words XXIV

This is an actual group email thing going on up on the third floor right now. Updates as they happen.
***
Dave:
Hello

It’s been talked about at many a session down the pub while in various states of drunkenness but a weekend away in the countryside near a pub is the topic at hand.

Sherwood Forest (no Richard, you may not bring your cross bow) is a front runner. Aside from it being Sherwood Forest, Nick informs me that Nottingham has both the highest ratio of pubs to area in the country and the highest ratio of women to men. A winning combination I think you’ll agree.

Nobody so far seems to be free on the same weekend so we have a choice of weekends anytime from now until the weekend of 20th September and someone might be available. Don’t think it will be all that expensive, put together a few tents between us and the most expensive thing should be beer and maybe the train fare. Cheap weekends are a Good Thing.

Is anyone actually interested and available or have any thoughts?

***
Patrick: I thought they cut the forest down?
***
Dave: Richard’s going to help save the rest of it while we have some beer
***
Rich: SEE!!!

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=460500&y=362500&z=3&sv=Sherwood+Forest&st=3&tl=Sherwood+Forest,+Nottinghamshire+[Forest/Wood]&searchp=newsearch.srf&mapp=newmap.srf

It has tree shaped things!

So still there.

😛
***
Andy: Can I bring my axe and checked shirt?
***
Pat: I’m a lumber jack and I’m ok!
***
John AKA Hamo AKA Sparky : fuck the axe, I’m bringing a can of petrol and a lighter
***
Trev:
Now that is scary…..I’ve seen Hamo start a bar-b!!!!
***
Dave:Or we could just re enact Battle Royale. Rich – Crossbow, Andy – Axe, Sparky – Petrol bombs. Who gets the frying pan?
***
John: One last point.. we have to make sure not to distress any little animals while cutting/burning their habitat, I wouldn’t want that to ruin my weekend… I’ll feel terribly guilty.
***
Andy: Well, I’m not planning on going hungry, dunno about you.
***
John: Do you like bite sized sparrow… I hear they are rather nice, I’ll help you hunt
***
Andy: Yeah, with a Kestrel egg omelette on the side.
***
John: No, use the sparrow hawk eggs instead, then there are more sparrows to go around the group… Make sense?
***
Fred: Yeah, that makes about as much sense as anything else in this conversation 🙂 How are the Badgers and Mash up in Nottingham?
***
Andy: Indeed, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush(e)

>Email was momentarily delayed while I threw a rubber ball at Andy.

Richard: Anyone have flame-proof tents for this blazing inferno that we’re going to be camping in?
***
Dave: See Richard, you’re learning. We are more important than the enviroment.
***
Trev: no tent can protect you from Sparky’s flames……they don’t call him Sparky for nothing!
***
Pat: can we reenact the Blair witch project?
***
Rich: Is that where you end up dead Pat? 😛
***
Rich: A study was done recently on the demise of the sparrow… I don’t believe they took into
accounts Sparky’s culinary predilections
***
Pat: No he doesn’t eat them he just hunts them!
***
Nick: im confused…. or maybe i shouldnt have that pint at lunch, but none of this is making sense any more
***
Andy: I had a pint at lunch, and it’s like working with the panel from Have I got news for you…
***
John: Patrick is right, I capture them for my aviary… anytime I go into the woods, I bring a cage and make sparrow mating calls, then they just flock to me.. excuse the pun
***
Rich:Given those sparrow mating calls of yours what Patrick really should have written was: “No he doesn’t eat them he just humps them!”
***
Fred: What is there not to understand? This is standard planning for any of our trips.
***
Nick: fantastic – im sure it will be a great success
***
Andy: We’ll never end up going anywhere, but we’ll have a laugh planning it
***
Pat: But wheres the boat?
***
Andy: Hold on, hold on. What?
***
Nick:HMS Sparky??? ::flees:::
***
Trev: Do we have jobs?
***
Fred: Define jobs please.
***
Nick: Anyway now the emails have slowed down – im always up for a bit of camping :o)
***
Andy: But no eating birds…

>At this point I’m giving up trying to order the threads, just refer back for more.

Nick: nope no birds here – leave them to the bushe
***
Pat: Depends is it an African or European swallow?
***
Trev: That has vibes of this rabbit/human cloning craic that has been going on. The Sparky Sparrow?
***
Rich: He doesn’t care if they swallow.
***
Dave: so getting back to the topic at hand. Does anyone have any other thoughts?
***
Andy: Lots, thanks.
***
Fred: I guess there’s a first time for everything.
***
Dave: And would you like to share with the group any of these thoughts
***
Pat: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
***
Andy: Sure. People who forget to flush the toilet – do they also forget to wipe to their arse?
***
Pat: Hmm you know in the middle of winter when you sit on a warm toilet seat it feels nice…. ever think why it’s warm?
***
Andy: Because we have indoor toilets these days, you bumpkin.
***
John: Want to know why the weather is so hot lately? Whales fart! Don’t they consider that they are contributing to toxic emissions and directly contributing to global warming? Thanks to Dave Bushe for informing me about this one, so after camping do we want to go whale hunting???.. I’m sure Richard will be able to tell us good places to harpooning.
***
Andy: Indeed, and Patrick can help us out when we come to sell the corpses to the Japanese. Tell you what, who needs xxxx <- internal joke listserv? *** Trev: The advantage of xxxx is that you can unsubscribe
**
Rich: The population of whales has been shown to have drastically changed from what it once was: http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=21635&newsdate=25-Jul-2003
I hypothesis then that it is actually people who are responsible for increase in global warming due to their flatulence from eating the whales who had chronic flatulence in the first place.
***

And at this stage it got a little more on topic and we sorted out some details. Some great laughs throughout and an entertaining afternoon.

Not much to report at the moment.
Went out last night to play some pool and play pool I did. Started off pretty evenly and then went up and down for a little while but it a complete victory in the end, 12 – 9 to me. It was good fun. Got home late and slept well.

Soundtrack is U2’s vastly under-rated Pop all brought on by wanting to listen to Do you feel Loved by a website yesterday. Still enjoying the fuck out of Swamp Thing and I really don’t want to finish them. I am looking forward to the new material a lot and enjoying the old stuff more than ever. Andy Diggle is doing a Swamp Thing mini next year(?) and I’m hoping for that to be good.

There isn’t really all that much going on to be honest.

Awesome

Right so then Ted where are we?

It’s Wednesday morning and all is quiet. Just had a team meeting and things are ticking along. Still waiting on some information but in a much better state than yesterday.

More Queen stuff going on, listening to some now and enjoying it lots. Hit the pub for a little while last night for a couple of cokes and some games of pool. It was good fun. Then home to do some reading, more on that in a mo. The Shield wasn’t great. There were some nice moments but the ending was obvious from the very start and didn’t really mean very much. Still could be good for the rest of the season.

Reading these days is some classic Alan Moore Saga of the Swamp Thing. I picked up the sixth and final book in the series when it came out last week and so I’ve started at the start again to work my way through. It’s good stuff and I’m enjoying it a hell of a lot more than the first time around.

It’s cooled down quite a bit, still no sign of the thunder and lightining we were promised but no temperatures higher than 25. A little nicer then.

I want to go and see Pirates of the Caribbean this week. It looks like lots of fun and I have heard many good things about it. So perhaps tonight or tomorrow night or something to do at the weekend. We shall see.

I was reading an Uncut special about Bruce Springsteen last night. Someone left in the kitchen in work a while ago and I figured I would give it a read. It was basically a large group of people putting together the 40 best Springsteen songs. It was good reading and good tracks all. I have very little Springsteen, I should go out and pick up some more at some stage. Anyway it led me to really want to listen to some more Springsteen. It’s all tied together to the fact that the soundtrack of my weekend in the park was Born In the USA. I was looking for my copy of his greatest hits but I can’t seem to find it despite knowing that I saw it very recently anyway I have it on the musical joy that is my Mac and so it’s playing for me nice and quite nicely too.

Last night I watched Queen: Live from Wembly Stadium, Trev lent me the DVD and it was wonderful. A little strange watching in places, knowing that Freddie is long dead but really great stuff through and through. They really were a great band and they put on a really great performance, I’d love to have seem them live in the flesh myself. Just a bit before my time unfortunately.

Works allright at the mo, I’m having a little trouble getting access to files that I need and I’m about to escalate the fuck out of it but overall things are running smoothly. Jumped in on some stuff yesterday fairly suddenly and it went pretty well and indeed is still going pretty well. My weekly report (shudder) today wasn’t bad at all.

And yes, watch all that come back to bite me.

Internet at home seems to be slipping away and there is only so much stuff I can do at work, so no idea what’s going to happen there. 🙁

Went out last night, headed down to Rileys and played some 9 ball. It was good fun but too hot and I wasn’t really in the mood for it. Still managed to win by a damn nice margin.

If there is one way to brighten up my life straight away, it’s very simple. Give me some good music and give it to me loud. In work just over an hour and dealt with all the overnight stuff and the usual morning stuff and then turned to my mac to fire up iTunes. It loads up and in the bottom right two little words draw my attention: Achtung Baby. A quick click on and Until the end of the World is coming at me and it’s just perfect. The mood is immediately lightened and I feel better.

Also booked a small holiday this morning. Got Ryanair’s usual mailing and they have return flights to Dublin for £0.50 for going Thursday to Tuesday. One quick booking and holiday form later I’m off to Dublin for a Thursday till Tuesday at the end of September for £27.64 including all tax. Nice. Looking forward to that. It also gets my parents off my back. My sister gets back from Tokyo in a couple of days so they have dropped the odd hint that I should make myself available for a few days. But I’m already looking forward to it alot.

Fucking naplam? The US used fucking naplam and then lied about it?
US admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq

Good morning.

I had a fun weekend. A lot of it was spent outside in the park. Yesterday was the hottest day in the UK since recording keeping began in the 1800’s. As all the tabloids were anxious to run as their main headline this morning, it was the first time 100 degree’s fahrenheit was recorded. That’s just under 38 degree’s celsius. It was at times too hot but I had some good reading done in the park yesterday with a break in-between to go into a dark room to watch a movie.

I’m getting ahead of myself tho. Saturday was Trev’s birthday and we had no joy on the boat front so we were off to the park for knacker drinking. At least that was the plan. We got there to find it was too hot to do anything but sit around in a pub with a cold drink. Trev has developed a taste for Pimms lately so we had a ‘terribly gay’ afternoon sitting around drinking jugs of Pimms and lemonade. It was good. Later on when it had cooled down a little we sat down in some shade in the park and had a bit to eat followed by a kick around of a football. It was good fun but still too hot so we went on a bit of a pub crawl along Clapham high street. No, funnily enough we skipped the 2 Brewers and finished off in the Railway which was very nice indeed.

So it was a good day in all, good weather, good beer and good company. Really fucking hot with about 85% humidity did sap it a little but we managed to keep it together and finish off around midnight.

Sunday was just sitting in the park and reading and then nipped over the bridge to Fulham road for a preview of American Pie: The Wedding which was good fun. I laughed a lot. Like the first two movies it has one moment in it which had the audience clapping and cheering but for the rest it was laughter all the way. A fun summer movie.

Last night I watched The Iron Giant for the first time which was a fun movie. Nicely animated with some good robot moments, “soooooperman” ranking right up there.

Friday night is a topic for later…maybe 😉

So it’s about 20 past 6 and I’m walking out the front door. Behind me, Patrick and his boss, Paul are walking out the back door. Paul sees me and aks if I fancy a swift half. I get home to bed at 15 minutes past 1 in the AM.

Moral of the story, there is no such thing as a swift half.

It was an interesting night at the least, with lots to think about

Lastnight didn’t happen. Things kinda fell apart at the end of the day and everyone went off their own separate ways. I wasn’t in the best mood so I went home to drop some stuff off and then went to sit in the park andread for a while. It was good. I finished off Iain Banks A Song of Stone leaving me at two books in two days and not sure what to be reading next. I’ll dig something out tonight I guess.

Got back from the park just before 10, in time to flick on Channel 4and catch the start of the third season of Teachers.Not as good as the last season, lots of the sarcasm missing but it was still funny.

My sister sent me some DVD’s a few days ago, last night I watched Grave of the Fireflies from Studio Ghibli. It’s a pretty harrowing movie, even more so now that I see it’s based on a true story. Wonderful animation and voicing, the little girl was so very believable.

It’s still too damn hot here. The AC is quite nice and I do have to admit I’m looking forward to leaving the office at lunchtime for a bit but it’s still too damn hot.

One of the message boards I used to visit years ago started off as a sci-fi board for a couple of shows. I’ve not hung out there in years. I drop in every now and again, at least I did until recently. It’s not a nice place anymore. It’s more cliqued than it ever was (and that’s saying alot) and it’s gone pretty much all the way to the old christian right. Not good, not good at all. So of course clashes with the young liberals are only natural, partly why I avoid the place now, there is just so much stupidity floating around it makes me want to scream and it’s just a waste of time to even try and post back at them.

Anyway, some resource conflicts in work at the moment, I’m not sure what I should actually be working on and it is making my life fun. Still it’s slowly sorting itself out.

I’m missing blogging from home a lot. There is a lot more stuff I’d be putting down here if I had the time to actually sit down and tpye it and wander around the net doing stuff while dropping in things every now and again. Today’s soundtrack is Ryan Adam’s Gold.

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Fish

too hot!