LegsEleven
September 3, 2006LegsEleven has popped into the world. Just as well she's a girl, or the name wouldn't suit quite as well. Well done the pair of you. I guess Brenda did OK as well. Roo has now just enough time to buy the other half of the sword collection for the baby to play with. It shouldn't be long til we see some pictures of the new arrival - the swords that is. Oh, and maybe a baby pic also if there's any room left on the camera. It being father's day, I had already commented to my father that afternoon that Roo nearly qualified as a father, but not quite...
The bits you miss when you're in the labour ward. The Dutch SBK was a case of last bike standing in the pouring rain, and saw a kwaka win for the first time since Sugo 1999 - Chris Walker conquering Assen by taking a classic last to first victory. Race two dried off a bit and Bayliss cruised it in, after the other Troy took out Nori-chan before the first corner...
Georgina Victoria Hope
September 4, 2006C'était seulement une question de temps - un nom est choisi. Still, given that she is a native of NSW, the southern connotations of the name is a little disturbing. Actually, I think it's a lovely name! And it's happy, healthy and noisy. All the things we desire in a child. Roo's parents now have seven grandchildren, and Koh's have eight, but between the four of them they have only ten. It's a mystery, as Statovarius have often said.
Mind over Matter
September 5, 2006I d/led IM's new album A Matter of Life and Death last night even though I knew I was picking it up today from Sanity Music. So far I have heard the album once on the PC, once on the ipod, and the last time with the CD in the car. I will need to hear it a few times more before I decide where it rates amongst their other albums. The lyrics are definitely more about what we haven't learnt in the last century from war, rather than being based on books and films. Perhaps the boys are getting older and care more for the world they are leaving their children. Speaking of time passing: a sig from a metal forum said something like this - the music we listened to used to scare our parents, now it scares our kids...
Who?
September 6, 2006Was mellowing out with an ipod in a crowded lunchroom today at work, whereupon I was given the third degree about it's contents. I listed the twenty or so artists to a sea (say fifteen people, OK more a small lake, or maybe a puddle) of blank faces... except for Iron Maiden, no-one had heard of any of these groups/artists: Altaria, Angra, Apocalyptica, Atreyu, Avantasia, Dragonforce, Edenbridge, Evergrey, Freedom Call, Haggard, Hammerfall, Hawkwind, Kick Axe, Korpiklaani, Nightwish, Rammstein, Rhapsody, Sonata Arctica, Stratovarius, Tesla, Trivium, and Within Temptation. When asked for the general genre it was easier to say - mostly folkmusic. Iron Maiden's new album, A Matter of Life and Death was released last week and has got to the following position on these album charts: UK -4, Ireland -5, France -5, Finland -1, Norway -2, Australia -12. There's more than one classical metal music fan out there.
A Stretch
September 7, 2006Wee Genna is minus her stretchy leg for a few days. Without the plaster I didn't hear the clump bump clump as she wandered up the hall to snuggle with her mum in the hours before dawn. She'll need a week of baths and showers in two nights to set her up for the next week of tendon stretching serial casting. The chaos that is homelife is a sanity preserver after the headbutting roulette that is work.
Sword Pic
September 8, 2006Roo has sent through some pictures at last. Wee Georgina has now been digitally gazed upon by her double cousins... The camera must have malfunctioned because I'm sure there was a sword in there somewhere. According to wiki, The Fun Boy Three discovered Bananarama who have had like 18 albums since 1981 and last year had the #2 song in the US Dance charts. Awesome. The Darkness are way cool, but you have to be less than 18 months old to dance to them successfully because of the falsetto. Go Alistair!
Baby Pics
September 9, 2006Every nursery needs decorations, and Georgina is lucky to have a range of weapons from the Lord of the Rings saga adorning her walls. OK, so not all the swords are actually in the nursery but the thought is there. Being strickly acurate, none of them are, but they could be. In the interests of taste, no axes are in evidence, yet.
Easy As
September 10, 2006Hosing rain all day. Rocky creek dam is at about 95% and early spring is starting to feel like Auckland in winter. Have been undecided as to the flavour of gaming console to be found under the christmas tree this year. Nintendo, MS or Sony were the choices. No.6 is right - assuming Sony would deliver was just plain absurd. Is another motorsport day on TV - MotoGP during the arvo, SBK during the evening and F1 later tonight. Go Jenson.
Inside Job
September 13, 2006Rebuilt a Dell D4500 for a friend tonight. A work of art inside, even if the case is a little foolish to open. Dell has nearly all the drivers you need in one download spot, and the online help even for hardware options and add-ons is cool. No wonder they have done so well in the global OEM market. In the last several months I have had far more trouble with Toshiba and IBM PCs - once they reach 2-3 years old it gets difficult to source the bits you need. Am getting very close to ditching this AMD2200 Win98 box - even Zonealarm doesn't support 98 anymore. And I want to be able to Skype from my own machine... not just when I can crowbar one of the kids off their XP machines.
Bravery
September 14, 2006Nearly had the weekend off. Scored saturday on-call, don't mind really, happy to help Al out, he doesn't ask very often. There must be a recognised cycle of news reporting following the demise of a public face - from highest eulogy to character shredding. Happened with Peter Brock after a few days, only happed with Steve Irwin if you count Germain Greer, and happened with Michael Schumacher (who didn't exactly die, but still counts). It's a bit like giving a rude hand signal to a traffic policeman below the level of the car window. Drinking hospital coffee with three sugars doesn't count - that's still brave, just like listening to Duran^2. Having got heartily sick of my car CD player bouncing and skipping on this wonderful towns hi and bi ways - I now enmusique automotivilly by running my ipod through a FM transmitter and using the radio. Marvelous.
Hackers
September 15, 2006Wee Georgina is nearly half a moon old and therefore deserves a collage of sorts. She is very vocal, and sweeter than dark grade maple syrup and will be the cause of much bandwidth usage, probably for years to come. Just two months until we can come down and see her up close - skype is great, but not quite there. Speaking of sweet, whilst making pumice toffee tonight Taff and I were unable to determine the exact minute that the boiling mixture had reduced enough so as to reach 155degC, so it turned out more like lava. Must invest in a cooking thermometer.
Down to Earth
September 16, 2006Have to do something whilst twiddling your thumbs on-call. Discovered another interesting Finnish metal group, Turisas. Probably classifiable as Viking or Battle metal, at the doom end of the scale. A wee bit growly in places but very complete musically - maybe a little hard to take seriously. The drums are a little basic, i.e. not fast enough. A similar sound is found with Dark Moor, a Spanish power metal group who will try anything from Mozart and Valhalla to symphonic Roman legends, but at least they're SPEEDY. Can't say that Maiden's new album has grabbed me yet, maybe I won't buy the T-Shirt.
Comet Ham
September 17, 2006Excitement of the day: The newly discovered comet 2006 P1 McNaught will approach to within 0.17 AU of the Sun on Jan 11, 2007 and may be visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere during late January
Sad but true - many midnight binocular sessions lying on the trompoline coming up. Phillip Island MotoGP is on today, a track that's been good for Kawasaki's occasionally over the years. Nakano is 2nd on the grid - we'll see. Jen's at work today and tonight I start eleven straight. My sanity may not remain intact. Or as intact as it is at present. Or as I think it is. I may think that it's intact then, but I may not know. Maybe it's already unintact.
Said the somewhat loopy Adam Savage, I reject your reality and substitute my own. Any town who encourages marital perjury with the offer of a dead farmyard hoover is hardly a fit role model for the kitchen. There was once a time in the world's history when refrigeration wasn't. They used to rub strips of dead animal with salt and arsenic and hang them in the smoke of a sacrificed hickory tree to drive away evil spirits. The muscle, fat and skin thus desicated would last months, even years - resisting all but the hardiest maggots and most of the bacteria and fungi endemic to the storehouses. Even with the 20th century knowledge explosion it's still done to this day apparently. You then fry it up, presumably in first cold pressed extra virgin olive oil, and inter it between two pieces of bread. And then, umm, - I'm not sure what you do with it next, but you'd have to be wearing gloves and probably a facemask. Oh yeah - then there's the issue of the smell... In conclusion I would have to say that bacon is still better than cucumber.
Back Again
September 19, 2006Care of a wet 25kg bag of sand yesterday, I have back trouble. The finalisation of the HMAS Not-As-Yet-Named-Sandpit will have to wait a few more days. Got called up to OT for a hip pinning last night and it took more than five minutes to put the theatre boots on. A few nsaids later and I'm hoping that I'll survive tonight til midnight. I'm back on US at 0830 and it's going to be more difficult doing that than xray. Maybe I'll just have a lie down in the sandpit... Have now got 24 episodes of Mythbusters and 8 of the Cadfael series, and am at 200% of my adsl d/l allowance. Going for a record here. The nsaids have left me with their normal effect of vague inspecific anxiety - a bit like this quad rider who's hamming it up.
Cocaine
September 20, 2006A rainy Phillip Is MotoGP, unwatched by myself due to bad time management, appeared to be a bit of a dog's breakfast but at least Vermeulen hit the podium behind Melandri. The Sylvania 300 Nascar results had the good, the bad and the ugly: Jeff Gordon +5, Jimmie Johnson -7, and Tony Stewart -who-gives-a-toss. There is nobody undeserving left in the chase. Would love to see Little E get up. Speaking of getting up, my back definitely has me down - can't see getting back to work before friday - that'll impress Al!
Dragged the kids outside to catch the flash of Iridium 26 tonight - according to Heavens Above it was at -6 mag as we were 2km off the path - way cool, even Taff went WOW. Was visible for maybe 15 seconds moving across a few degrees of sky but the one second flash was intense.
A bunch of mellow Austrians named Edenbridge, in a song titled The Most Beautiful Place:
You are what I call Cockaign
And you take away all my pain
use the word Cockaign which we originally heard as the coca derived crystalline tropane alkaloid of Eric Clapton fame but have now been enlightened. This fictional place has had multitudinous literary appearances including within Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's novel Don Quixote de la Mancha where Sancho Panza (the name given to any manservant/squire accompanying any Don Quixote on any journey) recieves a fictional fief, la ínsula Barataria which is commonly translated as a form of Cockaign, where "...the houses were made of barley sugar and cakes, the streets were paved with pastry, and the shops supplied goods for nothing... roasted pigs wander about with knives in their backs to make carving easy..." According to Wiki, "In the 1820s, the name Cockaigne came to be applied jocularly to London, as the land of Cockneys". London - utopian? You off yer Bacon?
Not Hampster!
September 21, 2006No! not the Hampster. What is it about the month of September? At this time Richard Hammond is in a serious but stable condition, with no word as to the nature of his injuries. A roll over at 280mph is a mechanism of injury compatable with any senario... Wiki had all the known details included into Richards bio within hours of the accident. Wiki seems to be a combination of encyclopaedia and newspaper - what I always imagined the internet should be. Attempting a land speed record in a 5000bhp 370mph capable rocket car is not the normal Top Gear content - makes you wonder. The latest reports seem to be playing down his injuries somewhat so here's hoping.
RE: Comet 2006 P1 McNaught, was about 16th Mag in early July, brightens to 14th by October and 8th by the new year, hopefully becoming a binocular object by late January. Chances are it will disintergrate before perihelion.
Speed
September 24, 2006According to Mythbusters episode 23, talking to your plants (either sweet talk or evil talk) makes them grow better than silence, and playing music gets a better response than just talking, and the most effective music was death metal. Works for me. I'm fatter now than I've ever been, maybe I need to get back onto a diet of baroque classical. The Hampster is out of danger and appears to have suffered no injury except significant brain damage: well that's all right then. The team are talking about the adjusted starting time for series 9, rather than IF the series will start this year as we had feared. Some political wally in Britain accused the BBC of wasting tax payers money with Hampster's rescue and chopper flight to hospital (costed at less than 400 pounds per trip and 3600 per day) - in response the Pistonheads autoclub have raised 130k+ pounds in Richard's name for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance Charity. Eat Avgas wally.
Traffic
September 25, 2006One trusts that the noise radiating out from the politically correct UK press re: the closure or (at best) restructuring of Top Gear, is just that - noise. They wouldn't dare. On a positive front, Richard is apparently annoyed that the October 8 start for series 9 has been delayed. Means he's definitely feeling better. I have noticed that nobody has asked The Stig what he thinks of the whole to-do. Not that there would be any point to that.
Darkness
September 27, 2006Brave et al are visiting this weekend and I've prepared by stocking up on at least eight forms of caffeine. Will have to cook something very high cholesterol. A fairly rare occurance tonight: Iridiums 31 and 95 will flare within 2 deg of sky, within 20 sec and both about -5 mag. Two small problems though, I will be at work and we will almost certainly be under thick cloud cover... Apparently you don't need darkness to see them - they are sometimes visible during the day if you look in the right spot... The Hampster reportedly continues to improve, and the money raised to cover his emergency retrieval will now purchase another chopper - to be known as Hammies Helli. Last night at work was busy only because of the 3.5 hrs spent in OT splashing radiation into and around an obese femoral nail whose insertion could only be likened to a deep underground mine rescue.
A wild boy within morbidA random collection of lines from Darklyrics
attraction, talented but
flashy, brave but foolhardy,
arrogant preying on innocence,
whoredom brings disease and sorrow,
repeat offending drunken drug crazed
criminal, assaulter of sense, molester
and basher hateful symphony of pain,
the accident gave brain damage,
dribbling and mumbling then returning,
but self pity and depression,
then a neck-tie party,
the swinging bloated corpse,
dance on grave in witchtown,
headstone micturition fantasy
The sun shines again
from the Crooked Nose Book of Dhugal
Sprung
September 30, 2006
The last day of the first month of spring was very pleasant. Attended Alstonville church with the senior Geelans and congregated where junior Geelan Paul delivered a cool sermon on doctrinal elipses. Then decended en masse to a park called Bullwinkle to supp, and in turn be supped upon by small black blood sucking flying things that looked almost like mosquetti. Hardly any of us fell in the swollen river or perished from exposure in the search for a patch of sunlitten grass. Twas excellent. Dinner turned out to consist of twelve types of cheese, deep fried chips and hash browns. Only Sue's pineapple was fat free.
The last day of the first month of spring was very pleasant. Attended Alstonville church with the senior Geelans and congregated where junior Geelan Paul delivered a cool sermon on doctrinal elipses. Then decended en masse to a park called Bullwinkle to supp, and in turn be supped upon by small black blood sucking flying things that looked almost like mosquetti. Hardly any of us fell in the swollen river or perished from exposure in the search for a patch of sunlitten grass. Twas excellent. Dinner turned out to consist of twelve types of cheese, deep fried chips and hash browns. Only Sue's pineapple was fat free.
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