Category
Reflections
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02.06.08Game for a laugh (or something darker): deceit in popular cultureLast night, out for dinner with a group of friends in celebration of one of our number's birthday, I mentioned that I had noticed that in an awful lot of articles lamenting the lately departed entertainer and king of trivia and video clips, Jeremy Beadle, he was referred to as a "Prankster". In fact, a casual search on the interwebs shows that he's been referred to as such online on no fewer than 464,000 occasions, and that his name occurs in nearly a fifth of all search results for "prankster". This is surely the only proof required. This got me thinking about ...
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07.24.07Night thoughtsAs some of you may know, I had to go into hospital last week - nothing particularly dramatic, and I'm much better now, but serious enough at the time to warrant 24 hours under observation and on IV medication. I've never been in hospital before - though I've obviously visited other people in them, and had the odd outpatients appointment. When I was much, much younger, my somewhat, erm, adventurous approach to play landed me in casualty a few times, but I was always discharged a few hours later, swaddled in bandages or splinted and hopping. So it was with some ...
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01.10.07And speaking of namesI'm on several mailing lists at my company which give details of server maintenance outages and the like. And most of the time, they fly through the inbox and I can happily ignore them. However, yesterday there were a flurry of mails with priceless subject lines: I loved the idea that they needed to take all the little green Irish fellas out of service to give them new green trousers, or because the pot of gold was broken or something. However, I'm sure that our colleagues in the US just thought about it as a server name - because that's what happens, isn't ...
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09.08.06Out of contactI just upgraded my phone, and I'm in the process of transferring all my stored numbers from the old handset to the new one, via the wonders of Bluetooth. Because this is a fairly laborious process, I don't want to transfer any numbers over which I don't think are valid, or haven't used for a long while, or think I won't use again. This activity, which I complete every time I change phones - so, once a year or thereabouts - , causes a pruning effect among my contacts, by making me re-evaluate the viability of social and business contacts, which ...
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09.13.04Not JackLast week, in Tiree, I visited the Hebridean Trust's museum at Hynish, which contains an exhibition about the building of the Skerryvore lighthouse. I've always liked lighthouses - possibly since reading Flannan Isle (spooky poem based on a true mystery in another isolated lighthouse, off the Isle of Lewis) in the first year of secondary school, or perhaps since visiting my grandparents in the Isle of Man as a child, and being sung to sleep by the foghorn from Chicken Rock, or maybe since taking a boat trip in primary school around the Needles, which involved the boatmaster handing a copy ...
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01.12.03Contraceptive"I want my pocket moneyI want my pocket moneyI want my pocket moneyI WANT MY POCKET MONEYI...WANT...MY....POCKET...MONEY[sniff]I want my pocket moneyI want my pocket moneyI want my pocket moneyI want my pocket moneyI want my pocket moneyI want my pocket moneyI WANT MY POCKET MONEYI want my pocket money NOWGive me my pocket moneyGive me my pocket moneyGive me my pocket moneyGIVE ME MY POCKET MONEY NOWI want my pocket money[sniff]I want my pocket moneyI want my pocket moneyI want my pocket moneyI want my pocket moneyI.... WANT..... MY.... POCKET..... MONEYI want my pocket money[sniff, howl]I want my pocket moneyI ...
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01.01.03On WaitingI hate waiting. I'm really bad at it. See, I'm impatient at the best of times, and P frequently accuses me of wanting everything at once. It's true. Despite my previous assertion that I measure out life in doses of delayed gratification, the truth is that that's fine as long as I'm the one delaying it. Making myself wait, fine. Other people making me wait, very unfine indeed. If someone says they'll pop over this afternoon sometime, I'm completely stuck. Since they might arrive and interrupt me at any time, it's difficult to start anything properly - you can't embark on ...
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01.01.03On Prolonging PleasureI think I've got the wrong attitude about going to the gym. I mean, I enjoy it, and I make an effort to go regularly, and I do feel like it's worthwhile, but there's a fundamental problem with the way I think about it.See, most of my gym-going friends say things like:"Oh no, I shouldn't have a biscuit because I've done all that work at the gym"...meaning that it'll undo all their hard work. I, on the other hand, find myself saying things like:"I can have a biscuit because I've done all that hard work at the gym"They're goal-based - ...
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01.01.03Home AbstractMore images...When I was a kid, in bed and unable to sleep at night, I would look up at the ceiling and imagine what it would be like if the world was turned on its head, studying the shape of the room from the perspective of the empty expanse of the ceiling. If I lived on the ceiling, how would I get through the door? I'd need to clamber up to the doorway, suspended a couple of feet from the floor (ceiling) surface. The windows would be low the walls. The lightswitch high up. I'd need to avoid the light ...
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01.01.03On Visual MemoryAt one point, a few years ago, my friends used to poke gentle fun at me for always drawing maps using the objects on the table: "So imagine that this salt cellar is me, and that ashtray is the corner of the road...hand on, can you pass that fork? Ok, that fork is the zebra crossing, and the mug, I mean the bus was going along here like this..." My listening friends would start to chip in usefully: "What's this pepper pot?" "How about my lasagne?" "Can this glass be a bus stop?" and so on. Smart arses. But I can't help it: ...
recent posts
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