Loony’s Neighborhood

if only I hadn't already bought my sink and toilet this princess pink pair would be very tempting...

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Some more pics as promised. They were all taken with my phone as my basic requirement for a phone is that it should be a movie-quality camera first, scanner, laser gun, computer and possibly coffee maker second and a phone third or even 93rd, but obviously quality of these pics is sometimes low given the low tech threshold of Terrans.

1. A beach at Cape Point Nature reserve

2. The airport at Palaborwa. Yup. That is the WHOLE airport. It reminded me of the airport in Gaborone (Botswana) 20 years ago (or even Tirana in Albania a few years ago) except it was bigger, cleaner and way more functional. The plane was tiny, only two seats on one side and one seat on the other side of the isle and the passengers had to be spaced out evenly in it to balance it. Total capacity was 32 people including pilots and crew.

3. A giraffe

4. A not so clear pic of a wildeebeest running

1. Buffalo

2. Zebra

3. Frog. Only little but surprisingly loud. It made more noise than the Hippos.

4. Old male Elephant with Musk, waving it's ears at us in a rather pissed off fashion. Luckily the guide was a cool guy and didn't get freaked and stayed there with the car so we could get nice pics. Redhead Girl spotted it and we would have missed it if it wasn't for her. It's amazing how a 5 ton animal can basically hide behind the equivalent of a shrub at 20 metres. See later pics for proof...

1. Elephant hiding behind the equivalent of a bush lamp-post

2. And now you see him...

3. If you look carefully you should see the "tear" that shows he's in musk making him irritable, and testosterone fuelled, meaning, more likely to make him want to stomp dumb tourists bugging him, but he liked us I guess.

4. Inside the plane, pic taken by me holding my arm out. The other side of the isle was a single seat.

So that should complete the pics of animals section for ya.

The trip was basically all good and I even got to see and talk with my father again after 7 years. He's still physically fit and doing well, except I think he thinks in his 60s he should be "old" so has slowed down a bit, which is not all bad since he really needed to get better emotionally speaking. He seems calmer anyway and he's finally retired, which is good.

Hopefully he will think up of a nice hobby that doesn't involve shooting people or hunting criminals. He wrote an article for Magnum (an outdoor/hunting/wildlife magazine) and they liked it, so he might do more of that which I think would be nice for him as he certainly has a lot of funny, crazy, stories to tell and it saves me having to do it at some point.

Dad in the left one and Mom on the right one.

The only hitch was that on the way back the flight was cancelled which was badly unannounced so we wasted hours at the airport before finding out and had to come back the next day to fly home a day late in an almost empty 747 which meant we could stretch out taking up five seats to sleep a bit. Redhead Girl didn't bother, but I did as I never get to sleep on planes due to my height mostly.

Also I renewed my membership to the Mile High Club as Redhead Girl insisted she wanted to join this exclusive club... That's why I love her, she's just comic-book cool.

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You all know that I'm fucking nuts, so this will come as no surprise.

On Monday, I was at work, bored, staring down an afternoon with little to do. I did what anyone with a serious mental illness would do: I faked a headache and left work to go work on the house!

I put in a good five hours, feeling pleased that I was getting closer to being ready for my drywall contractor to work next week. The next morning, it occurred to me that I already had an excuse in place, so I called in sick. Good thing I did.

At about 9:30, my drywall contractor called to say that his schedule had changed. He could either start on Wednesday or he wouldn't be able to get to it until the new year.

My people, you know what I did. I said, "Start on Wednesday," and then I threw my ass in gear to get ready for him. I knew I had at least two more days of work to do, so I figured on at least 16 hours. It ended up taking a little longer than that. It was my first and hopefully my last home remodeling all-nighter. Because it's one thing to pull an all-nighter, sitting around eating pizza and studying. It's another thing to spend all night standing on a ladder, scraping, peeling, sanding, and priming.

At about 8 pm, I broke for dinner and went down the block to the nearest fast food place. In the shape I was in, I would normally have gone through the drive-thru, but the bathroom in my basement is sooooo cold. I was willing to face a little public humilation in order to put my ass on a toilet seat that was not glacial.

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I took my pee break and went back out to order some dinner. People stepped away from me in line. At the counter, the cashier recoiled. Now I knew I was dirty, but until that moment I hadn't realized just how dirty. I had a cloud of dust and debris around me--the pulverized particulate of fifty years of bad wallpaper choices. And probably not a little in the way of lead paint chips. The cashier didn't even bother to ask if I wanted my food to go; she just bagged it up and handed it to me from arm's length. Only then did I notice the little semi-circle of dust and detritus that I'd left at the counter where I'd been standing.

But wait, there's more. At midnight, about 15 hours into my ordeal, I was dying. I could see I had at least 3 more hours of work and maybe 5 hours. I went out to the local quickie mart for coffee and another pee break in non-artic conditions. An elderly man stood by the counter chatting with the college age cashier. Clearly the old man had reached that point in life where he no longer really needed sleep, so he'd taken to hanging around pestering cashiers at all-night quickie marts.

When I approached with my coffee, the old man smiled at me and said, "Why don't you let me get that for you?"

I was already in a slightly stunned state, but I managed to say, "No, that's okay. I got it."

He persisted, but I already had my money out on the counter.

Having failed to buy me a coffee, the old man said, "Do you have some place warm to stay tonight?"

Yes, that's right, my people. I was so bedraggled looking that I was mistaken for a homeless person. I schlepped my crusty, dusty self back to my 2 bedroom gulag, and went on with the work. At 4:30, I put the last strokes of primer on all the cut wallpaper seams, and dragged myself home to shower and sleep for a few hours.

For the record, I do not recommend this, but I do now have sheetrock on my walls.

plus pumpkin lasagne.

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Yeah, I know. You were all waiting with baited breath for my return. The 1 comment I'll get from samjohn999 trying to sell me some real estate in Cambodia or take part in the very safe and secure online spreadbetting that has recently made many millionaires will be all the proof I need.

Yes. I do thank God for my adamantium self-esteem daily. So there.

ANYWAY...Lots happened over the last two months, which is why the long absence from my blog. But I make it up by reporting much funny things and some amazing pictures from my recent trip to see my family in Africa.

So...I am now able to tell you dear readers that I now NO LONGER WORK! That is, I am now no longer employed by anyone to do anything for them that I don't want to do. I will be writing books, finally getting my hypnosis work that I have been doing for 4 years more mainstream and training in and occassionally teaching (when my friend Uldis is not doing it) the System, that awesome, awesome, cool amazing "martial art" (but really oh sooo much more than just that) I have been doing for a while now.

Some of you that care can go see more on that at WWW.WAYOFSYSTEMA.COM where you will find a rather simple site (which badly needs a revamp but I have no time or skills to do it and am hoping one of the other Systema guys will improve it sometime before 2012....)

So yeah!! I am no longer a slave of the system. For a little while anyway. I have a little money saved up for a year at least so the plan is to make enough money to survive (or even you know, buy a few islands, I don't mind being stupidly, obscenely rich, it's ok with me...) doing only what I want to do out of my own wish to do it, as opposed to having to in order to do luxurious things like have running water and food to eat in a nice apartment.

Those of you now turning green with envy please note that you are as much in a position to be doing what I am doing (sweet, sweet nothing) as I am or was. If you REALLY want to do so, I cannot suggest strongly enough that you read Vadim Zeland's book Transurfing Reality (There are three books but the first two are really enough and the last two are only available in Russian for now). More than anything it has certainly helped to shape my view of reality in a way that is really malleable by me, the operator of it. Sounds too Matrix-ish for you? Too bad. That's how it works and you should watch more SF movies anyway, it's good for you!

I also moved home and thus pay a cheaper rent, though that at the moment is REALLY cheap as I have stopped paying it altogether since more than 2 months after we moved in I STILL have boiler and electrical problems of a pretty serious nature (not to mention several other issues not as serious but certainly not fun to deal with). Let's see how long it takes the Estate agents to wake up now. In the meantime I am going about fixing these things myself now and I will simply not pay rent until I have it ALL sorted and then I will deduct all the costs as well as my time for sorting it all out and only THEN start paying rent again.

Every possible reasonable option has honestly been tried before this and at the end of it I have just lost patience with the utter fucking scandalous incompetence, stupidity and fucktard, brain-damaged-like inability to get any kind of half-decent service done in apparently the whole of greater London from people who take chunks of money from you for supposedly providing such non-existent service. 

I would list the incredibly long amount of retarded things I have been subjected to but I'll stick to a few highlights for your amusement:

• The leaky tap in the kitchen was supposedly visited by a plumber. It still leaks exactly the same as before so I asked if the next time the plumber can maybe also hold it and speak some comforting words to it as apparently just visiting it doesn't do the trick.

• Today the guy who supposedly sorted out the washing machine (but I haven't tried it yet so I seriously doubt he actually did anything successful on that appliance) suggested that the way to rectify the problem of the fridge door not staying closed was to "not put any bottles in the bottle holding part of the door". Actually since it's snowing in London I suppose really I should just throw all the stuff in the fridge on the balcony and hope for the best. Maybe even hope it snows enough to make an ice-box which will take us through the short summer like trappers of old in the Canadian wilderness. I somehow resisted the urge to ice-pick the "handy-man" and hang him from a hook off the balcony in case meat runs low in the harsh winter months.

• The boiler "knocking noise" and intermittent hot-cold water when showering is not due to any problem with our boiler. It's from another flat. Hyperdimensional physics must clearly be involved, but I guess it's a "need to know" thing because when I asked how in the name of anyone sane could an electrical problem in ANOTHER flat be affecting MY hot water supply I was not given an answer. Just repeated the same drivel above. I invited the estate agency's maintenance guy to come up here and see for himself. To be precise I told him to bring a towel because I would have pleasure in having him take a shower here to experience for himself the situation. I don't care if it sounded gay to him. At this point buggery is after all only about the 7th lowest item on the list of things I'd like to do to the whole of the "management" of the Estate agency and their employees responsible for them not fixing these issues over a period of 2-3 months.

So yeah...rent's gonna be real cheap around here for a while. I may have to live like a fur trapper of the 19th century but then again the Estate agency offices are literally just outside the apartment complex I live in, so if I ever run out of fresh meat I will just go ice-pick one of the proto-humans they employ and hang his/her carcass from my balcony for preservation purposes and good meat curing. They certainly don't seem to serve any other function so I assume they are a meat giving animal. Sort of like cows but stupider and less useful. And more full of shit which probably means they play havoc with the ozone layer.

In the meantime enjoy a picture of the view I have from my new office space I created inside the flat. That mild reflection is me and I am glad to say I actually have my PJ bottoms on...bonus!

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After the hectic end of my work and move, Redhead Girl and I went on holiday for three weeks to South Africa, (Johannesburgh) though she also visited her oldest friend who now lives in Maputo and we also went to Cape Town and a resort bordering the Kruger National Park for a few days so we were actually in planes a whole bunch of times while there.

The trip was great and I also got to train with Vadim Dobrin who is a gentleman as well as being a deadly and funny guy. He was so cool he basically organised one class on a Saturday just for me with two of his top students (who are both younger, nicer people and better than me at Systema, but I feel I make up for it by being far more ornery, vicious and unpleasant than them in general life [which gives me immense satisfaction]* and knowing things about women and sex they will only discover if they become at least as debauched as I am and work hard at it for the next 50 years or so)**

Here's a few pics for you (and more later, including some of an Elephant in musk at about 15 metres from us):

They are (from left to right):

1. Redhead Girl silhoutted on Camps Bay beach

2. Me and my little brother after I just baptised him (with some sea-water, hence the crosses) "Aldo Libero" the first in my own sect of free people. Yes, I plan to have a religion named after me one day, it's all part of my plan to take over the world for my Martian brethren. This was at Yzerfontein where I have a couple of plots, one of which is now for sale for about R1,100,000.00 (roughly about £90,000) which considering it's about 200 metres from the Ocean and has guaranteed views and given the general prices in the area is actually a decent price, so if any of you want it, let me know. Broker fees would be on top of this.

3. Redhead girl looking sexy at Boulders, the Penguin colony, which she loved and where she took hundreds of pictures of the ridiculous and yet very cool penguins.

4. Redhead girl and me at Boulders again (Simon's Town).

Here is a couple more for you:

1. A Penguin suntanning. if you look you can see he has his eyes closed and little short feet propped up

2. Boulders beach. Exclusively for the use of Penguins so their small colony can be safe from human interference

3. Redhead girl at the Dias cross at Cape Point

4. My view for a lot of the time we were at the game resort

But since I know you're all waiting for the animal pics, here they are:

1. Ostriches at cape point. the males are black with white feathers and the females brown

2. Hippos at the golfing resort (I have never played golf, but the animals all over the range are cool)

3. Crock near the pond in the middle of the golf course. I had to get a little closer than you see Redhead Girl in the last pic as all these pics were taken with my camera phone, but he was sleeping so no problem really

4. Redhead Girl takin pic of the giant lizard

This post is becoming mammoth, so more pics of animals (including the Elephant one) in the next post after I eat dinner!

* Hey I get my pleasure where I can, don't judge.

** I'm not that old, it's just that there's lots of catching up to do for them in this area really. Way more than is healthy anyway.

Didn't they invent Search?

Not quite, but their monster algorithm, PageRank, was touted to give you the best results based on computer-calculated relevance, & web "approval" eg. if many links went to a page, that page must have cred. Trouble was, Google couldn't tell good quality from well-crafted rubbish, & the multitude of links scattered through blogs wrecked the links=reliability idea. Then Twitter appeared.

This article from the very witty & accurate UK site theregister.co.uk is pretty damning of Google. It makes some excellent points: up to a third of sites indexed are spam robots, many results are machine-generated, & there's too many to deal with. Which is why Google's given up.

To quote: Since 2005 Google has relied heavily on Wikipedia to mask the flaws. The thinking is that the typical punter just wants to know something quickly, and Wikipedia will give them a rough and ready answer, and links for further reading. It may as well have hardwired Wikipedia to the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

Read on, it's worth it. And of course the message is, as always, check the source. If it's made up, it usually shows pretty quickly.

Victoria Police will be pleased when Christmas sales push them off the front page. Various serious problems have cropped up, including evidence destroyed, seized drugs not destroyed, & now DNA contamination, already to blame for trials falling over, sent an innocent man to jail for 16 months.

Farah Jama protested he was at home, praying from the Koran over his sick father, & nowhere near a nightclub where a woman had passed out & was later part of a rape investigation. (Rape in Australia is a "public" crime, with the - alleged - victim only a witness. Bizarre I know.) Koran, eh? And he's black too? Young man, hmm? That would have NO bearing on the case of course... Luckily his dogged lawyers found the discrepancy in the DNA tests, since a police review of 6,000 cases didn't pick it up.

But I had to laugh at two of our esteemed newspapers & their responses.

The Age: "progressive" broadsheet, headlines with "Man freed after 16 months imprisonment, DNA bungle quashes conviction" web story slightly different
Herald Sun, Murdoch's first newspaper & proud of it, screams "HUGE COMPO PAYOUT OVER DNA BUNGLE" web story slightly more balanced!

Yes, the one story, but two very different angles.

I really hope you're laughing with me on this one, as I showed this to colleagues at work, who weren't nearly as troubled by the discrepancy.

I've just gutted my entire house, right down to the studs, and am slowly rebuilding it. After months of nothing but demolition, I'm finally starting to reverse the process. My bathroom contractor is working today to get ready for my tile guy. The insulation guy worked yesterday, so the house is nice and cozy now. (Right, except that I have to put the windows back in.) On Tuesday, the sheetrock guy comes to start putting my ceilings and walls back.

Just as soon as I wrap up my work in the attic: 2 more ceiling joists to sister, one more ceiling fan mount to install, plus 3 more fixture mounts for other lights. I'd planned to sister all the 5 ceiling joists that need it this weekend, but Tuesday I created a little emergency. While trying to rip out a piece of planking in the wall that had bowed and split--thereby preventing the sheetrock from being flush--I discovered that two of my ceiling joists were actually resting on that plank, instead of on the exterior load-bearing wall. The reason? when the foundation failed in the 40s that wall bowed out about three inches, and the joists slipped off it.

Which is how I broke my nose. With all that weight on the plank, it was under a lot of pressure, so when I finally managed to pry it off the studs, it came loose at high speed and whacked me in the face. I blacked out for about a second, before that little quiet voice in the back of my head kicked in. You know, the little voice that whispers, "Maybe you shouldn't take that short cut," and "Get up and check the door." My little voice said, "Don't fall off the ladder."

I didn't. I managed to get myself down the ladder, my head ringing, and my dust mask filling up with blood. As I was just starting to wonder how badly I'd fucked myself up, I heard this soft groaning sound and looked up. Above me, the ceiling was sagging about three inches. Not terrible, but likely to become so.

This was at about 8 pm, and who was I going to call for help? Sure, 911 would take care of my face, but they wouldn't do anything about my ceiling joists. So I went out to my truck, grabbed the jack, and a couple of 2 x 4's on my way back through the garage. I slapped one 2 x 4 up to the ceiling with a pair of screws (thank you, trusty cordless drill), wedged the other one up under it, balanced on top of the jack, and cranked the ceiling back up to the proper height. Contrary to my expectations, it worked perfectly. After all, that little jack was designed to lift one quarter of my truck, so it was strong enough to lift one tenth of my ceiling.

Then I could worry about my nose. Luckily I still have a kitchen sink, so I went it and pulled the dust mask off. Blood, lots of it. I washed off a bunch of it, but I didn't have a mirror, so I couldn't really see what the damage was. I had half a bag of ice in the freezer, so I grabbed that, stuck it on my face and drove to my temporary digs.

I kept the ice on it for about five hours, and that seems to have done the trick. I have a bump, a bruise, and my eyes are a little black, but my nose is straight. I'm pretty sure it's broken, because I can feel it wiggle when I laugh, and my eyebrows actually hurt.

Episode 2 was me calling into work sick the next morning. Only I didn't stay home. I couldn't. I went to the house and crawled up in the attic to sister in the three joists that just couldn't wait for this weekend. Then I had to repair and replace the plank I'd originally been intending to fix when it bitch slapped me. I won the rematch. 

As I emerge from the darkness of not posting for nearly a year(!), I've taken to exploring Vox a bit. Some marvellous stuff, from all over the world. Now I have a few more neighbours (but I still miss Loony).

And that's how I discovered Strive2Be in Canada. The condoms caught my attention (I know I know), but the whole thing's a delight. Well worth dropping in, if just to see her exquisite picture of moonrise... & do read the comments. I did.