lack of phone line problem

Argh! We have no home phone line, for reasons unknown. Although it affects (at the very least) everyone in our block who uses BT, said company have, in their infinite wisdom, told us it will be "up to 5 days" before it can be fixed. So alarm and calamity. Not that I could care less about receiving voice calls (anyone who actually wants to get hold of us will ring our mobiles anyway), but cutting us off from the internet is like cutting us off from TV, the public library and the pub all at the same time! Argh!

Anyway, miraculously!, for some strange reason, we still have internet connectivity. While I understand it is possible for the voice part of the line to be broken but the ADSL part to work, it seems wrong somehow. And I'm expecting at any minute for the ADSL to die as well (maybe if an overenthusiastic BT engineer decides to try "rebooting" the line but doesn't do it properly?). So if you don't hear from me for the next n days, that'll be why.

Did I already say argh? Argh!

beards (again)

A fluffy post before my serious one.

We went to see "Return of the King" yesterday (about bloody time, some of you are thinking - but we wanted to leave seeing it until the hysteria had died down). It was... a film, kinda geeky, completes the trilogy, and all that. But it occurs to me that while the first film was an advert for the beauty of New Zealand, this one is an advert for the joys of... long-haired beardy men!

Think about it. How much of the screen time is devoted to long-haired beardies, frequently in leather and/or chains? We have the entire range, from Aragorn himself (young(ish), handsome(ish), dreamy, often needing a wash), King Theoden (regal, elegant, kinda tubby), to Eomer (who I thought was King Theoden's guard, so little was his part - but hot damn, that man was sexy!). There's even Gimli, for those who prefer the bear look (and bears everywhere stop reading my journal in disgust). All in all, I reckon that more than half the film (that's 100 minutes, fact fans) is devoted to shots of brave, handsome, long-haired beardies being - brave, handsome, long-haired and beardy. Hrm.

What does this mean? Well, after watching this advert for several hours, I left the cinema desperate for some long-haired beardy action. Fortunately, the guy in front of me was complete with long brown hair, a beard, and even wearing leather, so I pounced on him and demanded he come home with me. Fortunately, he already lives with me, so he didn't have to go out of his way. But I did seriously wonder about Peter Jackson's motives. While it does not surprise me to discover that he could in fact star in one of his own films, I do wonder whether anyone likes beards enough to make a lengthy, extended documentary about them.

Or maybe he really has been turned down for a date that often, and is thus driven by a burning desire to present the long hair & beard combination as the new look for the new millennnnium. Hmm.

( In other news... )

might as well face it, you're addicted to drugs

Damn you, Semagic, for eating my post!

I suppose it should have been obvious that hitting "save file" without changing the file name would save over the top of the entry I was trying to save for later... but damnit, I thought changing the subject line would be enough to change the file name! Oh nooo, that's not how it works. So now I have to try to recreate my rant from scratch, and recreated rants are never as good as the original-that's-been-lost-to-bitbucket-hell.

Anyway. This is one of my rare Serious posts. Look Serious in preparation for reading it. Huh.

I hate being a drug addict.

As this will come as a shock to some of you, let me replace "drug" with "prescription medicine". Does that make it sound better? Does replacing the implication of unknown & dangerous substances with the knowledge that the supply is safely controlled by a team of medical professionals make it any more palatable?

Well, it doesn't make it any easier for me.

In order to stay (relatively) healthy, I need to take a large number of drugs - some of which have unpleasant side effects. At least one of them is physically addictive. Oh, the big Pharmaceutical companies (known also as BigPharma) will try to dress it up, and redefine words all over the place to avoid the phrase "drug addiction"; but the fact remains - my body is dependent on the drug and undergoes really damn unpleasant side effects on withdrawal. Or, in the immortal words of the miserable ovoid creature ad, "if you take it for awhile, and then suddenly stop taking it, your brain will explode". ( Read more... )

Dinner with the geeks.

Dear wuzzie, I would like a glass of water. Love wolfy X.

Dear Wolfy X, it would be bad if you were an Ex. Love wuzzie (current).