‮hjap‮

Gale force winds forecast today, up to 60 knots.

What a fucking day to be wearing a skirt.

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This evening was the first time—and the last, I hope—that I'll ever have to say Hello, you must be my daughter.

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TRAPPED IN PEEBLES STOP SEND HELP STOP

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I was in Macbeth with Ailidh Mackay
who was in Atonement with Keira Knightley (mmm)
who was in Love Actually with Colin Firth
who was in Where the Truth Lies with Kevin Bacon.

Anyone out there got an Erdos number, and if so, can we co-author something?

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I know you're going to dig this.

Happy time_t = 1234567890, everybody!

Where's my flying car?

The Large Hadron Collider will generate a tiny black hole tomorrow, and the entire Earth will be consumed and spat out into an alternate universe. The entire process will take less than Planck time and will be undetectable even by specialized instruments.

The new universe in which we find ourselves will be subtly different from the old one. I predict that it will be one in which everyone claims that their fear of the LHC was, in fact, merely ironic, and the media quickly forgets about it and moves on to the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012.

Tomorrow, if anyone's science officer suddenly gets a beard and starts killing people, please let me know.

Note to self. When at work, on the phone and preoccupied, and inexplicably handed a large claw hammer: do not toss it up in the air and catch it.

Ouch.

More impressive even than the Firefox crop circle, reports are flooding in of the discovery of the snappily-monickered G1.9+0.3: an eighty trillion-mile-wide Firefox logo at the centre of the Galaxy.

God Himself uses Firefox. You can, too.

(Phil Plait, as always, has the scoop on the techie stuff.)

Someone on a `reality' TV show: I think Edinburgh isn't what it used to be.
The University of Edinburgh: Waaaah!
The Scotsman: Waaaah!
The blogosphere: Waaaah!

Nobody seems to have mentioned the fact that, possibly, it wasn't the responsibility of the Classics Department to teach this guy comparative religion. Particularly of his own religion. That stuff is really supposed to be covered in pre-tertiary education.

And of course, this same maligned institution is the one that deliberately, and with malicious intent, sent me crazy and ruined my life. About this, as I recall, there was not a whisper in the press.

~

Potatoes fight back! Alex, is this your doing? We will fight for tuberous freedom?

( It's another late-night IM conversation, click at your peril )

I would have got it eventually, by the way. And it has been six years since I've seen it.

A somewhat stressful day off work—would that it ever be otherwise—but there's an impossibly clear sky and, I noticed while performing my carer/PA duties for Jehane, the stars are spectacular tonight. If we'd had weather like this last week, the eclipse would have been incredible.

(I was watching The Sky At Night last night—BBC iPlayer, despite only half-working on Linux, along with a few other things, has forced me to reappraise my opinion of the lamentable state of current television—and, despite already having been spoilered for the outcome of their special Lunar Eclipse Edition, it was marvellous. Sir Patrick Moore, despite being 180 years old and sort of like a lovable cuddly version of Davros, said at the end that he'll see us all for the next eclipse in 2017, and I have no doubt that he will. He's a British institution now, like the Nelson monument or King Arthur, and thus immortal. Also, he plays the xylophone.)

Later, walking home across the Meadows with mp3 player on, I remembered this and looked up just as I moved out of the sphere of influence of a street lamp, and six thousand globes of light came out to play in all their pellucid glory, on cue, as the Allegro from Mozart's 40th came to its first breathtaking crescendo.

I nearly fell over.

Later, up on Bruntsfield Links, all the bloody street lights were out again, which gave me an uninterrupted view of the stars all the way along the path to Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

It's the little things that make it all worthwhile. I love winter.

This is fantastic.

In a new book to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the marmalade-loving bear's debut, entitled Paddington Here and Now, the eponymous hero is going to be arrested and interrogated over his immigration status.

(While they're at it, they should take a good close look at that Mr Gruber as well. I always thought he was a Nazi war criminal in hiding. Where was he getting all those valuable artworks?)

In related news:

Postman Pat has been convicted of animal cruelty for taking his black-and-white cat, Jess, along on his rounds. It never used to be a problem, said post-office worker Mrs Coggins, a long-time colleague of Mr Pat's, but recently he's been delivering to the new Greendale housing scheme, and the kids there keep throwing bricks at his bright red van.

Romeo and Juliet have staged Reggie Perrin-style disappearances, claimed off each other's life insurance policies, and were last seen living in Panama Mantua.

Caliban has failed his citizenship test and thus has been refused permission to work as Prospero's manservant. Would't have been done! said the mooncalf in a statement. Thou didst prevent me; I had peopl'd else \ This sweatshop with Calibans.

Beowulf has been accused of incitement to racial hatred following his scorched-earth policy against the descendants of Cain. First Grendel and now his mother, said a spokesperson for Amnesty. It's clear the man has some sort of sick personal vendetta. Initially, the warrior-hero claimed that, as a Geatish resident, British laws had no jurisdiction over him; but since no Consulate of Geatland could be found anywhere in the Greater London area, his claims were dismissed.

This is fun. What other classics can we ruin, er, update for the new-Labour generation?

(And yes, The Comic Strip got there before me, I know.)

Wiith my sseconnd coffffee of the morrniing[0][1], Ii gott onne of thoose choccolate stiirrinng sticcks forr Jjehane. Thhey are 70% and Belggian and Ii was allllowedd tto tryy some ffirstt.

Tthe enttire thinng mmelted offff iinto myy Ggingerrbreaad Latttte wwith prredicctable rresults[2].

Ii ccan seee tiiime!

Duuuude.

--
[0] Morning. Good... morrniiiing. Morrrniiiiing. Good heavens, it's evening! Eeeeveniiiiing... etc.

[1] And yes, it was actually the actual morning for once, which probably didn't help.

[2] Aaaaaaace!

Wearing a cloak, as I do, has a tendency to get things shouted at me in the street. Mostly these take the form as a false identification of me as a fictional character of some description.

The most common comedy misidentification is Zorro. Perhaps interestingly, probably not, it's always the people who shout Zorro who think they're the funniest. Another one I get a lot is The Undertaker: I gather he's a wrestler of some kind.

Over the last couple of years, according to random idiot passersby, I've been Neo, Morpheus, The Crow, Frodo, Darth Vader, Dracula, and on one notable occasion I had a group of scaffolders spontaneously break into an acapella rendition of A Fistful of Dollars as I walked by.

Oh, and Batman. Don't forget Batman.

Today, a guy coming out of a chip shop took one look at me and reflexively declared: Doctor Who!

I can stop wearing the cloak now. Its job is done.

(On the other hand it's forecast to be -2° again tomorrow. The cloak stays.)

(And a big flappy cloak is presumably more Valeyard material, surely?)

I get home from work at about 11.30pm, or 23:30:00 in your newfangled Internet words.

( Yes, folks, it's another late-night IM conversation )

ETA: Firefox now autocompletes the Tags field on the LJ update page with random, personal life, self-indulgent drunken wankery. Thanks a lot, Firefox.

--
[0] Ping is an irregular verb as any fule kno, and pung is the widely-accepted past tense construction thereof. I cite common usage.

At lunch, I could swear that my mocha latte was getting distinctly hotter the longer I left it. Each sip was decidedly ahh-ooh-ow-not-ready-yet, and each was definitely more so than the last. Newton's Law of Cooling would seem to preclude this.

I'm too English to say anything about this. And besides, what would one say?

Waitress, I don't mean to bother you, but my coffee appears to be defying the laws of physics.

Sorry, miss—I meant to ask for some Second Law of Thermodynamics with that.

Excuse me: there seems to be a Maxwell's Demon in my coffee. Could I get another cup?

The coffee machine from whence it came was indeed big and impressive, so might well have contained some sort of particle accelerator—so it's conceivable that my coffee was being poured from another dimension. Or maybe there were packets of entropy provided on the counter next to the sugar. Perhaps the Government was operating a Silent Guardian nearby, subduing a pocket of insurgent Hare Krishnas on Queensferry Street. Or possibly the orbital mind-warp lasers were slightly off target today due to a latent Y2K bug.

Or it was those bastards at King's Buildings again, warping the fabric of spacetime with their ungodly experiments. Anyone who's ever tried to walk along one of the non-Euclidean corridors in the James Clerk Maxwell Building will know what I'm on about.

Fortunately, the statistical anomaly seemed to subside after fifteen minutes or so, thus saving me from the ignominy of having to shout Everybody down! and dive under the table as my coffee spontaneously erupted. That would be one of those situations in which it's pretty clear that no tip was required.

(05:55:21) pajh: I love cyberpunk. I wish there had been more of it.
(05:57:53) pajh: As a result, you may find that I use the phrase ``hack the planet'' more often than a regular human being might, and the word ``duuuude!'' /much/ more often.
(05:58:13) pajh: I hope this won't impact upon our friendship.

I think I've figured out what to do about ID cards.

Let's all get ID cards, but insist on referring to them as multipass, repeatedly and ad nauseam. See how soon we can get people to stop asking for them any more.

Carrot-coloured wigs and costumes made from a couple of crepe bandages optional, but recommended. Especially for cute girls.

Yesterday I managed to put my finger on the reason behind my psychological compunction to fix everything. Naturally, it's Doctor Who.

There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep and the rivers dream, people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on Ace, we've got work to do.

Perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps not, I am absolutely fine with this, because my father-figure can talk a Dalek to death.

~

On the subject of Doctor Who: linkspam!

Quite interesting argument about the deficiencies in the new series. Contains spoilers for, well, pretty much everything really, but specifically for Last of the Time Lords, so Jehane's not allowed to watch it. Also: it's ten minutes long, but worth it. (Thanks to bibliophile1887 via miss_s_b.)

Some people say that Ghost Light is difficult to understand. These people, clearly, are errant fools. For their benefit, however, the demigodlike ionlylurkhere has produced Ghost Light in the form of lolcats, which is all kinds of awesome. Contains spoilers for Ghost Light obviously, and more incredibly obscure references than you'll find in a week's worth of posts by me.