I've put a new illustration at elizabyte. It's a slightly smaller (and watermarked) version of an illustration I did for the website of a professional drag queen. I had a blast doing this project, and the client was wonderful to work with. I love it when that happens.

Picking your nose and eating it is one of the best ways to stay healthy, according to a top Austrian doctor.

Shannon Kramer's plans to fire a rocket toward his girlfriend went awry when the firework ricocheted inside his car and dived between his legs, bursting in a display that burned hair and skin from his feet to his groin, police said.

My domain has been unviewable to the outside world for... well, a while. Probably a couple of days. The DNS record for it got screwed up and I've only just noticed (because I don't actually look at my own domain that often, if you know what I mean). It's fixed now, but it'll take a while for the corrected DNS to propigate. *sigh*

Also couldn't blog because Andrew upgraded the database system and it made my database files for MT unreadable. I was quite upset about that, actually, as it appeared that all of my usernames and all of my blogs were gone... Andrew (who inadvertantly broke it in the first place) fixed it, though, and now I can blog again.

Not that I have much to blog about. Everyone here is sick and we've been taking turns all week playing "Who's Got a Fever Now?" Ugh...

I forgot to mention that I updated Miranda's website. Redid the design completely.

Yesterday evening, I got a call from Andrew saying that he was at the train station, but the car wasn't, and he was about to call the police to report it. (This was his father's car, which is 20+ years old and which is only used to go to the station and back.)

Normally, he puts a steering wheel lock bar on it, but he was in a rush yesterday and skipped it. Guess he won't make that mistake again...

Anyway, the police found the car last night in another suburb some distance from here. The ignition switch wasn't broken, and as far as they could tell it was drivable. They secured it and told Andrew where to come to pick it up, which he did this morning.

When Andrew got there to pick it up today, the battery was dead, and there's a little bit of damage to the interior, with some knife slashes on the passenger side arm rest and the soft cover of the parking brake. Someone was smoking in the car, and Andrew said it didn't smell like tobacco, if you take my meaning. The baby seat (which had been in the back seat) was in the boot (trunk), but we think the police put it in there, because the car doesn't have an automatic release for that, and the thieves left a valuable socket set and some other stuff in the boot. The glove box was empty, but we're not sure anything was even in there to begin with (if there was, it wasn't important). It even still has the plates and all the registration stickers and such, and the lights and all the windows are fine.

Amusingly, the thieves thoughtfully put petrol in it (although they may have put in unleaded, although the car is old enough to require leaded; Andrew put in a bottle of that stuff to add lead just in case). The car was found on a rather remote road, one that was partially gravel, which is probably why it was reported as quickly as it was (folks who live out that way are quick to note anything suspicious).

The car has a loose battery post, and the thieves probably knocked it when they were hotwiring it. Since the battery couldn't charge as they were driving, it went dead and eventually stalled out and they couldn't restart it, so they just left it. I reckon that's when they slashed the interior, out of frustration (and I bloody well hope they were good and inconvienienced and had to walk a long way to get where they were going, too).

This was certainly not done by professional car thieves, to say the very least. These guys (and yes, I think it probably was "guys", most likely teenaged boys or young men) were fairly inept and not too smart (and probably quite stoned, as well). Basically, they stole a car, put some petrol in it, went for a ride, and it crapped out on them on a remote road and they had to hoof it wherever they were going after that...

We live in a pretty safe area, but the train station draws all sorts of people who hop off the train, commit a crime, and leave, so it's hard to track them (this happens at many urban and suburban train stations, by the way; it's not just where we live).

Andrew ended up driving the car to work today, and he said it seemed to be fine, mechanically (and he wanted to give the battery a chance to charge up).

So, other than a bit of drama we really could have done without and the smell of smoke and a bit of slash damage inside, I suspect that the thieves came out of it worse than we did. After all, they had to pay for the petrol and they ended up stranded...

My belief that a keyboard cannot survive being doused in sugared soft drink has proved to be true. Andrew took the thing apart four or five times, cleaning, tweaking, etc., and it never did work correctly.

So now I have a new keyboard, same brand/style as the other one (curved; I HATE a standard flat keyboard, ugh!). It's money I wouldn't have spent if I'd had a choice, but, well, there you go.

No point crying over spilled soft drink.

The former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq warned on Monday that the United States is in "grave danger" of destroying its credibility at home and abroad if it does not own up to its mistakes in Iraq.

The Six Patron Saints of Graphic Design

We had an interesting day. We went to a country town in the wooded hills to attend a handfasting. It was the wedding of Andrew's cousin Craig and his longtime partner, Tracey.

I can't claim to know them well, but Craig is a geek, and that's a universal language, and Tracey is just the lovliest woman you can imagine. She's like a bright spark.

So, as I mentioned, it was a handfasting. I'd call it a Celtic-based neo-pagan ceremony, but I suppose it could have been Wiccan (I didn't actually ask). It was a really interesting ceremony, lots of nice elements, very rich in symbolism.

The bride wore a purple velvet corset with a white skirt and had hair hair long around her shoulders, and a casual bouquet of roses, and the groom wore a blue tailcoat and a ponytail. All the bridesmaids were in black satin corsets with different colored skirts, and the men in the bridal party had colored shirts, so it was all very, well, colorful.

It was also outdoors, and the weather was just lovely. Perfect autumn weather (it's near equinox here, but I'm not sure the precise day of the equinox this year).

The most interesting thing about the event, I thought, was that there was an incredibly diverse crowd. Lots of neo-pagans in colorful and interesting costumes, a long-haired gentleman in full Scottish dress, some very traditional and somewhat bewildered family members, and lots of polished up geeks (i.e., people that you just know live in t-shirts and jeans but who dressed up for the day).

Andrew was the "polished up geek" sort. I fit it a little more with the "interesting costume" crowd, although I didn't have on a corset or anything. I wore a long black crushed velvet skirt and a black tshirt with a crushed velvet open jacket over it. Andrew commented that I looked like I was going to a funeral, and I could have done, actually, but when we got there, I felt right at ease. Andrew pointed out that for me to really fit in I should have had on boots (I do have black boots that would have worked) and I think I should have worn the dangly garnet earrings I was considering instead of the polished hematite ones I ended up in, but overall it worked out pretty well.

It was a really fun event, quite enjoyable. I'm really glad we got to go.

And yes, of course, I have pictures.

A woman is facing a drink driving charge after she crashed into a car pushing it into a police booze bus at Pakenham, south-east of Melbourne.

WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?
 
An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.

Even though they allow for high-volume servicing and back-in-a-flash trips to the john, the point-and-shoot-a-stinky-deodorizer-cake oddity known as the men’s restroom urinal has been, for women, a constant enigma. But nothing will prepare you for the men’s room in the newly-designed Virgin Airways Clubhouse in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, terminal 4: Urinals shaped like a woman’s mouth, dolled up with red lipstick, wide open and ready for business.

Well, it worked fine at first but then as the liquid evaporated more, it got very bizarre. Andrew took it apart (twice) and cleaned the inner keys and the plastic sheet over the electronics. It was still weird, typing random characters and other strange behavior.

I decided to let it dry overnight and see how it was today, and it's better. It's still not working correctly, but I think it's going to be okay when Andrew takes it apart for a third time and cleans it again. At least, I hope so. I really do NOT want to buy a new keyboard.

By the way, I hate the icky flat keyboard I'm using at the moment (it's the spare we keep around). Makes my hands hurt in pretty short order. Bleah.

I just spilled a considerable amount of sweetened drink on my work area. It was all over me, all over the keyboard, all over the mousepad, all over the floor, and on a couple of books. The glass just basically fell out of my hand, it was weird. It's like I had a twitch or something, and my grip momentarily lost strength.

Anyway, the good news is that the keyboard (which is only a few weeks old anyway) appears to be fine. It's still a bit sticky in places, but it seems to work perfectly. Whew. Last ime someone spilled a drink on my keyboard, the keyboard died utterly.

The other good news is that I have an optical mouse, rather than a traditional one, so "sticky" isn't that much of a problem (and I did give the mousepad a good wiping down; it's plastic and vinyl, so it's quite washable).

The the VERY good news is that my pen tablet was spared completely, other than a few very small random droplets. I had moved it to where I normally keep my mouse pad (and moved the mouse pad to where the pen tablet normally lives). The pen was up on the shelf in the pen holder (On a tangental note, Wacom doesn't appear to provide pen holders any more. The one I use is from my first Wacom, which I bought in 1998 and which has long since gone on to wherever dead components go. But I kept the pen holder and have used it ever since, because they no longer come with the pen tablets, or at least, they don't come with the ones that I buy.)

So, well, yuck. And just for the record, this is the first time in ten years (or more) that I've ever spilled drink on my work area (that last one I mentioned was Andrew spilling a drink on my keyboard). I kinda wish that it had been Diet Coke rather than sugary drink, but then again, the last keyboard that died of drink spillage was drowned in Diet Coke, so maybe I should just shut up already...

I'm taking an online course in Corel Painter. I've have every even-numbered version since 4, actually, but I've never really managed to wrap my brain around it. Well, I have version 8 now, and the interface makes much more sense to me now (yes, Photoshop users, you'll find it much more intuitive).

Anyway, I've put two new images in the gallery at elizabyte.net if you want to see some hand-drawn work.

I find it ironic that Australia restricts postal import of "Goods produced wholly or partly in prisons or by convict labor," but I find some other countries postal restrictions quite bizarre (and amusing).

City officials were so concerned about the potentially dangerous properties of dihydrogen monoxide that they considered banning foam cups after they learned the chemical was used in their production.
 
Then they learned, to their chagrin, that dihydrogen monoxide — H2O for short — is the scientific term for water.

A scientist dubbed the "Safeway poisoner" and jailed for trying to poison his wife has been employed by a British university to lecture students on ethics, the institution said on Thursday.

A US woman who allegedly ignored medical warnings to have a Caesarean section has been charged with murder after one of her twins was stillborn.

Man admits: I was 'Bigfoot' - Says famed footage depicts him in gorilla costume

A US woman has been charged with forgery after trying to use a fake $1 million bill at a supermarket

I put up two new pictures at elizabyte. Just go to the gallery there if you want to have a look.

I posted a recipe for Seafood Chowder over at The Red Kitchen. Check it out if you want to try your hand at making chowder. It's surprisingly easy once you get the knack for it.

Nerdslut


What's your sexual appeal?
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(Note, the title of this is from my favorite scene in Moscow on the Hudson, a movie I highly recommend.)

Forget the scare stories, says dietician Chiara Trombetti, of the Humanitas Gavazzeni institute in the northern Italian town of Bergamo.
 
There is sound scientific reason to enjoy your morning espresso without worrying about the health effects.
 
Coffee can be good for you - she says - and the stronger, the better.

The Great Bonni appeared to me and said:

   "Go forth into the world,

      To the furthest
corners of the Big 8,

   Tell them the message which
I have for them

      The message
of the times to come.

   For soon the falcon shall
lie down with the wild ox,

      The lion
and the man shall be reconciled,

   And a great torment will come
forth

      Against
those whose head is firmly wedged in their rectum."




   And I said to Bonni: "What
is this? Your words are as a clanging bell.

      Can you
not speak plain English?"



   And The Great Bonni appeared
to be again and said to me:



   "Be silent, and know that
I am Bonni,

      She who
posesses the huge tracts of land.

   She from whom innuendo gushes
forth,

      As the young
man has spurts of... growth.

   My sarcasm is always funny,

      But of course you know all about that, don't
you.

      Heed not my words,

      And you
shall surely be ridiculed."

   And I said to Her: "Your Grace,
your message is hard.

      Shall we
make here two tents, one for You and one for
Muggins?"

   And The Great Bonni appeared
again and said:

    "As surely as the sun rises
in the morning,

      So you need
a life."

   And The Great Bonni left for
a while. And I was tossing all night.

Copyright © A.J.Bromage,
1996, used by permission. All rights reserved.

---

Andrew wrote this in 1996. Yes, it's quite tongue in cheek, and it was in context, but I still think it's pretty darned funny. I put it on the main index of my personal pages for posterity.