life’s a beach and then you die
Santa is an anagram of Satan. Discuss.
Anyway, last year we had a hoot making our own cards with some expensive but lovely wooden stamps. This year I tried to enthuse the kids with my low-rent alternative - A6 stamps made out of polystyrene pizza bases. The boys watched Attack of the Clones instead. Tilly and I had a great time. Okay, I had a great time…
Memo to self, type post - please ignore if you don’t have a Mac and a Nintendo DS…
You will need:
And then there we are, enjoying Shaun the Sheep, transferred off the Humax PVR and onto the small screen - 1 episode clocks in at about 9 MB. Perfect for boredom-relieving.
They were handing out free Mentos at Charing Cross the other week - I couldn’t resist introducing them to some diet cola…
A colleague had tried it with no luck, so perhaps the trick is to do as we did, and warm the cola in a bowl of hot water from the kettle. A smaller nozzle and pin to allow controlled dropping of the Mentos would be good ideas too. I could only get the first Mento to fizz - I added 4 more and nothing much else happened.
A week ago, during a stressful visit to Bluewater, I was dragging the kids around and my youngest was screaming. I wanted to scream too, but possibly for different reasons. I was in M&S trying to buy food and they didn’t have any. It had taken ages to get there because of road works, we’d witnessed the aftermath of a 3-car smash on the slip-road, had driven round for about 20 minutes trying to find a parking space and I didn’t want to go in the first place. Anyway, a foul-looking man looked at me with hatred and said “bloody kids!”. Was he never young?
Last week on the train going home from work, in the far end of the carriage a baby cried. Young woman stopped snogging her boyfriend briefly to say “bloody kids!”. Let’s hope that snogging never ends in pregnancy.
Yesterday a woman had a small dog on the train which kept barking. No-one said “bloody dogs”.
When we had our first child we just couldn’t agree on his surname. I wanted him to have mine, my wife wanted him to have her’s. So we did that awful compromise and he became a double-barreled Booth-Farmer. I don’t like it, but it seemed the least-worst option.
We know one couple that changed both their names to a third name, but this seems frankly bonkers. But I do wonder what happens if Henry Booth-Farmer marries Sophie Rees-Harmer… will their first child be Maisie Booth-Farmer-Rees-Harmer?
I think I’ve found a solution. There’s a girl in Henry’s class with the surname Booth. He should marry her and - in a gesture of right-on feminist solidarity - ensure he and their children take her name.
This is the car driven by the woman who pulled into the parent and child space I was about to park in. She drove in at a sharp angle at quite high speed. Couldn’t see any children in her car. I had a very clingy 1 year-old in mine and I could have done with the space. I didn’t say anything of course. Just gave her, and her female companion, a Paddington Bear Hard Stare.
It was probably selfish of me to want that space. Probably selfish of me to have 3 children. I should slay them now to improve our family’s carbon footprint.
As you can tell, I’m in a good mood. I blame watching 28 Days Later back over two nights. Two nights ruined. Two nights alone staring into the abyss wondering if I could kill one of my children if they became infected with a zombie rage virus.
Okay, it’s only a film.
Incidentally, why does Danny Boyle always have to have insanely stupid things in his films that no-one mentions? In Shallow Grave I never understood why they just didn’t hide the money and call the police, turn the body in. And why did the coppers never notice all the holes in the ceiling? The holes! Look up, Sherlock!
In 28 Days Later, to be fair, they do say driving through the Rotherhithe Tunnel is an insanely stupid thing to do - but they still do it, driving over cars, bodies, rubble - and who’d'a’thunk it? They get a flat tyre! Also, assuming there is normal life going on beyond the shores of this infected isle, why can they not hear any European radio stations on Long Wave? I can hear several here in London. Why spend hours making beautifully perfect huge letters spelling ‘HELLO’ when ‘SOS’ would have done? Why… why… why?
I know. It’s only a film.
Both exmonkey and I have noticed this: our jeans used to wear out at the crotch and now they wear out at the knees. Changing nappies, you see.
Cyril Connolly is supposed to have said ‘the pram in the hallway is the enemy of promise’ (although a little googling tells me his book was called Enemies of Promise and the quotation should go ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’). Maybe he should have written ‘the knee-hole in the trouser is the enemy of promise’, but then one wonders how many nappies Cyril changed himself.
Will have to track down Enemies of Promise, partly because Cyril Connolly is referred to a few times in the commuting book Notes from Overground by Tiresias, and it apparently contains other corkers like ‘whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising’. I like that. Reminds me a bit of my A-level history teacher Mr Hofton who one day skewered me with this withering remark: “Booth, are you really intelligent, or merely well-educated?”
With a slightly heavy heart I’ve had to install parental controls on the computer in the back room - which meant upgrading the G3 Tower of Power from MacOS 10.3 to 10.4 (Tiger).
The boys had been looking at some very mildly risque videos on a web site they’d got off some friends - eldest is only 7. The computer is in a shared room, but not a room where they’re very noticable, which is probably a bad thing but there’s nowhere else to put it, and I don’t like their sticky fingers on my PowerBook very much. Makes me nervous.
So, another little bit of innocence lost.
But the nerd in me was quite pleased to have figured this out: I had MacOS 10.3 installed on a 20GB drive that had been partitioned in two. I only have an upgrade installer for 10.4 that requires 10.3 to be installed before it’ll run. But once it’s found a 10.3 installation, you can use Disc Utility on the 10.4 updated DVD to repartition / reformat the disc that 10.3 is itself on. So all the files you need for OS 10.4 must be on the updater DVD. And I only had to spend an hour or two shovelling a spare DVD drive into it and updating the OS, and recreating everyone’s accounts and finding wallpaper of James Bond and Thierry Henry and worrying about data I might have inadvertantly wiped…
I kept dreaming of a new kind of laptop. I kept drawing it and doodling it.
It would be about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, have Wifi, run some kind of Linux and - crucially - have no hard drive. A Cambridge Z88, an Apple eMate for the internet age.
Turns out the One Laptop Per Child project are thinking along the same lines. The project aims to design and build cheap, robust laptops for the third world. $100 laptops. Not for me, of course, but for children who really need them.
There was some ballyhoo in the media a while ago that the project - whilst still not going commercial, not selling them in Europe or the US - would let you buy one if you bought one for the developing world. A brilliant idea. Buy 2, get 1.
It’s not quite clear from their web site if they’re really going to do this or not. I hope they do. I want one of these so much, it hurts.
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