29 April 2006 at 18:27
The commentary on the previous post went off in some interesting directions:
Negotiations were successfully concluded for marketing the underpantaclava worldwide. That means I 'll be able to drop the agency for hotboy's literary output, which wasn't selling well anyway. Mainly because his books have too much buddhism and not enough sex. I had been looking forward to reading the manuscript of his new book Bending Over, in my hotel room. Until I realised it's all about yoga positions. Surely there's a law against misleading titles?
Mackerel Sinus gave permission for me to use one of his HNT art shots as a marital aid. And I found out that he is related to another HNTer, Lelly, but they live at opposite ends of the world and haven't met in 35 years. HNT helps families stay in touch! Even the church would surely approve.
Keda suggested, in the nicest possible way, that I'm a total wack-job. Just because I (allegedly) wrote her a letter as Sir David Attenborough, and left comments under the nom-de-plume of Alec McClochendichter! Actually, it probably wasn't just that - there's also my body of work which kind of speaks for itself.
Dudley Doright is a famous person who has the good fortune to look like me.
I scored an invitation to California, where the pantaclava market hasn't even begun to take off.
I persuaded the McDonald Institute to pay my expenses to a Photo Imaging conference, so this weekend I'm in Sydney. The expo attached to the conference has exhibits from all the big photographic companies, and each one has about 10 or 20 photo-printing machines which you can use for free. Fortunately, I've brought all my HNT and other snaps with me on memory card, so I've been printimg off blow-ups of ukulele and banana nudes. What will the UnHeard Of customs people say is they open my suitcase when I arrive back?
I'll be stuck in the hotel room on my own tonight, far from my partner. But there's a TV program on, about the World Cup team I have supported for decades (France). I'll be reliving their unfair defeat in the 1982 semi-final (on penalties!) by Germany. Thank goodness I had the good sense to bring some home brew to the hotel and chill it in the minibar. My employers don't cover alcoholic expenses.
Finally, this week I read one of the best bits of news in a long time.
Research proves that men who masturbate 5 times a week are 30% less likely to get prostate cancer. So back at the hotel tonight I'll be doing my bit for men's health. What a fortunate creature I am!
~
~
27 April 2006 at 07:07
The weather here at this time of year is perishing. Here on UnHeard Island it has just changed from 3-jumper to 4-jumper weather.
The penguins are immune to facial frostbite, but humans need to wear an underpantaclava in bed at night to keep the ears from freezing solid.
Keda has pointed out that
her kids invented the underpantaclava too. I didn't plagiarise their work - it was a simultaneous invention, and we can divide up the global market, so long as they take the northern hemisphere and I'll keep to the south.
To keep my other parts warm, I'll be visiting
Mackerel Sinus's classy HNT post this week:
If you missed previous HNTs, you can access all the old half baked thursday posts here.~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
21 April 2006 at 14:15
Every year, skinheads all over Europe celebrate my birthday with marches or riots. Yesterday was my birthday (thanks for the song, Lee Ann, and the wishes from Menzies), so they were at it again. Why?
When I was young, my mother would bake cakes for my birthday, bless her.
I hate drinking real beer. I love the taste, but I hate the alcohol. Excessive happiness and then hangover. Yesterday I was forced to open a bottle of Beez Neez Honey Wheat Beer. I got it as a present, so I had to drink it. A smooth honey taste, but lacking in bitterness, and not a patch on the genuine German wheat beer. It was way too easy to drink, and the alcohol interfered with my sleep last night. Thank goodness I still have over 100 bottles of alcohol-free home brew to fall back on. Not literally, obviously.
This is always a busy time of year for me. Last weekend was the 12th anniversary of meeting my beloved partner. She and I often use this date as an excuse to review the preceding year, and brainstorm some ways to make the next year better. At various times this year, each of us has been through occasional "difficult" spells. As one does.
To make the next year better, my partner came up with this magic formula for happiness:
"When I'm feeling bad, all you need to do is pay some attention to me.
And when you're feeling bad, all you need to do is pay some attention to me." ©
It's so simple! I'll let you know if I give it a try.
PS - looking into my stats for yesterday, I see somebody went to the trouble of translating my page
into Spanish. Also, I'm still getting about 40 extra hits per day from an old tattoo picture I posted last year. And repeated hits are coming from one of MM's old comments that contained a link to
a rabbit bestialising a chicken. Well done
MM!
~
~
~
~
~
20 April 2006 at 08:18
My Northern Hemisphere friend
hotboy is a self-confessed fat basturn. To work off the excess flab caused by drinking beer, he uses a patented system called the Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle.
Here in the Southern Hemisphere, I'm a skinny basturn, so I used the beer diet to try and put on some pounds. Naturally, it didn't work, and I even lost weight - I had forgotten that North is the opposite of South, and everything has to balance up. I may ask hotboy to send me a Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle. On crossing the Equator, it would convert into a Beer Monster Inflation Vehicle. I could use it to pack on some weight Down Under.
This photo was taken recently, after six months on the beer diet.
If you missed previous HNTs, you can access all the old half baked thursday posts here.~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
18 April 2006 at 17:36
Just back from a 4-day holiday with our dog at Mrs. Omar's beachside shack. We were looking after her tripe-hound while she was away at the Flat Island Folk Festival.
Panda and Stu and their dog joined us for a couple of days, so it was dog pandemonium. Because of my Aryan background, the animals view me as the top dog - this means I get to shout at someone who actually takes some notice. But leadership is a big responsibility, as I discovered in
my previous life too.
Spud's brother, Usuff, has a dark room in the cottage, where he photographs geometric patterns, using a camera and a torch on 2 swinging pendulums.
This is one of the pictures he made.
And here's how he does it:
There are
more pictures, and if you want to know how he works out the right timing for swinging the pendulum, here's
an example of his calculations. I don't understand it, but you might.
The long weekend was action-packed - we walked the pack of dogs for hours along the shore, swam in an icy sea pool, and watched lifesavers rescuing two half-drowned swimmers from the big surf. As we arrived at the beach, the boats were out looking for the second guy. The first guy was lying unconscious on the sand, and his swimming trunks had somehow fallen down around his knees during the rescue. I had my camera in my hand, and it would have made a dramatic HNT photo, but I decided to show some sensitivity for once in my life.
So instead, here's a picture of Buster and Lucy after they joined in the surf rescue and nearly drowned each other.
And here's my dog rock-hopping. She's an Australian sheepdog, can you see the kangaroo influence?
Back home now, and tired from all the activity and sea air, thank goodness I've still got 2 weeks off work, so I can take things real easy and put the finishing touches to this Thursday's FNT post. What a fortunate creature I am!
Now it's time to read and answer the backlog of comments that arrived while I was away.
~
~
~
~
13 April 2006 at 13:12
Oops! The
Flat-island Fundamentalist has let the cat out of the bag. Now anyone can get access to the ultimate wisdom:
"Pretending to be normal is crap. It is also too expensive." ©
Once you learn the truth of that, you know everything.
If I was a normal (i.e. what he would call a flatheid), I would be excited about going away this Friday for 4 days, to visit Spud's mum at the beach. No work, just loafing and taking nude photos of myself, for 4 whole days! But in fact for someone like me, a reformed pretend-normal, it's all just continuous life, whether at home (where I blog whenever I want) or at work (where I also blog whenever I want). It's all just life. You're alive so what does it matter where you do the living?
This week, I have laid on exams for every single class. That keeps them quiet, and lets me get on with this. What a fortunate creature I am!
Of course, after the weekend, when I start a further 2 weeks' holiday (What a fortunate creature I am!), I'll need to spend some of my time marking the exams. Everything balances up, there's no boundary between work and life. If you do it right, it's all just life.
What a fortunate etc ....!
I know how many people this will disappoint, but my return to full HNT form (to be precise, it'll be FNT) has been delayed another week because Spud's mum, bless her, doesn't have a PC. Spud was going to buy her one, until he realised she'd be able to send him email. As it is, she sometimes phones Carslemane just to make sure Spud's changing his undies every week, whether they're dirty or not.
~
~
~
~
~
~
12 April 2006 at 19:15
While
hotboy can't believe that everyone doesn't want to meditate, I can't believe that everyone doesn't have a blog. I try to tell people how blogging could benefit them, but nobody takes any notice.
If all my friends had blogs, then we could keep in touch in that special reciprocal bloggy way. Mind you, first I'd have to make some face-to-face friends, and that's never going to happen here in the UnHeard Of Islands.
A couple of my colleagues at the McDonald Institute,
deliberately ignoring my advice to start blogging.~
~
~
~
11 April 2006 at 07:53
Scotland seems to be making world headlines these days. Top-ranking country for single motherhood, female violence and childhood obesity. And as of this week, the country is now officially a bird flu zone. Yet still some people say Scotland isn't world-class.
To promote Scotland to foreign tourists, there's now a government web site . It lists some of the many other reasons for visiting Scotland. Here are two photos from the website,
visitscotland.com.
This photo of tourist accommodation is captioned: "Remember to bring your earplugs in case of snoring room-mates."
In Scotland, smoking used to be the most popular way to reduce family size. But since smoking was banned (except in your own home), picnicking under an overhanging caravan is now the recommended culling method.
But I still love visiting Scotland, mainly because of the great people and the country lifestyle. According to the BBC, if it wasn't for the Scottish Highlands, the tradition of sheep-shagging might have died out long ago.
07 April 2006 at 20:08
I was going to be rich. At work I have one of these fake leather chairs that makes a farting noise when you move. Then last week I read that
a teacher in England is suing her employer for £1m because her chair at work lets out a farting noise every time she sits down, and they refused to replace it.
"It was very embarrassing to sit on," she said. "I asked for a chair that didn't make these very embarrassing farting sounds. I regularly had to apologise that it wasn't me, it was my chair."
If the English case succeeds, it will set a legal precedent. When I mentioned this to the colleague who shares my office, she pointed out that it's not my chair making the noises, it's me.
~
~
~
~
at 08:25
President George W Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, according to
a BBC TV series.
Nabil Shaath, Palestinian Foreign Minister in 2003, told of his 2003 meeting with Bush:
"President Bush said to us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"I was hoping this might be a joke, maybe a delayed April Fool, but it checks out. I hadn't realised things were quite this bad.
And now I'm even wondering if this joke I heard about Bush is really a joke at all: unkind people say that Bush doesn't understand anything about world geography, but as soon as his staff told him about bird flu, he gave the order to bomb the Canary Islands and Turkey.
~
~
~
~
03 April 2006 at 12:44
Now I know what I want for my birthday. A
screambody, a "wearable space for screaming".
When a user needs to scream but it is just not socially acceptable, they can scream into this soundproof backback. And the Screambody records the scream so you can take it home with you and release it safely where nobody will object.
It's a bit expensive to buy, but cheaper and healthier than using drugs, and easier than meditation.
There's also a
video (or
Quicktime version for faster download).
~
~
~
~
~
~
