Practically dead

Hey vast empty internet.

This blog has kind of died in the ass. Maybe it'll be revived, maybe not. At the moment, the prognosis is grim.

Eventually, I may set up a new blog, but in the meantime, i'm on twitter here. Come follow me like I'm the Pied Piper of Hamelin and you're all a bunch of entranced German children.

Time flies

Especially when you're busy travelling all around Europe and shit.

That's why I haven't written lately. We've been travelling our asses off and I haven't had time, nor have I wanted to take time out to write a post. Although now we have a lazy week in San Sebastian, Spain so I'm writing this so you know this isn't completely dead. It's close, but not completely.

Maybe when we get back hoem in November, I'll write about things more often on here.

In the meantime, just be thankful your keyboard isn't covered in weird-ass symbols and you have the @ symbol in a location that doesn't require you to have twelve fingers to get all the pertinent keys pressed. Also, who in the hell has a keyboard with a 'q' where the 'a' should be?
What are these? Foreign languages?
Ridiculous. I bet they don't even have normal food in these places.

Music and Geekery

This is brilliant.

Radiohead + Old computing artifacts = Awesome

It all kicks off just after the one minute mark.

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.
Way better than anything that anyone did for the Nude remix project

Sometimes it's all a bit surreal.

Especially when you're sitting at the bar of your local historic pub (which has a vending machine in the bathroom that sells blow-up sheep sex dolls, vibrators and viagra) drinking a pint of cider, watching one of the pub cats sleep on a bar stool, whilst Mean Girls plays on a plasma screen, its sound drowned out by a string of Garth Brooks songs. Meanwhile, a burly Welsh man and a small Indian guy stand at the jukebox arguing over whether to play more Garth Brooks or some Ice Cube.

Sometimes it's all a bit surreal.

Dear dude that used the toilet at work before me,

Hi.
It's super awesome that you enjoy corn. I like corn too. The good thing about corn is it's in so many foods. Like popcorn. And creamed corn. But you have my respect for sticking with good old fashioned corn kernels. You're a straight shooter. I like that.
If I might just make a little suggestion though; One of the benefits of corn is that it's pretty handy when it comes to the whole nutrient provision stakes. If you want to harness the awesome power that is Corn Energy™, maybe you should try chewing your corn. Not only will it help you digest all that corn, it also means you'll probably choke a bunch less than you currently do whilst trying to woof down those little-kernels-of-joy whole.
The other good thing about chewing your corn is that when I use the toilet after you, I'm not greeted by a tiny armada of yellow buoys, bobbing away in the bowl, marking the area in which you recently shat. As nice as it is to be greeted by your little golden battleships, I do prefer my toilets to be corn-free zones.
If you could look into the whole mastication process, it would be greatly appreciated.
Best of luck with all your future endeavours, corn related and otherwise.

Sincerely,

Jiminy

Hair things and blocks that stick together to make other things.

I saw a guy on the bus just now who had the craziest beard ever. Crazy as in, if the members of self-titled-album-era Whitesnake joined into some hair metal Voltron and attached to this guys, chin, it would look exactly like this beard. He may have been a wizard for all I know.
Dude had serious beard.

There were at least three distinct beards within the greater beard. Clearly the point of his chin was the no-nonsense, straight-up long greyish beard producing zone. To either side of this existed a small area which would be described as 'deep rough', were his mandible a golf course.
Needless to say, his mandible was not a golf course and he just had a shitload of long unkempt hair hanging off his face.
Moving away from the chin up towards the cheeks, there was the crazy zone. The area just behind his cheekbones was clearly receiving a rich supply of insane hormones. Or maybe it's where he shot up his crack, cos the facial hair here was the most abundant and ridiculous I've ever encountered.
Think perma-perm. Tight, bouncy perma-perm. It was like a hundred thousand tiny slinkys attempting to cascade down his face. I wondered how he ate, how many biscuits were hidden within, how many orangutans had given birth betwixt his dense growth. I wondered if there was a Predator lurking within, hunting down a team of commandos...
Whilst I was busy wondering this, the owner of the beard glared at me. It would seem I had been staring. Considering I'd run off on such a tangent, I probably was staring at him with a bit of a crazy face too.
What does he expect though, his face is basically a portable zoo.

I'm probably just jealous though, because I have the facial hair growing ability of an 8 year old girl. With alopecia. Facial alopecia.
I think if I collected all the hair I've ever shaved off my face, I could probably weave it into a piece of string that would be long enough to maybe tie around your thumb. Although I don't think you could weave my facial hair. The limited facial hair i do grow is hardcore, like tiny bits of fishing line. But not that weak-ass fly-fishing line, more like off-shore blue marlin style fishing line.
In years gone by, aboriginal tribes used to gather around my bathroom window and I'd throw them my facial hair trimmings and they'd hollow them out and turn them into didgeridoos. In return they'd make me beaded necklaces.
For reals.

The flipside to this is that I have totally kick ass head-hair growing abilities. The rate at which hair grows from my head is off the chain. (I'm sorry, but there was no other way to convey that)
I try to keep it on the down-low these days, but I used to have big hair. Like, afro big. When my hair grows long, it doesn't fall around my ears. It's not endearing. It's not even foppish. It could only be described as 'Furry Deathstar'.
Imagine if Macy Gray and a thousand blaxploitation actors from the 70's had a massive orgy in a big round topiary bush. My hair would be the love child borne of this tryst.*

A mate and I had a competition in our last year of high school to see who could grown the biggest afro.
I think I cut mine first, but mainly because 40 degree heat and 4 kilos of hair on your head don't mix. Also it smelt weird. Also, because I went in for a trim one day and the hairdresser said to me "Oh, there's a stick in here."
So i guess I lost.
The other reason I lost is that we were hanging out watching a movie one day and my mate was scratching his head, then pulled out a lego block.
He's not even a magician, so this was totally awesome. The only way i could trump that would be to discover a Duplo block in my hair and no one has Duplo except for 3 year olds and special needs people. The blocks are so fucking big that unless you had a designated Duplo storage room in your house, the maximum number of Duplo blocks you could have in one place at any given time was about 7. 7 rectangles that stick together. What a bunch of fun that is.
Even young Stumpy McNo-Arms from next door could play with Duplo.
What an unfortunate coincidence that his parent's surnames were McNo and Arms. And they called him Stumpy! And he had no forearms/hands. Terrible really. Such inconsiderate parents.

Stumpy did good? You did real good Stumpy. Real Good.

So I lost. My mate won. We both cut our hair and regained our standing as decent humans.
If I could have found some Duplo though, I would have been king. King of Hair. I could of had my own Hair-em. I would have been a modern day Robin of Locks-ley. I would have... err.. I'm out of hair puns.

Anyways, hair has been a prevailing them of late. The Girl just got her hair done and it looks pretty ace, I need a haircut because the afro is respawning and I need to destroy it before it envelops me and a guy at work was involved in a hair related incident the other night. One of the guys, Chris, was telling me he couldn't help overhearing the dude behind him speaking to someone on the phone.
Apparently they were calling people on behalf of a cancer charity and the dude was getting way too into it and asking some pretty inconsiderate questions. Chris thought nothing of it, but then he heard this little slice of fried gold:

"Oh so do you know anyone that's been through chemotherapy?"
"Oh you have been?"
"Wow. Did you lose all your hair?"
"Fantastic!!"
"So anyway, we're calling to ask for donations for...."

Wow. Nice work pilot-knob!
I'm sure everyone that's been through chemo thinks it's 'Fantastic'.
"Oh you're sterile too? FANTASTIC!"
I'm pretty sure when people are diagnosed with leukaemia they get a flyer that says "Need Chemo? FANTASTIC! Scared about losing your hair? FANTASTIC! You've got leukaemia? That's right- FANTASTIC!"

What a douche. I bet he had a beard. Or at least a bucket of Duplo.



*Ok, the use of borne/born is hells confusing in this instance. I'm going with borne, as nouns aside, I think it is the most grammatically correct form to use in this phrase.
Correct me if I'm wrong though. I think I'm a bit paranoid after the whole canape ordeal.

Also, include Art Garfunkel in the orgy scene.

Putting the 'Hi' into Hiatus

Wow.
It's been aaaaages.
Turns out this whole 'real life' business can be a time consuming pain in the ass.

So yeah, I've been busy sorting out travel plans, working fuckloads and doing assorted other junk.

Still, not much to write at the moment as I'm kinda overloaded in the head.

Here's a tip for y'all though:
If you're emailing a relatively large number of highly ranked, government communications staff, don't get distracted and try to work out the correct spelling of hors d'oeuvres using only the powers of your mind.
Mainly because it will be discovered that the powers of your mind are in fact categiorized as 'Feeble' after you realise you've just sent out a batch email with the text "hors ordeavues" sitting just below the "Dear [important government person]" part.

Yeah, my bad.
I think the government have now tagged me as a "Special-Needs Child" in their database.
Next time I'll just write canapes instead.

One of these days, everything will chill the fuck out for a bit and I'll get back to posting with more regularity. Bring on the literary Metamucil!

Back to the grindstone...

Oh, how sweet.

Upon my entering the unisex toilets at work:

"I'd use the other loo if I was you."

See, the ladies I work with are actually really, really considerate.

Like all decent humans, I hate Crocs.

I just found out that I am the only person in my office that is vehemently opposed to the wearing of Crocs. If you don't know what crocs are, you must live in one of the few remaining pristine, Croc free zones. Consider yourself lucky.
It pains me to even capitalise the word Crocs as it feels like I'm validating their existence.
Apparently, my colleagues think Crocs all sorts of things, like 'nifty' and 'lightweight' and worst of all, 'funky'.
This differs from my description of Crocs which often includes words such as 'fucked', 'shithouse' and 'slap-in-the-face-to-all-thinking-humans.'

Goddammit people, what the fuck?

Although I may have overstepped the mark in expressing my dislike for them whilst conversing with the banshee manager (The BM).

The BM: Oh yeah, my family all have crocs, even my little boy has a pair and he loves them! In fact, we all went to go out the other day and I said to my husband, "We can't all go out wearing crocs! Hahaha!"

Me: Ha, yeah because I know if I saw a whole family wearing crocs, I'd drive up over the kerb and run them over! Bam! Natural Selection! Hahaha!

The BM: [Shocked look accompanied by awkward silence.]

Me: [As my maniacal laughter fades] Err... Yeah, I'm gonna make lunch now.

Does anyone know if there's an animal that's higher up the food chain than the crocodile? I can't think of one. If I could I would make a pair of shoes and call them "[Abbreviated term for an animal higher up the food chain than the crocodile]" and their soles would be made from melted down Crocs and the upper would be made from the skin of the people I caught wearing Crocs in public.