Hey.

Sorry to disappear like that but appears I'm having the latest round of my recent bout of problems with my connection (I need a new ISP) and my IM client is not coping.

I'm not sure how long it will take me to get things ironed out (or even if I'll be able to post this - I'm hoping yes in a brief connection window) so I just wanted to let you know that it's been lovely chatting and I hope to talk again soon.

Hope the film works out well.

. . . and I have to say I'm a little disappointed.

The design itself is quite cool and I love the colour I was really sad to see that threadless decided to omit the back half of the design.

Woe is me.

This blog is not about the B grade horror films, much as they contain Alicia Witt who I will one day marry.

It's about those crazy stories that you tell your friends when you're up getting drunk or camping out in the bush or when you're on a road trip at night to keep yourself awake.

It occurs to me that my life has been a little short on story telling recently.

I mean when I was a child my Dad used to make up stories all the time. When he was driving my sister and I home from swimming lessons or whatever he'd entertain my sister Kim and I with stories of Josephine and Kenneth the naughtiest children who ever lived and our strange, sex reversed alter egos.

No one really tells me stories at the moment and I think I miss it.

So tell me a story if you've got one, I'll even go ahead and start things off.

Here goes:

The girl who sits at the desk next to me at work loves snakes, in fact all kinds of reptiles really, she has photos of them in her cube and as the desktop image on her computer and a rubber one that sits on top of her monitor.

Many of the more skittish people in my office have fallen afoul of that rubber snake hidden on a chair or in a drawer or file.

I think the thing that I find the most disconcerting about her snake fetish (when I'm not finding a rubber snake hidden in my lunch salad anyway) is the fact that she owns a pet snake that sleeps in her bed.

I'd probably be more comfortable with this if we were talking about a carpet snake or some other harmless mouse eating reptile either, but I'm not, the snake is some kind of Python that was bought back from one of the jungles of Cambodia on a conservation permit.

Its about four metres long and, but for it's living situation, would survive primarily on pigs in the wild.

The girls in my office like to joke that it's the last remnant of my cubemate's career as a stripper.

Anyway a few months ago my friend comes in to work looking a little upset, like really, it's a verge of tears kind of thing.

I'm a long way from being a soft guy but seeing a girl cry (particularly when it's someone I like) always grabs something soft deep inside me and twists hard and so I take a moment to ask her what's wrong figuring that another boyfriend has cheated on her or stolen her car.

And she tells me that the snake has stopped eating the rabbits that she's been feeding it.

She's really worried about it and so I do my best to hide my relief.

Later that week she takes the afternoon off work to take the snake to the vet.

All in all the vet isn't real concerned about the whole thing. The vet tells her that these snakes can go for months without food. In the wild they fast for a little while after every meal and it may be that feeding it a little bit every day has messed with the snake's naturall gorge/fast feeding cycle. He also points her in the direction of some research that shows that its not uncommon for them to fast in stages of their breeding cycle or if their environment changes.

All in all my workmate shouldn't worry unless this continues for at least a few months and if it does, she should come back and they'll do some tests.

So my workmate goes home and she does the reading. Turns out the snake vet is right. These snakes fast all the time, one of them was documented fasting for two years between meals, and so she waits and she watches for two months as the snake gets thinner and thinner.

Sixty days later when the snake still won't eat anything she goes back to the vet again.

The vet checks the snake out and can't find anything wrong with it, it's normal and healthy and so he decides that this must be something environmental.

Now my workmate is the cleanest girl ever, I'm talking borderline OCD clean and she's really particular about her space. She hasn't moved apartment or changed her carpet or furniture or done any of the stuff that the vet asks about. The snake is still in the same environment.

The vet is a bit stumped, and asks my workmate if anything else has changed.

My workmate thinks for a minute and decides that nothing has and the vet gets this puzzled look and says that they'll just have to wait and see then.

My workmate picks up her snake and is on the way out when she remembers something.

She says she's sure it's not important but she has realised that the snake used to sleep coiled up on the end of her bed and now it's started sleeping laying out straight on the bed next to her.

And the vet says.

"You have to put that snake down.

"It's been starving itself for two months and now it's lying next to you sizing you up to eat."

Your turn.

I just got a chain letter.

I pretty much never get them because my friends are the kind of people who'd block my email address if I forwarded one on and given that they are not hypocrites I don't get a lot of them coming my way. I don't think I've had one in about five or six years.

But I got one today and I'm not sure what to do with it.

You see this chain letter is the big grand daddy of all chain letter and it's threatening me with sixteen years of bad luck if I don't pass it on to someone.

Now I'm not a superstitious person but you can't be too careful right?

As such I'm looking for someone to send this to, here's what you need to know:

• On one hand this chain letter purports to provide some insight into my personality and the kind of person I am and it appears to be pretty accurate so you might learn something interesting and fun about me as a result of receiving it.

• On the other hand you will have a chain letter in your inbox and you'll have to find someone to forward it to or run the risk of suffering a level thirteen chain letter hex.

Anyone want to be my knight in shining armour?

With the deadline for Exquisite corpse rapidly approaching (or maybe not but I can dream right) it occurred to me to ask: did you need a hand with proofreading stuff or anything?

(This is not a lame attempt at getting the manuscript early, I gave up on that long ago, I just thought I'd check if you needed any help with anything)

I just got home from seeing their Melbourne gig and I have to say I was blown away.

I'm the first to admit I've got a soft spot for Japanese percussion and it's fair to say that I may be a little biased by the fact that it's one of my favourite types of acoustic music.

That said the fact that I love it means that I've seen a lot of drumming troupes (both Taiko and Wadaiko - Japanese in origin and otherwise) and these guys left everything else in their wake. Their drumming was powerful and exceptionally precise and, unlike several Taiko troops I've seen, the guys and girls from Drum Tao really went out there to perform. What impressed me the most however was the fact that throughout it all regardless of what they were doing the drumming maintained an exceptional standard.



The crowd loved every second and four encores later we made our way from the hall. It's probably a comment on the troupe's skills and showmanship that most crowd lingered well after the music had stopped.

If you get a chance to catch their current tour I highly recommend it.

So about two months ago I got involved in a conversation with noodlezoop which, after many twists and turn, ended up in the realms of cooking.

She was cooking something with a secret blend of herbs and spices called old bay.

I commented that it sounded nice and that I'd never heard of it and, within my usual 10 second memory event horizon, promptly forgot all about it.

Until a box like this arrived on my doorstep.



Now I've been trying for the last few weeks to think of something that I can cook with it so I can post a blog saying that I have used it but to no avail.

Until I got home from work today and put together one of these:



I'll let you know how the experiment goes.

For those of you who've never been to one it's basically two teams of girls on roller skates doing their best to pummel each other into oblivion.

I'm told there's some rules and a process for keeping score but near as I can tell these things are largely irrelevant when weighed against a couple of dozen roller skaters in teeny tiny shorts heading out to do battle.

The evening was full of all the usual spectator sport events insofar as we jostled for seats and spent roughly two thirds of the evening in the line to get beer and food.

All in all though if you get the chance I'd highly recommend checking out a game. It appears to be one of those sports that you can get in to and yell and scream for a couple of hours without being bothered to work out what the rules are and how it's played.

Though maybe the teeny shorts had something to do with that.

I only wish I'd worn Derby of the Damned along.

PS: Melbourne's lesbian community were also out in force showing their support for the event so it's probably not a bad place to meet some nice lesbian wymyn if that's your thing.

Does anyone know of a free program (shareware or freeware I guess) that will allow me to slice up an Avi file into smaller clips?

Thanks in anticipation.

So I'm writing this blog to cement Leon's theory that I'm a total princess, here we go:

I have a friend.

A female friend.

We've been friends for a while and while nothing has ever happened; there's always been a certain tension between us but that's about it.

She got drunk a few weekends ago and propositioned me and while I made all the usual "respect you as a friend and don't see you that way" kind of noises things seem to have changed since then.

It's worth noting that I'm a fairly tactile guy so I hug a lot and generally have a fair amount of physical contact between myself and my friends (regardless of their gender etc etc) but recently contact with this girl seems to have taken on a weird undertone.

She does things that seem a little presumptuous physically given that we're just friends.

Now normally I'd just sit her down and set her straight but she's fairly high strung and she doesn't take rejection well and I'm a little worried that I might lose my friend if I confront her about it.

Can someone help me out?