It’s generally accepted that time perception during dreams is totally unrelated to real time i.e. a dream may seem to take place over a period of days or months but in reality you’re only asleep for the maximum of a few hours. But I’ve never been able to prove this to myself until last night when I feel to sleep with a headphone in my ear.
We have a cheap little MP3 player solely for the bed on which we have many hours of radio and stand-up comedy. Frequently we’ll drift off to sleep listening to something, and frequently the audio will break though into my dreams.
Last night, the way it manifested itself in my dream was that the comedian “Spencer Brown” was with me and the others in my dream. Now, his set on the MP3 player is no more than an hour long but it spanned weeks of dream-time. In fact, because I’ve heard this routine many, many times, I was getting irritated that this guy was being seemingly quick-witted about the things that were going on but really he was just using bits of his well rehearsed act. I was pretending that I’d never heard it before and laughing out of politeness but it was getting quite irritating to have him permanently there. One (dream) morning I woke up and he was still there and I was thinking “oh god when is he just going to go away!” Worse was that in reality his stand-up routine was shaping the events in the dream so that he always seemed to have a perfect comment to hand for what was going on. The other people were loving it, but I’d heard it all before…

The main thing that struck me about this was not the audio entering and shaping the dream – that happens a lot – but it was that I was aware of days passing in the dream. I’ve never had that happen before – my memories of dreams are of a long fluid series of events and time doesn’t really have any recognisable divisions.

Alright alright, I just thought it was interesting.

Hey, what did you do with your Labor day weekend ?
If you have an answer for this then frankly I’m not in the least bit interested; if you don’t then you’re probably thinking “huh huh, he didn’t put the ‘u’ in Labour”, in which case please shut up.

Labor Day is an American celebration of Labor – a bit like the English “Labour movement” but without all of the nasty traitorous “new Labour” overtones. Over here very few people realise it’s a Socialist holiday and instead it’s regarded as the real end of summer. Of course to me it’s just another crap Bank Holiday Monday, but here people treat it like it’s a six month paid holiday in Thailand. It’s just a Monday off work! Not only that, but any holiday benefits you had before (like early Fridays) finish afterwards. It’s nothing to celebrate!

If the masses realised that Labor day was a genuinely socialist celebration they would immediately go back to work out of patriotism. Over here the word “Socialist” means “all of the bad things like Hitler, and communism, and you know, terrorists and stuff”. It’s quite sad.

Meanwhile, the true patriots are engaged in the ultimate battle against evil: the battle against a healthcare system that will allow them to get treated when they are ill without having to go into even more poverty. I thought I knew a bunch of pig-ignorant racist arseholes in London, but nothing like the army of porky tosspots who live here.

Sadly the problem seems very simple and it’s what we already knew: the Rightards are pathetically scared of black people. Not only that, but when a black man can stand up in the face of a bunch of shit-for-brains cracker senators and deliver a beautifully well written speech with confidence and dignity, they get terrified! Can you imagine what’s going on in their little pea-brains ?

“I like what he says, but he’s an evil nazi communist, socialist, evil murderous muslim. DOES NOT COMPUTE! Mr Beck says he’s evil and Mr Beck is obviously right because I understand all of the words he uses…and he cries when he talks about AMERICA…so he must be nice.”

If America fails to end up with healthcare-for-all after this, then America doesn’t fucking deserve it.

Rather than rant on about all of the things that have caused my Stressed-Eric vein to throb this week, here is the most awesome thing ever made:

The Roots of Breakdance.

My friend Gary showed me this at work today and it blew my mind. I only hope it’s genuine because it will improve the world.
[ Update – it’s fake, but it’s still an amazing piece of work ]

Euphemism of the week this week goes to Hilary Clinton for: “extending a defence umbrella over the [Gulf] region”, meaning to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran.

The close runner up is: “Extended Deterrents”, meaning to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran.

Before you get irritated about the “Hero’s Welcome” received by Abdel Basset al-Megrahi in Libya please remember the one fact that no news network is happy to report:

HE DIDN’T DO IT!

This will probably be news to most people because The News(TM) would never dare report the rigorous, accurate, investigations undertaken by serious journalists at the time. Yes, at the time, serious journalists did exist.
Regardless, the guy didn’t do it. Even Nelson Mandela believes the Libyans were set-up… maybe because he was one of the few that bothered to examine the evidence.
Buy Private Eye’s “Lockerbie: The Flight From Justice”, read it, and then get angry. If you can’t afford £5 then let me know and I’ll let you borrow my copy.

Obama’s outrage about Megrahi’s “hero’s welcome” is either ignorance, or lies. Neither option is a comfort.

The reaction from the Republicans is not of interest to anyone with a brain.

One of the problems with watching downloaded media from overseas TV is that the ends of the recordings inevitably include the continuity announcer describing the enticing wares available immediately to those lucky enough to be watching it live. It really feels like having our noses rubbed in it.

“Next on BBC Four, a programme about all of the things you like, presented by someone cool like Stephen Fry or Alexei Sayle. Meanwhile on BBC3 more comedy with Something Excellent by Sean Lock.”

We’ve pretty much given up on TV over here; even though there are potentially good programmes, the sheer weight of commercials renders them unwatchable. I’d like to say that the commercials are far worse over here, but apart from the quantity of pharmaceuticals being hawked, they’re equally as irritating as the ones in the UK. And that doesn’t even include the crazy fucking frog, which amazingly never made it over here. I’d watch 50 commercials for Viagra if it could spare me from watching one more Jamster ad.

I was off work today with some form of gutrot and the cable box was powered up for a total of two minutes: enough time to look at the schedules, check out the on-demand content and resolve to go back to watching Tron and Outnumbered.

Tomorrow I’ll probably be well enough to go back to work; a single day off has built-up a healthy list of stuff to do, so I won’t get bored by any stretch of the imagination. Just tired.

Pity the poor people in England who are suffering with a heat wave that may reach 90F. For the love of god please discover air-conditioning. It’s been permanently hotter than that here for weeks. Sucks doesn’t it ? I’m so glad not to have to use TfL. At least SEPTA is air conditioned.

And so to bed. Ask your doctor about Veghead’s Old Farts Almanac(TM).

If after reading this blog you experience an erection lasting longer than four hours, seek medical attention. This blog may cause a variety of disgusting and potentially life threatening conditions including oozing and flaking. Do not read this blog if you are in any way normal.

Recent weeks have been busy work-wise, domestically and emotionally. The main downer being the catastrophically stupid behaviour of the mental minority of masochists who think they are libertarian visionaries over here…you know what I’m talking about: healthcare. The anger is still too raw for me to construct syntactically correct sentences.

So – back to the quotidian.

A week or two ago, a friend at work donated one of his ex-projects to me: a dead MythTV box. So, I bought a new motherboard and embarked on a mission to bring it back to life as a useful DVR.
Once the motherboard I’d ordered had arrived I set to work installing it in the attractive case my mate had donated. It didn’t take too long to realise my new motherboard didn’t fit…it was too small. But, being a bloody-minded idiot, I decided that it will fit and got the hack-saw out.
It took me a week to make it fit, but it did fit!
Sort of. And then I discovered that the connector from the front panel (i.e. the power switch, light, hard drive light etc) didn’t fit the motherboard connector and in bloody-minded-move-the-mountain mode I rewired, forced, and glued the connectors until they fitted.
The end result is that we now have a cool multi-media player attached to our TV that plays anything we give it, including our audio and video collection. It is also supposed to work as a DVR but it needs some hand-holding until that particular task is understood fully by all concerned.

I’m mid-way through soldering together a bunch of stuff harvested from broken DVD players, radios, and power-supplies to make an infrared remote control adapter. After this, we will not need the mortal TV service as everything of worth can be viewed via teh internets.

On a less geeky note, we had a wicked time at our neighbours’ “cook-out” last night. To the uninitiated, a “cook-out” appears to be an outdoor party with high quality food and drink. And a barbecue. We met a bunch of excellent people, saw a wasps nest, and consumed way too much. We also got bitten to buggery by little mosquitoes, which is a small price to pay.

Ever since reading Watchmen I have been fascinated by the idea of turning it into a film. Terry Gilliam was one of the many directors who had considered it in the past but eventually turned it down because he felt it was too long for a single film. He was obviously right.

Netflix delivered it to us today, and after 30 minutes it was turned off…not forever, just for now. Visually they managed to pull off a few scenes so they looked just like the comic book…oops…graphic novel. But somehow, and the exact details are difficult to explain, they’ve made it dull; boring even. Alan Moore’s seemingly odd hostility to his books being made into films is starting to make sense to me. Even if you could make an accurate movie version of the book, and convey all of the sentiments behind it, what would be the point ? It’s already a visual medium! The visual aspects have already been taken care of by the authors. Now that CGI is such a widespread and accessible technology, the idea of converting a set of hand-drawn graphics to high-res computer graphics seems pretty pointless; especially if compromises have to be made to the plot and characterisation.
So that just leaves the only thing that was missing from the graphic novel: the soundtrack. Frankly, I never envisioned the collection of popular classics present on the soundtrack CD (available from all mediocre vendors) being played in the background while I was reading it. But as long as you buy the CD, you’ll be giving money back to the people that count: the rich and talentless who run the music/movie industry.
Don’t bother.

Seeing pictures taken by the New Cross Massive often makes me homesick and long to participate in one of those rose-tinted evenings down at one of the many agreeable boozers that are splattered throughout.

But yesterday evening was surprisingly reminiscent of a good Friday out. In fact, it was one.

While we were down the pub with some neighbours, a guy in a Michael Bolton t-shirt approached Michele at the bar. I checked with Tim’s sister that it really was “Michael Bolton” on the back of the shirt and she confirmed that it wasn’t a problem with my vision. Perplexed, and slightly concerned, I joined the conversation and he was introducing himself as someone who literally lives over the road from us. He seemed to be way too cool to like “no talent ass clowns” and so I was confused. This is America! He surely can’t be wearing that t-shirt ironically! It has Michael Bolton’s boat on it! That would be extreme irony. Maybe he’s a terrorist ?

We got talking and he turns out to be a geeky, analogue-synth-collecting, really nice guy, who lived in the UK for nine years, called Matt. We were slightly irritated to have not known him for so long and then he told us he was about to leave the area and move to Chicago. Arses!

Later that evening, I was watching War Games on TCM with Leo on my shoulder. Now I must have watched that film hundreds of times, literally, but it gets better every time I see it. It’s also the only film I’ve watched with both Humphrey and Leo on my shoulder. They both seemed to enjoy it.

Just before that bollocks bit at the end (with the tic-tac-toe and the voice synthesizer in the control room) there was a banging at the door. I ended up playing Dominoes with Tim, his cousin, and some bloke they met at a party over the road. Fortunately I eschewed the Jagermeister in favour of Carlo Rossi’s cheapest and so managed to stay reasonably coherent.

Then, when it was really bed-time, new friend Matt arrived at the porch and asked if I wanted to share some single Malts with him and his friend on his porch. Before he had time to admit it was a joke and that he didn’t really have any malts, I was over there. And he did! 15 year old Glenfiddich! He also makes his own homebrew! And, as it was beginning to seem like it couldn’t get any better, the other guy waiting on the porch turned out to be one of the only other people I know in the area: Kevin. He’s a hairy UNIX geek too and a thoroughly bloody nice chap. As you can imagine, we get on quite well.

Good night.

Michele has been ill with a really nasty cold. It’s always a tad scary when she’s ill because asthma makes it potentially serious. But she’s getting better! While she’s been ill I’ve been snagging a ride into work with a neighbour who coincidently works in the building next to mine…10 miles a way from where we live.

Last night Michele went to bed early to fight off the lurgy and I ended up playing cards with Tim and Bob (guy that lives over the road) on Tim’s porch. Drinking wine, chatting, and playing Rummy in the balmy summer evenings is something I could learn to love.

Tonight Michele was well enough to make some of her awesome Calzones which we ate whilst watching Peep Show, and whilst drinking wine with a little Leo standing by. He’s currently preening himself on my shoulder.

Good night!