Christmas present.

This year my mum and sister came over to mine for Christmas dinner. My sister has a son and he usually goes and stays with his dad; my sister is divorced. This year he wanted to stay in Scotland but he also wanted to see his dad, so my sister's ex husband also came. My mother is also divorced, in fact she's been divorced twice now, so far.

The thing is, when I was young she had an affair with this guy. He was married, with kids, and he was a friend of my best friend's mother, my best friend's mother was also my mothers best friend. Anyway, she had an affair with him on and off for a few years until I was about 8 and she left my dad and went to London with this guy. It was all pre-planned. She took me and my sister to my best friend's house for a visit and we all stayed over for a few days. This was not unusual as they lived a good few miles out of town on a farm and we did this quite a lot. It was during the summer holidays, she left my sister and I with my best friend's family. She came into the room late on the second night where I was not yet asleep and said goodbye and left me some money to buy a Birthday present with. I remember crying for a long time after that, until I fell asleep. I did it very quietly so I didn't disturb my friend, who was in the bottom bunk. But many years later he admitted that he'd heard me, anyway.

I think the plan was that she would come back and take us to stay in London. We went to stay with my grandmother, my dad worked shifts so we couldn't stay at home. I was there for a while because I went to school from there for a number of weeks after the summer holiday's ended. She came back. We went to stay back at home. Life got back to normal but I never really trusted her again. I think she continued to see him for a while after that but then he went to work abroad when I was about 12 and I remember her getting drunk and depressed one time.

She left my dad when I was about 16 or 17 for a different man. Lived with him for years before getting married about 7 years ago. She'd been with him longer than she had been with my dad but they divorced at the beginning of this year.

This September my mum was working in the country, looking after someone for a number of weeks to give the woman's daughter some respite. One day she was out food shopping and decided to go to a different supermarket than the one she'd been instructed to go to (the woman was boycotting Tesco for some reason) and reaching for a tin of tomatoes and there was the guy also looking for tomatoes. He lives nearby and had gone out for petrol, but decided he didn't want to go to his usual place so had gone to Tesco, someone earlier that day had told him it was cheaper than his usual place, but on reaching Tesco had turned the wrong way and ended up in the car park. So he'd ended up just going in for some tomatoes. Serendipity.

My mum's been seeing him ever since almost every week. They both came over when I was half moved back into the house, post renovation. But he was also there on Christmas day. I remember, all those years ago, with my best friend and his two brothers, trashing the guy's caravan, which he kept near my best friend's farm. We broke in and wrecked it. We took his clothes out of the cupboards and I pissed all over them. But I couldn't feel angry at him now. For taking my mother away all those years ago. I quite like him. He's more of a gentleman than my dad and more intelligent than my stepdad and kinder than both of them. I think when she left that night she said I'd understand one day, when I was older. I never understood until only a few weeks ago when she told me he's the only man she's ever loved, he's the only man who's treated her with respect. I can understand that.

We had a really great day. The food was fantastic. I gave really thoughtful presents and I didn't really get anything special, but it didn't bother me like it usually does. I don't know why.

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas, when it arrives. Of course it'll probably all be over before anyone actually reads this.

AllofMP3.com gets sued

I read this a few days ago on Boing Boing but I managed to use a Mastercard to update my balance. I would comment on this but there is no way to comment on Boing Boing that I can see.

Billy Connelly gets married

I had this dream the other night where Doris at work was leaving because she'd married Billy Connelly and went off to live in his millionaires castle at Candacraig. There was no mention of Pamela Stephenson or of Doris' husband. The thing is Doris is wee and dumpy and lives in Currie. It was quite bizarre.

Tale of a Tyre Slasher

It was pretty warm as I crossed the road and walked down the cobbled hill into the car park opposite the flat. All the windows, except mine and Phil's, looked out the back and Phil was asleep. That bastard Ben didn't have a window. He would practice his guitar playing until 2am. I had to sleep with not only earbud headphones but also a pair of ear defenders, as worn by builders when they used pneumatic drills to dig up roads. I used mine when I shot .22 target pistols. And when Ben practiced his guitar late at night.

His van, the band van, was there. In plain view of the flat windows that no one was looking out of. The car park used to be the site of a disco that had burned down, now it was what they called a hole-in-the-ground site. Flattened and made into a car park until they build something else, like a row of replica Edwardian tenements.

I took out the potato peeler from my hooded sweatshirt pocket and on the side of the van which was hidden from view I plunged it into the hard rubber of each tyre, several times. It was noisy and I was paranoid as I re-entered the flat, trying to be as quiet as possible. Ben was still snoring very gently as I went to my room and back to bed. That will teach him to drive me nuts by keeping me awake night after night. The band will surely miss their gig now. Bastards. He wouldn't notice until it was too late as he was off tomorrow and would sleep all day.

The next night Ben arrived home late.
"How was the gig?"
"Fine, pretty good."
"No problems, then?"
"Not really, two of the van tyres were flat this morning but I got them fixed on the way to college, only a tenner each."

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Rudy Rucker's Flurb Webzine issue 2 is out.

Flurb, the webzine published by Rudy Rucker, has been released online. I intend to put a link in the sidebar.

Gizmodo Vacuum shoes

I love these from the Gizmodo gadget blog. If you ramp up the suction could you do the ceiling cobwebs too?

BoingBoing: Pulp Xmas

I can't get youTube to work on this thing, the html is all wonky and unfinished when you paste an embedded player and the adding a blog thing just doesn't complete. So here's a link to boingboing's post about Pulp Xmas video mashup. Cool.

I was a teenage stalker

She was very beautiful, or at least I thought so. When she turned me down I became depressed, dispossessed and obsessed. I wrote to her for years afterwards, on expensive paper and envelopes in funky combinations of her favorite colours. I spent hours, days making compilation tapes of vaguely meaningful songs and sending them. I transposed all the lyrics and typed them up and sent them in a folder with the final cassette. Thought about ending it. I worshiped her, from a distance, rarely saw her, felt an ache in my chest for 8 years, for the first 3 thought of her daily. I actually thought that we'd been together in a previous life, that we were soul mates but she'd forgotten. I was bereft and grieving and had never really known her. That feeling comes back now and again, 25 years later. Sad old man. Never really loved anyone else. Not like that.

She's married now. Been together years, they have. Kids, lovely house, lovely setting. Probably have a white picket fence.

My favorite Vancouver picture

This is my favorite picture that I took in Vancouver earlier this year. The basket of lizards on sticks was part of a display of dried fish and other edibles in Vancouver Chinatown. I'm not sure if you're supposed to eat them like that or cook them or even if they are for eating. Maybe someone can enlighten me.

I'm a geek, official.

I just came back from a friend's house. I was plugging in their Telewest digibox into their new Samsung TV. They are not very savvy when it comes to technology. He had plugged in the RF cable into the back and when he'd autotuned it had skipped past the signal and didn't stop and he couldn't figure how to do it manually. So they phoned and asked for help. All I did was suggest they use a scart cable. I gave them a spare one of mine as they needed one for the DVD player. The Samsung TV has 2 scart inputs and better than my Phillips with the old contrast ratio.

I don't consider myself a geek but they do turn to me in times of technocrisis, so to them I guess I am.

Save a kitten

I re-found this picture on The Dwarves website. I think it's so funny. I'm also reminded of a quote by Robert Anton Wilson where he says that of all perversions, he finds celibacy the most perverted.

Wii Porn

Here is a Flickr pool of photos of people playing with their Wii. There's a few funny expressions but what strikes me is the great diversity of people playing with the console. Yes it's true it's predominantly young males, but there are also plenty of girls and older people as well.

Here's a couple of my favorites-

I think I'm RU Sirius

Seriously, I am. I discovered the RU Sirius Radio Show podcasts and have been downloading and listening to them on my mp3 player. I currently have a queue of 48 shows to listen to, this includes some Neofiles as well. I have been playing them all the time I have a free moment, commuting to work, at lunchtime, in bed before sleep etc etc.

It's getting to the stage I think I am RU. I am also more and more strongly influenced to go for full transcendental blowout on acid.

I tried LSD about 12 years ago at New Years eve street party in Edinburgh. Me and a few friends had been drinking, been locked in after the bar closed because our friend worked there, then had a strange and lethal cocktail before leaving to join the party. Just before midnight we dropped a blotter tab each (I think there were 4 of us) had some more beer and chat with some nice girls then went to a party.

I got completely paranoid and monosyllabic, some solutions were offered by my tripping friends and non-tripping hosts but I rejected them all and just wanted to go home. One of my friends got completely manic and tried to convince me to stay, arguing with me on the front step of the flat. This made me worse and I left.

I later raided the fridge at home whilst naked, there was nobody else around I have to add, but the whole experience wasn't really any different to being really drunk (which I was) and stoned on weed. So much for the transcendental other.

However, I truly believe that my consciousness had been changed since I woke up the day after and my outlook and life since then have been transformed. The effect I think lasted about 10 years and the last 2 years I've felt the need to take another dose.

Maybe this New Year is the time to repeat the experiment. Now all I need is someone to supply me with LSD. I haven't a clue or a contact to be able to get any. That's a hint by the way.

Why do postmen deliver parcels when you're out?

You know it seem utterly fucking pointless to me for postmen to be delivering packages and parcels when 80% of the population is at work. It would save more money to have them deliver early on, say before 8am, and later, say, after 6pm, when most people are at home, and pay them overtime rate, than employ five people to staff a central pick up point 16 hours a day so people can come with their little cards and collect their parcels.

This morning I watched a postman get out a van with a parcel for me, go to my house, find out nobody was in (I was standing across the street watching my bus approaching) then go back to the van with the Amazon package and take out 3 more parcels and not deliver them to several more houses around the corner, then (it wasn't my bus after all) take them back to the van and drive off to another street to repeat the process until his shift was finished and he took them all back to the depot undelivered. It's so utterly fucking pointless, a waste of everyones time and money.

Fuck the post office.

Mondo 2000 and other doomed subscriptions

I was a huge fan of Mondo 2000. I have around half of the print run. I subscribed around issue 13 and got 2 issues, 14 and 15 before they went silent. I discovered today there were 17 and possibly 18 issues published which brings back the frustration and anger at paying for a 5 issue sub and only getting 2 issues. I also don't have issues 1 to 5 because they'd been published already when I discovered the mag in my local Science Fiction bookshop, (before they sold out to Forbidden Planet). I missed issues 7 and 9 also because of the erratic print schedule. I think I never got the last 2 or 3 issues because by that time I'd given up on getting another issue or my money back and so hadn't bothered to tell them I'd moved.

I also, around that time, subscribed to the UK version of Wired. Wired had been in existence for a couple of years in the US and it became my tamer and duller Mondo substitute. So when the UK edition was published I subscribed within the first few issues. This time I did get all 12 or whatever number of the issues I'd subscribed to but didn't renew my sub after the first year and they folded soon afterwards, although not because I didn't renew, they were just not very good.

More recently I subscribed to Trajectories, a zine edited by D Scott Appel and consisting of various stuff by Robert Anton Wilson. Again, I sent off a cheque to California for a 5 or so issues sub and got, a few weeks later, a VHS tape of their latest video edition which consited of an interview with Wilson about a book I'd bought and read a year previously. There were no more issues after that as Bob had become more ill and was writing less.

The thing that prompted this blog is that I subscribed to a Scottish arts, politics and media magazine called Product which was a reasonable £10 for 4 quarterly issues. I just received the first issue of my sub, which is not unusual until I say that I subscribed around 2 years ago. They have been beset by financial problems but they intend to honour my subscription even although the sub has gone up by 50%, which is a reward for my patience I suppose. I'm really glad to be supporting such a venture despite them no longer being local as the latest issue was published and written by Glaswegians rather than the Edinburghers who'd published the previous 10 issues.

I feel like a subscription from me is the kiss of death for any magazine. I just subscribed to Wired, watch this space.