The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
I'm applying to a part-time job as a technical copy writer for a biotech firm here in Cambridge. It's 5-10 hours a week, and it might give us some more leeway in trying to get the capital we need for a down payment on a mortgage. In that vein, I have updated my resume. You can see it here if you're curious: http://www.flubu.com/resume/rc-cv-2006-en.pdf
It ain't looking too shabby, if I do say so myself :)
The pictures from our weekend in London are up: http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/london-jan2006/
We're back in Cambs after a rather long weekend.
Thanks to a shady, back-room deal†, I managed to score 4 tickets to go see Alegria in London at the Royal Albert Hall. Katy and I left Cambs at 11 on saturday and met up with Katy's parents at St-Pancs. The hotel I'd booked was ok. Nothing to write home to mom about. Seriously, next time we have plans in London, I'll go back to the B&B we stayed in but get a better room. The rooms we had were big and had en-suites, but we had to call the front desk to complain about one set of neighbours who were having some sort of party in their room at 11pm. At 1:30am, I was awakened by the other set of neighbours who were doing god-knows-what. Anyway…
We had a pootle in Kensington parc, where large swans threatened to eat small children. It was a nice day out and I took some cool pictures. They'll be online when I can be assed. We went to eat at an italian restaurant on Kensington High Street called Sopranos. It's a little mom&pop place that has lots of good food for reasonable prices. It was funny because it was one of the restaurants Katy and I ate at the first time we spent time in London, about a year ago now, when we were in town to go see Dralion.
The show was good. Katy and her folks enjoyed it, but I secretly think that it wasn't as good as the other times I'd seen it. The clowns were better, but some acts weren't there (like the strongman) and some acts seemed less impressive than memory served (like the speedtrack and the trapezes). Anyway, maybe I'm spoiled and biased because I've seen Alegria so often now (this was my 3rd time). Katy and her folks hadn't seen it before and were quite impressed. The show was also incident #1 in my I-am-really-starting-to-hate-people phase. The family behind us kept talking really loudly in arabic. The father of the family kept belching. I wasn't impressed. Katy told them to be quiet during the intermission. For the most part, they were. Except for the belching and the munching noises.
We spent most of today wandering around the Victoria&Albert museum, where I saw a kick-ass collection of stained glass, and the Natural History Museum, where incident #2 of my IARSTHPP reared its ugly head. The museum was packed. It seems like a really interesting place. Just the architecture of the building made me want to stop and gape. There was just WAY THE FUCK TOO MANY PEOPLE. You couldn't move at times, and when you wanted to stop and look at the exhibits, there was a queue of people pushing you in the ass to move forward. Throw in a ton of hyped-up kids who couldn't care less to be there and preferred to run and scream, parents who indulge them instead of giving them a good smack once in a while and it all made for a situation I was glad to get out of. And then there was the fat kid who kept trying to kick the pigeons (and when that didn't work, her strategy devolved to barking at them). Classy.
All in all, a good weekend, but people need to learn manners and social graces. I don't say that I don't burp (dear god, people who know me know that's not true). But I do it at home, or at least I try to be discreet…
† I asked Nat.
Your friends will wonder in which direction your life philosophy has wandered when they see this hand-carved knife block, a prototype by Irene van Gestel of De Meubelmaat, a design group in the Netherlands. This gal must certainly possess a macabre sense of humor. Perhaps this knife caddie, chiseled out of a block of solid limewood, would be an ideal accessory in Cellblock B at Sing-Sing, where those who are looking for an appropriate place to store knives might be inclined to use their bunkmates heads.
Chirac threatens nuclear attack on states sponsoring terrorism
President Jacques Chirac has dropped a political bombshell by threatening to retaliate with nuclear strikes against any state found to be responsible for a large-scale terrorist attack on France. In the biggest shift in French nuclear doctrine for 40 years, M. Chirac revealed that the force de frappe – the French nuclear deterrent – had already been reconfigured to allow it to destroy the “power centres” of any state which sponsored a terrorist assault.
Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article339823.ece
Cure me with sex
A woman has taken out a full page advert in a newspaper asking for sex to help cure her cancer. Divorcee Elisaveta, 30, explained in the ad: “Doctors have discovered two lumps in my breast. “They have told me the best way to beat cancer and stop the spread is to have sex.”
Her plea in top Russian daily Moscow Komsomolets added: “The ideal candidate would need to have sex with me every two days for at least a year.” A cancer specialist told the paper: “To avoid this cancer after a certain age, three sex sessions a week are necessary.”
Source: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16601093&method=full&siteid=94762&headline=cure-me-with-sex–name_page.html
The good news is that I have been able to double my time on the rowing machine and now have a 500m split time to have a decent baseline. It's 2m53s. It's horrible, but it's a start.
The bad news is that I think my back went *sproing* when I was doing assisted chin-ups. I'll see how bad it is tomorrow when I wake up.
My paper has been accepted pending minor revisions.
Woohah!
Some of you will have received links/memes from me in the past pointing to truly weird shit (bonerbunny comes to mind). I make no secret that through various means, I come into contact with stuff that most people wouldn't even dream of. Yet today, I have found my match. A link that sounds so horribly vile that I daren't even click on it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you http://www.ratemyvomit.com/
(and if you do go look at it, please, don't tell me about it).
I've been looking into my website stats again. According to Google, these are the top search queries that are directed to my website from Google:
garfield
coldplay
coupe de cheveux
bizarro
animal porn
dilbert powerpoint
batman quebecois
bogeyman
porn
garfield comics
scotch
get fuzzy
bookmarks
comics sexy
dilbert strategy
doritos
garfield “new year”
happy new year
vote
I'm sorry, but animal porn??????
Edit: ok, I figured it out. People are scary. If you go to google images and try this query: http://images.google.com/images?q=animal+porn+site%3Awww.flubu.com&hl=en you'll end up with a picture of a loaf of bread. The picture is called “bread-porn.jpg” and since the title of my LJ blog is “the beaver is a proud and noble animal“, it fits the bill.
But still, jaysus.
Senators say military strike on Iran must be option
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican and Democratic senators said on Sunday the United States may ultimately have to undertake a military strike to deter Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, but that should be the last resort. “That is the last option. Everything else has to be exhausted. But to say under no circumstances would we exercise a military option, that would be crazy,” Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona said on CBS's “Face the Nation.”
I saw this one coming a while ago. The cynical part of me is thinking the US is going to bomb the hell our of Iran. The realist part of me says the cynical part of me isn't far off the mark. That scares me.