Archive for the 'Misc.' Category

All the ducks are

Published
by
Colm
on 15 December, 2009
in Misc.
. 5 Comments

Today I saw a dude trying to feed some ducks. Trying, because seagulls are like ninjas. There were two ducks sitting right in the middle of the canal, no other birds in sight, and the instant the first bit of bread hit the water it was grabbed by a seagull who’d swooped in out of nowhere. I reckon ducks are used to this, because they didn’t put up much of a fight, and within minutes they’d been shunted over to the banks. At first, to his credit, Dude tried to manoeuvre a few scraps through the storm, but eventually he gave up in favour of tricking the gulls into some slick-ass aeronautics. I’m pretty sure they were doing barrel-rolls at one point.

What was interesting was how the system evolved. Dumping bread in the water is well and fine for your laid-back duck-type scenario, but it’s way less than efficient when what you’re feeding is essentially a scale model of a Mongolian horde. As time went on the gulls formed into a basic rubgy line-out configuration while Dude fired the bread directly at them in mid-air. I don’t know if you know how ludicrous it looks when twenty-odd birds are doing a kind of asynchronous low-gravity pogo-hop off the surface of a canal, but I’ll clue you in: pretty damn ludicrous.

There was one sorry bastard in the middle of all this, jumping at all the wrong times and giving off an adorable impression of birdy panic. As I stood up to leave, he finally pulled together enough sense to huff his way out of the crowd, and our hero tossed a scrap his way. And then, with the most beautiful comic timing I’ve ever seen in the animal kingdom… a duck got it.

Stupid thick, luxuriant hair

Published
by
Colm
on 4 November, 2009
in Misc.
. 4 Comments

Hair: I have a lot of it. I mean, just a ludicrous amount. I remember going for a trim as a child and coming out an hour later, the hairdresser sweating buckets, muttering to herself about rainforests and staring into the middle distance.1

I leave a trail of loose hair wherever I go. I don’t need to buy blankets, because it only takes ten minutes lying down to achieve full three-inch coverage. Cleaning up after a shower is a nightmare – tiled floors like, whose idea was that? My first house is going to have a black shag carpet in the bathroom. And I am never, ever going to look at it.

(Do you know, incidentally, how awkward it is picking up strands of hair off a men’s room floor? Because you know that when people see them they’ll know straight away whose head it came off, and they’ll be all “Ugh, that guy has a body, with things on it”. I personally have no idea how awkward that would be, but I imagine fairly. It’s probably almost as awkward as having someone come into a men’s room while you’re standing there in the middle of the floor, whistling, with your hands in your pockets and a bunch of god damn hair all around your feet.)

I would worry that I’m going bald, but this has been happening since I was 13 with no sign of any thinning. I tell you what, I’m not even sure I have a scalp under there. There’s an expedition going in this Saturday to see what they can dig up. Pray for them, internet. Pray for them.

  1. Saw her the other day actually. I was like, Check her out, all reintegrated into normal human society! It was nice to see, you know? [↩]

On the metaphysics of customer service

Published
by
Colm
on 1 October, 2009
in Fun with words and Misc.
. 8 Comments

Got a text message from NTL there. Oh hey NTL, haven’t heard from you in a while! What’s happenin’, bro?

In Regards to a recent Termination – Cancellation on your Chorus/NTL account please be advised that despite numinous attempts we have been unable to contact you to collect our equipment.

Man, whatever. I mean, let’s not get into who tried to contact who, and who got through first time and arranged to pick up the equipment, and who nevertheless didn’t bother to turn up. Let’s not get into how maybe you’re coming off a little pissy right now, NTL. No. There are much more interesting things we could talk about.

When I first glanced over the message I read it as “despite numerous attempts”. But that ain’t what it says.

From Wikipedia: “Numinous (from the Classical Latin numen) is an English adjective describing the power or presence of a divinity.” Dear Mary. So that itch I’ve been getting on and off just behind my ear, is that them deploying their mighty powers to try to communicate with me? Perhaps my rock-solid rationalism has prevented them getting a clear signal. I shall clear my mind and meditate, and we shall see if we can sort this matter out once and for all.

… nope, still just trying to flog me a landline. Dammit NTL. Such a waste.

New adventures in marketing

Published
by
Eli
on 31 August, 2009
in Misc.
. 3 Comments

While in the bookshop yesterday I happened across a book, the name of which eludes me, which nevertheless stuck in my mind because the front cover loudly hailed it as THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK ABOUT EVOLUTION SINCE DAWKINS’ SELFISH GENE.1 You’ll note there’s no attribution or quotation marks there. It’s just something they slapped on. I didn’t know you were allowed do that.

Naturally, I got in touch with my publisher tout de suite.

Axel, baby,

Has The Tau-Upsilon Procedure gone to print yet? Don’t answer that, there’s no time. Pulp them if necessary. We have a new cover. Print the following, 18pt:

A MOST EXCELLENT NOVEL. SO EXCITING MY EYES HAVE MELTED. FIVE STARS. NO: ELEVEN STARS!

Is that cocky? Print FIVE STARS in Comic Sans so as to create ambiguity. Title and my name can go on the spine. Omit title if necessary.

Won’t keep you any longer. Get to it.

yrs in sport,

E.

PS: I think the boy has been drinking my sherry. Have him fired.

PPS: Working on a new series, The Continuing Escapades of Selfish Gene. Send advance pls. Will forward manuscript on my return from Ecuador.

PPPS: Will be in Ecuador for the foreseeable. Have the boy take care of my post.

  1. As an aside, wouldn’t Selfish Gene be a great name for a character in a children’s story? If you even think about considering stealing that, I’ll Berne Convention you so hard your teeth will spin. [↩]

The depoxening

Published
by
Colm
on 13 August, 2009
in Misc.
. 3 Comments

Those of you who checked back here over the past while (cheers, incidentally) will have noticed there was some villainy afoot1. Firstly, to get the ringing-my-exes bit out of the way: scary warning notwithstanding, the site has been clean since 31 July, but if you accessed it in, say, the week before that, you might want to download Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware and give yourself an old scanaroonie. To be fair, you were probably already riddled anyway, so this is long overdue.

Secondly, thanks to the hosting ninjas at Blacknight for helping me sort this out. Hey, looking for a hosting plan? Try Blacknight! They’re ninjas.

Finally, I actually had stuff I wanted to post in that time. I know! So keep an eye out for that.

  1. Of which full details here. [↩]

One bottle of Prosecco later

Published
by
Colm
on 16 July, 2009
in Misc.
. 9 Comments

Writes L in Belfast:

If you could live in any century, what century would that be?

envelope

Logic will break your heart

Published
by
Colm
on 16 June, 2009
in Misc.
. 30 Comments

There is a riddle, you see. I knew the answer, and I knew how to arrive at the answer, and yet even after roping in two other people it still took the guts of half an hour and at least three beermats to reverse engineer the riddle itself. So you are going to read it and you are going to enjoy it.

Three people are standing in a line, facing forward. Like so: A -> B -> C ->. Person A can see Person B and Person C. Person B can see Person C. Person C is kind of staring off into space, perhaps pondering the merits of dogs vs. cats as household pets, or idly doing some mental arithmetic.1

Now then: hats. Each of them is wearing a hat, which has been distributed from a pool of two white hats and three black hats. They don’t know what hat they’ve been given, although of course they can see the hats of those in front of them. They are asked to say, without guessing, what colour hat they’re wearing.

A says nothing. B says nothing. C says, “I know what colour hat I’m wearing.”

What colour hat does he have, and how does he know?

  1. They all do this. They’re very logical people, you understand, and that’s how they get their jollies. Even that bit about the dogs and cats is just a mental exercise. Do you think Person C would ever actually want to have a pet? You fool. [↩]

The Beard Brothers

Published
by
Colm
on 23 April, 2009
in Misc.
. 8 Comments

Some fellers are fixin’ to get some information out of me. NotRuairi is (n’t?) at it, as is this hirsute hombre. Six things they want, which is a bit annoying, since I gone and did 25 of them on Facebook a while ago. Seriously, those are all the things about me. I have nothing left.

But then I read Andrew’s facts, and it occurred to me that they were awful familiar. Awful familiar indeed… for you see, I know this man – or rather, I knew him. We were a team, Andrew and I, before an unpleasantness forced us apart. Then a while later we were a team again, before a misunderstanding put paid to our relationship. Then after a couple of years we were a team again, and then we kind of got really really drunk, and I guess there might have been some psychotropics in the mix, and basically we haven’t seen each other since.

Many fine histories of our exploits have been written1, but here’s a few choice “behind the scenes” nuggets that tend to get left out:

1. While my favourite pen is a Bic biro, Andrew is a die-hard fan of Staedtlers. In order to minimise arguments and avoid needless destruction of property, we tend to write in pencil when in each other’s company.

2. You know where at the start of those Pepé le Pew cartoons the cat would squeeze under like a freshly-painted fence or something and then the skunk would chase her for ages looking to do the deed on her? Well, [excised at the request of the British Royal Family]

3. In the space of three minutes during a late-night/early-morning singalong in a Munich pub in the 1860s, we inadvertently invented the Eurovision, paracetamol and Cambodia.

4. Pork, as a meat, was much less delicious before we started hanging out together. We’re not sure why.

5. We wrote the preliminary code for Auto-Tune in 1971. It’s taken 38 years for someone to find a proper use for it.

6. The seven-day-week thing is one of Andrew’s most common boasts  but, as usual, he was only partly responsible. I recall it was a balmy Blurnsday evening back in the sixteenth century: myself and himself were pretty heavily into peyote at the time, as were the rest of the Tibetan aristocracy2, and in the middle of one of our lengthier binges I happened to make an offhand comment about there being seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye. Well, things got somewhat hazy, but when we came to several days later Andrew was clutching a sheaf of paperwork from the US Patent Office3. After several months on the road, and some characteristic mountebankery, we’d convinced the rest of the world to adopt the new system.

  1. q.v. particularly the following paragraph on Wikipedia: “In the course of history, men with facial hair have been ascribed various attributes such as wisdom and knowledge, sexual virility, or high social status; and, conversely, filthiness, crudeness, or an eccentric disposition, such as in the case of a bum, hobo or vagrant.” [↩]
  2. Long story. [↩]
  3. which office, ironically, we ourselves had founded less than two weeks earlier. [↩]

The end of smart casual

Published
by
Colm
on 27 March, 2009
in Misc.
. 28 Comments

A group of us are visiting a friend in Galway this weekend. I neglected to mention this to him until something approaching the last minute. He was mildly resentful at having to change his plans – plans in the loosest sense, since he was just going to be sitting on his arse doing nothing. In his words, he’d been looking forward to not having to put pants on for the weekend.

You might say, I remarked, that we’re forcing you to move to PANTSCON 4.

I might, he said. In fact, I will.

We quickly realised what we were sitting on. An effective PANTSCON scale would do away with the footling awkwardness of “smart casual” and “work formal” and so on – after all, once you’re wearing the right trousers, everyone else falls into place automatically.

Twelve hours later, and here we are. The PANTSCON scale, revision 1:

5: Pantsless. The lowest condition of pants readiness.
4: Pyjamas or similar slouchypants.
3: Jeans. Cords, if you’re that way inclined.
2: Work-appropriate pants. Chinos. “Slacks”.
1: Fancy pants, with a crease you could lose a finger on. A condition of maximum pants alert.

Patent pending. Use it wisely.

I feel almost human again

Published
by
Colm
on 20 March, 2009
in Misc.
. 13 Comments

It’s bizarre how messed up you can get simply by not sleeping. I’ve been completely useless for the last couple of weeks and I’m pretty sure I was seeing through time for a while. Plus the weird fascination with what my hair was doing: I woke up one morning with it stubbornly piled on one side of my head which, combined with the natrual eyeshadow afforded by my heroin-addict good looks, made me a shoe-in for a New Romantic. At least until it went all Dylan-Moran-in-an-explosion-factory and I started feeling all deranged postpunk nasty. This happened without me getting anywhere near a mirror, by the way. I was learning of my hair situation subconsciously, through some kind of barnet osmosis. This1 leads me to believe that my hair is essentially a more versatile, less vindictive Venom symbiote. Whatevs. The ladiezz still love it, yo.

  1. and the sleep deprivation, obviously [↩]