Quite Random

Tick tock

Falling without hitting land, through the vines and twigs of a wooded canopy miles deep, then I’d wake feeling dizzy from the motion. Running through an orchard towards a dark house, steps becoming lighter until I flew, cold air on my face in the night sky as I dodged telephone wires, miles up in the air. Lying in bed, inside a giant lift going down, a tall figure in a cloak standing over me, red light coming through the walls. Standing in tall grass, deafened by the sound of crickets, knowing that something was coming.

The dreams I had when I was six used to be pretty interesting.

I wrote a short story once about a man whose life was so mundane that he looked forward to sleep, and the adventures he had in his dreams. He did whatever he could to sleep as much as possible, ate cheese, and went to bed with the excitement of a boy going on a trip. In this dreams he was a swashbuckler, he flew, he dove through crystalline waters amongst shoals of brightly coloured fish, he looked and dressed better, and the girl from the corner shop who sold him his bread and never said hello was his love. Eventually, his life turned upside down when his dreams became his reality and his waking hours became a dream.

I am spectacularly bored.

Condom trivia

The oldest surviving condom in the world has gone on display in an Austrian museum.

The reusable condom dates back to 1640 and is completely intact, as is its original users’ manual, written in Latin.

The manual suggests that users immerse the condom in warm milk prior to its use to avoid diseases.

The antique, found in Lund in Sweden, is made of pig intestine and is one of 250 ancient objects related to sex on display at the Tirolean County Museum in Austria this summer.

Ananova – World’s oldest condom

…and now for the trivia. The condom was found in the Swedish town of Lund, and the word Lund means ‘penis’ in Hindi!

 I’ll get my coat.

Kerrrr-pow! Zing! Vroom! Brain Rot!

I’ve just got super-fast broadband from Be - it’s very impressive. It downloads so fast that you’ve often got a page loaded up before you even thought of looking for it, and you’ve checked the weather, answered your e-mails and read a blog or two in the morning before you’ve even woken up. Small problem – there’s still bugger all worth looking at on the Internet a lot of the time, and broadband won’t kick me out of bed or make me a coffee. It’s a bit like buying the nicest, newest, spankiest telly and there being nothing good on, or getting the sportiest, fastest, shiniest car, and then only being able to drive it round the car park at Sainsbury’s. Movie trailers, hell, entire movies, downloaded at breakneck pace. Music streaming. Videos of talking dogs. All of these are available in no time at all – but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s healthier not to turn your computer on in the first place and get outside instead, or that you are forced to share the Internet with people who write things like “That is so lame lol wtf die die die”. I’m not even getting in to online gaming – I’d be found months after disappearing from society, crouched before my screen, stewing in my own juices, muscles wasted, skin white as a sheet, a Boo Radley for the new millennium.

Where will it stop? The alarming pace of technological development is such that we will soon have breathalysers in our mobile phones to tell us we’re too drunk to call our ex (really), access to the Internet from absolutely anywhere via laptop or the new bluetooth tooth, phones in our nostrils, TV in our retinas, a USB port in our brains, and wireless access points up our bottoms (though why eludes me at the moment). We’ll want so much information and entertainment that sandwiches will double as MP3 players and laptops will double as pets or furniture. More information is being piled onto us all the time, TV programs getting more and more frenetic, entertainment becoming interactive whether we like it or not, red dots left, right and centre asking us to participate in the news, pulling us in to some hive mind. Doctor Who recently featured a story where the people of London were brought, entranced by messages through their earpieces, to have their brains removed by machines and entombed in the metal bodies of the Cybermen – how far off are we, when the white headphone cords of iPods dangle from every other ear and catatonic, glazed expressions greet you every morning on the train in to work?

We are becoming the Eloi. Cast off your earphones and smell the flowers!

Oh the interconnectedness of it all

This is how I know it’s a day off – 2 blog entries in one day – it’s incredible what free time does for your mental energy when it hasn’t come after eight hours at work. The Internet being the very finest tool for procrastination there is, more entries could follow, meanwhile I haven’t even found enough boxes to put things in yet.

People who find websites can (usually) be assured that the way they found them is kept anonymous – a search engine tells me what people put into a search engine to find this and other sites I have, but not who. It’s a good job. Recent ways people have found my site include:

• menstruation pics (errr, euw?!)
• this is not just salmon
• i love you
• hat rin full moon party sex (if that was you try reading Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered)
• big photos of many mongos (???)

Mmm. Meanwhile, I was surprised to see that this blog has been featured in an article on Suffolk bloggers on the BBC Suffolk website. The article describes this blog as follows:

Written by a Suffolk man, this is an excellent example of a quirky journal blog. The writing covers all sorts of things that have happened in day to day life, including exciting travelling stories.

If you found me through BBC Suffolk, hello. And sorry, this is almost certainly an anti-climax for you. The most exciting recent travel story I can recount is that the dog nearly got lost wandering around the garden, or that I fell asleep on the train back to Ipswich yesterday and snored so loud I woke myself back up again.

A scary thing happens when you write a blog entry – even though you might not proactively go out and tell someone you made a remark about them, or something you’ve seen on their site, blogs do it for you. Pings, links, referrers, these are all hopelessly dull techie terms for the fact that people know if you say something about them. It’s all a little bit disconcerting. Where are you supposed to go to say things behind people’s backs?

Chef and the Beckhams

Isaac Hayes, gravel-voiced love god of soul, singer of the Shaft theme and voice of South Park’s salty-balled Chef, has quit South Park, saying that he cannot stomach South Park’s “intolerance and bigotry towards [the] religious beliefs of others”, and claiming that “as a civil rights activist of the past 40 years I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices”.

Isaac Hayes has been the voice of Chef on South Park for the last nine years, during which time the show has lampooned just about every religious group going, including Christians, Muslims, Mormons and Jews. So why did he quit? In the South Park Episode ‘Trapped in the Closet‘ (and highly amusing it is) they took the mickey out of Scientology, and, yes, Hayes is a Scientologist. When the shoe is on the other foot, all of a sudden South Park has crossed the line. Thankfully, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the makers of South Park, pointed out this hypocrisy and finished with something along the lines of “don’t forget to shut the door on your way out”.

Scientology, meanwhile, may be coming for Posh and Becks. When David Beckham was famously quoted as saying “I definitely want Brooklyn to be christened, but I don’t know into what religion yet”, it seems that maybe someone was listening. Victoria Beckham is set to be Katie Holmes’ birthing partner at the birth of her first child with Tom Cruise (Scientology superstar), has been seen reading Scientology literature, and Tom has even made a donation to Scientology on the Beckham’s behalf as a sort of cultish Good Gift.

As little as I usually think about the Beckhams, certainly compared to a Daily Mirror columnist, I still almost feel protective towards them – the desire to keep them away from a religion that is blacklisted as a dangerous sect in France, that rejects psychology, psychiatry and prescription drugs, and that was after all created by a loony who wrote science fiction for a living, and who said in a 1966 interview “The insane, and so forth, somebody else can have them, they’ve already failed”. A bit of trivia while we’re on the subject – John Travolta starred in the steaming turd of a movie ‘Battlefield Earth’, which was based on an L Ron Hubbard novel, and Travolta is also a Scientologist.

3D matchbox rattling strangeness

Listen to this with headphones on – Holophonic sound (1878kb MP3) . 3D freakyness in your earholes.

Signs…

Signs you’re spending too much time with your computer and not enough in the real world:

• Friends without MSN Messenger, Skype or e-mail are woefully neglected
• You’d sooner call someone in Australia on Skype because it’s cool and free than you would someone up the road with a normal phone
• You never quite get over the thrill of getting a new e-mail
• You IM someone in the same house to tell them tea’s ready
• Most songs that get played on your computer never make it past half a second, because you’ve heard them all and you can’t concentrate long enough to listen to a whole one anyway
• New software updates are even more exciting than new e-mails
• You have at least ten Firefox extensions you wouldn’t be without now
• You know enough keyboard shortcuts to look scarily like you know what you’re doing to a normal person
• All of the letters have worn off your keyboard but you can still type without any problems
• You lose entire hours procrastinating
• If you get pissed off enough about something you don’t phone someone up or even stand in front of them and shout at them, you damn well blog about it
• comments on Flickr are yet another daily highlight
• Your concentration becomes so bad that you end up chatting on MSN while sending an e-mail at the same time as looking for the latest popular pages on del.icio.us, listening to Pandora, writing your blog, and watching the TV with the sound turned down.