Chocolate Potatoes. They come from Lancashire, and that’s all the explanation there seems to be.

Things to do:

1. Wake up (morning)
2. Smile w/ rising sun
3. Meeting w/ three little birds (doorstep) re: singing sweet songs
   n.b. melodies – pure, true

4. Draft memo to listeners re: worrying about a thing – don’t

I just got about 160 e-mail messages that had apparently been sitting around undelivered somewhere. If you’ve been expecting an urgent reply to something, I probably haven’t got to it yet.

On Saturday we played another evening of Vahid’s Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Yes, this is a roleplaying geek story – you don’t have to read it. Given Vahid’s many responsibilities, his games only happen once every few months – just enough time for me to forget everything about my character and lose the Excel spreadsheet I was using as a character sheet. We managed to bodge together what we could recall with an older version of the file, and after an hour or so I felt like I was playing Eric Bystander again.

Now the thing about Eric is that, being a dragon travelling in human form, he has one strategy for effectively dealing with practically any dangerous situation. Beset by brigands? Turn back into a dragon. Caught up in an inconvenient border dispute? Turn back into a dragon. Walked straight into the assassin’s guildhall, sat down for a nice conversation and drank several mouthfuls of the special ale they keep for people who don’t know they have a contract on their head? Turn back into a dragon just before you pass out.
The whole thing tends to get sorted out in a few minutes, with little people running away in blind terror, some fire, and a certain degree of collateral damage to one’s friends and fellow travellers. Or, in the latter scenario, with the destruction of the entire building.

On the occasion of the End of the School Year, and whereas the company of dear friends is ever the cause of felicity and upliftment to the human spirt, the pleasure of your sparkling company is hereby requested at a convivial and festive Soiree, to be held on the Sixth day of December at the domicile of Isaac Freeman Esq.

Should the hectic social schedule of the Festive Season permit, it would be most gratifying if you, and such other worthies as you might wish to join you, would be so good as to join me in partaking of sweetmeats and libations, rejoicing in the Terpsichordean Muse, and engaging in light banter of a conversational nature.

One of my jobs at work is to set up signs outside exam rooms so that junior students know where to be especially quiet. The signs are little A-frame contraptions, and somewhere along the line somebody thought it would be a good idea if instead of having a fixed message they could be general-purpose whiteboards. Although I’ve never seen them used for anything but exam signs, this decision has resulted in greatly enhanced entertainment value for the more witty of our students.

The finest achievement so far has been to convert

QUIET
EXAMS IN
PROGRESS

into

QUI T
YAMS IN
P IG S

The staff in general, not excluding the Principal, have been much impressed by the high standard of waggery exhibited by the student body.

As expected, the Extended Edition of Two Towers is extraordinarily good. And when I say extraordinarily good, those who know me will be aware that I mean more Ents. The Song of the Entwives is there, and the Entdraught and a longer Entmoot. I’m pretty sure in the background of one of the scenes you can see the Entmobile and some Rohirrim using the Entsignal. I think the Ents should have their own spin-off movies. It was good enough for the Ewoks. They could do a kung-fu movie called Enter the Ent. I’ll start again.

The Extended Edition of Two Towers is extraordinarily good. Watching it makes you realise how many ways they had to compromise the films. I always thought the changes from the book (Elves arriving at Helm’s Deep and the changes to Faramir) were reasonably sensible, but they make even more sense when you see the scenes leading up them.

The production quality is likewise extraordinary, except for one spelling mistake on Disc Three – has anyone else spotted it yet?

Your heart is where it’s always been, your head is somewhere in between.
Even Better Than The Real Thing, U2

No posts today. I have marking to do and Two Towers to watch.

You are not reading a post.

It’s just a picture of a post. On your computer screen. But it’s not actually a post. Because the map isn’t the territory. And it’s not the flag moving or the wind moving, it’s your own mind.

A mighty blow for reliable soil moistness was struck yesterday, as my father and I completed another phase in our epic garden sprinkler installation project. This one involved such impressive endeavours as lifting paving tiles, tunnelling under railway sleepers, and lifting a section of lawn turf. But now there is a loop around my front garden, with sprinklers to water my cabbage tree, some shrubs and flowers, and that spiky Doctor Seuss Tree that I don’t know the proper name of.

And I have enough pipe and fittings left to embark on the next phase, in which I will boldly go where no man has bothered weeding for quite a long time.

Did you ever think to stop and squirt the flowers in your own back yard?
Water Pistol Man, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy

It was on Thursday that I finally went to see the new Matrix kinematograph. Given that I thought the first one was merely adequate, and the second a shudderingly incoherent mistake, I’m not sure quite what possessed me to see it. Perhaps I was assuming that my expectations were no so low that it couldn’t fail to exceed them.

But it did. They even managed to make the dialogue worse, and I don’t believe a single character trait was exhibited by any member of the cast, with the possible exception of The Guy Who Says Goddamn A Lot. I could sympathise with his frustration with the rest of humanity as he knew it, and the whole thing veered dangerously close to The English Patient: the only movie from which my attention has ever been completely diverted by the blinking LED on the smoke alarm on the ceiling of the cinema for longer than a full hour of screen time.

However, the second half of The Matrix Resignations improved somewhat. Perhaps my expectations had finally been sufficiently diminished to accept anything, but I found the conclusion reasonably satisfying. They didn’t bother to wrap up any of the plot holes, but they managed to avoid having Neo just magic everything away with his unlimited magic. Or wake up and it was all a dream or was it. Despite expectations, I managed to leave the cinema without feeling like I had wasted my money.