Land of Diskgrinder

five seconds of truth, gone

With good friends who chip in occasionally (imagine, I'm thinking of you) the starting point and main point of this blog is lost. See, I'm a technical director for a large advertising agency and my job is partly to understand the trends and tropes of the interweb (the other part is to swear fulsomely and creatively at people less prima-donna than me), so I know exactly how unread blogs actually are. The 95% percent rule applies - Most blogs are shit Of the blogs that are not shit, most of the posts therein are shit Of the posts that are not shit, in the blogs that are not shit, most of the content is shit Of the content that is not shit, in the posts that are not shit, in the blogs that are not shit, most of the words are shit And so on, until you achieve the granularity of lexicography and you are assigning 95% of the alphabet to the category "shit" (is "a" more shit than "f"?). So when I started writing this blog I had the happy realis...

Plus photoshop filter, and eye-high-lighting, makes for vanity publishing. Yours for the price of a slack cigarette Have at it phrenologists, the topology of my skull brooks no tiny patch algebra .

Going to shave off all my hair tonight. Down to the nub of skull. Because that's attractive. I have for many years, since I started losing hairs (one by bunch) flirted with the skinhead look (and even when I had the full head of sprouting weeds). As I have lost a deal of weight in the past two months (due to indian illness ) slim-lining with a lack of head-hedge will suit. I'll post a photograph through the loveliness of photobooth when I'm done. You know, because that's some kind of entertainment and a record for me in later years (happen this post doesn't succumb to pixel-rot).

Even though I'm an atheist (though I prefer the term afairiest, as I don't believe in fairies as much as I don't believe in magic-man-in-the-sky) I am extremely superstitious. Apparently we have this spiritual gland that's buried deep in the grey pudding in our skulls - a little illuminator that lights up the corners in our heads. Mine is atrophied, but like an appendix (another evolutionary cul-de-sac, punctuating the colon) it occasionally shoots some bitter issue into my digestive tract, and I have to eat my words. So I have an abhorrence of pavement(sidewalk)-spanning ladders and black cats, and deeply, deeply believe in karmic retribution (although I think that's a network effect - what goes around comes around: you put shit into the world machine eventually the cogs will churn you up). That's it, and that's the end: shit in; shit out. Live your life with less than brio and half-burned, you'll get a lacklustre and tepid experience in return. T...

Like a dying battery that arcs occasionally, the smell of ozone cracking in the air "The delta wave has started building - how long does it need" I think I'm going to go to the poetry slam upcoming. Although it sounds like the usual dreary twats will be in attendance, still I think I may enjoy it. Here's a quote from the site: Slamming is competitive poetry; where poets perform their work and the audience decide by their applause which poets are best. Sounds engaging. Any suggestions as to what I should perform? Perhaps this (I like it). Or maybe I'll crash?

With cellulose X-rays. I've noticed recently that my posts are degenerating into little more than tweets; thin dough leavened with the occasional yeast of dirty music I have banged together with music hammers in Garageband . I have an oldest and dearest friend, with finely tuned sensibilities, and a horror of amateur musical twiddlage, who would be disgusted by my attempts at harmonious hoo-har . But I get pleasure out of it, in the same way I get pleasure out of doing bad DIY. I have built my house over a number of years: heavily over-engineered; brutalist with ogees ; Le Corbusier in frills. I did architecture for a moment in the early eighties, at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University, because the word polytechnic got associated with sixties socialism and, well, brutalist architecture, and that's not good marketing). There's a thought: socialist marketing; there'd be top billboard campaigns . I have a kind of affection for all that nasty concrete...

Oh no, Apple have put together the sleekest most lovely computer I have ever seen. I want one, and I'm so fighting my natural hunter-gatherer instinct to go out with my hunting spear and gathering trousers and pocket me one of they iMacs. Damn and blast.

Second smallest boy

Industrial tweeting. The money's gone.

wish I hadn't.

Well work-wise anyway. Now onwards to this developer conference thing at the WS.

The sun is up, out and glowering over the muddled Bristol rooftops. Seagulls are arguing about politics in the gables. People are squinting (but mainly with smiling). I can hear the engines starting up, at last. July was crap, mind.

Anyone looking for a top Mac blogging tool (an intertube spade, or web pliers) should look no further than Marsedit , because there's nothing worth looking at past it. In fact, its lissom silhouette obscures feature-bloated competitors waving and bobbing for attention in its shadow. You have to know a bit of HTML (happy tamarind monkey lingo), it's not WYSIWYG (what you suck is what you giblets), to get the fullest extent of its powers (annealing, coffee-making, empathy and grade three piano). Me, being an OCD geek, have studied its mechanics. With its happy help I wield my blog spanner with aplomb. Cheers, ta, red sweater.

No really. You may recognise this expression from that one unexpected (and unwelcome) encounter after so long in the silence. Not intended. You looked sick. Sorry.

Some musical nastiness... And another...

I know this makes no sense, but it's a nice juxtaposition of wordy-happenstance. biff |bif| informal verb [ trans. ] strike (someone) roughly or sharply, usually with the fist : he biffed me on the nose. Plantagenet |planˈtajənit| adjective of or relating to the English royal dynasty that held the throne from the accession of Henry II in 1154 until the death of Richard III in 1485.

We English people say "arse" to rhyme with farce. And to us, "ass" (rhymes with mass) is another word for donkey, so it doesn't sound right to say "shove it up your donkey," or "Jesus rode into Damascus on his ass". I have a theory that American swearing is a lot harsher than English swearing (and differs from Glaswegian swearing in the same way). Americans appear to have no equivalent of "bugger" (which can be affectionate), "twat" (which is dismissive) and "bollocks" (which is a gentler way of saying "bullshit"). American swearing seems so much more venomous and nasty - "cocksucker" and the "mother-****er" concatenation (even I can't write that one full, it is deeply nasty) are super-aggressive. Also we tend to find the word "fuck" a lot funnier than they seem to. For instance, I can say "fuck off" with a smile, meant to mean "you're hav...