...ant fugue

i'm trying to accept the fact that an ant hill has moved into our house. currently there's four little blighters on my desk, congregating where the bottle of irn bru that they found used to be. i could wipe them off again, but maybe if i leave them to explore they'll find out that there's nothing to have in my room and the message will get back to the hive mind. it's amazing what you learn at university.*

i hope they're not mistaking the tea stain for food.

why do i feel upset by them being here? i barely noticed them in the rainforest, and those ones bit. ants are nature's vacuum cleaner, cleaning up sugary messes. and on a related point, why do i feel so good about having cleaned my room? ants mean you've got a mess, and things are filthy. this is why we like having clean floors. we like big, clear spaces because they feel clean. have you ever felt so evolved?

which is funny because

The theory of ID [intelligent design] holds that the world is so complex it must have been created.

has anyone who believes in ID actually tried creating their own universe? or looked at computer-evolved circuit boards or robot brains, ones beyond human comprehension? complexity actually works against their argument. so they 'introduce' the god figure to make the theory work.. it would be laughable, if the president of the u.s.a. hadn't said "the jury is still out on evolution." anyway, rossignol has pointed the way to this fascinating article (includes the amazing allegation that all creatures were vegetarian, even the tyrannasoarus rex, since none could die, until the fall of man).

this was fun too: Highest functions of brain produce lowest form of wit.

here's a good link from dan for a random wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage


and now, the ants have gone.

after my last exam tomorrow, i'm going to stop eating so much canned food. because i haven't really been living recently. and the day i finally finished deus ex, ed came down as if just to give me his copy of planescape:torment. he left his tvbgone too, which, from its discription, seems to work just as well at switching tvs on as off. coincidentally, this week i got the 'get a life' book, and as such have had many conversations about tv, especially as laurence got his working just for eurovision, and then promptly and deliberately crippled it again.
ironically, i've spent so much time on the internet this weekend that i've very nearly given myself a repetive strain injury.


spotted:bridget jones' diary being used to stop open a window.


those lonely pies..

anyway, everyone's gone and this weekend i have been enjoying largely myself. see you soon!

xxx

*actually, they didn't tell us if ants do communicate like this.

fucking shoes.

well that's it: i've officially finished my exams, and will be having many good times until i must be getting a job.

understand, i haven't actually finished, but since everyone else has, and my next/last exam is cruddy databases in a week, i can but ride along with the swelling tides of vulgar joy and claim that i have 'officially' finished.

this morning i dreampt the chs gang and i were trapped in a cross between labyrinth and blackpool pleasure beach. eh?


here's a couple of recent photos:






now i can just sit and wait for laurence to give me deus ex back...

in other news, friday's exam was interesting. about ten minutes before it was due to start, the man arrived and let me and another person into our computer room (due to dyslexia, i get to do exams on the computer with 25% extra time, and an assortment of other misfits), and let us in with about five minutes to go. going through the instructions he said,
"so you've got a couple of minutes of reading time before you can start writing".
my peer said,
"but i'm supposed to have 10 minutes."
the invigilator said:
"yes, but the invigilator wasn't here."
what, so by deferring yourself to the third person you absolve yourself from blame?
i must try that.

arse the parlour maid

where the fuck is my wok?

grilly's law

your friend's freind is a wanker.

no matter how much you like your friend, seeing them contexualised amongst there other friends will either lead to one of two things:
1 your friend becomes a wanker. this is what happens when, say, andy and his mate arthur guiness spend too long in each other's company.
2 your friend spends the whole evening apologising for their friend's behaviour.

there are three consequnces of grilly's law:
a systems based upon the should-be safe entry requirement of having a friend vouch for you - such as gmail, or the cowley club - are absolutely full of wankers.
b everyone is a wanker, including you.
c someone thinks that you are a wanker. but don't despair! that person's opinion doesn't count, because the person who thinks you're a wanker? they're a wanker too.

the only way to not be a wanker is to not have any friends at all. then you get to live in an irony tower of solitude, the bony king of nowhere. and no-one can call you a wanker.

quit smoking everyone. if anyone is interested in personal or social liberation, the first thing you should do is rid yourself of the vile slavery of addiction. i appreciate that there's some rebellion to it, some form of hedonism, but there's better hedonism than slow poison and there are plenty of forms of rebellion that don't fund capitalism.

for those who didn't get the cartoon two posts ago, i was talking about gödel's theorem, and rach thought i was talking about girdle's theorem.

oh no. i'm going to have to change my answer phone message.

at the anti-folk gig on monday, apparently hibbett was impressed (easily) with everyone he saw but loz and i:

Loads of other people played and i was surprised how GOOD everything was, especially Chap From Anal Beard who played a couple of songs, The Bobby McGees, and the ever-lovely POG. There was a guy doing MAGIC on when i left...

chatting with him and jimmy, and i found him quite standoffish until he found out who i was (having had a mitre of communication over the net), when he warmed up, which was very nice of him. everyone was so good - the night finished with charles latham's last gig (?) in the u.k., and that boy is a belter. nice to see someone (a lassy called rebbecca) doing a rendition of true love waits.


oh yeah, and the exams are going 'fine'.

topsoil!

p.s. stewart lee interviewing alan moore, anyone?
next week: alan moore interviewing brian eno. they said.

i've only got two hands

my feet felt like they'd not got enough exercise on the inside; like the shoes i wear just lift them up and put them down without ever manipulating them. actually, i think this has more to do with them poking out of the duvet right next to my window, not helped by a misplaced radiator (the central heating was done on the cheap; heat sources should be placed against outside walls to create a warmth barrier, but ours are all on interior walls). because of this, after failing to find words to help rach understand the paradox, i shoved my feet at her and whined until she massaged them. i did hers too, but then i *love* feet.

my jumper still smells of the massage oil, but surprisingly, no-one is willing to smell my cuff.

yesterday simon rang me up and sang circus music at me. the circus! i'm never going to let one come through town without visiting it again. even this one - pretty tawdry by all our accounts - still had plenty of enjoyment to be had. the clowns are a case in point - as clowns go, they were pretty bad clowns, but i found them so endearing. there was no magic, fire or animals, meaning it was really just a bunch of acrobats, some of which, like the finale, were really entertaining. oh, and the strong man too. bloody stupid, they drove a jeep over him. at the curtain call, most of the performers looked miserable.

when i got home, i can't remember how jabberwocky got brought up, but when it was, and since nick didn't know it, i fetched my hofstadter for the english/french/german versions. "you can't translate jabberwocky," said jess, with a good point, but clearly an incorrect one, because there it is on the printed page. we took turns to read, and fell about laughing at our accents (i've missed speaking german since i saw the educators).

and i can't believe the news, that bertie is leaving kefranski. what on earth will they do know? i'm gutted.

oh, and you might have noticed the new audio section down there. it's now super easy to get the whole of womansour and dovedale joints, and selected parts of try the view change button (i was going to put the whole album up, but that would do more harm than good). don't forget that lyrics and info are still only available on my soundclick page. hope you enjoy them.xxx

who shaves grilly?

grilly explaining 'russel's paradox' to rachel.

i was actually trying to use my favourite example, 'grelling's paradox':

divide the adjectives in english into two categories: those which are self-descriptive ('autological'), such as "pentasyllabic"... and those which are not ('heterological'), such as ..."bisyllabic". autological is clearly itself an autological word.
is heterological?

paraphrased from hofstadter.

10 years after the tragedy

and what do we get? two new remixes. liam fretwell's 'epic' mix and the author's 'metal' mix.

so i was buying a loaf of bread from chunky's, i'd plumped for the organic granary (their organic bread is the same price as the usual), and was eyeing up a quiche on the counter. i had been doing for some time, but if i was going to buy one, i'd first have to ask if it was made with (at least) free range eggs, and i didn't want to do that because it would make me look 'fussy'. so i'd not bought quiche (incidentally, co-op quiche is made with free range, but it uses g.m. rennet in it's cheese. i just want a bloody ethical quiche!). so this time, i asked. swallow your pride, and maybe you get to swallow some quiche.. the lady looked grim and slowly shook her head, didn't say anything. oh, okay. i stood there for a couple more seconds; i was not about to say, 'well, i'll get it anyway, after all, what does it matter?', but i felt like maybe i should get something else to make up for it. but what did i owe them?

but why did i feel bad about asking? free range is a fair enough question, and while old labour have been fighting so hard to get blood sports banned as the hang over from class war, factory farming is still legal, though plans have been long afoot to stop it (to which there would be no opposition. get your priorities right!).
it's about doing the right thing. i'm glad i did.

however, later i found out their bread wasn't made with free range eggs either. oh well.


incidentally, the independant has picked up on what i was saying about the gap between what we voted for and what we got. nice to see someone's listening.

grilly's difficult anti-blog!!

today, i uninstalled deus ex; i call this progress. it's amazing that with every one of my precautions it found it's way back onto the hard drive, like a nano-virus designed to wreck my studies. but it's gone now, for a guaranteed two weeks. i can conquer my death wish because i want to. i still can't quite accept that i've got my finals in a week, but soon i won't have to.

food's been big. being full is normally an impassable berlin wall, but at the moment it's more like a friendly roadside suggestion, or a government warning on a pack of fags. i reckon it's all the thinking i'm doing. and for tea tonight? pie and chips!
how come hp sauce (prop.: danone) has tomatoes as the second ingredient, whilst the classic daddies' (prop.: hp foods(!)) is made almost entirely from sugar and vinegar? just two of the brown sauce mysteries.


it may not instantly occur to you quite how sick that picture is.
i also bought the new cephalic carnage record, because it had really good tentacles coming out of the sky on the back.

yes.

the results are in..

i'm gutted that the greens didn't get their seat in brighton.
here we have a very interesting list of all the parties that ran, including captain beany, and the mysterious "death, dungeons and taxes" party.
and here is the breakdown of votes cast. despite having only a tenth more votes, labour get 3/4 more seats than conservative. it's the bollocks! we desperately need proportional representation.

...and there was light.

well it's been a lovely few days since i handed the work in. thursday night, obviously i slept (since wednesday had been a literal all-nighter), right up until quarter to ten on friday morning when i sprang up in bed to read the time; desert island discs with cocker had just finished. i successfully pissed away friday, the first official day off for weeks, made a cd for ed, and wandered off to croydon toulouse my kefranskerginity.





i am now a cunt at a gig with a phone.

ed's got a lot of bottle.
hanging out back stage was great, me the real hanger-on, filming twenty minutes of conversation, passing myself off as a musician and feeling like a dad; there were kids, performing on stage, vintage 1988, who had never heard of the sea horses.
a falafel burger and the usual thameslink narcoleprosey later, i got to bed at half five. it had been an excellent night, it was thoughroughly brilliant to see those folk again, and i am grateful that i can call them my friends.

some time later, i woke up and we did town. i was in dire need of an irn bru, which just so happened to be on special offer at the co-op, 2 large bottles for 1 pound, 79! now that is blogworthy.
that night was fletcher's birthday party, at which i was paid an enourmous compliment of being "intriguing" to someone. we danced around the living room and carefully burnt two small holes in the twin towers poster. bed at five.

may day has been delightful, watching celebrations in queen's park and agonising over how many 'x's to leave on text messages. we went up by the race course and felt like giants, and nearly stood on a tiny bird's nest. there was only one way to end the day: pizza and post-manga.
after watching casshern, it's now way gone midnight again. tomorrow sees me getting to work for the exams, and tuesday is my presentation. my tutor is not the kind of person to balk at saying, to face, like an unsatisfied customer of mr. tourettes, "this, is fucking shit." lets hope he has no need to.