nixsight

[edit] Test over… thanks to those of you who had a look… I am sticking with the normal design for a while, as I think it’s ace, but may make a more prominent, less navigation-intrusive space for the ads in a third column (more…)

The two “Life Isn’t A Box Of Chocolates, It’s A Rucksack Full Of Shit” pieces are the first of a new category I’m starting, called Broken Narratives. This category is going to be reserved for pieces of writing that I’ve unearthed that, for some reason, I don’t think I’m ever going to finish, but can’t find it in my heart to discard. (more…)

At lunchtime the weather was fine, but now it looks like there’s a storm coming.

The fact is that it hasn’t been the same since the hospital.
She still fetches the kids, smiles as she tells them stories about being grown up, or settles them in front of the telly while she does the dishes, to make it easier for mum to do dinner when she gets in.
Dad still comes home around the same time as mum, but he always wants to get in the shower first thing, wash off the garage before anyone has to kiss him, so there’s still the half hour of chatting at the kitchen table, the two women of the house, before he swoops down the stairs and fills the house with his booming laugh. (more…)

“One of the clients suggested that he might kill himself today.”
“Really? Which one?” (more…)

… who sometimes, when typing quite fast, hears the theme music to Murder, She Wrote in the back of their mind?

I felt like maybe I should credit the good people whose plugins I’m using on WordPress, so I’ve done so.

Oh, right. Yeah. It’s here: Plugin love

On Thursday, zeFrank completely nailed my feelings on the current cultural and political response to the recent thwarting of the terrorist plot to ‘splode lots of planes, with lots of people on them, and the subsequent mayhem caused.

To hear the genius at work, click here. If you’ve never heard him before, persevere… his delivery may disorientate you to begin with, but that’s because he’s smarter than you.

(He follows it up with a cutely self-conscious diss of himself on Friday’s show, and addresses similar issues in a very insightful riff on the American threat measurement system here.)

The always enjoyable, often ascerbic Pigdogfucker covered similar ground this week, here and here, but for me, zeFrank really gets to the point most concisely.

Josh Ellis (another very smart man that I don’t always agree with, but more often do) sheds light on related terrorist-based craziness here.

J, my housemate, has been following the ins and outs of what’s been released about the investigation, in the news and on a couple of the related plane-porn forums he reads, and he and I are both amazed at how uncharacteristically bad and speculative early BBC coverage of the situation has been, and conversely, how much better the New York Times website reported on the story.

I don’t really have much to add on the subject, because I am shamed by my inability to collate the data through the spin the way J does, beyond that I spotted the use of the term “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” a few times in the coverage, and couldn’t help but wonder which planet the speaker had been living on for the last few years. Couching everything that happens in this sort of language is deliberately upping the emotional currency of situations that are already emotional enough, and to my mind completely fucking irresponsible. But, uh… zeFrank kind of deals with that issue better and more concisely than I just have.

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This is just an experimental post, while I work out if I’m into that whole “this is the song I want to share with you right the hell now” thing… It’s a nice idea, but I’m not sure how I feel about glomming so completely off other people’s creativity. Oh, also, about ever using the word “glomming” again…

Apologies to those of you who read the site pretty regularly, as you may, once again, have been confused to see that Google’s all powerful, “Do No Evil”, super-smart Adsense software, with it’s awesome interpreting power and generally spankiness, decided that the most appropriate websites to advertise, tailored as they are specifically to my website, were all either Christian propoganda sites, or dating places for young Muslim women in the UK.

Apologies also to those of you who are either young Muslim women in the UK hoping to hook up with a bright-eyed young Christian fella, or vice-versa, because I am frantically adding each one of those sorts of sites shown here to my Adsense “no fucking way do I wish to advertise these sites round these parts” filter. Which is a pain in the ass, but what are you going to do?
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Which, of course, isn’t news to anyone, but I’ve really done it this time…

So, last week, for a couple of days, I had pretty bad back and kidney pains… I had entertained the vague concern that I might be dying of something sneaky and pernicious (and a beautiful young woman of my recent acquaintance entertained the idea that I might be angling for a massage. I am of the opinion that a massage is a pleasant, relaxing activity that first and foremost is about relieving aches and pains, but happily often ends up in sexual exploits. She is of the opposite opinion, that they are solely a mechanism of seduction, and who do I think I’m fooling? She is, as it turns out, probably quite a bit more perceptive than I am smart…)
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