segue, verb, proceed without interruption

Yesterday I saw a surveyor type wheeling around one of those clicky wheel things for measuring distances, and the only thing that made sense to me at the time was that he should grow up and get himself an adult-sized unicycle.

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I walked past a shop with a whole selection of these fantastic knife racks in the window. Seriously cool. When I have lots of money to spend on kitchenware to make it look like I do lots of cooking even though I blatantly don't/won't, this will be a serious contender. I wonder if I could make clothes and removable name tags and still retain functionality...

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Last night I dreamt I defeated the giant mutant snakes by shooting them lots from the back of a motorcycle. Except we kept the big troll-like snake around because both he and his mum were friendly and helpful. Also, I think I went on and partly organised a school trip to Samoa via Fiji. It was sunny and stuff. I am overjoyed that I have finally managed to defeat the snakes. For those I haven't previously mentioned this to, I've been having horrible snake-themed nightmares every now and again for the last couple of years. This has been rather odd, as I've never been particularly scared of snakes.

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See? Snakes are cute.

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I suspect I am most likely preaching to the choir here, but this article said it perfectly for me. The problem with science is that it doesn't have any singing clown fish.

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I randomly came across the link for the cardboard moose thing they have in Milgi's that I like. Apparently it's man-tacular, whatever that means. Is there a pun there that I'm not getting? All I can think of is that it rhymes with vernacular, and sounds like it only comes out at night. Like perhaps Buffy needs to go look it up and give it a good staking, only that seems awfully unfair and unnecessary seeing as it's already a decapitated cardboard head of a moose to start with.

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The cows over here think they can sing. They join in every morning with the birds as the sun is coming up. It's endearing, if atonal.

Media Consumption

I was going to write this absolutely fantastic entry that subtly announced my return in a beautifully understated manner, some kind of rundown of the movies I watched on the flight over here. But the truth of the matter is I can't be bothered. I really can't think of anything particularly profound to say about any of them, since I decided that romantic comedies were the way to go. The only one I'd even bother with again was Bridge to Terabithia, which I found out I had been pronouncing incorrectly all this time, and additionally made me cry my eyes out.

Last time I flew I made the mistake of watching I Am Legend followed by Sweeney Todd. I ended up so weirded out I threw up in the toilet. Romantic comedies and kids movies from now on, at least when stuck in 12 hours of recycled air.

I read a book as well, right through immigration. Captive Of My Desires by Johanna Lindsey. If you think it sounds trashy, that's because it is. But when I got to the stage where I hadn't slept for close to 22 hours it was absolutely perfect. This particular book manages to avoid falling into completely distasteful and badly disguised rape fantasy (a flaw of what seems to be a shocking number of historical fantasies) by successfully and rather literally chaining up the hero and all his raw animal power for most of the second half of the book. Piratey joy. It was picked out for me by the completely giant built black guy in the bookshop in Heathrow. I didn't understand a word he said, but he found me a whole bunch of books to pick from, and dug out this particular one from the storeroom as it wasn't on the shelves. He seemed rather overjoyed to be helping me. Gotta love a guy with that much enthusiasm for trashy historical romances.

Finally, a quick mention for Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy by Múm, which I spent quite a bit of time listening to over and over on the flight. Really rather fantastic, and much easier to listen to than their previous stuff. I'll be off to buy this album as soon as I get near any shops.

Alternate Universe

Imagine a world without nuclear weaponry.

I know, I know, a hundred dozen hippies have asked the same, but with the various posts I've been reading on the issues surrounding the replacement of the British nuclear deterrent, it suddenly occurred to me that I'd never really considered this particular alternate universe.

I can't really see it. I try to consider what life might be like if Hiroshima and Nagasaki had never happened, but I don't really get very far.

I get to the mental vision of a pilot in a cockpit peering down through... whatever the window bit in a cockpit is called. I get to crackling radio and various explosions making loud noises and shocking light.

I can sort of hear a voice, "Oh, crap, nothing happened." But in an American accent, which for some reason my aural imagination just can't reach to without introducing Ben Affleck. I point blank refuse to bring Ben Affleck into this, so "Oh, crap, nothing happened" will have to stay in a slightly out-of-place accent.

Later, I can maybe see a bunch of scientists getting fired.

Other than that there's nothing. Possibly, the human race is extinguished by something a bit icky due to resources being redirected to biological weaponry. Maybe we, like, unite and colonise space and learn to communicate with sweater monsters. Maybe we sit around in kimonos all day and smoke an endless supply of marijuana.

Not that anybody needs reminding, but they're called alternate universes because they didn't happen, and in this particular case my head isn't filling in any blanks for me.

So. What's next?

Lord, We Need A Revival

My laptop magically came back to life today. It's been refusing to boot for literally months and today I was supposed to take it into a rumoured repair shop to get the dead-to-the-world CD/DVD drive replaced. This would then allow me to reinstall Windows or apply some other OS with a breath of hope in it.

But this is not how my laptop came back to life. It did not make it to the repair shop but instead came back by magic. Magic, I tell thee.

That thing that defies explanation. One minute broken, the next... million or so (during which nothing happened) minutes later... fixed!

It's amusing because I named the computer Persephone for no other reason than I like the phonetics of the name and it shows up in Firefly. Must have been a particularly auspicious day for the naming of technology, though, because this isn't actually the first time that this laptop has risen from the dead.

Serious dead. Not just a little dead, not just Missiedith-is-a-bit-incompetent dead. People wot know what they're talking about have spoken to me of doom.

Tinkering and prodding has proved inarguably ineffectual. The only thing capable, it would appear, of fixing my computer is magic. The letters should sparkle before your eyes, and not just from sitting in front of a computer for too long.

It only remains to quote the words of Alice from The Vicar of Dibley:

I remember the first time my budgie Carrot died. He came back to life, you know. A bit like Jesus but with feathers.

Toilet Gods And Their Porcelain Temples

The world was designed to spite me and every word I utter.

The glorious Indian I was so looking forward to only yesterday was tasty and glorious, just as I anticipated.

Until about 2-4 in the morning, during which period I got to enjoy it all over again in reverse, praying devoutly to the toilet bowl.

It's possible I'm being a little unfair, as I suppose my upset stomach might have been a result of exam stress. Other than that, however, I've been feeling perfectly unstressed, a serene picture of calm and tranquility. So I've decided to sideline the stress diagnosis and instead curse the takeaway.

The Chim-chim kids just got scolded by the librarian, and have, to all intents and purposes, completely ignored her. I'm mildly disappointed that she didn't catch them singing.

Are there any musicals out there featuring librarians as particularly prominent characters? I feel the need for a rousing chorus led by a lady in horn-rimmed glasses, preferably involving the swivelling-wheely footstool-stand things that help you reach the top shelf.

If anyone ever writes a Harry Potter musical that absolutely must be a feature.

Ooh, she's on a rampage now, for the printer paper must be refilled. Ooh-ah ooh. Bring on the high kicks and flying leaps.

My Null Hypothesis

H-0: After tomorrow? I solemnly swear I will never study Statistics again. No matter how much they promise to pay me.

And there will not be any damned alternative hypothesis.

Deleted: Long-winded blather and wangst on the degenerate state of my relationship with Statistics. Frustration over my inability to correctly input and output numbers, no matter how well I know what I'm doing. Joy and anticipation over leaving the topic behind for the rest of forever at the exam I have tomorrow.

Being thus cleansed, I will instead extol the virtues of the local Indian takeaway.

It's good. Damn good. I'm going to get up off my arse and get some food from there any minute now. They give you free salad with everything, which just seems so goodwilled of them. They're trying to help, you see? They want me to eat good food, but they'll help me to be healthy as much as they can too.

This day's been quite good, actually. It started quite slow, with a flavour of exam terror, and then moved on to a reassuring few past papers. And then I had a mini fit when I realised half my answers were wrong (but only just) and now I'm feeling ok again. After tomorrow, it will be over.

I have lots to smile about. As my girlfriend pointed out earlier (and as I, er, forgot) we've now been together for an intimidating 15 months. It's a complicated relationship, I suppose, seeing as there's also a mutual boyfriend included in it, but it works.

I am slightly interested, however, as to why an advert for County Estates (an approved letting agency) appears on my main page when I try to rebuild the stylesheet for this place. Fortunately it seems to disappear when I rebuild the main page, but still. Mystery mystery.

Happy New Year

Yeah, it's a bit late. But this way I get to prolong the holiday cheer that little bit further.

Apparently, there is nothing like weeks of fairly incessant math revision to make me crave full sentences. I miss them. I pine for the grammatical structure, and reminisce fondly over the innocent and unperverted use of apostrophes, commas and colons. I languish in my hunger for sentences that begin with capital letters. At this point I think I'd even settle for sentences that begin with actual words.

The arrows and logical quantifiers are determined to give me cancer of the puppy. Don't even get me started on the greek letters. It's a poisonous black malice that spider-scrawls from my pen these days.

Also? The students sitting at the table behind me just started singing Chim-chiminy Chim-chim Cheree Chim-cheroo. I swear. My brain isn't making this shit up. They really are singing. They were singing. I really hope they were singing, or else I have a whole new set of problems to try to manoeuvre about.

In other news, I booked my ticket to New Zealand yesterday. New Zealand: land of full sentences and large hill things. Could it sound any better?

Darlings, the bitch is back. This new year's resolution is to write at least one full sentence a day, even if it's only a descriptive fantasy on the death of entirely gratuitous i-s and j-s.

Proud To Be A Nerd?

I just spent far too long trying to work this out.

The left hand side is fine, I suppose, if you ignore the fact that they forgot to mention what they were integrating with respect to, but the right hand side...?

What does f(u)ⁿ even mean? f(uⁿ) - ok. (f(u))ⁿ - also bearable. fⁿ(u) - just about. What they have? Means nothing to me. Why would you even define a function with those variables if you were relating it to e^x? Why would you write anything even slightly convoluted for what is probably the easiest function to integrate of them all? I spent a long time being worried that it was all supposed to mean something to me before I thought to read the expression rather than try to solve it.

Ah. Then came the kooky message. Sex is fun. It took me this long to work that out.

I hate it when people do this. I get the same urge to stab people when letters from the cyrillic alphabet are used to spell out words in a language they were not intended for. The back-to-front N is not an 'n' sound. The back-to-fron R isn't even a consonant. I hate that people think they're being so incredibly cool and in touch when in actual fact they're just being hideously ignorant. If they had any genuine interest in Russian, or Mathematics, then maybe they would have made the effort to learn a little about either of the two, and in which case they'd know they were walking around with nonsense on their shirt/tatooed on their arse.

It's like the people that walk around with Chinese all over their clothing and skin, acting like it has a zen meaning for them or something. For most people, it's nothing but fashion, and it could just as well say something like "please anally rape me with a pick-axe" for all they're aware.

You know what I think I hate most about this design on CafePress? It's in the nerd section. This particular design came from proudnerd.com which has the slogan BE PROUD TO BE A NERD. WE'LL HELP YOU SHOW IT OFF.

I think I must take this oppurtunity to deplore any nerd wearing this design. The site's slogan on the basis of this design should be rather BE PROUD TO BE AN IGNORANT WANNABE SHEEP PERSON. WE'LL HELP YOU SHOW IT OFF. To top it off, the title of the design is "Integral Fun". It's supposed to be fun to watch the notation of my chosen subject get twisted and emptied of meaning just so some very stupid people can think they look a little cooler? Really? Fuck off.

Why would anyone be proud to be a nerd? Well, my view is that they can be proud to know what they're talking about on certain topics. The idea that fashion could do anything to further that is nothing but ridiculous to me.

Alcoholic Bastards

I have no idea who George Best is. I am, however, getting sick of people using the label 'alcoholic' in much the same way they'd use the words 'complete bastard'. Yeah, it sucks that he didn't take advantage of the second opportunity that was given to him with the liver replacement, and maybe, whoever George Best is, he could have tried harder. From what I understand, he had a family and a good deal to live for – every reason to fight. Maybe he could have tried harder.

But alcoholism is a disease, and to be honest, I have very little patience with anybody that says otherwise. Science says it's a disease, and unless you're a religious nut that still insists that it's turtles all the way down (in which case you're excused) you're not allowed to ignore science. So when you're calling someone an alcoholic, try not to make it sound like they're dirty in some way. They're ill. Some may be complete bastards as well as being alcoholics, but the two are not necessarily tied together in any way. The fact that a person's a bastard makes them so; the fact that they're an alcoholic just makes them ill.

Here goes.

I'm not an alcoholic. A few I've lived with would tell you otherwise. If I knew I had a rough day coming up I would have more than a shot of vodka with breakfast, and when the morning inevitably went disastrously I would come home and drink myself silly over lunch. My binges would never last more than 3-4 days, and I never developed a physical dependence. I did end up with a bit of an inconvenient tolerance and I was not fully in control. But alcoholism was not my problem, it was only ever a symptom of other problems, and when it got to the point that I felt I needed an alternative I found one with relative ease. It was equally as unhealthy and solved possibly even less than the alcohol, but at least I am now able to drink socially.

Not an alcoholic. But it scares me that I took those few steps along that path, or parallel to that path, and it was, as others have said before me, an unimaginable hell. Alcoholism isn't even a recognised diagnosis anymore. I've been writing about it like it is, but the problems relating to alcohol are really far more complicated than that. Correspondingly, it should be more complicated than just pinning a label to someone, but that's what I'm seeing everywhere George Best is getting mentioned.

Sexist remarks, racist remarks, homophobic remarks - we all get up in arms. Prejudiced, ignorant, and abusive remarks about alcoholics – and I'm left to worry that I'm the only one sitting here feeling uncomfortable.

Please, no more Asshole just wasted another liver.

Rather, Damn, alcoholism just got another one. Poor bastard.

Zebra Style

It's almost quite pretty. Or rephrasing to better explain, it almost looks roughly as I had in mind.

I redesigned this blog at some point in the middle of the summer, and then failed terribly to implement my haphazard attempt at aesthetics. MT threw a bit of a fit at me, caomhin got whined at extensively, and then, fairly predictably, I gave up. I'd had my chance to do the fun bit, the mucking about with glue and paper and whatever random art materials I found easily to hand, and I was fairly happy to let the blog die in its second only-inches-away-from-default incarnation.

Now we're back to the point in the year at which I feel the need to rant excessively and frequently on the degenerate state of the stinking weather, and I find that the people I talk to in person are getting a little, shall we say, weary of the topic. Most of the personal blogs I used to read have gone the same way as this one, which I find sad.

Defunct. It's a brilliant word. The sound of it. De-funct. Funked.

The combination of these factors and fair level of boredom has resulted in me fiddling about with this place again. I figured, if I messed it all up and the page ended up looking like a Picasso with leprosy then it didn't really matter because - defunct. But I think it's turned out rather well, at least in terms of what I set out to do...

Shame about the sidebar. It hangs by a thread, a casualty of the surgery. I hereby attach a "fix me" label to it.

Edit: So apparently it only looks relatively half-way decent if you have a freaky widescreen resolution. Blah.