Possibly my favourite Dilbert Line ever

Although on reflection maybe it's ripped off from the Ocean's Eleven remake: "The seventies called. They want their hair back!!"

brief moment of introspection

A few random threads from conversing with Dominus over the course of Thursday and Friday leads me to conclude that I'm neither as smart as I thought nor as open-minded.

This is good.

Mark also showed me a rather neat entry in his quotes file, which approximated is this: "there's a name for someone who's so stupid that they think everyone else is stupid.". While I don't think that way, I can certainly see ways of applying the quote reflexively.

This is also good.

if you are a decent person you will not bring me to a bookstore

Annette cruelly suggested a trip to Waterstone's yesterday. Purveyors of fine (and not so fine) books to the masses. I came away with the newest edition of Neil Gaiman's sort-of Douglas Adams biography - it's more about Adams' books than Adams himself; Schott's Miscellany, a useless book which will endlessly amuse me; and a Jeff Noon book that I wasn't previously aware of. I would have picked up Pixel Juice except that I couldn't recall if I'd already bought it or not. Total outlay was about €35, plus a dose of pizza, too much coffee, and a taxi home. Just now I read the Gaiman book cover-to-cover while lying in bed. This is the first time in several months that I've bought books, and for this exact reason - I motor through them in no time and inevitably go back to rereading what's already on my shelves (there are a few books I've not yet managed to finish, but most of what's on my shelves has already been read at least twice, and some books are now probably approaching double digits in terms of readings) and feel ultimately dissatisfied that I've spent so much on so little (temporally speaking) enteertainment. But hey. Like that's going to stop me.

sudden rush of crap to my blog

Watched The Cider House Rules last night, which was sort of a pleasant way to pass a couple of hours rather than a Great Moment In Cinema. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, and I did get kinda caught up in the story, but I also spent a lot of time noticing that Tobey Maguire's performance here seems to be near-identical to his performance in Spiderman, in that he spends a lot of time looking kinda slackjawed with surprise at the world around him and being hopelessly in love with someone else's girl and all. However, my mistake was not switching off the TV, because BBC2 was showing series 2 of 24. And at the end of the episode, they showed another. And at the end of that episode, they showed another. So I ended up watching three hours (actually only two, I think, as the "hours" are actually 40 minutes to allow room for advertising, which BBC tends to skip) of the story, and now I want to follow the damn thing and find out what happens next. This is, of course, doomed to failure as I have trouble identifying which day of the week it is a lot of the time, so following any sort of weekly serial inevitably breaks down within three weeks of my deciding to do so. Bah. Curse you, BBC2! *shakes fist*