Poking around on a friend's blog today, I kept getting targeted advertising for an amputee dating site.


it said.

So after seeing the advert several times, I thought "fuck this, I'm signing up right now" and clicked the link.


Rightaway I was struck that I had been had by obviously-false advertising. Jane (pictured) has her two original legs, but a prosthetic-arm.

But between you and I, I'm not that upset about it. Who knew that I would find a dating site devoted to my fetish? I'm gonna register as a devotee, a pretender, an admirer, and a need-to-be -- and I'm expecting to find a love-match within days.

Labels: miscellany

It's pretty awesome that Def Leppard are still touring. Fuck, it's pretty awesome that they're still taking their shirts off, too.

Check out all the action at the contemporary Def Leppard concert photos blog.

Labels: miscellany

I'm becoming more and more convinced that I am in control of the weather.

I know that sounds mental, like I am having a psychotic episode or something, but the evidence is beginning to stack up. Have a look at the following timeline:

It was a lovely sunny Saturday (A) so I washed two loads of washing and hung them out. That evening a rainstorm arrived. The rainstorm persisted for a week (B), while I doggedly resisted the offers of a friend to dry my washing at her house -- preferring to run out of socks and underwear.

On a stormy Saturday morning (C) I relented, and carted my washing to her house and dried it. The weather cleared up that afternoon and a period of golden weather ensued (D), ending only on the Thursday (E) that I reckoned was a great day to wash my bedding. I hung the sheets and duvet cover out and a couple of hours later it began to piss down.

This time I was determined I was going to see it out, and get my bedding dry the natural way. It continued to piss down. After almost a week (F) I took everything to my long-suffering friend's house (G) and dried it in her machine.

Thence followed a delightful few days (H) of Indian-summer style weather. Yesterday (I), I reckoned that I should run another quick load through the machine and get it dry. It seemed only moments after I hung everything out that the downpour started.

And on and on it goes.

It's clear that in order to stop the weather turning bad, I must not wash my clothes, and/or hang them out on the line out the back of the house. It's not so clear what is required to turn the current bad weather (X marks today) to the good again. Must I always prevail upon the kindnesses of others? Purchase a dryer? Dry the clothes some other way -- hot-water cupboard, heater, clothes-rack? I'm sorry about this. Until I figure it out, you're going to keep being cold and getting your feet wet. I can only hope the effect is localised.

In the meantime, here's a couple of songs:

Bryan Ferry - A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (3.66 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

This high-camp cover of Bob Dylan's Hard Rain... got to #10 in the UK singles charts in 1973 or so. British people are sometimes quite weird like that (cf Benny Hill, the Laughing Policemen, early David Bowie etc).

The Cure - Open (4.71 MB mp3: Save As or play)

Open umm.. opens The Cure's 1992 album Wish, which is much more maligned that it deserves to be. Sure it contains a couple of 'novelty' tracks such as Friday I'm In Love, but for the most part it stands alongside bands like Spiritualised and My Bloody Valentine and Bailter Space and so on as far as downer disassociative isolationist oppressive head-fuck multitracked melanges of guitars and noise goes.

I wanted to tag this post misanthropy, but I decided it wasn't really that hateful. I wonder if I should start (another) new tag: cautiously hopeful?

Labels: miscellany, music

In the beginning, there was the birthday and the birthday was with cake and cake was the birthday. And the same was in the beginning with *cake:



* Actually, you can probably see that that is a pan of chocolate brownie, rather than cake, but this is a minor detail best left from the narrative for fear of obfuscating the essence of the passage.

This photograph was taken at the best possible moment -- festooned with 34 lit candles, seconds later the candles started to melt as one and a layer of hot, coloured wax was deposited on the cake. You may have thought that this would be an impediment to the consumption of the cake, but it was not; the cake was served hot and almost-cooked, with a large amount of fresh whipped cream. It was paired by our sommelier with a stunningly-good 2006 Johannesdorf gewürtztraminer.

Later on the cake was unfairly targeted by a vicious smear campaign, as one's tummy complained long and hard about the ingestion of this confused mixture of substances.


Some time later, it came to pass that a second cake was proposed, and the birthday promptly moved upon the kitchen bench and made it so. And the birthday saw that the cake was good:



You probably won't recognise the cake as the classic "Ghost" design, with a sheet of marzipan 'draped' over a conical sponge cake, but veritably that is what it is. It's also not the most moist number ever; it is due to be introduced to a bottle of marsala, or possibly tripel sec, in the very near future.

Severed Heads - We Have Come To Bless This House (5.38 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

You possibly should never expect the worst.

Labels: miscellany, photos

Surely this is the best cat in the world:

The cat was found in great pain trailing a gin trap clamped to its front left paw in the Christchurch suburb of Yaldhurst on Sunday.

Have you seen the size of that fucken thing? That he was dragging down the road?

The injured cat is recovering well and will be put up for adoption if it is not claimed by its owner by the middle of next week.

"He is a big, friendly cat and there is a good chance someone is missing him."

I know it's still months until Christmas, and even longer until my birthday again, but... can I please has?

Someone?

Labels: cat photos, miscellany

"so whose is that new motorcycle parked outside the house?"

Labels: mai new house, miscellany

Powers Booth and Doug Graham:



What say you, savages?

Labels: miscellany, separated at birth

Awwwwwwwwww......



Poor little bastards are under threat of extinction due to a rare and mysterious cancer disease -- Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD). (story)

Labels: miscellany

You may think that it sux0x being stuck in an office on such a lovely day as this; but let me tell you, you've no cause for disconsolance when you've a pair of Found Peach-Tinted Happy Glasses (TM):



There's no way anything can be wrong in the world with a pair of these wrapped around yer pies. Although I had to add the comedy LOLmouth cos I wasn't looking happy enough.

Labels: bling, miscellany

Joy!



My 18-month-long self-renovation art-project -- making myself over in the image of the killer from Twin Peaks -- has almost reached fruition.

Labels: art, miscellany

River Phoenix and Heath Ledger:



What say you, savages?

Labels: miscellany, separated at birth

Just a wee heads up: I'll be presenting the very first Wellingtonista Radio Show on The VBC tonight. The VBC is the student owned and operated/community LPFM radio station broadcasting on 88.3FM, based at the Kelburn Campus of Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand.



I've had little luck picking up their signal on my radio -- which is odd given that I live quite close to the transmitter (I think I'm in the shadow of a hill) -- but the streaming feed (http://202.50.176.139:8000/listen.pls) works just fine. The show will go from 7 - 9 pm, NZDT (GMT+13). The studio line is +64 4 463 9994 if you feel like ringing up and abusing/encouraging me.

Things is in they infancy, but expect the show to grow and grow and take on a life and form of its own over the early weeks of the year, with contributions from many of the Wellingtonista's writers.

Labels: miscellany, radio

Art cards support emerging NZ artists

Art cards are top quality greeting cards featuring the art of young, emerging New Zealand artists. For every card you buy, $1 is given to the artist to help support their careers and enable them to continue to develop their art practice.

Art cards are professionally designed and photographed, printed in New Zealand, fully recyclable and have no unnecessary packaging.

...more...



Finding art in all the wrong places..........

Labels: miscellany, props

In order to offset my seasonal-misanthropy, and to ensure a totally non-wack Xmas day, I've decided to compile a Totally Non-Wack Xmas Music Compilation.

Yeah, I thought it was a good idea too.

Then my mind went totally blank.

The criteria is somewhat complicated. For a start, the tune cannot be wack in any shape or form. Things that could make a tune be wack include:

• it's on every other goddam Christmas compilation (no Snoopy's Christmas, y'dig)
• it's overtly, inertly or otherwise-didactically Christian or theological in some way
• .. and some other rather tenuous and difficult to describe aspects
  

So far I've got:
James Brown -- Signs of Christmas
James Brown -- Let's make Christmas mean something this year
Stevie Wonder -- The day that love began
Stevie Wonder -- Someday at Christmas
Stevie Wonder -- Silver bells
Stevie Wonder -- Twinkle, twinkle, little me
Stevie Wonder -- What Christmas means to me
Stevie Wonder -- The miracles of Christmas
Stevie Wonder -- Everyone's a kid at Christmas time
and uh.. Big Star -- Jesus Christ

The James Browns are pretty much the only ones from this which don't suck ass. I mean are non-wack. The Stevie Wonders are from this, and there's bound to be much less of them in the final mix as soon as I can replace them with some other tracks.

There doesn't need to be a particular emphasis on funky-ass; just some soul and a little bit of melody will do. I'm anticipating there's probably some furious, stonkin' gospel shit out there which would go off... hopefully. I had high hopes for this compilation which I found on the blogosphere, but most of it is kinda lame -- with some stunning exceptions.

So can you help?

...

Come along to this, on Wednesday night, if you can (and are in Wellington, NZ):

This is a free event. It'll be grand.

Labels: miscellany, promotions

She says "You don't read women authors do ya?" / at least that's what I think I hear her say / Well I say "How would you know, and what would it matter anyway" / Well she says "Ya just don't seem like ya do", I said "You're way wrong" / She says "Which ones have you read then?", I say "I've read Erica Jong" / She goes away for a minute, and I slide out, out of my chair / I step outside back to the busy street, but nobody's goin' anywhere

-- Bob Dylan, Highlands

Reading Eric Jong (Fear of Flying) is turning out to be quite the experience. Frankly it's upsetting, and unsettling, and I haven't even finished it. It's the (in)famous one, the one about trying to reconcile passion with feminism, the one about the "zipless fuck" -- in which the narrator Isadora Wing details her fantasy of elated anonymous sex -- sex without strings, preambles, or consequences; sex with a stranger on a train, an itinerant Romeo who comes, sees, conquers, and disappears into the mists of the station.

What was it about [committed relationships] anyway? Even if you loved your [partner], there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge, no danger. And you longed for an overripe Camembert, a rare goat cheese: luscious, creamy, cloven-hoofed.

I was not against [committed relationships]. I believed in [them], in fact. It was necessary to have one best friend in a hostile world, one person you'd be loyal to no matter what, one person who'd always be loyal to you. But what about all those other longings which after a while the [relationship] did nothing to appease? The restlessness, the hunger, the thump in the gut, the thump in the cunt, the longing to be filled up, to be fucked thorough every hole, the yearning for dry champagne and wet kisses........*

The zipless fuck, the (comparatively; relatively) meaningless encounter, dalliance, "affair" or just the one-nighter -- that's the ideal. The irony: Fear of Flying demonstrates the unavailability of the zipless fuck. Far from being an inspirational story (as it is routinely billed) of a woman's escape from a dead marriage and discovery of erotic pleasure and independence, it's the tale of a woman who ditches her husband only to find in the arms of a lover first impotence and frustration, then heartbreak and abandonment. Hardly the embodiment of female liberation -- or 35 years later, the evolution of the committed relationship and the shedding of it's (co-)dependence on monogamy; hardly what I was hoping for.

How disappointing.

Then with timing that's so good it's almost suspicious, you meet the person who throws your world into a spin; the person who throws a dart through the fug of your complacency; who causes you a sharp intake of breath and the racing of pulse and the blah-de-blah. That person who through no act nor blame of their own makes you wonder and ponder long-and-hard at their seeming-suitedness to you; now you're left doubting your commitment and wondering, simply, "am I with the right person?".

And am I able to ever trust your impulses, reasons, rationales, insights (or not) again.

This post was inspired in part by Harvey Pekar; ordinary life IS pretty complex stuff, indeed.

Mayo Thompson - Dear Betty Baby (2.62 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Christina Nehring on Erica Jong and the zipless fuck
Erica Jong on Bob Dylan

*excerpts from Christina Nehring and Erica Jong reproduced without permission.

Labels: books, miscellany, music

We don't have much in the way of natural disasters here in little ol' New Zealand. Nothing much ever goes wrong* -- on a grand scale, that is. Which was why it was a sudden blow to the senses, as it were to receive this email, this morning, after I sent in my latest review to the website I write for:

to:stephen
from:brad
thank god you emailed me. i didn't know your email address and have a favor to ask. tulsa got nailed w/ the worst ice storm in oklahoma history (!!!) sunday night, and we are stranded at my parents house b/c we have no electricity (hence no update yesterday since my computer is in cold storage aka my apt. fuckers). anyway, i also don't have ftp access on my parents shitty computer, so can you change the 'word from the editor' on the FD mainpage to say that we will hopefully be back next week with an update, but can't promise anything due to the power outages (1/3 of oklahoma was without power as of yesterday) and that i'll update the situation as it changes. anyway, just something to that effect and i'll love you forever (and harry too. oh wait, i already love harry forever). thx my dear

Sure enough: Half A Million Still Without Power





* knocks loudly on wood.

Labels: miscellany

Labels: miscellany, photos

So, Lorna Catherine Harrow-Hodginson participated in a multiple-participant sexual act on a balcony in downtown Christchurch, one Friday afternoon.

In full view of the public.

However, it all may not be as simple as all that. First of all, a bunch of drugs were involved. I mean, no shit (read the story). You'll also notice that the judge who bailed her forbade her to return within 100m of Latimer Square, and said:

"If you work, I would prefer you work in the more open area of Manchester Street, rather than (Latimer) square."

Latimer Square, which has a reputation as being used by young people hooking for trade. Work as in hooking. Manchester Street as in the "red-light" district.

So what we're really talking about is a party with drugs and hookers in the middle of the afternoon, which spilled out of the hotel room/apartment it was being held in and onto the balcony.

Umm:
1. Isn't 17 a bit young for a girl to be working as a prostitute? I'd have to check the law, but surely the legal age is at least 18?
2. Either way, I trust that young Lorna is in no way being exploited, abused, coerced or otherwise forced against her will into any "group sex on balconies in the middle of the afternoon".
3. Who the hell does Christchurch think it is? Las Vegas?

POSTSCRIPT
Lorna was picked up in Latimer Square again on Friday, and held in custody over the weekend (Poor wee mite! All that noise! All that piss and vomit!). This time the judge has given her a 7pm to 7am curfew. Not that that's gonna get in the way of any more group sex on balconies in the middle of the afternoon.

Which is just as well, and for that one really has to say, Praise the Lord. If there's one thing I think we can all agree on, it's that there should be more group sex on balconies in the middle of the afternoon. In fact, in answer to the ubiquitous question "What Does Wellington Need", I really only have one answer: "group sex on balconies in the middle of the afternoon".

Awesome.

I wonder if council community-project funding could be arranged.

Labels: christian-baiting, miscellany

Fuck me, it's Wednesday already. Wow. Y'see what happened is that on Friday morning I was horsing around with Ms. K -- we do that a bit, horsing around... you know, all-in wrestling, slap wars, that kinda thing -- and in doing so I managed to cause myself grievous bodily harm in the lower back department.

So commenced a heady and delicious 48 hours or so of a combination of extreme pain and opioid-induced delirium. That's right, I doped myself up on Norflex, Codeine and Ibuprofen and I went back to bed. And that was it until midday Sunday. I did get up and play cricket on Saturday, still extremely high -- and honestly it wasn't much fun. It was important to try and keep moving just a little, though.

Importantly, I had just the right record to play during those long and contented hours warm under the duvet, and I'll be touching on that shortly. But for now, let me present Tron Guy:


... and then The World of Grace Jones:

Labels: miscellany

Yeah, so I posted some videos of some friends (and other people) doing some parkour in Wellington.

Labels: miscellany

This is really, really good news.



I was affeared that the Kiwi T-Shirts shop had vanished forever from Wellington when it moved from its previous location on the corner of Chews Lane and Willis Street (for the "massive" Chews Lane project).

About a month ago I went hunting for it at its purported new location -- 27 Manners Street, according to the whitepages. It was nowhere to be found. "Oh noes" wailed I -- fearing the worst -- to anyone who would listen, "how'm I gonna make my one-off slogan art tee-shirts now?" (Galleryhag)

But riding past the location in a bus, yesterday, all my fears evaporated upon spying the new signage, and Kiwi T-Shirts man in the window, hanging up the good ol' trusty "print goofy images of your nephews and nieces on mousepads and white shirts" shop stock.

First up out of the blocks at the new location is gonna be...



... I think...

Labels: miscellany

Ooooh I got my order from aQuarius Records today... and with it... some new tUMULt buttons (Sorry for blurry, hands shaking):


Click on the logo, check out their site.. it's.. unusual.

Labels: bling, miscellany

I found a piccie of me at Jo Hubris's Russian party a couple of weeks ago.



Usually I look a lot more handsome, though, when I go to parties and stuff.

Labels: miscellany, photos

Sorry for not posting more. Sorry for mixing up the publishing of the last Friday Farce, and Monday Mystery. Sorry for well.. sorry for not having a farce today, either.




Truthfully, it's been a bit hard to concentrate, what with bloody Kerry Prendergast getting another term as mayor of Wellington, and the country being overrun by terrorists.

Yeah.. so..

...

At least go here, there's been another installment by The Commonsense Nihilist to his graphic novel.

Labels: cat photos, comix, lol, miscellany

For my New Zealand readers who are Xtra customers, if you are having trouble retrieving your email this morning, try this -- it worked for me.

Basically all you have to do is change your email account logon name to include the full domain part of your email address.

For example, this is from the Xtra help pages on their site:


Change as per this:


(click on either image to see larger version)

Like I said, these images are from the Xtra help pages on their site and they apply specifically to Outlook XP/2003, but the principle remains the same. (Here is the page where you can select help for whichever email client you are using.) This also applies only to @xtra.co.nz addresses -- if you have a domain email address (e.g. info@yourdomain.co.nz ) please click here for Xtra's online guide to configuring your email settings, and best of luck.

Labels: miscellany

Holy god............. (via For Your Entertainment):

Labels: miscellany, youtube

In other news...

Low response to postal voting
Apathy is looming as the biggest issue at this month's local body elections, with early voting figures suggesting a record low turnout. One person realised only a month ago that Wellington's mayor is a woman.

Fer fuckssakes, people, would you vote already? Please?


Muso on dope charge
A New Zealand musician has been detained for a week at Dubai International Airport for possession of marijuana. A customs inspector caught the 48-year-old New Zealander and father of thirteen children -- identified only as B A -- after searching him and finding about 25gm of marijuana.

The mystery man describes himself thusly:

a renowned musician who dedicated his life to nurturing underprivileged children and families through the art of music and musical expression.

Oooh gossip me up! What does B.A. stand for? Bryan Adams? He's Canadian, though, can't be him.

Labels: miscellany

Hugecrab.com was created on September 15, 2007 to "catalog the internet's RAPIDLY GROWING stockpile of huge crab; hencefore, All Your Base are belong to Us".

The Original Huge Crab.

Labels: linkage, lol, miscellany

I could watch this all day. Really. All day.

Labels: eye candy, miscellany

Labels: blog, miscellany

Own It 9/25 on DVD.. in the States, anyways...

Ol' Dirty Bastard - Shimmy Shimmy Ya (2.46 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Labels: miscellany, music

Sorry about the delay there; nothing to worry about, just had a bit of a messy midweek with which to contend. Thanks for your long-suffering tolerance, though.

• I has a profile at NZ Cricket Online. Nothing to get excited about, though, it's all a bit of a laugh. Speaking of cricket, though, it's almost the beginning of the new season, and the mighty Falconhawk(e) is about to rise from the ashes of um.. last season.
• The Commonsense Nihilist is taking the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service head-on in his own inimitable way.
• It was Kiran's birthday the other night; we had a drunken blast -- part of which involved her challenging me that I couldn't sling her over my shoulder and cart her down the street (silly girl!). She loved the present I got her.

Oh, and check out these guys:



They're Welsh rugby players Adam Jones, Colin Charvis and Duncan Jones. Aren't they the CUTEST???? Don't you love their hair?

Me too.

They look like big fluffy poodles, not mean, ferocious forwards in a rugby team.

Labels: Falconhawk, miscellany

All Blacks accused of Pacific pillage - again
Welshman and English rugby apologist Stephen Jones once again trots out his traditionally predictable, boring shite about New Zealand rugby and as usual, conveniently ignores the immigration trends of Pacific Islanders moving to New Zealand and the diverse cultural mix in our major cities.

He's also a really, really unattractive man. Now I'm not averse to a Welshman, me, but gee whiz, send him back to the fucken valleys wouldya?


Chinese man dies after three-day internet session
Meanwhile Chinese President Hu Jintao is heading a campaign to rid the internet of "unhealthy" content and make it a platform for Communist Party doctrine.

*is looking forward to being able to read the complete works of Mao online*

KFC drives Restaurant Brands' sales boost
Restaurant Brands is reporting second quarter sales across its three New Zealand businesses up 5.8 per cent to $93.6 million, in the most driven by solid growth in the KFC business.

Wow. People still eat KFC?


Who was that masked All Black?
A rather large individual with a hood over his head runs manically through a Rugby World Cup media conference.

Carl Hayman amuses and then shocks world media by first doing his impression of a gimp, followed by his "Michael Jackson" (sans infant, of course) and "the one that always slays em", a member of Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Can - Mother Upduff (4.1 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using player below)

Labels: miscellany, music

George Lunt's Corporate-Alien Blog:

Favourite two recent posts:

• Conflict of Interest between Drug Companies and Doctors

Malevolent extra-terrestrials and alien corporations are trying to poison us through substandard pharmeceuticals.

• The "Click It Or Ticket" Road to Fascism

Emotional propaganda used to encourage people to observe seatbelt laws is analogous to campaigns used by Hitler to "get his people to let him make important decisions for them".

The blog actually just seems to be a wrapper/index for the Corporate/Aliens site.

Blog author George Lunt also writes Lunt's World.

Labels: aliens are in our midst, blog, favourite new blog, miscellany

An Open Letter to Kanye West

Dear Kanye West,

Please shut up. Nobody cares. Sure, you're probably a marvelous producer and, according to white kids everywhere, you're a fantastic rapper.

more...

LOLz. Count it.

...



Even better than Britney Spears' bizarre performance on the MTV VMAs was comedienne Sarah Silverman's opening stand-up routine, which included her impersonation of Britney's "hairless" vulva. An utterly surreal moment of sublime physical comedy. I think.

Full transcript here.

In other news.. it happened again...

Labels: miscellany, youtube

I have been speculating for some time about what this is (on the pavement in Ghuznee Street outside Hamish McKay and Bowen Galleries):


One Moment Caller has speculated that it's the base of a sculpture, and made a purty wire-frame representation of it.



...



...

A song:

The Legend! - Melt The Guns (2.33 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using player below)

From the 1987 Creation Records compilation WOW Wild Summer.

Labels: art, comix, miscellany, music, photos

I wondered how long it would be before I saw some kind of 9/11 culture-jamming:



As it happens, it wasn't very long at all.

It was a beautiful spring day just like today -- and a Tuesday, too -- that six years ago I wandered down Aurora Tce and into the Terrace post office to post some LPs to the USA, and had to get the increasingly incredulous (!) shop-assistant to spell out why there would be unforeseen delays in getting the parcels to their destination. And then hurried home again, to spend the next few hours watching people jumping out of tall buildings; and so on.

And believe it or not, it was an utter coincidence that yesterday I posted some song-lyrics containing the following:

They wanna have a war to keep us on our knees
They wanna have a war to keep their factories
They wanna have a war to stop us buying Japanese
They wanna have a war to stop industrial disease
They're pointing out the enemy to keep you deaf and blind
They wanna sap your energy incarcerate your mind

... which frankly I find quite uncanny.

Labels: freedom-hating, miscellany, photos

The camera adds pounds, or whatever, as they say, but does the camera add a high collar, a pair of hollow-bore fangs and a coffin filled with dirt in a castle somewhere east of Bohemia?

I found this stuff on Kiwiblog. I can't be bothered with all the guff comparing Helen Clark with Robert Muldoon (pictorially OR politically), but this short morpho-tastic clip (below) is truly unsettling.

Who the hell is that at the end there? Frank-n-Furter?

...

You're gonna want to get the bad taste out of your mouth: so here's Tony Conrad with Faust -- From the side of man and womankind - part 2, first track of the album Outside the Dream Syndicate (1972).

Labels: miscellany, music, youtube

The Stumps show seemed to go quite well the other night, although the recording would seem to suggest otherwise. Honestly, but -- when do they not, eh? Live recordings, man *shudders*

...

I tell you what, fucking Telecom had better get their shit sorted out pronto. Not only did they make a complete balls-up of the recent move to their new Yahoo|Xtra email system, but they have obviously fucked up their spam-trapping somewhere along the line. I am being absolutely inundated with spam now; before the changeover, I was lucky if I saw one a day in my Inbox.

It's nice of them to give us one week's free internet as compensation for the email problems, but frankly, they can keep it -- just sort out the spam, guys. On the plus side, their new webmail client is streets ahead of the previous one -- so cheers to that -- though I dread to imagine how badly it's going to not work on my cellphone, or PDA.

A Facelift parody of the Yahoo|Xtra email trouble on Michael Gregg's blog.

...

The Commonsense Nihilist has published a set of background notes on his graphic novel. These are in their own right very interesting, but in addition they shed -- in some cases, crucial -- extra illumination on the goings-on in the comic.

His working title for the work is The New World: A revenge fantasy, which I quite like.

An index to proceedings:
Here is a link to the first instalment.
Here is a link to the second instalment.

I'll probably keep doing this, mainly on the off-chance someone is interested, but not so interested as to yet have loaded his URL into a feed-reader.

...

I drew this before, on my friend Martha's wall, on Facebook. It's the avenging croco-angel of modernism.


There was some debate initially as to whether or not it was actually a bird-angel, but I cleared up any confusion when I pointed out that bird-angels don't wear all-in-one flannelette jump-suits with built-in booties -- that privilege is reserved solely for croco-angels.

...

Can you tell I'm stalling? My phone's battery died, and I can't get the photos I want/need off it.

Labels: comix, miscellany, stumps

Paul Reubens (55 this week!) and Adam Sandler:



What say you, savages?

UPDATE I reckon there might be some Dustin Hoffman in there, as well.

Labels: miscellany, separated at birth

Paul Addis and Strongbad:



What say you, savages?

Labels: miscellany, separated at birth

Malcolm McDowell and Graham Cleghorn:



What say you, savages?

Labels: miscellany, separated at birth

The lunar eclipse went off last night, albeit with a few hitches. Locally it was a bit cloudy early, but cleared up later on and in plenty of time. Pity about the wind.



Above image by TELPortfolio. There is a Flickr group setup for images of the eclipsing moon, but there are plenty of other pics on there which are not part of the group (tag "lunareclipse_28aug2007"). A favourite page is this one, which just kinda fell together out of TELPortfolio's tagged "lunareclipse":



Frankly, that's fucking erotic.

Labels: miscellany, photos

...in Levin I found some incredible wallpaper, too. Isn't it just so purty?


Wants.

...

Following the David Bowies a couple of months ago, my new BFF neglected stairways has uploaded the 8-track version of Captain Beefheart's Strictly Personal.

On the left's a picture of The Captain; click it to be magically transported to a comprehensively fast and bulbous website all about the same.

Labels: heroes, miscellany, music, photos

Once upon a time, Dr. The Sneak went missing. She used to go walkabout quite a lot, but she always turned up. This time, however, days and days went by and she never showed -- and we feared the worst.

To quickly invoke Sod's law and cause The Sneak to come home, I quickly whipped up a design and printed some The Sneak t-shirts:


The slogan The Sneak is Not Dead is based on the song that Strongbad (from Homestarrunner.com; video) sang when he thought his offsider The Cheat (video) had run away for ever.

Strongbad - The Cheat is Not Dead (2.79 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using player below)

Here is some more information about the song.

The Sneak is named after The Sneak (wikipedia), the old-timey version of The Cheat. He is described as being "a small rodent or opossum with a striped tail". It's alleged that he once put a Bengal tiger in The Kaiser's latrine. He had a song written about him -- The Ballad of the Sneak (video).

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Oh, and yes -- The Sneak was definitely not dead (scroll down). Somehow she had found out about the bird sanctuary in Karori, and she had simply walked the several kilometers from our house to go and try her luck.

Labels: cat photos, miscellany, music

The USB 'stealth switch' claims to be "the worlds first desktop cloaking device". From the GadgetLite blog:

This device can be hidden and controlled under your desk! With its 6″ USB cable, its foot tap button can be placed "hiddenly" under your foot. Once the foot tap is stepped, the following functions can be activated according to your preset options:

1. To switch or hide your current window/all windows instantly.
2. You can preset to bring up a preferred window at all times.
3. Password to protect your computer.
4. Mute sound, etc...