Like puzzle pieces from the clay

Last night I watched A Better Tomorrow II, or 英雄本色 2 in Hong Kong. (Wikipedia/IMDb) and it was great.
It tended to be a bit hard to follow – it started with ballroom dancing and beards, grew into police infiltration of crime organisations, flew over to New York for some hilarious “EAT THE FUCKING RICE, GUILAO” (I’m paraphrasing ruthlessly) at gunpoint (in response to a protection racket) and then had some mind-losing.

But don’t worry, it turns into a bloodbath.  Really.  It’s like the Matrix Lobby Scene with more blood and Asians.
So, shotguns are awesome, Asians are awesome, rice is awesome.  Oh, and this is where The Matrix got the Trinity-sliding-down-stairs-shooting sequence.

There’s money-printing, force-feeding, dancing, badly dubbed white people, and Chow Yun Fat.

I think we should all see it.  I liked it a lot, it was great fun.  I wouldn’t say it was my favourite film, or anything near it.
“You no like my rice” is hilarious. There are other funny bits too, naturally.
But it reminds us that one of the few good things to come from the 80s (in addition to Tetris, Rick Astley, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) is action films where cars explode like that.
*clicks fingers illustratively*

The other night we had Burritos.  Eventually, the resident Chinese homestays Matthew and Timber (yes, like ‘wood’) loaded the tortillas with rice.  Tim quite likes drenching everything in tomato sauce.
Anyway, rice.

I was going to blag about other things; being introduced to awesome and shockingly close places by Brendan and the state my bike is in.
Also, moats, lilies, haze and such.

I haven’t been blagging much, actually. I never really feel the urge to – I only do it when it’s just there.
You’ll notice from my growing Blagroll that more and more of my friends are succumbing.

Peace, I’m out (segues are for losers).
Time for sleep.  I love sleep.

Silent in a heart of steel

Hello, I rarely blog.

That shows that I’m not afraid of blogging, that I am capable of blogging, and most importantly that I can be trusted to do so in moderation.

I’m quite aware that this is too small for adults, now that it’s been scaled to fit my blog.

The other day, I was walking along a cloister, and I passed a limping security guard muttering about how it was at the time “too bloody early in the morning” – though it was in fact early afternoon.  More notable was that he was followed at a short distance by a short (5′7″-ish) Indian man who looked very much like a dark Leon Trotsky.
This doesn’t go anywhere; that’s it.

I had a dream the other day, in which the rear tyre of my bicycle was flat.  The satisfaction you glean from this blog is like some unique drug, it’s dreamshit.  I just conveyed to you an entire dream in that one sentence – and not in such a way that you’d think Martin Luther King Jr. was unfamiliar with punctuation.  Oh, in my dream I kept forgetting that the tyre was flat, and I’d notice en route, and worry that I was damaging the rim.

More recently, I had a dream which may have begun with someone not entirely unlike Stephen Fry, and ended with me feeling profoundly inadequate.  And it had nothing to do with him, though it easily could have.  Stephen Fry makes us all feel inadequate, deep down – but only during our waking hours.

I’m well into reading the third last Hornblower book, and while I thirst for more, I’m also afraid of finishing the series.  C.S. Forester died 42 years ago, and I have no hopes of more.  I shed non-Euclidean tears t_t, they curve with sadness.  You’ve never wept Bézier curves.  Isaac Asimov’s estate authorised three Foundation novels from three of today’s respected Science Fiction authors – and we know how they turned out.

My hands are still very warm, as they have been all year.  We are in late spring, and I am not looking forward to the sweltering heat and swarming flies of summer.  Clare is escaping to Japan, and I will be all Clareless and alone for two months! D:

I’m plotting to hide in her suitcase or disguise myself as her mother, but there are several other people with designs on her luggage, and I’m too tall and hirsute to be her mum.  Also, I can’t speak Japanese. She objects strongly to me selling a kidney, so I’ll be down here, while she’s in the country responsible for Iron Chef.

If we swing away from organ trafficking and dreams (even the one I had at age four where I fell through a manhole down a long tunnel into my own bed through the hatch in the ceiling), I can return to discussing this blog, or perhaps blogging in general. To quote a demotivator, “Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.”

Also, Fi.  Fi blogs a lot.  If I had a dollar every time she posted a blog, I’d have $202 from the last 4.33 months.  At that rate, it would be $559.82 a year, which is far far below a taxable income.  But as an effortless supplement to any legal wage, it would be lovely.  I’ve noticed a slowing in the last couple of months – perhaps she has less to say, or perhaps she is being distracted by less worthy things such as her schooling, twitter, and her boyfriend.  N’awwwww.

I can ramble all I like.  But I won’t do it through that wretched mouthpiece that is twitter any more than fortnightly.  That’s what you get for slamming down your metaphorical hobnailed boot at 140 characters.

My blog.  My blog does not see me often, nor does it see many readers.

It does get a strange selection of Google search traffic, though.  I’ve taken this from my WordPress dashboard:

Inside my hands these petals browned

So the other day, after seeing the surprisingly excellent WALL·E with Clare, she and I went for yum cha at a Chinese restaurant neither of us had been to before.  She assured me that yum cha was a selection of small dishes, and the internet seems to agree.
Nobody, it seems, told this place, who presented us with an epic amount of food. Food for seven.
It was frightening.
We dealt with a lot of it, and left with the rest in containers.  All is well.

Today, I noticed a discolouration in the sky.  It seemed rather less blue, and rather more a dull lavender than usual, through the clouds.  I consulted Nick who lives a considerable distance to my West Sou’ West, and Kieran who lives a very similar distance directly to my south (oh my, looking at this map, I see we’re equilateral – I don’t think I’m ready for this kind of geometry in my life), and they both agree.
Meanwhile, a friend who is in Melbourne doesn’t.  The light at the time was still white and pure, perhaps a little more yellow…

Cordell says (12:40 PM):

You should be able to see the sky through a large gap in the clouds

Kieran says (12:40 PM):

What, why?

Cordell says (12:40 PM):

Can you do that?
I could swear it’s the wrong colour

Kieran says (12:41 PM):

I get blinded, the sun is in this gap
It looked somewhat grey though

Cordell says (12:41 PM):

HA HA, YOU GOT SUN-ROLLED

Buses in this state are ridiculous.  It took me two and a half hours to get home this evening (three minutes more, to be exact).  153 minutes to travel 16.4km.  To be fair, most of that time was spent waiting.  In real terms, that’s 142 pages of Captain Hornblower’s exciting escapades in South America since yesterday.  And my perception of time is more skewed at a bus stop than anywhere else, and it has been proven to be very good at other times.  I have in the past taken up the habit of walking eleven stops along the line instead of waiting.

Also, Indian cyclists.  Stay out of the bus lane, if you’re reading this.

Will motorists ever stop treating bike lanes like parking lots if they think cyclists don’t themselves respect traffic segregation? I don’t think it will make a difference, motorists aren’t at all observant.

Oh yeah, way to alienate.

Whoever shouts the loudest gets the most attention

I’m faster than a Chihuahua – one decided to chase me as I rode home. It gave up. I was not on a white stallion but a mountain bike, should you be imagining me in a heroic light.

I’m living up my last teenage years, today I met Antho at the library. I returned those books on the Boer War, and took out some on Surrealism.

I’m breaking the habit of putting images at the very end of posts.  Mixing it up.  Because I’m exciting.

This Apple & Kiwi Fruit juice is very good, but is unattractive. It’s opaque and khaki. Like the shirts in the dress uniforms on M*A*S*H, or what you get when you mix all your paint together while washing it down the drain.
When I’m buying a drink, I want to be reminded of American courts martial in the early nineteen-fifties. Surgeons being tried for obscene behaviour make me thirsty, as does Alan Alda. I don’t have to explain why tipping acrylic paints down the drain is appetising.

Do not distress, the long drought of Peach Ice Tea has been remedied.

Today was slightly too warm. The supermarket in Unley has user-operated checkouts now, with a tall guy to watch over them.

Everything is painted woodland grey, except for the trimmings which are a strong green. The floorboards are real, but an unwelcoming dull stain. It’s all modern and clean, but it is neither coloured like a medical research centre or a trendy apartment building.

Bow-ties suit my personality too well for me to wear them. They would take me into the extreme. I should be tempered by my clothing.

I slept well last night.

Whoever brings the night

Refitting the tread on a bicycle wheel is a bastard.  I got another puncture, you see, on the tube of the rear wheel.

Desktop computers should have small batteries.  If it can run for 20 minutes on its own, it can shut down properly when the power cuts out.  We have a dodgy fuse board or something.  I blame the kettle/Chinese.

I heard another mysterious night-time noise.  It sounded like someone tightly hugging a large plastic barrel in either the next room or in the roof.  I’ve heard it in the early morning and late at night, spread over weeks.

You know the sound of someone squeezing an empty plastic bottle? It’s like that, but suitably louder and deeper.

I drink a lot of Peach Ice Tea, it’s wonderful.  I bought 6 Litres the day before yesterday.  There was a man at the supermarket who looked like Peter Davison, the fifth Doctor.  Except that he was about 6′4″, hunched, and had eyebrows considerably paler than his skin.

I think that’s all?

Oh, being a pedestrian is bad.

Don’t let yourself destroy yourself

At 5:30 this evening, the sunlight was a curious amber.  The clouds were a peach colour, yet the sky behind them was a rich blue.  At the fluffier edges, it blurred into purple, and the stubby yet brightly coloured rainbows in the east.  Slightly surreal, with colours normally associated with HDRI photos.

The overall effect was a mormon propaganda piece. Why the mormons? Well, I notice that their website is quite attractive.

It didn’t rain today.

I went for a walk after dark last night, with no phone or wallet.  Mainly because it was completely spontaneous.  I went through two parks, up a road even bendier than the one I recently discovered (they’d be the same if they were properly lined up), and discovered where my bus turns around.

It’s always muddy in the long thin park with olive trees.

I’ve recently gotten into a pile of new music, and approve of the vastly improved automatic recommendation system on last.fm.

Wow, this was a short one.

But when your heart skips a beat it’s ruthless and aimless

Shocking news: I found a curvy road! (Why yes, I do live in Adelaide, why do you ask?)
I’m serious about this, it was designed with neither a ruler nor a compass.  It’s almost as if it were not planned at all, merely a tarmacked track that was once … organic.  It both undulates and twists, it has massive trees in unusual places, and two-storey houses built into the slope.  It is strangely incongruous with the grid that goes in all directions, as far as buildings go.

I love it here, but I’d hate it if it were in SimCity.  I will have an uninterrupted grid pattern!  My current city is perfect, and it even makes frequent use of those trains with which my Sims have some strange infatuation.  SimCity 3000 Unlimited’s Asian building set really makes my city much more impressive, too.  This means things are taller and shinier, which is what really matters.  SimCity 4, on the other hand, will not let control freaks (the only people playing this series) place their own side-roads.  You have to be tricky with the zoning to fool the computer into putting things where you want them.  Also, it is too complicated.  This is why I cannot be bothered finding out who I am lending my copy to, and then reclaiming it.

My bicycle has had a full servicing from a friend of mine who has an intimate knowledge of bicycles bordering on the concerning.  I hope I will remember how to do everything.  He assures me that stores would charge about $60 for that, and I assured him that the Mi Goreng he got in return was worth that. =)
Aligned brakes and an oiled drive chain mean that my bicycle is now like a ninja – silent.  But less deadly, as the brakes are no longer fail.  “Fail” is an adjective, if you missed that.  It does of course make that quiet clicky noise (not unlike power lines on a humid day) when I’m not pedalling.
I have neglected it for years, but there is no damage, apart from inconsequential corrosion from riding on the beach.  It’s still a good bike, except for the shock absorbers, which will not accept the ring thingies.  This could mean any number of things, but do not fret.  Explanations are a courtesy that you must earn, but you can be assured that this one is not important.

I have new boots, in which I can wriggle my toes.  This is a plus.  I like being able to do that.
There is nothing like new footwear to remind you that your feet are different sizes. Any sneakers which I’ve worn for years have been trained (like bonsai) to fit perfectly.  Also, ankle support.

It is very easy to think (or be distracted) while looking at a waterfall, so I spent about 45 minutes sitting in that park, watching the water.
Also, ducks are cute.

I think that is all.  No, I don’t need to use segues.

A mystery object, large and perplexing! I’m not sure what this is.  It could be a cog – and the only things large enough to take that would be the epic-scaled mining mechs and hydroelectric dams.
On the other hand, it could be a pier for a bridge. A segment of a pier, that is.  And by pier, I mean massive column rather than jetty.

If you know what it is, or have a source, do share it.

Edit: Mystery solved! It’s the Large Hadron Collider, which will destroy everything~
Thanks to the commenter identifying as ‘This’.