Clipboard-Wielding Maniacs

I can't remember whether I've detailed this before, but on most weekdays outside our office, there is a group of people in green and blue shirts holding a clump of forms under their arms, trying to get the attention of passers-by when they're on their way through Davis Square. Most of them are, naturally, from Greenpeace.

I should point out that they aren't there because of anything to do with the building that I work in - most of the Vanguard building is a health centre, and I don't think even Greenpeace could complain about that. There is the matter of the gigantic backup power system kept in our server room that dims the street lights a bit whenever it's turned on, but they don't know about that. Instead, their preferred location is outside this building because it happens to be on the corner next to a subway station - which is fantastic for when you're going to work in the rain, but not when you have a flock of canvassers watching the door ready to pounce.

It's possible to avoid them by going out the side door, around to the subway and out the other entrance on the opposite side of the square, but they often have people lining the road down to where everyone gets lunch as well. And before you say it, the simple solution of not talking to them or saying you're not interested just doesn't work - I tried that a couple of times and instead of taking the hint they cling to you like limpets. One of them followed me all the way back to the office once despite my elaborate web of deceit about having a membership with them in Norway.

Therefore, the only sure way to escape is to think up something to say that makes it clear you're not interested, and at the same time makes them actively want to never talk to you again. This is easy on rainy days, where you can wear your jacket zipped up to the nose and muffle incoherently at them until they give up. However, we haven't had any of those in the last couple of months. Pretending to be foreign is a decent fallback, but you have to be able to swiftly make up your own dialect or it's possible that they'll be able to continue the conversation in your chosen language.

So the pressure is on you to think up good, plausible but undeniably urgent excuses while hurrying past. Looking at those criteria written down, I suppose "Sorry, I've got five minutes to stop nuclear war with China" probably wasn't the highest-ranking on this list, but it provides the moment of surprise necessary for you to make your escape. Most of the time I've fallen back to "I've got to meet my wife" which has been true on about half the occasions that I've used it. After getting past with that one a couple of times, I thought of saying that I was late for my appointment for killing puppies with hammers, which would give them a shock but I haven't dared try that one yet.

Sometimes, what you're carrying can help you out - on Wednesdays I usually get a ball of mozzarella from the Farmers' Market down the road. (To my astonishment I noticed that the signs had the apostrophe in the right place last week - I could practically hear the choir of angels singing "Hallelujah" in the background.) It was blisteringly hot on most days during the past month, so on the way back, I could just hold up the rapidly dying wad of cheese and say that I had to get it back to the office fridge before it disintegrated.

By far my most elaborate scheme was an extension to this - when carrying lunch in a brown paper bag back down the road, I decided to say to the man outside the health centre that it contained a new liver that had to be in someone's chest within the next few minutes. While walking back I thought up more and more elaborate details to the story, eventually deciding that when questioned I would admit that it used to belong to a cow but if you put enough volts through it then all livers were pretty much interchangeable. I would then ask if he'd seen the proton accelerator dish on the roof, point upwards and run away while his attention was diverted.

He enthusiastically approached me and started off, but sadly, on delivery of the opening line he believed me without question and apologized for delaying me.

But starting last Monday, Davis Square has become home to an entirely new class of clipboard-wielding maniac. This lot call themselves Masspirg and I took the time to listen to one of them at the beginning of the week (largely because they're a lot better at covering the entire area and leaving no gaps for you to use to strategically cross roads). What they're trying to get money for is a stop to fare raises on the subway as well as pressuring the MBTA to organize the Big Dig a little better and stop bits falling off. The second of these goals is agreeable as at the moment the tunnel is as unstable as most of my websites, but the recent price rise brought the monthly ticket cost up to fully one quarter of what I would pay if I still lived in Scotland, so they can stop their moaning there.

Crystal Towers 2 - Floundering around

As I keep working on this, I realize more and more that I'm writing an RPG by accident. Stat-boosting, side quests and various other rewards are spread around the levels, and it's becoming difficult to keep track of them and all potential paths through the game. To solve that I wrote up a spreadsheet last weekend to list all the missions, enemies, levels and drop items in the game and how they relate to each other. I never considered how careful the planning would need to be to make the game make sense as a whole - really, the only way to make sure it's balanced is to build it all up and then change the bits that don't work. So I should really do some new levels - at the moment I'm just fiddling with everything I've got so far and not making a lot of progress.

For that reason, this journal's been pretty silent recently because of the lack of screenshots to upload - for the most part all work has been at the back end of the game and I've still only got four levels. However, in addition to this, I've completely reworked the projectile spells so that they're easier to expand on, written an entire synthesis side quest that will go throughout the game, and so on. I still need to work out the progress trees through them, but there are now a couple of things with a point to them there instead of just dummy names like "Old boots" and so on.

There's also the issue of when I'm going to introduce it to the game - it should be fairly early on, but once the player has gone through five levels or so without the additional complexity of it. Enemies will start dropping items once you reach the large machine in the middle of the Music Castle - which is a synthesizer, of course.

That reminds me - the Music Castle needs to be made a lot more musical. There are a couple of themed backdrops around it at the moment, but I'm envisioning giant Zool-like keyboards and instruments as obstacles.

The trouble is that for a lot of the plans for the game, I'm going to have to think up ways to do them now rather than later so that I don't have to go back and change a heap of things to get them working. The online element I'm planning should have a simple submission mechanism as I can just write a big parser to put the entire save information in a POST line, but the real issue is making sure that users can't modify the saves themselves (or indeed the mission list, which was included externally precisely for the reason that I wanted it to be editable by me). That's going to be difficult, but will probably involve a lot of MD5 checking.

The Great Sandwich Wars of 2007

For a couple of weeks, the display screens that were installed a few months ago at the main T stations in Boston have had a small, orange blinking cursor in the bottom right hand corner. I took this as the sign of something big about to happen, and indeed, this morning I arrived in Park Street and somebody had finally turned them on.

Except they seem to have missed the point of them by several hundred thousand miles - all they do is cycle through "No smoking" and "For free schedule information visit WWW.MBTA.COM", rather than displaying the time until the next train on each line, or anything useful as anyone would expect. Instead it looks like they're going to be used like the propaganda machines around the North Haugh in St Andrews that were installed in my second year. I hope somebody changes them, but it probably won't matter because they're LED boards and the Boston Police will soon be down to blow them up.

As for this entry's title... I was going to write about something completely different, and even though I decided not to bother with the trouble, I thought that the title was too good to waste. Suffice to say that I'm becoming slightly disheartened that I have the ability to surround myself with people in online communities that are almost completely socially incompetent and can use their smug MENSA-troll powers to make drama out of absolutely anything. It can't be a direct consequence of the communities I'm in - after all, I'm in them and I like to think of myself as having most brain functions intact. Why can't people be a bit cleverer? I'm so ronery etc etc.

It's not to do with what inspired that mood in the first place, but I'll leave you with this snoreathon of a pomposity slag-heap as a typical example.

I'll get you, Phil Cornwell

As I've used its most recognizable in-joke even more often than normal recently, I should mention that recently I've been listening to loads of Dead Ringers. I found a whole lot of it on BitTorrent a couple of months ago and have been listening to the first six series of the radio programme (which is fantastic, by the way) at work. That in turn reminded me that someone had decided to bring it to TV a while ago, after the days where I forgot about television as any sort of significant entity in my life - is it still on? - and even though TV-Links doesn't have any of it, I've been able to watch bits of it on Youtube instead.

And I'm unsure whether to love or hate it as a whole now. I wouldn't go so far as to say that having visuals actually spoils the main purpose of the programme, but it definitely takes something away from it - no matter how good an impression is, you can't get around the way that Mark Perry, Jon Culshaw and the others don't really look like the people that they're impersonating. But the whole sort of mood of it seems a little different, too. It might be the different cast of characters that does it. In around series four of the radio version, it had evolved into something that was almost a regular sketch programme with an only gradually changing cast of impersonated characters - John Humphrys and Sue MacGregor, Brian Perkins, Martin Jarvis, Robin Cook, the entire cast of The Archers, Matt Smith (whose sketches were all exactly the same joke but still managed to be hysterical) and so on. The TV version seems a little more haphazard even though it keeps a few of the same people - Anne Robinson, Nick Ross and the Tom Baker version of Doctor Who, to name a few - and it's less interesting for it. And on the whole it seems to be written in a more dumbed-down way, somehow.

They do come up with some gems occasionally ("Now I'm Gandalf the Tartan!", etc), but some of the standout ones are lifted off the radio version and done slightly less well - see the classic "Alan Rickman plays the token baddie in Hollywood films" sketch, for example. I would give a link to the better radio version too, but I can't find it anywhere - the collection I downloaded is hopelessly badly labelled by filename.

In fact, one of the TV version's best efforts was the impression of House, where they got the formula of the programme and Hugh Laurie's invented mannerisms perfectly. However, because Jon Culshaw doesn't look remotely like him (and that goes for the rest of them, too), people think it's dreadful, and someone commenting on the video clip I watched was saying that a sketch done by something called "madTV" was better. With the convenience of the Internet I had a look at this parody as well, and like most of American TV output it was blatant garbage - they seem to have gone for the complete package and chosen someone who doesn't look, sound or behave like Gregory House, so things must be bad if people are recommending things like that over it. But then, he was posting on Youtube so it's probably safe to assume that he was fairly stupid.

There's another thing that gets to me - I never noticed it before pointed it out, but once he mentioned it it started to drive me mad. They always introduce themselves by name rather than relying on the impression being good enough to be recognizable in itself. They do this occasionally on the radio version too, but it's marginally better worked into the script so that it's less noticeable.

So in the meantime, I'm going to be listening to Radio For Old People and forget about this television nonsense once again. But I'll quickly have to make an exception to that as Top Gear has a special on tonight. I've been missing my Britishness rations.

Fundamentalists say the funniest things

I seem to have been using this icon a lot more recently, which I suppose is indicative of my continuing sense of complete bafflement at this country.

This video has been around for a few months now, but I only just discovered it yesterday. The people who believe in evolution (with all our irrefutable evidence that's built up over the last couple of hundred years that annoys the creationists a bit) might as well give up now, because they've struck back with the argument to end all arguments. Evolution can be disproved by a simple demonstration with a jar of peanut butter.

These people truly live on another planet. (If anything in a jar disproves evolution, it's Marmite.) As unlikely as it seems, some of them have worked out how to use keyboards and as a result the comments are equally laughable. Not that I'd recommend reading them, because they're quite a danger to IQ-force.

Apparently another common argument against evolution is that if you hammer nails through a plank of wood, leave it lying around for ten thousand years or so and come back, you'll probably find that it hasn't turned into a house. (However, the advantage of this experiment is that it does leave you with a handy tool to beat some sense into whoever suggested it in the first place.)

I did try to get over that video and write about something else, but I can't. What were they expecting? Undead peanuts?

Edit: I've just realized that the first man in that video is Dr. Gish, as seen in Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure.

I'll get you, Harry Potter

I just went to the BBC News site and saw the headline "Bush to undergo medical procedure". I had hoped the procedure would be "receiving a brain", but it's something far more mundane and really something I didn't want to know. You shouldn't click that. Oh, too late.

Anyway. Apparently a reasonably long-awaited book is coming out at midnight tonight, which is actually tomorrow. For a series that everyone says is horribly written it's doing rather well for itself, and the entirety of Coolidge Corner up the road is hosting a party about it this evening. It's just one of hundreds of things all over the place.

In fact, everything in the world has suddenly gone mad - ASDA and Scholastic had a bit of a falling out about book pricing, with ASDA claiming that the publishers were going for "blatant profiteering" (which is a bit rich coming from Wal-Mart) and pricing their books at £5 for revenge, only to have their order halted by Scholastic. Now they've made up again and things might proceed as normal until 12:01 comes and they can get around to actually selling them to the five-hour-long queues outside.

It's an exciting event, I'm not saying it isn't. But in the end, it's just a book. J K Rowling-in-it happened to have the right idea at the right time (to an incredible degree) and this is what happened because of it. I wonder if the final part of Lord of the Rings would have been received like this if Tolkien had written it today (but if he had, then we wouldn't have had most high fantasy literature until now, and besides, he would be alive after his death, creating a paradox that would put the universe in limbo until we were eventually saved by Doctor Who).

Still, this will be the last one, and after that, all this will be over. Apart from when they release the films in a couple of years' time. And those books are fairly long, so it's likely they'll be split up into separate films so that it takes a bit longer than that. But after that, it might stop at some point within the next fifteen years.

A year in America

Today is a very special event - it is the first anniversary of the day that I escaped from London, ending the time in which I could say that I permanently lived somewhere in Britain. The entire account of the worst weekend I've ever lived through is documented starting in Bayswater. Any useful information starts and ends in that entry - the rest of the next few days just chronicle my rapid descent into insanity. Hell exists as a virtual entity encompassing all points between Whitney's great-aunt's flat and the American Embassy. (And I never did get around to answering 's question.) I did get a photo of the apocalyptic hotel room that I stayed in the night before I flew out, too, but it came out very grainy from passing through so many X-ray machines along the way and having deteriorated for a year).

Unfortunately that wasn't the end of my having to deal with the bureaucracy's incompetence, but it was certainly the highlight of it (if such a word can be used). I can't believe that it's gone past so quickly - and it's only half a month now until our first wedding anniversary.

I'll get you, John McClane

Whitney and I went to see the fourth Die Hard film last weekend. It's called "Live Free or Die Hard", but the title seems to mean absolutely nothing apart from being a way to tie it in to the Independence Day weekend. It is, however, slightly better than the situation they would have found themselves in if the third film had stayed with the title "Die Hardest", as they'd have to have called it "Die Even Harder than the Last Time We Made A Die Hard Film". Anyway. I imagine that Britain doesn't get it for about the next three years, so these are my thoughts.

The plot about illegal transfer of funds over the Internet seemed unusual at first, but thinking about it further, it's a natural progression of the series - the Die Hard villains have always been cyber-criminals. Hans's group were in the building at the time, Cardboard Cut-Out German Baddie #2 used the radio waves and Simon did it over the phone network while simultaneously stealing half the gold from underneath New York, but the principle was the same. The scope of the films has always increased, from a building to an airport to a whole city, and this time, the entire country is used as a weapon by the hackers - from diverting traffic two ways down a tunnel then turning the lights off, to channelling half the natural gas in the country to one refinery in their attempts to get John McClane. Which he naturally survives with only a slight nosebleed.

By the way, for the first time in a Die Hard film, the villains are not German - they're led by an American and include disposable henchmen from every nationality that they don't really like at the moment. I'm fairly certain that he had mismatched eye colours, too, which is a trend for characters that is getting well overused now (although it could have been just the way that, as another current trend dictates, the film was shot in almost complete darkness for a large part of its running time).

Naturally, a lot of the film centres around computers, and every single one in the film uses the mysterious movie-OS that no computer in the entire world looks like (nobody in the film or TV industry has ever got past this, the only exception that comes to mind at the moment being the computer that actually looks like a computer in The Manchurian Candidate). More worrying was the inability of the people who wrote it to spell either "algorthim" or "faild".

But you don't watch the film for that, you watch it to see Bruce Willis running around and alternately shooting at people and blowing things up. I have to wonder how screen writers come up with new fight scenes for action films. Each new idea becomes even more far-fetched than the last, and the possible highlight of this one is a fist/gun fight inside a van while it's nose-down halfway up a lift shaft. And at the end, the manic over-the-topness of the previous film is recreated and exaggerated further than ever before. It's difficult to imagine how anyone is going to beat John McClane driving an eighteen-wheel truck on nine wheels, around a collapsing freeway ramp, while on fire, pursued by a Harrier jumpjet.

Somehow, though, something about it didn't quite sit right - it's nowhere near as far removed from the rest of its own series as, say, Terminator 3, but it doesn't feel like the older films somehow. I think quite a lot of this is because it's the only Die Hard to not take place in near-realtime - 1 and 2 were pretty much continuous narrative, Die Hard 3 took place over the course of one day apart from the scene at the end, but in this one, there are gaps of up to half a day while the characters transport themselves from one enormous set-piece to the next. The cleverness and inventiveness of the other three seem to have replaced with making things as gigantically impressive as possible.

Overall, "With a Vengeance" remains the best Die Hard film, but having said that, I think "Die Harder" is still the worst. Considering the usual track record for adding on to an existing classic series, that's a pretty respectable result.

Eye Dream (NB. I was completely unable to think of a decent title for this post)

Disturbing dreams never really seem that disturbing until you wake up. I don't mean the blatantly frightening ones, like the ones involving Matey bubble bath bottles coming to life, or the String Owls, or the ones that I got the night after watching "Blink". Just the ones that play out a horrifying situation quite normally as if it were part of your real life. This one isn't quite as incredible as the malfunctioning strawberry, but it stayed in my head for longer.

To cut a long story short, then, my eye fell out. Strangely, all these kinds of dreams happen in the setting of my parents' house, and in this scenario, I had been aware of a cramping up in my right eye for a while. I went into the downstairs bathroom and looked in the mirror to see it pointing down too far, so I reached up, put my thumb in and slowly rotated it back to the right place (which is unusual enough, as I have a thing about eyes and can't touch them at all in real life). I couldn't get it to point in the right direction no matter how much I fiddled with it, and eventually my sight in it began to fade. I wandered through to the kitchen, where it eventually came loose, fell down into my mouth somehow, and I spat it out into my hand.

Surprisingly calm at the sight of my own eye, I noticed that it was a slightly spiked white ball (entirely white, no pupil or iris at all). The optic nerve coming out of the back consisted of six wires, which were colour-coded red, black and yellow, and they were bound together neatly with a series of plastic cable ties - suggesting that my head is far better physically laid out than mentally.

I can't really remember much more about it, apart from then going outside into the back garden to see if there was anyone around who could drive me to hospital. But I've been tentatively touching my right eye all day today to check if it's still there, taking care not to knock it out of place by accident.

(Warning: This post contained disturbing imagery and you shouldn't have read it)

A Chestofdrawersful of Oddities

A while ago, there was a meme going round that invited the perpetrator to name six unique, strange or possibly unknown things about themselves. I actually found the idea rather interesting as it was one of those that invited intelligent commentary, but I never got around to thinking about it much for myself. Therefore, this is only not a meme because I'm saying it isn't. Do it if you like, I don't much care as long as you provide something entertaining to read while I'm waiting for a large compile to finish at work, or as I am at the moment, waiting until Firefox and Thunderbird gather up all the fragments of memory that they've leaked out like colanders.

Hands

This is actually the point that first inspired me to make this post, even though the incident I'm about to relate to you happened when we were in New Haven in January. I've got a long memory. It was when I was approaching one of the "Hit here" buttons at a pedestrian crossing, confidently strode up to it, extended my elbow and pressed the button.

"Why did you do that?" Whitney asked, indicating the body part that might have come as a surprise to you when reading the above paragraph as well.

"Because I'm not wearing gloves," I responded, confident that that would explain everything. But it didn't. It turns out that something that I had always thought was standard practice was just considered weird by everyone else. I would have just thought that it was sensible not to touch things placed outdoors and pressed by countless unwashed fingers hundreds of times a day. In particular, any toilet not in your home should be flushed with your elbow and not your hand. Was I really the only one who grew up thinking this? Evidently I was, because Whitney then offered to buy me a little bottle of handwash fluid to carry around with me on account of thinking that I was a colossal germophobe. (Sorry, I can't remember the proper word.)

Slugs

This is something that I've mentioned to people a couple of times, but just to cement it further - I am mortally terrified of slugs. I have no rational explanation for it - they're small, weak and not exactly the kind of things that can chase after you, but whenever I see one I just about freeze and have to give it a wide berth. When we lived in Cupar I used to be very scared of taking the kitchen bin out on rainy days in case I lifted the lid of the wheelie-bin and there were any underneath. The first time they were there I wasn't expecting it, and I nearly jumped all the way back up the stairway to the front door and had to sit trembling for a while before I was able to move again.

Snails are marginally better as they have some sort of form to them, but I would still rather not be within a few miles of any of them. I'm shivering just thinking about these things, so I'll have to move swiftly on.

Invented linguistic peculiarities (I did try to think of a better name for this)

I don't know if anyone will have noticed this, but I have a habit of dropping little in-jokes or asides that I think that only I can understand whenever I'm writing or talking to a certain audience. It's either as a result of me thinking that people won't notice, or not realizing that other people won't get them.

An example is the insertion of "the" in the middle of people's names. This is a habit that was possibly derived from Tony Robinson's series of Maid Marian in the early nineties, where many of the characters were plays on familiar figures' names - Margaret the Thatcher, Jeffrey the Archer and Jeremy the Beadle are three that I can remember offhand. Those made more sense than most of the ones I use it on, but it can be applied to others as well - it only works with the rhythm of certain names, though. This habit also has the advantage of obfuscating the name from Google, which is handy if I've said anything incriminating and one of my former lecturers is looking around on the Internet for occurrences of their name. Something which I discovered happens quite often, to my lasting embarrassment.

It doesn't stop there - part of what I was looking forward to at home was being able to talk to someone that was able to recognize and understand these things. I imagine every family gets to be full of in-jokes like this, and the one that has probably survived the longest time is the way that my mum, in her school days, used to pronounce the word "picturesque" as "picture-skew" (a logical assumption but a very wrong one). So that is how the word is now pronounced in our house. I also tend to curse by using random words in cod-Nordic or German, but I've no idea where this came from and I try not to do it anywhere where I might be heard, though Whitney says that I do it all the time without being aware of it.

Sadly this habit had a bad effect on at least one of us - at one point I'd seen in one of those misprint compilation books that someone had written that "a cuckoo lays other birds' eggs in its own nest and viva voce", mangling the common expression into something different entirely. I was so fascinated by this misuse that I started using the two terms pretty much interchangeably, but only around people who understood the joke behind it. Or so I thought - I stopped doing this after a time when a few years ago, after I'd used the term in a sentence to mock something or other, asked me, quite earnestly, about when it was grammatically correct to use vice versa and when to use viva voce. I'd used it so often that he genuinely thought that there was a legitimate subtle reason behind it.

Photic Sneeze Reflex

I love photic sneeze reflex. Everyone who has it assumes that it's normal, everyone who doesn't never notices it. About one in six people, I think, have the nerves in their brain wired in a way that triggers a sneeze when they look at bright light (due to the two nerves that control these two things being placed so close together that in some people, they touch).

It was something that happened to my dad and I for ages, though my mum could never understand it and I thought that we there the only ones for a while. I first realized that we weren't when Ricky Gervais happened to mention on Room 101 that he enjoys stopping people from sneezing, and they would then go around for the whole day afterwards looking at lights. From what I've seen I think that the number of people who have it is significantly less in America than it is in Britain, mostly because of the increased likelihood of seeing the sun over here.

The Great Seal (or just walking on pavements)

This is something that I'm sure will be familiar to everyone who has even been a student at St Andrews. During our time there, along with a few things that are actually to do with our courses, we're taught over and over to avoid treading on the various letters on the roads and pavements in the city (as I must call it as it has a cathedral, even though it only has about 10,000 people in it) - the PH outside the quad, the cross on the ground near the castle, and so on. Stepping on these is meant to bring bad luck until you run into the sea at 5am on May Day, breaking the curse by causing you to die of pneumonia.

Now, I only stepped on one of these once - it was the PH stones on the way to my first year computer science exam, and as it happened I passed that with a 20, but I still couldn't help looking out for and avoiding them in the future. Now I habitually veer away from any markings, cobble seams or letters on the ground just in case stepping on them somehow brings bad luck. It's one step above still trying not to tread on the cracks in pavements.

No Favorites/Bookmarks

I don't use bookmarks in Firefox (or Favorites, as they were called in ancient times when we were all using browsers like Internet Explorer). This isn't due to any sort of aversion to them - it just seems that I forget that they're there, and I only bother to set up the sites in my regular forum cycle when I install a browser then all but forget that the ability to add things exists thereafter. Having done that, I tend to manually enter the URLs to everything regardless of whether there's a menu entry for them or not. You could have the account jjiiijiijiijiijj at http://www.zyqxxkcdqyxxyzzy.com and I'd still try and type it into my address bar every time. Happily, it seems that no one else I know uses them either, and I'm constantly asked about things like the link to the CT2 bug tracker and the quote site for the Clickteam chatroom. It's http://www.davidnewton.co.nr/clickquote, if you're wondering.

Doctor Who - S3E8 - S3E13

Being fed up of going around like the Likely Lads for a month, with my metaphorical fingers in my metaphorical ears and trying desperately to avoid spoilers, I decided that we needed to watch Doctor Who last Sunday as we still had the last six episodes of the third series to watch and everyone in Britain knew what happened except us. I didn't expect to get through all of them in one sitting, but the episodes are definitely getting better and we could hardly stop once we'd started.

The "Human Nature/Family of Blood" storyline was an unusual start - it was only after watching it that I found that it was based on one of the old Doctor Who novels (his human form was from Aberdeen originally!). The almost fairytale-like ending had a strange air of sadness to it, and, just as "42" was the first genuinely frightening episode so far, this was definitely the most emotionally involving. They just used the tactic of piling it on thicker and thicker at the end until you eventually collapse under the colossal weight of it all at the war memorial scene. Incredible acting from David Tennant there, and very different from his normal character.

On to "Blink", which I had to get from TV Links because I'd forgotten to download it somehow. It seems like they're going for one side-story episode per series, and just like the last one, this was pure evil in a forty-five minute package. The storyline was actually very clever, making more use of the time travel aspect than normal and creating a Back to the Future-like loop that I'm still on the point of working out. But what everyone will remember from this episode are the weeping angels.

It was bad enough giving the huge buildup before you fully realized what was happening, and showing the screaming, twisted faces of the angels in the basement as they advanced in a demented stop-motion manner - but the main event came at the end, in that it's the only episode I've ever seen that actively tried to make you scared of something, rather than playing on a fear that someone might have anyway. I found statues to be a little unsettling anyway, but the scene at the end implying that any one of them could be alive and about to kill you actually made me shout at the television. Because as it happens, the building I work in is in a square surrounded by staring, empty-eyed bronze-faced statues that I now feel compelled to keep my eyes on every time I walk past. I'll get you, Steven Moffat. (I also found it hilarious that the Doctor Who site gives a special warning about this episode along with a "fear factor" of 5.5. On a scale of 5.)

After that, it was the final three-part storyline. Now, I did think that his episodes were incredibly clever at first, but it's rapidly emerging that Russell T Davies is far from the best writer of the team despite heading the idea of reviving the programme in the first place. The clever, menacing fear of the previous episode was replaced in the first part by somebody with wonky teeth walking around and going "grr" a bit, and a lot of the musical scenes in the storyline just seemed a bit embarrassing, even given the fact that the Master obviously wanted to turn himself into a trendy young Mac user sort of tyrant.

However, it almost made up for this weirdness in the sheer over-the-topness of the second half of the storyline - I can now see why my dad was so anxious to immediately download the third episode and watch it when he was here, because I don't think I would have coped with thinking about the situation the middle episode ended in for a week. Allowing a complete disaster to happen and going into that storyline for an on-screen year only to undo it later on was quite a major shock.

And thanks to all that, that night I had a nightmare involving Doctor Who fighting the Vortex Queen from Ecco the Dolphin. Thanks a lot. Unfortunately those are the last episodes that we'll comfortably be able to watch together because some idiot's brought Catherine Tate back for the fourth series, and that might be the most frightening bit of it all.

The Melonflowers

I had a fairly large surprise at work on Friday, as while I was on the phone to Whitney asking what my prescription number was I heard my name being called from the other side of the room. We work in the quietest office in the world (even more so when the people who control all the parking spaces in America aren't there, as one of the requirements for working at that company is to have an intensely annoying ringtone) and it's unusual to hear anyone looking for anyone, so I assumed it must be another lost delivery man again. However, no one ever delivers anything to me there.

I stood up to see him looking around for someone who looked like a David Newton, and he was holding a two foot tall arrangement wrapped in a plastic bag, the contents of which I couldn't quite make out. Whitney had asked me the previous evening if I would be mortally embarrassed if she sent me flowers at work, so I suppose in hindsight I should have got a bit of a clue from that, but I didn't think that she would have plans already in motion. I took it back to my desk and picked up the phone again. It was a present for our eleventh month of being married, which was something that I had hardly realized - time has gone very fast this year.

It was only when Whitney told me to look again that I realized that they weren't flowers - they were fruit cut to look like flowers and arranged in a bouquet-like fashion in a basket. These are done by a company called Edible Arrangements, and they're really quite spectacular things - I hadn't seen anything like them before. The size of those photos doesn't do them justice, by the way - even the small ones are absolutely enormous. After being admired for a bit, it was carried through to the cold server room so that it could survive the day (being easily bigger than the office refrigerator).

I got it out again to try and work my way through some of it for lunch, but it was a losing battle and I'm sure that it was growing back as fast as the rest of the office (all both of them) and I were picking at it - after having it on my desk for an hour or so I was beginning to feel quite ill, and even though it looked like most of one side had been devoured, when it was turned around it was just as big as before. So back into the server room it went, and I spent a while being poked by its sharp spines while trying to make it less side-heavy to make it easier to transport home.

It wouldn't have been easy no matter how small it was, because the station was packed with a huge number of Japanese tourists for some reason. They didn't seem to be heading for a train at all, just milling about and taking up most of the space outside the ticket gates. However, just like a Volkswagen Beetle, with my compact size I was able to pick my way easily through the jam towards the stairs.

A train was already there when I got to the top of the stairs, and knowing that the arrangement in my hand would be getting more rotten in the heat by the minute, I knew I had to make a rush for it - I leapt down the stairs, hit the ground running, losing the box supporting the basket along the way, and with a triumphant (and entirely involuntary) cry of something resembling "Hahy'bastaad" as I hurtled towards the rapidly closing train door, I leapt through it with an inch to spare and landed in the laps of two heavily armed police officers, who must have thought that I was some sort of insane British fruit bomber.

After that, the rest of the journey passed without incident, apart from everyone I passed in Park Street looking down at the colourful arrangement in my left hand. Most of it's still in the fridge - you can at least say that it's good value, as I think there's easily about $50 worth of fruit on the thing. And, as we discovered when we dissembled it on the coffee table, the central structural point that supports it all is... a lettuce. Even the base is edible. It's a stroke of genius.

Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement

I'm not sure what Whitney's class for the summer is actually about, but judging from the children's book that was left on my side of the bed last night, I would imagine that its title is something like "Traumatizing Children for Life". It was a picture book titled "Arlene Sardine" by an evil genius called Chris Raschka, and even though it's not exactly respectful to the copyright I think that reproducing its text here is the only way to illustrate just how wrong this book is. Rather than set up a main character for children to identify with throughout the book, the author pretends to do this and then kills her off and goes down a different route entirely. Much like a junior version of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

"So you want to be a Sardine.
I knew a little fish once who wanted to be a sardine.
Her name was Arlene. Arlene wanted to be a sardine.
Arlene was born in a fjord.
This Arlene was a kind of little fish called a brisling. She was a happy little brisling because she had about ten hundred thousand friends.
First they swam this way.
Then they swam that way.
When Arlene was two, she was fully grown. For a little fish, she was grown up, grown up enough to become a sardine."

This is all very normal so far, isn't it? But this is where Chris Raschku begins to slowly turn insane.

"First thing Arlene swam into a big net, a purse net, a big purse net.
Arlene swam around in the net for three days and three nights and did not eat ANYTHING, so her stomach would be empty. There is a word for this. The word is THRONGING.
On the third day, the net was lifted out of the water and emptied onto the deck of a fishing boat.
Here, on the deck of the fishing boat, Arlene died."

The image on this page is a pile of fish, their eyes closed in peaceful but unsettling upturned moon shapes. Normally having your main character die twelve pages into the book would be a fairly major obstacle to its continuation, but not for Chris. He ploughs on regardless, detailing every step of the process in a uniquely demented fashion.

"However, Arlene's story is not over, because she was put on ice, in a box, with her friends.
Arlene sailed to the factory.
Machines there, grading machines, sorted Arlene in between other fish her size.
Arlene took a short, salty bath.
Then she was smoked, delicately. She was delicately smoked. Delicately smoked was she.
I'll bet Arlene felt well rested on the conveyer belt.
When Arlene reached the big packing room, she was picked up...
...and put into a little can, a 1/4 dingley can.
They were packed like sardines, which could be like this, or like this, or like this:"

(Here, as you would expect, there are several illustrations showing various arrangements of distressed fish.)

"I wonder if Arlene was a little nervous for the final inspection.
Last thing Arlene was covered in oil, olive oil, closed up with no air inside, hermetically, and cooked in her can.
At last, Arlene was a little fish, in oil, packed in a can. A little fish packed in oil, in a can, is a sardine.
Arlene was a sardine.
A sardine is what Arlene was."

Still, once you've scarred your young ones by reading them this book, you could always cheer them up with a cartoon. It's nice to see that the practice of terrifying children isn't as dead as I thought. Thought I'm still partial to using a threat I heard years ago - "If you don't behave, Margaret Thatcher will come and get you".

The Julyth of Four

As I'm now in America I think I should culturally-insensitively wish you all a happy 4th of July, but I'll split it into a happy Independence Day for Americans and a happy otherwise meaningless date for everyone else. Anyway, we get a day off work today. Every Wednesday should be a day off, it's been fantastic.

We got up in the afternoon and Whitney made some ridiculously patriotic waffles using the iron toaster thing that we got at Bed Bath and Beyond the other day purely so that we could use our "$25 off a total purchase of $125" voucher. Apparently you're meant to wear red, white and blue on this day, but the only clothing of that description that I own has some obvious problems.

And about five hours after we got up it was the evening, and we went around to one of Whitney's friends' flat to watch some large fireworks and people being rained on. I really thought I'd use the day off more productively, but sometimes you just need to waste a day...

Escalator Action

Well, today might be a new record in the field of the least successful attempt to have a quiet, relaxing lunch hour.

Today, my parents left to go back to Scotland, and they came around to the office to have lunch with me before they headed on to the airport. After meeting the few people that were around and being impressed at the number of St Andrews graduates around the place, Whitney arrived and we all went down to the taquiera that I frequent along the road to get burritos (or indeed burritoes).

The taquiera (or taquoieaeria) had the potential to be stressful as neither of my parents were used to ordering Americanized Mexican food, especially at the rate that Anna's goes at which is usually something like "AAAAHDOYOUWANTBEANSRICEWHATKINDOFMEATSALSALETTUCEANYTHINGELSE". But after the perfect situation where neither the Hispanic people on one side or the Scots on the other could really understand what the other were saying, we got them and we sat in the square to eat lunch. Afterwards, my dad and Whitney went to get ice cream while my mum gave me some last-minute life advice (are you sure you have enough money, don't talk to strangers, don't drive too fast, brush your teeth three times a day, chew your food before you swallow it). That all went fantastically, and we went up to the office again to get the luggage and then went down to the station, which is literally ten steps away from the door of the Vanguard building.

This was where the trouble started. I stepped off the long escalator leading down to the underground station, and Whitney tapped me on the shoulder.

"The escalator ate my flip-flop", she said. I turned around and first glanced at her feet, one of which was indeed bare. I then looked over at the foot of the escalator and saw my mum and dad standing next to it, peering down into the brushes at the base of the rolling staircase and watching the back three inches of a struggling sandal twitch from side to side as the flat bit of the escalator rolled past underneath it. After learning down to see if I could free it and then deciding I would rather keep my fingers, I looked at the Emergency Stop button, wondering whether this qualified as an emergency or not, and made the decision that it was probably best at this point to call for help.

The bored man in the box at the other end of the platform seemed rather glad of the excitement as I ran towards him and told him about the trapped shoe, and he leapt into action at a dazzling twelve feet a minute as he plodded towards the escalator. As I turned to follow him I was just in time to see the escalator grind to a halt. I hoped that that was something that the attendant had done from his box with the vague blinking lights in it, but on approaching the few people that had now gathered to watch the action it emerged that my dad had "helpfully" tried to free the trapped sandal by stamping on it a bit. The effect of this was not sliding it out of the brushes as I presume that he had intended, but instead causing them to swallow the rest of it and stop the escalator entirely.

By this time my parents really needed to leave to catch their flight. They only had five hours left before their plane to Glasgow took off and my dad's passport contains such friendly locations as Kazakhstan, China, Russia, and various other Eastern European territories that form and collapse faster than an IKEA dresser, so they have to allow for potential terrorist questioning time. So we said our goodbyes next to a broken escalator in a subway station and Whitney and I waited for the inspector to arrive from the next station down the line.

I had had images of an annoyed station inspector questioning us about how we'd managed to break the escalator with a shoe (and I'm still not entirely sure how it happened myself), and I was planning on getting off the hook by saying that the man actually responsible was now on his way to the airport to flee the country. But the inspector was actually very friendly and his first concern was for Whitney and whether all her toes were still present. I would have thought that a toe count that came up short would be fairly easy to notice and that we wouldn't have had to wait for him to decide whether she needed medical attention or not, but it was a nice gesture all the same. In the end he took Whitney's name and address so he could report it as a "no injury" incident and said that there was a repair crew on the way.

So the next task was to get Whitney a replacement pair of shoes so that she could get home. After returning to the office once again, which was still almost entirely empty, I left her in front of my computer, made sure of her shoe size and then left her to entertain herself or continue writing my DOT Report Definition form controller if she so desired. I hurried to the pharmacy along the road from the square.

Pharmacies in America are very different from the chemists that we have in Britain. They're like miniature supermarkets for household items, with aisles full of odds and ends of varying size and usefulness. After wandering around for ages I had to ask if they had any sandals or flip-flops, using as many synonyms as possible to make sure that I had at least some chance of being understood, and was directed to their meagre selection. There was only one pair in her size. It would have to do. I paid for it and some cold drinks and left.

No one had arrived back at the office when I came back, and frankly, what I'd told Whitney about four entirely different companies working in it was beginning to look suspect. But it's probably just as well that none of them arrived when Whitney was around and thought that I'd turned into a woman. I approached her with the pharmacy bag.

"Whitney... I'm really sorry," was all I could think of to say, and lifted out of the bag the most horrendous ugly pair of yellow and clear plastic sandals that grossly overworked people in China have ever put together. They were made up of a sheet of rigid translucent plastic for the foot with a brightly coloured band in a V shape that was meant to go across the toes and the rest of the foot, provided it hadn't shrivelled up and fallen off from the embarrassment at being seen in it. There are devices in the Edinburgh Dungeon that look much more comfortable to wear than these things, and you'd also have the advantage of no one being able to pass by, look at your feet and think what an awful taste in shoes you have.

But finally she was on her way back home for a lie-down to recover from lunch, and if she had any sense left I'll probably find the plastic monstrosities in the recycling bin when I get there. When I came home this evening I was to retrieve the earthly remains of the sandal that brought half the access to Davis Square Station to a standstill, but when I asked the people at the subway about it they said that it had been mangled beyond all recognition.

Whitney should come for lunch with me more often. It's always entertaining.

DavidN

I am reborn!

(I think that GameFAQs is the only place to go now, but you can't rename yourself on the forums even though you can change your contributor name. And I don't want to delete and restart an account because I'm only fifty days away from becoming an Ancient, the highest documented level.)