Quick one

It's 4:20; I just got this SMS from Bubble;

Just read your blog for today...am at the white stag...beer...

Cow

Out

Hello all

Day one with the folks in town went well; started with Bubble's now traditional "Tequila Thursday", although fortunately for all of us she only had two. On her best behaviour, I suspect. We then followed up with a Thai curry in "rat alley" which is behind LKF in central. I thought that my folks were aficionados of all things curry-like but it seems that the Thai explosion in Europe missed them out completely. It was heart warming to hear my dad state, in what approached a reverential tone; "this is GOOD soup." Of course, the only soup one might ever be forgiven for saying that about is the ubiquitous Thai starter Tom Yam Soup with enough chilli oil in it to burn a small house down. My mum, being Glaswegian, was the first to lower the tone to a discussion about the severity of expected ring burn once the soup made its way to the "end of the line." Nothing if not blunt, my mum.

I sent them of to Stanley shopping this morning and just had a phone call from dad; they are in a pub having lunch and a few sweeteners. Bastards. My dad only calls me to tell me about his lunchtime drinking to wind me up. Do you get that; when you're stuck at work and someone calls you from a pub or other such drinking establishment, you can almost taste the beer on the back of your tongue? I do, and mine's a pint of wife beater, guv'nor.

A Sweaty mate of mine sent me some links yesterday, both worth a look. The first is a site called limmy.com which, amongst other amusing pastimes, contains this bloody hilarious Xylaphone programme. Take a look at some of the other content too. Imaginative in a sort of rude Scottish way. You'll be playing with the Xylpahone for hours, I guarantee it. Second up is this rather disturbing clip from Rainbow (allegedly.) Der Management couldn't have done better. It made me laugh so much that flies started shooting out of my genitals.

The newspapers are full of the horrors of last night's Eurovision farce, where apparently the scoring computer cocked up and gave Turkey their first points in the history of the competition. Or something.

Enough for now, I need to get some work done this afternoon and justify my exorbitant salary

Bomber out

Hello all

My folks arrived this morning. 10 years in Asia and this is the first time they have visited so it is quite an occasion. Mum got stuck on the other side of the barrier when she failed to realise that the plastic wrapping on her train ticket needed to be removed before it would fit in the machine. Unfortunately the instructions for how to open said plastic cover were in Chinese so she had to go find the station master to help her.

Folks in the big city, I tell ya.

I left them at home eying up the beer in the fridge and shot off to work. Hopefully there's some left by the time I get home...

Duncan, the (rude) voice of my conscience, asked what a "me me" is; well here's what the dictionary says;

meme; noun

Biology an element of a culture or system of behaviour that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, especially imitation.

in other words; infectious information; eg religion

Unrelated to ugly wierd engineering student from Oxford Circa 1990

Dave pointed me to the most excellent site PWOT who employ the emminent movie critic Dr. Albert Oxford, PhD who gives, as his number one reason "50 Reasons Lord of the Rings Sucks";

Fellowship of the Rings and Two Towers were shoved down our throats.

I've heard some students are even forced to read some novelization of the movie in their literature classes. Ridiculous. Does Hollywood run our classrooms now?

Well worth a view, sort of like the Onion; with movie reviews. Much like the Onion has. err.

Of course the prizes are always the comments from those who didn't realise that it was satire...

be sure to read the rebuttal of the rebuttal "Wow, it must have been hard for "Tolkien" to make three movies while "in the trenches in the war" - to quote the other blind fools who actually believe the movies were based on old books."

This is getting ridiculous, I'll give 'em what for...

Bomber out

I linked this before, but get the feeling that no-one checked it ouit. Seriously worth a read so I'm trying again;

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Saddam's Interrogation Logs

Excerpt;

Interrogation commenced: 1430 hours

I tried to break the will of SH by showing him an Iraqi newspaper editorial calling for his trial and punishment. SH told me that our Psychological Ops folks obviously printed a fake newspaper. I told him I swore that I bought the paper at an off-base coffeehouse. He insisted it was a fake. I told him I crossed my heart. He said he did not believe me. I asked him what I needed to do to prove to him that it was a real newspaper and he suggested taking him to the off-base coffeehouse to see it firsthand. I asked, but Gen. Farley said absolutely no way. SH didn't say anything else aside from asking how much my PsyOps newspaper subscription cost and if there were any PsyOps coupons in it. I asked where the WMD were and he suggested I look in my copy of PsyOps Weekly.

Interrogation terminated: 1540 hours


Bomber out

Oh dear

I heard this quote on the BBC this morning and here it is posted on wired;

Outrage Upon Outrage
Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who describes himself as a leading conservative voice in the Senate, says he's outraged at the worldwide outrage over the treatment by American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners, who he calls "terrorists" and "murderers." "These prisoners, you know they're not there for traffic violations," Inhofe said. "If they're in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."

Apparently the whole naked thing was actually a gay rights roleplay.

Of course, the whole revolting Nick Berg beheading video thing is going to help. Bloody horrible.

OOOH

sod the Tablet PC thingy, I want one of these;



Gadget madness story here
more pictures here
Gizmodo story here

Also exciting, the clear implication that GT4 will be available on PSP. All it needs is a HDD and it could double as a portable video player...

OOOH

Hello all

From Al Jazeera;

The Geneva-based humanitarian organisation documented "frequent" abuse, including beatings, threats, tight handcuffing, prolonged exposure to the baking sun and the deprivation of sleep, food and water.

Military intelligence officers told the Red Cross the abuse was "part of the process".

"Physical and psychological coercion were used by military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information," it said.

Although the Red Cross made repeated warnings to the US-led coalition about the abuse throughout 2003, this appeared to have had little effect on the occupation forces, the report said.

That there was abuse seems indisputable, the real question to me is; If the administration knew in January (when it seems the pictures first surfaced) why did they wait until they started appearing in the papers, unless they were covering it up all along?

On a somewhat less controversial note, Neil Gaiman has a link to Fiction Submission Guidelines information page: Stories We See Too Often quite interesting reading, they also have a horror hackneyed plots page. Read and digest.

Last but certainly not least, Sony have announced a very nifty tablet PC according to I4U



Definitely on my christmas list (that's my mid-year Christmas list, that I go shopping for next week...)

Bomber out

Nippon

A potted history of my trip to Japan

Flew to Taipei Friday evening. Upgraded. Top

Got drunk and had top meal in "People's restaurant" In Taipei, which included the spiciest noodles I have ever eaten.

Spent the weekend watching DVDs and at the cinema;

Kill Bill 2 - disappointing
Dawn of the Dead - better the second time
Spaced - Bloody brilliant, miss at your own risk
Black Books - very funny
The Shield - more excellent original programming form those nice folks at HBO
Akira - in preparation for the impending Japan trip

Drank some more, Dave got ill, wound up dog.

Tuesday I left for Tokyo

Flying JAA, we were aboard a 747 old enough to have been smoked in. No seat back TVs and upholstery worryingly faded (as far as that indicated the age of the aircraft.) Pilot came on; Japanese geezer.

we had an aborted landing, all I could see out of the window was the rising sun painted on the wing. Day-mares of the captain putting on his bandanna and swearing that he would land the plane no matter what for the honor of his family. 747 tossed around like a toy. Several changes of underwear.

then they closed Narita due to high winds

We diverted to Osaka where we landed and waited for an hour before trucking back to Narita. Didn't get to the hotel until 10pm

Had a fantastic Tappanyaki meal which left me sweating butter for 2 days. Went out drinking in Roppongi, mucho Russian prossers about. Bars were crap.

Worked all day Wednesday, saw a few projects, then left for the airport and HK.

All in all far too short.

There's a full size replica of the Eifel tower in the middle of Tokyo. Nutters.

Bomber out

The new blog

Hey guys, blogger just updated their service so now I can bore you via email?

No more will you need to wait 'till I get back to the computer to hear how much more interesting my life is than yours, now I can conveniently post from my mobile phone!

Bomber out

Hello all

Well, after wanting to go sailing / biking / drinking on successive previous weekends and not managing, I did all 3 this weekend with results that would most accurately be described as; "tiring."

Saturday morning I was at work; an unfortunate side effect of working in Hong Kong, but them's the rules. Actually, Saturdays give me a good few hours to concentrate on such nicities as filing and; well, filing.

Saturday afternoon I had been picked for crew on Shikari, an 28' Impala class racer-cruiser. Sounds very swish; in fact the Impalas (there are 20 some of them in HK) are all nearly 30 years old and beat to hell. The fun in sailing them is that they are a fairly strict one design, leading to close boat to boat racing and that, for big boats, people are willing to get them very close together because they are old and don't mind the odd bump. All this leads to something akin to a laser race style blood bath, but in bigger boats. Fun. Unfortunately the weather was not very conducive on Saturday as the wind refused to get up (until the race was over, of course) so it was mostly sitting around waiting for the tide to take you to the next mark.

All that finished by 6pm on Saturday and I trundled home STARVING to find Andrea had spent all day alternating between working on her latest paper or avoiding same. I had had the idea to have a kip then go out and get embarassingly drunk in WanChai somewhere, but Andrea was beat so we watched some "Neverwhere" and ate pizza instead.

Sunday we had arranged a champagne brunch. This is a traditional method of getting mullahed at lunchtime for a fixed fee. The buffets are hosted by hotels (in this case the Excelsior) and are "all you can eat and drink" for about 4 hours starting at noon. Andrea coersced me in to going mountain biking first thing on Sunday morning, which is something we have discussed as a possibility before. Early start, van to the top of Route Twisk, ride down hill for and hour (a VERY good trail, although not so good for the fitness, as it is all down hill...) then van back to HK for a shower and noon arrival at the brunch. Andrea decided, however, that her paper had tired her out and that I should test the theory on my own. After being cajoled with the "you'll enjoy it once you're out there" type lines, I booked the van and, sure enough, thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Brunch went predictably; we crawled out of Carnegies (nic; "Carnage") at about 7pm and spent the evening in front of "the Shield" and HBO drama about LA cops. Bloody marvelous.

Andrea has just left for work, leaving me with the parting question; "Why do I always get sick after drinking?"

Go figure

Bomber out