“Which CSI is this one? Which one did we inflict on ourselves last night?”

“Oh, I don’t know. CSI Miami. CSI New York. There are millions of them.”

“CSI Antarctica?”

“CSI Penguin!”

The first scene of what turns out to be CSI New York shows a bar turned into an ice cave. There is a penguin.

I give up.

Well, tea, to be honest.

One of my favourite C+ers, the poster currently known as Toshiake — whom I wish to buy a drink or three at the earliest opportunity — posted the following classic piece:

Dear Sir

When so-called asylum seekers get free haircuts for their swans isn’t it time someone did something about cyclists?

Yesterday I saw a completely invisible cyclist riding backwards with no lights or helmet, drunk, on fire, juggling bubonic plague vials as laser death rays shot out of his lights and blinded passers-by. Dozens lay slain. And they don’t pay road tax.

Yours etc

Colin Apron.

Brilliant stuff. Keep up the good work that man.

I’ve been playing with my camera again.

I took this shot from a colleague’s car while it was sitting in the Glenrothes Morrison’s car park. He’d gone to get some lunch. The crow caught my eye and then I realised how ecclesiastical the lamp appeared against the overcast sky.

The bird stayed there long enough for me to take another shot, which I’ve colourised a little because, as they say in Pimp My Ride: I can.

…unless you come back with an injury.

We did the Chain Walk today with my parents. I slipped on the rock on the first chain while my finger was caught through a loop, and now the end of my finger is black and swollen. Even so, it was a brilliant day out. The one thing that put a bit of a downer on it was the vast amount of litter and trash all over beaches that I remember as being utterly beautiful when I was small.

More on that later. My finger hurts too much to type right now.

“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.

While on the team management screen on the aforementioned Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

“There’s Silver Surfer on his board. Maybe he’ll do a Stalefish.”

“Stalefish to Mute Air?”

“Followed by the Worm. Silver Surfer does the Worm.”

“I’d pay to see that.”

Marvel does SSX Tricky. That’s what passes for geekery round here.

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.