Hit the slopes on the snowboard again last night with a couple of friends. The kind (?) gentlemen at the Snowdome have decided, and who am I to argue, that the ramps, rails, picnic tables, buried Volvos, and other miscellaneous slidey implements of high-speed self-maiming with which they've so far decorated the piste are insufficiently dangerous for their clientèle. To this plethora of opportunities to crack one's spine like a piñata, they have now added The Rainbow Rail, which is a rail in the shape of a rainbow. A big rainbow, and more importantly a rainbow attached to the ground at such an angle that in order to get onto it one must leap, salmon-like, about three feet in the air from a more or less supine position. Fear not - I didn't go near the bloody thing. However, my mate Leon, who is well known for being a loony bastard with only limited regard for the completeness of his body parts, reckoned that no piece of metal was going to get the better of him, nosiree, and consequently is now at home nursing a twisted knee and a beautiful technicolour bruise on his face. Almost rainbow-coloured, in fact. Sometimes, justice truly is poetic.

Have finally finished Adrian's rather superb book. Enjoyed it immensely; I take my hat off to you, sir. Review available on the Amazon.com page. So when's the next one out?

Do you ever have the kind of argument where you know you're in the right, or at least feel you're in the right, but you've had such a crap day that having a quiet evening is more important than rightness? Of course you do. And inevitably it's an argument over something tiny and insignificant. And inevitably you wind up feeling tighter than a cat's bum, but having elected the quiet-evening option, you can't say anything else about it. Stupid, isn't it? [sigh]

Had the plumber round yesterday to fix a leak in the bath which, upon being emptied the day before, started dripping a considerable volume of water through our kitchen ceiling and creating an attractive crack in it. It turns out that the previous owners of the house, or possibly the ones before that, fitted the bath themselves (or, at best, got their Uncle Dodgy Dave to do it) with a degree of competence which we will charitably describe as "utterly shite". The trap (the bit that sits under the plughole) had been cross-threaded, making a leak inevitable from the start. At some point, obviously, they must have realised that there was a leak, because do you know what they did? Hmm, let's think.

Called a professional to fix it?

ERRRP. Wrong answer.

Tried to repair the leak themselves? Okay, so not as good as a real plumber, but still better than nothing, right?

You'd think, wouldn't you? No.

What they did was: stick a metal tray under the trap, to catch the drips.

It was a reasonably deep tray, so given the relatively low rate of seepage, you could safely empty a full bath without the leaked water overflowing the top of the tray. The leaked water would then evaporate in time for the next bath. Right. Fine and also dandy. Until, that is, several years later, when yours truly discovers the tray, and more to the point discovers the current chemical composition of the tray, which is pure rust. After that, it's simple physics; rusted tray disintegrates, no longer catches leaks, discharges contents through floorboards, et bloody cetera. A hundred and thirty quid later, we have a repaired bath and the erstwhile tray has been given a fitting burial with full military honours. Luckily, it looks like the insurance bods will cover the damage to the kitchen, which has of course started The Missus off on a let's-refit-the-entire-house planning spree. I plan to retreat to a safe and secret location, with my Playstation and a crate of Pot Noodles, until she's finished.

Made my first tentative foray into the world of Linux today, very tentatively. My knowledge of Linux has hitherto been limited to news items (e.g. "SCO Satan-Worshippers Mercilessly Hunt Down Hapless Linux Users And Sue Them For All They're Worth") and buzzwords like "open-source" and "kernel", which I had previously thought were (respectively) what you do to a ketchup bottle and something one fed to chickens. However, events are conspiring to thrust me into the world of all things non-clicky-pointy, so I have determined to meet the challenge head-on and install the mighty Penguin onto my unsuspecting laptop. I expect to be reporting back shortly to the effect that my laptop is now a £700 paperweight, that all my precious, precious data has gone to the Great Recycle Bin In The Sky, and that I will henceforth be blogging from an internet cafe in Nuneaton.

Aside from the inevitable squillion hits for "linguini", recent search hits for this blog include:

• chinese takeaway secret recipes - I could tell you some tales, and only some of them involve known vertebrates
• "coffee machine" office justify - surely coffee is its own justification?
• cordial and schnapps differences - well, for starters, one makes you dance funny
• tea lipton nausea - preaching to the converted, mate
• rottweilers+bloodshot eyes - someone's been having the same recurring dream as me, then

At last! The long-awaited package has arrived from the States of United Americans, or whatever new-fangled name those darn colonists are calling themselves these days. Yes, Orbital Burn is now gracing my bedside table, and is already proving nigh unputdownable. Review to follow, once I finish the book, which I suspect will not take long given my current rate of voracious page-devouring...

Herewith an excerpt from today's brief instant-messaging chat with my dad.

Dad says:
I've been scratching my bum
pastamasta says:
Did you find anything interesting?
Dad says:
one or two pieces of chewing gum, and an old chess piece I lost in 1993
Dad says:
and a piece of The Times newspaper
pastamasta says:
Was it a good article, at least?
pastamasta says:
Or was it the crossword
Dad says:
It was the crossword, but some of the clues were missing; so it was all a bit of a shot in the dark
pastamasta says:
Yes, I suppose it must have taken you a while to get to the bottom of it
Dad says:
I gave one answer which was a load of crap
Dad says:
The whole thing was a bit of an uphill struggle
pastamasta says:
Still, I suppose now you can put all that behind you

This is a fairly typical sort of conversation in my family. I feel quite sorry for my daughter sometimes.

"Winter Vegetable Soup," said the cheery yellow label on the counter. I declined, with regret, the opportunity to expend valuable seconds deciding whether it was (a) soup made from vegetables grown only in winter, and presumably in the howling wastes of Siberia for added authenticity, or (b) vegetable soup ideally suited to winter consumption, due to the truckful of paprika which had been dumped into the tureen not ten minutes previously, judging from the smell and the light dusting of reddish-orange powder around it, or of course (c) both, which would just be TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. No, its unassailably compelling strong point was its calories-per-penny ratio, which was in fact larger than 1, an unusual state of affairs in the office canteen. Never mind that it looked like a styrofoam cup full of runny sick; this was the meal for me, oh yes indeed!

Do not read on if you are of a sensitive nature.

Armed with this synthetic cornucopia of the vegetable-gardener's art, I joined my colleagues at the communal wallowing trough table and tucked in. We chatted, we grumbled, we laughed (oh, how we laughed! poor innocent fools), and never for a minute did we suspect the ravening Beast in our midst. It began as a low groaning noise, like someone waking up on a cold park bench in January, in the pit of my stomach. It repeated itself, a bit louder this time, and now some of the other diners began to peer about, suspecting that the heating system was playing silly buggers again. How wrong they were. A sudden tight, cramping pain gripped my entire torso. A sumptuous, fragrant and above all loud burp escaped my lips, right about the same time that I realised that this was going to be rent-a-soup and not the actually digestible version. I think I mumbled to my astonished friends, "Excuse me for a minute," or it may have been, "For the love of Christ, flee for your lives," but at any rate I abruptly upped and legged it, with gait decreasingly steady and visage increasingly green, in the direction of the corporate bogs.

You know that scene in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery where Mike Myers wakes up after being cryogenically frozen, and takes his first pee in 30 years? You know the way it just keeps on coming out? And then, just when you think it's finished, it starts up again, even more violently than before? And then, right at the end, when you're sure there can't possibly be any more left, a tiny little bit more pops out with its metaphorical two fingers in the air? Well, it was a bit like that.

I looked at today's "Soup of the Day", remembered the incident despite two intervening years, thought to myself a hearty Sod That For A Lark, and bought the fish and chips.

Now this is more like it:



(Create your own visited country map)
Apparently this represents 17% of the world. I wonder if that's by number of countries or by land area? Either way, I'm sure I can do better. Link via Pogo.

I've visited the counties in yellow. Which counties have you visited? made by marnanel map reproduced from Ordnance Survey map data by permission of the Ordnance Survey. © Crown copyright 2001.

Link via Mike. Apparently this counts as quite poorly-travelled. Well, I reckon I've seen most of the good bits, anyway. [sits back and waits for deluge of hate-mail from East Sussex]

If you haven't already seen it, and most importantly if you're not even remotely hungry, hie thee hence to the Gallery of Regrettable Food and feast your eyes, because you certainly wouldn't want to feast anything else, on the healthy and nutritious meals displayed there. I don't know about you, but I know I'll certainly be trying out some of these creative and surprising recipes, particularly the one that looks like puke in aspic.

I have just eaten my last goat bollock.

Maybe I should clarify: I visited a Chinese supermarket in Birmingham several weeks ago, in order to get my regular home-produce fix of lemon tea cartons, Pocky biscuits, dried mango sticks, sesame toffee, proper noodles, and miscellaneous unidentifiable items preserved in exotic unguents and then transported to the UK in vats brimming with monosodium glutamate. Amongst the many unusual goodies I picked up was a box of, well, things, which the label on the supermarket shelf describes as "Sweet Preserve Greenprune". They look something like this: <img src=picture of goat's bollock which I have been inexplicably unable to find on the Internet despite whole minutes of searching Google> I brought the box into work the following day, where everyone who saw the wrinkly little packages of delight promptly asked such intelligent and searching questions as "What the fuck are those" and "You're not seriously going to eat that are you". I explained that they were dried goat bollocks, that such items are a delicacy in the part of China from which I previously hailed, and that yes, I was indeed going to eat aforesaid goat bollocks, that I was going to do so in front of them, and that moreover they were welcome to partake of a bollock or two themselves, should they feel sufficiently adventurous and have adequate medical insurance. Surprisingly, my kind offer was roundly rejected by all concerned. Thus, the goat bollocks have sat on my desk for the last fortnight and have been picked at sporadically. Sadly, I have just come to the end of the box, and have no more goat bollocks with which to tantalise my tastebuds. What now shall I do to enliven the tedium of office drudgery? Where shall I turn for that instant hit of tangy sweetness?

P.S. In case you're confused, and are wondering whether they really were goat bollocks or actually just prunes, the answer to that question is written, along with the end of this sentence, on a small rock in

Am not with it at all today. Struggling pointlessly to achieve mental coherence, or at least something which looks to the naked eye like mental coherence and can be presented convincingly as such to my employers. I've already smacked my knee on a protruding wall (well, look, it got in my way), filed two pieces of scrap paper under URGENT MAIL, tried blowing my nose on an expense receipt, and made myself a nice mug of cold coffee. It is just going to be one of those days.

And the Lord looked, and saw that it was not good. [subdued and weary groan]

That's what she likes to do!

Have just finished (more or less) sorting out something nice for The Missus for Valentine's Day, into the details of which I will not go, in case she is reading this. I am struck by how much more difficult it is to make overblown romantic gestures to one's spouse once one is enbabied.

Came across a new and interesting word yesterday evening, whilst re-reading an old Terry Pratchett favourite:

enbunned

...as in, "The vendor enbunned a sausage and handed the resulting hot dog to his customer." Having remarked on the oddness of the word "enjoy" previously, which seems to use the same linguistic device, I've been trying it out on other nouns to see what I can come up with. So far the most fun have been:

entoileted
enketchupped
enenveloped

There are plenty more standard ones, too, like "enriched", "ennobled", "enacted" and "enclosed". I wonder how many nouns can successfully be enverbed in this way?

Apparently, my blogger code is:
B4d-t-k+su-fi-o+x-e-lc+
You can see what that means here, should you happen to care. Link via Jazz. Contains a question about whether you subscribe to various blog memes or not. ;)

Have just received an annoying note from Amazon.com, to the effect that my order for Adrian's book can't be completed at the moment and I'll have to wait until mid-March to get it. Am exceptionally disgruntled. May have to cancel order and get it elsewhere. By the way, if anyone isn't aware of Mr. Bedford's recent sterling efforts in the literature department, I strongly urge you to check them out here, or perchance even purchase a copy of them here.