Proposal for a grant? “Dear Dean of Stuff, I work at your University and I’d really like to do a study of the social networks in the Marvel comic book universe. I hope you will understand how important and useful a piece of research this could be. Yours, A. Nut.”
An otherwise wonderfully fun evening celebrating Luke‘s birthday ruined at the last minute by the discovery that I’ve lost my uninsured mobile phone, resulting in me becoming suddenly terrified about the potential cost of replacement.
Could this be the best magazine cover of all time? Or is it simply the best thing of all time? Or is it kinda dumb? Der Spiegel
I don’t know where he got the information from, but there’s a fascinating piece of writing about being born from exploding stars over at barbelith at the moment. It’s a lovely, wonderful and transformative idea – it’s also a slightly alarming one!
Researchers say twin supernovas two million years ago triggered the evolution of humankind. ìThese supernovas would have blown away our protective ozone layer,î says Dr. Narciso Benitez of Johns Hopkins University. ìEarth lost its protection against ultraviolet rays, and for several hundred years the planet would have been battered by intense radiation.î
I don’t think Cal is talking to me at the moment.
I haven’t said anything on plasticbag.org because I’ve been convinced that it would add extra pressure on me and that I’d buckle under it – but I seem to have given up smoking. It’s been almost two weeks now without a cigarette. I still want them quite badly, but I’m not having them. My ashtrays still sit in front of me on my desk – and they’re still full – I feel like if I threw them away that my totem of stubs would betray me and I’d be scratching my way out of the flat towards the local newsagent. It probably wasn’t the best time in the world to quit – but hey…
I don’t know if you’re aware of this fact – but I’m actually going to be thirty years old in roughly four months and twenty-eight days. I only mention this fact now, because clearly thirty is a big milestone and you’ll all want to be saving up so you can buy me a nice big sparkly present rather than the old tat you usually buy me (you know who you are). It occurs to me that if you people actually stopped being quite so useless and each sent me £20 via Paypal a year, then I wouldn’t have to get a damn job at the BBC anyway. Which would – of course – be their loss not mine. Sigh.
Ok, so tomorrow afternoon I should hear whether I got through the whole Occupational Psychologists’ testing – first stage of my interview process for the BBC job that I would cheerfully kill for. I’m not feeling very positive about it – in fact I feel heartily ill about it. I’ll go into full detail about the horrific experience tomorrow morning, at the moment I just want to pretend it never happened.
At the time of writing, the price of buying someone to come and kick your own ass was a mere $1.75. I wonder if it’s more if you want them to beat up other people…
