the Avril Lavigne concert?”.

As surreal as this seems there is a sane explanation. The geniuses (genii?) over at the Yellow pages have (for the second year running) screwed up and printed our number under the listing for an eastern states bus company, which may or may not have been running buses to the Avril Lavigne concert. We have also received calls inquiring about buses to Byron Bay, services between Melbourne and Broken Hill, and charters to the Abba inspired stage show “Mamma Mia” – the later from a woman with a voice so nasal that she could only have been from the western suburbs of Sydney.

Some of the real support calls aren’t much better though. I don’t have a problem with guiding people through stuff step by step – even I get confused now and then with some of the more complicated aspects of the system – but if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s stupidity. I don’t mean unfamiliarity with computers, or nervousness with new technology, I mean abject bone-headedness. Like this call, from a few weeks ago just after we altered the interface so the menu was across the top of the screen rather than down the left side…

ME: GTP Internet Commerce.

CLIENT (semi-panicked): Oh, hi, I was just trying to log in to the um…. website, and there’s nothing!

ME: OK, so you’ve got to the login page and out in your username and password, and nothing happens?

CLIENT: No, it lets me in, but there’s nothing there!!

ME: So when you log in, you’re not getting anything?

CLIENT: Yes, there’s nothing!

ME: Nothing at all on the screen?

CLIENT: No, there’s the manual page, but nothing else!

ME: So you can see the manual, but there’s nothing else on the screen?

CLIENT: Yes!! I can’t see the menu down the side!

ME: OK, there’s no blue bar above the manual?

CLIENT: Yes, I can see the blue bar, but there’s nothing else!

ME: Is there anything on the blue bar?

CLIENT: Well there’s ‘GTP iCommerce’ and ‘You are logged in as [username]’ but nothing else!

ME: There’s nothing below that?

CLIENT: There’s some boxes.

ME: Is there anything in them?

CLIENT: Yes, ‘iCommerce’, ‘iContact’, ‘iNews’, ‘Help’…

ME: OK, what happens when you move the mouse over the boxes?

CLIENT: Menus drop down, but that’s all! The menu isn’t on the side!

ME: OK, we’ve moved the menu from the left hand side up onto the blue bar at the top.

CLIENT: But where is it?!

ME: Those menus, they’re the same as the menu down the side.

CLIENT: Are they?

ME: Yes, roll over the first one.

CLIENT (doubtfully): OK….

ME: See, all the options from the iCommerce menu are there.

CLIENT (doubtfully): Oh, OK. Thank you. (hangs up)

ME (banging head against desk): ARRRRRGGGGGGGHGHHHHGGHGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You see what I mean? It seriously makes you wonder how some people manage to get out of bed in the morning without doing themselves some kind of serious injury.

Talking of people too mentally disadvantaged to get out of bed without assistance, Josie has finally come through and got the new cupboards installed in the bathroom. This is close on five months after Rebecca told her too. I took advantage of the fact that a new sink was being installed, and talked the workmen into unblocking the sink at the same time. So I now have a nice, functioning bathroom, and a large ex-bathroom mirror leaning against the loungeroom wall. I’m debating what to do with it. The possibility of fixing it to the bedroom ceiling and turning the place into a bordello exists of course, but it’s probably a bit small, and the Residents’ Council would almost certainly object. So it’ll probably end up getting thrown out. Just hope it’s not me doing the throwing, my luck is dodgy enough without an extra seven years of badness 😉

But on to politics.

I’m only turning to politics because there’s a fairly amusing stoush (does anyone except me ever use that word? 🙂 going on in South Australia between the State and Federal Governments over a radioactive waste dump. Canberra wants to put it on a farm in South Australia. The South Australians (understandably) don’t want a bar of this (yet another ancient phrase that no one but me ever uses :), and are trying to stop the development going through. So the Federal Government told them that if they didn’t hand over the land, it would be resumed, which is permitted under the constitution. So, the South Australian Government decided to declare the land a public park, because the legislation doesn’t allow for public parks to be resumed. At this point the Federal Government said that if the land was declared a public park, they’d cut off science funding to the state. At this point a group of South Australian scientists pointed out that the Federal Government doesn’t actually give them any funding at all, and in fact they’d been campaigning for funding from them for several years. It’s like something from Douglas Adams – I can hardly wait to see what happens next 🙂

Anyway, I suppose I’d better blog about what stupid I have been up to now that I’ve covered stupid clients, stupid property managers and stupid governments. As usual, not much. I did go up to Fabian’s place a few Saturdays ago to play my Max Schreck look alike cleric in his AD&D campaign. Playing a character with a charisma of 6 actually turned out to be pretty entertaining, particularly when I decided to make him completely paranoid. The other characters were continually irritated by his insistence on checking every room they stayed in for traps and secret panels *g*. But he’s pretty good at healing spells, which is enough to convince everyone not to do him in during the night. Particularly Michael’s character who, despite being an insanely tough half-orc, has been almost killed in every battle we’ve got ourselves into. I guess he just presents a much bigger target 🙂

I’ve also been playing a lot of Civilization III, particularly after buying the Play the World expansion pack. I finally managed a spaceship victory today, yey! In the year 1900 no less. I was playing on a huge scale map of Earth (playing as the English), and starting from Italy I ended up with an empire stretching from St Petersburg in the north, Spain in the west, Kiev in the east and south to the Congo. Throw in colonies in Australia (for uranium) and the Caribbean (for dyes) and that’s not too shoddy really. I could have taken the British Isles and Scandinavia as well, but I decided to be nice to the poor Persians and let them survive 🙂

One weird thing though is that at one point I swear my Trade Advisor said “I’m not even supposed to be here today!”. A Clerks fan in the Firaxis team perhaps? Or just a hallucination engendered from sitting in front of a computer for six hours? I guess I may never know…

Hmmmm, I’ve got a note here saying “Blog – Yes! 6!”. I know it’s to remind me to blog about something, but I have no idea what. I leave it as an exercise for my readers 🙂

OK, going to go now. Got some pasta on the stove that’s probably just about to dissolve..

Long weekend!! Yey!!!

To be perfectly honest I have no idea what this long weekend is for. Triple J is broadcasting it’s normal weekday programing, which is a good indication that it’s a West Australian public holiday only, but I’m not sure which one. Possibly it’s one of the Queen’s many birthdays, either that or Foundation Day, which celebrates some woman cutting down a tree. Anyway, I don’t care because after all a public holiday is a public holiday 🙂

I haven’t been up to all that much lately, apart from work. We’ve got a few big jobs on at the moment, one of the biggest being replicating a set of three entire websites without FTP access. That means that rather than go in and just download all the files in a sane and ordered manner, we have to do it all via the browser. You know, right click on every single image and save it, then save all the pages manually, then read the code and copy the URLs to get a hold of any linked css or js files. Needless to say this isn’t a lot of fun. I’m not exactly clear on why the client won’t give us the FTP details – my best guess is they don’t want the original company to know they’re changing over to us until it’s all a fait-acompli. This seems of dubious legality at best, but hey, I presume they know what they’re doing.

Apart from that the only thing of note I’ve accomplished in the last few months is an ambient/chill out remix of the Waifs’ London Still. You see Triple J were running a competition where they provided the various broken down components of three songs (London Still, El Questro by Downsyde and some stupid Silverchair thing) in MP3 format and challenged people to remix them, so I figured I’d have a go. I’m fairly pleased with my effort, but unfortunately it shall never see the light of day. Copyright was only waived by the artists for the purpose of the competition, the mp3 files were only allowed to be downloaded for use in the competition, the resultant remixes were only allowed to be posted to the competition website, and the competition was only open to people aged 25 years or under. So if I even play my remix to an empty room I’m probably in violation of international law and in extreme danger of having my door beaten down by the copyright police and being hauled off into imprisionment at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Or something 🙂

On the subject of music though I was extremely distressed to discover that those scary Russian lesbians Tatu (or whatever) have done a “cover” of the Smiths’ How Soon is Now. BLASPHEMY!! SACRILAGE!! HERESY!! DEVILTRY!! ISOLATIONISM!! FREE SILVER!! I mean good Lord, why not let them re-score Beethoven’s fifth for those singing cats while they’re at it? Doesn’t anyone have respect for the classics these days? Sheeze!!

I say “cover” because their version only barely resembles the original. They’ve got some semi-competant session musicians in to do a halfway decent version of the tune, but then totally disfigure it with their – well you can’t actually call it singing, they sound like a pair of trapped marmosets. Thin, reedy, whining and shrieking is closer to the mark. I move here and now, that we set up a fund to procure a rocket propelled grenade launcher and plane ticket to Moscow for Morrisey, and send him over to set them straight. We could even throw in a marmoset tracking dog. That’ll learn them!!

Hrumph!

Anyway, about the only other thing I’ve got to say is something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, namely the fun and games that went on over at F*ntastico a few weeks back. For those who came in late this is a long, narrow Subiaco eatery that Rebecca, Dom and myself visited a while ago (and at which the prawns gave me mild food poisoning). Anyway it was in the news recently when it was the scene of a vicious street brawl between a group of “high profile” C*ffin Ch**ters, and some “associates” of “N*rthbridge ident*ty” John K*zzon.

(Edit – August 9 2004 – I’ve altered several of the names and terms in the above paragaraph because this weblog entry kept coming up number one on K*zzon/F*zio related web searches – which probably isn’t the best thing for my long term health prospects. Allegedly 🙂

Apparently the two groups were eating at F*ntastico when an argument between them got out of hand. So they proceeded to step outside to sort it out. This “sorting out” resulted in one of K*zzon’s “associates” by the name of F*zio being knocked to the ground and having his head and face repeatedly kicked and stomped on, to the point where he required 40 stitches. The management of F*ntastico quite sensibly pulled down the roller shutters and locked everyone inside as soon as they realised what was going on, and eventually the police arrived and broke it up. Not long afterwards a “mysterious fire” hit F*zio’s gym in Northbridge, but the police swear black and blue that there’s no connection. Of course.

A few Perth-specific phrases there probably need some explanation. The C*ffin Ch**ters are what the press and police like to refer to as an “Outlaw Motorcycle Club” and the rest of the population as “bikies”. Northbridge is the nightclub and entertainment district of the city, hence a “N*rthbridge Ident*ty” is a person of importance in that area and the kinds of fields and endeavors associated with that sort of area (although K*zzon seems to be the only person to whom the term is ever applied). I might be more specific except it could well result in a visit from some “large men”. Allegedly.

(On the subject of bikies, it should be noted that in Australian English it’s quite common for words to be truncated and have an “ie” or “y” stuck on the end. For instance truckie, footy, Chrissy, barbie, prezzie (respectively truck driver, football, Christmas, barbeque and present – yes “Chrissy prezzie” is disturbingly common *g*) and a whole host of others I can’t be bothered thinking about. To someone unfamilar with this tendancy a “bikie” might sound like a quite cheerful and even jolly sort of person riding around on his Harley laughing deeply and waving at small children and pensioners. Remove this image from your mind at once. Bikies are not cheerful or jolly. Replace the “ie” with “er” to translate the phrase into into US or UK English. Yes, them.)

So yes, F*ntastico. The place to go for risky prawns and street violence. Extreme dining! 🙂

OK, I’m going to go now.

PS: My bathroom sink is unblocked! Yey!! 🙂

Well, now I’m done with embarrasing personal revelations for a while, I thought I’d relax with some stupid online tests…

You are Neo, from “The Matrix.” You
display a perfect fusion of heroism and
compassion.

What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Perfect fusion of heroism and compassion? OK, if they say so. Mind you, I did it again, changed a few answers where I could have gone either way and came up as Cypher, so I think I’ll stick with Neo 🙂

You are Professor X!

You are a very effective teacher, and you are very
committed to those who learn from you. You put
your all into everything you do, to some extent
because you fear failure more than anything
else. You are always seeking self-improvement,
even in areas where there is nothing you can do
to improve.

Which X-Men character are you most like?
brought to you by Quizilla

Cool, I’m Patrick Stewart! 🙂

I came out the same as Helen and Ali on the shipper test, so if you’re that interested, visit their blogs.

I did the Talk Like A Pirate Personality test too, but I came up as a Pirate 2nd Class. In the process it alleged some rather uncomplimentary things (Long walks on ta beach and cuddlin’? Arrrr!!! What ye be alledgin’ thar matey?!) so I’m not going to post it *g*.

Oh, and my pirate name is apparently “Dirty James Flint” which means I’m hard and sharp like the rock flint, but I’m also easily chipped and sparky. The other pirates also want to throw me into the ocean, not to get rid of me, just my smell.

Hmmm, somehow I don’t think I’m cut out to be a pirate 😉

I have an admission to make. An admission of a kind that I’d never make under normal circumstances. In fact virtually every instinct in my Geek brain is screaming at me to stop, but I’m sufficiently fed up to ignore them and press on. So, what is this shocking and potentially scarring confession that will horrify and alienate my small yet loyal band of readers? Well, nothing much really.

It is simply this. I have a crush on a friend of my brother’s, and in fact have had a crush on her pretty much for the last eight years. Specifically, Lyndah.

So, why this admission? I’ll cover that a bit later.

Now Lyndah. Lyndah is without a doubt the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met. I formed that opinion the moment I met her and am yet to encounter circumstances that would cause me to alter it. She is simply stunning. I’ve never known her to look less than fantastic. I was totally blown away the first time Andrew brought her back from uni and continue to be every time we happen to meet (which these days is maybe twice a year or so at some function of his or other).

So, fairly predictably I developed a mad crush on her, and now – eight years on – despite the fact that I hardly ever see her anymore, I still have a mad crush on her. And, well, frankly, I’m sick of it.

You see the particularly dumb thing about this is that really I hardly know Lyndah. We’ve had a few brief conversations over the years at various get togethers and openings, but that’s about it. My attraction to her is pretty much just physical (although I prefer the term “aesthetic” – “physical” makes me sound like I turn into a slavering neandertal every time she walks into the room*I actually turn into a stuttering idiot. In fact it’s annoying. As a Geek I pride myself on my “substance over style” ethic. To have a crush on a girl for eight years based on little more than the fact that she’s astonishingly beautiful is frankly embarrasing.

And what’s worse it’s a cliche. I mean c’mon, the dorky older brother having a secret crush on one of the cool brother’s female friends? It’s the stuff of countless unimaginative teen dramas. I have way too many cliches in my life – some days it seems like there’s little else – so I’m doing away with this one. No more secrecy.

Of course I’m under no illusions of anything coming of this admission. I can’t imagine Lyndah seeing anything much in an overweight, socially inept geek with bad hair such as myself. But that’s not what this is about. This isn’t an attempt to spark some kind of interest from her, or some kind of round-about geeky way of asking her out on a date. It’s simply a case of being sick to death with the status quo, and doing something to change it. Call it empowerment if you’re so inclined (I’m not).

Naturally coming out with all this publicly will make things insanely awkward the next time we happen to run into each other. But hey, talking to her is already pretty awkward for me, this is just a way of sharing the awkwardness around *g*.

So, yes. I find Lyndah insanely attractive and have done for the last eight years. Like woo-hoo, big deal. Now, if no one minds, I’ll get on with my life.

Over and out.

Hmmm, Helen seems to be under the impression that I was confused by The Matrix Reloaded. I suppose that’s one way of interpreting what I wrote, but it’s not actually what I meant *g*. I understood it all fine, in fact I think I was one of the few people in the cinema to actually get most of what the Architect said (uses lots of big words does that particular program :). What I meant was that I was totally blown away by… OK, I suppose I’d better do the traditional “hide the text against the background” trick here so as not to spoil people (if you’re reading this on my homepage it probably won’t be hidden, so be warned)…

OK, I was totally blown away by the concept that everything we learned in the first movie is a lie. The prophecy, the truth about Zion, the purpose of the One – even the Oracle turns out to be a program! And what’s more it’s all a lie created by the machines! It totally blew my mind (probbaly due in fact to my incipient bout of the flu), and that’s what I meant by my comments.

Another thing that amazed me was the fact that this is the sixth Matrix. The whole cycle of creating Zion and the emergence of the One has happened four times before (remember, the first Matrix failed). Given that Zion starts with 27 people each time and that the population in this version of Zion is 250,000 then the Matrix must be ancient. I did some quick maths the other day, and assuming a 50% population increase in each generation (from both breeding and releasing people from the system) and 25 years per generation that comes to a little under 600 years. So if that’s an average timespan for the One to emerge, then the Matrix must have existed for over 3,000 years. As Keanu (and Helen 😉 says, Woah!

So that’s what I meant. I could talk some more about the film, but Helen’s pretty much said all I would have, so go read her blog 🙂

I’m going now. Have to cook dinner.