31 December 2005 at 07:33
Here's a nice easy 3x3 tag for New Year's Eve:
- Three 2005 achievements you're proud of, no matter how small.
- Three 2005 events that delighted you, no matter how small.
- Three 2005 events that appalled you. Excluding meteorological events like tsunamis and hurricanes.
I'm tagging (in no particular order):
hotboy
lee ann
doviko
heather
ray ray
menzies
stone
carsey
jaxe
You can do the tag here and/or at your own place (then put a link here). If I haven't tagged you, please tag yourself.
Oops! Nearly forgot to tag myself. I've got all today to work out my answers. I may cheat and go over 3.
Happy New Year in the meantime. And just remember: everything balances up in the end.
Definition of carbon dating: - when two old people go out together.
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30 December 2005 at 11:17
An Old Gaelic Blessing:
May those who love us love us.
And those that don't love us,
May God turn their hearts.
And if he doesn't turn their hearts,
May he turn their ankles…
So we'll know them by their limping.
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26 December 2005 at 10:30
Of course, this photo is about 6 months old. Our Christmas happens in June.
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24 December 2005 at 08:44
Christmas Eve is such a busy time for everyone, last-minute shopping. I'm so lucky I had the foresight not to have any friends, and to live 12000 miles from my family - shopping problem solved without even leaving the house!
Here at Spud's mum's place in Sydney, we're over the riots now, and more worried about bushfires. Today's forecast is for hot gales - 38 degrees, bone dry and windy, so we may have a ringside seat for some spectacular bushfires, accidental or otherwise.
Hotboy would love it here, he'd have no problems raising heat. I've wrapped wet towels round the barrel, with a fan playing on the towels, so at least the yeast should survive even if we don't. What can go wrong?
I had hoped to to fly up to Daly Waters on Boxing Day, but what's the point when there's a total fire ban in operation, and no chance of being allowed to light a barbie with
Carsey and Spud?
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22 December 2005 at 16:42
There is no greater delight than to be conscious of sincerity on self-examination.
-- Mencius
I should have known right from the first day at the conference that my own star billing was jinxed.
On the first morning I had got stuck in traffic, so by the time I arrived flustered at the venue, the conference was already starting and everyone else was already seated in the lecture theatre.
Someone handed me a name-badge, and to avoid missing too much of the first presentation I tried to pin the badge to my chest at the same time as I raced to the toilet to take a leak.
Standing at the urinal - hurry! hurry! - I wrestled the badge one-handed to pin it to my shirt, but after a few attempts it still wasn't straight.
So I had a brainwave - hurry! hurry! - waddle over to the mirror, adjust the name-badge, then finish my pee.
Which is why the guy who came in the gents at that moment took one look at me apparently admiring my willy in the mirror, turned and went back out.
If he was one of the conference organisers, that would explain why my own paper was then mysteriously "dropped" from the programme.
I cheated this week, that's not me in the last picture.
If you missed previous HNTs, you can access all the old half naked posts here..
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20 December 2005 at 08:59
The
buddhist hermit has stopped drinking. Again.
I have no intention of giving up beer, but I gave up drugs (green tea) at the weekend. It's been hell. Can't be bothered doing anything except sleep. This must be the
retention deficit disorder reasserting itself over the
OCD. Everything balances out.
The tea withdrawal is making me lose the place. For instance, I was at
ray ray's blog the other day, and he said he suffered from OCD, ADD and RDD. So I asked him "what's RDD?"
He said "you should know, you told me about it - retention deficit disorder, remember?"
Silly me, I keep forgetting that amnesia is one of the symptoms.
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18 December 2005 at 13:32
This is nothing to do with the previous post. It's so hot here on the UnHeard Of Islands, that a whole barrel of beer went off while it was brewing. I had to pour it all down the drain. That's 70 bottles' worth!
The yeast was mugged by the wicked spoilage bacteria. Just when I had finally whittled my stash of 200-odd bottles down to the last half-dozen, through a rigorous program of after-work drinking. Now suddenly I'm going to run out of beer at Christmas. Funny how everything balances up.
I may even have to buy a six-pack or two to tide me over till the next brew comes to fruition. All that tax money going to the government, it's almost enough to put you off drinking.
Of course, I have already sterilised all the equipment and kicked off a new brew. You have to get straight back on the horse or lose your nerve. This batch should be ready just in time for New Year.
Meanwhile, the person who encouraged me to start drinking seriously this year has himself
given up beer. I see his plan - drag me down to the gutter, then use me as a stepping stone on his way up. I'm always happy to help.
Thought for the day: "Omit needless words"
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
--William Strunk, Jr., 1918
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15 December 2005 at 03:06
Yes, I can't deny it any longer - I'm impotent with women I'm not attracted to. Worse than that - even if I find a woman attractive, my "banana" won't function if I distrust or dislike her as a person. Oh, the shame of it! Please don't tell anyone.
This affliction means that the currently-fashionable hate-bonk is something I'll never experience. A pity-bonk is out of the question too, because of my freakish desire for rapport with a woman. Okay, I did once have sex with a grossly obese plain woman with no personality, but that was for a dare-bonk when I was young and reckless, and my banana disappeared to its full length without actually penetrating, so technically it doesn't count.
Let's do the math to calculate the enormity of my dysfunction. There's just over 3 billion women in the world, half the world population of 6,446,131,400 (source:
CIA), and I'm physically attracted to about 10% of them. And if I got to know those 10% I would only like about 10% of them very much as people. That means that there are 3,190,835,000 women with whom I'd have a mushy banana. Oh, the humiliation! If I was a real man I could service any woman on demand, without even thinking about it.
It so happens that my partner is one of the remaining 32 million women in the world that I like
and fancy. What luck!
Acknowledgement - Photoshop idea inspired by jaxePS - I knew a man once who had 5 willies. His underpants fitted like a glove.
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14 December 2005 at 05:08
There are some sites that are just made for music junkies like me.
At Music Map you type in the name of a band and you see a sort of 3-D (2-and-a-bit-D, really) representation of where that band fits in amongst other bands. You can use it to discover new music, or to better understand popular music history.
Music Map is just a visual representation of music, but at Pandora you can actually hear your music on a personalised juke box. What you do is type in the name of a band or musician or song that you like and, based on your perceived tastes, the site will create a streaming radio station of other songs you may like too. You can create multiple stations.
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11 December 2005 at 15:27
At the same time as the draw for the 2006 World Cup was announced, another announcement took place - the winner of the awful writing competition. I was the favourite to win, but because the judges used the same voting system as the 2000 U.S. election, the result was a fiddle.
But I've found another competition that I'm almost certain to win. Lee Ann posted about OCD, and as everyone was leaving comments it developed into an OCD competition.
It turns out that virtually every commenter there, including me, has the same symptoms! Lee Ann has stumbled on a new scientific principle, and she has agreed to be a co-author of my next McDonald Institute research monograph - OCD Incidence Amongst Bloggers.
There were only 2 non-OCD commenters, and they were both Scottish. This doesn't surpise me. In Scotland, OCD is almost unknown. They're too busy vomiting and knifing each other.
I can thank my mother's German wartime childhood under an authoritarian father for my own OCD. But I also suffer from retention deficit disorder, which has the opposite symptoms - sufferers don't care about anything and often live in filthy squalor. I can thank my Scots father for passing this on to me. It balances out my OCD, that's why I'm so normal overall.
There's one OCD symptom that I don't have, but my aunt (one of the ringed hands in my last HNT photo) has it in spades. At her house she makes everyone wipe down the hand basin (and the shower) after every use. She inspects the bathroom after you've used it, and there's hell to pay if there's a stray drop of water. Even if I was to go along with this, it would generate its own OCD sub-problem. Think about it: you've finished wiping the basin, and supposing you want to floss your teeth, you don't want to put basin-cloth fingers in your mouth, so you need to wash them first - in the basin! You'd never get out of the bathroom.
So when I visit her, I never shower at her house, as a protest and to avoid friction. Instead I use the local swimming pool showers. And I may buy a packet of wet wipes next time I visit, so I need never wash my hands in the basin either.
I won't bore you with my aunt's rules about using the toilet, but you can imagine why my uncle used to pee in the garden.
I have one extra symptom that Lee Ann doesn't have, and this is going to win me the prize. I store video tapes in order of fullness, so all the full ones are at one end and the blanks at the other end. And the part-empty ones are ranged in the middle, in order of how much blank space is left on them. I'm sure nobody else does that.
I found a
new toy at jazz's blog. If the figure gets stuck, you can help her with your mouse.
What do you think?
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08 December 2005 at 04:04
This is just to prove
Lee Ann is not the only one who can do tasteful. Hotboy asked if I would post another banana still life, but he'll need to wait till next week.
My grandfather had identical rings made for his immediate family, and when he and his wife died their rings were handed on to my brother and me.
The 4 people left in the family only ever meet up once every 5 years or so, and this photo was taken at our last meeting, in Scotland in 2003.
They are signet rings, and they actually work - I once used mine to seal a letter to a lover with wax. Despite what the rings may say about my ancestor's social pretensions, I am proud to wear mine, especially here at the other end of the earth from my surviving family.
The design of the signet uses a Huguenot crest: rose, heart and cross. Once, I was on holiday in a 400-year-old French farmhouse, with a group of free range actors, bikers, musicians and head-cases (I'm not saying which group I identified with, but I don't bike or act, and I left my ukulele at home). At the time, I was breaking up with Angie, and trying to sell our flat in Glasgow via phone from France.
Anyway, under the old farmhouse kitchen, there was a dark dank cellar. And in the cellar floor there was a flagstone you could lift, leading to a tiny cell called a priest's hidey-hole. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, genocidal French catholics chased most of the Huguenots out of the country, but a few brave souls chose to go into hiding in hidey-holes like this one.
To relieve his boredom, one of these fugitives had spent weeks or months carving this crest into the stone wall of the cell. When I saw that his handiwork matched my ring, I knew I was in the right place at the right time.
It is hundreds of years since the catholics chased these people into hiding, but some things never change. I know
a catholic buddhist meditator who chases bliss in a cell.
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06 December 2005 at 20:04
Here's a 2-minute game that's easy to play, but hard to get all the questions right. The idea is to match beards with famous names:
Name That Beard~
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05 December 2005 at 12:19
Last week I was reading some of the computer journals and I came across some interesting research findings.
It seems that cognitive science engineers have discovered that women have more problems than men when using a standard computer mouse.
They found that there is not a physical reason for this; it is more of a cognitive problem. Some women reported that computer mice have never 'felt right' in their hands.
Based on this research, a new mouse has been designed especially for women. They have done field tests on the new prototype, and there was feedback from some women who have tried it:
"I think mice were originally designed just for men, but this new type is definitely made for women. It fits right in with my lifestyle".
"It feels so much better. More comfortable, more like how it's supposed to be".
"I took to it like a duck to water, every woman should have one!"
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01 December 2005 at 09:01
About 15 brave people asked about the full story behind the
last week's scar photo. Well here is the real story. Once again, I should warn people who are squeamish about blood and scars - bail out now before it's too late. I promise next week's HNT post will be more aesthetic, probably another still life with bananas.
Many years ago, Angie and I decided to split up. She bought her air ticket back to Australia, and I arranged to drive her down to London and see her off at Heathrow. All very civilised.
There was one minor complication - I had been waiting months for a hospital appointment for a biopsy on a lump in my neck. My appointment had already been cancelled several times, because of nationwide nurses' and doctors' strikes. But I badgered the health admin folk till they did the biopsy, and on the day before driving Angie to London I got the results.
You know the expression "his hair stood on end"? I always thought it was just something they said in detective and horror stories.
All those years of whisky and cigarettes were paying off, in the worst way. Surgeon number 1, embarrassed, tried to cheer me up: "you're very lucky really - the best specialist in these cases works here in Glasgow, he's agreed to see you next week, and he'll be able to do any plastic surgery that you need". He made it sound almost like winning the lottery.
I went to see Surgeon no 2, who made a long phone call to the pathology lab. I couldn't hear what the pathologist was saying at the other end, but at this end the surgeon intermittently sucked air through his teeth and said things like "what a pity" and "oh dear". It seems I had hit the jackpot, with TWO different types of cancer in one. That's when I discovered the proverb: for every door that closes behind you, another slams shut in your face.
A week later, while Angie was in London consulting her friends over what to do with her life, I drove myself to hospital and checked in to get my neck opened up and lose the cancer and a few glands, nerves, and anything else they could take without turning me into a total Frankenstein. They would have amputated my head, if they could have done it without killing me.
When I awoke after the operation, I had a few stitches and drains, but I actually felt like a million dollars. The good old British health service had come through for me, in spite of all the government cost-cutting and the nurses' strikes.
I looked around, and saw that the guy in the bed next to me had his eyes all bandaged up. I asked him what he was in for. "A nose job, 2 weeks ago". So then I asked him - why the blindfold after a nose job, and why the long recovery period? He explained that, as he was coming out of the anaesthetic, he felt a blinding pain in both eyes - 2 student nurses had been cleaning his face with surgical spirit while he was still out cold, and they didn't realise you shouldn't spill alcohol into someone's eyes. And being semi-conscious he couldn't scream to alert them. His eyeballs were partially dissolved.
My own turn to experience amateur nursing came next day, when a sexy student nurse was given the job of removing the drained-off blood from the bottle at the end of my tube.
But she switched the pump the wrong way, and pumped the stale blood back into my wound and out through the stitches. The pain was almost worth enduring, just to have a nubile teenager at such close quarters. She could drain my tube any day.
A month later they started giving me what someone at a noisy party once misheard as
videotherapy ("Rob, I didn't know they could use video therapy now"). Actually, watching videos would have been almost as much use - the radiotherapy doc explained that my type of cancer wasn't really helped by radiation, "so we'll have to give you extra doses". It felt like sunburn in 3D.
For a while, I looked like an audition for a horror film - the students in my lectures that semester were strangely quiet and well-behaved.
Angie and I decided to stay together after all. Sweet. My father came to Glasgow to meet me in a pub, and he apologised selectively for some of the beatings when I was young. He must have thought it would be his last chance. A few years later he did the decent thing and died before me.
There are several permanent side-effects, but let me tell you, it's a lot better than being dead. And there were benefits. I'm unlikely to ever develop heart problems from being overweight. You too can solve your weight problems for life by getting cancer, but I'm not recommending it. There are no real scars, not physical anyway.
After that kind of experience you either use it to make your life better than before, or you go downhill. I've heard of people drinking themselves to death waiting for a recurrence that never came. These days I'm pretty well cured - I just need to keep doing the Half Narcissistic Therapy every week.
PS - if you'd like to chill out after reading that, try some
international back care exercises.
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