| Saturday, December 28, 2002 |
 | Christmas time is here by golly
No real median increase in goodwill worldwide as far as I can tell - Israel reimposes military curfew on Bethlehem (niiiice), and it is revealed to the surprise of no fucker whatsoever that the US are using techniques of interrogation in Camp X-Ray that, if you squint your eyes and look just out of the corner of one of them, look surprisingly like torture.
Fortunately, as we know, Muslims do not celebrate Christmas, and thus are probably not even terribly interested in the travails of Jamie Mitchell in Eastenders, so deserve neither oranges or clemency in their stocking. Also, if you pick them up by the ears it doesn't hurt at all.
Ah well. On the bright side, January sales are starting early. Let us consume, my children. There's a buy-one-get-one-free offer on sheepdrone mulch just down the road - don't miss!
The usual Christmas tales to follow, but in the meantime let's take a moment to remember what this time is actually all about.
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| Thursday, December 19, 2002 |
| Hoom. There is stuff on my mind at present, which is no great desire to be dark and mysterious but rather not to implicate or bore people. Also, because others have spoken very well and very movingly about related tpics, and Ihaveno intention of crashing their action. So, instead, let's catch up on Upsideclown.
"Uncle David, what's that on the mantelpiece?"
"That, my dear, is a golden coprolite."
"What's one of those?"
"Let me tell you a story..."
In reverse order of age, Victor has a touching tale involving not a single Werther's Original. Nor, to may disappointment, Gripper Stebson. Here.
"What did your last slave die of?"
I flex my fingers and think, and think some more. Celine? Or Margot? I can't quite remember the names any more. They blur with the round faces of those kept. The sun through the window-panes warms my skin and I tilt my head, hoping that the light will make my cheekbones glow.
She watches me steadily; the man at her elbow puts his pen down. Babette? It comes to me. "Alice! Exhaustion. She'd been was moving Lady Sofia's belongings into the palace. I think she'd been carrying the gold bath, or the gold bidet. Or both. Yes, both, because that's how they found her, with the bathroom stuff packed on top of her."
George, our own aristocrat, is involved once again in negotiations. And Matt is searching out an ancient race. We used to do it with pigeons:
A string of coincidences -- one of my graduate students spotting the same colour sequences in the rugs and the necklaces. An associate recognising another necklace with a pattern similar to ones she'd found in Spain. And, critically, the Neanderthal bead rug that could've languished forever in that basement in Prague if it wasn't for the 2012 floods. Without these, we'd never have started looking for commonalities in what we'd previously disregarded as simple craft.
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| ![]() src="http://www.alice.dryden.co.uk/muskehounds/badge_aramis.gif" width="220" height="130">
Which Muskehound are you?
Oh thank God. I feared taking this test for some time, just because I harboured such a profound fear of *not* being Aramis.Thanks Hevaens everything has turned out OK. In general I shun the "what kind of child killer" test, but Agent99, creator of this one, has her pop culture references in exactly the right place and a motorscooter to boot.
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| Monday, December 16, 2002 |
| Amazon recommends a 5-piece martini goft set. that's perfect, if my dad was the mortal remains of Dean Martin.
This line from Brooke sums up the spirit of Internet Christmas, I think.
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| It worries me profoundly that I only discovered how to open a tetrapak last week. Apparently, all the scrabbling along the tricorn crown at the centre of the top is mere vanity, and the correct course of action is to open it all four ways, by pulling firmly at two of the four points making up our dimension's experience of the tetrapak tesseract. Hmm yeah.
Of course, this leaves no way to pour the thing, as any pressure on the container will squeeze the suddenly gaping wound at the top shut, but thirsty is better than covered in milk, now, isn't it?
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| My continuing quest along the way to five tells me that nothing is quite so effective a wake-up call in the morning as a grapefruit and lemon smoothy, with the flesh of both liquidised into a base of pressed apple juice and the skins squeezed out over the resulting brew.
Especially not if you have just cut your finger. Fuck fuck fuck fuck PAIN.
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| Sunday, December 08, 2002 |
| Jesus - oneof the definite disadantages of being a smoker who doesn't smoke is that you assume your body will still treat cigarette smoke with the same callous indiference that it did when you were regularly filtering a constant slow stream of the cancer-causing gascum into your lungs on a daily basis. Between Friday (shuttling between seeing Paul and co., and a late-arriving Summoning at Garlic and Shots) and Saturday (a long time percolating gently in a pub in Kentish Town), I was setting myself up for a fall, and duly got it, hard, in the neck. Woken after 4 hours' sleep at 6am, I realised that my throat had closed up. Somewhat perturned, I doused the affected area liberally in water and self-pity, only to find that I could not get a wink more sleep. So, at present, I feel throaty and exhausted, and somewhat in need of a companionable Will-and-Bran-style hair-ruffling.
Perhaps quitting in December was an unwise decision. But I can count half a dozen fellow spirits whowill join me in january. It'll be like an emphysemic fellowship of the Ring. Fellowship of the Smoke Ring, possibly.
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| Thursday, December 05, 2002 |
| One day, I shall track down whoever decided to call a Goth tribute album devoted to the works of the Doors "Darken My Fire". I shall shake his hand. Then I shall nibble his earlobe, gently and regardless of his opinion on the matter. For a very long time.
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| Cocking hell. There was meant to be an enormous post here about going back to my old college town on Saturday, and how strange it is no longer to be a student there - how you seem to have no real function anymore. You don't know the doorcodes, your key doesn't open the gate, and the sandwiches no longer seem like a decadent luxury. Then again, after living in London being immersed up to the nose in cocaine by houris probably wouldn't seem that decadent, as long as you did it in Doncaster.
So, there we go. Instead, I must leave you to ponder what a young man might get up to in his old city, and why in God's name, nearly a decade on, friends of mine are still running for Union positions. all very peculiar.
What I will say, or more precisely repeat, is that there was an article in the college newspaper about Oxford Romance. This is about the saddest thing I have ever seen, with the single exception, of course, of the saddest CV ever written. Let's take a moment here to indulge an infrequent desire for honesty. If you are a heterosexual surrounded by about 15,000 people of about the same age as you, with discounted beer and a variety of ready-made opportunities to meet, and you find yourself at the age of 19 advertising on a lonely hearts website for love, then God does not want you to use your genitalia as anything other than storage space. Sorry. I can see an argument for gay and lesbian dating services - if you are not into the scene or society it can be hard to meet people with designs on your pants (or indeed their pants), but, sweet God, why here?
P.S. I don't have a problem with threesomes as a concept, but they're really not my cup-of-tea. So, could you (guys especially) please stop asking? No offence taken and none intended of course.
In a "female seeks female" ad pretty much says it all.
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| Monday, December 02, 2002 |
| It's been a weekend of catching up. Friday, I finally saw Attack of the Clones (where are the clones, there should be clones...), having skipped out on the theatrical release on the grounds that, although those who had seen it fulminated about the last ten minutes, sitting through the previous 120 or so without a cup of tea and a good book sounded like a counsel of madness.
And by God, how right I was. The extent to which this film sucks is almost incalculable to modern science. Barring a bit of kick-ass lightsaber action near the end, there really was almost nothing to recommend it whatsoever, except possibly the growing realisation that Ewan MacGregor was goign to do the funny voice for the whole film. Just...astonsihingly bad. The dialogue seemed to be aimed at children, but the plot was comically overcomplex (not to mention utterly frickin' ridiculous). You only get so many points for having Christopher Lee kick arse. In the end, I could only get through the astonishingly poorly-written love scenes between Limahl and Former Princess Amygdala was by appending "up my arse" at the end of every wooden line reading.
I don’t like sand up my arse. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere up my arse. Not like here. Here everything’s soft... and smooth..up my arse..
Good to see that George Lucas' grasp on human emotional response is as strong as ever, though. Remember Luke Skywalker looking very slightly upset when he found that his aunt and uncle, who had raised him since he was a child, had been crispy-fried, then agonising for three whole films about a bloke in a bathrobe he had known for about a week? Well, it's back and in full effect here. Having completely ignored his mother for ten years (and I'm sure that the Jedi wouldn't have minded too much if he had, oh, I don't know, BOUGHT HER OUT OF SLAVERY ON EXPENSES), he then gets all "Mommy Dearest" when Lucas needs a bit of a push to the Dark Side (tm).
And the burgeoning affair between Mannequin and Former Princess Medulla Oblongata was just creepy. Partly because of its untimely speed - I figure the gap from first romance to secret marriage must have been about three weeks - but that really only as an element of its emotional improbability. Finding out that a YTS Jedi has been wanking over you every night for the past decade is not likely to fill you with a sense of flattered desire. Much less when the same spunky reprobate is assigned to be your bodyguard. That's right, Senator Pad Thai, we're going to give you the emotionally stunted trainee Jedi with the severe emotional problems, the impulse control issues, and the cum-encrusted copy of "Galactic Princess Monthly". Your safety is important to us.
Jesus. The surprise is not that the Jedi were wiped out, but why it took so long. For further slating, try here.
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| In the wake of the UNAIDS report on HIV, and on World AIDS Day, a thought struck me; as a consequence of the place and the milieu I grew up in, my images of HIV, although full of fear and strength and beauty, were highly specialised. Public information adverts with subtitles and icebergs. Derek Jarman tending his garden. Adam Mars-Jones and his monopolies of loss. Red Hot and Blue. It took a while for me to realise that it was happening all over.
It's a funny thing. Do you remember when you realised that the way you had sex was going to be constitutionally different to the way that your parents had sex, in ways other than the obvious or icky? tell me.
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| It seems to me that the name "Scatman" is a great one. you know: after semi-singer and comedian Scatman Crothers.
I keep envision having a son named Scatman. I can imagine everyone he meets saying, 'What a cool name.' Which is good because that way they'll have something to like about him even if his personality is really off-putting. Or if he's shallow or a bully when he's like 13, when he should be getting into punk rock or something. At least they'll think he has a hip name.
But don't use it, cause I thought of it.
Sweet Jesus scooter....Catherine directed me to this bubbling swamp of horrifying baby names. What is wrong with these people? Is it just the schooling? Or the lead solids in the water pipes? God, I thought my life was a wasted charnel of meaningless nothingness...
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