Congratulations to Kate and Richard!

Who married yesterday, to each other, even. A beautiful ceremony on a beautiful day. I particularly liked the part where they read extracts of "The Velveteen Rabbit" to each other. As the officially appointed wedding photographer, I found it a bit hard to focus at times, as I was getting a bit misty (truly, I am a BIG SOOK at lovely weddings like this) From my family to yours Rich and Kate (& Griff), may your marriage be a loving happy and fruitful one, 'til all the seas gang dry my dears!

Sex, Lies and Research ~ and what we believe because it's on the net...

This is a slightly different post for me (don't think it is out of character however, I may post entries that talk about sex at any time without warning) but I read something recently that did make me chuckle. No doubt everyone else has already heard about this, but I don't care...In a recent article in the The Melbourne Age Bettina Arndt, Australian media writer and psychologist discussed the idea, which I very much agree with, that Of course sex is very good for us. Isn't it? The article was actually exploring research attempting to link good health to frequent sex, but one of the more amusing parts of the article had to do with a student by the name of Brandon Williamson who (as a joke) thought he would pen an article titled "Study: Fellatio may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women", insert a CNN banner on top of the page and pop it up on his college webpage, subsequently the article made news around the world, being taken as fact. After all the fuss had died down, young Brandon explained himself here. What I think amused me the most about this story though, was that (according to Arndt) Brandon apologized to his University, CNN and to "all men who did not take advantage of this article in time to get head" ~ I admire a well-honed ironic sense of political - incorrectness!
addit: Speaking of sex, see the latest weird & wonderful search queries leading here, listed below ~ No doubt I shall get a few more "sex" hits after this particular entry above...I have no idea where the female circumcision bit came from, I'm sure I have never discussed that barbaric practice in this blog. ~ I was glad to see a Zappa query there, along with Lateralus by Tool and one about Gremlin theme piano tabs??

Google: "female circumcision" pictures
Google: pictures of a female with female circumcision
Google: tool theme windows lateralus
Google: flash swf dont eat yellow snow frank zappa
MSN Search: amatuer wife sex pictures
Google: cool addit
Google: Gremlins theme piano tabs
Google: pics of weird sex postures

Creative Slump...

Current State
of Mind...

Sleep deprivation combined with an apathy of my creative spirit has caught me in a creative limbo...apart from the Calla Lilly I painted using Painter 8 on my Wacom, I have not done much at all...I want to play with Expression again, I love that program, you can do so much with it...(btw ~ if you want to see a simple example of one of my Expression drawings look at my White Swan) Oh yes, it would be good to find the energy, but after a day of...futzing and fussin and fightin, ah...I don't know....*sigh* On the upside, I have been creative in some ways by increasing my css knowledge and tweakage skills, I suppose...I have redisigned my creature features (The individual Bird Song and Aquarium Denizen pages) in the "other" area of the site with a great deal of illuminated guidance and help from looking at some of the great coding examples to be found at glish.com

In the Cut...

shiver...have just been to see this movie with my darling. Rather good film, quite disturbing, dark and powerful. Jane Campion's direction is spot on, and Meg Ryan shows her considerable acting talent, not to mention Mark Ruffalo...

So tired...

the children decided it was going to be

sleep-deprivation night

for the parents, yet again last night. Arggggghhh...I know this is just a phase we are going through, and I know one day I shall lament the fact that my wee-ins seem to have grown up so quickly and only seem to want to borrow the car or need some money or something like that when they talk to me...but, please...can't we have a little bit more sleep? Just a bit?

Happy Birthday to Meg, Congrats for Kat, and for Pat, More on The Lord Of The Rings "The Two Towers"! (Yes, this is

the longest post title I have ever done) ~ First let me say to Meg Happy Birthday!, sorry I'm late! Can I then say to Kat, not only congratulations on finally getting a message through on the recalcitrant enetatation, but congrats on winning the "Title My Untitled NanoWriMo Novel" contest at Utter Wonder! I hope that lottery ticket does well for you too!
Pat, I hope you get your copy of the extended DVD soon, but however long it takes it is worth the wait...just set aside a good week for yourself to savour it...I have just spent the last 3 hours being absorbed in the 2nd appendices disk, which goes into amazing detail about how the film score, orchestration, sound effects and foley etc. were put together, and this was just in one section of the disc that dealt with the audio on the film. I have also watched the warriors, stunts, filming, production and direction logistics with awe...Viggo Mortenson comes across as being one of the most dedicated actors to have ever played a part...I have still to watch much of the first appendices...but that is also fascinating, if just for the aforementioned "Taming of Sméagol" Am I ranting? Raving on a bit? Hmmm...I should probably go to bed then!

[Current Audio Stimuli: Descent into the Underworld - Mannheim Steamroller - Fresh Aire VI (04:08)]

The Two Towers...

...extended DVD is well worth every cent. The extra scenes and extended scenes alone flesh out the movies story line and explain much more than the cinema release could. It also goes a fair way towards explaining David Wenham's (Faramir) behaviour in the cinema release. Not only that but the appendices, such as "The Taming of Sméagol" are brilliant! More indepth review after I have checked out all the goodies on offer on the 4 Disks. Preliminary assessment: Just buy it!

Good Bad or just Indifferent?

Very interesting...In the course of following links from a friend of mines live journal thingy ~ I stumbled across this site that has a tool to determine how evil or good your site (or a particular block of text) is ~ so I gave it a go...I'm not as evil as I thought I might have been...or at least this blog isn't! (and I was even listening to Alice Cooper at the time) - Is this be something I should work on? (you can try it out yourself by clicking on the 32% Evil graphic) Oh and to Kat, Pat and anyone else who may have tried to leave an enetation comment re: the cave pics, thanks, and sorry it doesn't seem to be working. Eventually, maybe I will learn how to make my own comments interface that I can host myself...actually I see that pat's comment from a few days ago and one ryan left are showing now...but not Kat's...very, very strange. Comment gremlins!
addit: I just ran 5,000 words of an old essay I did for Uni through the evil/good comboobulator-thingy and it came out to be surprisingly good! (Shame the lecturer didn't think so...*chuckle*) What fascinates me is the way the goodness/evil quotient is determined; for example:

Value of phrase "the triage categorization of the patient is derived through determining the patient’s specific need." 5719 5719=7x817

[Current Audio Stimuli: Welcome to My Nightmare - Alice Cooper - Welcome to My Nightmare (05:21)]

Cave

The "latest thang" image is a shot of some geological formations found in the limestone caves near Buchan, Victoria, Australia...It's hard to believe I was only there with the family yesterday, it seems like another (entirely alien) world away. I shall put together a little gallery of some of the photographs I managed to take while touring one of the cave systems soon for those who may be interested in looking at more of this sort of thing. Let me also take this opportunity to thank Mr. Lawn Greengrass from Stratford Upon Avon-The Truth for kindly contacting me and pointing out I was getting my u's & e's mixed up in amateur (in my blog-descriptive-thing bit). He needn't have apologized for said corrections in his email, for I am well aware that my spelling (& grammer) occasionally leaves a lot to be desired and any corrections are taken in the spirit they are given, in good faith. Thanks to anyone who has actually decided to check back and see if I am blogging again too! I think I shall be spending the next few days catching up with the multitude of ebots I have received from Renderosity...
addit: I have now included a small gallery of 8 images from the Buchan Cave tour...here

[Current Audio Stimuli: I Know What I Like - Steve Hackett - Genesis Revisited [Remastered] [UK] (05:38)]

Off line/Hold the line/Over-the-line/Down the line/I am a linesman for the county type thingy notice...

Due to circumstances totally within my control I will be offline for a bit. Call it a sabbatical/philosophical exercise to see if I can resist my computer cravings for a few days! Hence no regular blog up dates for a little while. Check in later. I hope all my friends stay healthy, happy and creative in their personal lives in the interim. I will return!!

Sunshine, Lollipops...

beautiful day today ~ the sun is out, the skies are blue, it's beautiful and so are you...it isn't raining in my heart however. Hopefully it's pumping still, but no rain...which reminds me...via The Edge:

An autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time.

[Listening to: Years Ago - Alice Cooper - Welcome to My Nightmare (02:52)]

Macro Mouse and Visitors to PunkClown House/Site/Thingy

Thank you to Linda, of pernicious bloggage by chlora form the cat fame...Hey, anyone who puts a word like pernicious in their blog name has got to be cool! She popped in and signed my guest book leaving this nice message:

From what I've seen so far, lovely site. Cant remember how I got here, but once I was I hung around and read your blog. Very very nice. I'll be back. Your welcome to visit me at Pernicious Bloggage by Chlora Form the Cat. Not as snappy as yours but it serves. I try to be interesting and/or funny. Sometimes I succeed.

Thanks Linda, I appreciate the feedback, I have visited your blog and think you succeed with being interesting and funny rather well...I particularly liked your last post reviewing Moulin Rouge, I must say the musical about Genital Warts sounds...ummm different!
Thanks also to dear Meli who made an entry in my guest book as well, and told me she was concerned about my love of jellyfish...*evil grin* I have moved the Jelly Fish photograph into the latest thang archives now Meli...all I have managed to get time to do recently has been to take a macro photo of my mouse...tres exciting I don't think, but hey...I'm sure things will get more interesting (or at least slightly preposterous) soon! Cheers everyone....

Whoa! That was weird!

Just went to check the status of the blog and the page opened at the blogspot of a certain SteveSachs...hmmm...Checked the url and yes, it says punkclown.blogspot...refreshed the page....Stephen Sachs again. I'm not sure what was happening in blogspot universe. I decided to log into my blogspot account and republish the entire site which seems to have fixed the problem (except enetation appears to be "out" again) but I was baffled for a while there. The thing I want to know is that if visitors to this blog got Stephen Sachs blog...Where did the people going to Stephen's blog end up?

I was offline for a bit today

~ as my modem decided to have a wobbly for a while, don't know why...The wife who is the wonderful purchased a new computer desk for me (hell, my first computer desk, I've always gotten by with makeshift desks which were probably bad for posture etc. previously) Most of the afternoon was spent assembling it, as it came flat-packed and in pieces, but luckily I have had much Ikea immersive experience (no it wasn't from Ikea, but it could have been) so the process wasn't as stressful as it might have been...so I have a grrrrooovey new desk and the feng shui of the whole room is much better! However, I digress. Of course it was necessary for the computer to be unplugged and cables rethreaded and so forth...So this was done, but once everything was hooked up again, the little leds on the modem just didn't light up as they usually do. I plugged the little devil into a few different power sockets with no joy, then took it out and whacked it upside its casing a few times...and on trying it after this, it worked [note: I do not advocate use of force against inanimate ( or animate) objects, but in this case it was effective] So here I am, but only to say to anyone from Renderosity who is wondering where I am...I'm here, I just tried to check in on the 2D forum and the site was down for the scheduled maintenance, so apologies, but I will get to the threads tomorrow (as I'm going to bed soon) To you people and to everyone else: peace love and mungbeans!

[Listening to: Impossible Guitars [Roxy Music] - Phil Manzanera - Manzanera Collection Disc 1 (03:41)]

Site Map Update

It is done, here ~ after playing around with css menu items and the placement thereof, and finding out that I had stuffed up half of the addresses to my internal links during testing...HAHAHAHAHAHA HA HA but it's done now and I don't care...It's on the home page menu, instead of a silly # address where home used to be in the menu, which was really redundant wasn't it because you were already on the home page and yes I'm rambling now with very little punctuation at all writing writing madly ha perhaps I should join the nanowrimo thingy or even crazier thought the metamorphosism challenge-thang yes, thats it!!!! THATS IT! Ummm...No it isn't...I definitely should have worn more sunscreen or a hat or something when I mowed the lawn today I think. It's those damn solar flares frying my synapses ~ check em out at Gary's blog - but you better wear shades!

[Listening to: Time - Pink Floyd - Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd Disc 2 (06:48)]

Site Map

~ Got to get around to doing one!
Today: painting fusebox, painting downpipe, contemplating mowing front lawn as the grass has been on steroids lately...feeling a bit flat, or was that fat?

[Listening to: Schism - Tool - Lateralus (06:48)]

Tired

~ where does time go? I seem to let it slip through my fingers these days...my wife says I spend a lot of time "futzing" (as she calls it) on the computer...time wasting, I think she means...lol. Dial up contributes to a hell of a lot of futzing time I think... ah...what a strange sad, happy, sad few days...but I feel tired at the moment. Of course you do you silly man - it's gone past 2400hrs! Some things that reinvigorates me: Sunshine, Children's laughter, running my fingers through my wife's hair, friends words...Some things that amaze me...other peoples resilience in times of trouble, others capacity to help others when their well is nearly dry....things like that. Another thing that amazes me is the amount of boundless energy, good vibes and creativity that can be packaged into one human being ~ like my friend Meli!

[Listening to: Mantra - Tool - Lateralus (01:13)]

Poor Quack

~ He got through the night ok, and seemed fine this morning, but we went out for a few hours this afternoon, whilst the G.P. (grandparents) looked after the children. We left him him cheeping away in his box, only to return to find him dead. Perhaps he was sick to start with, he never seemed exactly quite right, no doubt in shock...we'll never know I suppose...anyway Jane & I buried him in the garden. The eldest child was a bit upset, but she is pretty realistic about things bless her. We still have the goldfish, cat and the chickens to keep us on our toes...poor quack was just not meant for this world obviously...

[Listening to: Going on 17 - Jerry Goodman - Ariel (07:17)]

Quack

I was working on the Rendo 2D Forum "November theme page" today: Chiaroscuro *lol* - don't ask, oh ok...ask...If you're interested go here....but I had to stop for a while because I was tracing the source of a sound Jane and I had been hearing most of the day, a baby bird's cry, which we figured must be a fledgling that had fallen from it's nest...we couldn't pinpoint it because of the other noise around at the middle of the day...all the other bird calls, the kids running around yelling and so forth...until finally I decided it was coming from under the verandah....sure enough, I crawled under the verandah and found a little duckling, not more than a week old...no sign of it's mother anywhere...so I have been busy setting up a box with warmth and food etc. for it...it seems fairly ok now, and I think it's imprinted on me...the eldest decided it should be named "Quack" - looks like we've been adopted by yet another animal! Boy, it's been a strange week, what with Beth and the possum and the butcher-bird and so forth...

[Listening to: Dimension D - Patrick O'Hearn - Between Two Worlds (04:58)]

Telly tonight...

~ Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom....OK, Indy is fun, but...hell I've seen it how many times now? Oh, the Movie Show with Margaret and David...gotta love those two, and they do fairly good movie reviews as well, if only I could get decent reception for SBS...Ah now, here's an interesting one...Hairy Women. A documentary with nudity and sex references... *raises eyebrows a millimetre or two* Ummm...the perennial favorite of course: Home Shopping but too late for me, and I'm afraid I'm not a very good consumer really...

A spider is a program that searches out sites by following links. Mostly they are used by search engines to log new sites. On a site with a multitude of internal crosslinks a spider may try and to follow down all of them and overloaded the servers. This is bad. To stop such a thing from grinding a busy site to a halt one would have to effectively lock down the site by "battening the hatches" Spiders are both cool and not cool .. on one hand it gets you more web traffic on the other hand ...

This interesting information above I have paraphrased from a colleague at 'rosity. I often find myself stopping, shaking my head and looking at our modern life now...Like, I am walking around inside a science fiction novel of the kind I may have read when I was a teenager. Sites like large organisms, being afflicted...by virii and bots that correlate to living pathological agents, not necessarily malicious in intent, just doing what they do...What a spin out man!

btw, I am still using w.bloggar and am really loving it, you can see what music I am currently listening to by virtue of me just hitting F 11 ...this box and associated text styles etc. is brought to you by the F 1 key...I tell you, it's pretty cool!
addit: This is weird however..I just noticed that the "Listening to" option has displayed the album title as "Fifteen Wild Septembers" when it is actually "Fifteen Wild Decembers" - that would be more to do with the windows media search database than the bloggar software however!

[Listening to: Six Wings of Bliss - Geoff Smith; Nicola Walker Smith - Fifteen Wild Septembers (06:34)]

fishface

~ I've been trying to upload this to Renderosity for a while now, but keep getting sql errors* - so I'll put it here ( if you click on the thumbnail you go to larger version) ... an unfinished work for October's 2D Graphics forum theme...Yes, I'm late, but I'm the forum's moderator so I can be! *rasberry* Stayed up late to work on it, and it's not even half finished yet...where are all those extra hours in the day? Ah well...rather tired today. Better have some lunch...tic toc tic toc...that's better!
*(post script ~ the site was crawled by some kind of spider-thingy which apparently really puts a spanner in the works ~ however the programmers fixed it toot sweet!)

[Listening to: Watcher Of The Skies - Steve Hackett - Genesis Revisited [Remastered] [UK] (08:40)]

Spooky Abandoned Hospital Story

~ Thanks Kat at Mostlyfluff for visiting and signing my guestbook. I was reading her last hallowe'en blog earlier ~ The Witching Hour Draws Nearer and it really reminded me of some of the photographs I have seen at abandoned-places.com very cool photography...just right to go with the mood of Kat's story!

[Listening to: Wrapped in Grey - XTC - Nonsuch (03:46)]

Possums and Parking Inspectors

After our sad news this am, we packed the children in the car to go and visit my sister-in-law Beth and her partner Paul (we had planned this a while back) The eldest was going for a sleepover with her auntie. They live in Elwood, quite close to the beach which would have been nice if the weather was a bit more clement, but as it was bitterly cold winds were lashing and thunder-clouds threatening. We went for a walk on the beach anyway.
When we first arrived there, Beth & Paul took us into the spare room to show us a little cardboard box with a towel inside...huddled in the towel was a baby possum that they rescued from it's mother's pouch. The poor mum had fallen out of the tree near their stairwell and was quite deceased. Having extracted the young animal, they rang a number for injured wildlife and were given another number for a person relatively local to them who cares for native wildlife in distress. The nearest person lived in Hawthorn (not that relatively local really...) After we left Beth drove with number 1 child to take the Possum there. Her new company car, which has all the latest bells and whistles broke down on the way there. As she says, it almost gives you a cardiac arrest with all the alarms and such that go off if you try and start it without your seat-belt on, but it did not have any alarm for the park-brake being left off, so if left in neutral, could roll away (not that that happened mind you, just an example of strange design faults). The car also had an electronic fuel gauge that happened to be faulty..which was the cause of the car coming to a halt in this case. The sun must have come out for a rare brief stint, as it was getting hot in the car for the two travellers (3 if you count the possum) so they got out to stretch their legs...they hadn't walked 3 metres (approx...... 9 feet) before another little car zoomed up and a parking inspector jumped out and proceeded to give Beth's car a ticket..."umm...that's my car" she said to the inspector "it's broken down" "you have to be standing by the car if it's broken down" the parking inspector said..."Ah...I'm right here..." Beth said to the woman...."you have to be standing by the car if it's broken down" she repeated pedantically. Beth explained that she wanted to stretch her and our little one's legs..."Have you tried to start it?" asked the parking inspector..."well, yes...it broke down, it won't start" "try it again" Beth got in and tried to start it thinking "I bet the bloody thing's going to start this time...my luck!" but it didn't start. So the parking inspector lightened up and "let them off" also radioing the other parking inspectors in the area to let them know this breakdown was legit...apparently they drive around covering every street every 10 minutes or so! (such is the power of revenue raising from parking violations...ever wonder why there never seems to be enough spots to park in? It's in the local councils fiscal interests.) Better to ride a bike or catch public transport if you can...if it's there. Beth finally got through to the roadside service people on her mobile phone and got moving again....So, the baby possum was safely delivered to the possum-person and Auntie Beth decided to take Number 1 to Luna Park

[Listening to: Naval Aviation in Art? - Frank Zappa - Strictly Genteel: A Classical Introduction to Frank Zappa (02:42)]

Butcher Birds & Other Sadness

~ My wife told me something that made me feel sad and a bit angry this morning. Apparently one of our neighbours shot and killed the butcherbird (Cracticus torquatus) that frequents (or used to frequent) our abode...Mrs PC had noted that the little fella hadn't been around much lately, and our neighbour's wife (who teaches Piano to the good-looking one) told her what her husband had done, apparently because the bird had been bombing them or some such rot...I mean shoot the poor thing? How about getting the garden hose out and spraying it with water? Why does the Alpha male homo-sapiens have to respond to every irritation or perceived threat with violence?

Then later this morning, my in-laws came over with some very sad news concerning the sudden death of a good friend of my wife's, Jill in England. Jill and Derek had taken in my wife when she travelled to England in her early 20's, knowing very few people in a different country - opening their house and hearts to her (and my sister-in-law too, when she went over there later) with great generosity. ..I have been fortunate enough to meet Jill and Derek when they travelled over here a couple of years ago, as well as getting to know two of their lovely daughters Bec and Em while they were travelling Australia. Jill and Derek struck me as a great couple with a fantastic senses of humour and a wonderful verve for life. I know Jill will be sorely missed. Our thoughts and love go out to Derek and the rest of the family over their loss.

This is a cool tool!

 ::w.bloggar::   via creativity machine

Testing ::w.bloggar:: to see if it works. Ohhh it's nearly 0500hrs so i'll probably break something....hmmmm lets see, shall we? COOL! It works! I suppose I'll work out how to get the post title in, but I only just started playing with this. At the moment I am using it's edit post tools, without having to log into my blogger account...So OKDOKEY Looks like it has promise, so here's a plug (above) for it too! Now I better go to bed...don't want to slip too much into nightshift mode again!

Michelle (meg) asks: it works?

Too right it does! It has all sorts of goodies such as custom tag options and the like! I have already customized ctrl-F1 to give me my

post title

tag
~ addit: - I just visited creativity machine again and Jean has already explained how to get your post titles so I can free up the ctrl-F1 tab for something else...I was obviously sleep deprived last night and missed that!
I have also defined ctrl-F2 to give me

this box

and I have only just started. You can edit your main template and so forth and preview it all quite quickly. Not to mention the convenience of being able to enter, edit and save entries without having to be online...the next time you go on line you can simply publish then. I personally think it's a pretty cool tool and will be using it a fair bit I'd say...Check it out for yourself. *GRIN*