sultry, damn! yeesh, but it’s hot, dagnabbit…

sleep! woo! slept like a dog last night & today i’m a total zen tech master… settin’ up PCs left & right, upgradin’ software, distributin’ information, answerin’ questions, troubleshootin’ minor network problems… my new zen tech name is Unflappable Mouse Fist (uh…) & my nature is IRREPRESSIBLE!

new feature coming soon — get ready to roll your eyes in disbelief at a brand new feature right here on magicdog vs sydney! (&, obviously, when i say get ready i mean, you know, don’t hold your breath or nuffin… mebbe after the weekend… if i get around to it…)

hi mum! nope, it wasn’t me who got shot in marrickville yesterday afternoon…

herbalrelaxationteaadvicezzzbing — so i’m reading yesterday’s entry & i’m going, sheesh, mope around a bit why don’tcha? but anyway, thanks heaps to his royal daveness & chrisF (in their capacities as Official Concerned Viewers) who wrote/phoned in with helpful suggestions on how to tackle the whole no sleep ’til brooklyn thing…

11.00pm to 4.00am — a combination of herbal tea, a shower, a watermelon-flavoured bacardi breezer & some relaxation exercises got me to sleep around eleven last night, & i stayed asleep until four, at which point i woke up & was so awake i felt like someone had attached electrodes to my testicles… mmm, electrodes…

so yeah — so i figure (i.e. i’m hoping) i’m over the worst of it (some really good advice from keri helped me sort out the things i was stressing about at work) & yeah, fingers crossed i’ll be back to my normally sleepy self tonight… <grin>

my oscillating head — so i didn’t sleep properly again last night, which makes something like a week of lying awake for hours on end, then drifting briefly into unconsciousness only to wake up half an hour later & do the whole lying awake for hours on end thing again… & gosh, you’d imagine that’d hafta be doing wonders for my general mood, stability & outlook, right?

a brief history of daveness, updated — so dave arrived on friday night, & we grabbed some thai food & sat up chattin’, then on saturday morning (i finally got to sleep about 6.00 after going to bed about 1.00… sigh…) we went & collected andrew from marrickville & grabbed alistair from town hall & headed off to bondi to do some film making for a couple of hours…

accountantability — i was supposed to be in dulwich hill for a meeting with my accountant at eleven o’clock, but there was no way i was gonna get there in time, so after trying unsuccessfully to call them on my mobile phone, dave & i zapped over to keri’s place in coogee where i eventually managed to contact them & had our meeting rescheduled for next weekend…

swimming — we didn’t have long before dave had to be at the airport, but we had just enough time to head down to gordon’s bay for a swim, then it was out to mascot for one last glimpse of dave disappearing through the doors of the ansett terminal…

dance follows the domestic banal — then i headed home to do my washing & attempt a bit of tidying up, at which point i kinda collapsed for a couple of hours before i jumped in the car & went back to keri’s place (where i spent another hour or so sobbing while keri patted me on the head… stability, don’tcha know) & then we met up with david & steven for dinner & headed off to the seymour centre to see a mardi gras dance performance that was really great…

take a break, test driver 8 — on sunday we drove over to north sydney & took a daihatsu cuore & a ford ka for test drives & checked out quotes & related blah, then we dropped in & visited keri’s brother gareth, & then we headed back over the bridge to grab some lunch & do a bit of shopping & kinda collapse for the rest of the afternoon… i was gonna go into work for a while, but i just couldn’t face it… (andrew had invited us to tropfest, but i couldn’t face that either…) anyway, after an extended bout of lying around, keri made us some dinner & we had a look at the information we’d gathered from the car dealers, & then i made my way back to dulwich hill where i was in bed by 11.00 (for all the good that did me…)

tally, ho — so if you’re of a mind to assess my life at the moment, you might well finish up with something like this:

• relationship: incredible
• work: messy (but almost sorted out)
• finances: messy (but almost sorted out)
• flat: messy (but almost sorted out)
• head: messy (but almost sorted out)
• ferrets: no ferrets to speak of
• sleep: ha
• song of the moment: i wanna be sedated

magicdogpaddle — woo! went swimming at coogee with keri yesterday & managed some actual real swimming! complete with new non-drowning action! plus, while i was swimming around a bit, i made it to where i could see some excellent crabs! (uh… ocean crabs… in the rocks… little tiny shiny blue-green crabs… they were plenty bitey, too!)

impending daveness — his royal daveness arrives in town tonight for another brief visit… he flies out again tomorrow afternoon, but while he’s here we’re doing the hire car thing… vroom!

dire android — andrew just called with a heads up for a brief movie-related project at bondi tomorrow morning… & to think i was wonderin’ how i was gonna keep dave entertained…

dinosaur mystery solved — linda offers the following helpful insight into the locomotive habits of the tyrannosaurus rex:

I was just thinking idly about Rob’s message, and I worked out why the
t-rex’s sometimes seem to make the ground shake, and at other times they
can move like ninjas…

Pogo sticks.

That’s right, they travel on pogo sticks. They’ve only got stubby little
arms, so they have to thump thump thump relatively slowly, but when they
get near their prey, they ditch the pogo sticks (behind a convenient
tree) and continue on foot.

Hah! Wow, I feel much better about this now. It’d been bugging me for a
while.

wow, so much for that stupid bbc documentary… walking with dinosaurs? who are they trying to kid? mind you, the T-Rex Onna Pogo Stick Theory still doesn’t fully explain the Velociraptor Onna Unicycle Dilemma, much less the Pterodactyl Wiffa Hairdryer Conundrum…

gym bunny — went back for more at the gym last night & got my legs blitzed again, but this morning i’m feeling much less like someone’s strapped me down & clobbered me with a hunk of timber than i did at the equivalent time last week, so i figure that’s progress…

important news from matsuyama, japan — magicdog.com’s official japanese correspondent reports on his recent sojourn in korea, & imparts some movie wisdom while he’s at it:

korea: it’s a cold cold place with no chance of having fucked up clown sex
with or without a jetpack wearing ape, unless you know the right names -
which obviously i didn’t. no siree.

actually i thought it was great and would love to go back. the war museum was
surprising excellent with many most historical facts dude.

hey dogosaurus check it out - JP3 its official!

http://www.jurassicpark.com/

something has survived - again! after the last movie i don’t think the blurb
is referring to the movies’ credibility. i wonder what feat of stealth and
escapology the T-rex will perform in its 3rd outing:

JP ichiban: at the climax it sneaks up on two raptors INSIDE a building,
after previously causing the whole earth to shake with each step for the rest
of the movie.

JP niban: inexplicibly escaping from a cell in a boat and murdering the crew
without smashing the wheelhouse. remember that dismembered hand on the helm?
then it hid back inside the bowels of boat, luring those dopey humans into
“releasing” it. how did t-rex do that? ninja magic of course fool!

JP sanban: nothing short of surviving a freefall from a disabled space
shuttle will suffice!

the rumormill

JP yonban: T-rex vs Aliens with Predator and those wacky ID4 critters!
together at last. ahh.

you know want it fAnbOy. your kind always does.

rob

gosh! am i that transparent? <grin> sounds like the greatest movie ever made! although personally, i’m waiting for jurassic park five, to be directed by ang lee… crouching t-rex, hidden raptor… just wait until you see the scene where the t-rex runs across the rooftops! not to mention the stegosaurus fight in the top of the bamboo grove!

hey, what are you looking at? another slow/no news day, so i figured why not take a few minutes to look over my search reports? since i added the search facility on 9 january 2000, 107 searches have been made… & in the category of the most popular words to search for…

the winners are:

7 searches for keri
5 searches for dinosaur
5 searches for test
4 searches for cassie lewis
4 searches for linda
3 searches for arms
2 searches for agility
2 searches for cunnamulla
2 searches for eek
2 searches for gay
2 searches for open gl
2 searches for phone
2 searches for robert small
2 searches for simonster
2 searches for stone temple
2 searches for stone temple dogbot
2 searches for svetlana khor
2 searches for tim booth

interestingly enough, i have no idea who cassie lewis & tim booth are… or why people might be searching for them on my site… maybe they’re people who run pages i’ve linked to, & they’ve been working backwards through their referer logs or something? but look! keri is more popular than dinosaur! (i mean, i knew that, but some of you mightn’t have realised…)

& the runners-up — recording but a single search each…

agustin el o mora; anarchy; applications; battlebot; berrigan; bis; booth; cait; cock; coke; dack; dave; dog; dogs; domain name; drugs; expo cd; fear; fish; frogger; gabriela mistral; ignis; kay; kelen; ken bolton; killbot; linda’s birthday; loaf; lou reed; majicdogranch.com; men; metascene; milk; mmmm; monkey; pirates; pneumatology; poems; poetry; queen; robot; scottish tits; sean; simon; simple life; sonnet generator; space; super; superfriends; technology; thistle; to vanquish; voila toys; webtricity2; yamato

mmmm, nice work that person who did a search for “mmmm”… i mean, you had to search for that? <grin> hmmm… now that i think about it, it might’ve been me…

& now, a few words from my office — argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! argh! <grin>

actually — things ain’t quite so bad as all that… yet…

hey chrisT — i’m not deliberately ignoring you (oops! almost wrote “annoying you” there… which wouldn’t, i guess, have been strictly true…) <grin> uh… oh yeah, right. i’m not deliberately ignoring you, it’s just that every time i try to send email to yr new wildturquoisedog address, it kinda bounces back & slaps me in the face… which, now that i think about it, might be some kinda funny jape on your part… hmmm. was there a point to this paragraph? not that i can recall.

uh…

hmmm…

oh, yeah…

yoga — so i finally managed to get to my first ever yoga class last night (at acharya’s yoga centre in pitt street) & really enjoyed it, even though my approach to yoga is in a slightly more comic vein than most people’s… touch my toes? what say i wave ineffectually at my thighs instead? yes, those are thighs. shut up already. balance on one leg? yeah, i’m fine, i think i’ll just lie here for a minute… <grin>

work work work work work — urgh. it’s that time of year again. major granting round time. hurrah. things are gonna be nuts here from now until the end of april, then a brief respite in may before june starts sucking mightily as well… if i wasn’t so busy i’d make a new graphic, but if you feel like complaining about my shameless rehashing of old material all i can suggest is you make a graphic of your own, put it on your own website, & send me the URL so i can link to it, & until you’ve done that you can go & stand over there in the queue with all the other people who are waiting to complain about me…

back from wagga — wagga was great, the performance went really well, & i even enjoyed the train trip(s)… expect some photography (of sorts), perhaps with narrative (of sorts), to appear sooner or later…

a concerned reader writes:

A comic review I think you need to read and (sorta widely) publicize:

http://www.savantmag.com/reviews.html

Mistah The Reaper

hmmm… (sorta widely) publicise? right you are…

heart of darkness

existential terror of the bush -
too serious? existential dilemma of the XPT,
sydney to wagga then a basement
full of schultz brothers, the civic centre coffeeshop
resisting barbara’s theory of
the geographical distribution of drinkable coffee
(lygon street as the transcendental ideal,
& the further you go the worse it gets)
not me / the further i go the older i get -
strange moments of clarity (the medication walking?
could be) willow trees collapsed
into the murrumbidgee / keri swimming, & later,
me swimming too, haltingly, four feet of water
at the edge of wagga beach
(watching myself / going under for the third time,
dad breaking up the adults’ picnic)
where memory is itchy like a rash
can i learn to tread water?
moving neither upstream nor down,
the train taking us away from the river.
faint music
bleeds from your headphones /
meals now available in the buffet.

i have so had it with george clooney — that’s it george, it’s over. not a card, not an email… go ahead & make your silly movies, but don’t expect me to watch them… at least brendan fraser returns my calls…

unbecomings was a little uneven, but parts of it were very, very good…

wagga — off to wagga tomorrow morning with keri for the exploding poetic inevitable’s inaugural regional tour… or something like that… hopefully the audience (hmmm… delusions of grandeur?) will only throw soft things…

not that i wanna be thought fickle — but if george clooney doesn’t send me a valentine’s day card this year there’s gonna be such trouble…

informative/performative — off to the performance space with keri tonight to see unbecomings…

full on head noise

now i am aware of life
certain attentions have come to my thing -

wind-up plastic robot of my heart

(it walks for you) /

poignant telephone /

fan cooling sweat
in the crack of my arse.

fabulous nude typist!

the distance from emotionally bereft to emotional.

(learning bodies.)

immense january sunsets /
the stars,
intensely liminal.

or like this -
meeting your friend for lunch,
then lunch,
then i go on

(strangely centred /
& full of you).

becoming-us.

laughter polishing the rain.

image generated by the heromachine — via eatonweb…

piked on yoga — okay, okay, so i piked on yoga last night… but i’m “exploring other possibilities” even as i sit here… well, okay, i’m just sitting here… but! i’m thinking about exploring other possibilities, & that has to count for something, right? right? hello? sheesh… tough crowd…

wurky beasts 1, magicdog 2 — nyah ha ha haaah! vast hordes of wurk defeated! but hark! what’s this, forsooth? egads! more vast hordes of wurk! [poses heroically & stage whispers dramatically…] mayhaps i must needs transmogrify mineself into a sleepy work zombie…

shape of a sleepy work zombie! [claps hands. cue (very) cheap sound & lighting effects…]

a word from our zombie — g’day. i’d like to talk to youse all today about the benefits of zombie-ism in the workplace… now, we’ve all seen those overly-sensational tabloid media portrayals of work zombies as twisted, misshapen creatures hanging around the xerox machine, waiting to feast on the brains of unsuspecting photocopier repair technicians… but in reality (a term i use loosely) many work zombies manage to put in highly productive working days, with only an occasional pause for a quick snack on some scrummy repairperson brains with lashings of lemonade…

cleanlidesk is next to binliness — oh, right, so you’re gonna tell me that doesn’t make any sense… this from the person who read the entire paragraph about zombies without complaining once…

how about those dancin’ robots, eh? well, here’s a few more… although i don’t like these ones anywhere near so much as yesterday’s… but you know, dancin’ robots & all…

actual news without any (added) silliness — off to my first ever yoga class tonight… i’m really looking forward to it… i’m going to check out a beginners’ class to start with, obviously, but i’m hoping that i’ll be doing more advanced things like stealing pic-a-nic baskets & learnin’ how to fool the ranger before too long… [warning: possibility of silliness being added to this paragraph is currently rated at high to very high, despite the (in hindsight admittedly somewhat misleading) claim in the bold bit at the start.]

from the howling legions of distraught fans department — look, will both of you just settle down? i’ve been busy, okay? <grin>

training, reports, panic, croutons — totally busy week with a two day training course stuck right in the middle of writing heaps of reports, dealing with (other) panicked research administrators & working on an important research project aimed at determining the best way to keep croutons crunchy, no matter how long they’ve been floating about in the soup… [warning: possibility of fabrication &/or inaccuracy in this paragraph is currently rated at high to very high.]

dive into python — a free book on python programming…

wake up to dancin’ robots — courtesy of ChrisT…

warning! weekend may cause drowsiness — do not attempt to operate heavy machinery while experiencing the after-effects of this weekend…

robot production shortfall to continue — urg. no. time. for. robots. but, you know, i’ve been makin’ some other things, which has been cool… no robots, though. grrr. (am i angry about not making robots? uh uh, nope.) but you know, i do kinda miss the shiny li’l critters…

ouchy the clown — via camworld…

requiem for a dream — went & saw requiem for a dream last night with keri & claire & andre & matthew… this movie will not win any major awards in categories dedicated to feel-good romantic comedies… i’m still not sure if i liked it or not (although i’m leaning towards not)… it’s kinda bleak, but it’s very glossy with it… i did kinda like the cinematography, although it was kinda gimmicky… & the film’s also really manipulative, & going to see it is really not so much a question of watching as of enduring it… (i mean, you know what’s gonna happen after ten minutes, & from then on it’s just a matter of waiting another hour & a half for the inexorable logic of the various narratives to get to the variously inexorable bits…)

from the webscripting comedy department — so i go to dictionary.com to look up inexorable (why for you keep using that word? i do not think it mean what you think it mean) & i notice this little box on the search results page…

hmmm, i think to myself, amazon.com is selling inexorable? no wonder they’re having to lay off so many staff… & then i thought, wow, i wonder what else they’re selling? well, apparently, they may (or may not) sell:

of course, i did eventually realise that getting the stupid webscript to generate an amazon promotional link using a made up word was all very well & good, but maybe i should be trying to buy something this page has been sorely lacking…

new plan/new york — so we decided on the weekend that we’re gonna move to new york… when? well, not for a couple of years or so… we both have some career/life type things to finish off/sort out first… but yeah, we’re outta here… (we’re planning a short visit later this year…)

oh yeah? yeah.

oh yeah? yeah.

oh yeah? yeah.

aussie robot shop — so yeah, my plan is to open the aussie robot shop, which will be a bit like a sushi-go-round except all the dishes will be served by cute li’l robots with great big eyes & some of them will be wearing thongs & instead of sushi there’ll be fish & chips & if you don’t like fish & chips the robots will all be made of tofu so you can eat those instead but if you eat the robots you’d better expect to pay for that buddy &… what?