Y’know the cognitive psychologists like to compare brains to computers and I don’t know that it’s such a fantastic idea but at the moment I got some serious malfunctions. Ninety per cent of my head is doing nothing – it’s not doing the homewerk and it’s not coming up with anything cleverclox for here either.
Actually, after two odd incidents today the thought entered that my head is leaking thoughts. Everyone, I’m sure, gets those moments where you’ll meet someone who will say something so highly appropriate that you get paranoid thinking that they are a mind reader. But what I’m talking about is way more – a serious, open-for-all hole. You know what I’m going to write next eh…

I’ve been farting an awful lot lately.

Here is a word-guide of for how to be speakin’ da Jamaican Mon. I heard that link on the radio.

I’ve completely lost the ability to do small talk. I’m continually presented with these situations where I could lean across the bus aisle and say, “sooo, Holden Racin’ Team fan are ya? Not doin’ too well this year are they?”—but I don’t and haven’t done for way too long and now I can’t. It’s getting to that time of year where you can say, “cold enough for ya?” too.

I only mention this because I’ve put the boot into them for every other attempt, but the bloodyvolvodriver ad campaign finally did an interesting one—everyone in it has beards including the women and kids and there’s doesn’t seem to be any reason for it. As they say in finland, niceypoo.

This image comes from a collection of fotos on salt and what it does to metal.

There’s a small set of darkly nice digital fotos of a ghost-town called Pittsfield which is part of this modern ruins site.

And both of those links come courtesy of artnotes.

I’m having a read through feral children.com. The ‘confined’ section’s a bit grisly, and I haven’t had a look at the ‘isolated”, but kids raised by animals is pretty damn interesting. They got a jackal girl, gazelle boy, sheep boy, Irish sheep boy, couple each bear girls and bear boys, dog boy { atlas, half-man, the geeks, the hired hands…} goat boy, monkey boys, leopard girl, more wolf boys than you could poke a stick at, and my personal fave: a monkey girl found in Ugnada by an Italian missionary.
As if adjusting to human society wouldn’t be confusing enough for the kid, the Italian decides to name her, “Baby Hospital”.
hehe, baby hospital—I gotta pinch that for a story.

I have the sneaking suspicion the whole website was set up to help sell a book. If it has, then they’ve gone to a lot of trouble.

If tour de france is ‘da bomb’, and it is, then track racing is firing up the ol’ cyclotron for a bit of particle acceleration action. There’s track championships on in melbourne at the moment. Wicked camera angle from the back of the derney (a thing that sets the pace in multi-rider races). I think it’s actually a freakin’ motorbike/moped thing—and I tell ya that’d tick me off—riding a bicycle indoors, on wood, and still being stuck behind a smelly petrol-vehicle.

During a school trip to Amsterdam Billy is offered a toke on a spliff.

Give or take half an hour.

Heard: In chemist, one middle-aged lady to another, “Can I touch you? Touch you for luck?”
Seen: Woman with kid in supermarket eating a little parcel of cold meat she’d presumably got at the deli. That’s great. More people should eat supermarket food while they’re still in the supermarket. That way you don’t have to pay for it.

While there’s more than a few christians who missed their calling as advertising creatives, I don’t think this sign belongs to one of them—I’d seen this for weeks before I finally got it. I wonder if god has a good knee-mail spam filtering application and if so could it please be open sourced because us mortals could sure use one.

Red hat is the name of a Linux distribution, they have a free version of their product named Fedora. This morning I found out that Fedora is the name of a hat. Here is a picture of one. And here is a glossary of hat terms.

Last night I was sitting on the lawn of a front yard overlooking Corio Bay. Talking to Michael Douglas but I don’t remember about what apart from him finishing a sentence in a casual tone of voice saying, ’… that was before I had the sex change operation’. Before I had any time react in whatever way I was going to a series of airforce planes and jets flew over. It was all part of some carnival in the town. A harrier jet slowed down and hovered right over the top of us. It brushed tree branches out of the way. S’pose I was a little surprised at how quiet it was and how little wind it produced. It was aqua. It’s engines faltered a bit and it jerked down to 20 or 30 feet above. I was a bit worried it was going to conk out and squash us.

A couple of weeks back I was vaguely wondering what I am going to do when I finish uni. There was a newspaper opened to the classifieds on the coffee table in front of me. A small ad caught my eye, “Be a Ninja” it said and directed me to khninjas.com. From it I read: “Their highly illegal counter culture was underground and it…” and thought, I’m counter culture, um, highly illegal and I go underground sometimes, like on holidays.
They have a local group and eventhough the pictures on the site are of people in black costumes, it says that Ninjas dress normally and could be any of the people you know walking among us. Yeah, so the Ninja life is mighty tempting—the way I figure it, if a Ninja wants to lay across the whole couch, he can because that what Ninjas do—if they want. Maybe me n’ the other Ninjas could take on Delphin and kick their proposed arses out of Fyansford, saving the villagers.

I’ve been feeling a bit like the proverbial teapot, short and stout, getting all steamed up and ready to shout except that someone stuck a gobber of bubblegum in whatever hole the steam comes out of. Nobody knows it’s time to tip me over, pour me out because they can’t hear anything. So I’ll probably explode and make a terrible mess.

- Been listening to internet radio. Finally, a decent app. for Linux, streamtuner, hooks into xmms. Listening to things I haven’t heard in a while, like drum n’ bass stuff and Zionradio, Jah Mon. And while I’ve known for a while that it’s a serious health hazard to listen to anything over 80 beats per minute while eating, especially dinner, I still end up doing it. Keep an eye on the obits.
– I saw a platypus in the Barwon river. Amazing considering how toxic it was in summer—algal bloom, big red painted WARNING signs saying not to let the water touch you. Rivers are so temporary.
– I feel like the whole of reality can at best only be considered a ‘secondary source’ of information lately.
– This is that part of the year where the writing here is gruel-thin and you’re doing me a favour by visiting.
– Got another story rejected and sent back the other day. They said only peasants use contractions.
– Add ‘Winterbottom’ to the list of surnames that sound funny.

We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do! We wanna be free to ride! We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the man! And we wanna get loaded! [crowd cheering]

That foto is from this bunch of collections of photos from Soviet Russia. They go from the ‘20s through to WWII.
And the top samples database helped remind me how that bit went.

[update: Mon arvo: I neglected to mention that I saw the Russian link at bighappyfunhouse, via excitement machine.]

The component of eurovision that I didn’t mention was the commentary. Frankly, I think all those whingers complaining that they want that wogan guy back should go back to england because they must be whinging poms.
I like Des Mangan. I think some of the things he says are funny. Thoughout the week I was thinking that, and thinking ‘it’s a realistic kind of funny. If he’s funny, then so am I’—that’s a good thing. And then I read this and find that he’s been writing comedy for Sydney radio for eight years. Those sydney people must laugh at anything. It’s heartening for a laddy like me.

Anyway, I went in this competition for one of 25 copies of the book Des Mangan wrote, This is Sweden Calling—I’m so good at those N words or less competitions—the less the better (in this case 25) and I knew I would win and I did. Neato!

You’re a Spirograph!! You’re pretty tripped out,
even though you’ve been known to be a bit
boring at times. You manage to serve your
purpose in life while expending hardly any
effort (and are probably stoned to the gills
all the while).

What childhood toy from the 80s are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

[via brainal meltdown]

Yeah y’know I watched the preliminary final on Friday night and the estonian entry was good because the drummer guy hit the cymbal with his head, a la Animal from the Muppets.

But in the final last night I was going for Serbia n’ Montenegro. SBS really cashed in on the whole thing with a half hour each weeknight in the lead up, then the prelim plus the actual eurovision—so some songs I’d actually seen three times and in some cases that was three times too many.
But it didn’t take long to figure out that the serb n mont song was catchy. Nice chord sequence. Different things appeal to different people, choreography, costume, vocal performance – or the actual sound of the song is what makes me sit up. Plus they had those little guitars.
So I was pretty excited when it blasted into the lead early on, but then faded in the second half. Cora in germany also has a bit to say about it all, and I agree that the voting is the most exciting and interesting bit about it all. I said it last year and I’ll say it again now—it’s actually more complicated than the system we use to elect our political leaders here.

The Ukrainian song that won was kind of okay, but the costumes they had were totally hardcore and understandably would’ve earned them a few points. You could knock up a telemovie sceenplay in half an hour and still get it accepted if it included all that leather, fur and whips.

I liked Ludwig’s head from Malta:

or more specifically his hair do – a straight haired mullet parted at the side. Very No-Wave or something, couldda slapped on a black singlet and slotted into the new york punk scene.
Moving toward the tongue in cheek ‘I liked’, also I liked Deen from Bosnia n’ Hertzagovina’s ‘In the disco’. It was kind of funny that Deen had this intensely camp singing style but also had these rather racey looking women swirling around him.

my uni lecturer would call this scene ‘Patriarchal’
But at least it was distinctive. Interesting to hear that many of the national finalists were picked from ‘australian idol’ type shows, which seemed to backfire for a lot of countries—there was a glut of solo male vocalists. This also says something about those kind of shows (same with Big Brother) that the winners are mostly 20-something white males.
The cruisin’ down the road MOR-fiend in me also liked “Max” from Germany and his tune. Maybe I should grow my hair like Max .. hhehehehheheheehahaHAHAHAAHAAA!
I’m glad I wasn’t on acid when those ABBA puppets came on—that was horrific.

I think if the UK ever want to do well again they’ll have atomise into Wales, England, N.Ireland, and Scotland splitting in two; ‘scotland’ proper and in the north Pictland (or Pixieland—ie. where the Picts live). This way they can vote for eachother.
Then again, the Swedish song seemed pretty lame to me, but did well. And same with Spain – that song was pretty forgetable. I can’t help but wonder how much politics and the state of a country’s foriegn policy PR plays a part in it. Was Spain getting sympathy votes? Did people ditch Israel in the Preliminaries because they are being arseholes to Palestine? Did the UK get no votes because they are US running-dogs in Iraq?
What this theory doesn’t explain is why was Italy not there again? (did they do something terrible and got banned for good?) Same with Hungary and Czech republic. And why did Tango King from Finland bomb out?