My God, It's Raining

While we were getting some bulk shopping over at Costco yesterday, I started to feel a little bit under the weather.  I have headaches a lot, so I didn’t think a great deal of it.

By the time we got home, I could think of little else.  I was lying on my bed, sheeted in a cold sweat, and alternating between yelling and sobbing from the pain.

Lisa took me in to the hospital, and I spent the night there.  My CT scan came up clear, which was a relief, but I’m now on medication to lower my blood pressure (which was through the roof when I went in, and moderately brushing the rafters when they discharged me).  According to my ECG, I have an enlarged heart (‘how enlarged?’ I asked.  ’10%?  20%? Is my heart where my lung should be and has my lung become a vestigial lump?’ – for future reference, doctors have zero sense of humour when you are flippant in this manner) and a couple of other ancillary symptoms that point to hypertension as the primary cause of my attack.

Not the most fun way to spend your Saturday, and I don’t imagine Lisa had a great time either.  I think once she comes home I’m going to be told in no uncertain terms that I no longer have permission to scare her like that.

You can get Eddie Izzard voice commands for your sat nav.

I don’t have a sat nav but if I did I would have Eddie Izzard on it.

Also he ran about a billion miles for Sport Relief recently.  Probably would have been better to mention that first to be perfectly honest I was so excited about the idea of him yelling directions at me all thoughts of charity leapt from my mind.

(found via Kotaku)

Play magazine’s front cover for September can be found here.  It’s dominated by George Kamitani’s illustration of the Muramasa heroine versus…well…tentacles.

Despite being a little bit on the squicky side, I think it’s still pretty awesome, as magazine cover art goes.

So I’m not really planning on doing any big holiday report posts for the ‘blog.

However, I guess a quick pick of the photos and a short set of accompanying text might be edifying.  I’ll link the full Flickr set of images at the end for anyone who’s interested.

Read more…

It’s all in the choice of gel, and the choice of razor.

For some reason, back somewhere in my early twenties, I went from being able to shave in two minutes with disposable blades to taking ten minutes and requiring a fairly sharp razor to do it with.  Maybe there was a threshold toughening point in the bristles that I wasn’t fully aware of occurring, but when I look back on how I used to shave, I wince.

Additionally, I can’t shave on consecutive days now.  If I do, I end up cutting myself horribly.  While I’m not working (and, lets be honest, sometimes when I was working) I let myself foster a good few days growth before I shave, just to let my skin recover a bit.  It saves on hot water, and I seem to get fewer issues with ingrowing bristles because of it.

I can’t bring myself to stay beardy.  It’s just too itchy, and Lisa hates it.

Anyway, I ran out of shaving gel while on holiday, so I had to buy new stuff.  The supermarket was out of my normal choice, but there were other King of Shaves brands available.  Normally would have just waited, or gone to another shop, but I’m willing to investigate the rest of the KoS line.  I’m not massively into brand loyalty, but through investigation of various different types, it really is one of the few instances where one brand stands head and shoulders above the rest of its competition.  I even tried Clinique shaving foam for comparison.  It was terrible.

So the brand I bought this time was called “Azor”.  see, they’ve taken the word “razor” and removed the “r” to make it seem space-age and cool!  How awesome is that?  This, everyone, is what happens when you name things by committee.  Shit like that starts to seem plausible.

Irregardless of stupid naming conventions, the gel is actually really good, although the company seem to be heading the way of Pantene Pro-V.  With each further generation of their product, they slowly move towards something that has the colour and consistency of male ejaculate.

For the first time in about seven years, I shaved in under two minutes.

So the CIA Inspector General’s report (2004) was released yesterday, focussing on the detention and torture of suspects during the period 2001-2003.  A massie amount of it has been censored, but the stuff that isn’t is damning stuff nonetheless.

A quick summary, if there is such a thing for a report like this, can be found over at salon.com on Glenn Greenwald’s ‘blog.

If you’ve really got the stomach for it, click through to the comments on that link.  Prepare to spend your time sighing, or becoming increasingly irate.

Due to high winds around Firenze airport, we got delayed by a good ninety-minutes-plus-change and missed our connecting flight.  Thanks to Lisa’s perspicacity, our flights were with a proper airline and not a cheap and nasty cattle-class affair like the sort I used to regard as being the only realistic option.  As a result, we were rebooked on flights this morning, and given hotel accommodation overnight along with details of the customer service office should we feel any need to lodge a complaint.

Had we taken cattle-class flights (assuming there were any to be had, that is), we would likely have been told to fuck off, left to sleep on the airport floor overnight, and would have had to buy seats on a replacement flight at enormous personal expense.  I’ve read a few blogs about cheap flight carriers and their recent escalation from simple money grubbery into the heady territory of possible extortion.  I always thought that behaviour such as turning up the heat in the aircon and then making people pay through the nose for lukewarm drinks was limited to the Bullfrog classic, Theme Park,  but apparently not these days.  I’d honestly rather travel less than expose myself to that kind of low-class machination.

In any case, it feels like we’ve been gone for a month, at least.  Maybe it’s because we haven’t been away since January, but it felt like a complete disconnect from the normal reality of life.  Was it really just a week?  Feels like it was a month right now.
Anyway, I had a couple of story ideas while I was away.  I duly wrote them down in the chicken scratchings I claim as handwriting and will transpose them to the PC later.  I should also get back to work on the urban fantasy thing I’ve been doing (25 k booyah).  It’s pretty mediocre stuff at the moment, but once I’ve got the bones laid out I’ll spend some time kicking it into shape.

On a side note, what the hell is up with the US media, and to a lesser extent their government, at the moment with regards to the UK?  Fucking fair-weather friends, that lot.

Almost snorted tea out of my nose over ‘texts from last night‘, as found on the b3ta newsletter.

Granted, most are probably faked but that doesn’t prevent them from being awesome.

(650): the ice cream truck is coming omgomg
(1-650): dude, it’s 2 am.
(650): but its COMING

(Oh, btw, very NSFW)

So, at the end of the week Lisa and I are off to Italy!  Hooray!  I get to wander around lovely Tuscany going “ooh isn’t it pretty?” and Lisa gets to have her bum pinched by Berlusconi (it could happen).

She’s been practising with the phrasebook, which has been interesting to listen to.  There’s a touch of the it’s-a-me, Mario! to her delivery as she reads out the carefully-split phonetic renderings, bouncing a little on the emphasis, that adds a certain comic charm to lines like, “I do not want a blood transfusion” and “can you use a clean needle?”

We were meant to go and see The Ugly Truth on Monday, an event which ended up not happening due to someone not being able to make it along.  I can’t say I was too bothered, really.  So far I’ve missed out on quite a lot of cinema viewing this summer, and from the trailers I’ve seen perhaps I’m stretching the term, ‘missed out’ to the very limits of definition.  I have missed out on wasting money on humourless industry potboiler churn would be more appropriate.  I popped onto Apple’s trailer site the other day and sat through ten minutes of increasingly generic twaddle that made me suspect the Apocalypse is long past and no-one had quite noticed yet.  I mean, Sandra Bullock has already had her yearly rom-com, hasn’t she?  Do we really need another?  Going to the In Development section of IMDB, the titles forthcoming up to 2012 include Bridesmaids, Jingle, One of the Guys, Kiss & Tango, and The Sprinkler Queen.  Who’s with me on betting at least two are about a kooky, socially inept woman who has no time for a personal life meeting the man of her dreams and winning him over with the hitherto unrecognised sunniness she hides inside?

I know, I know.  You’d all bet it was 4 of them.

All of this leads me on to my morning internet reading, which includes a browse of the BBC news website and the Guardian.  I won’t even start on the BBC news, at least in an in-depth fashion.  Lets just say, whoever sits down every morning and decides that yes, these are the big stories that require as much lead time as possible, needs a goddamn slap.  Along with that, whoever has the job of going out and getting a ‘public reaction’ needs to do something other than  picking the first person they see and just making do with that.  I read news stories on there and just get angrier and angrier and angrier.

The top story of the day is “Unemployment poised to rise again”, with the strap revealing that the actual numbers are yet to be released.  So, what it really is, is speculation, not news.  Granted, it’s a pretty safe bet, but then if we were to take this method to it’s logical conclusion, the headlines should really read:

Sun expected to rise tomorrow

Giant ball of gas in space is expected to illuminate the British countryside again, following a brief dip overnight.

OK, so it turned out I *was* going to rant about it after all, which leaves me hardly any space to rant about the Guardian website being so full of op-ed bullshit that I think it’s somewhat remiss for them to call hijinks over the Investor’s Business Daily printing a fallacious comment about Stephen Hawking.  At least the IBD Editors went and removed the erroneous paragraph (although I guess they stopped short of rolling up a newspaper and smacking the author of the piece over the nose with it), a full day before the Guardian featured it in their online diary.

Of course I could take all the space I want, this being my ‘blog and all, but there’s a certain limit I hit when ranting after which I just start making spluttering noises and start weeping in an uncontrolled fashion that makes it hard to see the screen.  Since I’m dangerously close to that point, and I doubt you want to see what happens when I inneffectually paw the keyboard while gurning and wailing (but you do that already, I hear you cry), I’ll leave it there.

I learned that John Hughes has passed away, at the age of 59 from a heart attack.  Although I grew out of the kind of movies he wrote, produced and directed (I passed on such offerings as Flubber, Maid in Manhattan and Drillbit Taylor), his earlier offerings were enthusiastically watched in my youth, over and over and over again.

No doubt there are going to be a lot of Ferris Bueller references today, and maybe more than a few Home Alone ones in there…how about we go a little further back and watch the trailer for Mr. Mom?

Ah, simpler times.

In other news, this article may be of interest to my brother.  Doug Fine has gone the way of Walden Pond, but not on the same motivational basis.  Instead, he articulately defends his decision to attempt self-sufficiency on the grounds that he’s concerned pootling along as normal is going to fuck his shit up when the bottom falls out of society, as it were.

Ali and I had a conversation a few years ago about a post-consumer, post-apocalyptic storyline that I always kind of pushed away because I had problems imagining the kind of person that would basically pre-empt the collapse and set up on their own.  I couldn’t see it without some sort of fundamentalist nutcase sidling into view.  Maybe I’ll go back and dust off the premise one of these days.  You know, before computers stop working and we can no longer travel.

And finally, for Lisa: BABY KNITTING THAT LOOKS LIKE LINK OMG OMG