Personal

SK to the limit

DSC00577 Not quite getting on to those substantive posts of which I spoke, but rather a requested post from a man more egocentric than even my humble self, the great SK had his birthday do last night at the ever-popular Sway bar, and it was an entertaining evening indeed.

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve witnessed drinks ignited midway through the process of being imbibed, but Sam, having valiantly paced himself through the evening, was appropriately and sufficiently waylaid by his friends into consuming a number of flaming vials of that most aniseedy of elixirs — [[black sambuca]].

DSC00573 The net result – an entertaining evening. Whilst my rapidly approaching middle age had me home at a relatively early hour, it was not before I witnessed a fair few flaming shots, and a number of bongo-offs between SK and the resident, erm, bongo-er, and, indeed, borne witness to Steve’s more pyromaniacal tendencies.

And if questioned as to why I didn’t set fire to drinks in my mouth? Well, this should be enough answer for anyone…

Personal

Busy bee

Been a busy weekend; have implemented about 4 new plugins on this website – fun as it is for people to read about the updates to the blog, suffice it to say that its simply been an effort at digital housekeeping…

…which has been accompanied by literal housekeeping. We’ve completely reorganised the living room; its amazing! Like waking up to a whole new house. Feels pretty good…

Anwyay, more substantive posts to follow. Have finished yet another Raymond Feist book this weekend, as well as the housekeeping (including the minor DIY already referenced), and made it out on Sat night (more to follow…).

Personal

Motivation, renovation, asphyxiation

Phew. Busy Saturday so far. Inspired by Sheila, we’ve had furniture rearrangment, hardware buying, picture hanging, [[dim sum]] eating, and general life reorganisation. Had I been lacking in enthusiasm for the project, I’d never have indulged in the dust-kicking-up expedition that has been today: Don Quixote now hangs in pride of place above my bed (I would, after all, fight the unbeatable foe just for the hell of it), and our living room is transformed.

No doubt part of the same batch of pro-activity that has seen the addition of the wp-audioscrobbler plugin (that tells you what I’m listening to somewhere down the right had column of the blog, and the Wikipedia plugin (link for which I can’t now find) that lets me link to that wonderful repository of information with nothing more than two pairs of [[square brackets]]…

Personal

Narcissism

Unsurprisingly, the last post was just to check if my Wikipedia plugin for WordPress worked. Now I just use square brackets to link directly to a Wikipedia entry about anything. Even [[halitosis]]. Or possibly [[narcissism]] itself.

Books

Raymond Feist is entertaining

Once again, wading through volumes of fantasy – need to turn my attention elsewhere for a while – but just finished the Riftwar saga, which was pretty durn good. From talking to a fan-friend at work, it sounds like Feist, more than most, has spun this franchise out far and wide to make money, and it seems likely its going to work on me. I’ve just ordered the next six books from Amazon…

Bring on the Serpentwar Saga…. (well, after a short interlude of reading books not written in flowery English, with characters riding on dragons, casting spells and being generally invulnerable/immortal).

Actually; I’m going to read Shalimar the Clown next, and old Salman does like to put in a character that’s a bit like him into his books sometimes (“Fury”, anyone?), so there may be someone godlike in there. At any rate, it will be better than “On Beauty”…

Miscellany

Lactose-free dreams

Last night, so weird, that I feel I have to blog about them.

(1) I was about to go on holiday to New York, which was about 20 minutes away somehow. I was struggling to manage handover notes and for some reason had to brief Simon Cowell on the campaign plan we’d work him into for one of our clients — although the “Router-Factor” really doesn’t have the same ring to it.

(2) New York was a 20 minute walk across an Ocean (in my dream, “Atlantis”), via a raising bridge (qua Tower Bridge), and I was walking up the incline with my friends. It was too steep!

(3) I also took a train to get from work to the start of the bridge, from which beautiful views of a teeny-tiny and barely recognisable New York were visible, which gave me bad vertigo (a flying train – Astrotrain?) and noted that a very normal, very unlikely friend from work had 8 piercings and silver rings in his face.

Who needs cheesey pizzas or hallucinogenic drugs? Just eat a bowl of crunchy nut clusters with Tesco soy milk and you’re away, evidently….

Media & Marketing, Television

It ain’t got Jack

Lamenting the loss of “Jack O’Neill” from cult-favourite sci-fi “Stargate SG-1”. This Cameron Mitchell character is fully sub-par.

Wonder if I’ll finally stop watching a series because its gotten too bad, or if I’m adequately hooked by 8 preceding series…? I suspect I’m hooked, and will watch in the hope that Richard Dean Anderson will make a return…

< / geek>

Current affairs

ImmiNation

Chris’ post about the recently introduced British-ness test is damned astute, and pretty damn funny.

Its something I’ve thought about for a while: I am technically eligible for the ol’ pork pie and bowler hat passport, but haven’t as yet done anything about it. This whole test shenanigan kind of grates on me…

Makes me think vaguely about a TV programme I was on, years ago… “England my England”, a show that sadly screened before the full heyday of the Internet made it linkable to…. In any case, Peregrine Worsthorne and Darcus Howe came to my school (amongst others) and interviewed a bunch of us about Britishness, and what it meant to be who we were.

I don’t remember the detail of the conversation but I do remember thinking of it more as an exercise in PR for my school, and so pretty much missed the point. As the royal suck-up that I was, I wedged a couple of silver spoons in my mouth and came out with the catchphrase they used in the final cut — a (bearded) Malaysian Oxbridge candidate surrounded by an atypically International selection of students — claiming that “it’s more about who you are, than what you are.”

Crikey.

Well. Right. Apparently the British government agrees: at least, as long as you can get 80% on a test like this.

Armand David's personal weblog: dadhood, technology, running, media, food, stuff and nonsense.