amuchmoreexotic

It must be snowing! Flash just came in through the catflap with snow all over his back, and plonked himself down by the radiator.
Going to go and have a look out the frontroom window.

Edit: It's properly snowing. Archway looks lovely.

You know, I thought the whole Facebook stunt to propel Rage Against The Machine's 1992 song "Killing in the Name Of" to the top of the UK's pop chart by Christmas was really lame. Then I heard the likely alternative:



One, it's a cover of a Hannah Montana song. Two, it's about hope and trying hard. Three, as my friend pointed out, it sounds like something they would sing on South Park except it isn't funny at all. Four OH MY GOD. Five, you know that in eighteen years or so this song is going to be dusted off by Internet nerds and they'll call it ElderRolling, and I'll be old then and I want to keep from having to hear this song in my mid-50s in my cyberjack implant.

So, to the peoples of the United Kingdom, HOW CAN I HELP YOU? HOW CAN I HELP YOU WITH THE UPHILL BATTLE! HOW CAN HELP YOU WITH THE CLIIIIIIIIIIIIIMB...oh God it's already starting! Quick, tell me what to do?!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I make an exactly average wage for a woman over 25 with an advanced degree (ignoring the bonus situation. If I make my full bonus, I get a 10% boost) and my goal is to make a salary that is right on the border of the highest quintile.

Also, my dream is that the feds stop dicking my gay self and give me the proper tax breaks! I do not look forward to the nightmare of trying to do the proper mortgage, childcare, and child tax credits when I can't be legally married. (I admit another pet peeve is when people I know who are conservative on Facebook talk about how liberals don't work and I'm like, "whip out your degree and salary, asshole. The statistics tell me that I make more than at least 75% of all Americans aged 16 and over, and just under that for all Americans aged 25 and over.")

Okay, yes, I am a bit bored and looking at statistics makes me oddly happy. Even though it also makes me go, "NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!" and be enraged on the behalf of women, African-Americans, and Latinos.
--

Does anyone else think this sand sculpture awesomeness...


...looks more'n a little like Mighty Greg Davies? (Or have I got a very particular form of tinnitus of the eyes..?)

Hello again for today.

( Tweets )

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No glasses! But still cute :)

What did Rachel Maddow and Fox News president Roger Ailes' say to each other at tonight's White House holiday party for broadcast journalists? Our guess: [Five minutes of awkward silence.] MADDOW: "Well, I guess I'm going to get a drink?"

http://gawker.com/5427537/to-be-a-fly-on-the-wall

*looks up*

aha, bcz it is an WINTRY BLIZZARD outside

Octo-Shocktopus
This is an excellent cartoon about the new observation of a sneaky octopus finding: coconuts make excellent hats and hiding places, not just substitute horse hooves.

Proposal Proposal
An illustrator makes an illustration of city scenes that, folded in exactly the right way, also serves as a marriage proposal. But only if you fold it jussst right.

Mountain Buoyancy
The Alps are shrinking, slowly, because of erosion. But this makes them lighter. So they don't sink as deep into the mantle. And thus get taller. This is SCIENCE.

Thankyou the internet, people, rigorous series of observations and experiments, etc.

Non-story of the moment is the manufactured battle between Simon Cowell's latest automaton and major-label rebellion-by-numbers merchants Rage Against The Machine for the "prestigious" Christmas number one spot, and boy oh boy has there been a lot of hot air about nothing on this subject from unexpected quarters, to say nothing of the zillions of column inches in the prolefeed sheets. What makes it a non-story is not so much the fact that both tracks are released by the same multinational conglomerate megacorp, nor is it Cowell (no relation to Henry) and his marketing methods, but the records show that the list of Christmas number ones ever since the first British charts were compiled in 1952 have, with few exceptions, been not very good. What an unholy mix of the over-familiar and the utterly disposable! To be honest, it's just an extension of the nature of the charts themselves; it must be over 20 years since I could correctly tell you what the current number one is, and well over thirty since I gave a toss. For me, TOTP lost its magic at about the same time that Pan's People retired. Also, without wishing to sound like a crown court judge, who the hell was/is Leon Jackson? Not even Cowell's aggressive marketing by osmosis has implanted this fellow's existence into my consciousness.

Elsewhere in the world, I see our old chum Rupert Read is being unintentionally hilarious again; do all of his colleagues in the Woo Party believe that "liberality(sic) points toward societal disintegration" or that "that way (liberalism) lies nemesis"? Sounds more like authoritarian control freakery than peace-loving ecology to me, and I'm pretty sure it's contra to the Greens' manifesto, unless they're gearing up for a return to the era of Edward Goldsmith or (shudder) James Wentworth Day and haven't yet told anyone in public. Personally, though, I think it's just the bog-standard kind of hysterical, bitter anti-Liberal trolling I come to expect from similarly-minded turncoats, though someone ought to tell him that LibCon's hardly a hotbed of liberalism despite the name...

Does anyone know of a good, srs bsns moisturiser for cracked and bleeding skin?

To illustrate its story about cheques, today's Scotsman is running a full page photo of Gary Linneker and Des Lynam sitting next to each other, both holding onto a cheque. The caption reads: 'Cheques were the preferred option for many people until recently but the rise of credit and debit cards has sounded their death knell'.

What the caption and article fail to explain or refer to in any way is the fact that Des Lynam is dressed as a nun. You'd think this would be a bigger story, wouldn't you? I didn't even realise Des Lynam was Catholic.

Another thing: it is now freezing outside but the apartment is lovely and snug. Not too warm--just a comfortable temperature with no draught.

And the heating is free, provided courtesy of the building water heating system. Just part of the revelation of how tiny our bills are here compared to England.

The Swedes really have cracked this coping-with-the-cold lark. I'd be unsurprised if there turned out to be a law about minimum heating standards.

It's just like England. A light smattering of snow--just three centimetres overnight--and the whole of Skåne is thrown into chaos.

All the Swedes from Stockholm and points north just laugh at this.

Last night I dreamt that I was summoned to watch a big dog trying to herd a baby elephant. But when I got there, it turned out that the 'elephant' was a quadruped with the upper body and arms of a woman.

Somebody got the dog under control, and I found myself walking alongside the woman. Her haunches were at about my chest height and she was wearing a specially adapted denim skirt.

"Sooo..." I asked, "are you a human with a ... condition or are you a species of animal I haven't seen before? I mean - not that humans aren't also animals!"

"Oh, I'm a human. I'm surprised you haven't seen this before! 1 in 80 people are born with this condition."

It turned out that she was a university student, and we were on her campus. She offered to show me two other students in her year (both of them women) who had this strange, four-legged condition.

When I met them I suddenly realised that this would make a great entry for this journal, what with that whole "girltaur" thing I used to jokingly pretend to be into. I asked the three lady quadrupeds if they would mind having their photo taken, and they said sure. I was trying to get the original girltaur's phone number when ophe1ia_in_red pulled me aside and told me that exploiting these women to indulge my quadropedophilia was very wrong.

I woke up before the dream had a chance to go anywhere good. :(

Yes yes, half of all December sales go to Autism research. And it's not on Sony. And it's not teenage reactionary but heartfelt and actually, you know, Christmassy. But still. The most pleasing thing about the push to get Tim Minchin's 'White Wine in the Sun' to chart is it's a song people who haven't heard it before may be enchanted by when they do, and actually want to buy. You know, like when they shop for music ordinarily...

Further to Carol Ann Duffy's rotten Christmas poetry, the new Private Eye has this pithy summation of her writing:

I'm dreaming of a white
Christmas
Just like the BNP
Who are bastards

The insulation went in on Tuesday, and it's really taken the chill off the mornings, so that was well worth doing. The condensation continues problematic, though; well, it's a question of slow elimination of causes, I guess, and everything will help.

The kitten's beginning to crack the whole crawling into bed at 5am thing, although she can't quite manage to settle in the crook of my arm without waking me up at least a little bit. She also discovered that the bath is a marvellous miraculous playground of delight last night, so I got a little damp paw in my face. This morning Tim pulled up the amazing anti-mould bathmat, creating a series of explosive disengagements as the suckers released, and she now sees the bath as a place of terror. Flighty.

I've tracked down probable cause for yesterday's computer catastrophe to having to turn off the computer after a sound-related browser hang while it was going through an automatic security download. Hurrah! Had to go back to a restore point, but all that lost me was a codec bundle I downloaded so I could watch some Samurai Jack (late episodes! including Rave Jack!). Well, that's easily redone. Re-installing Firefox was also necessary (perhaps that, too had been updating?) but that turned out to be a good thing; it's running much better than it was before, making me wonder if I hadn't botched an update at some point. Hmmm oh well. It was a good thing I returned from my office party in a zen-like state of calmness, though, as this all took a while...

Bernard Cribbens was good in last night's Buzzcocks, wasn't he?

Well, I did my office Christmas party duty and drunkenly

1. cried in the toilets for an hour
2. propositioned a co-worker (it was Lead Reporter and he very politely said no).

My boss is bringing Cinnabon for breakfast today!

An open letter to the women of Japan
Dear women of Japan, walking around the streets of your delightful capital, Tokyo, and catching your eye on trains, on escalators, on the street and in stores, I can't help noticing your perplexed reactions to me, Momo. "What the fuck is that?" you seem to be saying to yourselves. "Is it a clown? Will it produce some balls and start juggling? Or is it just an old, ugly, ridiculously-dressed gaijin who thinks he'll score points with us by trying to look 'interesting' in a totally weird way?"



I, Momo, have seen these thoughts passing all-too-obviously through your head, and been slightly saddened, I must confess. Yes, I'm old, and foreign, and a bit eccentric. Sure, I could pass for Momo the Clown, or some kind of walking black flower. But there's something you should know. I am, more or less, Nino.

Nino. Ninomiya from boy band Arashi. He's your favourite current man, isn't he? He's everywhere, with his child-monkey charm and delicate, intelligent, feminine features. Look, there, in the Wii SuperMario Brothers poster! And here in the au by KDDI commercial!



What a fun boyfriend Nino would be! What good children he'd make, and how well he'd help you raise them! You dream of Arashi, you keep them under your pillow and take them out at night, and when anyone asks your favourite you say "Nino!" If you saw him on the street you'd scream. But if you saw Momo on the street... well, you'd scream!



And that's what I'm writing to tell you today. There's actually a lot less difference than you think between Momo and Nino! We both make you scream, that's a start! But it goes so much deeper than that! Let me prove to you that Momo equals Nino, more or less!

Up to 60% of the human body is water, which means that me and Nino are already 60% the same thing. Water! It's not like Nino's water is sexy and Momo's is weird. No, that 60% majority component of Nino and Momo is identical. Water!

It doesn't stop there, either. Nino and Momo both have two eyes, a nose, a mouth on the front of our heads. Okay, Momo has one eye that's shriveled like a grape, so let's give him 75% eyes compared with Nino's 100% eyes, but, you know, 75% ain't bad, girls! Momo has less hair than Nino, but, you know, it's hair!



And look at their jobs! Momo and Nino are both singers! Okay, Arashi might perform at the Yokohama Arena while Momo just sings karaoke over an iPod at a Tokyo art gallery, but what's an audience gap of tens of thousands when the profession is the same?

There are some other striking similarities. Momo's middle name is John, and Nino is managed by Johnny's Entertainment. Nino is hot, Momo is not, but there's only one letter difference between those words, which makes them 66% the same. Nino's sperm is young and healthy, whereas Momo produces slightly damaged old man sperm, but even old man sperm can make a perfectly good baby, if you don't mind the fact that it wouldn't be racially 100% pure (it would, though, be racially 50% pure, which is good enough for anyone except sticklers).

I want to conclude this open letter to you, dear Women of Japan, by saying, in your delightful language, yoroshiku; be nice to me. Next time you see me on the street, say to yourself "There -- but for a few insignificant details and my own blind Darwinian prejudices -- walks Nino from Arashi!" And allow yourself a small scream. A nice, excited scream, not the terrified one you normally do.