Procrastination (Japanese Sushibar Video)

I'M NOT MEANT TO BE HERE. I didn't know what to say either: so have a look at this film:~

ANOTHER SUSHIBAR CAMERA VIDEO

You can watch this at work because the dialogue's almost all in Japanese, though I think the people who put the camera on the conveyor belt (who you see) were American...

Koalas II

A FURRY MONDAY:

I wasn't into posting this at the weekend, but here's the other half of the koalas post...

Basically THIS is what it's easy to forget about bushfires; that the local wildlife suffers terribly. Lots of koalas got burned in last summer's Victoria conflagration...



Even those who were physically all right had much of their habitat destroyed. Many came wandering dazed into the suburbs desperate for drinking water. This picture of a fireman giving one a drink is famous:



Thankfully many of the casualties got treated and recovered. They can look very cute in bandages like this furry pensioner:



And this joey:



Wildlife and animal rescue charities did a sterling job:



Many babies lost their parents or were orphaned:



But were lucky enough to be rescued and taken into people's homes:





... and with a bit of luck and love they should live happily ever after...



Here's the fireman-koala-drink story from the news:

Koalas

FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAY:

Australia's cutest furries...



... are called "bears" but aren't actually bears at all...



... apart from their fur they look so cute because of their characteristic cradling...



... and hugging posture. Koalas, as you can see, have very good grip...



... which they really do need for trees as they climb them whether or not they seem to go anywhere ...



... or are perilously thin ...



... because they try to do everything up in the branches ...

... including sleeping ...

I Don't Want an HIV Test

MY DRUGGIEWORKER is on at me to get tested for HIV and hepatitis. I really don't want to get it done. I was negative last time. She doesn't think I have HIV (and remarked she thinks this is distinctly unlikely, I don't "look" like it either). But she believes hepatitis C might be a possibility because I'm so exhausted so much of the time.

Hepatitis is a "retrovirus" just like HIV. Retroviruses, as far as I understand, alter their genetic coding like the twists of a rubic's cube between generations, which is why it's so very tricky to make vaccines against them. Like HIV hep C is transmitted most "effectively" via blood-to-blood contact (hence the connexion with IV drug abuse). Unlike HIV, the hep C viruses are extremely hardy and are thought to be able to survive for months outside the body.

In the minds of the general public it's "dirty" (used) needles that spread such infections. In actuality hepatitis is said to be more likely spread via shared spoons. The microscopic viruses pass from the end of a reused needle into the drug solution and from here find their way into the myriad micro-scratches that lace the bowl of any drugs spoon, no matter how "new". It's here, in these scratches that hep C is thought to congregate and pass on and on...

... it is also suspected that hepatitis C can spread via used tourniquets (that could have micro-scabs all over them, even if they look clean) and other shared drug paraphernalia, including the citric acid or vitamin C European heroin users add to the mix to break down brown Afghan heroin.

On top of this, the testing nurse, who I've spoken to, says she knows cases who have NEVER INJECTED AT ALL ~ but caught the hep C virus most probably by sharing crack pipes. Tiny cuts or burns on the lips allow the virus in... and wahey.

In most cases hep C remains asymptomatic most of the time. When symptoms do manifest, they tend to be along the lines of constant fatigue, "brain fog", run-down-ness and depression. A very similar picture to the chronic fatigue syndrome I got diagnosed with over 15 years ago. So I really don't want hep C on top...

In a smaller number of cases, about 10-20% hep C leads on to severe liver damage and cirrhosis. In a smaller percentage, about 5% liver cancer results.

I know someone who is walking around today with less than half of his original liver as cancer ate a chunk out of it and surgeons cut a chunk more. He's the only person I know who's had interferon combination therapy to kill of the virus ~ and it worked! None of this is anything you'd go through voluntarily. After weekly "therapy" he said he could barely get out of bed for the first four days...

I have had at least four "blood bourne virus" tests, covering HIV, hep A, hep B, hep C and syphilis. Each one so far has been negative for everything, thank God. I don't know, am I being childish? I just don't want to be tested again, at least not right now. I also have reservations about just how "confidential" the results might be. Considering that even in the supposedly anonymous GUM clinic where you're encouraged to give a name "you can remember" with your real date of birth (for ease of memory, though I always made one up). Security cameras film your face on entering and leaving... Just how anonymous is any of this anyhow? Excuses, excuses I know.

I basically don't want the test...


ILLUSTRATIONS: top and bottom = HIV virus; middle = heptatitis C virus

Should This Have Been Allowed?

AT YESTERDAY'S MICHAEL JACKSON MEMORIAL SERVICE, before an estimated world TV audience of 1,000,000,000 eleven year-old Paris Jackson gave a tearful tribute to the memory of a man who, biological relation or not, had been a father to her all her life...



PAUL MCCARTNEY AND MICHAEL JACKSON: SAY SAY SAY
I think this was one of the best videos MJ ever did... also starring La Toya Jackson + the late Linda McCartney...



YOU ARE NOT ALONE ~ FANMADE MICHAEL JACKSON MONTAGE



EARTH SONG
This tune keeps going round and round my head. One of MJ's masterpieces:

New Bar Of Soap

I FOUND A NEW BAR of SOAP on the street. The wrapper said: "luxurious olive oil soap" in English and "Saf Zeytinyağı Sabunu" in Turkish. And when I attempted to coax lather from it, the bar remained harsh and dry as a block of pumice. Five minutes later a faint slime began to manifest. And got all over my hands. And unlike any other soap I'd ever known: wouldn't wash off! And worse still ~ smells of mouse urine and diarrhoea. Like, you know, that musty scent when they get in your cornflakes and the droppings swirl round the breakfast bowl like choc-chips on the milk.

Plus: the odour of the mouse-pooze mingles with overheated metal and hair. With a bit of vitriolic acid plopped on the hair for good effect.

It's as if I've buried my hands overnight in a mousey public toilet. And this sick aroma won't come off! Help me someone, please.

My Brains Have Turned To Prawns

(THOSE ARE SHRIMPS to you Western Hemespherites who don't understand our Old World language ...)

OK I know I'm repeating~repeating~repeating myself (what changes) but my brains have turned to mush. From what? From too much Spanish, of course. All in an attempt "not to be lazy" I have been cramming the language into my head as if I had brains the size of Olympic swimming pools, which I do not.

In consequence most of it has splurged out again. I have an ooze of Spanish-word-paella trickling back out of my ears.

When will I ever be complete again? When will I ever sleep without dreaming (and Sueños, as in BBC Sueños World Spanish, means "dreams") ... without my sleep being piqued and punctuated by Spanish donkeys, por favors, Mexican heroin farms, more donkeys, great costas, people booking hotel rooms in polysyllabic gradually fading drivel ... and so on and so on.

Help me. Help me please! I am drowning in foreign words!!

PS Let me stress: I have never eaten a prawn in my life, except by accident. (And that one was disgusting.) And I never would. Prawns are UNCLEAN, rank sewerage-cleaners of the oceans and thus unfit for human consumption. And, might I add, every time people have mocked me for this belief and gorged THEMSELVES on all the prawn satay sticks THEY got food poisoning and I escaped it. So who had the last laugh THERE??

IT'S ALL GONE PETE TONG
THIS is why MOST young Brits go to Spain... specifically IBIZA!!
('Cept I wouldn't: I'm too ******* OLD!!)
PS You really do see great snaggletoothed furry monsters (as at 0mins 31; 2mins 16), if you do too much coke...



AND HERE'S A "BALEARIC" MUSICAL BREAK:

Woodmice

A FURRY FRIDAY ON SATURDAYS POST...

THIS IS MY SECOND FURRY WEEKEND POST: DON'T MISS ALSO FURRY FRIDAY ON FRIDAY ~ FANTASTIC MR FOX! ... JUST SCROLL DOWN

AND HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY TO Y'ALL OUT THERE IN THE MIGHTY U.S. OF A!

The woodmouse Apodemus sylvaticus) is one of the perkiest furries of the British hedgerow. Their conker-coloured fur covers a droplet-shaped body with long tail ~ for lots of nimble clambering ~ and poppy bright eyes. Although they might venture into outbuildings, woodmice are never known to live inside people's homes. Being totally native species to the British Isles they cannot stand the artificial heat. Their domain is the countryside and the great outdoors:



They crouch with a distinctive posture:



And are not to be confused with the smaller-eyed greyer-coated common housemouse (Mus musculus), who, having travelled to these isles on cargo ships from warmer lands frequently ventures inside to "forage" out our food and take shelter from our inconveniently harsh winters!



The woodmouse is closely related to the larger yellow-necked mouse (Apodemus flavicollis)



Woodmice and yellow-necked mice both hibernate in winter, and are often to be found in vast underground nesting chambers snoozing on top of one another huddled for warmth in furry heaps. These enterprising little critters will survive on any food they can get their paws on:



Of course they have to be exceedingly agile to survive:



Woodmice are not generally kept as pets, though they may become tame if accustomed to human contact at a young enough age. They are born blind, bald and naked, like "baked beans with paws". This is what they look like with first fur, still a few days old. Note the eyes remain closed:



This one is but a few weeks old. Look at the perky expression on that face!

Spare a Thought For Halfwit

NEVER APOLOGIZE. NEVER EXPLAIN. ~ IMMANUEL KANT. As quoted at Melody Lee's blog...

Spare a thought for poor Freddy Halfwit. He is a contestant on the current series of Big Brother. This year Big Brother played a trick on all potential housemates, by letting them into the house, yet forcing them to "earn" the right to full-housemateship by completing (usually bluffed) tasks e.g. "walking across broken glass in bare feet" ~ it was actually sugar glass as used in the movies. Poor Freddie, and a braindead topless model called Sophie made it first to the diary room and were told they would only be allowed in if they changed their names by deed poll to Halfwit and Dogface. Which they duly did. Nobody calls Dogface that because she's actually quite pretty (though what she has in prettiness she loses in dullness bigtime). But poor Halfwit is universally known by that name.

For his terrible singing. His crackpot theories (which actually hold a lot of sense, it's their expression and endless repetition that's halfwitted). His constant need to apologize and explain and demand to know what's the problem rather than just dropping things and just letting them go (a skill I'd like to think I learned years ago but we all make mistakes). His gone-out facial expressions (the photo is quite characteristic). And best of all, his description of a good party: "we all eat lasagne and sit around strumming guitars all night and philosophizing" (but I'd be quite intrigued to attend one of these.)

Now, as you probably know, each week, every housemate must enter two nominations, with "valid reasons" for whatever housemates they think should face the public vote that Friday. It says everything that poor Halfwit has faced eviction EVERY SINGLE WEEK.

From being an annoying character who smiled inanely and proclaimed he was "drunk on life", he is now limping, wounded, apologizing for every insult thrown his way.

Now, just like a shark with a broken fin, the others circle around him regularly taking pops at him and anything he says or does is just used against him. If I could pass in a secret message I'd say, "Freddie: stop apologizing and explaining. Keep quiet and get strength from that

Never apologize. Never explain. said Immanuel Kant (as quoted at Melody Lee's blog).

In his defence, poor halfwit is intelligent (too intelligent; this has been his biggest failing: his way of expressing philosophical points e.g. about the house being divided into "wolves, sheep, shepherds and individuals" in his posh accent comes over as patronizing) but best of all he seems quite pure of heart, which is quite an unusual thing these days... Far far more of a fascination than the shallow wannabes who make up more than half of the Big Brother house year on year...

HAVE A LOOK AT THIS:



For the record, I liked Angel the most. She was a genuine individual and only got knocked out for ridiculously going around telling the girls they all "looked pregnant" and "needed to lose 10kg each" the day before nominations. Hardly the actions of a "schemer who knows what she's doing," as Lisa ((pink hairstripe) rival lesbian and the biggest gameplayer in the house) put it. Her Russian accent was very sexy and despite the lesbionic chic I thought her heartshaped Madonna face very pretty:



FOOT MUSHROOMS ~ GOING ALREADY! From a choice of "Lamasil Once" ~4g @ 1%, £8 or Lamsil ordinary ~ 15g@1%, only £6... (Do they think we're idiots?) ... Which do you think I went for..??!? It's working very efficaciously, thankyouverymuchindeed...

My feet are less cracked and dry. FAR less smelly ~ yeeurkh! They never were "fissured and running with yellow pus" as the leaflet described the most extreme manifestation.

But they were getting highly inconvenient in all this heat. And are far less inconvenient now...


NOW TO MY TROTTERDONKEY SPANISH... I have por favors and yo, tú, él, nostros etc verbs coming out of my ears. Together with accompanying Spanish mandolin sounds. I'm starting to think these courses have booked the same sessions guitar player. A poor old man with a donkey trundling across the Andalusían countryside swigging wine from old skins as he clip-clops from recording studio to recording studio. "Oh man! Today I must go back recording studio for BBC Sueños ~ I tell them mañana, mañana, they no listen... why they no call yesterday when I do Teach Yourself, Berlitz and Routledge!" he mutters as the donkey wearily treads on...

... Not to be too ambitious but I was thinking of trying to get on an A Level Spanish course in the autumn. An A Level is what you do after completing three month's of solid effort in a British high school diluted into five years. I.e. you pass the GCSE or lower school certificate in a language. To get this you must be able to read basic texts, e.g. menus, instructions, postcards, letters, emails, handle yourself in everyday situations talking about yourself and your background, ordering food and drink, buying things, giving directions etc. And have good listening comprehension skills for recordings e.g. of people talking about themselves and their families, their passtimes and musical tastes. The courses I've got out of the library cover all this and the approximate vocabulary of 1500 words you need for a GCSE. Though you need to give it quite some welly to pick up all the words. I am only on lesson 3 of 15 and have been putting in a good 2 hours a day. And I still keep forgetting absolutely elementary things like how to say "you are" using "ser" (to be constantly) rather than "estar" (to be in the moment). Ser is what you ARE, estar is e.g. how you feel. I get the distinction but forget the declensions. Anyway I thought that might be a good goal, if I can complete these studies full-on for three months I'd like to do an A Level or higher school certificate in Spanish ~ but ONLY if it includes literature studies. I hate the modern business-oriented courses. We did French like that at A Level but German with literature and the French felt so soulless in comparison... Not to mention the fact that literature adds to your vocabulary immensely, especially if you can do poetry (fewer words, more meaning, less flicking through the bilingual dictionary...)

~~OH SHUT UP!!~~

I had a browse over the internet but found no inspiring-looking courses. Maple Syrup launches to the most obvious "oh do a course in Spanish" but you get so many free course credits paid for you and I'm not wasting these on basic level courses I can race through at home: if I'm willing to practise ad nauseum for hours each day. Anyone can do it this quick if they apply themselves, there's nothing special about me except the desire to learn.

After all this slogging through CDs, dictionaries and filling notebooks full of grammar and vocabulary I'm utterly drained. Which makes me wonder whether I'll ever be able to hold down a proper job. Because it's not as if I'll accept workworkwork and just sleep as a compromise. No! I'll STILL be learning 2 languages ON TOP of a full day's activities ~ see what I mean? There's no "instead" about it...

~~WHO CARES ABOUT ANY OF THIS... BLAH BLAH BLAH BLIBBLIBBLIB... B L O B .. ! ~~

OK so that's me for today. And how was your day? Have a cheery weekend, y'all... and don't forget furry Friday's foxes BELOW...


áéíñóúü ¡...? and ¿...!

Fantastic Mr Fox!

(A FURRY FRIDAY ON FRIDAY POST)

AS I MENTIONED IN YESTERDAY's comments, I cannot put out my rubbish for fear of the local foxes ripping it apart ~ and all manner of telling accoutrements to methadone and heroin taking tumbling across our front yard. I try to fish these out in advance but have not ALWAYS been successful...

I thought North America had far more wildlife than we have here. Everything we get Americans and Canadians have too, only polar bears, raccoons and coyotes in addition... Isn't it true that some towns in the icy north have to shut off major roads because of the polar bear population crossing..?

Our only truly urbanized (nondomesticated) mammal is the FOX. Being omnivores and not averse to carrion (pre-killed meat), they come to towns for the easy pickings from our bins. O yeah! You regularly see foxes trotting down the rd at 4 in the morning with Chinese chicken hotwings in their snouts ~ the thieving swines!

Foxes are of course related to dogs, but unlike doggies, these clever creatures dig huge holes with tunnels and nest chambers and sleep safely underground all day, only venturing out in the depths of night when most human beings are either asleep or too oblivious to care. Here's a fox hole:



Foxes are well known for being sneaky and sly:



If you have bins for rifling they will rifle them. Or pinch any food they can get their nose round:



And can end up in some surprising places:



Foxes can show surprising initiative when a potential dinner's involved. Look at this swine, tugging its way in to that lopsy-eared bunny!



Occasionally urban foxes can become uncannily tame:



~Baby foxes look just like Porkshire terriers or chihuahuas:

Foot Mushrooms!

ALL THIS "HEATWAVE" SWEATING has brought me out in the most terrible "athlete's" feet and prickly heat. That river of perspiration running down my back has sprouted all manner of fungal growths. I know what's happening because it happened before at my old house with radiators on full blast in high summer. The house where I lost my mind.

So I'm now covered in two types of antifungal emollients. One a "wash" the other a "creme" formulation.

These unguents are said to go on working for some time after application and hopefully will get zonked out straight away by this highly proactive nuking situation.

I also bought miracle "yukky foot smell in old boots and trainers begone" spray for about £5 ~ and amazingly it works!

If there's any other intimate medical details you'd like to know ~ just ask.

It's what that comments box is all about!!

PS: "foot mushrooms" ~ Fußpilz or Fusspilz ~ being the Germans' charmingly direct expression for "athlete's foot"..!

PPS: Can anyone name the "brand" of mushrooms illustrated?... If so, you might get a cash prize!

(And also might not)...

MICHAEL JACKSON: "MILK OF AMNESIA" FOUND AT STAR'S HOME

MICHAEL JACKSON was on some hardcore pharmaceuticals, the Sun newspaper reveals. The most recent allegation being that a bottle of Propofol, an "anaesthetic induction agent" (ie something you IV and it zonks you right out) was discovered in the late superstar's boudoir.

Media sources are claiming the singer regularly "begged" his nurses for this medication and that he was taking it just to sleep at night!

Propofol is classed as a nonbarbiturate hypnotic agent that should be used with extreme caution in conjunction with opioid analgesics. In other words, it is being alleged, the combination of this with everything else Jackson was alleged to be on, could well be what finished him off.

This medication should only ever be administered by a trained anaesthetist in an operating-theatre situation, physicians insist.

So what on earth was it doing in Michael Jackson's bedroom..?