back in da hood

i'm using my 10th different currency in 12 weeks. as it happens, the latest one is pounds sterling and this means only one thing: i am home :)

i've had a great time travelling around but it is really good to be back. of course i'm not back in london, as i no longer have a flat there, so catching up with those friends is not yet possible.

the remainder of november and most of december will be spent doing some serious bumming around. but i think i will learn to rollerblade, and i want to do a short language course. and i need to sort out a snowboard trip. plus there's the GTA action to be had. plus attempting to lig onto other people work xmas parties.

come to think of it, being back and unemployed is going to be sweet. every other year you really just want to do the xmas parties bit but you have to work. i get to just do the parties :)

The Matrix: rotations

it turns out that this matrix is capable of finding out whether you are a perve:

    /  0   1 \ 

M = |        |

    \ -1   0 /

Now visit this link :)

this item shamelessly nicked from i:de'o:gramas

uncharitable

i've only heard the band aid 20 single twice and it's already getting on my nerves. you'd have thought 20 years would be enough for the last overdose to wear off.

YoungUns: you'll know what I mean by january.

quale uomo rosso?

it feels normal again here. i feel right at home.

it's a strange thing to say: venice is like no other city on earth. But the people are the thing. There was always this divide in the east. Even in Ljubljana, the most westerly point (before venice) of my trip, and a mere 4 hours on the train from here, there are certain things that divide they the people and me, the tourist.

crossing the road for a start.

Everywhere, from Estonia to Slovenia on my trip they obey the red man. It doesn't matter if the road is clear. It does not matter if the road has been clear for 10 minutes. It does not matter if the tumbleweed blows past. It probably doesn't even matter if the road is closed for maintenance. They will not cross the road when the man is red. I find this bewildering. It's not so much that the other side of the road is a promised land that must be reached as soon as possible, just that whilst you stand still waiting for an electronic circuit to give you permission to cross the empty tarmac, you are wasting your life. Why wouldn't you feel the urge to cross?
Also, I think it is the Londoner in me. A red light awakens the competitive spirit: when the lights go green it's GO! and the race begins. Got to get ahead of the other rats in this race. They might slow me down, and where I'm going is ever so important :)

The italians are like me; they would just cross. quale uomo rosso? I guess the comparison is a little unfair, after all in venice there are no roads (at least not here in the thick of the waterways).

The funny thing is, there's a side effect to this disconnect I never would have predicted in advance. Guilt. A lady waits patiently for the red man. Enter me, stage left. I assess the empty road. I cross, doing some left/right checks while I am crossing. My peripheral vision sees the lady I left behind. She doesn't know what to do. Does she cross too? But the man is red! No she cannot cross! But I have crossed, it must be ok!??!! My actions have left her so confused she might explode. And it is all my fault: I have made her explode, look stupid, be terminally confused, whatever. The red man stares at me with stern affrontage, and I feel guilty for crossing the empty road wilderness, with all it's tumbleweed.

the eyes have it

even if I'd been in a coma and just woken I could tell that we'd pulled into an italian station. everyone who got on wore sunnies - and kept them on.

welcome to the land of eye contact and eye defence...

inferno

There was a siren. I woke. Groggily I contemplated whether I could be arsed to get up and see if there was a real fire. A few seconds passed as the whine continued.

Then, the sound of running footsteps in the corridor filled me with urgency. I rose. I remembered where my clothes were. I pulled on my jeans and grabbed my t-shirt and left the room.

I looked around this strange place I had never seen before, thinking how annoying and typical it was that there maybe was a fire just when I had no idea where I even was, or how to get out of there.

I was in a corridor outside the doorway of the room I had been sleeping in. There was an open window on the other side of the corridor. It looked out upon a shaft that ran down the whole of the centre of the building, to provide light to the inner parts. Through opposing windows I could see into some corridors on the other side of this space. Nothing was happening. Noone was around. But I could hear some scuffling and footsteps out of sight.

I was overcome with the need to pee. Confused and unsure of what to do, I pragmatically decided to defer any decisions until I had had a pee. I wondered where the toilet was. I turned and found that I was quite close to the end of the corridor. There was a door - the ladies toilet. The gents had to be nearby. And it was.

Relieved, I stumbled back into the corridor. A guy was there. He said to me "What do you think is going on?". I mumbled some response designed to communicate that not only did I not know what was going on, but that I was wondering where the hell I was, or if I was dreaming. The guy went to pee.

I found the doorway to the bedroom again. Then the siren stopped. All was quiet. The weight of confusion and inaction was lifted from my shoulders. Happy, I went back to bed and fell asleep immediately.

This really happened in all its aspects. Although it still feels a lot like it was a dream I had a chat with the other guys in the dorm room this morning and confirmed I hadn't been dreaming. The strange thing was that I had been staying in the hostel for 3 days. But when I was awoken by the alarm, some things I knew without thinking - like where my clothes were. But I had no idea where I was. Nor who anyone else was (the guy I spoke to in the night was Adam who is in the same dorm room, but I didn't recognise him properly at the time).

I guess different parts of the brain wake up at different speeds. I wonder if the my memory woke up at all last night, or whether it was blissfully unaware.

In case you were wondering if there was a significance to the theme that people seemed to need a pee; no significance, sorry. This was just down to alcohol consumption earlier that night :)

window shopping

anyone else ever noticed the similarity between a slow sales day in the fashion/underwear/shoe shop area of town (aka shopping paradise for laydeez) and the amsterdam red-light district canal?

Let me explain. On this particular street here in Budapest, there were almost no shoppers shopping. a few people walking past, but even then not many. Probably because it was rainy, and it's cold here. and the wind blows the cold right through you. it's not been a day for walking around and browsing.

I was exploring. I hadn't acquired a map yet, and was wandering around aimlessly. Glacing in the windows, time and again I saw an attractive girl sales assistant. Doing nothing; no customers to be served. Just standing around looking back out at me. Just like in those red windows of Amsterdam. The guys look in and the girl looks back out at them.

Now, granted, she wasn't actually wearing the crotchless knickers, but she was probably selling them :)

a digest of a summary, redux

it turns out there is a name for the buggy-pusher behaviour i mentioned a few posts ago. The Universal Right of Way! :) :) This guy sums it up:

The stroller mom assessed her accessories - baby, waterproof bags, stroller snow tires, Keds - and, deciding she was too good for this kind of abuse and probably possessed the Universal Right of Way, searched her personal menu of suitable responses. She dismissed "controlled silence" or "absent-minded apology" as options and went straight for "establish dominance."

"Excuse me. If I knew you had a cat in your bag, I wouldn't have bumped you!" She then turned to others in line, bugging her eyes, which is semafore for, "am I right or am I fucking right?"

-- * --

A joke that made me laugh, from i:de'o:gramas

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The Onion rocks. And it has news about policy reform in bush's second term :) I'm not holding my breath that he'll keep his promise on this one....
Depressing: annotated mirror of some of The Onion's 2000 US election satire shows how much of it turned out not to be satire at all :(

-- * --

This one is for orpheus, who likes to blog about toilet experiences :) It seems you are not alone... :)

-- * --

...which is also where with some surprise I discovered that that little squirt Wesley from Star Trek: The Next Generation blogs! And is 30 and slightly less squirty now. Not a bad blog actually - the 'hooters' intro made me smile...

vice city

crap i've just realised i've got to get back to the UK to play GTA: San Andreas

dammmit rockstar!

cabbage cabbage

what happens when a cabbage grows a mouth and become sentient? It gets hungry. What do hungry cabbages eat? who knows.

In Being John Malkovich they did not shy away from the question of what would happen if Mr Malkovich himself went down the tunnel. A world of Malkovich. Or to say that in the native dialect of that world, 'Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich'....

So... the cabbage. You see, this happened here. It has to have. The cabbage grew a mouth, became sentient and ate.... another cabbage. The result of this extraordinary event was a world full of cabbage. It exists. It is here, central europe. From the northern shores of Gdansk through the capitals of Warszawa, Praha and Bratislava and maybe beyond.

Cabbage Cabbage Cabbage Cabbage

Would you like cabbage with that sir? actually no, i'm getting a bit fed up with it :)

positivity

i was just reading my last post. lighthearted but basically negative. So here's the yang.

woken by sunshine through the windows and not the alarm clock. people watching on the trolley bus into brno centre. a cute brunette clocks my gaze. a cool refreshing breeze. ambling through square admiring the buildings. sorting out tomorrows bus ticket in no time at all. finding an english newspaper in the newsstand. the smell of coffee. attempting to order coffee in czech. reading other people's blogs. receiving email. nowhere to be. a world full of choices to take or leave.

it's a great day today.

kids r us

i hate pushchairs. buggies. prams. whatever you call them.

it's not the carriage itself, more the people who push them. and women are the worst offenders here (anyway, it's comparatively rare to see a bloke pushing one). quite often I have been stopped in my tracks as the only possible gap in which to pass is blocked by a buggy slowly ambling through. Driven by someone looking in a completely different direction.

I say in my head as I pass: don't you care that you're shoving your beloved child towards unknown territory while you rubberneck at god knows what?

But I have seen this before - in the supermarket. they look at the items on the shelves, slowly pushing the trolley onwards.

So maybe there are similarities between a small child and the weekly groceries. The more I think about it the more there are. Maybe this is reasonable behaviour after all.

Groceries                  Kids

2 for the price of 1       Twins

smell when they go off     smell for other reasons

fruit and veg              Meat and two veg (on 50% of them anyway)

cost you more than seems   ditto

reasonable 

from despair to where

it looks like bush has won, ohio is undeclared but the margin he leads by is sufficient to say that it is highly improbable that the uncounted votes will change the position.

i am deflated; the world is stuck with that warmongering corporate lackey and his quasi-religious bullshit and his 'leadership' (note to the oed: leadership now means that you don't change your mind under any circumstances, especially in the face of overwhelming evidence)

and this time the americans voted for him when they knew what he stood for. or at least one america did. it's very obvious from the breakdown of the voting across the various states that there are two americas.

one is hicksville america where they still believe in god, own more guns than al capone and find it difficult to locate any other country on a map. the other is the intelligent people (my bias may be somewhat obvious) of the metropolises of california, washington state and new york. outmuscled by the ignorant masses.

hicksville america rules the world. help us indeed.

namedropping

blogs from some people i know

dreamcatcher
the case of the deceptively large head
arcoiris (rainbow)

I admit it, it's personal.

it's 2.30am and l'm in bed. l've been out drinking on this my last night in prague. I should down a load of water and go to sleep. but instead I'm surfing bbc news, cnn and various blogs. hail to the thief once again? please, no...