Killing time 'til the US chap I need to speak to comes online, I thought I'd join Mlle Srah in this very, very long meme...
1. Name: Spike
2. Birthday: Yes
3. Piercings: None. Ick.
4. Tattoos: One
5. Height: About 6'
6. Shoe size: No idea, actually!
7. Hair color: Brown
8. Hair Length: Long. Very long, for a male.
9. Pets: One cat, Pie 'Oh' Pah and one rabbit, Rebecca. An extra cat, Biscotte, over at Psycho's place.
10. In the morning I am: Always late and half asleep.
11. Love is: Way too much hassle.
12. If I could see one person right now: Scary Ross. It's been too long since we harangued each other in person!
Last...
1. Movie you rented: Good grief... er... no idea. Probably Le Diner De Cons.
2. Movie you bought: Stalingrad - it was going very cheap at the petrol station.
3. Song you listened to: Le Vent Nous Portera (Noir Desir and Manu Chao)
4. Song you had stuck in your head: That damned advert for Danette.
5. Song you've downloaded: Er... something by Jeanne Mas, for Psycho, at a guess.
6. Person you've called: Psycho. I hate phones, too, Srah.
7. Person that called you: Psycho. No surprises there.
Do...
1. You have a B/F or G/F?: No thank you.
2. You have a crush on someone?: Not to speak of. I suppose I could mention Lien and Ia, but they're not really crushes.
3. You wish you could live somewhere else?: Not really.
4. You think about suicide?: Nope. It'd be such a waste of a perfectly good set of teeth.
5. You believe in online dating?: No.
6. Others find you attractive?: I would be very surprised.
7. You want more piercing?: Never: I don't like the idea of puncturing holes in myself.
8. You want more tattoos?: Not at the moment. Maybe some day.
9. Do you like cleaning? Not particularly.
10. You write in cursive or print?: I type. :)
11. You carry a donor card?: Yes. Definitely. Always.
For or against...
1. Long distance relationships: If necessary.
2. Using someone: As a door-stop? A hatstand?
3. Suicide: Neither. I don't like it and would try to stop people, but if it were too late I wouldn't hate them for it.
4. Killing people: Any people in particular? :)
5. Teenage smoking: Neither. That's a personal choice.
6. Driving drunk: Very much against. Stupid-ass idiots.
7. Gay/lesbian relationships: Definitely strongly in favour of them. Though not for me, personally.
Favorite...
1. Food? Pizza!
2. Song? The Kiss (The Cure)
3. Thing to do? Drive drunk... er... no. Ummm, faff about on a PC.
4. Thing to talk about? Anything except politics.
5. Sports? None, really. American football is watchable, as are athletics.
6. Drinks? Orange juice, with pulp.
7. Clothes? Black.
8. Movies? Shichinin no samurai, The Wicker Man, Leon, Det sjunde inseglet, Yin shi nan nu... amongst many others!
9. Bands? The Cure, Depeche Mode, Paul Oakenfold...
10. Holiday? At home, alone.
11. Car? Lotus Elise. I want one. Now.
12. Ever cried over a girl? Yes.
13. Ever lied to someone? Hah! Of course!
14. Ever been in a fight or arrested? Yes (if you class being hit and not fighting back, or stopping someone's punch because he was so drunk it was incredibly slow). Never been arrested.
What...
1. Shampoo do you use? Organics.
2. Perfume/Cologne do you use? Pi, but not often.
3. Number of times I have had my heart broken? Three. Or alternatively "enough for one lifetime".
4. Number of hearts I have broken? No idea. Probably none.
5. # Of girs I have kissed? No idea. Probably half a dozen. If you include the French greeting, lots.
6. # Of drugs taken illegally? Ummm, four or five at a guess.
7. # Of people I would classify as true, could trust with my life type friends? Two.
8. # Of people I consider my enemies? One.
9. # Of people from high school that I stayed in contact with? Not many - two or three.
10. # Of CDs? Goodness only knows. Fifty or sixty with music on them, at a guess.
11. # Of scars on my body? A couple, on my head, from stitches.
12. # Of things in my past that I regret? Only a couple, both female.
Have You...
1. Pictured your crush naked? Nope. I prefer women partially clothed until things get down and dirty - much sexier.
2. Actually seen your crush naked? Hah! Nope.
3. Been in love? Yes
4. Cried when someone died? Yes, three times I can think of.
5. Drank alcohol? Yes.
With the opposite sex:
1. What do you notice first? The eyes, then the hair and smile. Then I aim lower.
Who:
1. Makes you laugh the most? Scary Ross, without a doubt. Then Psycho, very close behind.
2. Makes you smile? The same two, and a bunch of other folks. I smile very easily.
3. Gives you a funny feeling when you see them? Ia and Winona Ryder.
4. Is easiest to talk to: Scary Ross.
Have you ever:
1. Sat on the Internet all day waiting for someone special to I.M. you? Nope.
2. Saved AOL/AIM conversations? Nope.
3. Cried because of someone saying something to you? Not since the age of about 10, no.
4. Fallen for your best friend? Best female friend, yes.
5. Been rejected? Way too many times.
6. Rejected someone? Nope. Never been asked.
7. Been cheated on? Yes, every time.
Who was the last person:
1. You talked to? A colleague at work.
2. Hugged? The cat. Excluding non-humans, Psycho.
3. Kissed? Really kissed, probably Psycho about six years ago.
4. You instant messaged? Scary Ross.
5. You laughed with? The same colleague I spoke to.
Do you:
1. Color your hair? No, but I have in the past.
2. Ever get off the darn computer? Not if I can help it.
3. Habla espanol? Ta gueule.
Have you/ Are you/ Do you:
1. Obsessive: Reasonably so, yes.
2. Could you live without the computer? Not unless I found a really splendid woman, and even then I'd really rather not.
3. How many people are on your buddy list? A dozen or so.
4. What's your favorite food? Pizza, but then I said that already.
5. Whats your favorite fruit? None, really. Bananas are good.
6. Drink alcohol? Only on special occasions.
7. Like watching sunrises or sunset? Umm, usually asleep or busy, but they can be very pretty, especially on a beach.
8. What hurts the most, physical pain or emotional pain? Emotional, of course. Unless we're talking physical torture, here.
9. Trust others way too easily? Nope. I don't trust anybody as far as I could comfortably spit a large rat. Exceptions are Scary Ross and Psycho.
Final Questions:
I want: People to stop expecting me to always be the strong one in the group.
I wish: I could speak every language on Earth, perhaps even including animal languages.
I love: Quiet days on my own, Psycho's omelettes.
I miss: Having proper holidays.
I fear: Spiders.
I hear: The whirring of many PC fans.
I wonder: If humanity will destroy itself in my lifetime.
I am: Going home very soon!
Recently, I lost contact with my Vietnamese penpal/correspondent for a few days because her email (or, apparently, most of Vietnam's email) was only working intermittently. Sitting here at a massive networking company, I was mildly surprised: it's been so long since I had network troubles beyond "Oh my! I can only download at 100Kb/s!" that I'd forgotten what it's like to not be able to do anything online.
What's that? You didn't know I have a Vietnamese correspondant? Well, I do - her name's Trung and she's fun, although a little down at the moment.
Unfortunately, this morning, I found out what it was like. It seems that the transatlantic link died and the failover went out at the same time, too, so loads of centralised stuff stopped working. Basically anything that relied on linking to Corporate was unavailable - including printers, for some strange reason. Of course, today was the day I wanted to print out my expenses, some documents, an application form, an analysis template... *sigh*
Still, the good news is that the lack of network forced me to produce the document I'd been carefully avoiding all week. There's always an up-side to these situations. The network's back now, of course, but that temporary outage was really quite unpleasant.
Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of a telephone call from my cable internet provider. They'd just realised I want to cancel my subscription (ooh, only took a couple of weeks, there!) and were calling to try to interest me in staying with them. I had a lovely chat with the lady who called: she explained that, in fact, they were increasing bandwidth and so on and would have been able to offer me free connectivity until the end of the year if I signed up again.
I explained that, in that case, someone(s) in their support department had badly screwed up and hadn't told me that, despite my asking three times. I also suggested she go down there and slap the person who made the mistake, since it had just cost them my subscriptions for both cable internet (which would have been at the maximum bandwidth and cost) and TV.
Not surprisingly, she thought that was quite a good idea and said she'd go right down and sort them out. It's nice when things go well.
Today's entry marks the inauguration of a new category: I suddenly realised that I didn't have a marker for computer stuff and was putting it in Real World, Work or elsewhere. That just won't do.
Last night, I dropped in at the pharmacy for some stuff for Psycho. I live right above said pharmacy, so I tend to pick up her meds: it's not only simpler, but the lady who owns the shop is friendly and we get on really well. Yesterday, she had a surprise for me - my ADSL modem had been delivered, but it's pretty huge, so the delivery chap had left it with her. That was kind of her.
So last night I set everything up. Surprisingly easy (particularly for France, where red tape and make-the-client's-life-difficult are standard issue) and much faster than the cable I had before. It surprises me, to be honest, that the cable folks are so slow: I wrote to their online support folks three times, explaining that I really didn't want to change if I didn't have to, asking if they were going to make things faster (particularly upload speed, which is limited to 12Kb/s - not bad, but not enough when I'm trying to use the USB phone!) and basically giving them a chance to improve their services.
Their reply? You can have a faster connection for more money, but that won't make upload any quicker. So I switched and am now paying 25% less every month for at least twice the bandwidth, in both directions.
This morning, I received a wonderful piece of spam. We're all used to the normal level of stupidity in unrequested email, but this one attained a momentous new level of uneducated blathering. I couldn't resist sharing it with you.
The subject was "Stop Israeli Jews", all capitalised, of course. The body:
Insert list of half a dozen racist site URLs here.
Finally we have proof of evolution! The one-(brain-)cell life form has reached a point where it can use the Internet! Darwin would be proud!
Quentin Tarantino's latest effort has hit the box office almost everywhere in the world excluding, of course, non-English-speaking countries where dubbing will take a month or so... such as here in France. In fact, only Argentina, Sweden, Russia and Brazil will have to wait longer to see it. So much for first-world countries. Must be all the red tape causing hassle, as usual.
I'm in two minds about Tarantino: he definitely produces different films, but at least one of them is crap and he has the infuriating habit of acting in his own movies. The last point wouldn't be so important if he wasn't such an egotistical weasel who can't act and is obnoxious on-screen. Go back behind the camera, idiot.
Having seen Pulp Fiction which did, let's face it, change the face of moviemaking, I made a point of seeing Reservoir Dogs. Yes, I know, wrong way round. That's unimportant. The simple fact is that this one guy managed to make two films that were absolutely stunning, for different reasons. They're both a bit hard on the stomach at times, of course, but that's how Tarantino is: it seems he doesn't believe in having bullets disappear cleanly into a person who falls neatly to the ground and dies quietly. Realism can be hard when you have to sit through it for a couple of hours.
His third film, Jackie Brown can be summed up in one phrase: "This is the only film during which I have nearly walked out of the cinema." Psycho slept through most of it and I only held on because I'm stubborn and wouldn't like to say a film is crap without seeing all of it. Having seen bits of it since, it's not as bad as I thought at first viewing, but it is incredibly slow and tedious.
So anyway, Kill Bill, Volume 1 is the latest. First off, it's a bit odd to release a film in two parts: Tarantino apparently decided too much would have to be cut to do the whole thing in one sitting. Alternatively, he decided it would be a better way to make lots of cash. Choose one.
Secondly, the film is reportedly extremely bloody and violent. Now, this is nothing new for Tarantino, but it always causes a stir in the film world when someone fills the screen with blood in a mainstream movie. It seems that it's fine to do it in horror, slasher, gore and other flicks as long as the only people watching them are adolescents who rent the VHS by pretending they're 18. Mainstream film? Oh, dearie me, no... can't have that.
What a lot of folks haven't heard, though, is that the film is of course on P2P networks (file-sharing, for the non-PC-literate) in what seems to be its workprint form! That is, complete with video timers, little interruptions where everything goes black before the 6-5-4 whirly black-and-white clock timer thingy appears for the next scene. Now, I'm only going on what folks are saying on various forums, but to me this is rather amusing. The MPAA make such a huge deal out of file sharing (as do the RIAA), but the film companies can't even keep their own staff from passing on a workprint to someone who then encodes it, makes it available and ruins all their massively profitable work?
I thought these things were supposed to be digitally copyrighted, so that whoever encoded it could be traced. Apparently that was just another "live in fear, unknowing PC user" line from the MPAA. Much like their constant mutterings about "stealing someone else's art" when all they really worry about is the cash.
I sometimes wonder if any artist out there is particularly bothered by their work being stolen on P2P networks, apart from the loss of money. I mean, they're artists: they want to share what they create with the world, right? What better way than by sharing it freely (cf. David Bowie releasing albums over the internet for free) rather than allowing a bunch of suits to tax it at 80% and pocket everything except thruppence ha'penny?
Corporate America: a wonder of modern civilisation. Long may it fester.
And yes, I know other countries are bad: the US is unfortunately the worst and so makes for the most popular target. If you don't like that, vote with your brain and elect someone sensible next time, instead of voting with the contents of your toilet.
Is it just me, or does the world seem rife with terrorism at the moment?
I grew up in the UK, so I'm used to the constant trickle of terrorist attacks in Northern Ireland: soldiers being killed or wounded while doing their job, civilians being caught in the crossfire and people being attacked because of their religion. It all seemed so pointless. I'm not even sure whether anyone in the IRA could still explain why they wanted the English out of Northern Ireland... or, conversely, why any English people would want to stay when they were constantly under attack by a bunch of lunatics.
However, more recently, it seems that the news is constantly full of terrorism. Despite the IRA now scrapping arms to advance the peace process, the rest of the world seems to be drowning in blood. The Middle East, the Far East, South America, Corsica... it's all over.
Are humans really so ignorant that the only way we can express ourselves is by death and destruction?
I've decided not to care any more. Not in a global sense, of course, just in a very specific "I'm fed up with Psycho always complaining" way. It has to be said that she's a professional whiner: every second sentence (that's a generous average) is a whine or complaint, which can get a bit tedious. Of course, she's not alone in this - there are many, many people who need something to be wrong in life.
I used to be like this, in fact. I'd always look for something to worry about, for something to be wrong, for something to complain over. That was until the Magic Midget pointed out to me one day, "You're not happy unless you have something to worry you." This had a profound effect on me, little did she know, in that I decided I should stop looking for things to be anxious about and to simply get on with life. Life has a habit of throwing bad stuff at us all anyway, so there's no reason to go hunting for it.
I don't care any more. Whenever she whines, I shall think "I don't care", unless it's something important. So there. Nyer.
As mademoiselle says, "Everyone else was doing it, so why shouldn't I?". Indeed. It's early, it's Sunday, I have nothing better to do than sit here twiddling my brain-thumbs and hating my main PC, so I shall move with the herd:
A - Act Your Age: 33 - and just who defines how I should act at a given age?
B - Boyfriend: Nope, I'm not one.
C - Chore You Hate: Shopping for food for Psycho, who seems to think I will happily do this for her and don't need any thanks.
D - Dad's Name: Herbert.
E - Essential Make-Up Item: Notepad. How can I make stuff up if I can't write it down to remember later?
F - Fave Actress: Winona Ryder.
G - Gold or Silver: Silver.
H - Homeland: The Armpit of the United Kingdom, otherwise known as Essex.
I - Instruments You Play: Piano (part of one tune). I can't read music, but am determined to one day learn to play guitar (of which I own two).
J - Job Title: I've never had an official one. At the moment I'm somewhere around 'Technical Lead', 'IT Analyst' or 'Project Coordinator'. Personally, I think 'Tea Boy' would be most fitting of my abilities.
K - Kids: Lightly roasted, please. I have none and want none. The world is quite crowded enough and is a horrific thing to inflict upon an unsuspecting soul. I refuse to bring any new life into this world purely for my own enjoyment or through feelings of obligation.
L - Living Arrangements: Alone, with a cat and rabbit. The only way to live is with animals.
M - Mom's Name: Jean.
N - Number of Women You've Slept With: Slept or had sex? Either way, I can't really remember: it's not something I obsessively count. I would guess around half a dozen or so. And no, I won't say in which category. :)
O - Overnight Hospital Stays: One, when I put my back out. Got to try morphine, too. Woooo, funky dreams.
P - Phobia: Arachnophobia.
Q - Quote You Like: "Women. Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em."
R - Religious Affiliation: Pagan/Wiccan. I have nothing against any religion, provided they do harm to no one (and preferably either don't try to convert me or at least accept a difficult discussion!).
S - Siblings: 4 brothers, all older than me.
T - Time You Wake Up: 6:45, up at 7:00. At the weekends, I get up nearer 8:00.
U - Unique Habit: No habit is unique.
V - Vegetable You Refuse to Eat: Spinach. I actually refuse to eat more meats than vegetables.
W - Worst Habit: Lying (extremely well) to avoid dropping emotional defences.
X - X-Rays You've Had: Teeth (for braces) and back (when I screwed it up).
Y - Yummy Food You Make: Some would say "Chicken Ding", but I'd personally say I do a really nice chicken with veggies and gravy thing. Basically, anything I make that is simple is edible.
Z - Zodiac Sign: Capricorn (old goat).
Bah, humbug. Spoke too soon: the PC is still crashing regularly and it definitely seems to be the fault of DirectX 9b. What can I say? I've tried the PC with DX8.1 and no updated drivers, with updated drivers, with DX9b and no drivers, with every combination I can think of. I've tinkered in the BIOS, I've updated everything possible.
Basically, I no longer have a gaming PC. That sucks, especially at the weekend.
After several (nay, many!) hours of troubleshooting and fiddle-faddling around with DirectX 9b, nVidia drivers, reinstalls, formats, motherboard nForce drivers and goodness knows what else, I have finally found out why my PC was rebooting whenever I played Direct3D games.
It's not the graphics card.
As it turns out, the anti-virus was not helping, but it wasn't the main problem. This was causing a 'PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA' error after some time and in some games - the solution to which was found on Microsoft's TechNet, scarily enough! Disabling the automatic protection while playing games stops this error occuring, which is good news.
The real problem was, and still is, the sound card! It shares an IRQ with the network card, so I disabled the net connection. Unfortunately, it still crashes. So I tried disabling the sound card itself (a Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! Value) and everything runs smoothly.
However, I also learnt that sound card now have hardware acceleration: having never had a problem with one before, I was unaware of this. Unfortunately, reducing the acceleration does not help. Games still crash after a short time. Switching off acceleration stops most of them from loading in the first place.
So now I have a choice: play games with no sound - which is terribly boring - or not play them at all. Looks like it's time to consider a new sound card, perhaps. More research first, I think!
Pah. I spent last night reinstalling everything again on my main PC, since it's still freaking out and won't let me play games. I seem to have narrowed the problem down to "something wrong" which occurs "when the power's switched on".
More precisely, I don't have a clue. The graphics card seems OK from DirectX tests and it's causing problems even with acceleration turned down to the minimum. It's starting to look like either a Direct3D problem or something more hardware-based. Either way, I'm screwed, since it'll be trial-and-error to figure it out and correct it.
Bummer.
I just (pointlessly) reinstalled my main PC's operating system (WinXP Pro): a couple of games had been crashing badly during play and I suspected it was probably due to the constant installing-uninstalling which is part of that machine's life. Since DirectX 9b was released, nVidia have also updated their drivers (I have a GeForce card in that PC), but unfortunately it seems that one of those two sets of drivers is the problem. In other words, I just reinstalled my main PC's operating system for absolutely no change whatsoever. Ho hum. Such is life.
On the other hand, it did allow me to ghost an image of the system drive (for future reinstalls - much easier than faffing around with an XP install and trying to find all the appropriate CDs for basic setup). It's also wiped out all my old email (oops) and cleaned out the registry.
One thing I hadn't thought of when I decided to format the C: drive and reinstall was all the cookies. I have prompting switched on in IE, since I don't like too many cookies invading my PC and spreading my info all over the place - I get quite enough spam mail without adding any via spyware and so on. It's quite astounding how big a list of blocked sites can get when one has been using a machine for months and months: now I have to rebuild that list, click by click.
*sigh*
In other news, Psycho's new PC has arrived: as I said to Scary Ross yesterday, it's in 2BBB format. Two Big Boxes of Bits: that is, it's a kit and I need to build it for her! It'll be a vast improvement over her current box (that wording is just for you, Ross), since the CPU will jump from a P133 to an AMD 2500 XP+ and there's an extra 384Mb of RAM in there, too!
Her old PC will make its way here, making a total of three permanent residents and a visiting laptop (!!). I have yet to decide what to do with it, since it's such an old piece of crap: I might install Linux or FreeBSD or something on it, just for laughs. There's a spare slot on the hub, so it could even be connected, although I can't honestly think of a good use for it at the moment. We'll see what I can come up with.
Once again, the blogspammers are out and about. In many ways thanks to Google's inability to correctly categorise blog entries, often ending up with terribly inappropriate web site entries as the number one response on searches, spammers are able to wander the web and find us easily. Then they post a comment with an advert in it. It's a little annoying, but easily deleted and the IP banned (speaking of which, if any of them actually manages to evolve beyond the Neanderthal period of human existence and spoof an IP address, thereby getting you blocked, just let me know).
The current one is a retarded subhuman advertising some kind of gift shop. It's a very strange post, to be honest, made up of semi-sentences with HTML links all over the place. It reads as if a demented robot wrote it.
Which is probably the case, given the intelligence level of most spammers.
Ah, back to the grind after a pleasant weekend. I spent Saturday bumming around and relaxing after the nightmare week, but was so tired in the evening that I was in bed before 11 p.m. Unheard of...
Sunday, of course, was Lama Day. Thanks to the company, Psycho and I had free parking and places in the lodge (which is very swanky, I must say). That makes life much easier for access to the stadium: there were huge crowds trying to get in through most of the entrances, but we just walked through the car park, into a lift and up to the private area. Way cool.
The Dalai Lama was, of course, excellent. He's an interesting individual and has a great sense of humour, as best as one can appreciate it in a stadium full of 10,000 people or more. He was alone on the 'stage', apart from a single individual performing translation duties, since the talk was in Tibetan (which is, not surprisingly, very much like Chinese, although a little softer in intonation as far as I can gather).
He spoke for a couple of hours (so about an hour, practically speaking, allowing double time for speaking and translation) on interior and exterior peace - and from there, interior and exterior disarmament. The idea is that, although it is immediately important to externally disarm (i.e. take big guns away from bad, nasty people), it is much more important to internally disarm those individuals. By this, he means to change their way of thinking so that they don't even want the big guns to begin with. Obviously this ties in to altruism and kindness, and the importance of being nice to people.
None of his speech was particularly new or astounding, of course. It was also not geared towards converting people to Buddhism, which is a good thing. For me, the most important part of the experience was to see and hear him: being a luminary of his stature, it's not as if he's going to invite me round for a chat over tea and scones, so this opportunity was unmissable... and very much worth the effort.
This week has been an absolute nightmare. Not only was I already swamped in work, what with the new job and all, but the folks in Germany are upgrading their laptops. This means a whole ton of extra work for all those people using the app I look after as they all need to reinstall, get their local databases set up and everything.
In addition, one poor chap in Amsterdam called to say that all his data was gone from the server. I had a look and, indeed, it was not there. Disappeared. *Poof!* As if it never existed. So I've spent most of the week chasing around trying to get a backup of the entire database restored elsewhere, then writing SQL (which I don't know doodly about) to pull his data out. Nightmare.
Still, on Sunday, I have tickets to go and hear the Dalai Lama speaking. He's visiting Paris and I figured my chances of ever sipping tea with him in Tibet are pretty slim, so I'd best not miss this opportunity! The company has a lodge at the stadium, complete with parking and everything... and they're even paying for the tickets!
I shall be listening to his "Interior Peace, Universal Peace" talk in a couple of days' time. How cool is that?
Had an excellent chat with my new manager yesterday about this whole new job thing. She knows me better than most folks at work, since she was also my first boss some six years or so ago!
Turns out she wants me to do analysis for and coordinate/supervise one of her projects while she's off on maternity leave, which is a relief for me. Basically, it's an administration job, rather than some kind of go-get-'em, proactive managerial thingummy.
In a misguided attempt at Apartment domination this weekend, the evil genius Pie 'Oh' Pah tried to push the boundaries of his territory into the neighbouring Rabbit State. Following an initial reconnaissance action from the top of Scratching Sofa mountain, Pah believed his covert ops abilities would gain him access to Rabbit Park, thus establishing a foothold in enemy territory.
Under the cover of evening greyness, the feline leader moved to the assault, attempting an infiltration of Rabbit Park through a gap in the wire fencing. After much careful pawing, an entry was created through which he could slip.
However, the undefeated master of the Apartment met with stiff opposition from the Rabbit State's queen, Rebecca. Hopping quickly out of her palatial abode, the monarch was reported to have given her enemy a sidelong look before scrabbling frantically with her front paws, only a matter of inches from his entrenched position.
Faced by an obviously belligerent defensive force, Pah opted for a strategic withdrawal on this occasion. No casualties were reported, although both parties maintain that they were victorious. This attack comes after months of unsteady peace and mutual respect.
Diplomatic relations have not yet been re-established.
Have you ever noticed how the things that mark us are often the smallest, stupidest little occurences? Obviously big events mark us as well - wars, deaths, births, marriages, historical events and so on will also rest in our memories - but the ones that really stay are often the dumb little personal things.
Take as an example two questions: "Where were you when the Berlin Wall was torn down?" and "Can you name your favourite Muppet?" Which of those is easier to answer? Obviously, this is simply an example, but I would be willing to bet that the latter is easier than the former: we remember the things that affect us personally, no matter how silly.
I was thinking about this because I've been cleaning up the flat again - yes, the continued de-junking of the past! I've worked my way round about two-thirds of the lounge now, filling five or six bin-bags with rubbish in the process, and noticed just how difficult it is to throw some things away. The things that mark us are often ridiculous.
Presents (no matter how inappropriate, uninteresting or useless) seem to be among the worst offenders, along with cards and notes from people I care about. Books, of course, are incredibly difficult to throw away (and I have kept them all), particularly those in my little Zelazny collection.
Computer bits are the next in line: hardware that is out of date, software that I may never use and even case screws! In fact, this is the one area in which I am willing to make concessions. I never throw away computer bits and have often been very glad I don't: an old CD drive or graphics card can be a life-saver quite often when a machine blows a part. Not that this happens to me a lot, of course. Oh no. Definitely not. Honest.
The worst thing for me at the moment is the stack of boxes in the middle of the lounge. I know I have to deal with them, but I'm lazy. There's a huge box that the server arrived in, plus a bunch of smaller ones filled with stuff I brought over from the UK that needs sorting through. I'm unsurprisingly reluctant to go through about 800 old floppies to see what's on them.
Ah, well. It has to be done, I suppose. I've found some wacky things from my past since starting this cleanup, anyway, and need to clear those boxes so I can vaccuum properly.
Oh, and by the way: "At University in London" and "Animal".