Actually, not that funny a story, really.

It revolves around camo pants (mine), so badly shit-stained that the befoulment was clearly visible through the camouflage pattern. And army gear is ace for hiding the filth. I regularly rub grease onto them, and wipe dripping paint brushes dry on my camo pants; the stains just add character, right?

Not this time. No-one likes the kind of character who randomly craps himself.

Finally I realise: I've got a leather bike seat. It's brown leather. I've been greasing it a lot, to soften it up and break it in. My creepy stain was just oil, grime and dye.

I breath a sigh of relief.

A news story got my interest, since it sounds a bit science fictioney:

Driverless airport pods unveiled

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8194698.stm

It's a pretty badly presented article - £25m for a really small bit of light rail.  It sounds like £24m more than that particular service requires.  There's also the WTF? of giving it's top speed as 25mph on a British (metric) webpage.

The wikipedia page about it seems a whole lot more interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra

I like that it's largely off-the-shelf tech, and pretty cheap to set up.  It's essentially what happens when an electric bicycle makes sweet love to a monorail.

"According to an ATS study of a hypothetical city-based installation, consisting of 19.8 km of guideway (89% of it elevated), the total cost of ULTra track and associated civil engineering works is estimated to be £2.9M/km ($8.7M/mi). Per-station costs were estimated to be £0.48M ($0.89M). Vehicle costs were not considered in this study."

That's pretty economical.  I think it could be lots cheaper, in some cases:

(1) The guideway - consider a non-hypothetical shitty little city like Canberra (sprawling, car-dependent, with fairly bad public transport).  Connecting the centre with the outer suburbs and satellite towns (Woden, Belconnen, Tuggeranong) with ULTra would make it a whole lot more livable.  It's flat, and there's lots of open space between the population clusters, so the guideway would only need to be elevated for small sections.

(2) The vehicles: I think you could mass produce most of the vehicles for a few hundred dollars each by leaving out the engines.  In most cases, the "cargo" could be the engines.  

The first day I put a speedo for my bike, I stopped at the lights behind a lady, about 55 years old, carrying herself and a pannier of luggage on her bike.  I paced her for a short while - about 15 seconds after the lights changed, she was doing more than 20kph.*   Put the same lady on a purpose-built trike, on a dedicated guideway, and gave the trike a fairing (to keep off rain, and reduce air drag), and her same low level of exertion could maintain a speed of 30kph or more,**  which compares well with the average speed of suburban traffic.

You'd only need a few engined ones for the elderly and disabled, and to tow chains of the regular trikes back to high-demand intersections (for example, to cope with mostly one-way flows during peak hour).

*cycling with low air drag, meaning speeds up to 25kph, requires the same energy as walking.
**The hour record for an athlete in such a vehicle (a muscle-powered bicycle with an aerodynamic fairing) is 90 km. The top speed recorded is >130kph.

I'm getting the most awesome bed hair these days - a stiff, jaunty mane, like I've used hairspray whilst driving a convertible.

Today I'm procrastinating before I head out into the howling wind to get stuff done.  I need a new fridge, minor bits of hardware, phone credit, groceries and other boring stuff.

This afternoon, I'm planning to hook up with a buddy for some grinding / welding action, an experiment to see if we can breathe new life into a Malvern Star bicycle from the 80's (forty bucks from the op shop).  I've stripped it down and am using it as a single speed, but I'd like something with more longevity than the current hack job - I'm using a milo lid as the chain guide, and a sawn-off bit of PVC pipe to set the spacing on the back cog correctly.  Bush mechanic is me.

At the moment I have 3 working bikes, which is probably one too many -

The old Malvern Star is for work commuting / not getting stolen in the city.  It's only really good for short rides, it's a bit tiring for 10km+ rides.  As anti-theft, it's cunningly disguised as a cheap, beaten-up rusted old bike.  The lock is more valuable than it is :-)  As extra security, I take it's seat off and into work with me when I lock it up, since drunks / vandals like to steal seats.  It kinda doesn't make sense to weld / upgrade it, but I can't help myself... the magpie urge (must be good!  must be shiny!) is too strong.

The old $50 Hanimex looks like it will be my country bike, for tree-planting adventures.  It weighs a ton, but it's nice to ride, it's shape / riding position is suited to longer distances, and it's easy to fix / fiddle with because the components are old / simple.  It was pretty good when stock, then I got it a comfy leather saddle, and now I want to marry it.

I'm not sure what to do with my original (modern) bike now.

Lucy's Crown are still good.  When I saw them last, they had re-jigged their set a fair bit.  The only song I missed was (?), which was a favourite of mine for opening up the hard rock square dancing genre (take your partner by the hand, take your partner by the hand, take your partner by the hand, take your partner by the hand).  Their new drummer has huge arms, a larger drumkit than the usual, and a fairly flashy playing style.  The singer gave flowers and snuggles to her devotedest fans - she's like a groupie groupie.  How cool is that?

I played scrabble yesterday.  It's been a really, REALLY long time.  I'm kinda surprised at how "rigged" it is.  I'd always assumed it was about general vocabulary and good placement, but it's skewed really heavily towards specific and otherwise useless vocabulary: all the 2-letter words, and the Q-without-U words.  It seems that about 30% of good plays involve 2 letter words.

Knowing about them vastly increases the number of possible placements, e.g.

If the start word is RADII, the average player tries to drop a word through it, for example:

A
R	A	D	I	I
S
E

...which means the word they create must use an existing letter.

But a fully sick playa knows that "QI" is an allowable 2-letter word, so:

				Q	A	N	A	T
R	A	D	I	I

...they place a word that has NO letters in common with existing words. 

Also, the rules about abbreviations are fucked.  BIS is the abbreviated plural of bisexual.  It's allowed.  Trannies is the the abbreviated plural of transsexual.  It's not allowed.  Fuck you, scrabble.

That destroys the simple (and flawed) faith I had in the virtue of the game.

One day I'll blog about wine and picnics.  I do tend to bang away about hobbies and arcane interests...

The arcade gaming cabinet is getting closer to completion. 

I'm going to be such a proud daddy when I get it done.  It has a glass top and artwork, which looks pretty slick, and all parts have been obtained.  I'd hoped to finish it up by now, but there is still a fair bit of structure and cosmetic stuff to go - like mounting the joystick, and making a seat to go with it.  I'm considering building a specialised nerd throne, a seat / joystick combo, in the style of those lecture chairs (the ones with a drop-down writing table part).

Bike stuff has been fun.

I've stripped and am re-building a mountain bike (an 80's steel-framed Malvern Star from an op shop) to make a single-speed bike.  The idea is to use the single-speed for commuting in the city, and turn my old one into a light touring bike. 

This will mean I can set the old bike up with nice stuff without worrying about it being nicked or vandalised (again) in the city.

The cool thing about the rebuild is that it went OK on the first go.  I like simple stuff that works.

Total costing:

bike - $40
new tool - $21 (a chain splitter)
needs new tubes - about $15

= about $75.  Miscellaneous costs (if I pretty it up) should still see me get change from $100.

I've done a 90km ride on the old bike.  It was OK.  From a fitness point of view, I think I'm fine to do runs out into the country.  Comfort is the priority now.  A better seat is next on the shopping list, so I can do the return trip without walking like a cowboy afterwards. 

I'll spend a lot more on a good leather saddle for my old bike than the total cost of the "new" bike :-)

I took a longer (55-60km) ride today.

Getting lost has it's benefits.  I stumbled across a native pasture reserve, and it was cool.  I'm a bit of an eco geek.  Native pasture seems to be a combination of prarie-style grasses (buffalo chow) and ye olde volcanic rubble dotted with hunched-over gnarly little shrubbettes.

How did I get lost?  Well, I'm finding that bike paths are much harder to use than the maps would make it seem - on paper, the brave little dotted line extends happily for ever. In reality, there are lots of places where the path just...vanishes.

For example, trying to travel down the Merri Creek path towards the city, there are a few places where the path debouches onto an asphalt road, with no signage.  You have to cast around at random to find where the bike path picks up again. There is also a big chunk that is closed because it's being used for construction access, and no alternate route is given.  You either sneak through illegally, or you have to get lost in a mass of really congested intersections, which doesn't jibe well with the pictures of smiling cycling families that you see on the government pamphlets.

Going away from the city, map also != reality. In theory, I should be able to take the Merri Creek path north all the way to the Ring Road path, meaning I could go string 3 routes together to go all the way to Cragieburn (if I choose) on bike paths. However, the thing that shows clearly on the map as the Merri Creek path actually ends up petering out into unposted gravel tracks. I've tried 3 times to take this path northward, consulting my street directory and Google Earth between attempts, and haven't yet managed to find the "right" way.

Something quite neat I discovered: apparently there is some legislation that requires all urban (uncyclable) freeways to have a bike path in parallel. This seems like a great idea, and the resulting paths are very nice-looking. Some oddities within this:

a) the "Galada Tamboore" path (The Craigieburn one) kicks ass.  You can go really fast, and when you slow down, you notice how pretty it is- there are kangaroos and native pasture in decent shape to look at.  Initially, this path was being built as an unusable, bone-jarring monster until they were given a slap upside the head

http://www.bv.com.au/change-the-world/11374/

b) that really cool-looking bridge over the Hume (and this picture does not do it justice, the actual structure is so fucking cool looking it hurts):

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/viewPhoto?uname=lachlan.hurst&aid=5231436739393387633&iid=5231436912035807986

...goes nowhere. Seriously. The east side has the aforementioned path to Craigieburn, but if you cross to the west, after about 15m, the concrete ends and you end up on a muddy gravel farm road which goes for about 500m through some thistle-choked, unused pasture until it dead-ends against the creek.

I wonder how many million this road to nowhere cost?

On my way home, as night was falling, I saw some fucker drive his 4WD down and start chainsawing trees on the side of Merri Creek.  Even without the signs everywhere saying "protected native vegetation", I'd be pretty sure that was illegal (and just a basically shitty thing to do), so I called the cops on him, and gave his location + number plate.  The best bits: 

The lady on the phone using that "Queenie X-ray Foxtrot" speak that you only normally hear on TV.

...and:

Q: Did you get a close look at him?
A: No, I didn't want to.  He had a chainsaw.

Since I heard of the concept, I've wanted to make a MAME cabinet.  One day at the Comfortable Chair, an excellent friend was playing Galaga, and exclaiming about how much she liked old video games.  I offered to build one for her, and it's coming along nicely.  How perfect, huh?

The main part of the structure is done and painted, but there is plenty to go.  It's a cocktail-style cab.  To get some idea of how it should look, put [ MAME cocktail cabinet ] into a Google image search.

It will be black and white, with a space motiff (images of Luna, Phobos etc) - glossy, high-quality images for the top (showing through the glass, on either side of the screen), big Rasterbated paste-up images for the sides.  I need to experiment with paper, printing and pasting, so I can put together a big, high-contrast, wrinkle-free image.

For extra joy, it's mostly coming together from second hand and salvage stuff.  I have a lot of materials that I want to use up.

Monitor - free. 40cm flat screen Sony Trinitron, rescued from an office refit (I saw the guy loading perfect monitors onto his ute in the rain).

PC - 3G Pentium4 from the Brotherhood op shop (with software, mouse, keyboard), $210

Timber - free. 13mm chipboard and good pine: rescued from skips. 16mm ply: recycled from old loudspeaker projects.

Speakers -  I have a bunch just lying around  :-)  I turned a 12" car subwoofer into a computer-friendly woofer by prising the magnet off a second sub, flipping it over and gluing it onto the intact driver.  Now it can be mounted quite close to a monitor without making the colours bleed.

The new components: paint, glass (unless I can magically score a big piece somewhere), joystick (which I should order soon).

Total cost should be about $500, which seems pretty decent for a solid games PC / item of furniture.

I'm being a bit intrepid with my cycling.  My goal is to do about 100km in a single flat ride without it being a big deal.  A top athlete would do this in 2 hours.  I'm shooting for 4 or less.

I got a $35 speedo, to give me some idea of how long a 100 kilometre ride would take me, and whether I would benefit from splashing out on a L33T cycle. I've started ramping up my riding (from basic commuting to actually covering distance for its own sake).  I did a spot over 100km this weekend without it costing me anything in terms of chafing or weariness.  This seems pretty neat for a relatively novice rider on a cheap bike.

A surprising thing is how narrow the cycling speed range is:

15-17Kph - lowest gear, only pedalling part of the time.  Any person capable of sitting upright could keep this up for hours (this is about twice brisk walking speed).

25Kph - easy for me to maintain on straight, flat road (this was the average speed of the first Tour de France winner, in 1903).

40kph - hard work, not maintainable (elite athletes can maintain higher speeds, and can exceed 60 kph in their final sprints to the finish line).

Getting a fancy bike?  I'm still not sure.  I think I should see whether my current enthusiasm lasts, first.  Also, half of me says that I should go for a good bike, and try to blaze through 100km like it's nothing.  The other half says: spend heaps less on simple things (better headphones and a good leather saddle for my current bike), and just chill - who cares if the trip takes an extra hour?

I met a cyclist dude today who is 50.  He did 140km on a fairly standard touring bike yesterday.  Before lunch.  He just takes it easy, stays at about 25kph "enjoying the view", and gets there when he gets there.

In Melbourne, Victoria, residents are facing water restrictions.  The suggested target is for each person to use 155 litres of water per day.

Due to our water shortage, we may have to get a desalination plant (at a cash cost of more than 3 billion dollars).

In The Age newspaper a few months ago, there was an article about water allocations from the Murray-Darling river.  One farmer was arguing that farmers should be allowed large allocations, because each kilo of locally produced beef required 14,000 litres of water.

The CSIRO estimate is higher, at 50,000 to 100,000 litres per kilo.

http://www.clw.csiro.au/issues/water/water_for_food.html

Let's split the difference, and call it 30,000 litres for each kg.  Two kilos of beef then requires more water than one Melbourne resident is supposed to use for an entire year.

That is a crazy statistic.  If our water is so "precious", why are we wasting so much of it on cows?  In Australia, why is beef so cheap, and water so expensive?

So, using the power of these big numbers, I wonder... why don't we:

==> Use 2kg less beef per person per year
==> Spend that same 3 billion dollars to buy up a few marginally profitable cattle farms
==> Return 90% of this land to native forest / grassland
==> Use the massive water allocations of these former farms for urban supply

Trip to the country = cool.  Planted trees (banksias, acacias one eucalypt).  The previous planting hadn't died, which is a plus.

Since the V-line service got cancelled late in 2008, I only get out there when a friend feels like going on a road trip.  The train now only runs to Seymour, meaning it would be a 93km cycle journey to get there (it used to be just 13km on my bike, from Benalla).

I'd really like to be able to get out there.

I don't want to buy a car / van vehicle that I only use once a fortnight to water saplings. 

Ass.

Last weekend, I went to a wedding, which involved looking great in my old suit (date and maker unknown - it's wool, pinstriped and has a tag that says something in German), good music, a spine-damaging trip in the groom's hot rod (which I'd provided occasional assistance in building), and so on.

I'm a bit intrigued by this customising-of-vehicles business, but could never bring myself to own something which burns so much petrol.  I'd rather restore an old motorbike.  I like the look of small, vintage road bikes - Jawas are cute, or a Husqvarna - it would match the sewing machine :-)

Or I'd like one of these.  It'd be like driving a torpedo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Monaco-Trossi1935.jpg

It's been gloomy weather.  Melbourne is having actual winter weather this year.  Many days have been rainy, and pretty dark pretty early - perfect for staying indoors and having soup.

I've mounted a panel from an old Einstürzende Neubauten T-shirt, and put it on the wall.  I've recycled a couple of Bjork images this way, but I'm not sure about the EN one.  I think there's a reason why most art in people's houses is high-key, and the EN one is almost 100% black.

I read about Hirohito, colonialism and the Japanese Empire.  I'm amazed at the effectiveness and durability of propaganda - that the Japanese were given such a villainous reputation as a result of WW2, when their culture / empire:

a) was reclusive, and only brought into contact with the world by force
b) didn't do anything that the victorious countries hadn't

After the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the USA had rapidly and brutally expanded it's empire - gobbling up the land, some purchased (Florida), some by warfare (California).  They made widespread use of slave labour, exterminated "inferior" races and used brinkmanship / gunboat diplomacy to get what they wanted.

The US sent warships to Japan in 1853 to give a demonstration of their power (including using their cannons in Edo's harbour).  In '54 the Japanese were forced to end their isolation and accept uneven trade agreements. 

The Japanese quickly caught up with Western tech, then rapidly and brutally expanded it's empire - gobbling up the land in SE Asia, some annexed (Korea), and some by force, including a war with Russia to take a large amount of territory.  They also used slave labour and other racist practices.

Who were the villains here?  I say both nations acted quite similarly. 

Japan at the beginning of their expansion was a peaceful, culturally advanced, relatively even, well-policed society with a 70-80% literacy rate, seizing territory from corrupt empires with vast numbers of badly-treated illiterate peasants (Russia and China).  The USA, when it became independent and began it's expansion was a much rougher country which had a vast gulf between it's wealthy and many slaves and indentured labourers (4 million slaves by 1860).

But the country which had the industrial advantage and built nukes first, used them, then went on writing the history books.

The Terminator:

Technology nearly ENDS future society.  That's an impact, ain't it?

However, what happens in the new milieu?  Nothing really new.  In the future setting, it's cheap-looking guerrilla warfare.  And it's really very lazily thought-out guerilla warfare (eg why do the future humans use bullet-firing anti-personnel weapons, when their only enemies are robots?  Why do the robots use beam weapons when their only enemies are fleshy, and old-style bullets would work perfectly?)

In the "present-day" setting, it's just super-hero cage fighting again.

Alien & Alien 2 (life is too short to watch the further sequels)

A narrow pass.  Most of what happens to the society of these movies is just an analogue of what's already happened (Europe colonising the new world ==> Earth colonising other planets.  The Royal Navy ==> Space Marines.  Pissed-upon human minority groups ==> pissed-upon inhuman minority groups).

Cold sleep is the one factor where the posited science does something new to society.  It allows the possibility of being alive after your grandchildren have rotted to nothing.  Which is pretty rad.  I mean, what have my theoretical grandchildren ever done for me?  Nuttin'.

Blade Runner

A pass.  Who were the replicants, again?  Escaped soldiers.  Having humanoid droids to do the fighting for you = no more draft.  Ever.  For rich and technologically advanced countries, anyway.  That's a bit of a change.

Also the anxiety about, and blurring of the definition of humanity is a social impact that really needs the stimulus of scientific advance to go in that particular direction.  It takes that Sunday School question "Miss Strictbottom, do kittens go to heaven?" a few steps further along.

A big sucky fail for Blade Runner is the cities.  They have flying cars.  Cars that FUCKING FLY.  Yet they live in huge, disgusting, dark, dirty mega-ghettoes.  What's with that?  If I had a car that could FLY, I'd live 10 or 15 minutes away from town...  150 kilometres or so out into the pleasant-smelling non-disgusting country.  And guess what?  So would everyone else.

The Matrix

Kinda.  OK, yes society is drastically different.  But this is a SF movie that only makes sense to people who never attended a single science class in high school.

1) They were using humans as the only source of energy.  This was explained against a backdrop of roiling cloud and lightning strikes.  So... lightning and wind are not forms of energy?  Fuck you, Wachowski brothers, for insulting my intelligence like this.

2 ) Humans are not net producers of energy.  Nothing is.  OK, except suns, and unstable (radioactive) materials, but that's because they annihilate matter and convert it to energy.  Human bodies can't do this.  Not even if they jump on and off fast-moving buses a lot.

3) Even putting point 2) aside, you don't need to keep human minds alive to produce body warmth.  A human with no frontal lobe is just as warm as a human with a functional brain.  Sunny von Bülow lived almost 28 years in a persistent vegetative state with current tech... agent Smith could surely beat that record.

4) Why not just use dogs or sheep or something?

Fucking lame-assed premise.

Essentially, my point is that about two thirds of films termed "SF" tend to be normal action films with a future or space setting.  They are too focused on action sequences, or plain lazy to get into the impacts of technology on society.  The ones that have a go usually fail halfway.

A total aside.  It's a bit annoying that LJ only uses US spelling.  Whatevs, life goes on.  However, the thing that seems funny is that they came up with an alternate spelling "kilometer".

  The USA is one of the 3 countries - along with the highly-developed powerhouses Liberia and Myanmar (Burma) - to not use kilometres as a standard measure of distance.

I've watched two movies this week, which is two more than usual.

I'm too lazy to more than mention Saved.   It was fine, except Patrick's character didn't make sense to me.  He seemed way too mature for his age, too open-minded for his background, and way too single-minded for his maturity.

Platoon was pretty good.  The setting is really well evoked.  The violence makes you wince at times.  You really, really want particular characters to die.  A lot.  And it does make Full Metal Jacket look like it was filmed in a parking lot in London (cos it ...was). 

If I could go back in time, and give Ollie some constructive advice, it would be:

1) Remove some of the narration.  Has narration ever improved a film?  It'd be a rare thing.

2) Make the behaviour of the old-time combat gods a bit more cautious / realistic.  They did a bit too much Rambo-style rushing about, without worrying about cover.

Now for my  generalised rant about Science Fiction.  I like this neat little definition of SF:

"fantasy involving the imagined impact of science on society"

...and it's interesting to note what is commonly seen as science fiction, but which fails this definition.

Star Wars: 

Why is this considered SF? 

Because it's set in space, and the bullets, "photon torpedoes" (whatever the fuck THAT means) and so on glow a lot more then mundane bullets.

Why do I say it's NOT SF? 

The technology of the Star Wars universe has not impacted the societies of the Star Wars universe.  

Living on Tatooine is just like living in a cowboy movie.  Somehow, having robot slaves to do all the heavy lifting doesn't improve the quality of life.

The space conflicts are just like WW2 carrier battles, with more glowing stuff.  In fact, some of the technology and techniques from WW2 seem to be absent (eg guided missiles, encryption).

Star Trek (original, I haven't seen any of the spinoffs): 

Why is this considered SF? 

Because it's set in space, and the bullets, shields and stuff glow a lot more then mundane bullets.

Why do I say it's NOT SF? 

The technology of the Star Trek universe is not shown as impacting the society of the Star Trek universe.

The technology only benefits Kirk and company, it has no effect on the society that created it.  Essentially, Star Trek is a superhero adventure.  Instead of intrinsically being able to fly, speak a million languages and so on, the officers of the Enterprise have gadgets and a support crew that allow them to do so.

To be continued...

I'm gonna sound like a love letter to caffeine, but fuck me - I needed it today.

I taught one lesson where I flapped around like a wet sock.  Then I had coffee, and became a god walking among mere mortals.

Another observation - coffee gives me beer goggles.  Pre coffee, I'm all like, whatever.  Post coffee, I'm a chameleon (chameleon!?  you might exclaim to yourself.  Well, untutored one, allow me to inform you that a chameleon's eyes rotate independently, making them the animal kingdom's most capable perverts).  As a bonus -  where I worship at the altar of superficiality - I adore the place near my work where they serve espresso in a little methadone cup.  It looks so... purposeful.

Speaking of eyes, it's been superbly gratifying when people have exclaimed about my glasses-less-ness.  Also, I have a cm of hair for the first time in ages, so I'm bordering on unrecognisable.  I think a lot of people assumed my X-treme grooming was a method of coping with male-pattern baldness, and are surprised at how ardently my locks are springing forth from mine skull, yes yes.

Weird caffeine deity.  I should worship it.  It breaks all the spelling rules.

Ms Whybrow is a person I met in Canberra.  I can credit her with two excellent things...

1) An abode.  When I moved to Melbourne, I moved straight into the flat she had just vacated.  No tiresome inspections and applications, just straight into Chinatown.  As a wee bonus, she directed me to the Croft Institute, which was a few months old back then, and was just outside the back entrance of the apartment.  The Croft looked better (more medical / Victorian grotesque) back in those early days, and they used to serve something called a Corpse Rooter (they took it off the menu, blanded out the decor... I stopped going).

2) The martini trick.

First, an aside - what is a martini?  It's a strong alcoholic drink with

• a gin base
• additional flavour provided by alcohols that have been aromatized with herbs and spices

Anyhoo, the trick is to neck the gin bottle (that is, drink roughly two shots of gin).  Then you top it up with white vermouth (traditional), bitters (the mixed drink is also known as "pink gin", for obvious reasons), Chartreuse (the "emerald martini", natch) or similar.  Into the freezer it goes.  When it's really cold, pour and enjoy.

No pissing about with ice and shakers.  No dilly-dallying with mix ratios.  No watering down of the drink with icemelt.  Normal, mixed Martinis seem a bit strange, now that I've become accustomed to full-strength freezertinis.

Tanqueray was on special.  I just mixed up 2 litres worth of emerald martinis.

The wiki article foolishly disses my martini trick:

There are swarms of ants in my basil pot plant.  I guess they love the exoticism of indoor dirt - it's not like the scabby old dirt outside.  I have some ant rid left over from poisoning the neighbour's children, but I'm not that keen to use it... I'm too curious about what the ants are up to.

Thursday, I will finish my surgical action, and attain the binocular vision that my race are famous for.  I'm a bit over missing keyholes, and running over assorted nuns, pets, and tiny babies.

I accompanied neonfaerie to a wedding on the weekend.  As well as the usual assortment of genial old people, there were many guys present who were so nerdy I felt like a knuckle-dragging footy jock in comparison.  Their regular wine-and-dinner-table conversation featured zombies, look-up tables and so on.  Luckily, no-one was wearing a cape.

Oddity: the father of the groom had a pretty decent wine cellar, and I totally grooved on the table red at dinner.  His son doesn't have a taste for alcohol at all... maybe bored by too much wine talk: surely you detect a hint of violets?  No?  Perhaps bruised myrtle leaves?  No?  Possibly the essence of the rare and famous honey-basted melody cat?

Stick this into Google [  youtube "billy idol" literal  ]

The result will get TOTALLY stuck in your head.  In a good way.

One down, one to go!

Again, no muss, no fuss.  Pre-op, they put me under, and injected locals to numb me from brow to teeth.  During the procedure, I was conscious, but so chilled out, I made the Fonz look like a hyperactive 16-year-old on his first night in jail.  I could only see out of the eye being operated upon, which was full of drugs, sharp steel, probes and a really expensive, crumpled-up piece of plastic: imagine munching the contents of Winona's handbag, then watching an avant-garde movie on the ceiling.

Amusing stuff part one - the woman who, when the nurse gave her post-op instructions, yelped pathetically about not being able to wear make-up for a month.  I could go on all day about how fucked that is, but essentially, it's two points.

Women:  men care less than you think about how or whether you bury your real face in make-believe colours. 

Everybody: read the fucking instructions BEFORE you have surgery.

Amusing stuff part two - apparently, it's worth reiterating that I should be really careful about making sure I don't get soap or shampoo in my eyes during my next shower or three. 

Doctor, maybe you overlooked that my hair is about 5mm long.  It doesn't need a lot of 'poo.

Also, since I'm following the other post-op instructions (no mosh pits, bestiality, heavy lifting), my skin shouldn't be getting particularly dirty / oily anyway, so I'm being a genius, and not using soap when I shower.

+++

Mini-review: Kaleidoscope Cafe, 161 Sydney Road

Good value - for $13 I got a chai, a frittata and a mountain of salad that would have got Monet all hot and bothered.  The chai was a bit spineless, but the rest was good.

The staff were dark and pretty - eye candy for all major genders.

It's oddly (pleasantly) quiet there, considering that it's a good, well-placed venue.

At school, I'm working night shifts 3 days a week, and afternoons for two.  It's a pretty big workload and income jump.  I'm so far using the big span of pre-work morning and early afternoon time quite wisely - sleeping in, doing carpentry and shopping (for manly stuff, natch).

+++

I now have extra drainage holes burned into my eyeballs.  For the procedure, they:
 

• shrink your pupils (to expand / stretch the iris)
• numb your eyeball (they used to use a cocaine solution for this in the bad old days)
• hold your eyeball still with a (no doubt) expensive medical-grade thimble thingy
• zappety-zap!

When the laser is doing the do*, there is a stabby feel in your eye, and a snapping (rubber band) sensation.  Luckily I'm not squeamish, and I don't mind my eyeballs being poked - I was unflustered by this.

The post-op discomfort / effects: nil.

Soon, I'll be getting lenses implanted, and I can donate my old glasses to someone or other. 

Hot trivia:

in 1970, a doctor decided to switch to plastics (not glass) for implants, because he had noticed WW2 pilots getting about with fragments of windscreens STILL embedded in their eyes, with no signs of their bodies rejecting them. 

I once met a guy who was blinded in a car crash.  Fragments of glass were still circulating in his body.  Occasionally they would lodge in a random piece of soft tissue (eg. his toes), then work their way out.

I once ate glass (I thought the crunching was from bits of shell in my scrambled eggs).  Unfortunately, I have never seen any of it abrupting from my toes.

+++

Yesterday I looked at a van.  It seemed OK.  The seller has knocked the price down a fair bit since she initially advertised it.  I guess with a zillion people losing their jobs at the moment, no-one is buying vehicles... probably a lot of 2-car families are downgrading to one.

I'm looking forward to season change.  I want a cargo vehicle for tree planting when (if) we get Autumn rains.  I'll be shouting out for intrepid tree-planting comrades when the time comes.

+++

Post surgery, I want to have a 33.33rd birthday.... so please wait till AFTER April before moving to Haiti / diving into shallow water / eating a pie in Scotland.

* hands up if you get this reference.

I usually play old PC games.  It's cheaper that way - I don't have to own a cutting edge computer, and games are usually a lot more affordable when they are a couple of years old.  Also, one or two years in, I sometimes have an idea about which games are dreck, and which are gold.

At the moment, I'm more up to date than usual... I bought a newish NVidia somethingorother video card, (which works fine, except it's really really noisy), and a newish game to see how impressive graphics are these days.

The game is The Royal Marines Commando.  What appalling crap it is.  Imagine your most embarrassing, deranged aunt spraying a steaming wash of filth from an anal fissure.  Now imagine Atari seizing this ass-gush gladly, and burning it to disc.  Seriously, I've never wasted money on software this heinous before.

It's buggy:

--> It locked up once, and the sound clicks and pops unnervingly

The AI is hosebagged:

--> you can't move your computer-controlled teammates out of the way.  Occasionally, a teammate will stand in the doorway of a dead end room.  Meaning you are stuck there forever.

--> Your teammates will yell "all clear" while a still-living German soldier is shooting you in the head.

--> your teammates will run directly in front of your blazing gun muzzle, while you are firing.  Luckily, they don't get hurt by friendly bullets (or ever).

It's got subtitles that don't match the spoken words, and which are fiercely ungrammatical.

The game environment is clunky and weirdly limited.  I'm reminded of Half-Life 2, here: 

--> You can't jump or climb over knee-high obstacles. 

--> You can't climb rubble or stone, even when the gradient is very gentle. 

--> You can't pick objects up... and most objects (including frail and weathered old timber doors) are totally explosion and bullet-proof.

--> Fences (that a 6-year old would climb easily) stop you cold.

--> The Germans NEVER run out of ammo.  But after you kill them, their guns ALWAYS contain just 3 bullets.

....In fact, you can't do anything except walk in a straight line.... unless it's a scripted event, in which case you become a fully sick he-man ninja acrobat.  With guns.

It's only THREE HOURS LONG.  What the fuck?

So, does anyone wanna buy a steaming hit of aunty fissure-juice?  Ten bucks.  You could use it as an example of how NOT to make a game.

Note 1 the patch is a 55meg download.  Uh-huuuuu.... 55meg, to patch a 3-hour long, not-very-good game.  I really am perplexed.  It used to be that actually playable games (the whole thing, not just the patch) were smaller than that.

Note 2 the term "commando" is quite old, but for WW2 it's actually pretty tight in it's meaning.  It refers to British soldiers who performed rapid operations in Axis-occupied territories (that is, Europe after 1941).  The term does NOT mean "lame attempts at all-round bad-assery, including films starring Austrian-born actors, and shithouse video games".

Note 3: Presumably in an attempt to fool people into buying the wrong game, Commando copies it's cover art directly off the Call of Duty games.  Nasty.

Note 4 Atari: please drown the people responsible.

Thank you.

I've been busy-ish, with a little more work than usual and 3 rock shows in a week. 

Lucy's Crown were good as always.  They do a very consistent set, with most (all) of the same songs cropping up.  If I were in a band, I'd probably ruin things by wanting to do different songs, cover Misfits and Mazzy Star in the same show, and so on.  The EP-launch part of the night didn't seem to happen... maybe next time?

Michael Gira was OK.  The man himself played and sang well, but It was swoony-hot in the venue, so I hazed out for most of it.  Also, the audio quality at the Toff in Town is not stellar - the system sounded very steely and overloaded when Mr G raised his voice.  The sound guy didn't notice - he looked like an extremely heroin-dosed Ronnie James Dio, who never sat upright at any point, and was barely able to keep his eyes open.  A lot of music industry guys get huge notches in their hearing, and total loss of high frequency hearing... so overdriven, metallicly-ringing treble probably sounds just right to them.

Throwing Muses were OK, but less good than their support act, Baseball.  They were rather fine indeed, and local, so I'll be seeing them again.  Great drumming, an interesting Einar / Bjork style vocal clash, interesting songs bla bla bla.  I talked to one of the singers (Cameron), who told me intriguing stuff about the band - the whammy bar in his larynx is definately there due to Jello Biafra's good work.

Right now-ish I'm doing craft, practicing the ancient art of speaker repair.

Next weekend: Rainbow Serpent.  Doof doof doof.  Yay!