Lipsum

It's not to be Bourne

Bourne Again

It was Bourne upon me

Bourne Free (Bourne Three?)

I dunno - there may be something there, but I can't get it. (Captain Jack, on the other hand (Aubrey, not Harkness! What sort of a girl do you think I am!) would smoke it. I'm just not in his league.) Did Ludlum choose the name for its possibilities? Hmmm . . .

Sorry. Not paying attention there. SO and I have just watched all three Bournes on three successive evenings, and we are drained - drained, I tell you. (And while SO went to bed I caught up with Torchwood. Sometimes I don't know where I find the strength.)

Actually I wanted to tell you about the eventual (its been years coming. Years.) purchase of a USB turntable. I'm rather hoping that SO and I can get together in the library (with the lead pipe. And Colonel Plum. STOP IT.) tomorrow night and set the little beauty up, and finally start translating our lovely lovely vinyl collection into tidy sets of noughts and ones, ready for actually listening to. I can't tell you how much (well I can, obv., but then I really really can't tell you just how bored you'd be) I've missed Jack Buchanan, The Comedian Harmonists, Al Bowlly, the Christopher Hogwood Messiah, and Simon and Garfunkel. To name but a few.

Thank goodness that wretched earworm has gone. *sigh* only to be replaced by this one . . .

Shosholoza

Ku lezontaba

Stimela siphum' eSouth Africa

Wen' uyabaleka

Ku lezontaba

Stimela siphum' eSouth Africa

The Three Rs

There's this bloke, who is - well, I guess he's a dustman. He works at some rubbish dump, and what he does, as other dustmen do, is sift through the stuff people throw away, I guess in the hope of making an easy buck. Well, this fellow sells his stuff on eBay - calls hisself summat like 'Reduce-reuse-recycle'. He makes it quite clear where his wares come from, and also that he is operating well within the law - what he does confirms to every guideline going.

He sells odd stuff - vinyls, bakelite phones, cutlery, and on this occasion, a beaten-up guitar. My friend (who told me this story) said it was in pretty sad shape, but on looking at the photos she found herself wondering if the pattern around the sound-box hole wasn't real honest-to-goodness inlay, and not the transfer most of us live with.

She kept an eye on the item, and wasn't altogether surprised when, a coupla days ago, the bidding hit £90. Well, the auction ended today, and the guitar was sold to a German buyer for



£820.01.

I love stories like that.

Another bloody birthday

January is a perfectly bloody month for birthdays. I've endured four already, and all with unnaturally high degrees of hands-on-ness demanded from me. Cooking and baking mostly (and the shopping before and the washing-up after and then the serving out and blimmin'eck more washing up didn't I just do some of this already?) .

And the present-buying, so soon after Christmas ha ha, except this year I discovered Amazon vouchers - now there's a present which says you care - well it would to me. (What on earth possessed them to call it Amazon? It's the first thing SO sees when he opens the credit card bills. Sometimes the second, third and fourth thing too. Now if it was called Valkyrie, say, it would be tucked neatly under the fold, and SO would have those monthly extra few seconds of his head not exploding. Again.)

And tomorrow is mine - Li'l Sis is cooking, huzzah, and to my immense relief SO has FINALLY explained to his mother the mechanics of the Amazon Wish List. Actually he did this before Christmas. How startled was I when, having opened her gift to me - which I normally do wishing desperately for a lead apron, a toughened-glass visor and extremely long tongs on account of having to unwrap, AND THEN FIND SOMETHING NICE TO SAY ABOUT, for instance a painting of such hideousness it makes vitreous humour leak out of your ears, or a hat, scarf and gloves set from Tie Rack fer Pete's sake - when has she ever seen me wear a - oh I get it. She thought I needed them.

Blast. I've put a full-stop now - two actually, if this was Word the screen would be all over green wiggly lines as the poor software looked desperately for a verb.

Be that as it may. This year, MiL's wrapping paper concealed Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, and David Lodge's 'Art of Fiction'. BLIMEY! I thought. If this isn't the most amazing co-incidence! How on earth did she come to choose two of the books I really want to read! So I'm approaching tomorrow with that particular weight off my mind.

And with a nod to I, Like the View, here are the lyrics to my current earworm -

It's not easy having yourself a good time
Greasing up those bets and betters
Watching out they don't four-letter
If I can kiss you both at the same time
Smells-like something I've forgotten
Curled up died and now it's rotten

I'm not a gangster tonight
Don't want to be a bad guy
I'm just a loner baby
And now you're gotten in my way

I can't decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you'll probably go to heaven
Please don't hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It's cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We're going for a ride

It's a bitch convincing people to like you
If I stop now call me a quitter
If lies were cats you'd be a litter
Pleasing everyone isn't like you
Dancing jigs until I'm crippled
Slug ten drinks I won't get pickled

I've got to hand it to you
You've played by all the same rules
It takes the truth to fool me
And now you've made me angry

I can't decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you'll probably go to heaven
Please don't hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It's cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We're going for a ride

Oh I could throw you in the lake
Or feed you poisoned birthday cake
I wont deny I'm gonna miss you when you're gone
Oh I could bury you alive
But you might crawl out with a knife
And kill me when I'm sleeping
That's why

I can't decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you'll probably go to heaven
Please don't hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It's cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We're going for a ride

Sorry, Cicero.

Still haven't found out what happened to Grissom's squeeze, on account of all hell broke loose on another front. Well, when I say 'all hell', I mean someone else's irritation became my crisis.

One of the reasons I went all quiet, blogwise, for a bit was that I found a new toy - Serif WebPlus 10, to be precise. (Amazon sell it for £40, of course.) The last time anyone had had a go at a website for our Parish church it all ended in tears, so I offered to give it a go. It meant starting from scratch as the last person to try it had flounced off in such a huff that there was no way he was going to share any of the work he had already done (alas, for from the little I saw it was a nice job).

Knowing absolutely zip about websites and building them, it took me a bit of time to realise that the package we had (123-reg. Ugh. Horrible user interface, counter-intuitive site structure, ghastly instant-build options, answers to FAQs which tell you nothing apart from how to buy more of their services and a fantastically speedy and helpful support team. Bah.) was useless, then I had to work out what I could usefully use (WebPlus 10 - just lovely), and design the thing. The rector's brief was - well, brief. 'Orange and purple' he said. 'Orange and purple, with a picture of me.'

And then the content.

Ah me, the content. A while ago First Nations tagged me to to produce a list of ten authors who should be beaten with a bat until they STOPPED, and to my shame, Cicero was on there. (To my embarrassment, one of the reasons, and the specific reason for this apology, doesn't get a mention in that poorly-worded post.)

'Qui tacet, consentiret'. 'He who is silent, agrees.' Or, 'I'll take that as a Yes then, shall I?' Poor sod delivered his unarguably beautifully cadenced speeches to a houseful of Senators, not one of whom had the courage / could be arsed to express an opinion. Imagine. You take ages over a presentation, you write reams of words on subjects you know NOTHING about, because the person who does know, won't do it, and when, heaven forfend, someone does offer you some information you spend ages trying to turn the sow's ear of clerical prose into the silk purse of - well, something that makes sense, and no-one expresses an opinion. They just sit there. You ask, and ask, and ask 'Is this right'? 'Should I change this?' 'What do you think?' AND NO-ONE SAYS ANYTHING. Oh they might murmur the occasional 'Well Done', but contribute? Nuh-Uh.

I'm ranting, aren't I?

The point being, that two weeks before I'd planned to make the site live, Rector calls, all of a dither, saying he needs the site up NOW. So that's taken care of all the idle moments in the last three days, and I still don't know whether I've done it right. On account of, any changes to do with DNS take 24 - 48 hours to propagate across the net. I need the domain name to point away from the (ghastly) temporary page supplied by 123 (phtui) (that's spitting by the way) and at the actual domain where I've uploaded the site. I think. So by this time tomorrow, I'll know if I've delivered what I promised I could, or whether my name is actually Mud.

The Price of Integrity

Who was it who was recently talking about guilty pleasures? Gosh - maybe it wasn't in blogworld at all - maybe it was RL. Ooh - if it was, that might be a fun tag.

Well, one of mine is CSI. The Las Vegas and Miami variations, anyway. LV because Gil Grissom has me ensorcelled by his wisdom and integrity, and Miami because Horatio Caine makes my jaw drop with the vastness of his self-delusion (and Calleigh Duquesne. My oh my.) And last night saw the terrestrial opener to CSI:LV Series 8, which I recorded and should be watching right now instead of blimmin' blogging, on account of the cliffhanger at the end of the last series was SO GREAT.

I read somewhere (Wikipedia this is not. You'll just have to take my word that the following is absolutely true) that the lovely Jorja Fox, having been promoted AT LAST to Main Squeeze, asked (gasp) for a MASSIVE payrise. And do you know what the series bosses did?

They put her character under an overturned car, leaking petrol, in the middle of the Nevada desert. The final shot of the last series was her slender arm reaching out and ever-more-feebly scrabbling in the sand.

HA! That'll show her.

Or will it? . . .

Excuse me while I go find out . . .

AIBU?

Here's one I never met before. Undoubtedly something that everyone in the whole world knows except me, has done for ages and by now its so fuckin' passe that no-one uses it any more so I should just go get a life, ok?

Sorry.

I just hate when that happens - something pops up all over the damn' place and you have no idea what it means, and it takes you bluddy ages to figure out what everyone else is going on about. Well, not you, obv., I mean me, on account of you had it sussed ages ago, didn't you, you smug know-it-all git. Or else, like Betty or Reg you have absolutely no need of it AT ALL.

Sorry.


AIBU?

There's this place called Mumsnet. Not my sort of place at all really - a parenting forum for those who dunno what to do when little Samantha won't stop biting the heads off lizards, or baby Sebastian who is only three but is halfway through the Narnia series and wants to learn Greek, what shall I do! Bleurgh.

Except every so often, a whole bunch of them completely go off on one. Someone starts a thread and it spirals out of control, and my friend who actually does seriously visit the place sends me a link - like this one, and I end up with aching ribs and a runny nose from weeping with laughter. Dang, these women can be funny.

And here was where I found this never-before-seen abbreviation. I did make the (IMHO) reasonable leap that it hadn't been invented solely for this particular thread, and is to be found in general usage on the rest of the site. Is this a particularly parenting thing? A defence mechanism to use when you know you are, or a rallying cry from a lone voice of reason in a topsy-turvy world? It cropped up an awful lot, and I was left wondering whether parenthood turned otherwise reasonable people into needy passive-aggresives riddled with self-doubt?

Or Am I Being Unreasonable?

I'm with Moses

In the dark. Something is wrong with the fuse for the kitchen lights, they haven't been on all day, and I can't see a damn' thing. So cooking is chancy, washing-up decidely sub-standard, and blogging totally out of the question.

But look what I found in my library book! I saw the dedication first, and wondered that such a gift would have found its way, clearly unread, into the county stock. And then I notced the autograph, and I can't help feeling that this is some terrible mistake, and out there is some anguished William really wanting his book back. The way I see it, I have two options - a) tell a librarian, or b) pay the lost book fine, and change my name to William by deed poll.

Hmmmm . . .