Back on the horse

Well, despite the disbelief of Mark, I did write a big entry, and it did suffer a horrible disk failure, and I was unable to recover it. But that was a while ago now anyway, and it was mostly a load of old cobblers about TV advertising (why does that Nescafe Iced Tea snowman have a skeleton?) and the old cat that has taken up permanent residence on my bed. So it's probably not a terrible loss.

As has been noted by others, blogging seems to have dropped off sharpish like recently. I'm not sure exatly what the cause is. I personally haven't come to university in a week, so that makes it hard, because we don't live in William Gibson's universe yet, and direct content transfer from brain to website remains a tad difficult. But now that I am actually here, blogging is of course a much preferrable alternative to actual work. After a brief surge of enthusiam towards my thesis, I am now back down in the thoroughly uninspired doldrums after my supervisor informed me I would need surveys and figures and a much more empirical approach all round, which frankly is not why I have chosen to study non-scientific subjects.
My much preferred medium is educated waffle and giving credence to both sides of an argument, so the thought of a thesis that resembles a maths equation doesn't really thrill me. But I suppose I will see what happens.

And now a word or two about vomit.

The weekend could have been better. The netball semi-final was just sort of pathetic, and throwing up on somebody's door has little to recommend it (and is also just sort of pathetic). I suppose we could tick it off as another location for Being Sick Boy - James' kitchen door, Palmerston North, Manchester Street, University (I was actually properly ill that time), the Jolly Poacher, in a cavernous ex-haberdashery in Wellington, on Pete...when I think about it it's actually a disturbingly long list. However, I am always somewhat comforted by the fact that I have yet to throw up out of Xanadu's bedroom window or on it's driveway (not much chance there any more), continuously into a bucket for about 24 hours, in Hagley Park, in the UCSA building, on a tree or on part of the driveway outside the Chateau, in any Chateau sink, (aha, a technicality), in the driveway of unit 8, in bushes in Germany, or, (presumably) in an ambulance on the way to Auckland Hospital. You know who you are, people.

The points are the following:
1) Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
2) Everybody has matured a bit except me. Haha, nice one / bad one.
3) I get sick too much drinking, and frankly I'm rather, well, sick of it, and despite point one, I rather expect everyone else is as well.

I thought I had been doing pretty well in that department of late though actually. Damn. The theory that my alcohol tolerance levels swing wildly is again raised by this latest unsavory 'incident'. I've also decided it's a lot to do with speed of consumption (makes sense). Next time I feel I will insitute an 'at least 5 minutes between drinks' policy. What's really required is a series of carefully monitored scientific experiments, although I'm not sure that anyone would be prepared to come up with the research funding on that one, and I'm sure my liver at least would be an unwilling participant.

Strangely enough, despite this weekend of horror, on Monday I found myself out, like a glutton for punishment, quaffing Guinness. My cousins and my uncle, who are always mad keen to involve themselves with anything vaguely to do with the Celts or the Picts, decided that a St. Patricks Day drink was in order. Accordingly we set off for the nearest Irish pub. Unsurprisingly, 10,000 drunk people, most of them dressed in green, had for some reason come to the same conclusion. After 20 minutes and a pint in a marquis tent erected outside the Bog, where a glass could be heard smashing every 15 seconds or so, we decided to hell with this and went to Mickey Finn's, which featured a live band playing no Irish music whatsoever. You'd have thought the large Irish flags draped about the walls, the toasts being offered in Gaelic, and the hundreds of people inside the Irish theme bar drinking Guinness and wearing green on St Patrick's Day would have been an indication to these musos that perhaps something was up, and maybe they should examine their repertoire accordingly...but no, they continued to belt out country and western and country rock numbers. The closest they got was a Van Morrison (from Ireland) song, but I guess that took them out of their comfort zone a bit, because after that one song there was no more sign of him. Somewhat miffed at this, we proceded to have another pint, beat some people at pool and leave. So St Patrick's Day ended up as fairly non-Irish. But good work my uncle for buying me two pints of Guinness.

St Patrick's Day is a strange thing. People buy Guinness when they don't even want it. The tent at the Bog especially was littered with abandoned half and three-quarter full pints left behind by people who obviously thought they should buy some Guinness on St Patrick's day, and then couldn't even make it through the glass. (Hamish would have been in free drink heaven.) And the people who actually like it drink tonnes of the stuff. Irish pub owners must become millionaires overnight. We need to find a way to open an Irish bar for that one night of the year, and then close down and live off the profits until 2043. Some kind of Guinness cart or stand would be all that was required. People could purchase it on the footpath and then pour it directly into the gutter (the fools).

I think this may be about enough for the moment, I have to keep Mark off my back in some fashion. Another load of old cobblers perhaps, but God knows with cricket losses and killer flu viruses and imminent war there's enough seriously depressing stuff going on in the world at the moment for people to consider without me giving my 2 cents on it all.

Perhaps later.