christmas cheer

My last day of work before 11 days off is crawling by so far, but the end is in sight. I am looking forward to a week of sleeping in late, eating very well and drinking too much. Christmas dinner will be a family affair at my Aunt's house. My Aunt's Christmas dinners are amazing and she has a swanky new kitchen to play with this year so i am expecting good things. It will be roast turkey and roast pork and all the usual Christmas trimmings. mmmmm. I am glad that because there was a man preaching forgiveness and tolerance 2000 years ago, i get to give and receive gifts and eat good food until i feel slightly sick once a year in celebration of his birth. I think its what he would have wanted.

And after all the Christmas fun i am off to Stockholm for New Year. Wooo.

01707

As it is the build up to Christmas i have been out drinking quite a lot recently. Last night i saw some University friends. I stayed out late and just made the last northern line tube. It was going to the wrong side of the Northern line but it was getting me closer to home and i could get a bus across and up from Golders Green. The first part of the plan worked flawlessly. I arrived at Golders Green and waited for a bus. It was at this point my plan started to go wrong. I got on a bus, where the warm air, the gentle rocking motion, the low hum of the engine and the fact i was more than somewhat drunk meant i was soon asleep. The next thing i knew i was made to get off the bus at a bus depot. I stumbled off the bus and tried to get my bearings. I didn't recognise the area and was concerned to see the area code for the shops nearby was 01707. (The area codes for London are 0208 and 0207.) I was no longer in London, which couldn't be a good thing. I was drunk enough that the bus system was far too confusing to use to get back but was able to call my flat mate up and give him the name of the angling shop i was standing next to and the telephone number. From this he found out i was in Potters Bar (??) and was able to call me a cab and get me home safe and sound. Apparently my call back to the flat was an amusing one with me on the other end of the line drunkenly trying to explain where i was.

I was just looking today to try and work out the route i must have taken and exactly where Potters Bar is. It is 5 miles north of where i live and just outside the M25, hence the change in area code so the taxi back wasn't too bad. But the thing that is confusing me most is that according to the transport for London website to get from Golders Green to Potters Bar is a journey involving 3 different buses. So my conclusion is that one of the following things happened. A. I didn't get off at Golders Green at all and was somewhere else allowing me to get a direct bus to Potters Bar. B. I changed buses... twice without noticing. Or C. They didn't kick me off at the end of the line and finally noticed i was still on the bus at the bus depot. I think option C is the most likely. But I hope it was option B. I think i can discount A as i distinctly remember Golders Green.

relief

I went up home to see my cousin and her family on Saturday as they are not going to be around at Christmas. I drove over early in the afternoon and was fed once shortly after i arrived with a buffet type spread. It was all very nice and i ate well. We moved on to the pub for a few drinks before returning to their house for a delicious, filling goulash dinner. I was no longer in a fit state to drive so was going to walk home. I thought it would be about a 20 minute walk. It turned out to be more like 30 and was made worse by the fact i left my house keys in my car and only noticed about 5 minutes in to the walk, so had to go back and start again. I felt ominous stirrings in my belly as i was leaving but figured it would be fine. That was a school boy error. The last 15 minutes of the walk were a sphincter clenching nightmare. As i reached my road and my overly full belly was pushing on my liquid filled bowels and i was groaning with the effort of not pooing myself. The relief of release when i finally got home was near orgasm good.

new phone

I replaced my new phone with the best free phone they could give me, which i will inevitably break or lose at some point. I like it though. It has GPS built in so until i lose it i shouldn't get lost. It reads out new texts to me if i push a button - i am not sure exactly when that will be useful but i do like to hear my phone swearing so i have been texting myself with swear words. And if i push a button and say the name of the person i want to call it calls them. That seems to work pretty well and may well be useful.

Chas n Dave

I went to see Chas n Dave in concert last night. (Chas n Dave are a cockney double act who were popular in the early 1980s with various snooker based and tottenham hotspur supporting songs. A good old fashioned cockney pub knees up type act. Snooker Loopy was probably their most famous song. On their fliers they wished people a very happy christmas and a rockney new year. They describe their music as rockney.) It was a pretty enjoyable evening although i foolishly agreed to go on drinking afterwards and then slept through my alarm this morning and turned up to work 2 hours late. It was at the electric ballroom in Camden. They had the weeiest toilets i have ever seen. The entire floor of the mens toilet was covered in a slippery layer of wee. It would have been a revolting fall. After carefully walking to use the toilet and not slipping over i proceeded to wee. i had my coat tied around my waist and the arms were in the way of my zip so i had to hold them to the side. Mid wee i lost my hold on one of the arms, it fell in to the stream and was covered with wee. So my coat is a bit weeey now and i had to wear it today because it is freezing and it is my only coat.

bizarre

One of my friend's has recently moved to Australia. He is living in Perth at the moment where the local university has an anime club he has been attending on a Saturday afternoon. They show a variety of different anime, have some live action stuff and a bit of cosplay. (people getting dressed up as their favourite cartoon/ computer game characters is cosplay) In order to try and make sure they are showing the series people are most interested in they passed out a questionnaire for people to fill out.

Here are some of the brief descriptions of the shows from that questionnaire:

Bamboo Blade [School,Kendo club, girls]
Blue Dragon [Kid,Totem,Evil Empire]
Ghost Hound [Kidnapping,Visions]
Monster Princess [Guy dies - resurrected as servant]
Moyoshimon [Boy sees microbes]
Murder Princess [Princess,bounty hunter,body swap]
New Giant Robo [Daiskue,ruins,Giant Robo]
Pumpkin Scissors [War relief efforts]
Rental Magica [Rent a Magician]
Sky Girls [Young female test pilots]
Touka Getten [Fantasy,Many Themes,Weirdness]

I am intrigued by Touka Getten. A lot of anime is pretty weird so to have weirdness in the description it must be exceptionally weird.

And Moyoshimon - Boy sees microbes might also be worth a look. Looking it up on google brought me to this strange episode description.

The kiviak bit just sounds bizarre. If you can't be arsed to read the link the episode involves the boy who sees microbes following mirobes to a dead seal buried in the ground. Basically, if the cartoon is right, the kiviak is a fermented food eaten by inuits. They bury a seal in the ground filled with birds, leave it for ages and suck the juices out of the fermented birds through their anuses. Surely people can't eat something like that. An internet search for kiviak brought me this description...

"Kiviak is a gastronomical Christmas treat from Greenland which, for some reason, hasn't been adopted by many other nations. It's made from the raw flesh of an auk which has been buried under a stone in sealskin for several months until it's achieved an advanced stage of decomposition. Apparently, it smells like old blue cheese and tastes very pungent."

nothing about sucking the juices out of the birds asses though. There are other sites discussing its presence in the cartoon but i could find nothing definitive. It was mentioned that the best site about it is in Japanese, which is of no help to me as we are yet to learn the words for fermenting dead birds inside seals yet. Who first came up with the idea of fermenting dead birds in a seal carcass anyway? Seems a repulsive thing to try and then continue to do...

lost phone

On Sunday night I went out to the pub quiz thing with the quality streets. I drank too much and stayed too late and missed the last tube. I lost my phone at some point in between going down to the closed northern line and going back up. I had it on the escalator down but not on the way back up. I went back down to look for it but couldn't see it anywhere. I may have sent it flying when i threw my hands up in disgust at there being no more tubes. I am an idiot.

coconut chocolates

I went to a pub quiz last night where one of the prizes was a big tin of quality street chocolates. (a selection of different chocolates wrapped in foil. Life is not like a box of chocolates in the UK because you do know exactly what you are going to get next as all chocolate boxes come with a bit of paper telling you what all the different chocolates are.) They are a popular Christmas gift and there will normally be a tin of them passed around at Christmas parties. Standard eating practice dictates that the nicest chocolates will go first (the toffee and fudge based ones) , followed by the less good chocolates (fruit based and nougaty ones) and you will be left with a load of coconut chocolates in the bottom of the tin, which few people seem to like. One of my friend's Mums uses this to her advantage. She is a very big fan of coconut chocolates but rather than eating them first she will go with the other chocolates first knowing she will be able to indulge herself later on with all the remaining coconutty goodness. My friend is somewhat annoyed by this and in an act of petty revenge has taken to eating the coconut chocolates first even though he doesn't like them.

bragadocious

Thomas Hauser, a boxing writer, had this to say about American's views on Floyd Mayweather ahead of his Ricky Hatton fight this weekend...

"there are a lot of people who don't respond to his bragadocious nature."

I just tried to find the word bragadocious in an online dictionary and unsurprisingly could not. It can be found in the urban dictionary though - a collection of "urban" phrases too cool for normal dictionaries. It is not as good as my favourite made up American word - winningest, but i do like it.

The future

I saw a violin playing robot on the news last night and found this clip of it and other roboty things.
Very cool I think you'll agree.(As long as you find robots doing things that humans can do cool. i do)

Stone company

Writing about my work Christmas party last year got me thinking about my time there. The best story to come out of it was this. You may wince...

Our office was a fairly cramped affair. It was the Summer and it was a hot day so we had a fan going at the back of the room trying to cool things off a bit. Because of the lack of space the fax machine was placed on top of a filing cabinet above and to the left of the desk my boss was sitting at. A fax arrived and just as the page had finished printing out the fan turned back towards the fax and blew the paper across the room. This coincided with my boss turning his head. His open eye and the leading edge of the paper met and he was left with a nasty paper cut right across his eyeball. It was bad enough to bleed. He wasn't sure if it was something he should see a doctor about so checked on the internet to see if there was any advice, but the only mention of paper cuts to the eyeball were people asking the question- which would be more painful, a paper cut to the bell end or a paper cut to the eyeball?

He did have to go to hospital and was given eye drops which he had to put in for months. It took about a year for his eyesight to return to normal. The moral of the story- don't put fax machines between yourself and fans.

Confusing

Last night in Japanese 2 of the words we learnt were hospital and hairdresser.

byoin is hospital.
biyoin is hairdresser.

Confusingly similar considering it might be quite important if you needed a hospital... If you needed a haircut and got a hospital it would be less serious probably but still annoying. I assume it must have led to at least 1 hilarious mix up.

It seems like there may be a lot of these similar words with very different meanings - iie is no. ii is good. ie is home. e is picture or painting.
biru (with a long i) is beer. biru (with a short i) is building.
are some of the other ones i have learnt so far.

3D

I have been tempted to go and see Beowulf recently, mainly to see how good the 3D effects are. My friend has seen it and says without the 3D it would be rubbish but with the 3D it is just about worth a watch. Angelina Jolie is well realised apparently, which got me on to thinking about using 3D for other types of movies. Somebody presumably has already done this, but the world of porn would present a wealth of opportunities for things to be sticking out of the screen. The money shot could be quite the unpleasant experience for the audience.

Christmas Meal

I just went out for our work Christmas do. It is the first lunch time work bash I have been to and drinking was encouraged so my afternoon is not going to be particularly productive. But at least I have an excuse today.

It was a very different affair to my office party last year. Then, I was working for a company that fitted stone kitchen worktops, so the bulk of the workforce was made up of Eastern European men. We went to a Greek restaurant. Our company took up most of the downstairs area but there were also a couple of families sitting downstairs as well. When a load of stone workers get together and drink too much the atmosphere is not exactly a family one and they must have regretted their dining choice that night. It all got progressively drunker and the low point/ hightlight of the evening was when one of the Albanian guys decided urinating in the street outside would be far easier than walking to the toilet in the restaurant. The police didn't see this as an acceptable option and when it became clear he had no papers to be in the country he ended the evening in jail waiting to be deported. This dampened spirits briefly but things soon picked up again and a very drunken evening was had by all. I lost my glasses on a bus on the way home.

Today's Pizza Express Christmas menu lunch was unlikely to be quite as action packed as half the people present were menopausal women who sat there taking turns to fan themselves with wine lists as and when they hot flushed. It was moderately boozy and by the end of the meal the noise level had noticeably increased. The conversation was only moderately painful- the in depth discussion about the Spice Girls and how they look now compared to back in the day was the low point but it did kill nearly 3 hours of the day and was paid for so I can't really complain. Disappointingly, nobody got deported. After last year's benchmark, from now on I am only going to enjoy a work Christmas do if at least one person is deported.