Eight & a half definitely is a strange movie.

I suppose it might be a bit late to ask him… But nevertheless: could Glenn Gould please just shut. the. fuck. up.

Glen: we know you’re a bloody genius, and you do temper that clavier mighty well indeed. But seriously: ENOUGH WITH THE HUMING ALREADY. It is driving me batshit crazy (not that I need much these days).

Thanks.

Have you ever noticed how, sometime, you feel so great about life that the most catastrophic news barely manage to scratch past your happiness before slipping away unnoticed…

But then, when things have come crashing down and you feel utterly miserable about everything, inside or outside, you cannot bring yourself to care, let alone rejoice, about the sort of good news you’d been waiting with baited breath for months until then.

All that in an endlessly repeating sequence, it seems.

I think we need a name for that strangely cyclical phenomenon…

Despite my tummy’s strong disapproval of last night’s excesses, I shall soon be heading north for a [supposedly] relaxing week-end in the land of plentiful, cheap, yummy Indian food (been craving a real tikka massala for months now).

See ya on the other side.

So, apparently, “The Blogosphere is in deep mourning” and It has consequently decided to stop writing about Its cat for a day, “in honor towards” the latest US shooting craze victims. All that with shiny, yet appropriately sober, webtwozero buttons, because the Blogosphere likes nothing like an easy cut-n-paste mirror-effect logo to put in Its sidebar.

While some might be prompt to point at a culturally self-centred inconsequential web fad with vaguely nauseating marketing overtones, I won’t.

In fact, let’s take it one step further!

As of today, Tuesday, April 17th, the official death count for the ongoing Darfur genocide clocks in at a little over 400,000.

By my own calculation, and using the ongoing rate for online death commemoration, this gives us a mere 33.2 years, which we will round up to 30, for simplicity’s sake.

And it is therefore with great pleasure that I hereby introduce the 30yearBlogSilence initiative. Forgive me if I haven’t got the shiny web buttons ready, but feel free to set up a website for it.

As for the starting date, I think right fucking now is probably a good time: go ahead, I’ll be right behind you.

Sara: Yea, he is a bit strange, very moody, the autistic kind, you know… talks a lot, all the time…

Dave: Autistic? talks a lot? That doesn’t make sense… Wouldn’t an autistic temperament imply that he is overly quiet and keeping to himself most of the time?

Sara: Absolutely not! What are you talking about? He’s autistic… Has those weird fits of enthusiasm, gets excited about the smallest things, you know, the way autistic people often behave…

Dave: OK. You aren’t making any sense. We can’t possibly be talking about the same definition for autism, real or pretend.

Sara: Autism??? Who talked about autism, he is autistic: he makes aut, he’s an autist… He paints mostly.

Dave: Oh…

Dave: So things didn’t work out with D.?

Michèle: Nope. I really have a hard time with relationships, these days… Girls are so fucking complicated.

Dave: You mean boys are easier?

Michèle: Of course. You guys are so easy. [makes brain-switch-off motion] So unchallenging it is restful sometimes.

Dave: Alright, then stick to guys.

Michèle: Meh. Girls have nicer ass.

Dave: Right. Plus sometimes guys wanna cuddle after sex.

Michèle: Yea, what’s up with that ?

semester over. stop. made it alive. stop. merry kwanzukkah to all. stop. will resume posting pithy comments on daily activities and the world at large : very soon. full stop.

I have been dragging a stuffy nose for weeks months now and wake up each day with a fit of dry cough that makes me feel like I’m about to hack up a lung for good. Starting to worry a little bit.

Have I…

• … got common flu?
• … pneumonia?
• … Black Lung disease?
• … lupus?
• … watched one House MD episode too many?

I know I haven’t posted much (read: anything) of interest on this blog in a long while.

This isn’t about to change. But in the meantime, here is a Music Quizz, on par with what we had here a while back, made of dub, reggae, disco and pretty much everything in between… It’s tough but interesting (very large spectrum and a few unsuspected samples).

Go have a go at it (I think I got about 5 out of eight).

I dunno if this week’s forecast of warm temperatures and summery sunshine, coming after a full month of rainy Winter in August, is Parisian Gods’ way of saying “Look, I’m sorry for what happened, I’ll treat you better from now on”…

But if it is, then consider this my most heartfelt “Too little, too late” break-up letter.

Lining in front of me this morning at the subway ticket counter: a vastly overweight woman wearing offendingly stretchy pseudo-designer clothes and tacky sunglasses, extra large Starbucks latte in one hand, giant glazed donut of same, in the other, busy yapping with another equally attired woman in the loudest yankee accent this side of Jersey…

Just when I’m about to turn the volume up on my headphones, I get a glance at the tiny flag proudly pinned to her backpack and nearly fall over laughing.

Oh yea. She looked Canadian alright. Nearly had me fooled too.

Programmers who can’t spell…

Dear unknown person who produced this unspeakably awful batch of code I have to work with:

While I realize your first language is not English, and even though I have my doubts about your French spelling abilities for that matter, could you please make an effort and not spell it ‘avaliable’ in a few hundred files and templates?

I know the code works all the same. It just bugs the hell out of me.

On my way to work this morning, it downed on me that what the world so desperately needs right now is yet another Human League electro remix, and that I may be the ideal candidate for the task.

Unfortunately, my project-manager, on the other hand, seems to think that what the world desperately needs, is another 3000 lines of code by Monday and that, incidentally, I am the ideal, if not only, candidate for the task.

I think I may be a sell-out.

(more…)

OK, here is one for the Agatha Christie crowd out there:

I come home after a long day at work (and at the pub) to a supposedly empty apartment.

There are three small, oddly shaped, puddles right in the middle of my living room and, although it has been raining today, I live on the 4th of 6th floors (that is: neither under the roof, nor potentially close to any heretofore undiscovered Parisian groundwater spring). The wallpaper-covered ceiling above said puddles shows no trace of humidity.

[...]

Can anyone please point me to an explanation that doesn’t involve an incontinent Siberian tiger breaking into my place during the afternoon and currently sleeping on my bed in the back?