“The day my father Odin banished me from Asgard I was bitten by a vampire and had radioactive waste dumped into my eyes. To make matters worse, my mutant ability to control weather activated just as I was hit by a blast of gamma radiation.”

Deadpool.

Whatever else you might say about Marvel Ultimate Alliance, the dialogue is hilarious.

I took this photo last night, when I went along to visit my parents. All the way along to Upper Largo through Leven I could see this sky perfectly framed in the offside rear view mirror and I wanted to stop in the middle of the road and take a picture of the mirror.

Of course I didn’t do that because it would have been irresponsible, not to mention quite sad. Instead I waited until I was safely at my destination. Unfortunately the orientation of the main street didn’t produce the same expansive view as I’d had on my way along, but this isn’t too bad.

That’s my entries in for the Edinburgh Sprint Tri in March, the East Fife Sprint Tri in April and the Great Edinburgh Run in May.

Next month it’s the Musselburgh Audax but it clashes with the Bruce Tri Sprint in Lochgelly and I wanted to go along to that to talk to the club and sort out some open water swim training over the summer.

It’s expensive this racing. Nearly fifty quid for two entries, and that’s with a race licence.

I’ve just had to upgrade my Flickr account to a paid one (noting that I’ve had a flickr account for about a week but after several years of LJ use I’m still a scabby freeloader). The combination of having a digital camera (which means, because I don’t have to pay for it, I can snap away to my heart’s content not caring that I’ll only get 4 or 5 usable pictures out of an entire batch) and opportunity to use it has led to me becoming quite snap-happy.

We’ve had a digital camera for a while. It’s a big Fuji jobby that Frood bought a few years ago. I inherited his Minolta SLR when he bought the Fuji. I still like the SLR. There’s something about the clarity of photographs produced from film and the whole process of taking the film to be developed. It’s magical and alchemical. There is no way to tell what will come out. There isn’t the instant gratification of the digital camera, and so each print carries more of an investment — not just in monetary cost but in anticipation and care. Using an SLR has meant I’ve limited my photography. It’s big, costly, awkward to carry, eminently breakable and each shot has to be carefully chosen to make the most out of each roll of film.

We were given a Canon Ixus for our Christmas this year and I bought a 1GB memory card for it. The difference between this little baby and my Minolta is akin to drinking Jolt Cola rather than properly made espresso: both will give you a caffeine hit but the espresso requires more thought; is more elegant and sophisticated; and should be savoured to make the most of the effort.

Last night I was bored as a result of Frood going gallivanting and leaving me behind with no one to talk to except my invisible friends and the tellybox. So I spent twenty minutes taking pictures of my lava lamps. With the SLR that would have been twenty minutes setting up the tripod, working out which lens, setting the exposures and then taking 3 or 4 pictures before deciding that I’d wasted enough film in poor lighting.

With the compact digital I took more than 100 photographs and of those 100 photographs I decided only seven were worth uploading to Flickr. This must be how professional photographers feel. “It’s only film, darling!”

Talk about an instant hit.

Of course, the digital also grants the advantage of being able to dump the photos directly into PSP and start playing with them.

Isn’t technology grand? I do like my burr-mill ground, stove-top percolated SLR; but I’m rapidly coming to like the sugary fizz of the compact digital too.

The video for Gaybar by Electric Six (we are not worthy!) just came on one of the digital tellybox channels. The Hits, I think. Or something like that. Double figures, anyway. Unintelligible adverts featuring scantily clad women doing odd things with gym balls made of the same shade of latex as unflavoured condoms.

They bleeped out the words “war” and “nuclear” with the sound of a whipcrack. So it went sort of like this:

Let’s start a pksssshhhh!
Let’s start a pksssshhhh pkssshhhh!
At the gay bar, gay bar, gay bar…”

I thought pixellating the pepper grinder was bad enough. Is this the state of play now? We have to bleep out perfectly good words because… well, actually, I can’t think of a reason why they would do that. It’s just fucked-up.

Frood is off gallivanting, by the way. Christmas party, dinner, clubbing and staying over in Embra with a colleague. Only told me yesterday. I am all alone and have no one to play with.

Woe is me.

Over the past few days I’ve been listening almost incessantly to the album Lullabies to Paralyze by Queens of the Stone Age. Since Chuffy introduced them to me several years ago I have been enamoured both of Joshua Homme’s angelic voice and Nick Soltieri’s looks (although the latter and the band parted company after Songs For The Deaf). Homme’s singing reminds me of the Hollow Man: its angelic perfection used so demoniacally.

Lullabies is another of those albums that I didn’t like much at first and yet now I can’t get enough of it. It’s Van Leeuwen’s lap steel that does it. I’ve never heard such a mournful wail. The exquisite, pure cry — put to especially good use on the tracks Long Slow Goodbye and The Blood Is Love — is a beautiful counterpoint to Homme’s choirboy vocals. It’s an aching note that slices through the structure of the background: a cold wind searing through a landscape of dense, blocky architecture.

The synaesthesia has become more complex and intense over the years, perhaps because I’ve learned to pay more attention to it and appreciate the vast realms of sensory possibility it provides. Every so often I come across a sensory stimulus that does more than add an extra dimension to sight and sound: it engenders entire worlds. The first time this happened I was about 8 years old, and the track was The Whale by ELO. I didn’t see a whale: I saw an entire futuristic city with town planning and infrastructure and airships and monorails. I was much, much older and had come to realise how much of my perception arises from the complex interaction of synaesthesia with overactive imagination and parallel processors when I recognised that early evocation as a synaesthetic response to musical structure. Back then it was mainly architecture and climate, bizarrely. Now it’s not just architecture and climate but culture and people.

Lullabies has become particularly special to me because the album as a whole is evocative of Ben, just as Fakevox, by Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, is evocative of Frood.

And, of course, Joshua’s Homme’s voice is the essence of the Hollow Man: spawned in Heaven, blossomed in Hell.

I think he might be right.

My thanks to southlaker for that one.

Posted by jibi to C+.

http://www.netdisaster.com/

Blogger just “upgraded”.

They fucked up my RSS feed.

I fixed it, but now it has reposted everything from the last couple of months instead of just fixing it.

To those of you reading this on a feed: I am so, so sorry. If it’s any consolation, it has screwed up my LJ friends page as well. If it carries on doing this I will take the RSS feed off until I’ve moved the blog to something that works. Like WordPress.