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?

Sheepdog standing in the rain bullforg doing it again wsome kind of happiness is measured out in miles what makes you think your’re somehting special when you smile childlike no one understands jack kniefe in your swweaty hands some kinf od innocence is measured out in years you don;t know what it’s like to listen to your fears you can tralk to me you can talk to me you can tqalk to me if you;re lonely you can talk to mebig manwalkin gi nthe park wigwam firghtened of the dark somekinf od solitude ismeaures out in you you’re thin uyou kno me but you aven’t got a clue you can toalk to me you can tlak toiu me you can talk to meif you;re lonely you can talk to mehey bulldog heyy rarrhr ruff ruff hey ulldog ruff he bullog hey billeffog hey bulldog hey man what’s happening ruff, what do you say you say ruff you don’t need more roorrrhh ahh ahhhhaaaahhahaa you got it you got it tha’;ts right thata’s it taht’;s man that ’s it you got it ruff you really got potentital hahha hhhaaah ruff it you gotit ahhahhha ahhaa quiet!quiet! quiet!hey bulldog

[I wish I could claim this but it's from here along with a copy of Black Velvet Flag's cover of Suicidal Tendencies' Institutionalised.]

This is the sign for my fave coffee shop in the whole Geelong area.

It’s a reused petrol station set-up. They’ve got all this trashy furniture to sit on or you can sit outside near where the pumps used to be. That’s what I like to do. It’s on one of the main out-roads to the west (Ballarat et al.) and there’s quarries around, so there’s generally a fair amount of trucks on the go. But I kind of like that — trucks are at least honest about being noisy smog-belching things, and they’re actually doing something compared to 4WDs. And no, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, the sign really does look that wonky - it looks like I did it. I didn’t, although I was there on one of the days when it was being painted.

Fyansford is on the outskirts of the city and the next suburb over from where I am. After heading down there a couple of times I was surprised at how little time it takes to get there. It was late last year when I dug the area properly. I’d just finished watching the Twin Peaks series and could see that at least through the tricks and framing of a camera lens there were several parallels. There’s not actually much at Fyansford at all: a pub, a few shops and some old workers cottages. There’s a cement bridge there built in roughly 1904(?) which at the time was the first of its kind in the world.

On the cafe sign are three chimneys. They belong to the now almost completely defunct cement works. I know there’s only two showing in the second foto but the other is just out of shot.

But they’re going to demolish them and the first one comes down on the 30th. I’m not happy about it. Yes, they’re only cement, but they’ve got character.

I recently heard that Delphin are going to subdivide the area into 10 to 15 thousand allotments over the next 15 years. Ug. More about that another time.

More ug - it’s got to one of those periods where I have to turn off the news it’s all such a freakin’ freak show.

Three cheers for CORE for rolling with the punches and outliving the script kiddies. Core was recently messed up a couple of times by intruders, and so has switched content management systems from Nuke to WordPress. There’s a version you can have a play with here.

(1) biting his shirt or arm
(2) sticking out his tongue
(3) kicking or biting himself, others, or objects
(4) calling someone or something a derogatory name
(5) removing or threatening to remove his clothing
(6) saying “NO!” loudly and vigorously
(7) threatening to damage objects or persons
(8) throwing objects
(9) pushing his sister

The community edition of mandrake’s latest offering was on the May LinuxFormat mag. DVD. I got it and plunged headlong into another irreversible clean install.
It’s like stumbling into the house, blurry eyed and seeing that someone’s rearranged all the furniture, smashed up your favourite chair, ate all the porridge except for one bowl which was smashed against the far wall. With all bits of oats and dried milk draining down the wallpaper.
And then jerked off on you bed and they’re still in the bed, snoring…

I think it’s the last time i do things that way. It’s like the longer there is between a new install, the more I get things just the way I want them, and the more I forget of how to fiddle things into order.
But i did want to enlarge the partition it was all on because of the ever-growing music collection.

Back in the old days there were people who wouldn’t touch the .0 release of a distro because there wes bound to be a lot of bugs in it — better to wait for .1 they’d say. The way mandrake do things (grabbing the newest of everything and shoving it into the next distro) you’d think there wouldn’t be a difference between a ‘new’ and a ‘revision’. But there was because once I’d installed, there was over 700Mb of updates (bugfixes, security updates and general updates) waiting to be d/loaded — which is a lot through a dial up.

- the evolution mail client is broken. Lucky it’s not my choice for mail.
- whatever new version of XMMS doesn’t have the hotkey ‘S’ to turn on/off the shuffle feature. Damn.
- Konqueror as a web browser is getting better (Kde 3.2, and this is the one that has the Apple Safari offerings incorporated) but for me at least still wasn’t rendering pages in a consistent way. Also, there needs to be some way of seperating some of the settings out from the file manager / web browser components.

- For the first tew days XMMS was broken, so I used Kde’s Noatun, which still sucks. It’s ugly and when the CPU got busy it’d mess with the continuity of a song.

- As a seperate issue, I gave Opera 7.50b a spin but it’s still really half-baked and had this stupid way of spreading the google text-ad window right across the browser frame.

– Neat things are: in Konqueror there’s this thing that’ll render images in a folder as an HTML page complete with thumbnails, which can be easily saved and shoved on the web.
- a screen saver I hadn’t seen before that will randomly show images from a file of jor choosing.

- connectiong to the Penguin Liberacion Frente via urpmi is a must for any ‘drake enthusiast.

[The formation of a united front between Sunnis and Sheites reminded of what fantastically stubborn buggers us humans can be when someone's trying to take our stuff. This was one of the first stories I wrote for a short story class ages ago, so it's kind of fresh but maybe that's a good thing.]

They knocked on Bob’s screen wire door last Thursday. He was rearranging his furniture.
‘Come in, come in, whoever you are,’ he chimed toward the hallway absent mindedly.
‘Good day, citizen.’ The voice came from behind, and significantly above, Bob’s shoulder. Reluctantly he withdrew from staring at the positioning of a furry, faded, floral-patterned armchair.
‘Pleased to meet… erm, have we met before?’ Without his glasses, he squinted at the blurred faces.
‘It is unlikely,’ the first said. They wore the uniform of a dark blue, vinyl jumpsuit with padded shoulders. Their eyes were hidden. Large, wrap-around sun-glasses shaped neatly into rounded red helmets that were adorned with gold racing stripes.
They weren’t smiling. Bob thought offering a cuppa might cheer the poor fellows up.
‘No. Thank you, all we require is your attention. We have come from the star you know as Sirius. We require information as to who you are.’
Bob located his specs and as he sat down, he beamed intensely at them.
‘Yes, yes marvellous! The news people have been jabbering ceaselessly about you and that rocket ship of yours. Long trip I suppose! Funny that you look just like us.’
‘Yes,’ said the second, blankly.
‘Well, any way I can help you out is fine with me. In fact I’m flattered that you thought of me.’
‘Every adult is required to make a statement, Mr. Faustus,’ the first said, checking the name off the envelope they were delivering. He placed it on the coffee table in front of Bob.
‘Instructions are included,’ said the second.
‘Good-oh,’ Bob replied and wondered vaguely if they were staring at him.
‘Good day citizen.’ They left as they came. Bob thought again of the furniture. It now appeared to be positioned perfectly. He sat in another chair, but again, it looked all wrong. Engrossed in this trivial confusion, he remained there for sometime.
Saturday morning, Bob was humming the anthem of a football team that he didn’t barrack for. He opened the envelope and read.

       Dear Terran,
We are giving you the chance to explain a little about a subject you know plenty about. Yourself! It is entirely up to you as to what you think is important. However you will be assessed on what you include and what you omit.
In the interests of a succinct completion of liaison between your species and ours we request that you return the attached notice and questionnaire to your community collection point as soon as possible.

Bob hummed on and touched the tip of a pencil to his tongue and wrote:
Well, as I say to Mrs. Percival from next door, the best place to start is at the beginning. Grew up here in Rosemont. Beautiful place, this. I used to run around the neighbourhood ringing door bells and hiding in the bushes.
Our Prime Minister said it was imperative that young men of our country should fight to defend it. That’s what I thought too, so when I was 18 I joined the army and spent 4 years overseas as an Engineer. Mainly I dug trenches. Back breaking work but I enjoyed it at the time.
When it was time for him, my younger brother, Jim, didn’t want to join up and somehow got out of it. War just wasn’t for him. He stayed here in Rosey and worked in a factory making guns. Worked his little heart out too, fell down dead right there on the production line.
Everyone thought it’d be over in a year, ended up as eight. We stuck it out though, for the good of our country. It was the right thing to do.
I came back to Rosemont with a foot shot off. ‘Little Bobby Wood-foot,’ that was my nick-name when I got back. Times were fairly hard then, most of the businesses had closed down.
I spent the days wheeling around the place delivering what groceries there were to old folks who couldn’t get out. Walking was a bit painful but I rigged up a little trailer to the back of this funny tricycle that I could peddle with my hands.
Life was a bit more difficult compared to when I was a nipper but we all still got by. The sun came up in the morning and birds chirped.
The Gipple family had a piano and I’d pick up a couple of the oldies and wheel them over. We’d have a merry old singalong. Bert would bring milk fresh from his cow and we’d have cocoa.

These days I mainly spend in the backyard or at the park. I photograph insects - magnified, of course. Folks say I must be awfully patient, suppose I am. I sit in the warmth and breeze and wait for a bug to land on the right leaf. They are suprisingly pretty little things.
I’m a bit creaky now and my race is almost run but I sit out there and it’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream. Regards,
Bob Faustus

Weeks later a message zapped through space towards Sirius at the speed of light.
Scout Captain to Command Central:
Re: Annexation of Terra:

Upon further investigation I recommend the abandonment of our mission indefinitely. The nature of this species is riddled with paradox. Individually their method of reasoning is skewed and unpredictable, yet when threatened, innate qualities of cohesion and resolution come to bear against their aggressor.
They are suspicious of each other while, seemingly, devoted to one another’s well being.
The younger generations even appear to have been expecting our arrival, yet treated our questionnaire with scepticism.
We are currently preparing the vessel for relaunch to continue our search.
Y�ѵ�V!

- me, 1998

Pros:
- unlimited supply of hotel mini-soaps and sewing kits
- cool hat
- get to boss around co-pilot
- Flying High II
- chance to sate radio DJ aspirations via in-flight announcement system
- can blame all abnormal behaviour on occupational stress
- those things practically fly themselves these days

Cons:
- get bossed around by air traffic controller
- that ’screechy’ sound tyres make when landing
- that ’scrapy’ sound fuselage makes when tyres fail to deploy
- running out of petrol
- not a strong swimmer
- being a vegetarian makes resorting to cannabalism extra hard
- skyjacking: generalised perception of perps is that they’re not known for their personal hygene — compounded by confined space. (Nb. could be false assumption)
- get called ‘glorified bus driver’ by people

Passing on one such dramatic message to the world via Howard was evidently not enough, for the aliens repeatedly abducted him, which became rather tiresome. Later, however, he stumbled upon one of the few effective defenses against alien abduction: he discovered alcohol. When the aliens grabbed him from his college room one night he was in no mood to co-operate. Although he was happy enough to lie on the examination table, when they started fiddling about with him he got up and protested. The aliens tried to calm him down, but he would have none of it and stood unsteadily in the middle of the room making wild karate movements. The smaller aliens cowered against the wall while the tall alien tried to reason with him, but with no success because Howard was fighting drunk. The tall alien then stared deep into his eyes and the next thing that he remembered was that he was standing on the college lawn, about a mile away from his room, in his underpants.