Thanks, Munky. I really needed that this morning. See for yourself. The Armageddon Flowchart. I especially like the part that says:

Bruces Campbell and Willis ascend to Heaven, leaving us all in the lurch, the bastards.

It does indeed look like text from Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. How dull. It’s not nearly so interesting now.

It was a month after the Return that the first gull of the Flock so much more, but without a big glug at a moment like this –well, enough of are special and gifted and divine, above other birds.” grandmother to save his skin. But even Buzzard didn’t know anything about me eyed them critically. “Let’s begin with Level Flight.” And saying that, he night was three months ago, and I had gotten rid of most of the stuff and

But Jonathan Livingston Seagull, unashamed, stretching his wings crashed and left a hole in the clay. He grunted with pleasure.

another world. A burst of fear and shock and black as he hit, and then he

“Well, shall we get on with it?”
without a single flap of wing from sand to cloud and down again.

“You dog, you,” he said and smiled. “Well, let’s go for it. First thing
water.

“God, Red! Everybody calls you that.

Jonathan’s voice raised. “Irresponsibility? My brothers!” he cried. “Who
out to him. But I was used to working alone. I saw what I had to see, and I

The spam gibberish I get. Some of it is fab!

“Are you saying I can fly?”
spot. To be honest, I could have gotten by with seven, but I threw one just
other gulls have only hurt themselves, and one day they will know this,
thanks.
“Well sure, O.K. they’re Outcast,” said some of the younger gulls,
hadn’t worked out better. Some cure I came up with for his melancholy. And

and growing meteor-fast, directly in his path.
bullets miss you–it’s a stroke of luck. And as for anything else –that’s

Haven’t really got much to say for myself at the moment. I’m experiencing a touch of menstrual ennui that I hope will be gone by the weekend. Unless, of course, MVC happens to know some fetish clubs where that sort of thing is de rigeur.

Still fantasising about giving it all up and becoming a cycle messenger in Prague or Vancouver. Or St Andrews, to bring it back home with a bump. I’m appalled at the cycle shops in Fife. Either they are pretty poor or we were positively spoilt by the Bike Shed and Richard’s in Exeter.

I miss Richard. I’m in the market for a road bike for Frood. Maybe I should email him a picture of my boobs and see what discount I could get. Only I don’t know whether Mrs Richard reads his email and I don’t think she’d be too impressed if she saw such a thing.

Maybe there is a niche for a QC-style shop-cum-messenger business-cum bistro and bar with a comic shop tacked onto the back (that last is a relatively new addition, prompted by the TOTAL FUCKING LACK OF COMIC SHOPS IN FIFE. Thank gods for Toby, Jimbo and Dominic).

What is it round here? Fife is hardly a rural backwater, yet we had to drive all the way to Inverkeithing just to get a set of Time ATAC cleats.

Oh, and while I was feeling rather pleased with myself over my swimming the other day, watching the ITC Triathlon put it into perspective. Those girlies were doing 1500m in 19 minutes.

19 FUCKING MINUTES!

What, do they come with outboards? That’s 20 seconds a length, only they were outdoors in a lake!

Especially for Carl: the archive problem with the new gearblog (which meant that on any of the Singularity archive pages the entire post for that entry would come up in the gearblog box) has now been fixed. I don’t know whether it’s a reasonable solution, but I’m not a geek. I just muddle through the best I can. If it produces the desired result that’s good enough for me where this stuff is concerned. I’m no Apache architect — but I can build my own wheels and I could design a sewage works if you wanted me to.

I was over at the sanctified haven that is HubJub, soothing my fevered brow with thoughts of chain whips, when I came across these:

I didn’t even look at the price (although I wish I had). I had to have them.

Don’t bother trying to copy me, dahlings, those were the last ones. And I got the chain whip.

Wasn’t there a post just here just now?

Well, yes there was. But I moved it.

Never mind the inflatable pineal worm, it looks like Frood’s Fairy Death page upset someone enough for them to start a blog.

What a shame folk like that demonstrate remarkable lack of follow through. They could really have made something of that.

Yes, I am aware of how hypocritical it is of me to say that given the date of the last entry on Fairydeath. However I blame Blogger for going through so many blasted changes that it’s hard enough to keep my site functional, never mind get Frood’s working as well.

Frinstance: the new gear test blog over there? I was going to do cunning things with the archives, as I do with the Singularity blog (this one, dumbass). Click on the link over on the top right there and the index pops up. Only Blogger are disabling that feature because it’s ‘so easy’ to include the index list on the main page now. Which is fine if your blog is your main page. This page is built using Server Side Includes to insert the blogs into the main page, rather than adding in the rest of the material to the blog template.

The fact that I don’t want a massive list of archive links in my sidebar is apparently neither here nor there. Bastards. And I still can’t get the comments working properly.

One of the things that we have always lacked, Frood and I, is art. We actually have a lot of art, mostly mine, collected over the years, but mostly it’s of theRodney Matthews and fantasy Neo-Pagan style because that’s what I liked when I was about 18. Recently I’ve developed a thing for Gabriele Dell’Otto but it’s damn difficult to get hold of the stuff he does that I like (it’s a flash site: click on the navigation link at the bottom, hit ‘comics’ and click on the ‘next’ arrow 10 times where you will see a picture of Wolverine walking along the street in the rain — the first time I saw that picture I was stunned).

Last weekend I was reading a Sunday Times Magazine article about Modigliani and suddenly discovered a painter other than Turner I like. Normally I’m bowled over by use of light — that’s why Dell’Otto makes me go weak at the knees. It’s not so much what he paints but the shapes he implies with the light.

Modigliani is not my usual artistic bent. He can’t do faces. All his models look the same. But his use of texture on paintings such as this Reclining Nude and this one is exquisite. It makes me want to reach out and touch the skin.

I’m not good with faces at the best of times, and I don’t really like representations of people. Dell’Otto is so good because he just happens to be painting people I feel I recognise from Elsewhere, and so I stop trying to work out what the person should look like because I feel I know already and I can get on with enjoying the picture. Modigliani’s faces are so crude that they don’t look like people. They look like women wearing masks. Such attention has been paid to the flesh and the skin and every other aspect of their beauty, but their faces are sketched. It’s realism from the neck down.

The colours are beautiful as well. They delight my synaesthetic palette.

Hmmm. Looking through the catalogue on that poster shop it would appear that it is the reclining nudes that interest me. I don’t really like his portraits. Other than this one, which plays the same tricks with space using representations of light and colour.

Funny, really, how sometimes it seems as if, for me, sight and smell and sound are just there to create doorways into internal three-dimensional representation. Even a two dimensional piece of art ends up as an internal space that I experience by crawling around inside it and exploring its shapes and curves.

I haven’t been able to see in 3D since I was 15 months old.