Rivers start to burn.

Preparing, once again, to gird my loins and whisk myself and the family over to the Sunny southwest for my, most excellent chum M's wedding.

Rather than risk hiring a car we've decided to go the public transport route - it will do the kids good to go on a train with people clinging to the roof, baskets of chickens, pigs roaming around, overflowing toilets and hard wooden seats. The train usually calms down after Reading, however.

and yeah, it's been a while. So if you're reading this, and I think I know who you are, well done. It will be the usual stream of wittterings written in poo on the walls of a padded cell.

OMG! Just one of my all time favourite science-fiction books turned into a movie.....IMDb Video: I Am Legend....nice one, hopefully.

Very quickly....the news is that the children, now full of sausages and ginger biscuits are happily wrestling on the sofa and communicating with each other in their strange third lanquage...but the really big news is (as I learnt from Vice magazine) is that the Cult have released a new album. Yeah, yeaaaaahhh. As Ian Asbury would say.

In a famous allegory, Tolkien compared the author of "Beowulf" to a man who, inheriting a field full of ancient stones, used them to build a tower. His friends, recognizing that the stones had belonged to a more ancient building, tore down the tower "in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions." What they did not realize, Tolkien ends, was that "from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea." more...

Definition of Dangerous Wild Animals

Here's a link about the classification of dangerous animals, from Elmbridge County Council which they believe should be considered by DEFRA.., they've introduced an equation which is expressed as "ferocity x armament", which is very scientific. They must surely be taking the piss (in a most excellent way) when they give an example of "sloths or capybaras which, although equipped with big claws and large teeth, will never attack people unless they try to pick them up"... Definition of Dangerous Wild Animals: "ferocity".

Aside from that: I'm back, for the time being, but going slightly odd from paint fumes.

The skinny is that we're moving house...lock, stock and barrel, and children as well. As a hoarder of several years standing I have numerous bags of assorted filth, bed grit and chicken smeg to move. Lovely chubbly.

There's no immediate connection at the other end, which means this sadly neglected blog will become even more neglected for a while longer. Chop chop.

Note to self: shootings.

Launched the new website after putting in some serious hours over the last few weeks. The day of the launch was a 12 hour day but the launch itself was rather anti-climatic. just waiting to see if that link to 'Thai girls with big cocks' managed to remain undeleted in the html.

yawn. gosh, I seem to have soiled myself.

Posting on the blogspot dashboard about the 'storm' virus which managed to hijack peoples blogs, leaving links which, if the clinically thick clicked on them, would infect their computer. I've had a load of the same 'storm' emails sent to my account at work, notable for their, according to the bbc, cleverly crafted emails. I wonder if, in the future, as we give more and more personal information away on our social networking sites and wotnot, that we will get more personally crafted emails...for example, 'Dude, what were you thinking of' will certainly not get my attention but something along the lines of 'John, you left the gas on...click here for film of your house burning to the ground' would pipe straight into my anxieties and get me clicking on that infected link faster than you can say 'Trojan Horse, yes please'.

Off to see the Borne Ultimatum this evening, with my chum W. Should be good, first night no less, so expect lots of Borne enthusiasts. Which will either be lots of muscle bound young men or very, very geeky pale people.

For those of you who care, Reynolds new book 'The Prefect' is set in the Glitter Band before the melding plague. Excellent. It also has a great scene which totally captures the feeling that you get when someone says to you 'that last page update you did? I think you actually managed to delete our website'.

aacch, as we Scots like to say. That was a nasty few hours of packing up the remaining crap from the outer storage room (more like the outer fucking limits) into the nice boxes supplied to us by the moving firm. Now its the inner space's turn, as our attention turns to the jungle of wires, obsolete electronics, state of the art consoles, two years worth of new scientists, shares, bank statements, simpsons memorabilia, eldritch war boots and panties that is the storage room. Inner sanctum, my arse - exactly.

Sanctum, was incidently, a comic yarn which I read a few weeks ago. Not bad, but a little disjointed, mind you though, the art work was good.

tired now, must sleep and read some more A. Reynolds latest (The Prefect) before I catch some zzzzz's.

When a day you know is Monday starts off sounding like a Thursday afternoon then you know, somewhere, something has gone horribly wrong. Apologies to Mr Wyndham (or was it Doctor, probably, and in the medical sense I expect).
My good friend J wondered what had happened to the blog (I'm guessing the general lack of activity and, perhaps, the rather distressingly bland template)so I felt moved to add something...
An update - I'm currently working my arse off in the run up to working half time or so. Which, in effect, will probably mean I end of working some very very long days. The good news is that the website launch is going pretty well, it will be vanilla rather than chunky monkey, but tasty nonetheless.

Reading: Just actually finished 'Black Man' by the god of the sci fi action thriller that is Richard Morgan. Brilliant. Just decided to bin reading Romanitas (which, thinking about it, sounds like a medical condition) by Sophia Mcdougall which is pants, though a good idea (roman empire never collapsed and now, in the present day, occupies most of the planet). Finished Transcendent by Stephen Baxter, okay I suppose -whats next I wonder, Effervescent?

Playing: Oblivion, which is so fucking huge its just ridiculous and FEAR, which is actually way to scary. What a sad sack I am.

Moving: Well, I started packing carefully. Selecting items which should be sent to the dump, or stuff which it would be handy to have on the first few days of the move, and then carefully labelling boxes. After about five minutes of that I had resorted to tipping the same draw fulls of crap I've been moving around now for the last 10 years into boxes, once again, without sorting them. I'm sure I'm still carrying around front door keys for the first student house I lived in.

Annoyed: The pain in my shoulder which has come back to say hello, just as my pull up regime was hitting its stride. This was caused by a cheeky undercling on a gnarly 5b (english) problem.

WELL...managed to fuck that up nicely. SUCK! as we say in Swedish, I'll get back to this....Big Sweaty Bollock.

Watched: Hot Fuzz, lovely.
Listening: Ane Brun, sublime.

Messing around with the Google maps API to see how easy it is to use in the university website. Answer: Very. If a monkey like me can get into their blog in about, oooohh, all of twenty minutes then I imagine my resident java experts and wotnot will have no trouble at all.

Sick joke of the day: This popped into my head earlier. Actually, no, it's just too nasty.

Sensations: It's very hot in my office. Southfacing, no air conditioning. 5 metre high windows. Very sticky.

36 years wiser and writing some words, though not many mind, just to stop the blog from completely drying up...it's that time of year when a young man's thoughts turn to the holiday season, his sap begins to rise and he thinks of things other than the impending launch of a new website which he is pretty much single handedly responsible for. How an earth did that happen? Hornblower! Man the pumps!

Just watched Metallica on Live Earth, fucking excellent!

The dashboard (still in Swedish) tells me that its been weeks since I blogged. If you're actually reading this then it means that you cared enough to come and see if anything had changed, for which I thank you....I also worry that maybe you need to fill your life with some, perhaps rather more interesting things to do. Perhaps the sock draw needs to be organised, or that ant hill at the bottom of the garden needs attending to (you know, the one which glows that sickly yellow colour at night and which makes strange booming noises).

Loads happened at work today but because my colleagues are very switched web people I don't dare talk about lest I be discovered and summarily executed.

Its midsummer tomorrow which means dancing around the ringed tree and singing about frogs, I kid you not.

Ultravox New Europeans lyrics funny how wrong you can be, for bloody years (well, in fact since 1980) I thought old Midge sung "put up your chilling tendrils, his senses slip away" - which clearly makes little sense when in fact he sang "Full of future thoughts and thrills, his senses slip away", which makes a lot more sense. In a similar vein, I always thought titch sung, in Vienna "a man, and a duck, in a picture frame, so mystical and soulful", which as a bad poetry writing teenager I thought was, like, wow, really deep maaaan. I probably would have figured this one out a lot earlier had it not been for a picture in a student house which had, curiously, a man, a duck, and rather obviously, a picture frame. This was, for me, certain confirmation of my belief. Sadly, I was wrong. He actually sings "a man, in the dark, in a picture frame". Oh, and while we're on the subject he also did not sing "Please remember to mention me, in case you leave me behind" (on the track 'All stood still') but "in tapes you leave behind"...I think my version is rather better, actually.

Where would we be without t'internet, eh?

What can I say, probably too much. A stonking 10 day followed by a few glasses of wine and most of the first season, and some of the second, of Spaced makes me far too maudlin. So I'm going to go to bed, first removing my contact lens, prosthetic arms and trouser press.

lovely chubs.

The instrument panel for my blog has turned, annoyingly, over to using Swedish rather than Her Majesties English, which is fucking useful, isn't it. It was the same with my iPod, simply because the pc is running in Swedish it assumes that it should run in Swedish too...anyway, back to work tommorrow after two days of holiday grafted onto a weekend. Thursday was whitsun, you see, which made friday a 'clämdag'(i.e. a day falling between a public holiday and a weekend)and thus it became a holiday too.

I would blog more but a nice cup of tea calls.


Todays amusing link: Rate your students

Incident of the day: Upending a load of porridge powder on the floor. E immediately grabbed handfulls of it and proceeding to stuff them in his mouth, where the powder became a strange dough like substance which stuck to his face and mouth like glue. Lovely.