The Blog of Eternal Stench

Just a little too freaky

2004-04-07T12:48:37Z

I had an ear ache yesterday. Painful, but more notable for effectively preventing me from concentrating for more than a few minutes. In a somewhat bloody-minded (pun? I see no pun...) break from work, I decided to look up the War of Jenkins' Ear, probably to see if it was the left Ear which caused the problem then as it was causing me at the time.

Apparently, Captain Robert Jenkins of the merchant ship Rebecca was boarded by the then Spanish equivalent of customs guards. After finding that all was not to their satisfaction, the Spaniards duly tortured the captain and his lieutenant, including severing Jenkins' ear. Some seven or eight years later, when English political and public opinion was very anti-Spain, the incident became a sort of cause celebre for a war against Spain, after the Ear in question, now pickled, was displayed in the English Parliament.

That bit I knew. What I didn't know was that the good captain's ear was cut off when he was boarded just of the coast of Habana (aka Havana), on April 9, 1731. Depending on the time of day, it would most likely have been April 10, Melbourne time. My birthday.

Mr Music? Cue Twilight Zone soundtrack, please.

On another note, I discovered the Bog of Eternal Stench a while ago at work. One of the guys came over and asked me to smell his desk - a dodgy proposition at the best of times, especially considering the co-worker involved. However, I did, and something was indeed a bit whiffy coming from the hired pot-plants.

Let me repeat that last bit: "hired pot-plants". I work in what is technically described as a open plan office, more commonly known as a "cube farm". The nearest outside wall has floor to ceiling windows along its entire length (60 metres, I'd guess), which spend their entire time shuttered. Some deranged individual thought it would liven the place up to have pot-plants draped across various cubicle partitions. But since no one wants to actually buy/tend/water the damn things (in corporate-speak, that means no one will "take ownership" of them), we end up hiring them. There are companies out there that actually do this for a living. Our society is doomed.

These pot-plants are placed in troughs and anchored to the cubicle walls. This one was about one quarter full of water. Now, these troughs don't drain, and the only maintenance they get is from the pot-plant-hire-guy, who comes around every whenever to water them. So that water had been sitting there, undisturbed, in our slightly worse-than-useless air conditioning, probably for a few months.

It was pretty feral.

I helped him move it, 'cos the troughs are slightly awkward to move by yourself. In moving it, we broke the thin layer of scum covering the water which, it turns out, was actually keeping about 99% of the smell in. So we moved it out, leaving a trail of "Oh my God, what is that smell" behind us. It was really potent stuff - full on "one drop on your skin & you'll be in the shower with steel wool for an hour" bad. I know this because we both got a few drops on us, and I don't know about my co-worker, but I couldn't stop smelling it days later.

Anyway, if anyone was ever wondering what happened to the Bog of Eternal stench from "Labyrinth", now you know.

Zooooooooooooom!

2003-12-16T11:17:48Z

I now have a bicycle. Woo hoo!

So now it's back to the world of optional traffic lights, yelling at pedestrians and reading the minds of car drivers. The bike itself is only a cheap one, but I plan to trade it in for a better one a few months hence.

It's surprising how much I missed riding, although I think my legs are still not so sure about the whole thing ("Next time, warn us before you do something like that!"). The stairs at work are still a dodgy proposition at the moment. Oh, and I will be looking into buying a decent seat... Fitness is pretty ordinary, as would be expected of such a long break from riding, but hopefully that will change quickly.

The other odd thing is the songs that get stuck in my head as I'm riding. While Queen completely fails to rate, Portishead ("Strangers" - I blame reversing trucks for that one), Garbage (var.) and even Bowie ("Modern Love") occupy my headspace to whatever beat I happen to be pounding out at the time. I might start actually taking a CD walkman along with me once I have my bike legs back, but that would need to be edited carefully for mood - "Jagged Little Pill", for example, is right out (I say this from personal experience).

But right now, I don't care. It's summer and I have a bike.

Book meme

2003-10-05T04:54:56Z

Books you are reading right now.
Gould's Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan
Voice of Our Shadow - Jonathan Carroll

Books you use most often for reference
DNS and BIND - Cricket Liu
Roget's Thesaurus
Brewer's Concise Phrase and Fable has received a bit of a work-out too, recently.

Books you read on high rotation
The Phoenix Guards - Stephen Brust
The Pliocene Saga - Julian May

Books you read for comfort
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

Books you really ought to read
(I'm including what's on my current "Will Read Some Day Soon Now, No Really" list)
The Aubrey / Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian
The Scar - China Mieville
The Three Musketeers - Alexander Dumas
Don Quixote - Cervantes
Baudolino - Umberto Eco
Books by Jorge Loius Borges
Books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
More books by Russell Hoban

Books you will never read
How about never finish? The Gap Series - Stephen Donaldson

Edited for formatting only

Where the hell is Damien when you need him?

2003-08-23T07:53:19Z

In amongst all the bells and whistles today, two remarkable things occurred, roughly in this order:

I heard from an old friend whom I had regretted not keeping in touch with, and
I ended up with a Live-Journal account without asking, or indeed expecting it.

While I know the two events are coincidental, I shall choose to take this as An Omen. Not entirely sure of what yet, but for my money it's definitely An Omen. For starters, I'm actually in my house, which up until a couple of hours ago was looking distressingly unlikely due to the current distribution of house keys. Again.

So this was clearly meant to be.