Mododrums’ meme

Update: Since I wrote this, I realised that Wiz had already sent me this quiz, well before I read Mododrums’ blog post. Blargh! Sorry Wiz!

Once upon a time there was a Mododrum, and I did read her blog (among others) on my extremely read-only PDA using plucker. This did not afford me much opportunity to reply to the Mododrum, as I would typically think of things to say when I had no means of submitting them, then forget all about blogs by the time I got home.

Today however, I had more time than usual at work to sit around in the mindless boredom of a data-center and read my PDA, and something stuck sufficiently for me to remember it now. 🙂

  1. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE?
    Possibly this dude. Certainly not this dude. Actually, I doubt it:If I was, how do I account for my brother’s name?
  2. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED?
    Yesterday I would have had to give a long and needlessly gruesome self-excoriating answer, however I cried a little bit just this morning while listening to Dogs, the song referenced in my previous post.
  3. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING
    I once did, but then several years of technical-drawing happened to it, and the final nails were driven in by Palm (how very anti-stigmatic!). Now my handwriting is all but extinct. I fire up the printer just to leave notes for E. I still like to fiddle amateurishly with calligraphy.
  4. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE LUNCH MEAT?
    It’s a close-run race between good roast beef and good roast lamb. If it has to be mediocre, I will fall back to salami, as even bad salami is ok.
  5. DO YOU HAVE KIDS?
    No.
  6. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU?
    I very much doubt it. I don’t like me very much as it is, and I am me. Then again, if I were someone else, I might not have such fine-tuned sensitivity to all my own worst traits. What a silly question! If I were impossible and imaginary, would I fly or just teleport? but I digress…
  7. DO YOU USE SARCASM ALOT?
    Not in a million years. Nor do I exaggerate, and I am further above hyperbole than God.
  8. DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS?
    Yes.
  9. WOULD YOU BUNGEE JUMP?
    Probably. Even this man‘s fervent warnings leave me undeterred.
  10. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE CEREAL?
    Porridge. I am, however, a great girly southern pansy: I not only like milk and cream in mine, and often eat instant porridge, I also like golden syrup on mine. This profoundly offends the sensibilities of many porridge eaters, so why would I ever stop? 🙂
  11. DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF?
    Yes, or else they get ruined. Whoever wrote this question has very different feet to mine… wow.
  12. DO YOU THINK YOU ARE STRONG?
    No. For my size, build and gender I am physically pathetic. Emotionally, I am much much worse. At best I suppose I can claim the kind of resiliency which is attributed to the willow tree: I bend freely but seem to remain unbroken in the face of much crazy poop.
  13. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE ICE CREAM?
    The stuff from the old gelateria in Lygon street. What flavour? Probably some kind of toffee-caramel-crunchy-gooey variety.
  14. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE?
    To be brutally honest, I suspect my sensory filters would usually strive to gauge gender or height first.
  15. RED OR PINK?
    Red. Pink would be my favourite pastel, but generally I like primary colours vastly more than shades tones or pastels.
  16. WHAT IS THE LEAST FAVOURITE THING ABOUT YOURSELF?
    My inherited penchant for gratuitous melodrama.
  17. WHO DO YOU MISS THE MOST
    Right now, E. Her shifts are horrible for me, and must me indescribable diabolical torment for her.
  18. DO YOU WANT EVERYONE TO SEND THIS BACK TO YOU?
    No. That would make this a mailing lis, and it’s not, it’s a blog. Everyone can get their own dang blog and answer it there. 🙂
  19. WHAT COLOUR PANTS AND SHOES ARE YOU WEARING?
    Black and Black. Work and work. Then again, many of my casual shoes and pants are black too. Hmmm.
  20. WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU ATE?
    Warm plonky cake with custard. Before that it was midnight breakfast. See my earlier comment about E’s shifts.
  21. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW?
    The faint hum of my little pooter.
  22. IF YOU WHERE A CRAYON, WHAT COLOUR WOULD YOU BE?
    Transparent like candle wax.
  23. FAVOURITE SMELLS?
    E. The smell of cooking lamb. The odd hot-metal smell that older Melbourne trams and trains often make.
  24. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE PHONE?
    A workmate in Adelaide.
  25. DO YOU LIKE THE PERSON WHO SENT THIS TO YOU?
    Mododrum are uber niftah, sometimes even when using her powers for evil. 🙂
  26. FAVOURITE SPORTS TO WATCH?
    Scrapheap challeng, or, if I can’t call that a sport, rally driving.
  27. HAIR COLOUR?
    Boring blondish brown, when I let it get long enough to have a colour distinct from my scalp.
  28. EYE COLOUR?
    Bloodshot unnatural blue (see Q#29).
  29. DO YOU WEAR CONTACTS?
    Yes, they make my normally blue eyes very blue, and permanently bloodshot. I do not wear them for vanity: rigid contact lenses are the only viable way to overcome my keratoconus well enough to drive.
  30. FAVOURITE FOOD?
    Spit-roast meat.
  31. SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS?
    From these two, scary movies, although really I shuold be saying that I like sad, bleak endings best.
  32. LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED?
    Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix
  33. WHAT COLOUR SHIRT ARE YOU WEARING?
    White, work. See shoes.
  34. SUMMER OR WINTER?
    Summer. O please let there be a long enough summer for me to adjust before it finishes.
  35. HUGS OR KISSES?
    Hugs.
  36. FAVOURITE DESSERT?
    Cream caramel.
  37. MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND?
    sabik.
  38. LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND?
    My brother.
  39. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING NOW?
    Currently between books, although I have been meaning to finish Authentic Happiness by Seligman one of these days.
  40. WHAT IS ON YOUR MOUSE PAD?
    My what? This is the twenty-first century, and my mouse is optical, thankyouverymuch. We don’ need no steenkin mousepads! I have a Kaz mousepad around here somewhere though…
  41. WHAT DID YOU WATCH ON T.V. LAST NIGHT?
    Last night? I didn’t turn the TV on last night, I had dinner with friends and got some sleep. Tonight I watched taped episodes of Top Gear and Enough Rope.
  42. FAVOURITE SOUND?
    This is obscure… The sound that the backpacks in the original Ghostbusters movie make as they power up. It’s a bit like the rapidly-rising squeal that capacitors make as they charge, only with this great dangerous-sounding crunchiness to it.
  43. ROLLING STONES OR BEATLES?
    Sargeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, of course. Lennon may have been the second coming.
  44. WHAT IS THE FURTHEST YOU HAVE BEEN FROM HOME?
    Portland, Oregon.
  45. DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL TALENT?
    I like to think that I write well (in a sense which has absolutely nothing to do with handwriting).
  46. WHAT IRRITATES YOU MOST?
    Malicious misinformation, especially when it comes from people in positions of authority or power who have a responsibility to behave better. Doubly so if it is that person’s role to give out information, i.e. they are a teacher. It makes me so murderously angry I can barely contain myself.
  47. WHOSE ANSWERS ARE YOU LOOKING FORWARD TO GETTING BACK?
    E‘s.

Wonderful Terrible Things

Warning: I may be repeating myself

Today I find myself particularly struck by an old piece of music with which I am very familiar, and a relatively new (March 1995) piece of writing which I had never seen before.

In 1999 I was on the dole, feebly attempting to mop up the last few subjects, the stragglers of my degree. I had had a little work fixing laptops for an acquaintance of a friend. I had some more work for a nasty little criminal of a man whose name I will not mention here. (The low character of these two people should not be taken as any reflection on my friend. She would, I am sure, testify to their foulness; she didn’t choose to run into them either…). But I wasn’t really trying to get work. Thus, it came as somewhat of a surprise therefore, when I accidentally got myself hired into a ravening bloodthirsty beast of a dot-com startup. My experiences with Verve, and later with Versata, and finally (the horror!) with Microlistics, came as something of a culture-shock. I suspect these experiences will always form a part of my appreciation and understanding of the workplace, the realities of economics, and the so-called captains of industry at every level of it.

There were two Pink Floyd songs which seemed to express it all particularly well at the time:

First, Learning to Fly was the essence of it (and that fact that it flows smoothly into Dogs of war); the terrifying, glorious surge of uncontrollable acceleration as I found myself flown out to the USA for emergency consulting work in my first year on the job. The brutal disorientation: Welfare-pauper uni student one day, suited international business consultant the next. The exultation: That code there that processes a hundred million dollars every day: I wrote that. I wrote that today and a team of hardened veterans thanked me for it and took me out for lunch.

Second though, as Verve sickened into Versata and died, and I found myself at Microlistics, it was suddenly all about Dogs, quite possibly my favourite track of all time.

You gotta be crazy, you gotta have a real need
You gotta sleep on your toes, and when you’re on the street
You gotta be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed
And then moving in silently, down wind and out of sight
You gotta strike when the moment is right without thinking.
And after a while, you can work on points for style
Like the club tie, and the firm handshake
A certain look in the eye, and an easy smile
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to
So that when they turn their backs on you
You’ll get the chance to put the knife in.

<mesmerizing musical interlude>

You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder
You know it’s going to get harder, and harder, and harder as you get older
And in the end you’ll pack up, fly down south
Hide your head in the sand
Just another sad old man
All alone and dying of cancer.

<another mesmerizing musical interlude starring Mr Gilmour’s guitar>

And when you loose control, you’ll reap the harvest that you’ve sown
And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone

And it’s too late to loose the weight you used to need to throw around
So have a good drown, as you go down, alone
Dragged down by the stone.

<Yet another mesmerizing musical interlude, with synthesizers this time>

I gotta admit that I’m a little bit confused
Sometimes it seems to me as if I’m just being used
Gotta stay awake, gotta try and shake off this creeping malaise
If I don’t stand my own ground, how can I find my way out of this maze?
Deaf, dumb, and blind, you just keep on pretending
That everyone’s expendable and no-one has a real friend
And it seems to you the thing to do would be to isolate the winner
And everythings done under the sun
And you believe at heart, everyone’s a killer.

<one last mesmerizing musical interlude>

Who was born in a house full of pain
Who was trained not to spit in the fan
Who was told what to do by the man
Who was broken by trained personnel
Who was fitted with collar and chain
Who was given a pat on the back
Who was breaking away from the pack
Who was only a stranger at home
Who was ground down in the end
Who was found dead on the phone
Who was dragged down by the stone.

Who was dragged down by the stone.

Today, as I listened to this song again in an interlude between crises, reflecting on what a depressive wanker I was (and what a stunningly good song this still is) I read something that evoked a similar sense of fascination: Hunter S Thompson’s Song of the Sausage Creature.

Like everything he wrote, it’s a fascinating place to visit, but nowhere you would want to live. It’s all about my newest hobby; motorcycling. Thanks again Hunter for a fascinating glimpse of something I want no part of.

Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba….

And he was, in the end.

Target Market?

E has been known to browse eBay.

E: It’s a haunted gypsy mens jewelry(sic) penis enlargement spell! <archly> Do you think you need one? </archly>

Me: Do you think I need one?

E: No, not really.

Me: Then I don’t think I need one.

<pause>

Me: There’s spectacle, and there’s convenience, you know?

Of course, I needed the URL to write this, so I asked E for it… E sent it to me in a message entitled ‘I won’t ask why you want this’.

Today’s mindless blather brought to you by the common cold and the letter Mu.

Even more Transformers!

Saw it again on Sunday night with brother-dude (who persists in not having a homepage or a blog or anything I can link to. Dude!) and enjoyed it immensely. Couldn’t help thinking:

Optimus Prime: We learned your language from the World-Wide-Web. Kthxbye!

and even

Bumblebee: I has a lubricant! Let me show it to you!

Agent Simmons: It has a flavour… DO NOT WANT!

Optimus Prime: I saw what you did there.

but that’s because lolcats have fundamentally corrupted my mind… 🙂

Motarbaik!

I am now officially one of those foolish people who spurn two of the normal four wheels and all of the normal heavy steel armor which are so important to most drivers: I am now allowed to ride a motorbike as a learner!

Never mind that I have no helmet or boots, no actual motorbike, and am yet to obtain my actual physical learners permit, owing to bloodyminded vicroads beuraucratica.

I can happily recommend Motorcycle Motion as a great  place to train for and sit your motorcycle learner’s permit tests.

As to why, there are a few of reasons:

  1. I thought it might be fun
  2. E laiks baiks! I look forward to going touring one day very much.
  3. Money. It takes a lot more of the stuff for fuel, registration, maintenance, insurance and e-tag fees to keep this on the road:
    Mazda 929
    …than it does for this:
    Yamaha SRX 250
    …which is incidentally the same kind of cheap learner-legal bike I hope to soon buy off my brother.

Several people have expressed concern about the safety, or lack thereof, inherent in my doing this. I want to be very clear and very public in stating that my eyes are open. I know very well that motorcyclists are vastly more at risk than car drivers. I do not intend to take any chances, and will not be going anywhere without substantial safety gear. Nonetheless I know that what I am going to do is inherently unsafe. I’m ok with that.

More news will follow when I actually do some riding. 🙂

Word Pressure

A word of apology: if anyone’s wondering why my blog looks odd at present, it’s because my former favourite wordpress theme, ‘Benevolence’ died when I upgraded WPMU, and I cannot find a new up-to-date copy of it, so I have reverted back to the default for now.

I have a long-standing to-do to help E brighten up her wordpress theme, so there is a bit of work to be done. If anyone has WordPress (especially WPMU) theming expertise they would like to contribute, please comment or mail me or sumfin’.

Kthxbye 🙂