Budgerigars!

Feathery Friday on Saturday

Budgies are native to the Australian outback, where they fly around in huge green flocks. When they get tired they like to stop for a chat on a tree:



Sometimes the flocks are enormous:



Budgies make good pets as small birds go. They are members of the parrot family and thus quite intelligent and calm. They can also learn 2000 or more words of human language, and be bred in a multitude of colours, especially blue...



Of course the babies look very cute:



Have a good weekend.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?... Online!

I AM "IMPROVING MY GERMAN" by playing Sims 3 on my mobile phone. Although my first impression of the game was that it was devastatingly boring ~ all you seem to do is run between the loo, the bath, the TV set, flirt and kiss anyone of either sex (gets you more points) and do everything possible to stay in someone else's house (saves money) ~ then when you can't sleep, spend the night fishing and gardening... these are my tips for playing the Sims and I now have close to $3000 in Sim tokens/whatever they're called. But I have 2 boyfriends and 2 girlfriends and sometimes when all 4 are in the room at whoever's house I'm freeloading at, chaos ensues when I trie to plant a "hot kiss" on every one in a row... Anyway, where was this going? O yeah: because it's in GERMAN ~ I had terrible problems with one of the commands. I thought because it was under "hot kiss" it meant going even further (ie that they would like me more). But apparently, so I hear, "beleidigen" means "to insult" ~ no wonder I was constantly being left on my own!!

Speaking of online education, I am also setting up a Learn Japanese Free Online blog with all the links and hopefully embedded youtube screens for tutorials, games, etc. There are so many resources and with Rosetta stone weighing in at £380 for three levels with a mere 1500 word (ie very basic) vocabulary I decided I can afford not to bother with that (unless I could find it bargainaciously cheap on ebay... If anyone's interested in learning Japanese I will give the link once there's something actually on the page.

And last but not least: does anybody remember those oldfashioned text adventure games of the 1980s. "Interactive fiction" they are sometimes called. Well here's Zork: the biggest of them all. http://thcnet.net/error/index.php

PS sorry this site has gone so dull lately. Trust me, it's nowhere nearly as dull as I am.

PPS BTW here is a blog by someone who is trying to play homeless Sims who live a cashless life in a park...

Ashley-Cheryl Divorce

CHERYL COLE, Girls Aloud beauty and X-Factor judge is the talk of the nation this week because she is finally divorcing her deadbeat footballer husband, Ashley.

The newspapers know she is over him because she spent eight hours in a hotel room with her American dancer Derek Hough and his very cute yorkshire terrier. You can see the doggie by clicking here.

Today's Sun claims she is changing her name back to Cheryl Tweedy and compulsively removing every trace of her cheating sex-pest other half from their Surrey mansion. The newspaper claims she will not be pursuing him for a giant cut of his £14 million ($20 million) fortune, seeing as she has a few mill of her own.

For those of you reading this on Stateside shores feeling glad this tittle-tattle is of utter irrelevance to you ~ be warned! Simon Cowell is planning, so the newspapers claim, to set up Cheryl, who won her fame on a Popstars: The Rivals talent show as a judge on his new American X-Factor tellyprog. Which means that within the year her name might be resonating around the disinterested rafters of your brain, just like it does mine!

Birdie Din-dins

I SAW a gorgeous pigeon today in the bushes by the library. He looked just like this one, with white neck.

My first thought was: What a beautiful bird.

My second said: He would make a beautiful pie!!

But I didn't trap him or eat him. Instead I stalked him with my mobile phone camera, and got shots of undergrowth with "find the pigeon" puzzle (like those hidden-object games) ~ the 21st Century "spot the difference". (These are the only newspaper puzzles I'm truly good at. Crosswords rely on spelling rather than language itself (which would appeal to me more). Sudoku was invented by the Japanese because their language will not fit into crosswords. I recently told someone this and he was gobsmacked and said "well I never thought of that before!" ~ come on!

I HAVE YET another druggieworker as my old new one's leaving. The new one is a nutnut nurse. So I've come full circle. I even went to a dual diagnosis support group. Is it irony or fate or what is it? ~~ that I felt I had far more in common with the medicated psychotics in that room than the typical boringly alike swaggering junkies you get in other druggiemeets...?

At least people who go crazy end up in different places and get there different ways. Insanity comes in strikingly varied colours. Drug addicts, on the other hand, are all such the same-same-same they are chronically boring. The attitude is boring. The brittle exterior. The "I'm better at being an addict than you" you hear all the time. All boring boring boring. Same same same. And they're all liars. Partly because the system trains them to be... through the unrealistic expectations it places on addicts and the continual, implied threat that if you don't claim to be doing well enough you'll get cut off your script. Why on earth anyone would work with druggies by choice, especially in a "one substitute fits all" methadone clinic is beyond my comprehension... But there you go.

I'm off now for industrial cod-in-parsley-sauce on wild mushroom tortelloni with Orkney cheddar-sprinkled broccoli.

So what are you having for tea?

Takeaway

I SPLURGED OUT on Chinese takeaway last night. Chicken ~ satay sauce ~ mixed vegetable fried rice. I felt awfully indulgent spending the 80p extra ~ £3 on the paltry amount of demoralized veg they throw in against £2.20 on "egg fried" rice, but I was in a liberal mood so I splashed out anyway. And didn't even curse myself for missing half of EastEnders in the process..!

The whole thing cost me £7.

How times change! I used to buy chicken curry ~ egg fried rice for £3 back in 1992!

That was just about the only nutrition I ever ate in those days, when white bread and jam was what I considered a tasty meal and our sinister landlord never deigned to fix our unworkable oven the entire 12 months we were in there. 2 students and me, the depressed university drop-out who was so unemployable I got turned down for CLOAK ROOM ATTENDANT jobs~!!

1992 feels almost like yesterday in so many ways... that year was the heartland of hardcore "rave", a scene that I liked, but was never really part of. I didn't have the right friends, liked the euphoriant drugs, but was far too depressed ~ clinically so: dragging myself back and forth between psychiatrists' and counsellors' appointments, spending all day doing not very much, and never making seminars (we didn't have lectures ~ a passive form of education like that would have far appealed to me the miserable state I was in...)

What I remember most about that time is absolutely hating being alone. My head was about as comfortable a place to live as a roofless burned-out house with boarded windows, no electricity and only rats and mildew for company. So I paid these visits on poor, unfortunate other students who must have cursed the day they made my acquaintance. This was student residences, so visiting unannounced wasn't quite the social faux pas it becomes in later years. Certain rooms attracted a nightly crowd of TV watchers/music listeners/spliffsmokers anyhow. And I sat there. And most of the time had nothing at all to say. Nothing. No confidence. No shared interests. No attraction or attractiveness. Why on earth I didn't just jump in front of a train back then and put everyone out of their misery I do not know... O yes I do. Because I was in Norwich, which is at the end of the line. How very symbolic!

I had a semi-fixation with heroin even back then, though I didn't take it and certainly wasn't fool enough or desperate enough to hang around the roughest areas of town to get ripped off.

Heroin's main appeal to me was those government "Heroin Screws You Up" posters which portrayed alienated youthful angst and said: Do you feel like this? Then heroin's for you! This is widely dubbed the biggest backfiring ad campain in UK history. I mean, I'm not alone in my experience.

The second appeal of heroin was the taboo. I kind of semi fell in with a crowd who thought they were awfully hardcore and clever to be experimenting left, right and centre with every new dance pill that came out, various lines of powders ... even ~ ooh! cocaine ~ which was ever so glamorous and forbidden. But if you so much as even mentioned smack, all this open-mindedness closed off. Which made the drug appeal to me even more. So in a way it wasn't peer pressure, but peer antipressure that turned me in the opiate direction. Though I never found myself near any such "scene" for several years after this university student disaster experience of mine...

Thirdly I knew heroin could kill me ~ and that heroin is a painkiller that makes you "high". Nobody could explain this high in a satisfactory way (which piqued yet more curiosity)... but I did recognize that heroin overdose was a painless "easy" death. In fact the first time I ever tried to score I was intent on killing myself, so I gave someone I knew could get heroin (I had met a "connexion" by that time) £50 and said get me as much as you can, fully intending to snort the whole lot and hopefully never open my eyes again. When he gave my money back saying he couldn't get it I was gutted and instead tried zonking myself out on sleeping pills and drink and drowning myself in the bath, fully clothed and weighed down with bricks and as many layers of clothes as I could fit on. But I woke up freezing cold and floating many hours later. Yet another failure.

All in all, re those only days, when I so hated feeling as I did I was prepared to take acid and have a horrible trip than feel dull and depressed as I was, I am glad in a way I never did find heroin. Because if I had, I am sure without any doubt that I wouldn't be alive and posting this now.

I was so sad the other night I googled some old "rave" anthems on my phone. This was one of the nights I was awake all night... and felt incredibly old (the music is now called "old skool") and saw how crap most of those parties actually were. (You had to be on drugs to survive one...!)

Anyway. How Chinese takeaway got me on to all this I do not know, but I have to go. It's pissing it down outside, the most gormless of days. Grey skies, drizzle and damp.

PS if you think a three-headed skull-tongue man is a "symbolic" not literal experience, you've never dropped acid!

BODYSNATCH: JUST 4U LONDON
This one sounded transcendently beautiful at 4am on lots of "E"...



"MDMA: a drug so strong makes white men think they can dance ~ no wonder it's illegal":

It's not just the "cool moves" that are so appauling here... its' the thought that these people are in or nearly in their 40s today..!



URBAN SHAKEDOWN: SOME JUSTICE
(why on earth it was called that I've no idea ~ those words are nowhere to be heard in this track...)
"We live as one family" ~ ie "we are all together on E, E, E!!" ...
MDMA/Ecstasy is famous for the transcendent feelings of "empathy and togetherness" it engenders (as well as flying euphoria and irresistible urge to dance) ~ This is what the rave scene was all about. Worst of all, some of us BELIEVED in them..!!! Not so much the druggie stuff but what seemed to be "behind" it all. What utter utter crap.

Desparing...

ACTUALLY I despair most of all of any medical professional (with few exceptions) ever listening to me..!

I feel ill all the time. I am exhausted. I am not sleeping properly. The psychiatric nurse I've been seeing an hour a week says I'm depressed.

I feel bloody terrible. And desperate. Especially after what has happened to me when I've tried antidepressants in the past ~ namely three different eventualities:

1. side-effects but no antidepression
2. (ONCE ~ in about 7 or 8 different drugs) ~ the proper antidepressant effect works and I feel much better
or ~ most usually
3. severe psychiatric side-effects kick in, including agitation and insomnia. I cannot keep still and annoy everyone. I become euphoric and a bit "manic", as if I'm turning from a depressive into a manic-depressive... ~ and last time I went crashing down worse than I'd ever been depressed to start with. I was having hallucinations ~ which I thought were alcoholic DTs. I was physically shaky and people thought I was drunk (but I wasn't). I didn't even realize the pills were doing this, but put it in terms of a moral and spiritual crisis, the "rock bottom" all junkies have to hit before they can clean up. I was so low I didn't even want to take heroin any more, and trust me, I have to be very low indeed to feel that way...

I saw my smiley Nigerian Dr Chumbawumba this morning to tell her all this and that the council have demanded a letter explaining how/why/whatever I got into such a mess. She is the one who, when told I was a chronic heroin addict simply said to me "why don't you just stop taking that stuff"? Dur. Today she declared my antidepressant dramas are only a normal experience when you take such pills. She said tell the nurse and psychiatrist at your druggieservice to write it for you. So that is what I'll do. I have very low hopes of all this getting sorted. Why won't she just parrot the nurse's "to whom it may concern" letter I gave to her? That's all they're asking. Ho-hum.

At least the paperwork the council asked for is all in place and ready to be delivered at my next appointment.

Apart from that, though, I really don't know what to do. I feel I'm barely coping at all.



TALKING ABOUT that Mystery of the Universe known as Happiness, hava peruse of Ms Hen's post today on the subject... now here's a woman who understands the keys to Reality. I dare you to click on my Deer Hunter Music (Saturday) and read her blog with that playing beautifully in the background...

Sublime Saturdays

THIS MUSIC, which I know as "the gallery" from Tony Hart's kiddies TV art show, but most folks would know as the theme from The Deer Hunter:

The music's proper name is Cavatina, composed for the film by Stanley Myers and performed on guitar by John Williams.



With words added, the song is sometimes known as "She (or He) Was Beautiful" ~ performed here by Iris Williams, who has a gorgeous warm voice ~ but no Spanish guitar to be heard!:

Countless Free Games!

I DON'T KNOW whether it's my mobile phone having the breakdown now, but I downloaded a game for £4.99 yesterday ~ it was called deBlob and you go around blobbing into them and painting buildings various colours. I soon got tired of it. So I had a look down the list of 62 other games available. No Jet Set Willy (see yesterday), and nothing really caught my eye. But I found one called Anno I liked the look of. By now my credit was about £2.30 because I'd also sent my Dad a video message that cost me nearly £2. So I downloaded the £4.99 game anyhow ~ and it loaded up. After this I got into a loading frenzy and am now the proud possessor of Sim City Metropolis, Earthworm Jim, Edge, McVenture, The Sims 3, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Monopoly World, Trivial Pursuit 2010 and Sonic Unleashed ... that's about £60 worth of games on "paper" (as if phones would use oldfashioned paper these days!!)... but it cost me nothing.

But how did all this happen? Did the phone make a mistake and give me the entire lot free? Are they on 24 hours' approval? Will my next 6 topups get instantly drained as cyber-bailiffs home in to collect the debt?

Do you think the FBI will arrest me when I dare step foot on American soil? Can anybody explain anything about this?

Interestingly it's two of the games I thought would be least interesting that rivetted me most: Edge ~ a cube-rolling vaguely Tetris-like situation that reminds me of the old Adventure Game on BBC2 ("gronda-gronda your royal highness!" said the Chinese lady to the teapot... then the plucky adventurers did indeed brave cyber-squared spreading out to the edge of the universe, and if they lost, fell off into the infinite dark... and good old Monopoly, which I play against my telephone, and am currently winning hands-down!

And how was your day??!?

Edge: phone game review



Monopoly Here And Now World Edition:




Sorry my blog has got about as boring as smelling an old man pissing in a lavatory. I'm sorry, really. I feel so depressed otherwise... what do you want to hear about? How I'm miserable, not sleeping and sporadically drinking too much..?

Last but not least...
The Adventure Game ... hammy acting, not-too-bad-for-1986 special effects and... well ~
Just see for yourselves:






DON'T MISS EASTENDERS' 25th anniversary live episode tonight, BBC1, 8pm if you're in the UK ~ outlanders might be able to view later on BBC America/other carriers... we get to find out WHO KILLED ARCHIE MITCHELL!!

Here's a vid from the soap's hayday, when Den and Angie used to regularly pull in 18 million plus viewers... that's equivalent to a 90,000,000 rating in the US of A. Not bad for a shoestring soap, eh?



No! Apparently BBC America have ceased airing Eastenders... but in 2004 The Dish Network picked it up. (Airing episodes 5 years behind...!) So if you're a lucky viewer, you'll know what I'm talking about sometime come 2015..!

Oh what a cute furry entertainer!

Manic Miner/Murder She Wrote/Marmite

1: I AM CONVINCED I am having a mental breakdown of the worst type... How this happened I have no idea. But I somehow have found myself not only watching but looking forward to Murder She Wrote, which comes on between 2 and 3pm weekdays on BBC1. Once the series is finished I shall seek immediate psychiatric help.



2: NOW HERE is a blast from the past. Clickonthis to see a map of my favourite computer game of yore, 1984's Jet Set Willy ~ sequel to Manic Miner. The blurb goes something like this: having found loads of buried treasure in Manic Miner, Miner Willy buys a huge "haunted" mansion (haunted by machines, not ghosts)... whatever was happening to the mad professor the night he disappeared?... blah blah.

You can only play the game properly by cheating it for infinite lives, falling great hights without dying and fixing a bug that meant when you entered the attic the entire game went haywire. Have a look at the map if you like. It is emblazoned on my subconscious. Perhaps this is telling (or not) but my favourite room was right at the top of the megatree, called "Out on a Limb" ~ ;->...

Now this brings back memories:
Here is the entire game played on fast forward, maybe with a "sprite innoculator" (ie it's cheated so the baddies can't kill you).
Bear in mind before you laugh at the crap graphics, this game somehow squeezed over 80 screens into less than 48 kilobytes. It took nearly 5 minutes to load off old fashioned cassette tape!

I love old country houses, so as you can imagine, I loved this game:



And this is what the gameplay was actually like:



If you really want to, you can download and play the game here. Or play online here. By the way, it's a very good game to play for those of us without lightning reflexes. Though I suspect, just like Marmite, you have to get a taste for something like this when extremely young otherwise it probably makes no sense to you at all!

Before y'all leave showers of comments, have a look at this beautiful fuzzy terrier:

Techno Confusion

I AM VERY CONFUSED INDEED. After spending much of the night (well, 20 minutes) watching feature films on my mobile phone (on youtube ~ you can get full-length films there, you just have to look) and burning up 25 megabytes (is this a lot?) I know a 100,000 word wordprocessed document is very approximately 1 megabyte, but the visual medium is a grossly inferior storytelling form, using many times more data to tell the same tale in vastly abridged form, and though the imagery is of course crystal clear, the ambiguity factor is often higher. (How many times have you watched a film and thought What was THAT about? ~ but felt too shamed to ask anybody. (Or you were on your own.) Also I ran foul of the telephone's antipornography "measures" ~ so raymitheminx.com was barred to me. Raymi is a bored 20something teenager who takes pictures of herself eating noodles! Food porn perhaps, but nothing more!! And I still haven't a clue how to post up a photo I actually took onto my blog. Can't I post to Flickr from a public PC? I just don't know what function to go into to put the pictures online. I remember when my hamsters went on youtube, the internet cafe guy had to do everything, clicking back and forth in the cobwebby confines of the computer's sub-basement. I would be too scared to venture there alone... Anyway I've got to go, else I will be terminated for lack of time.

Gledwood joins the 21st Century (at long last)

I BOUGHT a 3G phone today.

It is called a ZTE F102 and I got it from Argos, the shop that sells everything.

It has a 2 megapixel camera, it does free Skype, it does free Network 3 to Network 3 calls for 5000 minutes on a £10 3-month top up, it cost £46 including the top-up and 2GB micro-SD card. How could I go wrong?...

By living in Britain! I hear you cry. I bet could get the whole lot for $46 or less in the humungoulsy-bargainacious US of A.

... And the handsfree didn't work for a start.

But I did manage to brouse my own blog on it, which was pretty amazing. Saturday's doggies looked so furry and cute I wanted to stick a chopstick in the screen and poke them till they nibbled it.

Talking of dogs I saw a Basset hound parked outside the supermarket and couldn't take its picture because the phone was still on charge (how annoying) and I've decided to try that mobile blogging thing. Does anyone know how to do it?

Also does anyone know how Skype actually works? What should I all myself? And what's that Windows Live instant messaging thing all about? How do I know I've got a message if it's in my phone? Will the phone ring? What happens? Does the sun go into eclipse, the sky go black and the birds start stop chirping? [Pay attention Gledwood, you fool!] Or do I only find out two weeks later when somebody's really offended with me and cut me off their Xmascard list?

So many questions and not enough answers. Can anybody tell me how I would actually post a photo online? Considering I do NOT own the computer and don't really want my pixx stored on a public hard-drive if I can avoid it. Can't I just email it to the blog using the 3g mc-thingie-malarky? If so precisely HOW?

For those who are interested, you can read the phone's spec HERE.

PS don't those poor Bertie Bassett hounds look really hang-dog in that photograph. Trust me, the others I browsed through looked even more miserable. Not to be cruel, but they also look like they really smell of dog-blankets. Now how many Bertie Bassett owners are going to write me, all offended... (none!) The one at the supermarket looked really friendly and cute. It also seemed to like me. (Which is more than most people do. Haha!!)

PS I just doublechecked and Google, so it seems don't support 3-mobile for mobile blogging in the UK. But surely I can post a photo online some other way and link it via my blog? Does anyone please know how I do that????

(Bottom right photo: Vincent, who has a mobile blog...)

Fuzzy Doggies

(ESPECIALLY LABRADOODLES!)

Furry Friday on Saturday...













If you hadn't heard of them before (and I hadn't until I saw Nicole and Vincent's friend's labradoodle in Amsterdam) ~ these are a new breed as the name suggests ~ a cross between labradors and poodles...

They come in a range of colours from dark brown to beige to white...

Doesn't this one look like a furry cartoon character!

Of course labradoodle puppies are really cute!