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Oh, all the animals I will never taste!

Gamera is really neat./He is filled with turtle meat...This morning I work up with an incredible craving for unusual meats. I blame this on last night’s exposure to Gamera Versus Guiron — another offering from MST3K. In this poorly-dubbed 1969 movie, a gigantic turtle-like creature battles to save two children from the clutches of Guiron — an oversized quadruped with a head like a ginsu knife.

During the ensuing mayhem, Joel and his bots are singing “Gameraaaaa! Gameraaaa! Gamera is really neat. He is filled with turtle meat…”. And it occurred to me that I have never tasted turtle. I can only imagine that it tastes like chicken, as every other meat does, apart from beef and Guiron.

Another meat I have often wondered about is penguin. All they do is eat fish all day and stand around. Sure it might be a little fatty, but if you drained that off after roasting, I’m sure you’d be left with some juicy, tender meat. Sort of like duck.

Mmmmmm. Roast penguin.

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About my recent facelift…

Those of you who read this blog regularly, if there are such people, will notice a few changes. I spent a few hours last night in a frenzy of HTML markup, giving this site a facelift. You’ll notice two major changes, apart from the new layout, which I admit is too wide for many screens. I’ll trim it down in the coming days.

Firstly, I changed the title from “Automaton: a blog of a cubicle dweller” to simply “Cubicle Dweller”. As a technical writer, I enjoy making things more concise. It’s one of the few things that bring meaning to my life.

Secondly, My name no longer appears on the site. This is something that has been brewing on my mind for several days now, prompted in part by a blog entry on Chris Taylor’s blog, DailyBlah.com, and in part by a blog entry on Escribitionist.com.

There seem to be three kinds of bloggers out there: those who don’t care much about privacy and anonymity, and put their name and photo all over their blog, like Chris Taylor; those who wish to be anonymous, and avoid revealing their name, photo, or other details, like Escribitionist; and those who really haven’t thought about it and do a mix of both. If you have visited my site before, you know that I was more like the first of those three. Now I’ll just remain semi-anonymous… for a while.

Anyway, if you haven’t visited here before, hello. I’m usually at least a little more entertaining than this. It’s an off-day when I can’t muster even just a little bit of sarcasm.

If you’re a returning reader… um… hi… again.

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A turnip shaped like a thingey

From Blackadder, as an explanation of my thingylamp blog:

Percy: …we came across a turnip that was exactly the same shape…as a thingy!

Edmund: …a “thingy.”

Baldrick: …a great big thingy! It was terrific.

Edmund: Size is no guarantee of quality, Baldrick. Most horses are very well endowed, but that does not necessarily make them sensitive lovers.

Baldrick: I found it particularly ironic, my lord, because I’ve got a thingy that’s shaped like a turnip!

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No one can tell you what the Matrix is…

In response to Sabine‘s comment about my threat to hurl the server out the window, here’s proof that her beloved computer is still alive and well.

The physical embodiment of this site.

Just like the Matrix, our websites have a physical existence in the real world. This is what it looks like — it hides in the corner under my coffee table.

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A lamp shaped like a thingey

Obviously, my living room is ill-suited to be a performance space. Yet, last night we squeezed into this room with half as many chairs as people and had the weekly Ready Or Not. No, this is definitely not a stage. After a warm, summer day, my apartment radiates all of its heat inwards, turning my home into an oven. As well, the absence of any practical lighting made it hard to see the performance. The lava lamp in the corner, apparently, didn’t help much, but did get more than one comment that it looks a bit like a… thingy.

So by the warm glow of the thingy lamp, we got all artsy and wacky. Singing, reading, monologuing.

When it came to my turn, my cohorts kindly agreed to read a script that I’ve had on the back burner since ’96. That, I have to say, was frightening. Their performances were excellent, despite reading cold — thank you Steve (Ahmed), Jim, Leanne, Elaine, and Christine. The frightening part was hearing these words coming alive from the past — hearing them in painful clarity as if for the first time. Now I know why I couldn’t finish the damn thing. The script is the stinkiest piece of stilted, meaningless crap I have ever heard.

Ah, well, I suppose I should keep it in perspective. The whole point of Ready Or Not is to try new things and get feedback. For me, it’s just for fun — really, I have no pretensions about being a writer. What I enjoy the most is just playing with words (as I’m doing now) and bouncing them off whoever will read or listen, in order to see how people react.

In the cold light of morning, I located the sides from last night’s reading and disposed of them in an appropriate manner. Their shreds will appear at the recycling plant to be processed and reborn to a better life as another document. Maybe as somebody’s user manual.

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