Sightings

I saw a UFO this morning.

At this point people are probably going “Oh god! Don’t tell me he believes in UFOs! He’s insane! I’m never reading this blog again!”. To which I say “Of course I believe in UFOs! I’ve seen a number of them over the years, I’d be mad to not believe in them!”

The point of course is that when you say “UFO” you probably mean “alien spaceship”, and when I say “UFO” I mean exactly what it says on the box – an Unidentified Flying Object.

Now I suppose it’s possible that any given UFO could be an alien spaceship, but – as a person with a decent grasp of both interstellar distances and physics – I wouldn’t be holding my breath. While I’m of the opinion that some UFOs may turn out to be anomalous – which is to say they are examples of a phenomena currently uncategorised by science – common sense dictates that the vast, vast majority of sightings are perfectly ordinary objects (such as aircraft, birds, stars, clouds, planets, meteors, etc.) seen from funny angles or under unusual conditions. I’m sure for instance that what I saw this morning was a plane either taking off from or circling to land at Perth Airport, which is only five or so kilometres from the site of my observation, Bayswater Railway Station.

What I saw at 8:33 this morning was a shining, slightly ovoid disc traveling from right to left across the east-north-eastern sky for between 30 seconds and a minute. It kept level at about four fingers above the treeline, and covered a distance of about four fingers before passing behind a cloud and vanishing. A mass of thin, whispy dark cloud was blowing across the sky from left to right, and the object was passing behind it, occasionally vanishing behind pillars of cloud – I was careful to note that the object was moving relative to the ground, not just to the cloud. Its level of brightness varied up and down, but remained constant for the last ten seconds of observation.

There were a large number of people on the platform at the time, but no-one else seemed to notice the object – or if they did they just assumed it was a plane. Which it almost certainly was. I considered taking a photo, but really couldn’t be bothered 🙂

So there we are. UFOs buzzing Bayswater. Tune in next week when I tell you about the thylacine I saw down by the river!

(Note: I have never actually seen a thylacine down by the river or indeed anywhere else :))

Create an Album Game

1: Go to Wikipedia and click ‘Random Article’ – That is your band name

2: Go to Wikiquote, click ‘Random Article’ and pick a quote – The last 3 to five words are your album title

3: Go to Flickr’s ‘Last 7 Days’ page – The fifth image is your album art

4: Compile the band name, album art and title in the image editor of your choice.

My design skills are obvious on vacation today…

(The base image is ‘Endless Sunshine’ by Brian 104 – if he objects to this completely unauthorised use of his image I shall of course take it down immediately)

Holy Calamity, Scream Insanity

Herp Derp Particle

The HerpDerpParticle Twitter feed is one of those things that first makes you laugh, and then makes you weep for the future of humanity. It does nothing but retweet insane twitter posts about the probable discovery of the Higgs Boson, which can mostly be categorised into three types…

1: Liberal atheist European scientists have found the God Particle, thus proving that God exists and hoisting the evil, science-worshiping, communist, agnostic, atheist, anti-American, Darwinist, liberal, gay, Muslim, perverts by their own petard.

2: Liberal atheist European scientists found the God Particle on July 4th, thus proving for all time that God loves America more than any other nation on Earth and condemning all evil, science-worshiping, communist, agnostic, atheist, Darwinist, liberal, gay, Muslim perverts to Hell for electing Barrack Obama.

3: All science is an evil, communist, agnostic, atheist, Darwinist, liberal, Anti-American, gay, Muslim, pervert plot and all the truth you ever need is in the Bible.

It’s this kind of thing that makes me reconsider living on this planet.

Later: But this cheers me right up 🙂

Lovely Spam

Enhance your Ewactwy Wo-um!

I’ve been getting quite a few spam comments on the Wyrmlog lately – which isn’t any kind of problem because my filters catch them all. I’ve usually been ignoring the contents but one today included a link to a YouTube video, which I decided to check out just for laughs (after all, what harm can a YouTube link do to your system?)

It turned out to be a video of a strongly accented man staring into the camera and talking about how great a particular brand of – shall we say – “enhancement” pills are, and how they increase “ewactwy wo-um”. Apparently other enhancement pills have all kinds of side effects, but these ones are side effect free, and have a really impressive effect on one’s ability to “ewactwate” – if that’s actually the kind of thing that particularly concerns one.

It was quite amusing, but I’m not going to reward spammy behaviour with a link.

On Skrillex

I actually don’t mind a bit of dubstep 🙂

I do not feel required to believe that Skrillex is a human being. My top three theories to explain the existence of such a thing are as follows…

1: Skrillex is the name of a program designed by a post-grad computer engineering student to simulate industrial workplace noise. After a night of heavy drinking said student inadvertently messed up some of the audio filters and induced a series of overlapping sound loops, then realised that the resulting cacophony might go down well at next weekend’s beer and ecstasy mixer.

2: Skrillex is an ancient fax-modem, forgotten about in a storage cupboard but still connected to the net, which has achieved sentience and a recording contract.

3: Skrillex is a member of an unknown, sapient, deep-sea dwelling species that is attempting to communicate with us by modulating its vocalisations for propagation through air rather than water. It’s not very good at it.