Birthday Clippings

...so it's my birthday again, and another year has come and gone in the life of the Michael. Mom made shortbread to give my array of cakes for the office a personal touch, which was very well received by all. Got a number of lovely missives from family in their various locales, including a great one from Keith, in which he mentioned that he's been on a special regimen of late.

He writes:

"Since my birthday, I have been put on the soup diet and have so far survived four out of seven days without alcohol, bread or sugar. This is indeed a testing exercise but so far I have shed some 4kg. Rude people comment - 'Oh well, he had plenty to lose!'"

Personally, I'm wondering if you could puree a filet mignon with roast potatoes and call it a soup...

I was reminded of an exchange I had back in March. Shortly after I got back down here I bumped into Felix Katsi-Katsi, an old friend from UCT days. One of his first comments was, "Oh, Michael, you're looking very... happy." Which I though was nice of him, and in fact I was in a particularly good humour that day. Then he explained himself more thoroughly: "Actually, in our culture, when we say someone is looking happy, it means, um... well-fed." Gee, thanks.

So I sympathise!

This past weekend was heavily centred on recuperation after last week's illness. I went out to Paulaner Brauhaus on Saturday night with Tiffany, and recuperated my way through a litre of weissbier. Then had a picnic (around the kitchen table as it was raining) out in Camps Bay on Sunday with Nicola and some of her friends, and I recuperated my way through a bottle of wine and a vast quantity of most excellent cheese.

Mmm... therapeutic.

Sickness continued...

Sorry, hated to leave the post hanging like that but I really had no choice. The pain became too much and I had to get me home to bed. Tony was looking for an excuse to escape the office, so he offered to run me home. Back at work today after a lot of bed rest, vitamin C and aspirin...

But to continue...

As wonderful as Saturday evening was, I did notice that my mind was unusually quick to deliberately mis-interpret what was being said. Considering that all those present were speaking entirely without malice or suggestiveness, I kept finding myself battling not to pass comments when I heard such things as:
"I want to puff on someone else's cigar."
"This one's pretty small, and the end is wet."
"When was the last time you had a good ride?"
...which referred respectively to someone having been offered their own cigar, describing a cigarillo which was currently in use, and inquiring as to how much cycling the other had recently enjoyed.

Where is my mind...?

Anyway, Sunday was an awesome day - went out to Stellenbosch with the parents to watch Douglas playing hockey, as he had been chosen for Maties firsts - very impressive. And they were playing Ikeys! Doug played well, but the final scoreline favoured UCT. And then a fabulous lunch at the Blue Orange with Douglas and Carli and Lianda, Doug's g/f. (I hadn't met her before, though everyone else had).

I'll end off here before I get myself into any more trouble, but before I go, I'll make one final suggestion:

Read "Questionable Content". You won't regret it.

Sickness prevails

Yuck, I hate being sick.

Here I was, mentally preparing to write about the great weekend I've just had, and instead I'm sitting here with a horrible flu. My muscles ache so much that it's difficult even to type, and the pressure of sitting upright is making my lower back scream in pain.

Screw it.

I'm not going to wait any longer. I'm too thrilled by my recent discovery to put this posting off.

So there I was, minding my own business on a Thursday morning at work, when I stumbled across a most magnificent website. An online cartoon so captivatingly brilliant that I spent the rest of the day... and the whole of Friday... reading back archives of the strip instead of working.

The strip is called "Questionable Content". As with any humour its quality is highly subjective, so there may well be readers who are either shocked or bored by it, but it appeals to me immensely. If you don't get it, you're probably either offended by honesty or just have no sense of humour, but for the rest, check it out for yourselves.

My own experience has been that it transports me to a weird happy place where life is better and more hopeful. To paraphrase one of the central characters of the strip, there are no adjectives to adequately describe the unexpected joy I've experienced while reading it. The personalities are beautifully complex, the drawings are attractive and fun to look at, and the script, THE SCRIPT!

Let's just say that my frequent collapses into a giggling puddle of mirth over the past two days have caused a bit of confusion among my co-workers...

Equally gratifying was the fact that it's intelligent and deep enough that I was forced to Google a couple of the phrases in order to get the full meaning of the relevant strips. (Not living in the States at the mo, I don't always catch the more obscure cultural chirps...) But any cartoon which references Frank Herbert's "Dune", Monty Python's "Life of Brian" and Picasso's "Guernica" has got to be seriously cool.

Anyway...

The whole reason I found the site was actually because Gavin forwarded me a DinosaurComic, and I browsed through that site's links page. Loads of other good stuff there, so check out that site too.

Thursday night was actually rather lousy. Spent the evening trying to transfer data from my old laptop HDD to the new one, with the unfortunate result that my old drive died... before I could remove any irreplaceable data...

Very frustrating. Still haven't managed to get the data off, but I remain hopeful.

I was so fed-up and exhausted on Friday that I actually went to bed as soon as I got home, and slept from about 6-11pm. Then I woke up, and spent the rest of the night watching old DVDs, getting back to bed at about 8am. A few hours later, got up and went out to Tokai to visit my parents, and then went to Tim's house in the evening for port and poetry. Excellent fun - read some of Big Jim's poems, which were well received (despite being pretty dark). Tiffany arrived towards the end of the evening, stressed after a long day of work, so the next two hours involved an exchange of neck and shoulder massages.

to be continued...