Sunny Breaks

Came across Red Meat last night. Pretty clever — I especially like bug-eyed Earl – like this one, this one and I might have to get some of them iron-on transfers for the bubble-jet and put this one on a t-shirt. I know they make t-shirts, but like gramma used to say, the fun hasn’t really started until copyright’s been breached.

And tracking back from there, here’s some clown jokes.

Mandrake Linux has jumped with their new version today, and I have been keeping an ear out for that announcement, but would’ve made more sense to me to wait another month or whatever – so they could include a more established version of the 2.6 kernel, and KDE 3.2.
I get little moments where frustration about aspects of Slackware get to me (like CD burning isn’t really working, mplayer plugin not sorted) but at least I’ve been able to easily upgrade things like KDE. Now that Mandrake’s run with kde 3.1.3, there won’t be any freely available updates to that, which ain’t very enticing.

comments:
Jon
url: the spork
date: 2003-10-16-20-00
http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/1997-03-31/index.html <—my favourite ! =)

For many many years professional raconteurs have known that adding the odd foreign word to conversation keeps things interesting. And sometimes there’s things out there that we just don’t have words for in English. The Wordsters have traditionally reached for French (or at a stretch, German) but I’m here to tell you that it’s a hackish and cliched move.

Why not dazzle your peers with a little Finnish? Like “kalsarik�nnit”, which according to Cybbis et. al. at brainal meltown—our experts in East Scandinavia, “Kal is pronounced cal in the word musical. Sa like in bonsai. Ri like in Ritz. K�n like Can in Canada. Ni(t) like in nitpick.”
The rough english equivalent is ‘underweardrunk’ and, “means drinking in home, alone, usually performed by men. May include watching sport from tv or other pitiful activities”.
Priceless!

comments:
Jon
url: the spork
date: 2003-10-14-16-31
Why, that’s wunderbar. I need to immediatly make friends with strange finnish people that seem to have nothing to do with their time except dream up words to spring on unsuspecting foreigners .. =). That and shovel snow from off their roofs.

name: yak sox
date: 2003-10-14-22-47
I thought they kept the snow on the roof for insulation.

Terribly procrastination-full day. Sometimes I get stuck in this space where I don’t want to do what i ‘should’ do – so I don’t, but I don’t feel good about it and it stops me from doing much else too.
I watched the kevin smith movie Dogma which was okay i s’pose.. A little self-serving. Got to wondering what has become of “Jay” – Jason Mewes after all this. I seem to remember he’d headed for mexico.

Mucking around a little bit with a wiki – the Wiki! sort, which should do fine – I don’t intend to load too much stuff into it. It’s not one of those collaborative things although the option is there to whack that function into it. I don’t know why I always go for over-saturated colours, probably because they are there.
Started working on my definition of a bombastic writing style where I will put the meanings of words that I make up and use here.
Ah… I should writie a list of all the really super-important things I want to do once School’s Out For Summer (now less than a month away).
1. Set up and run my own Pirate Video store.

I like these two fotos of the google guys juggling. i have to be honest and say i’m rather envious of them, and not because they can juggle.

I bumped into Obi Wan Kenobi yesterday – hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. There’s not too many other people who I know who can do what society would call ‘bummin’ around or nothing’ but what I’d call ‘just being’ — but he can. He joined a motorcycle gang.
That’s the exciting way of saying it – the factual way is: he joined the Ulysses motorcycle club. And has a Harley. Hehe. I never saw that coming. But in an age where horses just don’t cut it, one of those old-school Harley Davidsons could be seen as the next most stylish way of getting around.

How cool is Chairman Kaga – head Iron Chef?? That’s a rhetorical question. I really like his style. And tonight ‘Coughing Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ is on. Neat.

(Update): via graham – Ah-hah! – Here is the documentation of serious geographical inaccuracies. Maybe they have a pair of those portals that you walk through and are instantly transported to somewhere else, but I doubt it.

The local state govt here have started this publicity push to do with enticing people out of the city and into provincial Victoria. Fine. I saw an ad. for it tonight featuring some people who run a certain sourdough making establishment which is located just down the road from the sox family ancestral palaces – ie. where I was last weekend.
And ad. making people, I’ve got news for you – Irrewarra is not in the Otways. The distinct scarcity of trees alerts most people to this fact.
What they’re not telling prospective immigrants to irrewarra (now conveniently located in cool-temperate rainforest) is that they’d have to do their shopping in Colac – which is full of freaks. Even my mum agrees to that.
My personal take on it is that the whole town is stuck somewhere between 1967 and ‘74. Popularity of Hendrix, The Doors and Led Zep hasn’t fallen off at all.

When I was in year twelve I went over to the tech. school for one subject (psychology). We got there via a bus that’d just shuttle between the 3 secondary schools all day. A real flesh and blood Otto drove it – the long curly mullet, sunglasses – the lot. He’d stuck full-sized lounge-room stereo speakers in the luggage racks and blasted The Doors non-stop … Peace Frog, Roadhouse Blues etc. etc.
Anyway that’s just one slice of why colac is like it is. It’s not all bad – the supermarket has more variety than any of the ones I can reasonably get to.

How I’m getting my kicks at the moment: ascending staircases Three Steps At A Time!

I have no links today – but there’s recipes at the stereo total site mentioned yesterday — and some of those songs there are really good. They rock.

I got found out today. Someone came up to me and said i have a weblog don’t I? Hehe. Kind of spun me out, but not in an unpleasant way. Apparently this is what happens when one puts a foto of oneself on ze frontpage. So a big shout-out to all the dev. psych. students out there! ;^)

comments:
Jon
url: the spork
date: 2003-10-10-13-25
Whatever it is it has to be better that that ANNOYING unwinding roads of S.A. ad they insist on screening before every bloody film in the cinemas. That ad effects me just about in the opposite way – hey maybe it’s the same ad agency as the Panasonic ad ? Maybe they are targeting me n an anti-sort of way .. time for the tinfoil hat methinks.

name: Jay
url: mowabi
date: 2003-10-10-17-02
The way you describe Colac.. sounds very x-filey

name: yak sox
date: 2003-10-10-17-44
Unwinding roads eh? I haven’t seen it, and can’t tell if that’d be good or bad for car sickness.
Either way, you’re probably right about which agency made and that they are out to get you.
Mulder and Scully are probably involved too.

Hi Jay. Maybe with the right sound-track and some kitch billlboards it might make it.

Wacky-fun pop song numero uno right now is Stereo Total’s ‘I love you Ono’. There’s a line in it and I was dead certain it was, “Planet Ark—- recycling”, but it turns out I was way off the mark. It would’ve been cool if that really was what they said amongst a whole bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with recycling.
It is getable out there on the net, but I won’t link to it because it’s one of those slightly dodgey sites that host lots and lots of songs rather than just one as a taster. But i want everyone else to hear it because I like it, so here’s a clue in the form of 2 lines from a Ginsberg poem;
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

And the Stereo Total website is very neat too. They have a page with 13 track available for the grabbin’ — that’s enough for a whole album – wow! What do they sound like? I would say Serge Gainsbourg + Bridget Bardot meets the 5,6,7, 8s.

I just realised there a whole bunch of domain names going begging along the besmirch variation:
besmircher.com
besmirchy.
besmirching
besmirchen
but besmirched is taken.

Meet the Greys if you already haven’t.
<%image(20040113-grey.jpg|100|100|grey)%>
There’s not too much to say about them other than they don’t like you. They want to drill tiny, perfectly cylindrical holes in your teeth so things like MP3 players can be inserted there.
It’s entirely possible, dear reader, that they will do this to you tonight while you are asleep. The chances of this happening were much greater before March.

Meet the Blues.
<%image(20040113-blue.jpg|70|70|bleu)%>
The Blues are shorter and they work for the Greys.
Before March the first bullet point on a typical Blue’s job description was:

• transport humans to and from flying saucer

because that’s where the Grey’s did their work.
The Blues were getting back injuries at an alarming rate -slipped disks, hernias- because of all the lifting. Lucky for them, they took the matter to an industrial arbitration commision which decided that if the Greys wanted to continue their dental work, they had to perform it on the spot.
This was bad news for the Greys. It slowed down the project considerably.

What’s the deal with witches and broomsticks? ... I knew it was something like that.

I am really impressed by Old Timey’s link-finding prowess. Like 20 questions which I found while rifling through her archives.
I thought I’d go easy on it and not say ‘maybe’ much – and it guessed I was thinking lollypop. Not bad!

What I’m reading at the moment — gone back to the classics – Tintin and The Land of Black Gold <%image(20040113-gold.jpg|80|110|woof! woof!)%> Mainly because the reading load is heavy enough during the other parts of the day, but I’ve wanted to take another look anyway.
Actually, the tintin books aren’t as good as I remember them. I sure don’t remember the dog, Snowy, talking. Still a bit of fun but.

comments:
oldtimey
url: soup de jour of the day
date: 2003-10-09-14-51
Heh, thankyou! It proves I don’t have a life . . err, wait, I mean, proves that I am highly creative and charming. (Actually, I always preach that you can find great things if you just know where to look — easy enough.)

The witch/broomstick thing: crazy!

First, my apologies to the long suffering frequenters of this site. Hopefully some of these issues will be werked soon.

You know how at pizza shops when you’re ordering, even if you’re right there in the store they ask you for a name for the order — as in what’s your name for the order.. This is such a big and anonymous world. Here is a list of names that in the future I’ll be drawing from when they ask me for a name:
Ruttegur
Kung Lao
Karim
Olympus
C. Ola
Kenyon
Oysters Kilpatrick
Ride-on lawnm’wah
and maybe if there was someone else there we could say Mike and Ike.
Or any other thing that happened to be in eyesight at the time –
“Table. Mr.Table.”

And for once instead of feeling like a freaking peasant because i wasn’t sitting on a straight-backed at a straighty-straight table with silver cutlery — I walked through the streets on the way home eating pizza out of the box feeling liberated and omnipotent.
And it’s not like I’ll be able to do this kind of thing forever – the blood will start to dry up and two things as central as eating and walking will have to be done seperately.

Saw a thingo about this thing, Noise on saturday night. Their banner looks like it says spork.

comments:
yak sox
date: 2003-10-07-09-44
For eg. now the recent comments thing has gone wacky.
Ah.

name: yak sox
date: 2003-10-07-09-48
testing comments again.

name: Jon Harsem
the spork
date: 2003-10-07-11-42
hey yeah it does look like spork – this time I got the page perfectly – though i am not sure how your recent comments thing on the frontpage is going =).

name: yak sox
date: 2003-10-07-15-44
Yeh – it’s half-arsedly “reset” itself when i was doing something.

Just added to archives. From 4 years ago.

Rob n’ Fab, Fab n’ Rob. Rob died in 1998. I must\’ve been looking for something behind the couch then because this is the first I’d heard of it.
The answer to what Fab’s doing is less definitive. According to this overly flippant interview – not much, but I’ve added myself to the official fab mailing list, so stay tuned.

That ‘rob died’ page is quite colourful (I particularly like the visuals of Rob slapping guys and attacking someone with a lamp base)—- methinks a ripping dramatised telemovie doco could be made about their story – it’s got that Boogie Nights circular arc.

I’m having to read a bit about them for this last Cultural Studies thing on post-mod and music. I think they were judged a bit harshly. I mean – there’s lots of personalities out there in the music biz that are little more than a cog in the machine that is {name of act} – like limp bizkit etc.

<%image(20040113-dog.jpg|250|188|woof! WOOF!)%>
: a cow named Dog whose best friend is a horse.

TV: Pilot Guides is back – and even better because groover, Ian Wright, is hosting all the eps. Iran (I didn’t know they had a ski slope there. Wow), Norway (very natureful — lots of water and it all looked clean) and then earlier tonight Mongolia. I like the show because they show the icky bits too.

Ads: I like to live in the delusion that I’m not thick, but there’s these Volvo ads on telly that I just don’t get. They generally feature someone driving a Volvo — and that person uttering to themselves “Bloody Volvo drivers”, which is directed at someone who’s not driving a Volvo. ???

comments:

crisp
url: Crispyhead
date: 2003-10-06-18-41
finally! for some reason I couldn’t comment yesterday…there’s a volvo ad where there’s a guy in a supermarket and his trolley gets bumped by another guy with a trolley who was recklessly “driving” it and he says about Reckless Trolley Man when he has gone out of earshot, “bloody volvo drivers” or something like that which to me implies that Volvo drivers are reckless? is that what the ad is trying to say? i don’t get it either i think…

btw I like Pilot Guides too!

yak sox
date: 2003-10-06-23-19
I don’t realise what’s hapening til they’re half over. That’s the main problem.

Have come down the highway to The Ranch for a day or so.
Went to the dentist again yesterday. Realised afterward that it was a complete waste of time. A sharp jabby thing was stuck down between my gums and teeth. It was going in too far and I was refferred to a periodontist to get some tiny creatures out from down there. I have no intention of doing that because of the cost. Maybe when I’ve got me a white collar wage-slave job. Ideally something like dentistry … something where I have a people-getting person. The people-getting person goes into another room and gets the sucker whose money I’m getting, says to them, “mr.sox will take your money now see you now”, and brings them to another room where I am and where I get the money. Yeah – that’s where the money is.

I caught the train down last night. As soon as I got on it I was able to get some (creative) writing down.
I need my own train. Need money for a train. Or power – like Trotsky. Money and power and ratings.

I was walking along the footpath and a garbage truck came up behind me. The mechanical arm grabbed me around the waist – i got tipped upside down, shaken and some flourescent textas fell out of my pants-pocket. It was pretty good fun.
I miss my textas.

It’s crop circle wrap up time again. The Northern summer was supposedly hot and fast to get it on, which means that crops were pulled up pretty quickly = not as many patterns as other years. Arial fotos at CropCircleConnector and TemporaryTemples.

I was trying to write a clever little thing called ‘Straight Eye For The Queer Guy’ – see—(the obligatory reversal)
where our fag, Brian, finds himself in the unenviable postion of having to take a job in a rural town with pop. of less than 20,000. It’s either that or stay in the city on a less-than 50K a year job and we can’t have that, because that’s when the effects of homophobia really start to kick in.

Our team the you-beaut bonza blokes pour into Brian’s newly leased rural twonship pad. They’ll teach him to blend in, thus saving him from being beaten to a bloody pulp by the local rednecks.—It was going to include dialog scenes and have Kev as footy expert…
I just ran out of steam and there’s this huge gap between taking things too seriously, and letting things roll by unchallenged but I feel like I’m stuck at both poles similtaneously.
I s’pose it’s the superficiality of the show that sticks in my craw. It’s nice to see gay guys on telly that aren’t automatically being typecast as fairies (well, not all of them at least) — but I feel like any apparent gain that they make (as an opressed minority) through situations like this show getting a gig will be at the expense of all men being subjected that bit more to feeling like we should be fitting into some prescribed appearance.
At that point I can hear a chorus of women yelling ‘welcome to my world, buddy’, but it’s still no way forward.

The Linux window manager, Enlightenment, continues to trundle along – and I see they recently wrote up an update with all the filthy details here. For a second I thought it said it was dead completely. I think I’ve been waiting literally three years for E17 – its next release. It’s a shame there’s not more people working on it really because it’s the only Linux WM that could give OS X a run for its money aesthetically speaking – have a squiz at the screenshots.

The streets are shiny black and it’s fun walking around with an umbrella.
For several months now I’ve been getting this feeling of wanting to hang upside down from the ceiling. I’ll have to go find some monkeybars.

I’m kind of wondering if anyone’s actually watching Dr.Who after the ‘ooos’, ‘aaaahs’ and ‘w00ts’ about it returning. I’ve watched it about twice. Due to its 1963ness I find it a challenge to concentrate on – no ad. breaks and (in one ep. I saw) there was only two scenes — at 6pm when concentration levels are low anyway. More like a play than a tv show, which is fine but I can’t handle it — apparently the froggies’ kids are liking it — which means an 8 and 10 y.o. are concentrating better than me.
But tonight was a bit more pacey thanks to the Daleks. People were jumping on the backs of them like they were runaway photocopiers and they were rolling down the hallways making this book trolley click-clack-clack noise with their wheels.