Utterly speechless...

MEMORIAL DAY (US)
Sometimes I'm fortunate to run into something on the internet that makes me sit back and take a moment to think just how lucky a bastard I am. Today I bumped into a blog entry on one of my favourite online comics that provided such a moment.

This blog entry is one of those gems that arrive out of nowhere and hit you with a massive dose of reality.

A far view of close-up madness.

SOME PEOPLE JUST DON'T GET IT
For some people religion and computing are naturally bound together like Laurel and Hardy, Love and Marriage or (for the truly poetic of spirit) Ham and Eggs. Most of these sorts of followers can be found kneeling at the Altar of Mac/Linux/BeOS/TRS80/Whatever, depending on the particular flavour of their digital religious persuasion. At any rate, some of these binary devotees have a deep and abiding love for the Amiga computer, and choose to express this love is any number of ways. Eric Schwartz is one such person, his comic creations are enough to fill a book (several of them in fact), and a little while ago he decided to create a tribute video a while ago as a testament to the computer platform that he loves despite the fact that the only people to see any significant degree of cash from it since Commodore went bust back in 1994 are a bunch of rampaging lawyers.

If you've seen the video, and have more than a passing clue about the Amiga scene, then you'd know that it's a pretty accurate summation of the events that have befallen the Amiga since 1994, and is in no way to be taken seriously. Some people however, despite prolonged exposure to the collective blatherings of the 'net, just don't get it or the ideas of irony or pathos. Rann at Livejournal is one such beastie, and shows in this post that he missed the boat, the point and the gold-plated clue-by-four when it was his for the taking. Subsequent posts also show that he lost his sense of humour, but that's his problem...

The Amiga is (un)dead! Long (un)live the Amiga!

I'd procrastinate, if I could find the energy...

SLACKER
I'm getting really slack at this. I swear I procrastinate so much that even the most indolent of moss-covered tree sloths would look at me with disdain. I have no excuse, other than to say I'm not that lazy I'm just easily distracted by ... Ohhh look! Shiny!

A QUICK CATCH-UP
Since my last posting here the cats have entered into an uneasy truce ... One that often flares up into "border skirmishes". That wouldn't be so bad but for the fact that all three cats like sleeping on our bed, while Jennie and I are in it. While I am unlikely to be woken by any feline fracas that may ensue at 3:00 in the morning, I'm not looking forward to waking up in the morning with a face that looks like I'd tried shaving it using a blender set to "disfigure".

The prime threat to household peace is Trudy, who appears to believe that being the smallest and youngest cat in the house is like a licence to annoy, pester and bully the other feline inhabitants. One of these days Pixel and/or Koda is going to corner that little monster and pound the ever-lovin' crap out of her... I say we sit back, let it happen and keep the winner - A suburban version of "Survivor" if you like, with a one-way trip to the vet for those "voted out" of the house.

Koda is a worry. All my life I've had cats who have been more than happy to remain at or near ground level. Koda is something else... I now live in fear that one of these days I'm going to try and close an already open door, and that cat is going to drop on my head. Koda is a Burmese, a breed of cat that has be tailored through decades and centuries of selective breeding to bedevil and torment me and my sense of well being. If it's high and out of reach of anyone without the aid of a chair to stand on, Koda will be there. If it's cramped and inaccessable, Koda will be there. If it's hideously inconvenient to remove a blithering idiot from, especially if you have a load of jars and other foodstuffs in your arms that you have to put in the cupboard that you have to extract a cat from first, Koda will be there.

If it's stupid, insane and massively dangerous to the house as a whole to sleep there, Koda will be there. I didn't know that the cabinet that our oven is built into has a gap right above where the skirting board meets the floor, leaving a comfortable little hidey-hole for any cat with a deep-down desire to be at the centre of uncontrolled combustion - It took Koda, at most, 3 tenths of a second to find that hole and climb in.

FINAL SCORE: LOCAL NEWSAGENT 1, AUSTRALIA POST 0
This week the seemingly impossible happened. Australia Post, after much deliberation and argument, started delivering mail to our estate. Yay for me! I can only assume that they hired the services of someone eminently qualified to tell them exactly where their arse was in order for them to remove their finger from it and start doing their job. They didn't have to pay anyone for this, I would have been, and still am, more than happy to tell them where to go for free...

I find it so very amusing to note that while Australia Post's first mail delivery to our house was on Monday, they were beaten to first grazing rights on our letterbox by the local newsagent who started weekend deliveries of newspapers to our home 2 weeks before-hand. I wonder how much better things would be if we were to shift mail delivery responsibilities to our local newsagents and just shoot all the posties (before they shoot us).

Huh?...

A SUDDEN GROWTH SPURT
Our household grew by 8 feet over the weekend. The avowed and card-carrying member of the "I Really, REALLY Hate Cats Society" is responsible for the sudden addition of two more cats into our household. Obviously when she said "After Pixel dies there will not be any more cats", Jennie failed to take into account the provision for what might happen before Pixel died, which is where the faecal finger of fate steps in to mess with my head once more. To summarise the rest of the following blog post, after the weekend passed our complement of cats, from youngest to oldest, now reads as follows:

• A 5 month old female tabby named "Trudy", which is short for "Intruder";
• A 15 month old male Burmese named "Koda", which is short for "Takoda" and is supposed to mean "Friendship" or some such, and
• A 10 year old female tortoise shell named "Pixel", which appears to be short for "Nose permanently out of place and you're all going to pay ... In your sleep."

It began last Tuesday afternoon when I got an email from Jennie saying that she wanted to adopt Koda from a family who couldn't keep him any more (allergies to animal hair). Being more than allergic to rampant insanity, I tried talking her out of it - I thought that the last thing that we needed right now was another animal, and Jennie said flat-out that she was going to use the additional cat as an excuse to get another dog in the not-too-distant future - thereby showing the additional cal to be merely the thin edge of the wedge. We've been having this on again, off again argument about the addition of a second dog to our household since about 3 or 4 minutes after we agreed to get the first dog, and there was no way I was going to leave myself open to losing that particular argument now. So, in my mind, no extra cat, and that was that. (Or so I deluded myself into thinking).

It was only after I had resigned myself to the fact that Koda was moving in that Little Miss Pushy, a.k.a the soon to be named Trudy, propped on our doorstep on Saturday night looking for a feed, a bed for the night and a ludicrously soft touch. Lucky for her she found Mrs Pushy, and made arrangements to move in with us... But only after I had walked to every other occupied house in our estate late at night with that cat in my arms asking if the occupants had managed to lose a cat recently. The easy way out, also known as Plan A, was denied to me. Every single person I spoke to on the estate either had a full complement of cats already or were militantly opposed to the idea of adopting the spare one that I had. Plan B, phoning the council to arrange for a collection of the misplaced cat, turned out to be a bust as the local council doesn't collect cats at all. Time for Plan C! Plan C involved dropping the cat off at the local vet, who would then arrange for the cat to be picked up by the local council later that day (Why we couldn't have the cat collected directly by the council, thereby cutting out the middle-man, is forever a mystery).

When Jennie was informed that Little Miss Pushy's chances of a successful adoption were virtually nil (despite being illegally cute in a built up area), she was adamant that we were going to follow Plan D and adopt Little Miss Pushy, and "suggested" that I start thinking of a suitable name. Luckily for me the 2 hour car trip to adopt the other cat (Remember the email I received on Tuesday?) provided me with ample time to work on something appropriate. The real bummer of that was that I came up with a suitable name after about 15 minutes...

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