Shattered lips on a rotting skull

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2007-02-17T11:07:00.000+01:00

In israel. Will re-edit this with actual info at a later date.

What I did[n't] on my summer holiday

2007-01-09T09:03:00.000+01:00

All 14 days of it.

Item 1: Nothing
What bliss! While She Who Must Be Obeyed (henceforth referred to as "She"*) is a creature of ceaseless activity, I prefer to do my bit for the Universe by minimising entropy where I can. She was kind enough to dust me every now and again. Mostly, I sprawled inelegantly on whatever item of furniture available in the digs (when there wasn't one available, I sprawled on the floor), kept out of the way and read books that weren't research-related. A few that were, but most weren't.

* Said with the accorded sense of reverence. Before reading on, please take a few moments to kneel before the shrine and light the sacramental incense.She reads this, so I anticipate entering a "clumsy" phase of my life. I'm so uncoordinated: always walking into her fists. :P

Item 2: Nothing, but with food
I cooked. Cooking, I find, is the best mental doodling available. I conjured huge feasts of delicacies sufficient to satisfy an army of gourmands, looked at the contents of my wallet (which is so thin that it once lopped off the arm of an unlucky mugger**), and proceeded to make student-y food. Y'know, simple robust country recipes like "Sewage-marinaded roadkill (mammalian) on a bed of grass" and "What the cat dragged in, with cheese". She was not impressed.

** Not really. It stopped half-way through the bone. To feed. Let's not talk about what I keep in my wallet, okay?

Item 3: Grew my hair
It's down to my chest, now. I can't really take credit for that, mind you. It just happens.

Item number after 3. Errr...4?: Visited mates
Tash and Sarah (I think their conjugate name should be "Tarah" [pronounced: Terror]) are as usual, entertaining and good fun to hang with.

Another good mate breezed into the E.C., and we spent an afternoon catching up and getting to know her partner a bit better. Her partner scares me, but so does custard, which is why I try not to pay too much attention to my fears.

Item Epsilon: Farm-sat
Another good mate returned to Grahamstown, and managed to get a farm-sitting job. Her, myself and She whiled away a very pleasant 4, or so days, lazing around a different setting and occasionally invading the very expensive wine cellar and bar. "Make yourself at home" they said. Which brings me to the next item:

Item purple: Organ failure
While the liver*** is evil and must be punished, not even your cultural Satan figure deserved the damage sustained over the vac. A doctor might not even be helpful at this stage. I suspect that some form of necromancy might be required in order to restore it to anything resembling its pristine glory. So, if anyone has a chicken, a Voduin priest[ess], and a direct line to Baron Samhedi, lemme know. 'White goats' are welcome, if our livers match suitably (I'm hedging my religious bets here).

My brain and I had a talk and it wants to secede from the Colony. Already, little neurons with distinct Irish accents are launching from my ears and are heading in the direction of Boston.

Also I nearly chopped off She's foot. But that's a story for a different courtroom.

*** Which I've affectionately re-named to: Ow! Ow, fucking ow! WHHYHYHYHYHYHYHYHYOHWHY!

That's about it.

Best threat ever

2006-11-17T13:43:00.000+01:00

I must direct you to this comic for perhaps one of the best threats ever.

Savour the whales: a rant in rag-time

2006-10-30T09:18:00.000+01:00

These days I'm becoming increasingly angry at smug eco-conservationists, with their organically-woven underarm hairs and soya-bean-curd breath. Most of you don't actually care about your cause - it's an excuse to act mysterious, harmonically synchronised to Nature and to smoke a lot of marijuana. The few of you who do actually care about mother nature try to evangelise others with the heavy-handed condescension and holier-than-thou zealotry that would put any member of the Spanish Inquisition to the rack (and indeed, white-hot fingernail-needles and cat o' nine tails) of envy. I've had a few of the below conversations:

EcoFreak (EF): Do you care about the White-spotted Camel-dwelling desert tick?
Me (ME): Errr...nope.

EF: You're a terrible person, because you don't care about this planet. Don't you see? We're all connected. If one falls, everyone falls, and this fragile biosphere will crumble! You're a morally-deficient twisted relic of this industrialist-materialist paradigm, man! We must become one with nature again.

ME: You mean: eat our meat raw, run around naked, and sleep in trees to avoid predators? Hey, are those a pair of Nikes you're wearing?

etc. etc.

I maintain that the only reason that Average Joe wants to preserve "Mother Earth" (presumably with a big pickle jar) originates from innate self-interest. Read the following, slowly, because it has big words:

They...just...want...a...clean...backyard...for...ourselves.

Not so difficult, was it?

All of you people who want to save the tigers, because "we want our children to see what a tiger looks like"? Bollocks. Great, hairy bollocks. The tiger is only fluffy and majestic when viewed on your couches, or at the zoo. Up to 50 years ago, the only people who were in frequent contact with tigers (substitute any dangerous carnivore, if you feel like it) couldn't get wait to get rid of the whole lot of the goat-thieving, man-eating lot of them.

The amount of money these university-dwelling hippies spend on maintaining a eco-friendly appearance, means that someone, somewhere along their family tree, embraced an industrialist-capitalist perspective and made enough money for these people to live off. Of course none of these people, in sympathy for the Red Panda, have cut off their own allowances or diverted the entirety of it to a eco-friendly cause, making them just as dependant on our parasitic society as we are. So, eventually, it's a case of hypocrisy - but the religious kind: The shout-from-the-rooftops-how-humble-I-am kind of hypocrisy, using the "I'm much better than you because I'm right, I'm right because I'm much better than you" circular logic.

I'm posting this incoherent rant in the knowledge that the real eco-friendlies won't be using resource-gobbling computers made out of plastic and metal, using child labour.

snort

2006-10-19T10:24:00.000+01:00

Those whacky people at Google. Suddenly, the flattering interest in my little scrap-book of undermedicated rants becomes clear. A brief search of google using the search terms "shattered lips" will reveal all.

You perverts. You disgusting, assuming, sad, boring, twisted perverts. You haemorrhaging, putrid afterbirths of gonorrhea-ridden sows.

*sniff* I love you guys.

Group hug, everyone. If there's nobody around your PC who'll let you have a group hug (outstanding restraining orders do count), go outside and hug a stranger. Don't be too friendly - that's assault. If that doesn't dissuade you remember: "Pepper spray is just another way of saying: 'I don't want to come and live in your cupboard, as delightfully roomy as you've made it'".

Chaos! Capitalism! Ecological Disaster!

2006-10-18T10:01:00.000+01:00

I must share this great game with my sparse audience.

A cute little capitalistic game, where you lie, cheat and rape Mother Earth and Second-cousin Society in order to claw your way to a better profit margin. No resemblance at all with a certain fast-food franchise. None whatsoever. Really.

Kiss your pitiful attempts at work goodbye if you click on this link

Interrogation time!

2006-10-18T06:59:00.000+01:00

I'm addressing this question to all 4 of you. I've doubled the anticipated number of visitors ("estimation". It's a classy and intelligent way of saying 'I have no fuckin' idea') by assuming that at least 2 of you will be non-English speakers who've stumbled across this site, and will leave under the impression that I am either an embittered LSD-imbibing stripper, or a psycopath (why not both? Nobody ever guesses both. This is a liberal era, after all.)

Question: If you could outlaw one human activity / annoying habit (preferably made into a capital crime), what would it be?

For myself, I'd pick: stupidity. Repeat offenders (prior to arrest, because this is definitely going to be a capital crime) get to have their family tree pruned a bit further, just to remove any kind of genetic taint. I'm not talking about geniune ignorance, or naievety, but rather the "I've been told not to do this 30,000 times, but I'm going to do it anyway". I'm talking about the good ol' fashioned, pig-headed, "When it blows up in my face like it always does, the first thing I'm going to say is 'Nobody told me that would happen *sniffle*'". Y'know, the kind of forward thinking that made our ancestors both great and deposited as a red mist over a wide area of pasture-land.

Am I personalising a recent work event? Yes. Should I remove the severed and severely-battered head from my fridge at home? Maybe. The thought of my digsmates mistaking an accusatory eye as a pickled onion does fill me with a tinge of unholy glee.

Not even unholy glee, I must add, just that "I haven't been to church this week" kind of humdrum glee. Atheistic glee might even work.

Enough of this rant, your turn.

Weakened Work

2006-10-15T12:58:00.000+01:00

I just decided that I loathe Sunday work. Loathe, I think, might be too mild a word for it: I'd rather chew out my own eyeballs (if I were that flexibly-jawed) than come in to work on a Sunday. Besides, it would make a nifty excuse: "Sorry I was late for the meeting, but one of my retinas got stuck between my teeth. Well, I tried a toothpick, but then I started seeing sparks, and a walrus swam past me with a cactus on its tail, so I decided to spend the rest of the day watching what I ate. Yes, sir, that was a joke. No sir, I'm really blind" etc.

Tumbleweed rolling through the laboratory and cobwebs in the equipment. It's quite tranquil here, actually. Maybe I should just bite the bullet, finish working, and go home to bite some more bullets. Mmm...bullets.

*shrug*

Bygones.

There we go

2006-10-13T15:21:00.000+01:00

Everything nice and customised now. My own little Internet fiefdom. I think I'll go and hang a small "Welcome" mat over my network cable now.

erk Hi

2006-10-13T09:49:00.000+01:00

One of the many things I promised myself I'd never do. But it'll help in the future, when I'm travelling, to keep friends and family abreast of what's happening in my life.

To all the strangers visiting (or, as the news refers to your sort, "collateral damage"): hi. I'm Ron, and I'll be your incoherent babbler for however long you stay. Would you care to see a wine list, or something? Chair? Rack? Carnal relations with an elderly goat? We at Shattered Lips are eager to help you with all of your filthy, perverted, liberal habits in a professional and non-judgemental manner.

To those of you who don't know, I'm currently passing time by doing complicated things to inoffensive fungi and their extracts. It's not kinky, not fun and not all that interesting to those outside of my profession's sub-set, but I quite like it. For fun, I chain-smoke, pay handsomely for a stranger to shove sharp bits of metal through body parts (let's just leave it at "body parts", shall we? Actually, I'm the author. Shut up, and write complimentary comments at the bottom of the post. "I don't care what you think of me, as long as it's favourable", or some such.), and shouting at strangers. I have a talent for abrasiveness, which is useful in laboratory situations. Fuck, I don't know what else to say. I enjoy opera? I eat cottage cheese through my nose? What more do you need to know about me?

Currently South African, I guess I should add, and finishing off my MSc. Errr...the weather's wonderful - rainy and miserable. I'm so happy, I could chew off a live turtle's flipper.