Pig's Miscellany

dies laughing

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:02:11 GMT

"The worst thing when reading semen-eating-tapeworm porn is to be thinking "this sounds awfully familiar" - Revier

As the Daleks put it ... ADDITIONAL DIGITS WILL BE REQUIRED FOR ORGASM! YOU WILL PROVIDE DIGITS!PROVIDE!

Oh, god!

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:19:14 GMT

I just sent off an email in which I misspelled my own first name.

This is a new low...

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:00:03 GMT

Livejournal isn't a social networking site or journalling service or whatever.

It's a machine whose sole function is to allow you to locate depressed people.

It files them on your friendslist.

Pigeon

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 11:50:13 GMT

This was apparently saved as a draft in here: "I'm going off lj until I manage to turn into a funtioning human being again. Yesterday councillor said to me he thought I was coping fine. As if to perversely prove him wrong, since then that I've proceeded to be insanely angry in a way I've never been before in my life."

... hoo boy, it's been a LONG time since eljay!

Anyway, so those who know me know I kind of have this thing where I keep finding these goddamn injured or orphaned birds. And if course I can't just ignore them, so oh hello again my old friends Where The Hell Is A Cardboard Box and Can You Get Some Jellimeat On The Way Home, Yes Another One, Fine Then I'll Just Get It Myself and Can I Use A Spoon As A Splint. Rinse and repeat as required. So anyway, I have this thing with birds, yes? Keep bloody turning up?
And so today I am slowly riding my horse up the road. And this pigeon flies down and lands in front of us. RIGHT in front of us. Smack bang.
I stop the horse.
The pigeon stands there. And then he very deliberately turns around and starts slowly limping across the road in front of me. Slowly. With the lame leg turned to face me. And I'm like
"..."
And he's like "Look at my injury! Look at it! I am injured!"
And I'm like "Oh WHAT IS THIS. What am I, fucking Doctor Doolittle now, you're coming to me? YOU'RE JUST FLAUNTING THIS NOW."
And then he flew away.

And that is my story.

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 10:50:56 GMT

My dad died on the fourteenth of March this year. It was cancer: malignant melanoma. I've been trying to write out something to tell you all about what a fantastic person he was, but I want so much to write it well that I can't think how to get the words right. He was funny, he was intellectual and full of ideas, he was caring, generous, gentle and incredibly talented, he always tried his hardest to be a good dad to me. He always helped people. He was great to talk to and laugh with - everyone talks about the conversations they had with him, though we can barely remember what we talked about, except for 'everything'. We were incredibly lucky to have had him with us. I used to lie in bed and listen to him playing his jazz chords on the piano. He used to call me into the kitchen when he was cooking to help him, but all he really wanted was to chat with me. We hunched over the cooker cracking and juggling hot chestnuts we cooked in the frying pan. That's all you have left; snatches of memory. Death isn't about bodies or any dark symbolic crap, all it is is disappearence. A while afterwards, I can't remember how long, I sat up here with this laptop and watched the one Billy Connolly show on the DVD I bought him for Christmas that we'd not seen. You do things alone that you would have done together, and think of them.

Yesterday I wished that I could reach out to him and say, hey, it's going to be alright - me and mum are learning how to support each other. Today was a bad day and I haven't been so sure. Who knows what tomorrow will be like. Tomorrow is the first day of the new semester and I'm worried about uni. People have said 'I don't know how you cope' but all it is is you just keep going.

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:24:39 GMT

PS - If I wore a fursuit, and it was a pig, would that mean it'd be called a bristlesuit? And if I wore a naked mole rat fursuit, would that be a skinsuit and sound far too weird and creepy?

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:21:09 GMT

Tonight I feel that it is vitally important to tell the internet at large, or at small considering my readership, that my mouse is screwed. And buggered. And all other interestingly sexual metaphors for non-function. Yes, unfortunately for my mouse, it has not actually been lucky enough to partake in a little rumpy-pumpy with another wee grey and red morsel of software. It is just a sad and simple fact that it's on-screen pointer arrow thing has take great exception to being directed. It chooses to express this dissatisfaction by travelling in the opposite direction that the mouse goes. This is obviously stressful for the mouse pointer trekking rebelliously the wrong way across the screen like that, so it lets off tension by having a few casual epileptic fits every minute. Unfortunately, perhaps due to it's grande mal activity, it is deaf to my usual expletive-laden threats and curses. And so I shall use my tablet as a mouse, and perform even the most mundane of on-screen activities with the dramatic swooping arm movements truly befitting an artist.

Commercial radio has it's moments

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:50:37 GMT

"So are you doing anything for valentines?"
"Yup. I'm going golfing."
"With your wife?"
"No."

WELL DONE THAT MAN

Various things I feel like saying

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 07:50:47 GMT

1) I have to apologise to anyone who friended my journal because they thought I was funny and/or otherwise entertaining.

Sorry.

2) This is my last day as a teenager. Interesting. I feel like I should do something to commemorate the occasion, like ... throw a tantrum.

3) I forgot my own birthday. I didn't actually realise what day it was tomorrow until my mum said something about it. I was amazed. I had no idea. I didn't even register that that was why we have friends coming over tomorrow night.
Go me!

4) Onto less interesting stuff, as of today I have one (1) pierced ear. It is a sparkly stud (I wanted a ring but there wasn't much choice) and you may be amazed to find out that the sparkly is green. Green. Me. Who would ha' thunk it?

5) Don't smoke or go out without suntan on, bitchez. Cancer is so absolutely awful - and so devastating for those who care about you - that no minor gain by doing those things can possibly be better than risking it. Believe me on this one.

6) Pancakes with fruit

7) Rich text neither sucks nor blows, because it is utterly incapable of giving pleasure.

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 08:04:17 GMT

From New Scientist:

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 10:00:47 GMT

In his book Our Inner Ape, de Waal tells the story of a zookeeper used to working with chimps, who was introduced to bonobos and accepted a kiss from one of his new primate friends. "The keeper was understandably taken aback when he felt the bonobo's tongue in his mouth," de Waal recounts. While chimps are masters of the kiss of peace, bonobos are enthusiastic tongue-kissers who will make a pass at almost anyone.

In which I mumble about required post lengths.

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 08:10:09 GMT

So I was reading bad_rpers_suck and someone mentioned a role-playing game with a three paragraph minimum for posts. I didn't pay all that much attention at the time, but now several days later it's sunk in.Three paragraphs? THREE? What the ever-loving hell?

For one, I was alway taught at school that you started new paragraphs with stuff like focus shifts, subject shifts, place shifts or time shifts (even if they were only very minor ones). Every single post? Wow, have fun writing conversations there guys.

Secondly ... well, what would you write? Sure there are occasions when three paragraphs or more are suitable. But other occasions, well, unless you're writing about every pearlescent drop on your character's quivering ebony lashes...

I can see myself in a situation where the natural length of the post was fairly short. Let's say I'm playing a chap called Richard. It would go something like this:

Richard sighed and watched his cup of his tea, aimlessly stirring the spoon around. The clinking noises it made sounded unusually loud in the expectant silence. After he'd wasted as much time as he dared, he looked up at her again.
"Of course I didn't," he said, trying to sound believable but lacking the energy to put much effort into the lie. "I don't even like sheep."

Meanwhile in East Finchly, an old lady was watering her garden. Which plants deserved to be watered first - the petunias or the violets? The petunias had been particularly good today, but then come to think of it so had that naughty old spurge in the corner! Thoughtfully she scratched her mustache as she regarded the plants with a beady eye and a beady elbow and mentally totted up their performance. The zinnias had been particularly cheerful, and of course the cornflowers had greeted her so merrily when she'd stepped out in the morning. They definately deserved something special, but then ...

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 06:05:13 GMT

When you're picking up horse shit and you start noticing similarities between the manure and cake, you know it's time to go inside and eat something.

I just don't know what to do with myself ...

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 06:40:46 GMT

You can use an erasor to get rid of that annoying adhesive stuff that price stickers leave behind when they're peeled off.

Who's in the airing cupboard this time?

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 12:02:39 GMT

Here's one of them:

My parents despair of me.

They're like tiny wiffly wriggly electric bumps. You can't believe how fast these guys can travel. Put them down on the carpet and zoom! They're in the shoes! They're in the bathroom! They're under your legs! They're going cross-country across the top of the food dish!

You always know when a hedgehog's into the food. They smack their lips constantly; they're the noisiest eaters I've ever come across. It actually sounds kind of like a shoe creaking, or when the rubber of the sole pulls off something it stuck to on the floor.

Anyway, sitting up at one in the morning in a sparkly jacket is all very glamorous, but I need to sleep. More on the hodgehegs to come.

This picture brought to you by procrastination and the letter L

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 23:10:20 GMT

freudian_lispkalamburd makes a cake for wolfenwind

Yessss I was there I got there by MAGICZ. You just didn't see me cos you had your head in the pot :0

The finished product was here, woooo green pretty!

P.S: I scribbled this while I was studying for my learner licence test which I passed ahahahahah :D

It was so beautiful...

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 01:22:17 GMT

I waited for ages for the pepino to be at perfect ripeness, but I waited too long. I would explain the nuances of flavour that led me to this conclusion, but they were overwhelmed by the pungent stench of stink-bugs. Invisible stink-bugs that somehow managed to make their smell permiate right through the fruit and linger on my fingers long after I disgustedly chucked the fruit into the chook bucket. Maybe they pissed in it.

Maybe they're stink bugs with super-powers. Super-villains lurking around the garden at night farting on my food.

Bastards.

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 08:01:42 GMT

You know you've got Mad Skillz when: You nochalently toss a ball of horse shite over your shoulder towards the shelter-belt and have it collide with a branch above you, rebounding onto your head.

Merlin and Arthur.

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 10:55:07 GMT

So I woke up this morning, or rather stopped doggedly trying to go back to sleep, when my mother came into my room. With a solomn and mysterious sort of air about her she stood over my bed, hands cupped in front of her chest.
How odd, I thought. I mumbled something incoherent but vaugely question-like at her. She refused to answer. Something else happened that I can't remember because I was half asleep, and then somehow I was out of bed and looking at her hands.
Lo and behold!
They had a baby bird in them.

She found him on the ground in the barn, apparently. She was so madly enthusiastic about the whole rescuing him thing that I almost wished she was being all "let nature take it's course" like she'd been (at least outwardly, she's a bigger softy than me with animals) with my earlier babies. Christ woman, your enthusiasm is sweet and I love that you're happy about this, but I've done this before! I have a rough idea what to do! But after much gentle squabbling over details, the baby was installed in his box. Feeding started. After a mildly worrying delay, crapping started too, with slightly startling enthusiasm.

I decided that dog food with rice in it wasn't good for an insectivore past the immediate first need to get any nutrition into the little body. So I goinked one of the massive frozen lumps of chicken mince out of our freezer. In a little drama that involved three knives, sticky layers of defrosted flesh residue, sprays of frozen flesh crumble and lots of stabbing and sawing, I managed to detach some for baby food. A bit of microwaving and some added egg and I was set. Excellent! It turned out in consultation with a proper bird lady that this choice for food was exactly right, too, which was very nice. I felt terribly expert.

Anyway, things were set. I even managed to persuade mother that 'Guy' wasn't a good name for the little tweet.

And then in the middle of trotting through the stable, I looked down - and a little yellow mouth stared back up at me. Well, beady little eyes stared at me, but it was rather hard to see them past the mouth. So there I was, walking back to the house with another starling nestling in my hands letting me know in no uncertain terms that it wanted some bloody food, and NOW.

Hey, what's two babies when I was looking after one anyway? I'm quite glad there's a pair actually, it's far better for the babies to grow up with some company of their own kind than alone. The newer one is smaller and younger, but not by too much.

Of course another baby meant more food - almost immediately, seeing as he half swallowed the tweezers in his effort to ingest anything that came near his beak. So we had another frozen meat sawing episode, this one slightly more disturbing with mum hacking away at the stuff with a big garden saw and randomly telling us about this movie she saw where a man cut his own penis off with an electric bread knife.

Arthur and Merlin are now snuggled up together in their little polar-fleece lined nest, and heaven knows I wish I was getting as much sleep as them.

3785

Of NaNoWriMo.

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 09:49:23 GMT

My username's Irised Pig. Word count for yesterday, 1735. Word count today, 3415. I'm going to keep a note of my progress in my journal each day (but don't worry, if I've got nothing else to say on the day the entry will be secret). It's an interest thing, really. And a way of showing off if I'm feeling particularly accomplished. I suppose if I bomb out on any days I'll just put the numbers extra small or something.

Last years novel, though it had it's own start and finish, turned out to really be the middle portion of a larger story. The end didn't feel like the end of the larger plot, and later I realised that I should have started it far earlier also. So this year, I'm doing that first part along with a lot of other alterations aside. I haven't advanced my thinking on the rather complicated things I have to work out about the world, considering things like the effect on humans of not being the apex predator, basic things like geography and so on. I'm still making up what technology the people have as I go along. Fun! However other things have changed - there's global gender swapping even down to the animals, and I'm remaking most of the characters (and their names) to do things like ... not suck. Well, not all of the characters sucked, but my main character was totally uninteresting to me which does tend to be a bit of a disadvantage. I now think much more of ~~him~~ her. Things are better already!
They really are though, I can type faster now and it's easier to get the story out with less naughty going-back-and-editing for better results. Also, I've completed the challenge once. I know I can do it again, so I don't have to worry about that. Now ... just to have fun.

That night she lay on her bed and thumped the books down in front of her onto her pillow. Two she discarded as normal sort of theory books, but the third looked decidedly more interesting. It was almost like a magic book out of a clichéd magician’s rucksack … in fact, one that had been in a rucksack for some time, she observed as she peered at it closer. In the rucksack for some time with a herd of bored school kids, too, unless magicians normally drew pictures of penises and pierced love hearts all over the place. Somehow she doubted it, although as she squinted at an unusually imaginative image of a penis piercing a love heart she had to concede that it probably would have made the spells quite interesting. With a tiny, dusty little creak she thumbed the book open.

Hmm.

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 11:02:59 GMT

Today has brought both goats and pigs to our front door (even if my parents bizarrely insist that it is, in fact, our back door). Oscar the belligerently anti-social goat ventured briefly inside for a look around while mother and I stood around giggling about it. I spent the day wandering aimlessly online, talking to those nice internet people, and oh-so-slowly picking away at work for my university deadline. And so I am here at exactly midnight listening to Van Morrison, with a lot of pictures to print out and a photo to finish touching up.

Fellow word lovers (Anna?) are likely to enjoy these icons by feathered. She also links to what looks like a great website full of obscure and 'lost' words. Huzzah!

Paging the department of redundancy department

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 04:17:27 GMT

Heard on the radio news:

"... the unexpected call came out of the blue ... "

oh and

"[the victim] was repeatedly stabbed eighteen times..."

So the assailent stabbed the poor sod eighteen times, paused, stabbed him eighteen times, paused, stabbed him eighteen times, paused, stabbed him eighteen times, paused, stabbed him eighteen times ...

Even senselessly violent crims aren't free from the clutches of OCD.

Ugh, hiatus...

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 03:13:07 GMT

So in a while I guess I'll come back and you'll all get really really belated comments and replies and stuff* on ... things. Huh. Something. Cheers, anyway!

*or not. I might not reply, also. Nothing personal, doesn't mean I don't like you. I probably think you're great.

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:11:32 GMT

I'm sick like a sick sick thing. I spent the morning snoozing in the sun with a photography book on my lap.This made me smile too. And snigger. A lot.

I seem to run across an abnormally large number of people who haven't clued onto the fact that they aren't the only ones who have discovered the existance of sex. I am not quite sure how they have missed the newsflash that that sort of thing is actually really quite common, but there you go. Somehow they've reached the conclusion that their ability to associate themselves with it makes them special and interesting. Sorry dearies ...

There needs to be a word for that specific foreboding when you know you're getting sick.

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 05:14:39 GMT

literally.

All too often used as a kind of disclaimer by writers who mean - literally - the opposite of what they're saying. The result is generally painful: 'Hetzel was literally born with a butcher's knife in his mouth' (Chicago Tribune); 'After a slow start, they literally sliced up the Wildcats with their stunning last-half onslaught' (San Francisco Chronicle); 'Our eyes were literally pinned to the curtains' (cited by Fowler).
It shouldn't need saying, but if you don't wish to be taken literally, don't use literally. The word means actually, not figuratively. It is acceptable only when it serves to show that an expression usually used metaphorically is to be taken at it's word, as in: 'He literally died laughing'.

~ From Bill Bryson's excellent 'Dictionary of Troublesome Words'.