Current mood:	rushed
Current music:	"Voodoo Child" - Rogue Traders...

Queers, Who, Exploding Cars^2, Bush, Animal Cruelty and Friendly Floatees
Been an eventful couple of weeks what with one thing and another, hence the not being around much - by far the best aspect of which being Heike’s results. If any of you were interested in them but don’t have her friended, sorry for leaving you on tenterhooks! As is only natural for someone as freakishly freakishbrilliant as her, she did indeed get awarded a first – the only one awarded on her program this year, no less! Who’s a clever little biomedical scientist, then? ;P

Obviously much celebrating went on as a result of the above (during which we were blessed with an appearance by vinagrette -an unfortunately rare honour-, amongst several others), hence not updating y’all sooner!

Oh, and talking of celebrations, I hope that folks in the ‘hood (read: Greater London) are aware that it’s London Pride tomorrow. Any of you likely to be there and if not, where should I be sending the threats of a kneecapping? Heike and I shall likely be around, assuming that it’s not absolutely pissing down, of course. This, however, was presenting us with a slight problem, as conclusion of the parade will likely clash with the season finale of Doctor Who. Now, this is where I say something self-deprecating about us obviously being geeks of the highest order to consider there to be a contest between marching through Central London surrounded by a plethora of hot guys’n’gals and seeing a cheesy sci-fi show. However, it appears that this is a widespread worry – so much so, in fact, that those organising pride have arranged a live screening of the episode on a big-screen thingy in Trafalgar Sq., along with discussion of the episode earlier in the day by John Barrowman and Freema Agyeman. Haha – one less excuse for you lot to not attend!

Oh, speaking of Doctor Who, given RTD’s almost unhealthy fondness for anagrams, I decided to have a go at “Toclafane” earlier in the week to see what insight that might afford. Whilst the results were, I sincerely hope, indicative of anything to come in tomorrow’s episode, I thought I’d mention a few of the results:

• "Cola Fa Ten" – this appears the most Who-related of the answers, and given the state of The Doctor at the end of 3x12, he might appreciate a nice chilled drink.
  
• "Locate Fan" – also seems vaguely plausible as a little joke by the production crew given the whole decimation thing, though if they think that there are 650 million-odd Whovians, at least on Earth, then they are a tad over-optimistic, methinks!
  
• "Cane Float" - slightly worrying, given the implication that the little round flying robotic thingies in fact contain billions of clones of our dear Lucius!
  
• "A Fat Clone" - kinda speaks for itself!
  
• "Flea At Con" – obviously RTD has had a few… unsanitary experiences at Dr. Who conventions!
  
• "Faecal Ton" – dear God, please let this not be a spoiler, PLEASE!

Oh, and whilst I’m under a Dr. Who spoiler-cut, I might as well stick with the subject. Just in case any of you aren’t aware of the original Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, you should probably click on that link before watching… The Doctor Who version:
Anyway, as this seems to be a rather media-based/cut-tag riddled post, I might as well just go with it. So, do you lot (those with Heike friended), remember that whole teenage twats crashing cars in a rather spectacular (read: upturned) manner outside our house thing from about a year ago? Well, summer seems to be the season for such things, as we had another rather dramatic car incident the other week. I was asleep at the time (around 4AM, I believe), though in a strange reversal of sleeping patterns, Heike wasn’t. Sitting in the lounge, minding her own business, probably looking up Harry/Snape porn which would cause my eyeballs to fall out in horror if I know her at all, she suddenly heard an almighty “boom”, rushed to the window and saw... yup, a car, this time right-way-up, but unfortunately rather, umm, pyre-y; sheets of flame, billowing black smoke, minor explosions – the works! The fire brigade (and police, as the odds are pretty good, given that there was no-one present at the scene 10 seconds after the big ‘boom’, that this was a case of beered-up rudeboys having some ‘fun’) arrived and put the fire out and Heike, being the t00by t00b that she is, chose this time, not when the fucker was still ablaze, to take some photos! I also popped out later in the morning and took a few of the… carcass! Probably worth a look -








Continuing the multimedia theme, as well as making sure that you don’t drop dead of shock at my not mentioning US politics in a post, I bring you Oh, and whilst we’re at it, okay, I could go on at quite some considerable length on why I think that each and every declared or likely Republican candidate for ’08 is deeply, deeply flawed (and no, in case it needs to be said, I do not think that this can be inferred from the fact that they are Republicans; I may not agree with many Rupublican positions, but there are plenty of members of the party, both past and to a somewhat lesser but still significant degree present, who I simply disagree with but do not find flawed, crazy or just plain evil.) Indeed, I went through a bullet-point version of most of them with sexts a few weeks ago. However, I have to say that I really wasn’t expecting something like THIS (can't seem to get the direct link to the Boston Globe story to work from here, which is odd as it works perfectly well from the DailyKos page) For those who don’t fancy clicking, it’s an article on Mitt Romney (one of the four major Republican Candidates) going on a long (12 hours, I believe) drive to go on a holiday with his wife, five sons, their Irish Setter Seamus and a bunch of luggage. So, in case you haven’t figured out where this is going, it was obviously a tad cramped in their station wagon and something had to give. And by “give”, I mean be placed on the luggage rack on the roof of the car. So, three guesses on who/what got to spend 12 hours pelting down the highway strapped to the top of a fast-moving car; No, not one of the kids, he’s not quite that bad, but if you guessed Seamus the Setter, then you’d be right! Dear Fucking God! The twisted bastard strapped a dog-carrier to the roof rack and placed his dog in it. Okay, fair due to him, he did have the heart to construct a ‘wind-break’ to prevent the poor thing from being blinded by fast-moving stones and other debris from cars in front of him, but I’m not sure that that doesn’t in fact make the whole sordid affair even worse, as someone who can work out that this isn’t going to be very nice for the dog and rather than deciding, oh, I don’t know, to maybe strap the fucking luggage to the roof instead of the fucking dog is, well, not a very nice guy in my books. I’m not sure whether my books even have a term for someone whose reaction, an hour or two into the journey, to the poor thing having stress/fear-induced diarrhea all over itself and the roof of the car is to stop, hose the poor bugger down and then start off again (hint: wet fur and high winds make for an even less happy pooch, if that’s even possible at this point.) Just… holy fuck, people – this guy is a serious candidate. Urgh!

Anyway, I don’t want to leave you all with too much of a downer, so to finish off, here’s something rather more fun. Apparently, back in 1992 a crate of 29,000 “Friendly Floatees”, which would be brightly coloured Chinese-made rubber ducks, beavers, frogs and turtles (ie. bath toys), on a ship destined for Washington was washed overboard. The crate came apart and our intrepid bathtime friends were freed to swim across the seven seas. Oh, you think I’m exaggerating with the whole ‘seven seas’ thing, do you? Okay, I’m a geography nut, so I appreciate that the term is figurative, but taking it to mean ‘across the oceans of the world’, it’s entirely appropriate to use it! As you can see from the image in this article, two-thirds of them headed South and have visited all manner of places on the East Asian, Australian and South American coasts, whilst the other third went for broke and headed North. Yes, North, about as North as one can reasonably get via the sea, making their own version of the North-West Passage they went up North America, between Russia and Alaska, then across Northern Canada, Greenland and THE FRIGGIN’ ARCTIC, then back down past Iceland, across the USA’s Eastern Seaboard, before doing a U-Turn and making a beeline for the shores of these sceptred isles! Yup, the Friendly Floatees are heading for the beaches of the UK! I think that I love these things (though not in the ‘I wanna write Friendly Floatee slash’ – honest!) Anyway, those wishing for more info can find it here.

Right, now I really must fly, as I need to drop in at my doctor’s and then get into Central in time to get my hair cut. Seriously, folks, I believe that the last time I got my hair cut was going on for a year ago, and there’s no way in Hell that I’m going to be in the company of 10s of thousands of gay men in that state!

Edit : And oh-so-topically, given my talking both about exploding cars and heading into Central London later-on, it appears that a car-bomb was defused in Picadilly Circus earlier this morning. Le sigh!