:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Saturday, September 06, 2008 ::

Rorschach Toilet Blot Test

Green Eggs And Diarrhea
Originally uploaded by Kurt Christensen.


I'm ill. Or as one of my colleagues corrected, I'm sick. I came down with a fever last weekend. Shivering, sweating, chronic diarrhoea, all of that. No one else has caught it fortunately. So it's probably the result of something I ate or drank. Narrowing that down to things I had no one else did then it was either:
a) post work drinks last Friday
b) the glass of water I keep next to the bed at night that the cat likes to steal from me. I try to wash it when I know she's been at it but sometimes miss.
Basically, I've got cat's ass disease.

I had a couple of days of vomiting Lucozade out of my ass. Despite the fact they even write on the bottle "Lucozade is not suitable for replacing the fluid lost during diarrhoea." What sort of a reputation is that to have to try to live down! And why do I still buy it when I'm ill? It's psychosomatic now. Mentally Lucozade and diarrhoea go together in the same way Ealing comedies and "the sick bucket^TM" do.

I had to take a couple of days off of work. Even after the pure liquid form I still had a couple of days where I had only reached the viscosity to be able to create Rorschach Shit Blot tests on the back of the pan.


Déviation du test de Rorschach
Originally uploaded by Dominiq.


After that it turned in satay sauce. At least at that point I had energy enough to work from home for the rest of the week. I still haven't progressed past that point though. Time for some more rehydration salts. I've lost over 3kg (half a stone). That takes me from Light Welterweight to Super Featherweigh. At least, it would if I were a boxer.

I'm off all of this week anyway. On staycation. I hadn't heard that phrase until yesterday. Apparently even Radio 4 have used it. I feel like I'm jumping on a bandwagon. I have therefore decided to stay one step ahead of the pack and am declaring it an ironic post-staycation. Hopefully the rest will allow me to shit the rest of it through.

Labels: Humour, Personal, psychology

:: Dan 6.9.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

Morning. I am offline at the moment. My PC died last Friday (power surge wrote off the power supply and mother-board and due to age rendered processor and RAM useless) so only have internet access in work, which I obviously try to minimise. Webmail is blocked. Should anyone really want to contact me for some reason, I can still pick up Flickr and Murdockspace messages, but not Facebook. I bought a new PC from yoyotech last night. Thanks to Spoksey for specing that up for me. Normal service will resume soon.

News

From Sunday's Independent:
"At present, Britain does not routinely fingerprint airline passengers (see page 3 for the US attitude). But starting two months from tomorrow, several million travellers each year will have their fingerprints, and photograph, taken twice before being allowed aboard a domestic flight."
The referenced article about the US attitude is here.
I mailed this to a security consultant friend to find out how it came about. Apparently it's down to commercial reasons, so every one gets to access one set of shops. Wooo.

Rambert Dance Company's ‘Britney Breakdown’
(I did some acoustic work for Rambert a couple of years ago. Lovely people.)
"Rambert Dance Company's ever-popular Season of New Choreography is an exciting opportunity to see brand new work created by some of Rambert's versatile dancers. The company has a track record of nurturing young choreographers. One of these is Hubert Essakow, who has commissioned a new work from Richard Thomas for Adey to sing live with the dancers. You won't be surprised to know that she gets to sing the word "arse" quite a bit."
(You may remember Richard Thomas from sitting behind the piano on TMWRNJ and as the person who provided the music for and co-wrote Jerry Springer the Opera with Stewart Lee.)

Spotted

Filthy, muck-strewn white van on the M5 on whose back door a mischievous passing finger had scrolled, "Cleaned by the NHS."

Busses

Chatting to "That'll be the Day: The Musical: The Fleece woman" on the bus stop yesterday morning. Tells me about her job then asks what I do. I say I work for an engineering practice in the centre. "Is that an admin role?" she asks. What!? Look at me. Glasses. Beard. Carrying laptop bag. I'm an engineer you cheeky cow.

I sat on the bus today, reading The God Delusion, next to someone reading the Bible. Book II of Psalms to be precise. What a wonderfully secular society we live in.

Labels: Art, Literature, News, Personal, Secuirty, Spotted, Travel

:: Dan 31.1.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

Inspired by the Hijack "Whats in your pockets?" thread.


Personal Artefacts
Originally uploaded by gusset.


Click image for mouseovers.

List format:

Trouser pockets:

Wallet
Personal mobile
Tartan handkerchief

Jacket pockets:

Work mobile
Lose change
Sugar-free chewing gum
Sugar-free Strepsils
A note with someone’s address on it and a lump of Blu-tac inside it for postering
Business cards (in holder)
Space Pen
Bus ticket (now recycled)
That pointless extra piece of paper and coloured tape you always get stuck to your purchase in Argos (ditto)
Paper bag (ditto)
Prescription
Cough Suppressant (had this bloody cough for three weeks now, just made second visit to the Drs after work today)
Spoon (see above)

Missing in action:

House keys and Swiss Army Knife (not shown as are hanging inside the front door)

Artistic Licence:

Watch
Two rings
Glasses
(I take my watch and two rings off when I get into the house, but keep my wedding ring on. Glasses are only there as you can't have a personal artefacts still life without them in my opinion.)

Labels: Flickr, Personal

:: Dan 21.1.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

...these are a few of my favourite things:

• My magpie (Mrs P and her love of shinny things)
  
• Curried lamb, variety dependant on mood
  
• Sausage and mash with onion gravy
  
• Sharing a meal you cooked with friends
  
• Eating food you grow yourself
  
• The smell of coconut
  
• Dark ales
  
• The power of suggestion (I just saw a Bath Ales van drive past)
  
• Intelligent debate
  
• Radio 4
  
• Very dark chocolate with bits of orange or cherry in it
  
• Rubik's Cubes
  
• Heavy vinyl
  
• Travelling light
  
• Stopping to admire architecture
  
• The front page of The Independent
  
• The feel of a new book with a matt finish
  
• The smell of old books
  
• Women in brightly coloured/patterned, multi-layered clothes
  
• High heels
  
• Goths
  
• My leather sofa
  
• The satisfaction of pulling hair out of the plug
  
• Things that change unpredictably with time
  
• Throbbing noise you can get lost in
  
• Playing a good gig / seeing people dance to my music
  
• Very heavy rain, even better with thunder
  
• Routine
  
• A good job well done
  
• Getting up early
  
• Finding time to reflect
  
• Writing lists

[after this thread]
I can't stop myself adding to this list. As I said, I do enjoy writing them. Now it's passed the 30 mark I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and publish.

Labels: Personal

:: Dan 18.10.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

Happy Birthday Mrs P. X

Labels: Personal

:: Dan 11.9.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

I had a lot to crap to carry into work on the bus on Monday, including a laptop, my camera, the remains of a fruit salad in an ice-cream tub that decided HAD to be kept upright, etc. Staggering out of the door laden with all this I round the corner to see the cheap bus disappearing past the end of the road. Bugger.

Sometimes two of the cheap busses come along at once, so I risk waiting for the next one and let several of the extortionately priced First busses go past. 35 minutes later (no one can say I don't have patience!) the next friendly blue South Gloucestershire Buses bus pulls up. I get on to find none of the usual familiar faces and far less people looking like they are on the way into the office. An interesting ride with the people who don't have 9 to 5 jobs and are also willing to wait around for ages to save two-pounds-ninety on the bus fair.

The spacey seating area at the front intended for push-chairs, wheelchairs, the elderly, pregnant etc, is empty and seems to be the only area I can get to without emptying fruit salad into my bag, so I sit there. A couple of stops later and an old lady in a jacket that looks like an orange eiderdown gets on. She has a walking stick with a trigger operated grabber on the end, and is heading straight for me. I shuffle and rearrange my odd collection of personal possessions to make as much room for her as possible. She sits next to me and I get a fait waft of cigarettes.

Happy that she is comfortable I resume staring out of the window. I would normally read a book but economised on what I was carrying believe it or not. As I watch Gloucester Road flash by I feel the old lady tug my elbow. I turn and she is holding a letter with an appointment time on it. She points at it and says something I can't quite make out about going for a hearing test. I read the time and glanced at my watch. "Plenty of time," I say, "you'll get there nice and early." Hoping that this covers all bases of answer any question she may have been asking or just filling the void of small talk if that's what she was after. She agree and then tells me a bit about her hearing test and which ear she has problems with etc. Eventually she puts the letter away and we both resume staring ahead.

With the next nudge of the elbow I find she has produced another letter, this one from a travel agents. She proceeds to tell me about a holiday booking for Butlins in Minehead (presumably not for ATP). "That's nice. Are you looking forward to it?"

Later she nudges me again and I turn to find she has produced a lanyard from around her neck that reads "I AM HARD OF HEARING. PLEASE LOOK AT ME WHEN TALKING TO ME SO I CAN LIP READ." Was I not doing this already? I notice she isn't really looking at me anyway. I resort to saying yes and nodding a lot as I'm not sure how well she can follow me. She proceeds to tell me about her cataract. "Well, at least they can reuse those a lot more easily now." She then tells me about her average day and about some job she does when she gets home in the evening, details of which are sparse and exactly when she does all through the day is equally unclear.

On the next nudge I turn to find a plush horse toy in my face and involuntarily recoil from it. She strokes its mane and tells me it keeps her company because she gets lonely. She takes it with her everywhere. She sleeps with it. And she also has more teddies at home. The horse eventually gets put away and my palpitations subside.

When we get near the hospital I help her up to get off. She shuffles along and someone else helps her down the step to the pavement. She stands there are waves me off as the bus pulls away and I wave back, smiling at her.

I feel bad that that may be the most social contact she'll have all day, and I effectively tried to avoid as much of it as possible. I tell Mrs P about it later and she gets depressed. "That's what your nan is like you realise." No, my nan is far crazier, and I love her for it.

"I'll be like that too, if I ever get old," Mrs P points out. (Whether she will ever make old age has been a running dark joke since the insensitive vicar at her mum's funeral happily made light of it in small talk and proclaimed, "The women in your family do die young don't they!")

She mimes. "'This is my cabbage patch kid. Her name is Louise. I have an adoption certificate for her. I have it her somewhere' rustle rustle 'This is the sock Henry chewed. Henry was our dog.'" At least she's ready for it.

Labels: Humour, Personal

:: Dan 6.9.07 [Arc] [1 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

I've always been bad with faces, and Mrs P very good with them Often when watching TV she'll point to obscure actor and say "Hey look, it's the guy that was in that episode of Voyager, where the..." etc. I usually have to wait for them to speak and then identify them by the voice rather than the looks.



I was flicking through a magazine the other day and found this photo. If it wasn't sat along side many other pictures of this famous person there’s no way I would have worked out who it was. So I covered the text underneath it and held it up to ask Mrs P if she knew who it was. She glanced away from World of Warcraft and said, "It's Courtney Love," then turned back to skinning some beast she had just slaughtered. But how did she know. "It's obvious; the lips, the eyes." I, on the other hand, am instantly fooled by something as simple as a hair colour change.

Then, in another magazine, I found this: Identity crisis. "We can all forget a face, but some people draw a blank when looking at their colleagues, friends, even their parents. Alanna Maltby — who once failed to recognise her boyfriend — reports."

I think I may have an acute form of prosopagnosia. At least I have an excuse now.

Labels: Personal, science

:: Dan 6.9.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

Mrs P and I are off to the Civil Ceremony of an old school friend of mine tomorrow. Its at the Theatre Royal in Bath and is theatrical fancy dress!



As well as the potential for meeting up with old school friends I'm really looking forward to seeing how people turn up. I've bought a feathered mask thing and Mrs P has had a matching feather arrangement made for her hair. She then used it as an excuse to buy a new jacket. (She's already known as the Imelda Marcos of coats.) I've used it as an opportunity to try something I've always fancied and had a cut throat shave.

This is not something to be taken lightly. I haven't been in a barbers shop since I left school 13 years ago. It was then I started growing my hair and took to asking anyone I trusted with a pair of scissors to trim in now and again; this included among others the future mother-in-law, the future bridesmaid, one of my cousins, and an art student I worked with. (This is a prime opportunity to make an incest joke about them all being the same person, but they aren't, ok.) After nearly ten years of this I was thinning too much to be able to carry long hair anymore and I got my brother to shave it all off for me. 20 quid investment in clippers saved me years more spending on barbers. After ten years together I eventually entrusted hair-cutting duties to Mrs P, and after a few bodged attempts and with only the occasional slip she's been doing a reasonable job of it.

As the beard has come and gone with the seasons I've often wondered what a good old-fashioned cutthroat shave would feel like. Reputably it's amazingly close and lasts for days so as someone who is too lazy to wet shave – and in the winter too lazy to shave at all – I've always found this idea fascinating. So at lunchtime today I wondered up to St Nicks, and after meeting Parasite who paid on the nail for the gig last week, ventured into Kamuran's Barber Shop on All Saints Lane.

I flicked through a well thumbed copy of FHM as I waited in this only distantly familiar manly environment, watching the scissor clock hands ticking along and eyeing the huge collection of razors dominating the far wall, like a macabre celebration of butchery.

A quick and efficient hair trim later and I find my head leaning back, a towel wrapped round my collar, and I'm getting whipped around the face with the bushiest clump of badger hair I've seen outside of a badger. A light green paste was then squeezed over my face, I couldn't quite identify the smell but I couldn't help but suspect it was cheep toothpaste. Another brush, soaked in hot water, was then used to work this in a lather, before the knife was produced. I'd like to describe the metallic ringing sound worthy of Hollywood swordplay as it was unsheathed, the hypnotic rhythmic scraping as it was sharpened on an equally dangerous looking leather strap, the sparking flashes of reflective light as the blade cut through the air, but none of these things happened. I guess that was my overly romantic vision of the act.

Yet I was not disappointed with the experience. There is a section in Homage to Catalonia where Orwell does his best to describe the sensation of being shot. He is aware it is an unusual experience that you are not best place to analyse at the time it happens. He has the advantage however that the great majority of his readers will not have lived through the same experience and so will take his word for how it feels. Here, I am in the opposite situation, where I am attempting to describe something that is equally alien to me but in all probability intimately familiar to a good proportion of my readers. (Small and disparate group that you are.) With this in mind I'll not over burden you with information.

Within a few minutes of feeling the first stroke of the fetishised blade and freezing cold hands against my virgin throat I had settled into the process enough to start to find it relaxing. I never expected to be comfortably near to sleep whilst a stranger was wielding a blade at my throat, but I was. There were a couple of moments where I felt the need to swallow when he was working near my adams apple, which was difficult to fight but the moment was picked carefully and I escaped without bloodshed.

A particularly memorable moment came when he needed to attack my upper lip and to do so felt the need reach round from behind me, stick two fingers up my nose, and pull my head back. It brought to mind some unusual and unpleasant specialist tool that I won't link to here. In the interest of research I have tried several combinations of search terms and have found that if you Google Image Search for "nose bondage" you'll get a good idea how it felt.

Several particularly stubborn areas required multiple returns to the warm lather, now stinging slightly, before scraping at with the blade. By the end I suspect he had substituted the toothpaste for concentrated lemon juice. I then got gently slapped about, patted may be a better word for it, with a liberal amount of aftershave, and then a hot towel was applied. (Or were those last two things the other way around?)

Regardless, the whole process was interesting, invigorating and refreshing. On the negative side I'm not buying the part about it being a shave that last for days. My hair grows too damn fast and I already suspect I will be shaving again as normal in the morning.

Labels: Personal

:: Dan 10.5.07 [Arc] [1 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

Thanks for your concern, Lawrence, but this wasn't me:

"Drink-driver jailed
A teenage passenger was killed by a drunk driver days before he was due to receive compensation for an earlier accident. Nicholas Chlebko, 18, from Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire, died after his friend Daniel Pope, 18, drove into a lamppost in December. Pope was jailed for five years at Bristol Crown Court."

And for the record, neither is this, this, this, this, this or this.

Labels: News, Personal

:: Dan 4.4.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
...

Over the weekend we hired a belt sander to take the floor paint off of our concrete dinning room floor, in perpetration for tiling. I heaved the beast of a machine into the car this morning so Mrs P could drop it back at the shop on her way into work.

My work trousers are now covered in concrete dust, from ankle to groin level. I stood on the bus stop trying to bush it off without success. As the traffic flew past I started become more and more self conscious of it, gave it another brush, gave up, waited a bit and tried to ignore it, started again. It’s developing into a nervous groin brushing tick, which is more embarrassing in itself.

I feel like the criminal suspect aware of some latent evidence that needs to be removed but know I can’t do it. I still futilely sweep at it now and again. Maybe it is my guilty conscious that has led me to posting this string of excuses here? For all you know I could have just stuck a body under my dinning room floor in broad daylight.

If you see me buying new trousers at lunch time and depositing the old ones in a public bin call the police. In the mean time I’m just going to go and rub myself again. Any excuse, eh?

Labels: Humour, Personal

:: Dan 2.4.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
...