Prince Fred, Pricess Mary plus one

If you are the kind of person who reads gossip rags with titles like Chat and Hello, whose perm extends inside their skull and is royalty/celebrity obsessed you will already be aware that Crown Prince Fredrick of Denmark married a girl from Tasmania who he met in a Sydney pub (you have also found the wrong website, please stop reading now and get off the internet, trust me it isn't for you). You will also know that the couple have just had a child. Although the Australian public has gone into an undignified froth about this it doesn't interest me in the slightest - I just found myself wondering about how you would tell a girlfriend that you were a Danish Prince...

There are a few ways this could go . My first and probably favourite is to use it as a chat-up line and get it over and done with as soon as possible:

The Zaphod Beeblebrox method

Swagger up to girl and say something like: Hey baby come with me. I rule! You could potentially wear a t-shirt with I Rule printed on it, an Ermine trimmed robe and a crown, although this may be taking things a little far.

The not really method

So what do you do for a living?
Actually I'm Prince of Denmark.
Yeah right.
No, not really. Actually I'm a reindeer hunter. Fancy a shag?

And just leave the awkward task of telling her until it can be avoided no longer. Although to be fair this might not be that long:

Mary, you may be wondering why I made you fill out that non-disclosure agreement before the blowjob...
Yes, that has been troubling me a bit. Not quite as much as the security clearance vetting before we had sex.
Ah yes, bit of a passion killer that.
It's the first time I've been interrogated whilst wearing fluffy handcuffs.
You'll get used to it. Anyway, you may remember that I once told you I was Prince of Denmark...

The penny drops method

A little like the above only simply don't tell her at all, invite her to Denmark to meet the parents, sit back and watch how long it takes her to figure it out. Will it be in first class when you have the cabin to yourselves and a few minders? Will it be when the plane is greeted by a flag-bearing limo and more minders? Will it be when you drive through the palace gates? Or will it be when you introduce her to your Mum: Mary this is my Mum Queen Soren Haardraadaarsen of Denmark. Mum this is Mary of ...er... Tasmania. She's not that bright but I like her.

The Shakespearian method

Mope around the place looking serious, pretend you've seen a ghost, start talking to yourself in a suicidal manner, tell your girlfriend to go and become a nun, comission a rather grisly play at your house, kill her father "by mistake", make sure she goes mad, kill everyone you know and throw away your own life in a contrived, bloody and pointless duel. This method lacks subtlety, to be used only by those with a true flair for the dramatic.

This afternoon I shall amuse myself by suggesting deeply unsuitable middle names for the new prince. Favourites thus far:

• Koala
• Bruce
• Ship Inn
• Viking
• Rosencrantz
• Gildenstern
• Sydney (they wouldn't would they, I mean come on they aren't the Beckhams)
• Boomerang
• Sarcophilus harrisii
• Beer
• Flintoff

Other Aussie bating suggestions welcome.

Drinking Art

Now here's a piece of performance art that I could get intoAllurements of Mass Media by Anti-Cool: "A performance artist's show which saw her spend three hours balancing on a beam while becoming drunk on lager has been defended by theatre officials. "

Sounds like someone found a way to get shitfaced, make a twat of themselves in public and call it art. I had to go to university to do that! Oh well, at least she's sharing: "There were 48 bottles, but she did not drink all of those. Some of those she suspended from her neck by a rope inviting the audience to cut them away and take them for themselves."

The council may have missed the point:

Mr Patel, a Labour councillor for the Canton ward, said: "I don't agree with any binge drinking, regardless of what it is. I think it is inappropriate that a performance of this nature is staged in the public bar area - it should have been behind closed doors."

He added: "If she was drunk then that concerns me and it sends out the wrong message. It is an arts centre but it also has a cinema and it is all open, so if young people were to walk through the main door they would've seen that."

Mr Patel you are a nob. You have given the kind of reaction to 'binge drinking' that one might expect for public sodomy. Young people can see far worse binge drinking than that walking through Cardiff City Centre after a rugby match, something they are far more likely to do (and which may possibly involve public sodomy). Also it is taking place in a bar a bar i.e. a licensed premesis so anyone going in there is over 18 and so will be well accustomed to the effects of alchohol abuse.

Multiple choice section

Now Mr P. take the position of an 18 year old walking into a bar and seeing Anti-Cool at work, your reaction would be:

1. Look at that nutter! What the bloody hell is she doing?
2. What a bunch of pretentious wank that is
3. She's gonna fall off that surely, I'll have to stick around and see what happens
4. She's giving away free beer! Brilliant!
5. All ofthe above

And once again Mr P. this makes it:

1. A self-indulgent and pretentious piece of crap
2. An engaging and interesting public artwork
3. An unsubtle and heavy handed commentary on the contempory media environment
4. A slightly provocative performance with its's tongue firmly in cheek
5. An over-thought conceptual spectacle that has failed to realise that its' own artifice may render it innappropriate for its' intended purpose
6. A Japanese bird getting hammered balancing on a beam
7. All of the above

Amazingly enough it is the last option in both cases - astonishing eh?

I've been to Chapter and it is tucked away in the backstreets as it used to be a highschool. Whilst it does have a cinema it would have to be a fairly unusual 'young person' that would go in there. The vast majority of films they show are not exactly aimed at attracting 'young people'. My suggestion is that we let the silly artsy people do their thing in peace, after all some of it is quite interesting, and remember you are allowed to laugh at it.

R/evolution

The revolution when the revolution comes will be televised
It will have syndicated news feed from coast to coast, every coast.
It will have a PR campaign, a jingle and a website.
It will whiten your teeth and freshen your breath whilst you work rest and play with yourself.
The revolution will be a tee-shirt, a soft drink, a meal deal and a running shoe.

The revolution will print logos on your french fries and send automatic updates to your mobile phone.
It will be bought, sold and bartered. There will be pin badges posters and viral campaigns.
It will sell more washing powder and will come in sixteen fruit-flavoured colours. There will be stickers to collect and swap.
There will be a stick-shift and an automatic.
The revolution will have tinted windows.

The revolution will take place at the expense of the black and the white, the hungry, the disenfranchised, the sick, the poor, the tired and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
There will be no-one in the streets looking for a better day because they will all be watching the revolution on TV.
The revolution will not make a blind bit of difference, it will go unnoticed. There will be arguments afterwards about whether it really happened. It will have profound implications for consumer confidence, far reaching consequences and international relations will be strained.
The revolution will be by intelligent design.

The revolution will have security patches, updates and bug fixes.
There will be plugins and dockable toolbars, XML output, a spellcheck and popups.
It will be an enterprise level fully customiseable end to end solution with advanced knowledge management systems.
It will be XP compatible but Mac users will need to download additional components proir to installation.
There will be a revolution 2.0

The revolution will have trailers with voiceovers, preview showings and re-runs.
Its' outcome will decided by focus groups and creative consultants.
Its' format will be sold and reproduced, copied and imitated.
It will be themed and have a strong moral message. It may star David Hasselhoff.
The revolution will be broadcast on your wetware.

The revolution will be sponsored, there will be ad breaks and interuptions.
You will be able to tune out, change the channel and grab a beer.
There will be news bulletins and a ticker accross the bottom of the sceen. There will be a narrator.
There will be edited highlights and a late showing with unseen new footage.
The revolution will be a pre-recorded event, it will be pay per view and shown "as live".

The revolution when the revolution comes will be televised, and you will miss it.

based on "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron

Various bits

Because I've been fiddling about on the internet instead of doing my job I have some links to post.

First and foremost there are certain things I'm holding off from doing on here, including posting bizarre links I've found and more fiction writing, because blogger doesn't have a category system to allow you to filter what you read, and to manually code one is a right pain in the arse even with the help of "bookmarklets". So I am encouraging anyone and everyone to ask for this feature by voting for it. I'm sure Blogger, Google and Technorati are cooking something up but I'm getting pissed off with not having it.

Secondly I have discovered Google reader. This is a newsreader type thing that collates newsfeed from compatible websites to a single service. Confused? Then I wouldn't bother if I were you as it requires a little bit of technical savvy and a bit of winging it without istructions (Dad, GoatSan and BulaBulaPesci I am talking to you - did you know you had a newsfeed from your blog? You have). To be fair this is nothing to be worried about as it has taken me quite some time to figure out what the atom feed was for and even when I found out I was doubtful how useful it would be.

A good new Blogger feature is backlinks which ties in to Google's new blogsearch function. Backlinks is an active feature that each time you access a blog runs a search to see if anyone has linked to your posts. Naturally no one does. Due to some tricky display problems I'm having with JavaScript, CSS and blogger being a temperamental I am only putting this on the item page at the moment (the page solely for each post itself - click on the title of the post to see what I mean).

Other blogger features I'm looking at installing are their native comments as this allows me to format comments as I choose and display them under the post they relate to in collapsible sections and to show people who has commented underneath the post before they open the comments, which is much neater in my opinion. Unfortunately they are going to have to convince me that they have solved their huge comment spam problem before I do.

According to Modern Drunkard Magazine we should be boycotting Jack Daniels because they have dropped the alchohol content without telling anyone. I was way ahead of them but I was boycotting it because it was over-sweet American filth drunk by greasy heavy metal addicts (yes, I know I used to be one, I got better).

And finally sword swallowing xrays, just because.

And you were looking for...?

With the amount of hits on here approaching 1,000 I have been looking through the hits, mostly because I'm curious but also because I'm having a slow time writing at the moment and I needed some material...

People get to this blog via some very odd routes, particularly the Americans who normally only visit in passing but the things they are looking for are often very strange such as:

• Hammer dropping - why would you be searching for this? It's not a tricky enterprise:
  1. Find hammer
  2. Pick it up
  3. Extend arm
  4. Let go


• Steel grade data sheet - boy have you got the wrong site


• Telescope horse's head - er, hopefully this is someone looking for pictures of the horse's head nebula (quite a few hits for horse's head)

Odd picture searhes

• Couples arguing -what kind of sadist likes to look at pictures of couples arguing?


• Alchohol bottles - might be able to help you there.


• Hangover pics - what kind of sadist wants to look at pictures of hungover people?

Other

• Entertainment is obviously in short supply in Rossville (pron. Hicksville) Indiana as by far the strangest search to turn up was for -Riding the back of an old lady illusion costume. That is going to be a long fruitless search, but for some reason I really want to know what he finds.


• Estate agents bastards uk clearly someone house hunting in the UK, poor sod.


• Grotowski - I'm getting a few hits for people looking for info on Jerzy Grotowski. Here's a hint luvvies, over-serious Polish physical theatre is not only bloody exhausting it has a limited audience of serious minded performers. It is the dramatic equivalent of singing to the choir, and as you have no doubt discovered there is naff all information on him on the internet. Here's a novel approach - go to the library!

Rather disappointingly the number one search that people reach this site via is Celebrity Tongue. Apparently quite a number of people have nothing better to look for on the whole of the web than celebrities with their tongues out. It's a sad, sad world out there.

Do I know you?

It's always weird to bump into someone you know and haven't seen for years, but to do it in a different hemisphere from where either of you thought the other was is more than a little disconcerting...

Linda and I run into each other in the strangest places. Last time we randomly turned up at The Ten Bells on Shoreditch High Street at the same time, I had thought she was in Mexico (The Ten Bells is famed for being the "Jack the ripper pub"). The time before that we walked past each other at a music festival on Hackney Marshes, I thought she was back in Sweden, she thought I was living out in the sticks - I was!

Emily & I had been at the night noodle markets, which are part of Good Food Month in Sydney. We walked to the bus stop and Linda was getting the same bus as us home and currently lives round the corner from us. I was so stunned I couldn't think of anything to say, at all. At moments like this you really want to come accross well as how you are at that time may be the way that you are remembered until you meet them again. Given that the intervals that Linda and I meet are doubling every time - that could be four years! This made me more awkward than I would like and particularly as I was still in work clothing and in dire need of a haircut, she was dressed in civvies having been planting trees all day. Dammit I want to be a hippy and go and plant trees all day, and here I am working for AMP!

The slightly awkward feeling lasted for the most of the bus ride home but I have put it down to being tired and have written it off as surprise. I still made Em give me a haircut when we got home (given that she gets upset with me if I let anyone else cut it this isn't as extreme as it sounds). It was great to see Linda again and I hope that I see her again before she goes back to Sweden to train as a nurse but on our current form it'll be quite a while before I see her again.

Crap Tuesday

Tuesdays are crap. I got up feeling better than normal. I didn't even have my regular morning tantrum about having to go to work instead of sitting in the sunshine. Things went rapidly downhill from there. For one thing I arrived at work which always puts a downer on things. Then I realised I only had the most tedious tasks left to do, having done the more interesting on Monday and late last week.
Then we had a fire drill and on the way back to the 7th floor I got stuck in not one but two lifts. This would never have happened on a Friday...

Being stuck in two lifts for ten minutes apiece my mood blackened to the point where I can only think about the fact that I am now engaged in two of my least favourite activities for the forseable future: house hunting and job hunting.

Reasons to hate job hunting:

• You have to pretend you are still doing your job properly and are devoting your full attention to it


• Your free time is sucked up in long rounds of pointless letter writing and making phonecalls to agents to discover that they have advertised the post really very badly indeed


• There is honestly nothing out there worth applying for


• Job websites are blindingly obvious on your computer screen to anyone walking past your desk


• Recruitment Agents are by enlarge a shower of bastards that promise one thing and deliver ...er... well whatever suits them really


• You rapidly lose the will to continue breathing

Reasons to hate house hunting:

• You are going to have to move house


• Everything you like has already been taken


• You can't afford the ones you really like

Other people have absolutely no taste whatsoever and it's difficult not to tell them that when you're in their house

• Estate agents are a shower of bastards, without exception


• There are almost no furnished properties to rent in Oz - we are going to have to buy everything

Reasons to hate Tuesday:

• More people kill themselves on a Tuesday than any other day


• There are still three more days to the weekend


• You aren't allowed to winge about it because it isn't Monday


• If you Google "facts about Tuesday" among other things you get a list of links about adult star Tuesday Weld. Crap Tuesday has even cursed my lazy blog posting. I'm going back to bed.

On a brighter note: Smurfs village bombed by warplanes

Grey hair

Announcement:

Let it be known and may the word go forth that on the second day of October 2005, twenty eight years and two months after my birth, a grey hair was found on my head.

The finder immediately extracted the offending item to confound my disbelief. Upon which, after much taunting, I threatened to hide her hair dye so the world could see the extent of her own greys should she continue to taunt. There followed a brief period of silence, and then some quiet teasing.

Here endeth the announcement.