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.)

TV Links

Over the two weeks I spent alone at home (I meant to put this post up ages ago), I somehow got out of the habit of feeling that I constantly had to do anything useful with my life, put game, music and other projects on hold, and got addicted to watching things on TV Links. If you haven't already been there, this is a site that collects links from the recent explosion of web-based video sharing sites and organizes them neatly by series and episode. Not everything is anywhere near complete, but I was still very surprised at the amount of variety already there - it's constantly updated with programmes released by the day as well as having a decent archive of older shows and cartoon series.

Fantastic Four

The first thing I absolutely leapt on when I was it was the version of Fantastic Four that was made in about 1993. Why? Because when CBBC showed it all those years ago they decided to cut it off handily after two episodes of a three-part storyline and I never found out what happened. The cartoon itself wasn't among the absolute classics, but it was decent enough and had a fantastic 80s-style cheesy plot-summarization theme song that people just can't make these days.

What would make it even better is if they had the episodes of Iron Man that went along with them, as that was always my preferred Marvel series - however, they've just got one two-parter from then that cuts out about five minutes before everything is suddenly solved, and a few from the series a year later on when they gave Tony Stark an absolutely tragic mullet.

Sonic-X

After browsing around the Cartoons section I wanted to have a look at this, because I'd watched the other two animated takes on this series when I was about twelve. This Japanese effort wasn't actually terrible - no more embarrassing than, say, Ranma, and it actually made me laugh a few times. (This could be something to do with the other things that I tend to find funny, see below.) The theme music is one of those infuriating cheesy songs like the ones written by Ted Poley that's clearly appalling but remains stuck in your head and will not go away.

Unfortunately, even though the actors have changed over the last ten years and his voice is now mildly less irritating (it's no longer capable of sanding off a layer of the coffee table), my intense dislike of him has not yet subsided and I feel compelled to shout "You complete wanker" at the screen at least twice per episode. There's also the issue that I'm certain one of the baddies was called "Intellihentai". I'm sure that there must be a very good Japanese grammatical reason why that's a legitimate name, but with my limited vocabulary it just lets the imagination run wild.

Tom and Jerry

You must have seen this. Fred Quimby's series (not Chuck Jones, who ruined it) consists of the famous cat and mouse hitting each other with frying pans, fireworks, anvils and various other instruments of pain, and even though we're obviously far too sophisticated for that in Britain, it never stops being amusing. The best bit of the episodes on there at the moment isn't the physical violence, though - rather, the Robin Hood episode complete with voices that represent what the Americans think people from Britain sound like.

QI

In the moments on TV-links when I wasn't trying to relive my all too quickly vanished childhood, this was the main programme that I watched, and I got through a couple of episodes a night. It seemed like an original idea rather than a Have I Got News For You clone like most other panel games at the time, and it started just after I went down to university without access to television. It's often quite funny, but the previously warm and friendly Stephen Fry really does get quite irritating after a few programmes.

Reboot

Now that every single children's cartoon is either rendered in 3D, drawn in an angsty depressed angular fashion or is from Japan, it's difficult to remember why this was so special, but it was the first (I believe) regularly shown computer-rendered series. Clearly taking some inspiration from Tron and sounding like a strange precursor to The Matrix in places, it's a wonder it became so popular - it's undeniably the nerdiest cartoon in the entire world, with computery in-jokes comprising much of the vocabulary of the characters. And the token British villain was voiced by Tony Jay, the man with the voice so incredible that it qualified as a superpower.

Reboot, set in a city called Mainframe, drifted along in a fairly predictable storyline that didn't actually progress much for a while, then the end of the second series came and the writers went mad. After casually destroying the main character, they switched to doing the same kind of thing without him for a while, then decided they were fed up of that too, killed everyone else off and started again with a continuous hunt across entirely different worlds rather than staying in one location all the time. What happened after that is a mystery to me, because like most everything, Britain gave up showing it after a while and we never found out the conclusion.

MST3K

I was first shown MST3K - or, to give it its never-used massively long full title, Mystery Science Theater 3000 - when I was in first year of university. Being my usual open-minded self I predicted that it would just be over-Americanized rubbish like most of the rest of their TV output, but I was genuinely surprised to find that it was actually quite good. A programme about simply adding commentary to an existing film doesn't need a plot, but they put one in anyway, told in the theme song at the beginning of each episode (which is hilarious, by the way), and some of the observations by the characters are genuinely quite witty.

Bagpuss

This wasn't on TV Links, but it fitted in here - someone put up a Youtube video of an episode of Bagpuss from 1974, and watching it nearly made me cry, I promise you. Most Americans think that his name sounds like an obscenity, and even if they get past that it's difficult to explain what was special about a programme that involved talking wooden bookends, singing mice and a toad playing the banjo without sounding like I'd taken a decent quantity of hallucinogenic drugs. This particular episode has a wonderful a capella ragtime performance from the mice at about 3:40 through.

Later on in the video, another talent of the Bagpuss writers emerges - unintentionally writing incredibly creepy songs. I remember two episodes of this programme giving me nightmares, one that had something about the four seasons and another about ears (set to Dvorák's famous Humoresque). This one has a song about a ragdoll. A ragdoll with stitched-up eyes that dances about in a possessed stop-motion voodoo manner that makes it look like it's from a rejected episode of The Twilight Zone. This is all set to the programme's signature haunting sitar/banjo/detuned piano music (I can't decide which it is).

Overall I wasted just about two entire weekends watching all of the above, and I felt rather good for it. With torrents and sites like these springing up, I can genuinely see television as we know it becoming obsolete before too long - why stick to broadcasting something at a set date and time when you can have downloadable content available for viewing at any time? Of course, if it was to be adopted they'd have to put some sort of amazingly intrusive DRM in it that would render it unable to be viewed by anyone, and that's a fairly major obstacle.

Gibberish

Oh, I've just remembered something - my parents are here for a week. And my youngest siblings are now 18, meaning that there are no children in our family. This journal started off as a record of events from my life, but it now seems that it's become so detached from reality and about whatever I'm thinking about at the time that I hardly even bother to tell people what's actually happening in life. It was for that reason that I changed its name from the four year old in-joke that about two people understood to the more appropriate one that you see at the top of the page now. Except that if you're reading this on your Friends page, which you are, this is all irrelevant.

I would just give up and read if I were you. Uniquely at this point, it's a lot more exciting.

My mother's birthday was yesterday as well, and we took her out to the vaguely obscenely named Fugakyu, a quite famous restaurant down the road from us. I hadn't realized that she had never tried sushi, but it went very well - I hadn't seen it presented on a model boat before. I nearly managed to pay, as well. And the price was very reasonable - it was about the same as what we pay for takeaway sushi that isn't anywhere near as good. So next time we feel like getting sushi, we're definitely going there.

This post's going nowhere. And it's too hot. I'm leaving.

Crystal Towers 2 - Luminous Tower

After doing a lot of general back-end-type things for ages, I started on a new level yesterday. No screenshots as yet because I haven't put in the graphical style that I'm going for (I've just sketched out a few ideas on my work notepad just now), but it's going to be a futuristic environment called Luminous Tower. The layout at the moment is also a bit of a mystery, but as the name implies I'm going to try and make this one focus more on progress vertically rather than continually going right like the rest of them.

I've put in a vertically moving platform which almost-sort of works - the trouble with those is that you have to detect whether your ground detector is over them when moving the player, and work out a way of limiting it so that it doesn't move away and dump the player off when it changes direction. (That could actually be quite a decent gameplay feature, but perhaps for another level.)

What I have done are a couple of enemies - I'm going for at least three different types on each level to keep things interesting, and trying my best not to just use simple monsters that mindlessly wander back and forward. At the moment I have a small upside-down helicopter thing that accelerates over time and pauses when changing direction, and a slightly Goomba-esque thing that crawls along the ceiling and jumps down to get you, like the Viles from the first game.

Confusion

I've never really been in tune with my moods, to be honest. Regularly my head can be fine and the rest of me can feel entirely different, or vice versa. At the moment it's an hour until I leave to meet up with my parents after they arrive at the airport, and I think I'm excited about this, but that feeling is manifesting itself as something identifiable as panic. I've been shaking all over all day while trying to sort out a stacktrace (three screens wide - a new record!), and to be honest, that Yorkie bar from down at the import shop was probably a bad idea. I've also been refreshing the progress of my parents' flight every fifteen minutes, and even though it had already gone halfway across the Atlantic, its altitude only rose above zero a few minutes ago, so someone must have wanted to go water-skiing very fast.

At the moment I've done all I really need to do for the day in that the report editor works, but the trouble is that it worked rather unexpectedly after my test cases got more and more desperate and there is now a report with the name "hairy dave" visible in the system. Therefore, getting around to writing a Delete button would seem the best thing to do at this point.

Comments from a Madman

Feeling much better today, thank you. This is for two reasons:

Yesterday I was awarded a Featured position at SheezyArt, a site feature that I didn't know existed until someone pointed it out to me, and I was constantly refreshing my page at work to watch an avalanche of messages come in (and this just after I'd given up on getting listeners there). I'm trying to leave comments back as I think it's the polite thing to do, but they're coming in faster than I can think up different ways to say "Thanks for the favourite". The next time someone says I should form a real band, I may snap and actually do it.

And today, the first article on Worse Than Failure to make me laugh out loud at work was posted. Rather than direct people there and risk them being fatally injured from the discharge as the high-voltage overinflated egos scrape against each other, I thought I would reproduce it here. Now, amazingly enough, there may be people who read this who just can't find Java source code amusing, so I've improved it a bit by highlighting the comment lines (if the background of your page is blue you're out of luck). Think of it as like winding through Denis Norden on Alright on the Night to get to the funny bits.

Don't be scared by the code if you don't understand it (actually, if do understand it you're in danger of working with this man so you should probably be very scared indeed) - the best bit are the schizophrenic notes he leaves himself that signal a confident cruise into complete madness.

// I'll only ask one more question and then I think I am
// going to flip burgers for a living because I just
// can't figure this out!

// kludge, once in a blue this isn't set..

/**
* Tag to email the user. There is a seperate doc on the details on this tag somewhere...
*/

// new day is dawning or we re-booted, start count over

catch(Exception e) {

// hell what to say? Programmer not user error here!

}

return false;

//added by me

// oddity, can't figure out elegant solution

if (da.getServer().toLowerCase().equals("devdbsrv1"))
cmd.append("\\SQL2000");

catch(Exception e) {};

// sometimes its best to be quiet

// I don't get this why substracting 1 from the month is giving
// 1 YEAR ago. Would appear bad, so watch this

gc.add(Calendar.YEAR, -1);

private int rowCount = 0;

// due the nature of this "current row" isn't current row

// not sure why this needs to be a HashMap - and I wrote the damn thing

private HashMap applications = new HashMap();

//if we're not getting the database, just return some random numbers instead

System.out.println("db error: "+e);
Random r = new Random();
int randInt = Math.abs(r.nextInt()) % 11;
return Integer.toString(randInt);

//just tack on anything to make sure the result has no spaces or returns after it.

xmlOutput.append("&a=b");

// ooh baby is this check going to cause more issues then it's worth?

Core uc = (Core)findAncestorWithClass(this, Core.class);

// take a look at the content type

String type = "FIIN"; // f**k if I know

catch(Exception e) {

// what can we do? Printing an error as already failed!

}

// Don't let the command line get to big for it's britches

if (classNames.size() == 15 || j == nList.getLength() -1) {
String file = writeCommandFile(javaDir, classPath, tempDir, tomcatDir, classNames);
docBuff.append(runCommand(file));
classNames = new ArrayList();
}

int index = agent.indexOf("Windows");

// is it the 10,000LD Gorilla?

// don't ask.... okay you wanna know. Make unique URLs based on the image
// update count so when people change images it refelecs (else the page
// is cached

private static HashMap imagePageCount = new HashMap();

// just need get the &$*ing class name of a string array

String[] blah = new String[1];
Class[] cos = { blah.getClass() };

// this check in abstract should not be needed,
// but abstract is often too abstrat for me to postive about

if (df == null && rf == null)
continue;

// smart, stupid? Strugglign with the fact I dont know
// the prices without doing a DB query, and that will lots of DB queries

public static HashMap retailPrices = new HashMap();
public static HashMap dealerPrices = new HashMap();
public static ArrayList badParts = new ArrayList();

// massage the sucker so as to not confused my little po' head

int eot = pstrResponse.indexOf("^~000EOT");
if (eot > 0)
pstrResponse = pstrResponse.substring(0,eot);
eot = pstrResponse.indexOf("^~EOT");
if (eot > 0)
pstrResponse = pstrResponse.substring(0,eot);

// how many fields of repeatable data do we have, this handy dany calucalation tells us

int totalCols = tok.countTokens() - dataTok.countTokens() - singularFields + 1;

private String TRANSACTION_CODE="DLRORD ";

// complete guess, havnen't gotten anything from Jerry yet

// really a big &*&*& kludge, sick, hurry, tied, and worked 10 hours..

String spd = (String)dbFields.get("start_pay_month");
String epd = (String)dbFields.get("end_pay_month");

catch(Exception e) {

// not that big deal..

}

// one can question if this is the "best" way.
// I first take the information and throw into objects, then I create hashtables
// and then I make a view out that....
// okay maybe I should go strait to hash tables I see that now!

// abstractly this should be 0, but.. just accept 1.

if (count == 1)
return "Y";

// okay a little corny, but create new object to keep the
// the values field of this object untouched....

ItNutsAndNotes t = new ItNutsAndNotes();

/**
* Gets a list of invoices for orders with the given criteria
* @.attribute status: The status of s**t
*/

catch(Exception ex) {
System.out.println("CAN'T DO S**T");
};

// never happes, can't figure the f**k out why

if (action != null && action.toUpperCase().equals("CANCEL")) {
return EVAL_PAGE;
}

F**K <- Who wrote that???

if (r != EVAL_BODY_AGAIN) {
System.out.println("AAA....");
pageContext.getOut().print("F**KME");
}

//This is a miserable hack I am about to perform.
//Since the POCheck happens in the super class, and uses the user to do so,
//I need to temporarily set the order of the user to the deleted order, then switch
//it back to what it was after the POCheck is complete. The hand is quicker than the eye!

I haven't encountered anything quite as glorious as that lot in my work, but there was one that came pretty close. You'll have seen a couple of "catch {}" blocks in the code above, which are meant to be used for deciding what to do if an error occurs and hopefully recovering from it. Instead, the entire contents of one of the catch blocks in our system reads "// Oh well".

Why Everyone is Stupid

I think it's fair to say that anyone who spends a significant amount of time on the Internet will eventually become mildly irritated at the overused words and phrases that people use, as well as the increasing tendency towards blatant gibberish becoming an acceptable way to communicate. "It's just the Internet" is no excuse - if you're writing something that you expect people to read or answer, then I would have thought that writing style was of paramount importance in an environment where you're entirely composed of written language. As you can probably tell I'm in a bad mood just now, because we've just been hit with another doctor's fee on top of our already ludicrous hospital bill for Whitney's teeth, and preaching about these is one of the things that I do best. Don't take any of this personally. Let's open with the obvious.

"Alot" - Right, stop doing this. Also, stop saying that language evolves, the excuse of illiterates down the centuries, when people tell you to stop doing this. Evolution doesn't happen because you're too stupid to know better. Strangely, when it's written wrongly like this it's common to see it emphasized by putting it in capitals, drawing even more attention to the inability of the user. I would have thought that you would know that these are two separate words, how to use apostrophes correctly and the difference between "you're" and "your" by the time you're out of, say, primary seven (and that's a phenomenally generous estimate if you ask me). This is the first and last purely grammatical issue that I'm going to include, so you're probably safe from now on.

"Law of averages" - Not exclusive to the Internet by any means, but it gets to me every time someone mentions it. It's not a law. It doesn't work. Stop it. I never liked it, but my aversion to it was heightened when some people were talking about statistics on Worse Than Failure (the half that are predominantly stupid rather than predominantly loud) and using it to disprove that there's an equal chance of getting heads or tails when a coin is tossed. Idiots, the lot of them.

"k" - An abbreviation of an abbreviation. "OK". There's no reason to use this unless you happen to be Jam from Weebl and Bob. Is one extra keystroke too much to ask? And no, not "kk" either - it's only half an inch to stretch over to the O. You don't even need to hold the shift key down if you don't want to.

"O_O" - I hate this emoticon and all its variants. I don't like any of them much, not because of what they are but because I feel that by using them I'm admitting that I'm not good enough at expressing myself in writing not to have to rely on them. But this is the worst of the lot. Variations include O_o and o_O, and I've seen them almost exclusively used as entire posts by clueless people on the Java forums, making it shorthand in my head for "I'm an idiot and don't know how to ask coherent questions or say what I don't understand". Even more deplorable is when you fill an entire page of a chatroom with variations of it and those appalling < and > shifty-eyes things in a flickbook-animated style. Get off my Internet.

"Get off my Internet" - If you say this you're clearly an intolerant bastard with an overinflated sense of self-importance. (In other words, a perfect personality match for the Worse Than Failure forums.) You probably spend your time putting together lists of Internet words and phrases you hate, you tedious individual.

"You win the Internet" - Perhaps the opposite to the phrase above. It was hilarious the first time, and mildly funny as I kept hearing it for about a year afterwards, but I've now seen this about five times a day since 2002 and it's beginning to grate a little.

"[Anything] FTW!" - [People who use this] STFU!

"Urbs" - This is how the Americans say "herbs". I can't understand why. This isn't a writing issue, but I just thought I'd throw it in while I was at it.

"Full stops. For. Emphasis." - Stop. Doing. That.

"Nomnomnom" - Shut up.

"Sheeple" - No.

"confused" - Now, here we have to pause a moment. I have no idea why I don't like this word. There's no underlying grammatical reason to dislike it, but I find myself avoiding using it wherever possible. It's an example of something that I don't like purely for the sound of it in my head rather than how it's used. I'm not mental, I promise.

"Beta read" - I saw this for the first time yesterday and after a moment of looking at it, just about worked out what it meant. If you don't understand it, it was meant to mean "proofread", in presumably the same way that software goes through a beta stage where it's almost complete and needs checking over by a wider testing audience. I can see how this sort of makes sense, but it doesn't quite sit right in my mind - the context it was used in was wildly inappropriate if the suspicions I have as to where the term actually comes from are correct.

"LOL" - The universal killer. A staple of AOL-speak, it was introduced to indicate "laughing out loud", even though I would be prepared to bet that 99.9% of the time it's used that the user isn't. Worse is when it's used as a sentence delimiter in stream-of-consciousness gibberish that lacks any other form of punctuation. Even when used in a paragraph that's at least vaguely coherent it's often simply added to the end of sentences, making me feel to mentally pronounce it as I read it lol. See how annoying it is? It is the hallmark of the terminally stupid and I despite it utterly.

And some people have the nerve to ask why I care about people's grammar and written language so much. It's because in my daily interaction with the Internet I'm forced to read such garbage - I consider it polite if people talk in a way that I'm at least vaguely able to parse. I'm off to smash things with hammers.

Oh, by the way, I just got a Featured Art on Sheezyart, so that's brightened things up a bit.

Crystal Towers 2 - Online

After Wired got up to its tricks again and disabled sessions for half a week, I'm planning to move the bug tracker over to my free account at Byethost - there will be adverts, but I can set it up to be exclusively for CT issues rather than having problems with the bug tracker lumped in as well.

Recently I've still been working on the menu, and the game now has fully customizable controls! All that's left is to put Enter and Esc in as the default confirm and cancel buttons, so that navigation doesn't rely on you remembering what you set them to for each player.

As Jam has gone on an extension-writing spree recently, I've been thinking of how to include online high scores for the game using the new Live Receiver object. They probably won't be nearly as extensive as the Special Agent ones, instead giving each player a "data sheet" to show their progress through the levels and finding of secrets, and so on, with the high score table being the list of people who have completed the game. That means I'd need to extend the accounts system, possibly by adding an "Update online account" option to the existing player accounts and prompting for a password when needed. It would also mean that I would need to come up with a way to encrypt the save data so that it couldn't be modified by hand.

But that's jumping ahead a bit, as I've still only got three levels - I'll try to pick it up again soon, but what I really need to do is plan the layout of the hub a bit more. A possible progress tree would also help a lot.

Russia

My "RUSSIA" T-shirt caused problems again today, after last year when I wore it in the Megabowl in Dundee and couldn't cross the room without being asked to fix a lane. This time, on the way back from a walk to the reservoir at Cleveland Circle, we stopped at the Russian shop on the corner to get some kefir. This is one food item available in America that I've really developed a liking for even though Whitney thinks I'm impossibly gay for drinking it, and everything went fine until I approached the woman at the counter.

"шахматный кефир водка Каспаров?" she asked cheerily. Taken aback, I paused for a second, and on the spur of the moment only just stopped myself from answering in German. I think my mind must have gone through the process of "It's foreign, so she'll understand it". But I stumbled a reply out in English instead so that the conversation wasn't carried out in a language that neither of us really knew, and I didn't even notice that she thought I would be able to understand Russian because of the T-shirt until I'd convinced her I wasn't.

After a slump caused by nowhere to submit them, my music writing has picked up again recently and I finished the first song from a new planned album yesterday. In fact I've even drawn up a likely complete track list and posted it on the two sites I submit them to. Not that anyone ever pays attention to journals there, mind you (after the first explosion, things reverted to having exactly two people look at anything I've submitted in the future). Maybe a subtle "Comment on my submissions, you otaku cretins" would convince them otherwise.

Crystal Towers 2 - Time for another monthly update

I've been fixing a lot of little bugs for the last hundred years, so progress is slightly boring as far as the gameplay is concerned. There's a menu on the game now, though, and the joystick controls are fully customizable - something pretty vital for people with controllers other than the PS2 one I'm using, but that's nevertheless overlooked by a lot of games. That took ages and it still needs a couple of things ironed out of it.





Player accounts have also been done. Having separate saves, options and control settings for each player is a difficult thing to keep track of and I did wonder in the end how many people would actually use more than one player on the same computer. But my previous game had them so I was determined to get them into here. Saying that console-style name entry screens was annoying was obviously going to come back and bite me, and I've put one in to here. This gives two advantages - first, you don't need to check for invalid filenames put in as a result of awkward users, and second, it makes control the same through joystick and keyboard. And besides, if the keyboard triggers are letters, how do you know when the user's typing and when they're saying they're finished? (It also has an Easter egg on it, so I can cram in a few more in-jokes - if you put in enough someone's bound to get one.)





The background you see on there is a small taste of the graphics that Hayo is introducing to the game. He's been a bit busy recently, but I've seen a screenshot of some new tiles, and things are looking very exciting indeed...

Jam jam jam

At the moment I am writing a function to get some individual properties, conditions and search terms written in XML out of one part of the webapp, convert them into a set of PropertySearchCriterionBeans that another part of it can use, then loop to load these CriterionBeans into a publishing set.

The temptation to call it imFillingThePubSetWithBeans() is almost too much for me to cope with.

Massachusetts General Hospital

The last 36 hours or so have been some of the most stressful of my life, and that includes the weekend when I had to stay in London. Thursday was the day that Whitney got her teeth fixed, something that we'd been waiting for ever since Boxing Day when they decided to start growing into each other.

The first two insults came when the hospital phoned Whitney during Wednesday lunchtime to say that they wanted us to be there at 8:45 in the morning, and that we would be paying upwards of $3,000 for the surgery. This is apparently normal for students living in America under the least effective healthcare I've ever experienced. So even before we arrived, that doubled the number of painful extractions that were going to be performed that day. Turning around from the entrance to the Farmer's Market, I didn't even pause to finish my lunchtime burrito before taking the train home.

I couldn't sleep that night at all. I don't tend to have nightmares when I'm stressed, but instead my thought patterns get confused with what I've been doing earlier that day - and more often than not, I've been writing code. This means that two nights ago I had constant thoughts about having to instantiate the hopsital and plan how to implement its various departments and offices. After going to bed early, I woke up at ten, eleven, and two in the morning, trying to convince myself that all we had to do was get in a taxi and get to the hospital when we woke up.

And that task is difficult enough - to make absolutely certain that I would be all right for the journey, I rose out of bed at five o'clock. This isn't a wimpish aversion to early morning starts - I genuinely have to have a couple of hours in the morning before moving from the safety of where I live, or the result is usually like something out of the Exorcist. (Remember when everyone thought I was pregnant in first year of university? It's much the same as that.) At eight o'clock I decided that I didn't want to deal with the subway, and phoned for a taxi for both of us. A $20 fare on top of the riches the hospital was expecting us to pay wouldn't make a huge difference.

So after an uneasy taxi ride, we arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is an Escheresque set of very disparate buildings jammed together at random angles. But I'll say this for it - the lifts are impressive. Virtually as soon as you step in to them - "What floor would you li-" ZOOM "There you are". At the medical centre I work above, the lifts are so slow that anyone entering them while ill would probably be dead by the time that they arrived on an adjacent floor. In these, I'm surprised that we didn't momentarily become weightless.

When you go to hospital in America the first thing they do is hand you a heap of forms to fill in, to establish whether you're at risk from allergies or anything in your family history. Whitney got quite a full form out of this, as her extended family are some of the most resilient people in the world and they've together managed to amass just about the whole collection of disorders while staying alive regardless. The most interesting bit that I found on the form was a pain-o-meter of sorts, where the patient had to rate their level of agony on a scale from one to ten - from "Listening to a 9am Functional Analysis lecture" to "Dinner with Timmy Mallett". I can't imagine what possible use they could have for that for people that they're going to operate on anyway.

Much sooner than the original 10am appointment time, we were called through to what looked like a storage cupboard and sat down in very fake leather armchairs. Whitney was connected to an IV device, which she did very well with even though she's scared of needles, and we watched an ECG machine beep to itself at random as we waited for something else to happen. The nurse came through and asked about her name, age and what she was here for, which was mildly frightening as it's the kind of thing that you would think they should know already.

After what seemed an extraordinarily long time, during which half the staff came through and took gowns out of the shelving unit behind us, I watched Whitney being taken through into the operating room. I then walked back to the front area to wait, and for that hour, I was terrified. I had meant to ask how long the procedure was meant to take so that I had some idea of the time I would have to distract myself for, but I just had to keep going on Earthbound on my laptop, not knowing whether I could expect to wait another thirty minutes or that having to wait an hour signalled that something was wrong already. At the same moment my battery ran out, my name was called again and was shown through to Whitney, fast asleep on one of the leather chairs with a set of cooling bags around her jaws.

The nurse handed me a set of instructions and guidelines about what we would experience in the next few hours and what medication Whitney needed for her newly shaped jaw, then I was asked about contact details for a telephone follow-up on Monday. At this moment, Whitney sat upright, said very clearly that I had said our two phone numbers the wrong way around, then instantly fell asleep again. There's no escaping it. Over the next while she gradually came round, and after waiting for the doctor, who said how nice Whitney's jaw had been, we wandered out to the main entrance again, caught a taxi from the stop on the pavement outside and finally went home.

After getting back to the flat, we laid Whitney out on the sofa and I ventured forth to get her prescriptions from the local CVS pharmacy. (No, I can't look at that name without thinking that either.) Except they didn't have the all-important painkillers, so I had to phone the increasingly agonized Whitney and explain that I was trekking throughout the pharmacies to find them. Eventually the Walgreens along the road had them, and at the very reasonable price of $65, too - I was expecting to pay hundreds for them, the same as the painkillers that she had to take a few months ago. Now she should be asleep on the sofa, her mouth gradually forming into the right shape again. Hello if you're reading.

I've somehow managed to come up with a decent entry out of this, but this doesn't reflect at all how I felt at the time. The whole experience was almost as torturous and life-draining as the Visa process from start to finish. A word of advice - never get ill in America.

(By the way, for the benefit of as she's started some sort of linguistic counterterrorism initiative: Elevator; MGH; EKG; T; rank; sidewalk.)

48, 42, 2

I was mildly surprised to find forty-eight emails in my inbox this morning. Even accounting for the regular spam I get about cheap Ad0be s0ftware and c1aGgLi$, that's far beyond the number of LJ comments, worried emails from Mum and confused questions from confused people trying to follow the confused tutorials I've written for Clickteam. The source of the emails was comments from Livejournal, but not from my own - my previous pizza disaster tale was accepted to Mock The Stupid yesterday. I'm rather proud of that, as it's quite difficult to get on there - I've only had one other post accepted before and that was one that I didn't actually write. And it's being rather well received, so it looks like I've somehow learned how to write entertainingly. Whitney said to me that I should go into humour writing last week, but it's reasonable to assume that she might be slightly biased. And Don said on the same day that my posts remind him of Jeremy Clarkson, and that might be the most distressing compliment I've ever received.

We're a bit behind with Doctor Who, and we only got around to seeing the one from a fortnight ago last night. Some of them have been mildly disturbing this series, but "42" is definitely the first this series that I can say was genuinely frightening. I think only "Love and Monsters" comes close to it, and everyone else thought that one was just stupid. I've no idea what they could have done to make those Cyclops-from-the-X-Men sun masks look more frightening. And the stress of it was only heightened by the way that it was set in real-time, not allowing for any narrative breaks or reprieve of pace at all. It did make me wonder if the title "42" was meant to refer to the timer, a play on the title of "24", or a nod to Douglas Adams, but knowing the current Doctor Who writers, I would say that it was probably meant to be all three.

Whitney had a good find yesterday when we went into Gamestop on the way back from shopping - Kingdom Hearts 2 for $17.99, so after completing the first one last month, we had to get started on that. We played through what must be the longest pre-titles sequence ever last night, going for about five hours before being rewarded by it mentioning that we'd reached the start. It's almost an MGS2-like deception in that it starts you off thinking you're well into the game, then rips you out of it and puts you into a completely different one. The villain is bald and voiced by Christopher Lee - I don't know his name yet, but in typical Square fashion he wears two belts wrapped around his head.