Tuesday, 2nd January, 2007

Odd Apple Teaser

apple announcement

There's a strange message on Apple's web site today, which is either a quirky little corporate "Happy New Year", or a hint at something to make every rabid fanboy/girl wet his/her pants

I'm guessing it's not as monumental as it seems. But the image is crying out for parodying. If I wasn't so bloody tired (didn't sleep a wink last night) I'd be in Photoshop right now.

Why thirtysomethings will be staying in to watch TV tonight

thislife BBC link

"10 years on, [This Life's] comeback tonight is event television" — [The Guardian] God. It'd better be good...

Bom bom Bom bom Bom bom Bom!

Ah, you mean à la 2001: A Space Odyssey. I thought you meant this

Hmm, I'm still very doubtful about the phone thing. The only thing I'd stick my neck out over, is the possibility of a case redesign for the Mac Pro — and some speedbumps

Five Things You Didn't Know About Me

story name genius hypothemia lakedistrict virginity meme

Dammit, memed — and it was all my own fault. I must try and remember to keep my interfering gob shut this year.

Can I just say, before I make some kind of stab at this, that this wasn't very easy to do. Thinking up "five things I haven't written before" has occupied my head since Mike pinged me — and it was partly to blame for my complete insomnia last night. I've had to scrub a lot of this because a quick search through the archives revealed that there's very little I haven't already written about.

There were some things that I was certain I hadn't mentioned before — but even I have secrets, so nyah.

This then, is the best I could do...

#1 : My middle name is "John"

Apologies to Johns everywhere, but that's a little rubbish isn't it? Middle names are supposed to be flamboyant parental follies — cumbersome millstones around our necks for the whole of our lives, things like "Chesterton" and stuff — but I've got the plainest middle name I've ever heard.

(Siobhan's middle name, of course, is "Fucking" — with emphasis)

#2 : I was a Special Needs kid

I went to three primary schools in total — the first one was in Paris, where we were living for a year, followed by a short stint at one in the town we lived in until I was six, then the one where we lived until I left Northern Ireland for good.

I don't remember all that much from the earlier two (save painting lillies of the valley, getting all upset about a Valentine's Card, and making a fake birds nest out of grass), and not that much from the third either, to be honest.

I do remember being called up in front of the class in P2 though, and being offered the chance to take up the violin.

Apparently, see, I was a right little trouble-maker at school. I guess it'd be called something like ADHD these days, but I'd lose interest in what was going on very rapidly, and they thought the best way to shut me up was to give me something else to do.

I turned them down (which sounds all grand and adult, but what I probably said was "NO. Don't want to"), based purely on a very old memory of a picture of an old man playing the violin that I'd seen in a book.

D'ya know, thinking about this almost thirty years later, the whole thing seems preposterous. In the picture, the guy had the violin tucked underneath his chin, but it didn't have a chin-rest. And that's why I didn't want to play one — it looked uncomfortable.

The next day, they offered me it again, and I said yes (I have no idea why I changed my mind).

I am, of course, glad I did. I played the violin up until I went to secondary school, when I switched to the viola. And in the last year of school, I switched again to the double bass — which was much cooler, a lot easier to play, and had the added bonus of making me quite popular with the ladies.

Something about "a big insrument"...

#3 : Kendal Mint Cake saved my life

This is Honister Pass in the Lake District, as nicked from Jane 's photostream (which surprised me, because I was doing a Flickr-wide search and her's was one of the few that came up of it with a CC license)

In the summer of 1989, a small group of seventeen-year-old boys on their Duke of Edinburgh Gold Expedition were trudging up the side of that very beck, laden-down with rucksacks, and soaked to the bone by the consistent downpouring that had been going on for the past few days.

Yours truly (natch) was one of those boys, and the most rain-sodden of the lot of them.

God, it had been a miserable few days. We'd started off cheerfully enough on the far side of Keswick, but by the time we'd hiked across half the Lake District — and discovered why there was so many fucking lakes there — we were despondent, tired, cold, and on the verge of giving up.

My clothes didn't help. If you knew me at all in the early nineties, you'll recall the ludicrous pair of army-trousers I used to wear — the ones with the holes in them. This expedition was the first time I'd worn them (sans-holes, of course — I'm not that stupid), and despite my enthusiasm and optimism — figuring if they were good enough for the army, they were good enough for me on a five-day hike — they were rubbish at keeping me warm and dry.

As we walked up the pass, the rain lashing our faces, I started to fall behind the others. Every single step seemed arduous, and the sheer futility of the exercise started to grip me with increasing depression.

At one point, the others noticed what was going on, and slowed down their pace making sure I was generally in front of them. But it didn't make things better, and before I knew it, I'd collapsed face-first into a clump of grass by the side of the path.

A few days previously, we'd all been sat in a youth hostel in Keswick, chuckling at how vehemently the procedure for dealing with hypothermia was being drilled into us.

"Build a wall of rucksacks! Build a wall of rucksacks!" the instructors had kept saying.

Lying there, on the side of the mountain, rapidly losing consciousness and body-heat, I was dimly aware of rucksacks being piled around me, and grabbing the odd snatch of conversation along the lines of "I get what they meant now".

One of my friends had clambered down to the beck to get some water, and they were dissolving chunks of Kendal Mint Cake into a pan with hot chocolate orange to try and warm me up. By this stage, I was verging on delirious, and kept mumbling "uv hoh shola mn un mu ahg" to them.

What I was trying to say, was that I had hot chocolate mint in my bag, because what they were forcing down my neck was truly truly disgusting.

(Have you ever drunk orange juice just after brushing your teeth?)

I don't really remember that much about the whole thing, which is understasndable I guess. At some point, two of them went off back down the mountain to get some help, and after what seemed like an age we were joined by a handful of sturdy Mountain Rescue guys with a big red stretcher.

I vaguely remember being strapped into it, and being carted back down towards sea-level — all the time feeling like I was going to throw up. I also rememeber moments of staring up at the ceiling of an Landrover en-route to Cockermouth hospital — where I spent the next few days in bed.

When it was all over, and we were back in Belfast, they told me how close I'd been to death — minutes, apparently. I know I titled this "Kendal Mint Cake saved my life", but actually five guys saved my life, and I can't ever thank them enough for that.

#4 : I lost my virginity when I was nineteen

...because dry-humping doesn't really count, does it?

Quick side-step: I have a vivid memory of being in the bath when I was young, and declaring to my mother that I didn't ever want to get married.

"Why's that?"

"Because I don't ever want to have sex"

Aside from the obvious flaws in that argument, I think it was because I'd just found out that guys who were married had to put the thing that wee wee comes out of into a girl's thing that wee wee comes out of — and quite frankly, the whole thing sounded hideous and icky.

Years later, I discovered that girls' wee wee didn't come out of where I thought it did. How embarassing.

Anyway, by the time I'd reached adolescence, any aversion to bonking had long since passed, and even though I had a slight tendancy to try and convince myself that I would wait "for that special girl", I was pretty desperate to get my end away.

It didn't actually happen until the 23rd of February, 1991, at three o'clock in the afternoon (yeah, just don't OK?)

I'm led to believe that most people's stories of "the first time" are usually tales of disaster — fumbles and mishaps, quickies and back alleyways. Mine was bloody fantastic, frankly. Simultaneous orgasms, the works.

#5 : I have an IQ of 168

There was a massive temptation, when I first started thinking about all this, to fill these five things with tiny self-deprecating secrets — you know, things like "I wear the same pair of pants for three days at a time", stuff like that.

But sod it. I am, as others like to point out, far too ready to get all down about myself — and I thought I'd finish on something I'm rather proud of, but never said out loud in public.

I dunno why it is, but there seems to be a overwhelming taboo in our culture about being 'clever' — we're a lot happier writing things like "I'm so thick, me" about ourselves than we are patting ourselves on the back every once in a while. Even now, as I'm writing this, I'm fighting the urge to temper what seems to be a boastful statement with things like "in as much as you take IQ tests seriously", and "but of course, it slips to 6 when I'm drunk".

But again, sod it. I know I don't always act like I've got a high IQ, but I got it tested a while back, and it came out as 168.

Which is quite good, apparently.

Tell you what though, I have no idea what my Dad's is, but it must be a lot higher than that. The man is (literally) a genius.

There's a lovely little illustrative story of this, from when I was studying for my A-Levels...

My Mum used to do private coaching for O and A-Level kids, so when it came round to my turn to take them, she gave me (and a friend) a bit of a hand. One day, we were sat in the dining room, papers strewn about the table, stuck on a particularly knotty problem.

We had an equation that stretched out over four A4 sheets, but the answer was wrong. We checked and checked and checked, but we couldn't see anywhere where we'd made a mistake.

"Anyone want a cup of tea?" came a voice from behind us, as my Dad popped his head round the door, briefly scanned the papers and trotted off to put the kettle on.

Five minutes later, he came back, mugs in hand. As he put them down on the table, he casually pointed to a plus-sign on one of the pages.

"That should be a minus" he said, and left the room without another word.

The closest I ever get to that, is my little 'projector moments'.

...

Anyway, in an attempt to localise this bastard meme to the Lancaster district, NRT , Looby , Neil and Selina , consider yourselves pinged.

First Principles are great aren't they? They're like phonetics for sums

Oops

cockup

Apologies to anyone who followed the permalink to the above post, and got my 'About Me' page instead because of a piece of lazy crappy code in my RewriteRules

Oh, and thanks for the bazillions of emails warning me something was up

Like I'm going to be up then (Thank God for PVRs)

Speaking of Antisoftener BTW:

1. I'm glad I put it up after all

2. Just wondered if anyone got the title?

Hmm, not really, or at least that wasn't the original intent...

Odd One Out

link tits sad-fucker

Heh. Jane just blogged one of my photos, which took me back to it in my photostream with a curious desire to see who it was that had favourited it...

Sometimes, I feel, the cumulative actions of an individual over a long space of time can all add up to give you a pretty good insight into the workings of their mind.

Making Up Words: Prefagricate

definition

Making Up Words: Twank

definition

Sorry

I thought Fonzy was dead!

Does it go up or down as you get older?