Saturday, December 27, 2003

Coming home from the Rivoli, having just purchased a pile of LOTR tickets i spy a girl on the corner of Toorak & Chapel who's the spitting image of my ex girlfriend from the UK. i mention it to Liz, we chat about a little, but then our conversation returns to our staple of poo and fart jokes.

I think no more about it.

A few days later while christmas shopping in the city i spy her on a tram as it passes. i get the feeling she's looking at me, but i put that down to paranoia. Again i mention it to Liz but she retaliates with a farting noise from the side of her mouth and a comment about how an old hobo further down the street is 'my boyfriend'

Weird, I think, and mention it to a friend who says: "everyone has a clone, don't worry about it."

This afternoon I get a phone call from my parents, who are in the country visiting me.

"Are you alone?" my mum asks. "yup," i reply, "liz has gone home to do some stuff."
"ok," my mum says, and there's one of those weird pauses where you suddenly realise something you're not going to like is creeping closer.

"We bumped into Cath yesterday," she says, "On the tram. She accosted us and i had no idea who she was. She's travelling with her boyfriend and is here until march."

And harry was like: WTF MATE!?!?!

i mean, it's weird enough that she's over here and that i kept seeing her. There are people i know in melbourne that i don't see regularly. but the fact that my PARENTS of all people are the ones who run into her...

i don't like it...

but my dad has her phone number and i guess it would be rude not to make some sort of contact...

still...strange...little spun out...but ROTK tonight to take my little mind off the whole thing.

Harry.

p.s. if anyone has any advice how best to deal with a situation like this, please let me know...thanking you!

Friday, December 19, 2003

happy birthday mr sigerson! you keep cropping up in conversations i have with various people. your influence lingers here like a duck that's addicted to stale sandwiches.

i just watched being john malkovich. charlie kaufman is a genius and my new god! i will be erecting a statue to him shortly, albeit a stooped, fat, and balding statue.

i quit torus the other day. Bill (insane managing director) spat the dummy big time, and gave what i consider one of the lamest parting shots i've ever come across!

Me: We're just trying to be professional here.
Bill (storming off): Well you can go and be professional somewhere else.

it's also strange that with every job i've ever quit / been fired from (with the exception of my 6 month general electric contract) i've been congratulated on the event. almost as though 90% of jobs in the games industry are dirty little things to be escaped from.

And i discovered that fallopian tubes have little hairs inside them to help the sperm along...well, those sperm that aren't decimated by the acid wall before hand...

hurrah.

Thursday, December 18, 2003

Okay first of all, Happy Birthday Pol. After reaching 30 years meself, I know it's impolitic to ask how many candles there are on the cake, so let's just say we owe you a few ales.

In completely unrelated stuff, I finally found the letter to Bill Bryson the other day. It's been in my possession for about 5 years, and I still think it's one of the funniest things I've ever read (particularly if you've ever been to Harrow-on-the-Hill). I think it was originally published in Loaded or FHM, and was written by one Kevin Brooks of Manningtree in Essex. So here it is in all its glory:

Dear Bill Bryson,
I'm glad that you've fucked off back to America. You never had a clue what it was al about, did you? This country, this small island, it took you for a ride, baby. You, with your stupid fat face and your woolly-clad potbelly, your twatty beard, and your speccy little glasses, your student hair adn simpering limp grin - this country licked its lips, wiped its grubby hands and took you to the cleaners.
Yeah, yeah, you sold about a million books. So what? It only goes to show what a bunch of morons we are, we buy your damn books for the same reason we watch all that crap on TV, so we can kid ourselves that England's a nice place to live - wacky, humble, friendly, fundamentally decent.
Bollocks. I'll tell you what England's like, Bill. England's a small town. The high street is full of crap shops. It's got drunk buskers, buskers with flutes who think they can play the blues but can't, a madman with matted hair who shouts at cars; hundreds of teenagers with one pitiful haircut between them; 12-year-old girls dressed like whores; hard men, fat women, thin women with pushchairs the size of trucks, crazy little men in tight t-shirts who walk too fast, knobs with golfing umbrellas, and one or two bewildered-looking people who just want to go home.
There are four banks, a couple of building societies, a McDonald's, a Pizza Hut, a Burger King and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. A shoe repair/key-cutting place run by disfigured halfwits, half-a-dozen estate agents full of pasty young men in nasty suits and one dozy girl wearing a see-through blouse trying to put something into a filing cabinet. The pubs in the high street are dark and scary and full of stooped, simian nightmares. Outside the deadness of the Hippodrome, redneck minicab drivers hang around the open boot of a pale blue Sierra hawking and coughing, smoking fags and laughing loudly.
There's your town, Bill. It's the same as the US, only 40 years too late. We've taken the scrag-end of all the stuff you started in the Fifties and well and truly finished it - service with a tattooed smile, idiot language, corporate violence, bad TV, bad music, bad films, bad manners, dumb politics, blame-culture, car-culture, no culture, no style, no class, no insight, no idea.
Wondrous, you call it, Bill. Yeah? You reckon? Let's see what we really have here: watches that beep, fruit with stickers on, chimpanzees wearing clothes, local radio, crass technology, disposable babies, beef jokes, poof jokes, Paki jokes, sex jokes, divine celebrity, Crimewatch UK, mock history, lager, unread bestsellers, limp bread, weak coffee, sick charity, diseased toilets, proud ignorance.
That's England. You wouldn't know what to do if it jumped up and bit you in the bollocks.
Kevin Brooks,
Manningtree,
Essex.


Genius.

OK so Vivendi is making an xbox/ps2 game of Fight Club, but looking at screenshots like this

, I can't say that i'm particularly excited. It looks like maybe a reskin of virtua fighter 2 for the ps1, and somebody's going to have to talk pretty fast to convince me otherwise.

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

Wednesday, December 10, 2003

So, on the subject of breakfast foods for the alleviation of hangovers, we discover that billyjoebob's favourite is eggs benedict. The problem being, that if we follow said nomenclature through to its conclusion, that there must also be such contrivances as eggs hannibal, eggs murdoch and eggs face. And of course, eggs Mr T.

I pity the fool who eats them eggs.

In related news, hey fuzzy, what's the deal with LOTR:ROTK GC XMAS+1 tixz?

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

The Bad Sex award shortlisted passages.

From : Bunker 13 by Aniruddha Bahal (Faber & Faber)
She picks up a Bugatti's momentum. You want her more at a Volkswagen's steady trot. Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she's eating up the road with all cylinders blazing. You lift her out. You want to try different kinds of fusion.

From: The Sucker's Kiss by Alan Parker (Sceptre)
...true to her Scottish roots, she sucked away like she was the last person left on earth to play the bagpipes on Robbie Burns' birthday.

From: Eleven Minutes by Paolo Coelho (HarperCollins)
As he simultaneously penetrated and touched me, I felt that he was doing this not only to me, but to the whole universe. . .

Ironic Brunswick Street Band Name of the Day: Eftposse.

Thursday, December 04, 2003

Oooh, old school, I actually logged into blogger instead of using blogthis...

Yes, we're all okay after the crazy weather... in preston we had a 3 hour storm with constant thunder and lightning, and giant hail... okay, giant hail is destructive, but it's also kind of exciting - when it's hitting your tin roof, it's louder than an overhead thunderclap, and the dogs liked it too, they tried to eat it. We were lucky that the flooding didn't hit us, a couple of blocks away, the roads were flooded.

Also embarrassed to admit I had a dream about Richard Gere last night. Thankfully, it was an *odd* dream, in which RG was bitten by a cat, and then half turned into one, and lived in a seamy feline underworld. No more cheese before bedtime for me. Although the underworld thing could have come from the fact that I blagged a free bottle of wine from Chopper Read, who had a wine stall at Sexpo this year, and I've been impressed with my blagging skills all week... :-)

Trying to kickstart my writing brain, i did a google search on "coping with blindness".

this came up.

Not quite what i had in mind :(