LeChuck is my shnoogums

My love is like a dark cloud full of rain that's always right there up above you

2009-01-26T21:02:19Z

I've had a rubbish couple of weeks at work which have been made bearable by being listening to Tallahassee by the Mountain Goats on constant repeat. I can thoroughly recommend it if you are angry at things and can get away with listening to music at work.

The good news is that the bad work times are over. Even better, Al got me an i-trip. I've been stuck for months listening to Radio 4 and Forth 1 on my lengthy drive to work. Radio 4 spends an upsetting amount of time talking about the England Cricket team at half seven in the morning. Forth 1 is all Kid Rock, all the time. Perhaps slightly irrationally, I've been worrying that if I crash my car and die while listening to this nonsense people will think that this is secretly the music I like. My funeral will end up like some kind of white coffin and soft focus nightmare with 'Let me be your fantasy' by Baby D being sung by a child choir. But no more.

Work is good. Music I like is good. And God bless you John Darnielle and the wonderfully bitter songs you write.

Surely not

2008-11-11T00:24:34Z

It's been a while, but there are exciting things afoot. Al has a podcast with Paul which is awesome but already seems to have a large amount of support so I don't think needs any more. Consequently I advise you not to go to http://housetoastonish.podomatic.com

I've also been writing things on the internet at http://www.gamefatale.com which have received a less rapturous reception and so must have greater artistic credibility than Al's thing.

Possibly even more importantly I've been practicing raising one eyebrow. Progress so far is non-existent, but no-one ever got to be skeptical by giving up.

Sugar pie, honey bunch

2006-12-05T20:11:35Z

Baking is an excellent thing. Al and I spent yesterday evening making fairy cakes - some with red icing and some with green (as they're festive colours) with hundreds and thousands on top - and accidentally dying bits of the kitchen. I made them for work as there's a semi-voluntary (as in not at all) cake bringing system for one of the regular meetings which had the benefit of me not inadvertantly eating twenty four fairy cakes because they were just sitting around. On the downside, they were extremely tasty cakes and people weren't quite as appreciative as I would like given that they were (a) free (b) delicious and (c) full of Christmas cheer.

Incidentally, due to my great-grandfather being made to sign the Temperance pledge (that teetotalism for anyone born after 1900) as a child, brandy butter is called Christmas Cheer in my family. Although originally it was just so he could pretend he didn't know it was alcoholic and have some sneaky once-a-year alcohol my family would still call it that thirty years after he died. In case you're wondering, my fairy cakes were full of Christmas cheer because they were red and green and not because they were full of brandy butter.

What was interesting about the bringing cakes to work experience was that when I offered two of the men who sit near me their choice of red or green both chose red without no hesitation. I realised afterwards that it was related to football team colours. I don't really understand the mentality of rabid sports fandom but I'd say that, as a rule of thumb, if it's affecting your choice of confectionary it's probably gone a bit far.

Discovery of the month - I read American Psycho recently and among all those knowingly tedious clothes descriptions (ah, thank you Brett Easton Ellis, it's meant to be tedious. That makes it so much better) and super-plus violence was a section which made me laugh a lot. The section read "When the moon hits the sky like a big pizza pie" which was not, as I had always believed the lyric to be, "When the sun hits your eye like a big piece of pie". It wasn't 'til I found out what the actual lyric was that I started thinking how unlikely my version had been.

ALSO: Pre-order for Wii is in. Christmas annual leave has been booked. All I need now is the massive Christmas Radio Times and all will be well with the world.

betaraycarrie @ 2006-03-21T21:23:00

2006-03-21T21:49:28Z

Ahem. What was I saying?

Oh, yes. I have a new job. I'm not starting for a month or two, but I'm going to be a statistician for the government. I can't even tell you what kind of statistician - not because I've signed the Official Secrets Act, which I will have to do eventually - but because they've only decided that they want to give me a job, they haven't got as far as deciding what it is I should be doing. You will have to believe me when I tell you that this is an exciting development and it will almost certainly involve numbers.

One definite is that the new job will be forty minutes bus ride from the flat, which means that I'm going to have to get some new books to read. My recent excursions into reading have included John Peel's biography (which prompted me to dig out and re-listen to some of the more obsure corners of my CD collection)and Mao: the Unknown Story (very interesting but I did realise about twenty pages in that I really needed to get better acquainted with Mao: the Known Story if I was going to be shocked by any of the revelations - still good, though). I haven't read so much in the way of fiction recently, due to my unerring instinct for picking up books that look as if they're going to be interesting character stories/mysteries/children's books and always end up being about the sexual abuse people experienced as children. I wonder how the proportion of books which cover sexual abuse compares to the incidence of sexual abuse in the real world. Hmm.

So far, my to-read list contains only the Master and Margarita, and that's only because Al bought that and I stole it off him. Any suggestions would be great.

You fake it, you make it

2005-10-24T22:07:07Z

On the bus today a group of boys, (average age: about 12), had drawn anarchy symbols on the condensation on the inside of the windows. Only they had drawn them in perfectly aligned rows. They then spent the rest of the journey sat quietly until they rang the bell to get off, almost as if they were normal conformists. A dastardly clever ironic statement, perhaps?

An alternative explanation, which makes more sense of their behaviour, (and which I much prefer) is that they were expressing their admiration for much-overlooked early 2000s girl-guitar outfit Angelica who had a similar encirled A as part of their logo. Maybe they're having a resurgence.

Charmed, I'm sure

2005-10-12T22:51:48Z

Today was a day of not much note, except for the fact that I met a man with the most insulting handshake I have ever encountered. And it's not often you can say that.

You may have to coerce someone else into helping you reenact this to get the full effect of it, but it was a handshake which involved taking someone's hand and throwing it back at them, as if you'd only touched them in the first place just so you could register how much they disgust you. I was a little offended, until I realised what a fiendishly efficient way to meet people without having to interact with them at all - it's a simultaneous greeting and dismissal. I realise now that I should have responded by a polite enquiry into his day combined with a headbutt, but I'll know for next time.

And another!

2005-10-09T19:54:41Z

This one features a monkey.

http://www.stripgenerator.com/view.php?id=48959

I made a thing

2005-10-09T12:49:32Z

http://www.stripgenerator.com/viewEng.php?id=48711

Go look!

All change here

2005-10-01T17:37:39Z

I was at the bus stop a little while ago with my friend Danny. Danny was rooting through his pockets for bus change. "No, no" I said to him "Don't bother yourself with finding money. I will pay your bus fare, because I am magnanimous and just generally great". The bus turns round the corner. I stick out my arm to hail it - the arm which, at its end, has a hand which holds both my and Danny's bus fares. I accidentally throw our bus fares under the front of the bus, just as it stops to let us on. I have no more money. Danny has to pay for both of us (for he is magnanimous and just generally great).

Since this happened, I can't help feeling that you should be able to use this situation as a metaphor for... bringing about an opportunity and in doing so, making yourself incapable of taking advantage of that opportunity. A metaphor for shooting yourself in the foot (and, yes, I'm aware that that space may already be filled) but bus-and-change related. But it just doesn't seem to shrink down to a metaphor size - I just keep telling everyone the story. Any ideas?

The Massachusetts State Home for the Bewildered

2005-09-29T18:51:20Z

Yes, I know. I'm a non-updating loser. In my defence, I have been writing dissertations and becoming gainfully employed. I am now, and for the next few months, a civil servant. The most exciting thing about it (although it is, in all honesty, a really interesting job) is that the building looks, from the outside, like a 1920s asylum, but inside is full of the future come to life. The future, I now know, doesn't require you to have to turn on a tap. There are sensors to do that for you (it does, however, still involve toilet roll in the toilets, rather than the three seashells that Demolition Man has promised us is our toilet-right, which is a little weak). One slight downside of the place is that all the departments have been moved around recently - well, either that, or it's some crazy civil service prank - so none of the signs bear any resemblance to where departments actually are. I have honed my look of being politely lost to an art form.

In the more exciting world of stuff you can buy, my severely reduced free time has been spent on West Wing, Series 4 (it's very good), Diana Wynne Jones' The Lives of Christopher Chant (thank you sylphigirl, I'm liking it very much) and Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door. Paper Mario is, in my eyes, a game of especial greatness because it's a 2D platform game that takes the piss out of 3D platform games. And well it might. 3D platform games make me feel ill.

And in case you see me on the street and don't recognise me because of my great hair, I have new great hair. It is red.

Out of my way, cakesniffers

2005-08-26T17:04:06Z

Edinburgh is full of people wandering aimlessly then stopping in the middle of busy pavements without warning, clogging up the buses and generally acting as if they're on holiday. It's malingering and I don't like it.

On a festival note, I went to see a band called VHS or Beta last night (who I keep thinking of as TV on the Radio, but they're a completely different media-themed band). If you haven't heard them (and you can say if you haven't because I hadn't heard of them until last night when a friend gave me a ticket) they sound like a very polished version of Dire Straits, with Tony Hadley singing vocals over a drum-machine disco beat. Alternatively they sound alot like a soulless version the Killers and Franz Ferdinand and sometimes a little Daft Punk, if you can imagine such a thing. I probably don't need to add that I didn't like them that much.

I had an automatic down on them because they kept playing instrumentals. I hate instrumentals. If I wanted to listen to an instumental, I'd do the thing properly and listen to some classical music rather than listening to some self-indulgent piece of noodling that no one could be bothered to write any lyrics to, but they insist on playing anyway because the bass player really likes the three note section in the chorus. Conclusion: instrumentals are superweak and VHS or Beta are alright, I guess.

So the downside is too many people and the upside is the chance to see mediocre bands. I swear that this festival thing is more trouble than it's worth.

Dear Occupant

2005-08-03T19:16:38Z

I’m staying at home at the moment. There’s lots of things that aren’t so great about it – like that the house is on the market, so I have to be upsettingly tidy all the time and all the stuff I have that makes things better (all my comics, most of my books and the majority of my CDs) has gone into storage. The house is a shrine to minimalism, and for what? The majority of people that have been shown round aren’t in a position to buy, or even that interested in selling their own houses, they’re just desperately sad and very odd people who like to look around other people’s houses. In particular they seem to be divorced middle-aged women with no children.

I used to know a boy – the most depressing boy in the world – who would call up every now and again and ask what I’d been up to. Regardless of what I told him I’d done (stayed in, been ill, gone on a date) his response was always: *sigh* “That would’ve been nice”. Presumably the second half of that sentence would be “… if you’d thought to invite me”, which, obviously, it wouldn’t have because he was the most depressing boy in the world. I think of these sad cases who keep coming to look around the house as being similar, wandering around other people’s lives thinking ‘If only my life hadn’t got derailed: I could be living here! This could be my child’s bedroom! That would be… nice.’

And, yes, I am sympathetic – because, yes, it’s tragically sad – but it’s equally really annoying. Get out of my house, no life women!

There’s good stuff about being at home, too. Al and I finished the last Monkey Island game this weekend (actually, it was the Curse of Monkey Island, but it was the last one I had to play)which was good, if very self-referential. Possibly even more excitingly I got to spend last night with two of my oldest friends talking at length about very little and arguing about who is more competitive (well, Sarah and I argued and Suzanne sat that conversation out, which I think pretty much sums up our relative placings on the spectrum of competitiveness). All in all I think I'll be a little sad when I leave for good (in about two weeks. New flat! Eee!). A little sad and hugely relieved that I can go and be a real grown up again.

betaraycarrie @ 2005-07-26T20:02:00

2005-07-26T19:25:09Z

As all of my time over the next few weeks is going to be spent looking at official statistics on obesity and, on an exciting day, calculating some obesity statistics of my very own, I am full of fat facts.

Did you know, for example, that between 1980 and 2003 the proportion of the British population who were obese increased from 7% to 23%. That's compared to, say, the Netherlands, who went from 5% to 10% of the population being obese over the same period. And that's why Britain is never never compared to other European countries when these kind of figures come out. Instead, Britain gets compared against America (1980 - 15% of the US population was obese, 2003 - 31% was obese) because it sounds so much better. It's not any better, though. You may be able to sense my statistic prowess when I say 23% is loads of fat people and 31%, that's about one in three of the population and - if my analyses are right - that's just plain silly. Especially in only twenty years. How is it even possible? Have people just been eating for twenty years?

There. I'll try to keep that as the limit of my obesity statistics ranting although, if anyone's interested, my statistics ranting repetoire currently covers pretty much the whole spectrum of the body mass index. I can be hired to kill parties.

betaraycarrie @ 2005-07-26T00:01:00

2005-07-25T23:03:27Z

I've had an ace, if slightly Thor-themed, birthday weekend. Thor-presents included:
1. The DVD of the old '60s cartoon the Mighty Thor (I say cartoon, it's more like being shown each static panel from the comic in sucession, but with a really enthusiastic voice-over man doing all the reading for you). It's made all the greater - or, indeed, mightier - by the theme song, which you can tell was made in the 1960s because it appears to have been done in sixteen part harmony and sounds like it should be a soap powder jingle.
2. The second Walt Simonson Thor: Legends trade, which is great so far (well, great if you like lots of running around, bombastic dialogue and plot resolution which frequently hinges on people getting hit with a big hammer, which I do).
3. Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, which, um, has Thor in it.

In celebration of this Thor-confluence, I've started this. Hello and welcome to anyone who wants to read it.

As I will only disappoint hardcore Thor fans, I should probably point out that I also got some lovely non-Thor presents like:
1. Bright Eyes' I'm wide awake, it's morning, so now I have something slightly more informed to say about Connor Oberest. I like it, he's good (previously my only thought: his name sounds like bratwurst).
2. The DVD of the Philadelphia Story, which is fantastic, although it does make you prone to talk very fast while drinking in a slightly gung ho manner after you've watched it.