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Stands

Which reminds me ...
At the risk of boring you to death. About six or seven years ago I was sitting in the 'bar' (actually the garage) of a mate's place and was positioned next to a largish double sliding glass door which gave access to the rear of the house. Whilst enjoying the afternoon sunlight beaming through the glass (that's the door, as well as the hand held one!) I noticed a wasp wandering up the pane. It was about 2" to 3" long and was dragging a huntsman spider up the door. I had heard of wasps paralysing spiders and laying their eggs within but had never seen the act. Anyway, interesting as that was at the time, some twelve months ago I had a wasp buzzing around in my workshop - it's not unusual and usually ignored - which finally got itself tangled in my hair (what's left of it.) Naturally I brushed it away. When I did it dropped its load; a load that I had not realized it was a'carrying. The bounty which it had lost landed on the keyboard of my computer which I was using at the time; it was the legless body of a huntsman! Urrgh! It turns out that the wasps paralyse the spiders, nibble off their legs at body level and then lay their eggs and secrete them within the little dirt cells that they build. It gave me the shivering quits for a couple of days, I can tell you.

As found in the Canberra Times, Personals section...

'Wanted: A tall well built woman with good
reputation, who can cook frogs
legs, who appreciates a good fuc-
schia garden, classic music and tal-
king without getting too serious.

Interested? Then please only read
lines 1, 3 and 5; still interested?
Call me at...... ***********'

The one who, along with it's load, became entangled in my thinning thatch was more likely a black species which is common here. They have the typical dangling long legs as they aeronaut around the place and often pop into my workshop to pass the time of day.

[pen] Hope you're having lots of fun. Tis still rather windy here in the UK, so enjoy the pleasant climes!

Dujon]Golden square takes me back to my student days and the first year of my architecture degree and didactic patterns in nature. Including a day of research in the fine city of Bath.

[Boolbar] Ninty? Sounds a bit like that Brazillian slang 'Pinto' to me. And just for you:

Rab - Oct 10
Incle Korky - Oct ?
Rosie - Nov 17
Darren - Oct ?
Chalky's budgie - Oct 26
Inkspot - Sept ?

any one else...?

This might interest some.

I suppose it depends how long their washing was out. If it was a while, then fair enough.

I had a very good goat cheddar from Sainsbury's a few years ago. Excellent, sad I haven't seen anything like it here yet.

I was in Cheddar a couple of months ago, and was forced to go into The Real Cheddar Cheese Company shop, and ended up with a (thankfully small triangle of) vintage cheddar, and it was delicious (in far-too-small portions). I miss (full-fat, creamy, hand-made, farmhouse) cheese (feta, cheddar, cheshire, wensleydale, lancashire, double gloucester, red leicester among... well, more varieties than that). I miss it badly.

[UK] You confuse me. Most of the cheeses you list are of the highest quality, but then you have Monterey Jack on your cheese board? Maybe the Jack you buy is better than the pappy Jack we can get here... is it dry Jack?

More importantly than all this, I'm glad to see my DSL chose to remain alive this morning, after I forgot yet again to make sure it was okay when I left the house.

Re: Mountain Dew - tried it once, I didn't like it. It's approximately orange flavoured, but it has a lot of caffeine in it. I managed to drink half a can before I got a splitting headache. I threw the rest away.

I got this sent to my hotmail account -

Hi, Thank you for submitting your e-mail address to various SPAM companies, courtesy of The Official David Blaine website, www.davidblaine.com. Your e-mail address alone provided us with 0.5 cents, which, when you think about it, is $1k for every 200,000 addresses. So, thanks for adding to the FoB - Funds of Blaine. While I'm here, kudos to Mr Blaine on his recent trial, and all the English that do various, drunken things in front of poor Blainey, to try to cause a little havoc... well, you all suck. Go find something sensible to do, and stop wasting your lives. Yours, The Official David Blaine Society, together with over 2000 various mailing lists who now have your e-mail address.

Cheeky, or what? As its an e-mail address I use to sign up for any old rubbish, I don't really mind, but the nerve of some people! I was wondering at the sudden recent influx of pr0nographic spam, though. And what GIMP came up with that insulting simulpost message? SLAP!!!

My poetry is painful
The use of time not gainful
For the looks I get are baneful
And say that it is awful!

Anybody got a good anagram for "Jonathan Ellis"?

Handedness: I'm right-handed in most things, but ambidextrous when piano-playing or trying to catch things one-handed. Can't throw or write left-handed. Feet are not so much ambidextrous as ambi-sinister (equally incompetent with both, when playing football), and I think I favour my left eye more than my right.

Oh, and no more spiders for the time being.

What do you mean, "That's the point"? Harrumph.

[snorgs] Well done gal. Perhaps you can tell me - WHY OH WHY when for the first time, I put my ten grand on a Royal thinking he's going to get shedloads of column cms because of What The Butler Did - his chuffin' share price goes down?

DrQu+xum - "Leg ringer - glory jog"
Wol - "ADDIIIKLLNVW"
LotUS - "OUI A MANGLED WIG" (my name is more or less entirely 'Asian' with an Arabic/Muslim first name and a Sinhalese surname)
Fat German - "Random Horrid Wreckage"
Uncle Korky - "Lanky Baron Bronchitis"
Tina - "I bent cute lean ice frogs" (7,6,8)
and Dujon's recent "aabdddeghhIjlnnooorsvw" above.
Also Darren asked "Can anyone identify what this is an anagram of? Patch cocky, bent grammar".
So no work for me today then.
[DrQ] Gregory?

I saw quite an amusing one the other day... Oregon allows you to put pretty much any combination of six characters on your plate, with spacing of your choice. Usually the characters are centred, but someone had thought to put spaces in front of their word and: "  ASKEW"

Well, I liked it.

[Chalky] Tongue-in-cheek, of course. The spelling doesn't really matter, but there is definitely a distinction between Kates, Katies and the above...

[BtD] Have to agree with you on almost all of those. I would also lump Jo(h)annas in with your Joannes... Also is it just me, but girls with hyphenated names can be a bit wet, possibly deriving from an indecision on the part of their parents.

Actually, I tell a lie - a Bulgarian colleague was telling me that there is a Bulgarian pumpkin pie, but it is more akin to baclava with pumpkin layered between the pastry.

I have a colleague whose neighbours did this too. The developer who now owns their property has been trying to clear out the house for six months now. Quite sad, really.

Still, as a member of a collecting family, I can hardly point the finger too aggressively. My wall of Trek tapes would only point back.

Why are not Bactrian camels more prolific than Dromedaries given that the former has more humps than the latter?

[1] ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) is a bad name, but it is also the name assigned to whatever ADD is. Personally, I don't think it's a disorder of the individual so much as a mismatch between how society trains people to behave and how some people's brains work, but there we are. The effect is much the same.

[Riff] You are correct, to a point, but is it just that you are afeared that the other parties to a conversation may be ignorant of the meaning of certain words and, therefore, you 'lower' your language to the level that you surmise is acceptable?

[re: junk] My excuse for accumulating huge piles of junk is that I might want to glue some of it together into sculpture. Of course, this rarely happens, but the fact that it does happen once in a while makes it that much harder to throw any of it away. From where I'm sitting, I can count nine empty cigarette boxes (one of them an interesting little slide-drawer thing), an attractive Harrods cookie tin, and a large lump of rusty metal that I haven't any idea what it is.

Sorry for the pathetic overtones, but it's true.

Some people find this disconcerting, or think I'm boring, or (more likely) stupid. *shrugs*. It's lonely sometimes, but places like this are very good, and I think I've learned a great deal. Thanks.

[Aspergers] I have a friend who is like this, and his mum suggested he might have Aspergers. However a friendly medic who had met him immediately said "No, he's not got Aspergers"... I think there is a fashion to give everything a fancy label nowadays, and like Projoy, believe this is not a good thing. I would have thought it were obvious that different people approach things differently, and there's degrees of conformance to the "standard" way of doing things (known popularly as "normality").

In fact, drawing these two stands together, I find most "normal" people rather dull. Is this just me being an arrogant arse-wit?

Which, in a way, brings us back to collecting junk: I have a small amount of "stuff", but mostly I have books (I've been very restrained, honest!!). I used to have a tendency to collect empty or hardly-used notebooks (mmmm stationery), but recently disposed of almost all of them. A lot of things will be farmed out to friends/relatives, and some stored, but I'm quite looking forward to starting again in January with little more than a suitcaseful. Should be interesting.

It is clear that ADD behaviours can be severe enough to cause problems, and that there are a lot of people who carry these behaviours around with them, but it is not certain that ADD is an objectively definable disease. For instance, ADD has been described and recognised by the US psychiatric establishment for more than 30 years (although its name has been changed a few even times over that time), but the UK establishment only officially recognised ADD in the 1990s - this despite the first published work on ADD being in the UK a hundred years before. Even in the US, ADD has only recently (ie in the last ten years or so) been widely recognised as occurring in adults - it was considered a childhood affliction which was obliterated by adolescence.

Part of the problem is that labelled conditions such as ADD, OCD, etc are note discrete: a bone is broken or it is not broken, but ADD has more degrees than there are labels, and even then it is not clear that even someone whose collection of symptoms is technically pathological enough to be so labelled is actually displaying anything more than just a strong personality trait. There has been work to scan brains under ADD-expressing conditions, and there are apparently common factors to those scans, but ADD is at best a collection of possibly related symptoms. But then is personality just an expression of brain chemistry?

As I say, my belief is that those who are actually disadvantaged by their ADD behaviours are those who have been trying to use their brains in ways which don't mesh with their brain chemistry or personality, where "one size fits all" education systems teach the same learning mechanisms to everyone regardless of how they really learn best. This is one of the reasons that I talk about my having ADD behaviours; Idon't consider myself to be diseased¹.

[1] this is going in a footnote because it's not part of the core point, but one of the things which concerns me about statements that ADD is underdiagnosed is that it is then treated as a disease. At this point the children (and this is where I become most concerned - it is almost always children) are dosed up with psychostimulants in order to make them fit in rather than training them to use their brains to their best advantage: the problem is not solved, it is avoided.

The temporal lobe controls your ability to concentrate, and is more active when a brain is concentrating on something. A typical pattern in an ADD brain is that when it is used to concentrate deliberately on something then the temporal lobe is actually deactivated (ie there is less neural activity). I say "deliberately" because a common ADD behaviour is 'hyperfocus' where the brain will concentrate on something novel¹ to the exclusion of all else, but this is rarely deliberate.

Note that there is another book called "Healing ADD" by Thom Hartmann, that I would also recommend, but which is entirely different. In particular, Mr Hartmann specifically attacks Amens' work in scanning brains. But there we are.

[1] another very annoying aspect of this is that I cannot go to sleep if there is speech in earshot. I'll be drifting off quite satisfactorily when my brain will latch on to the interesting noises and amplify them in my perception. Similarly, I need silence or at least white noise if I need to think about a task which I am not entirely involved in, because otherwise my mind will concentrate on the novel rather than what I'm supposed to be doing.

For instance, even the mechanisms by which ADD brain patterns arise in the individual are not certain. There is a high correlation between ADD in parents and in their offspring (a figure of 70% is often quoted) which might suggest a genetic link, but it could equally be due to upbringing: the brain is plastic enough that learning will change its structure (no specific references, I'm afraid - I read this recently but can't remember where), and if much of a child's early development is achieved through mimicry then it's quite possible to imagine that parental ADD behaviours might imprint on the child.

It may well be that the role of genetics in mental development is overstated. There is some work (this book, for instance) which puts forward the argument that:

1. there is a common perception that genetic factors are the largest causative agent in mental illness
2. there is almost no evidence of a correlation between mental illness in children and in their parents (the book linked to states that the strongest correlation is in schizophrenia where there is a 50% correlation; nothing about ADD though)
3. if hypothesis (1) is wrong, then it must be environmental
4. the most pervasive environmental influence on children is their parenting
5. therefore the way you are raised is why your head works the way it does.

I'm afraid that Doris_Newbold and ffiish are about to lose a bit of well earned dosh, Doris though having just made the finishing post.

Service Disruption Start: Wednesday, 12 November 2003 at 5:53AM EDST
Last Updated: Wednesday, 12 November 2003 at 12:04PM EDST
Scheduled Service Disruption: No
Who is affected: Some customers
Impact: We are currently having problems with ADSL. This is affecting customers in New South Wales. Some customers will experience no dataflow. Technicians are treating this issue as a priority and are working on the problem.

Right, I'm off to find a pub or a bottle or something - it beats crying. Any takers?

I have just spent considerable amounts of time attempting to post/read/hack a number of sites. I'm giving up and, hopefully, will see you all tomorrow.

Totally irrelevant I know, but just a small example of how the MC community brings happiness into the world in small unexpected ways. :)

Noting your simulpost PJ - it's because you're having an BAD ADD day

Yay! I just won a prize!

I have had several attempts at seeing if people could coordinate to turn up in the chatroom at some particular time, but it's never worked. However, pilgs have been great, and things seem to really take off when there's more than three people there (or more than one, which is more often the case). Now that there seems to be some sort of interest, of *course* I'll be around. When people are at wirk it just doesn't work, I think, so UK evenings are fine for me, especially now that the sun comes up earlier. Day of the week doesn't matter too much, although if I work that day I may have to leave by 11pm UK time (Sundays and Tuesdays, probably). Some days I can be around longer because I'll be working from home, so there may be a possibility of more US-Aus meeting more towards the US evening time, (even west coast). My possible times, of course, are only for the next two months, then I'll have to see how the net connection and a new time zone work. Monday night is fine. What other possibilities are there? Maybe broadcast the idea to the other two sites.

*lights candle, sings softly to self*

Well, if the activity in the chatroom last night was any indication, we could be in for a fun time when Mondays roll around :-)

*blows out candle, wanders off*

Meanwhile over at Celebrity MC mini league Chalky takes over from DrQ at No 1, and staight in at No3 is the mysterious x_sugarbabe_x

On second thoughts ignore that, I wouldn't change him for anything...
st d] It's not the just lists but the silent looks, perhaps Chalky could give some insight ;)

Sorry ZK ... nothing personal :-)

thinks: I wonder if there is legs in games which never end, but which automatically drop off the front page if unused. Kind of half games which don't count against the game limit but which would be, as it were, already won when they're started. Hmm...

OK - so perhaps my example is a bit crap, but you get the gist?

I have to say, I'm favouring the MC Game idea more than the continuous story - only because the recent StoryGame in MCiOS took off like a rocket and fizzled into the ether rather too quickly.

But not from me, obviously.

[1] Unless offered huge wads of cash, or favours to a similar value.

In other news Celebdaq is back up and I've finally made to the Players Chart front page...at No 30. Still along way to go to beat penelope who managed No6.

But I'd also like a round of "Misheard Lyrics". A bit like Spellcheck Songs (remember that from !York?), except we rewrite chosen songs using soundalike words (not lookalike words). The last game was popular, as long as we kept the songs short

"My Way" (Frank Sinatra)

Kow-tow, they send the beer;
Ah so I'll brace for the coming burton.
Please lend, me some buckshee
To save my face, or it's the slate on....

Yes, I know it's not good - just off the top of the head stuff: but is that the idea?

Sorry for the delay - I've been fighting the Geocities' pop-ups. ... :-)

Do you think it will work? There seemed to be few contributors on that one - although, even though I'm terrible with lyrics, it sounds intriguing.

make that one more for the Lost Consnants

[all] Good weekend?

and Dujon: please check your email, see if mine got through to you, and let us know what you think... Thanks.

Also, when I switched my computer off, it seemed to switch off, but I realised later that the screen was off but the power was still on in the base unit..

"Due to difficulties we are unable to serve hot food in the resturant tonight. Please bare with us".

Not entirely sure how taking our clothes off will help, but willing to try!