29 Dec 2006
Good heavens!
Someone just sent me this link here.
:o)
Which led me to ego-google and I found this as well. Well I never knew that. Oh and this too.
Have fun.
So close!
I’ve now got the net from the laptop but it’s still not managing to get to the Wii. Sigh.
Somehow there’ll be a way to sort this I’m sure. Perhaps I should just whinge at the ISP.
Have fun.
Wah!
The cry of a 4 year old and a 5 year old in full flight!
We had young Bogomil up from London yesterday with his mum along with Matthew and his folks. I don’t recall ever having 2 kids of this age in my house. K was marginally fraught at times but then she was trying to help her mum cater (very well) for the crowd as well.
The 2 lads played together instantly with no problems at all. We had them drawing and playing tennis with balloons and various other high jinks.
I was under instruction to buy them both a present for Christmas so ended up at Tesco before work trying to figure out what to buy for 2 young lads. I ended up with these dinosaur egg thingies. They’re made of some stuff wot fizzes and melts away when you put them into hot water and inside you’re left with bits of dinosaur that build to make a little model. They were a hit with everyone in the house, not just the kids.
After Matthew left I was there to play with Bogomil for the rest of the evening. We ended up having a very long game of balloon tennis and then a longer game of “throw the juggling ball at the standing up juggling club”; oh what fun.
I showed him the Wii and thrashed him at Tennis (no mercy) then let him rip on Boxing. What a revelation. He hammered the first 4 opponents with barely a pause for breath. I think his mum wasn’t too happy as he seems very interested in fighting of all sorts. I think there’s a candidate for disciplined martial arts classes if ever I saw one.
After being worn out by all this palaver I retired knackered and went to bed. Sadly I didn’t get to see them this morning and they’re off before I get home from work. It was really nice to see Katya again and Bogomil has changed quite a bit since last I met him. His English is stunning compared with previously and apparently when he plays alone he talks to himself in English now rather than Bulgarian; and I detected a bit of an east London accent at times.
A cool afternoon. If a little hard work.
Have fun.
PS and I still haven’t got internet at home! This is now more than a week I’ve been cut off.
27 Dec 2006
Christmas fillums
I’ve seen a few fillums this week but none on Brit TV. Bulgarian telly showed some doozies though.
The best was “A History of Violence” by David Cronenburg and stars Viggo Mortensen. An excellent fillum worthy of your time but it’s not a happy 90 minutes. The basic plot is small town man becomes local and national hero after stopping a violent robbery. Then a gangster comes to town and reckons he knows this bloke. Then the thing becomes a “Is he who he says he is?” type wotsit and plays out beautifully. Great film by a shamefuily under-appreciated director.
Next was “Instant Message”. I’d never heard of it and for good reason. It’s a light piece of fluff for Christmas and not much more. A young boy and girl start out as pen-pals and make a pact never to phone each other but relate their lives in letter form for the other for years. Their respective pen pal becomes the person who knows them better than anyone. Then when they’re in their early twenties they get pushed into a situation where they’ll meet for the first time. But neither was particularly happy with their own confidence as a youngster so they’ve both sent photos of their best friends (attractive but not as deep, in both cases) rather than their own pics. Cue hilarity as confusion reigns as they finagle their pals into meeting their pen-pal instead of them. Oh what a wheeze. Actually it wasn’t terrible but nothing more than fluff.
“The Jackal” was the Bruce Willis remake of “Day of the Jackal”. Slightly ruined by having Richard Gere in it and not as good as the original.
Can’t think of any more now.
Have fun.
Cold Turkey
2 days before Christmas the internet at home decides to break. Router’s fine, PC is fine but the ISP can’t get any content to me. So I’ve had 5 days internet-less. It’s like losing a leg.
I’m annoyed ‘cos I can’t keep up with rec.juggling and blogs and stuff. Nor can I find Gamefaqs to get me past the bit on Twilight Princess I’m totally stuck on. K can’t find out what’s on Bg TV. And the family can’t get in touch with me to try out the webcams we all got for Christmas. I’m also late sending a CV in to Ethitec as requested.
Hopefully they’ll sort it today but they’re not guaranteeing it. Aaarggh.
Oh Christmas was nice.
The day was quiet and I cooked a whopping meal with all the trimmings (minus sprouts) which went down a treat.
Presents were opened and I managed to get half the world’s supply of chocolate and biscuits. K and Ma got electric blankets off me which seem to have gone down very well indeed.
In the evening the usual suspects came round for fun and japes. The games were good and the laughter was infectious particularly when P and C got to say “poopoo” a large number of times and then Pee did his fish impression which is never to be repeated and had to be seen to be believed.
And so back to work - and disagreeing with people on rec.juggling.
Have fun.
Wii-post
Cool
Just downloaded Opera for Wii and it works reasonably well. This post comes direct from my wiimote and hasn’t been difficult to write because the predictive text jobby is very useful.
Anyway just testing.
Have fun.
21 Dec 2006
Humbling 2
When I was a wee physio student there was one lecture that had me nauseous. It was all about burns. Surface burns are bad enough but electrical burns is what got me. The fact that the burn can be internal and along the bone; the flesh dies and becomes manky and the pain is horrible and amputation follows (perhaps). Urgh, shudder!
Today I saw a man in his late 40’s. When he was 13 he stood on the “wrong rail” when playing around some train tracks. Cue huge electric shock with massive burns both internal and external. Somehow he survived this but has been living with the consequences ever since.
Click here if you want to read more (not for everyone): Read the rest of this entry »
19 Dec 2006
Spam
I’ve been getting an annoying amount of spam messages to this site recently so I’ve introduced pre-mod from now. If you’ve had a comment published and the info you give is the same then your comments will appear as if nothing has changed.
If you’re new to the game and haven’t commented before then your first comment will be held for moderation (which I’ll do quite quickly). Once a comment is approved you’ll be free to post further comments without having to jump through this particular hoop.
Some folk are annoying.
Have fun.
Humbling
This is something that occasionally happens in my work particularly at Prince Philip House in the centre of Leicester where all the “sponging” asylum seekers live.
A man came to see me today. He’s from Eritrea. If you didn’t know this is the neighbour to Ethiopia; you know, that poor country that has no money to feed its population but plenty to fight a border war against Eritrea.
He’s a young man (early 30’s) and had been in the army as all able bodied men in Eritrea have to be (as in many countries) for a year or two. He’d left this service and returned to his family where he was the main earner since his dad died.
The border war kicked off so he got drafted. Got shot in the stomach and invalided out of the army. Recuperated then got re-drafted to do supplies work rather than fight.
He was “caught” reading a pentecostal bible rather than the official religious book (I don’t know what the official book is). Apparently he read this bible because it was in his language rather than some official lingo.
So he’s been beaten. Shot in the buttock, knee and foot. Put in hospital again with his leg in a cast. This cast was on for months. When it was taken off he was unable to move his leg much at all (as expected with this sort of treatment). One of the army doctors then proceeded to forcibly bend his knee - quite possibly one of the most painful things you could do to someone in that state. He was thrown back into prison and his leg beaten regularly until it broke again. So back to hospital and he escaped to Sudan with a friend who was a hospital worker. And he ends up here where he might actually get some sympathetic treatment.
Sometimes I really like this country. Shame about the idiots who think all “these people” are thieving scumbags.
Have more fun than him.