I know I said I wouldn't be posting here again, but I'm delurking for important reasons.

You may or may not be aware of the current funding crisis affecting the UK's physicists and astronomers. Essentially, we're short £80 million and STFC, the body who dish out the dough, have been forced to make some pretty hefty cuts in funding allocations. This will result in job losses, department closures, and the UK losing it's reputation as a nation that produces world class science. The present government have always made a big deal about how much they value and support science, and how we're valuable to the knowledge economy and such, but are they willing to put a bit more money behind us?

But anyway. There's lots of stuff currently going on as we try and get this put right. One thing you can do to help, if you're a British citizen or resident, is to sign this petition. There's almost 3500 signatures so far, but I think we can do much better than that. Tell your friends: scientists are for life, not just for Christmas.

If you would like to keep up with my actions in an increasingly meaningless Universe, you should be aware that I'm leaving LJ. Here are methods for continuing to read my bloggery.

If you are remaining on LJ, add handknitpirate to your friendslist.

If you read blogs through a feed reader, try this for size

If you want to look at the same words on a boring blogger template, the full thing is here.

Livejournal is dead! Long live The Hand-Knitted Pirate"

So, we've been sold to SUP. As glad as I am that the whole SixApart debacle is over, I think that I'm probably going to be jumping ship about now.

What alternative blogging services can you recommend?

Oh my god, the new familiar of the month in Kingdom of Loathing is hilarious.

So as well as being a volleyball/sombrero (and made of WIN), it gives you silly effects. My favourite is 'can has cyborger' which turns all your combat text to LOLcat. It can be win tiem nao plz?

Two possible solutions to the "What do hungover vegetarians eat for breakfast?" conundrum that has plagued mankind for, ooh, a while now:

1) The Fried Egg Sandwich
Make some oil or butter hot in a pan. Open an egg. Bring the contents of the egg into close contact with your hot fat. Watch the albumen undergo a delicious physical transformation. Take the bread of your choice (or the only bread available, whatever) and prepare it to recieve the ovular bounty with the condiments of your preference (brown sauce for me, natürlich). By now, your fried egg should be slightly carbonised around the edges. Remove the egg from the pan and insert it into the bread. Eat. Carefully, lest you get an egg banjo.

2) Dirty Quorn Burgers
I believe that Quorn, while not strictly a foodstuff, will do nicely in certain special situations. In the freezer, I keep an emergency supply of Southern Fried Quorn burgers (I keep trying to type Quran, which is inaccurate and blasphemalicious) which are lovely when you are craving something disgusting, greasy and proteiny. If you have bread, stick them between two slices or into the gaping maw of a bread roll. If not, just eat the bastards anyway.

I went to a clubnight called Kaput last night. Fucking marvellous doesn't even cover it. What DJ would think to play deep, rumbling dub, screechy German synth stuff, The Damned, the Cramps, Gang of Four and The Waitress' Chrismas Wrapping all in the same night?

My 'T' key keeps sticking. This bodes ill.

Dear LJ,

As it's Friday and you are likely to be on the downward slope to the weekend, like a rolling ball in a high school dynamics experiment, have a jaunty little song about gravity.

What Is Gravity? - Tom Glazer & Dottie Evans

Features the funkiest little guitar solo in any song about gravity I've ever heard.

(I haven't heard many songs about gravity)

Hmmm, LJ. We now have to flag our adult themes and explicit content, do we?

If I were playing by the rules, I ought to mark my journal 'adult concepts', as I swear a lot, talk about boozing and my love life and my most read posts to date are epic curse-fests. Also, by whose definition of 'adult concepts' are we working? Are we flagging things that would upset the easily upsettable (so, that's my whole LJ gone, especially the gay bits) or are we working to some sensible list of things that exists somewhere? No? Thought not.

Fuck this. My journal contains mild peril and some language. The rest, you'll have to take as it comes.

You know how I bought 2.4km of yarn?

I never actually considered what it would be like to wind it out of the skeins by hand. I just did about 50m, and now I'm bored.

I'll just have to build one of these.

So, what lace pattern shall I try? Traditional Print O' The Wave or Skull & Crossbones?

There is nothing quite like taking a pair of tweezers to your eyebrows for the first time in six months. Of course, with black eyebrows and pasty British skin, I can't really get rid of too much otherwise they'll look wrong, but it's nice not to be Norman Lamont anymore.

(I had to ask jakeybob about the guy with the eyebrows - my googling of "prominent eyebrow tory" and other related strings wasn't getting me anywhere. Now my search history is totally fucked)

I finished my rollerskating socks this evening. It's a shame I haven't skated in a good few months, although I could take my skates along and go to roller derby training after fencing tomorrow if I was feeling totally smegging crazy.

My current unfinished project list is getting a bit less frightening. As it currently stands:
- A felted messenger bag which has yet to be felted.
- A burgundy Clapotis, which is getting quite long now and as I now wear colours other than black and turquoise, I might actually wear.
- A fan stitch crocheted silk wrap which I intend to dye black when I've finished it.
- A simple waistcoat thing for my mum that I have yet to design
- A pair of soberly grey fingerless Knucks which have yet to be started.
- A couple of yarn experiments that haven't really worked out.

Today in the post, I acquired 2.4 kilometres of gorgeous yellow/orange Bluefaced Leicester yarn. I wonder if it's enough to make an extremely lightweight lacy jumper. In the same delivery, there was also the new Rowan Studio 7 book, which is themed around 'Twists'. Pattern-wise, it has;
- a very cosy snood/scarf thing that jenjemeer might like if she knitted.
- a distinctly odd bondage strap cardigan thing which looks nicer than I made it sound
- a vest with some cables, which might be quite interesting construction-wise
- a gorgeous round-necked jumper with plaited detail round the neck and wrists
- a time-consuming kimono style cardigan, in a style which looks cool now, but you'd never knit before it went out of fashion
- a very odd thing which appears to be a glamorous long-sleeved shrug with integral scarf
- a very basic round-necked jumper in Kidsilk Haze, which is so nice I'm considering adapting the pattern to use the 2.4 km of laceweight that I've got. Swatching and other frightening things would have to occur, but I'm up to the job

I'd also quite like to knit or crochet a big old beret, as I hear those things are fashionable at the minute.

I just physically purchased Kylie's new album, X, on the day of release. I'm listening to it while I do my lab marking. It's good. It's a bit like the spangly camp dancefloor album that Goldfrapp aren't currently making, but it's also a bit like Kylie has been turned into some sort of chilly pop robot.

Thoughts so far:

2 Hearts, Like A Drug and In My Arms are all shiny, poptastic and lovely - I heard them on the mixtape/radio, and the full versions are as good as I expected. Onto the new stuff!

Speakerphone has mystifying lyrics 'rock hard like a cinderblock' and 'feel it down your collarbone'. It's ok, I suppose.

Sensitized is rather good - a swooshy Guy Chambers/Cathy Dennis collaboration with possible tinges of autoharp and someone shouting 'woo hoo!' in the background.

On the first listen, Heart Beat Rock is just noise, but I'm willing to let Kylie's Peaches-style faux-rapping efforts grow on me. Or not.

The One was one of the most intriguing snippets on the mixtape. In full it's a bit like I Believe In You, which isn't really a bad thing. I hear that there's a klaxons-aloft remix from the Freemasons, so that might be quite good too.

If it weren't for the wierd robotizing filter on Kylie's voice, No More Rain might be quite sweetly listenable. There's a bit where the music turns to puree, and Kylie does a wierd spoken word thing over the bridge. I have a bit of an aversion to that sort of thing - it's like the exact reverse of my feelings for songs in which the singer spells something out.

All I See is a bit 1999. It feels a bit like the follow-up to All My Life that K-Ci and JoJo never came up with. It's wispy, and if I were feeling just a little bit more teary, I might really get into it.

By the time the record gets to Stars, I've almost dropped to sleep. Then this big old burst of guitar comes along and wakes me up! It's like a b-side from the Impossible Princess era! It is slightly lacking in a tune, but never mind.

Wow clatters along with a stuttery piano riff, and then spoils a quite nicely Daft Punk-esque filtery house track with a stupid Wow-ow-ow chorus. However, I confidently expect this to sound quite good on the dancefloor at one's local gay nightspot.

Nu-di-ty is either rubbish or genius. It's got oddly parping trumpets and synths that are meant to sound like trumpets and don't and the vocals are cut up to ribbons. Then there's a dancey bit which I'm sure was nicked from some recent hateful chart dance shenanagins and on the whole, it's like aliens re-interpreting Gett Off as an advertising jingle for some sort of pseudopod strip club. I'm not sure what's going on, but I'm fairly sure everyone's having a good time.

Ah, big sloppy ballad time. Cosmic contains the line 'I want to be alone with a cowboy', and frankly why not? It's fairly lovely. If I give it another couple of listens, it might go on my 'Soppy Ballads' playlist with Leona Lewis and other records which shall remain unreferred to.

So to sum up, it's not Revolver or Songs In The Key Of Life. But what were you expecting? It's a Kylie album!

Even if this album's fate is to have my favourite five tracks ripped to my hard drive and the rest ignored, the trip to Fopp wasn't wasted. I picked up Pulp's singles collection and a deluxe, coconut-a-long, double disc edition of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

My vegetarianism was nearly accidentally compromised today, when I narrowly avoided cooking a little moth that was living (or rather, dying) in my bag of organic cavallo nero. Poor little furry thing - I felt very bad as I shuffled it's corpse into the bin.

In other news, I'm still locked out of Pirates of the Caribbean Online. It's causing me so much pain that I cannot now deny that I'm addicted to the swash and buckle of it all. I'm currently in tech support chat, which is really quite exciting in a sad way.

Next week is going to be busy. I've got things going on every evening after work, and work is liable to be fairly intense also.

Plus, it's going to be December, which I find very worrying. I ought to sort out some Christmas shopping, really.

ETA: Apparently my Pirates Online access has been stopped because of some sort of billing issue. Not good. I hope they're not going to suddenly have problems with me being all British and everything.

OH GOD. I can't log into Pirates Online.

I'm hopelessly addicted to this game. It's buggy as hell, the game is polarized between newbs and high level hero pirates, the quests are odd to say the least, and NPCs keep doing the strangest things but I could spend hours messing about on boats in the Spanish main, but I can't log in.

It's like crack.

Why is the rum gone?

I was drinking g'n't last night, so why isn't there any rum?

I think my dreadful hangover may be evidence of a rational explanation for this. I did make a new friend though. One always needs more screamingly camp Oxford graduate baritone friends. It reminds me of that time I was at that swiss finishing school.

I'm clearly still pissed. Back to bed....

I did not know that the bottle bank was invented and first used in Barnsley.

Truly, every day is a school day.

My dreams last night involved the death of Stephen Hawking, my bank account being 6 grand in the red, and me taking on the job of nanny to Angelina Jolie's brood.

There may have been an overarching plot line to all of these things, but if there was, I can't remember it and I'm not expecting that it made any sense at all.

I wasn't even eating cheese.

Combining the Emo Pain of the Internet with kitteh pix and Impact-fonted captions... It's my new favourite website - LOLsecretz.

My personal favourites are ones like this one, which riffs on the 'I made you a [ITEM], but I ated it' or this 'I has a flavr' variant.

But then there's the sad ones where the secret is more like a Postsecret secret 'Emoshunal depf or this one Cutz Too Much.

And then there's the stray dog secrets and the caption competitions, which win on surreality and humour.

(Thankyou ajodasso for bringing the kitteh sekritz into my life - my workrate is compromised, but my life is richer (or should that be I DOES NO WORKS, BUT MY LIFE HAS A FLAVR))

Croatian FA boss arrested for shoplifting at Gatwick?

Could this be part of a manoeuvre to unsettle the Croats and secure victory for England? I'm feeling conspiracy theory friendly today.

Not being personally affected by the whole child benefit information fiasco I've been able to think detachedly about the poor junior staff member whose epic-level Carruthers* has caused this incident.

Imagine yourself in their (likely) situation. You've just taken a new job in a government office which is, to put it mildly, in a state of disarray. They've just had a massive merger, a huge and byzantine IT changeover and the compulsory redundancies of a quarter of existing staff. They are quite literally all over the place. You are a young, enthusiastic graduate, MS Office skills resplendent on your CV, eager to prove yourself efficient and worthy of promotion to a better payscale.

Very quickly, you find yourself fielding emails that you suspect may be directed at people further up the pecking order than you, but as everyone is pulling together and mucking in, you follow the instructions in them unquestioningly. One day, the National Audit Office email you to ask for the delivery of some data on child benefit recipients. You say to yourself, "I know how to do this" and without anybody questioning whether what you're doing is a good idea, you download the entire sodding database and burn it onto a couple of CDs, which you then stick in an envelope and pop in the internal mail. Your line manager isn't particularly IT literate, and no-one in the entire office has much of an idea about secure data transfer. The guys in the IT cavern would have probably muttered voodoo nonsense about VPNs or PGP or AES, but as far as you know, popping a password-protected CD in the post is probably going to be ok. So you stick the envelope into the internal mailbox and go back to the next crisis. You forget the envelope.

But today, you are sitting in the kitchen in your pants, unable to move or speak or eat, watching the rolling news in horror.


* Carruthers: 1. Act of being demonstrably daft, stupid, etc. 2. Act of copying someone else. 3. Act of going to the bank. 4. Act of buying a footlong Subway when a 6-incher would do.

(I have never met Carruthers)

I <3 the West End. i'm randomly at an open mic night at the rio cafe,
about to give Zombie Sex Attack it's public debut. wish me luck!

Phew! I just narrowly averted a flood in one of the labs. As I was the person who left the ultrasonic bath filling, I would also have been the culprit, but least said soonest mended and all that jazz.

I'm feeling very consumery today. I'd quite like to buy some yarn (maybe some of this Bright Dyes laceweight in the deliciously yellow shade at the bottom of the page - but then there's also this other shiny laceweight merino or this Peruvian sock yarn taking my fancy)

I'd also quite like a brightly coloured belted coat. I've got an incredibly zingy green woollen vintage swing coat, which is lovely and amazing but a bit *too* cosy and doesn't look great with jeans. So I'd like to have a belted mac style coat, maybe in royal blue. I used to have an astonishingly bright pink one with black trim (I think it was from Topshop) which I used to wear when I had red henna'd hair and had a turquoise sequinned handbag. What a horrific riot of colour that must have been.

Gaming-wise, I had a fun weekend. I'm now on the long grind to lvl30 with my super-powered Turtle Tamer (the V for Vivala mask, combined with a pilgrim shield made the run simplicity and beauty itself - if you like to hit things, and hit them hard, buy that mask) and I'm getting my elemental trophies and farming elemental gems while I'm at it. My stat grinding method is to do the daily bounty quest, hit the Louvre for ~100 adventures and then do ~50 in the middle of the pyramid for ancient spices, Magi-Wipes and leathery bat skins which get turned into jackets and then pulverized for wadly goodness.

The whole Pirates of the Caribbean Online thing is going nicely. I bought a nicer boat and a bigger sword, fought a few undead and a *lot* of alligators. I was randomly invited to join a guild and I've found a bunch of high level characters who like to take me on raids and have me fire wild, random cannon strikes into the briny expanses of the Mar de Plata. My solo questing is coming on quite nicely - the only dark cloud on the horizon is the Fly Trap that I've got to take out at some point, which killed me in one shot when I rocked up to just take a look at it. Ow.

Today I've done absolutely nowt except sit and watch the whole first series of Life On Mars. I've enjoyed all eight hours of my marathon quest, and I'm now going to have to get series 2 and spend next Sunday doing something pretty much like what I've done today, to whit, nothing.

My official verdict: I like it. I think it's good.

Ow! Of all the pointless and avoidable injuries to have, splinters are my least favourite.

You even hear the little voice in your head saying 'If you run your finger along this surface, you're likely to get a bit of it embedded in you' and still you go right ahead and then, POW! You've got a bit of foreign matter embedded in your sensitive fingertip.

Once, I had a splinter of fused silica stuck in my finger for ages. It wouldn't come out for ages - I'd resorted to all kinds of insane folk remedies and was about ready to dissolve the end of my finger when one day it just popped out onto my desk, sparkling innocently, as if it hadn't spent the last few days living in my finger. It was nasty, let me tell you.

Why am I on about splinters? I just got a raggedy, oily aluminium one in my left middle finger. That hurt. Ow!

Oh yes! New BSG! Which I am watching! Now!

Tonight at fencing, after a torture thing called 'warm-up' and some lessons in how not to get hit while hitting the other person, we got to the whole point of why I wanted to learn how to use a sword in the first place. The name of the game is: PIRATES!

In Pirates, you form a group of rowdy, sweaty fencers into two opposing teams using some arbitrary criterion (boys vs girls, oldbies vs n00bs, what have you) and then the two teams get on their 'ships', both sides of a dividing line. Then the free-for-all, foil-poking, back-stabbing game begins. You can hit any one you want, and if you get them on target then they're dead. It's fun. It was even fun when I got killed and was out, which isn't usually the case for someone as competitive as me.

Yay! Pirates!

There's lots of pirate stuff on Etsy. There's the usual jewelry, pottery, fibrecraft, leatherwork stuff, but then there's also the other stuff.

Like these pirate pasties (for all those burlesque pirates I never seem to see) and this badge with a pirate llama on it, which is so adorably daft that I'm almost tempted to have it sent to me seeing as it costs practically nowt.

I was supposed to be going for a curry with my Dad tonight, but he ended up not being able to make it. Instead, I went to restock my spartan kitchen cupboards. I bought some interesting stuff - a big bulb of fennel, some nice pak choi, a big fat English parsnip, some interesting Omega 3 & 6-enriched bean pate, ginger marinated tofu, and to push my total over the limit required to use my card, I impulse bought some crazy gluten free bread. I've never tried gluten-free stuff before, but my general impression of it was that it tasted like ass, and you were probably better getting used to a life of rice and lentils than clinging onto fake bread and biscuits.

(PS: jenoofer - you might be interested in the vegan pesto I saw today - I think the brand was 'Zest')

So I bought this stuff called 'St John's Bread', which I have since found out is another name for carob. It was a small square loaf, which felt very dense and had what looked like an outer coating of big, healthy-looking seeds. I was expecting the texture inside to be a bit like pumpernickel or something, but when I read the production notes and ingredients, it became clear that I was heading for a totally non-bread experience. It claimed to be halal, kosher, salt-free, sugar-free, yeast-free, organic, biodynamic (automatic, hydromatic...) and the main ingredient other than water was 'sprouted Demeter spelt'.

I hurried home to try a slice, hoping to be transported to some magical hippy land free from cruelty, death and disease. As I cut into it, I realised that it really wasn't what I was expecting. It was stuffed full of spelt seeds and the carob-derived 'bread' bit made up about 5% of the cross-sectional area of the slice. I nervously munched the slice, and found the taste and texture to be equally disgusting. Spelt is my new least favourite form of carbohydrate, knocking polenta off the top spot that it has comfortably occupied for years.

This non-bread disappointment spurred me on to bake some real bread. I made some ciabatta rolls, which have turned out brown, crusty and really nice. I ate the first one with dinner - butternut squash tagine, which was spicily orange and thickly delicious.

( Tagine recipe... )

I'm not a total goody two-shoes, however, as I have failed to do the washing up and I broke a pyrex dish. :(

As jira_rd reminded me to do it, I have made the Brief Brief History of Time posts public again. Hurrah for that!

I've also started seriously writing the thing about gravitational waves - it's very different in tone to BBHoT, but I hope that I'll be able to enthuse a few people about the marvellous and challenging area of science that I've ended up involved with.

In other news, there is no other news.

I'm currently in Nottingham (specifically, across the road from the
only Hooters in the UK - I shit you not) for a course on making stuff
cold. Nottingham is totally dead on a Tuesday night, but I can
recommend the Lace Market for weary travellers in search of food and
booze.

Also, £1 = $2.094? LOL!

(PS: If you are the person who has recently been talking to their
brother about me, here is a big hello. HELLO!)

I'm contemplating ordering one of these lovely hammered silver bangles which you can customize with 120 characters of whatever you want. The question is, what do I want?

Poll #1083197
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

What shall I put on the customized bracelet?

If you have a specific suggestion you think I might like, enter it here (120 char limit)

So I joined the Pirates of the Caribbean MMO. I'm currently rejoicing under the name 'Nell Plundermenace' and I've had a couple of run-ins with a certain Captain Sparrow already. I've also got a couple of quests of the 'Fetch this', 'Kill that' and 'Talk to the other' variety.

The game environment feels quite safe, and none of the big kids made fun of me. I ran into a couple of pirates who I think were guild recruiting bots while I was out killing giant crabs (or whatever) but as the game is still very, very new, most of the other players are also total n00bs. I'm running the game on my antiquated laptop, and it barely ran at all until I figured out how to turn the detail down on the (fairly nice) graphics. The combat system isn't too bad - although it took me forever to figure out how to stop wildly swinging my cannon about (so to speak) and aim on the wreck I was supposed to be holing (also so to speak. I have been watching Fanny Hill and everything now sounds like a flowery metaphor for something the redoubtable Fanny would have charged extra for)

( Introducing the Fearsome Miss Nell Plundermenace... )

Last night, as I was preparing for the party to end all Halloween parties, I happened on a documentary about a Polish roots/folk troupe on BBC4 (of course it was on BBC4) and was stopped dead in my tracks by their incredible sound. I'm not usually found in the 'World Music' section of Fopp, but this band are seriously amazing. They're called the Warsaw Village Band and they're just what my poor, beleaguered mind needs on a day like this.

Here they are on YouTube.

Loving bacon gives you cancer, apparently.

This Halloween, my scary costume is 'Zombie Nigella Lawson'. This will allow me to participate fully in the party while hanging around in my dressing gown. My vegetarianism will unfortunately prevent me from lustily rubbing a ham, but I think wild zombie makeup and a big carving knife will make me look sufficiently scary.



Argh!

ETA: Also, things can go wrong when you're doing scientific endeavour. I have yet to make a mistake as costly as this one. (link to torn ISS solar panel. Oops.)

I've got a lot of things going on in my life at the minute. Work is full of science-y goodness, I've found a sort of hilarious makeshift bookcase for my room, I'm hosting a party on Friday that is a birthday party for two people who aren't me, I'm currently entertaining my parents who are in town on some sort of city break and lots of other stuff is going on too.

In KoL, I'll be hitting floor 500 of Fernswarthy's Basement tomorrow. The floors between 401 and 499 have been excruciatingly tough - next time around I'm going to be a softcore Turtle Tamer with a muscle sign, so that I can add Tao of the Terrapin to my skills list. Basement diving without Tao has been difficult - every time I've had one of the tests where it sees how much damage you can withstand, I've had to buy gremlin mutagens and all kinds of ridiculous stuff, and the elemental tests have been tricky in the extreme.

Last night, I went to see Ash at the Barrowlands. I wouldn't normally have made a special effort to see Ash, but my parents were wanting to go, so I went along with them. To my surprise, they didn't really bother with noodling around with their current album, and went for the pop jugular by playing the hits. We're talking A Life Less Ordinary, most of 1977, the big singles from Free All Angels, Orpheus, that sort of thing. The only one they missed for me was Envy, but as Charlotte has now left the band (*sob*), I think that one would sound a bit limp without her backing vocals.

I've also been to lots of restaurants over the weekend, so I should do a massive review post for here and physvrevx.

Another project which is steadily brewing is my long-non-awaited popular science guide to gravitational waves. It actually exists at the minute, in the shape of a chapter outline and some sketches. It's much more difficult than the whole BBHoT thing was, as I don't have any painfully overrated source material to take the mickey out of. It might end up having have a much lower LOL density than BBHoT, but I at least hope it will be informative. I am considering writing it for NaNoWriMo, but hopefully the whole thing will be done in a lot less than 50000 words.

I know it's ridiculous, and I don't wear copper, but I want this anyway.

Oh god. You can buy shoes off Amazon. This is dangerous.

(For those interested, I'm currently shopping for trainers. As in like, actual shoes you wear to do actual sports. I've seen lots of marvellous ethically produced trainers and lots of whizzy old school trainers but nothing sensible, sport-tastic and without go-faster ribbing on the sides)

ETA:

A bunch of broken links to pages on Amazon showing unlikely trainers. Couldn't fix links.

Here is what I'm up to at the minute. You may find it interesting. Or you may not.

- Knitting a second rollerskate sock
- Contemplating taking up fencing
- Enjoying randomchris's choir to the max
- Co-writing a brilliant and unusual song about the Windscale disaster
- Practicing ceilidh music for a miniature ceilidh band!
- Working on a screenplay for a 10 minute high concept sci-fi horror short film
- Turning to vegetarianism
- Smelling BPAL perfumes and particularly appreciating Mary Read (pirates!) and White Rabbit (tea!)
- Struggling manfully through Fernswarthy's Basement (currently 372 floors down...)
- Booking travel to Nottingham to go on a course about cryogenics
- Science! Lots of science!

I'm quite busy, really.

Without wanting to start any arguments, what do you, the people of LJ, think about the practice of vegetarianism? Aye or nay?

Have you heard the new Kylie single? It's pretty good, and there's a spectacularly spangletastic video to go with it. Musically, I'm reminded of the more stompy stuff off of Feist's most recent album and the massive glam choruses of Goldfrapp.

Oh, Kylie!

I <3 The Anticraft. It's a knitting/crafting webzine that updates at pagan quarter and cross-quarter festivals (the current issue is Lughnasadh and the next one will be Samhain) and it's a bizarre mixture of gothic, sarcastic, anarchistic and generally sick craft and humour.

Here's a Crafter's Zombie Apocalypse Survival Kit, which is daft but appeals to my apocalyptic leanings. There's also some strangely lovely things like this Beaded Skull Lariat.

I'm writing this from my new and utterly, utterly shiny flat. Earlier
today I had lunch sitting in the garden outside our kitchen, drinking
tea from my handy dandy new infuser teapot. It was bloody nice, it
was.

I went to town and refreshed my Lush supplies earlier on and I bought
some of the crazy new Big Tease gel/backcombing putty. It's crazy
stuff and to me it smells ooooooh nice.

And finally, my BPAL order shipped today. Woo hoo!

I really love Jane Brocket's blog, Yarnstorm. She talks about what she's knitting, crocheting or quilting, what books she's reading, she shares recipes and pictures of her lovely home baking and she talks about her kids and how she's trying to give them the best life she can. She illustrates the blog with gorgeous photos of her projects, and it's not too much of a surprise that her blog has spawned a book.

And then this woman in the Telegraph writes this awful, snotty, bitter opinion piece based on the book, about how people like Jane Brocket are ruining women everywhere by producing unrealistic lifestyle porn and ooh, just forcing all women to be everything to all people all the time *and* make quince jam into the bargain. Call me naive, but I thought feminism was about choice? I have to stop reading allegedly feminist opinion pieces in newspapers, as I'm sure it's not doing me and my faith in humankind any good. Anyone recommend any actually decent feminist publications or publications with a vague feminist slant?

And finally, here's some unrealistic lifestyle porn:



I bought a spool of this crazy Japanese wool/stainless steel blend yarn from my LYS and I've been experimenting with various techniques. My initial plan was to use it to crochet some cog and gearwheel motifs to make a vaguely steampunk-ish lace choker, but now I've actually started working with it using a 2.5mm hook, the crocheted fabric is a wee bit holey.



I think that it looks more like a pencil scribble. So I'm crocheting random freeform scribble patterns and flowers and it's starting to look rather lovely.



I would like to go to the Habu store in Japan and buy at least one of everything. Especially this yarn made of 100% silver.

Hello readers.

Those of you who read my LJ without logging in or being on my friends list may have noticed that last week I totally flipped out and locked my LJ down for an as-yet-unspecified reason. I now have 2254 posts to go through and vet for content. This is, as you can appreciate, a big task and one which I will not complete for a long, long time. I will start posting publicly again soon, but don't hold your breath for any salacious content (was there ever any in the first place?).

Also, prepare yourselves for a possibly entertaining and almost certainly ground-breaking essay on the philosophy of dating which I concocted in the pub on Friday. There will be pictures!

Temporary lockdown!

More later!

Humans (puny humans) are dreadful at judging risks. I am, whatever my little sisters may say, a human and not an alien or humanoid robot or animate nightstand or whatever. Therefore, I am also dreadful at judging risks. Here are five of things that I am disproportionately and irrationally afraid of:

1) Slipping and falling in the shower
This one is like a choose-your-own adventure of horror. Allow me to explain. You're there, soaping yourself luxuriously in the shower, when something glittery catches your eye. Momentarily, you're off balance and you find yourself rapidly becoming perpendicular to your favoured showering vector. You might hit your head on something tragically hard and die naked, covered in suds. Depending on your personal circumstances, you could either lie undiscovered for weeks and be eaten by dalmatians, or your flatmate could come to see why you've not put the kettle on for a couple of hours and get a hell of a shock. Sure, this is bad for everyone involved, but just imagine how much more horrifying it would be if you survived. You could survive long enough to perish from sheer embarrassment en route to the hospital. You could survive long enough to wake up being eaten by dalmatians. You could survive long enough to die of embarrassment on the way to hospital. You could even survive long enough to thank your flatmate/dalmatian for rescuing you from your soapy predicament and have them never look you in the eye again. I do not want to slip and fall in the shower.

2) Daddy-Long-Legs, and by extension, Peter Crouch
To me, the humble cranefly is a vile, vile abomination. I know that it's totally harmless, has less brains than a safety-pin and is incapable of poisoning me, but I most certainly am more scared of it than it is of me. Peter Crouch comes into the same category as a cranefly and I have been scared of him since I saw him playing for some random Div 1 team years back.

3)Ectopic Pregnancy
Now, pregnancy in general freaks me out, but an ectopic pregnancy has even more of an air of Alien about it. The whole idea of something parasitically attaching itself to a place where it ain't supposed to be and growing there until it bursts your fallopian tube and destroys your ovary is shudder-inducing to say the least. And the worst thing is, you might not even know that it's going on until you're on a trolley in agony with a foetus bursting out the wrong end of your reproductive tract. Even if they catch it early and operate, you're significantly less likely to be able to conceive naturally in the future. It is just ugh.

4) Jeff Wayne's musical version of the War of the Worlds
UUUULLLL-LAAAAAA!!!!!!

5) Seeing Death at the foot of my bed
This one is stupid, because it doesn't even fit in with my entire philosophy of the world. I think it stems from my habit of sleeping with the radio on. In the early days of this habit, Talk Radio was my nocturnal station of choice - their blend of unchallenging chat and news was just boring enough without being irritating and it was quite nice to fall asleep to. The only problem was that I was often plagued with strangely specific nightmares which always woke me up at the same time of night. This puzzled me for a while, until one night I couldn't sleep and ended up just lying their listening to the radio all night. At about half three in the morning, in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable late-night phone in, this horrible music started. It had an organ-curdling bass organ note and the Psycho violins and it was bloody scary. It was followed up by a scary man with a scary voice reading a scary and supposedly true story. Was I scared? Hell yes. That particular story was about this guy who was visited by Mr G. Reaper Esq. during the night and had various horrible and blood-thirsty things happening and to this day I have a horrible, illogical dread of seeing a cowled figure at the end of my bed. Although, if Neil Gaiman is right and Death is a lovely goth maiden, it wouldn't be that bad.

6) Peter Gabriel and his Beard
When I was a little girl, me and my dad listened to a lot of music and would often watch the Chart Show together on a Saturday morning. For some reason, they had a live performance from some award ceremony or other in one of the slots. The artist was Peter Gabriel and the song was Sledgehammer. He had (in my memory at least) a horrible pointy white beard like some kind of dwarf-demon and leather trousers and one of those headset mics. He looked like the oldest, creepiest man in the world to my young eyes and when he started doing pelvic thrusts in his dancing I ran out of the room in tears because I didn't like the horrible creepy man on the telly. Since then, I have been afraid of Peter Gabriel and his beard.

So, that is what I am irrationally afraid of. What are you irrationally afraid of, LJ-land?

Woo! Today's adventure in the Blue Mountains has been big fun - fun in the kind of way that nearly kills you and that you cannot recommend to your friends, but big fun nevertheless.

The day started bright and early - I caught a stupidly early train out of Central to Wentworth Falls, which wound steadily out of the bustling metropolis into the leafy suburbs and up into the chilly mountains. The town of Wentworth Falls, when I got there, turned out to be a lovely little place almost entirely devoid of tourists. 'Good', I thought, 'I like it when places are quiet' and carried on to a very delightful little cafe called 'Il Postino' and ate pancakes with a vast dollop of homemade lemon curd.

Thusly fuelled, I made my way to the start of the bushwalk I'd decided to do. Darwin's Walk is a very gentle 3/4 hour stroll through the very gentlest of bush and follows the route that old Charlie-boy Darwin himself took one time in 1836. It leads, very gently, to an absolutely stunning view over a waterfall and out over the mountains beyond. Apparently when Darwin saw the view, he said it was 'very magnificent' or something. Anyway, I thought that this would be a suitable trek for me, as I haven't got walking boots, I wasn't carrying a map or compass and I was pretty much dressed as I'd been the day before when my most strenuous activity was taking the escalator in a mall. I had a picture in my mind of Charles Darwin setting off down the same route in a stiff Victorian suit with a pith helmet perched on his head at a jaunty angle, and to me, this suggested that I could handle the walk.

Indeed, as it turms out, I could handle the walk admirably. I took vast numbers of pictures of the scenery and dallied by babbling brooks in the freezing winter sunshine. And then I got to the waterfall and Darwin's 'magnificent' view and things started to go wrong. The view was so incredible and the waterfall so... waterfally, that I decided to carry on down the path a bit further - just to see where it would lead. The spirit of adventure had posessed me! I took a look at my battered Converse trainers, my still quite-nice new jeans and my vastly inappropriate leather bag and thought 'Fuck it. I bet Darwin was even less appropriately dressed' and then started to follow the path down an increasingly rickety set of steps cut into the cliff face. T

Two things became quickly apparent:

1) This path went all the way down the sheer cliff face to the bottom pool of the waterfall.
2) I was afraid of heights.

Or more to the point, I was afraid of falling to my death in a ravine in the Blue Mountains. As I descended the path, swearing vehemently and clutching onto the pitons in the rock for dear life, I decided in my mind how different sections of the press would cover my imminent death and disappearance.

THE SERIOUS UK PRESS: Promising grad student dies in Australian hiking tragedy!

THE TABLOID UK PRESS: Tragic boffin in Mountain Mishap!

THE AUSSIE PRESS: Pommie Idiot Killed By Own Stupidity!

I'd just started making little shrieks of alarm when I ran into a lovely Australian couple coming along the trail the other way. They asked me to take their photograph. I did so. They told me that they were doing a circular walk to the Conservation Hut and that the lunch there was really excellent. 'Right,' I thought, 'Lunch! Now there's a cause I could easily die for' and boldly soldiered on.

By this time, I'd come most of the way down the cliff and was practically vibrating with adrenaline. The path had flattened out and I was wandering through a very confusing place. The various waterfalls were splashing around me, filling the low forest with a very cold water mist and generally being breathtakingly beautiful. For want of anything better to do, I followed the path across the bottom of the main waterfall, which was still in deep shade. All the overhanging branches and rocks were hung with giant icicles and the stepping stones across the pool had turned into cubes of slick, glassy ice. It was something of a trial, stepping gingerly from ice-block to ice-block as the waterfall pelted me with cold spray and small, sharp shards of icicle. I hurled mildly pissed-off imprecations at the waterfall. It ignored me.

On the other side of the main pool, my ascent began again. 'I really hope that this alleged Conservation Hut isn't right on top of the cliff,' I said to myself (by this time I was sure I was alone, so I was having full and animated conversations with myself as I trekked, as well as singing my new song 'Like Darwin, I'm Inappropriately Dressed' at a discreet volume. The climb began with a slither up a damp rockface and passage onto the 'National Pass' trail. In my research I'd read about this trail. Unlike Darwin's Walk, the 'National Pass' is rated HARD and should only be attempted by people who are fit (which I am not) and prepared (hoo boy, was I ever). I took a look back at the way I came and decided that I'd take my chances and carry on.

By this time, I was actually in the fucking rainforest. Like, seriously. Red parrots, strange vines, wierd shrieking noises that weren't coming from me, serious humidity and trees with big root things sticking out of them. I was laughing manically, but holding up well. The climb snaked it's way slowly up the opposite side of the cliff face without any real sign as to where it was going. I entertained myself by alternating these two behaviours:

1) Intoning the mantra: "I'm going to fucking die in the fucking rainforest up a mountain in Australia and it's all my fucking fault, why am I so fucking stupid and why can I never just fucking go back?!"

2) Pretending to be Michael Buerk introducing the 999 Special: When Twats Go Backpacking And Die!

And in no time I was halfway up the mountain, sweating wildly and acting like a crazy person. I was getting slightly worried, however, that I hadn't run into a single soul since I took that picture for the nice couple. As this was now several hours ago and I was feeling pretty lost and scared, you can only imagine my relief to run into a couple of conservation workers rebuilding a section of the path. We bantered for a while and eventually I went on my way, safe in the knowledge that the Conservation Hut was only another hour away, up even more damp cliff-face.

The last bit wasn't fun, really. It got really steep and there were several false summits, but at least I'd stopped swearing constantly and I'd stepped back from the brink of madness. I reached an area with picnic tables and signs and almost wept for joy. This wasn't where I was looking for, unfortunately, but as signs that other humans were active in the area it was pretty much what I wanted. The top of the cliff was about ten minutes further on, and I hung about at the viewpoints (called 'Empress' and 'Queen Victoria' respectively) until I looked sufficiently un-shagged out enough to visit the Conservation Hut.

As it turned out, the Hut was actually a rather smart eco-lodge with a thatched roof and solar panels. Inside, there was a lovely open fire and the Nice Couple from earlier on having a spot of lunch. I joined them for a cup of very nice organic leaf tea (Oooh, the orange pekoe please!) and followed this up with the single most deserved lunch I've ever eaten. I had a beef goulash pie with tomato relish on garlic mash and it was as delicious, poncy and excellent as you could wish. It turned out that the Nice Couple had taken a massive shortcut which didn't involve nearly dying, sheer cliff faces or making shrieks of alarm, but I don't think they'd had anywhere near as much fun as I had.

By the time my adventure was over, it was only about half an hour before dark, so I hopped back onto the mountain train to Centra and chugged away into the sunset, glad to be alive.

(By the way, if you enjoyed this post, be prepared to enjoy it all over again when I get home. I've got some pictures to illustrate the scary bits.)

And finally, if any bastard spoils me for Harry Potter now that it appears the book has leaked, I will find new ways of wreaking my serious vengance upon you.

I'll probably be staying away from my flist from tomorrow until Sunday, and I'm reading the book in a single sitting on my 20-hour flight home to Scotland, so if I stay away from LJ and the plethora of spoilery icons, I should be ok.

( Darwin's View )

On Friday night, I did a gig with my bands Look Up For Danger and Corpse Full Of Bees. The gig was really truly awesome fun, but if you ever meet anyone who describes me as 'feral' or 'a total savage', then they're probably talking about the after party.

But the gig was really good and we looking forwards to doing it all again, but only louder and with more songs.

As far as I'm aware, no-one video'd or bootlegged the gig, so no audio goodness - but absolutely tonnes of pictures were taken, which I'm sure will get posted at some stage. Considering I was wearing my hair in a beehive, and had decorated it with small crocheted bees, and I was bellowing rock and roll at the top of my lungs, the pictures will surely be interesting at least.

Saturday rolled round while I was still partying hard, and passed in a haze of buying pie from Tescos and watching seven straight hours of Grand Designs. But this would never do! Saturday night was Eurovision night and we were going to be hosting a full-on Europarty! jakeybob and I started ramping up the camp factor with a bracing hour of Any Dream Will Do (I find it faintly sinister that the entire premise of the show is Lloyd Webber selecting the tastiest morsel from a menu of young men in tight jeans and vests) and then people started arriving (some still with grey and haunted looks from the previous nights debacle) for the Europopapocalypse.

What can I say about Eurovision that hasn't already been said? I thought that the mix of entries this year was better than last year, and I was quite glad to see the various Lordi-a-likes get knocked out in the semis. Ukraine's entry was pure mental genius, France totally pulled it out of the bag after what seems like decades of boring ballads that were the audio equivalent of a Gallic shrug, Russia got my 'bad ass spinning around' (whatever that means), I genuinely liked the Georgian wierd house effort, The Ark were much fun, Ireland were totally dismal and I was sort of expecting a big old Euroballad to win this year, so ho hum Serbia.

Sunday passed almost without me knowing what was going on, and now it's Monday and I'm back in work again, ready for another week that will hopefully have a lot less Sturm und Drang than last week.

ETA: Also, I am thinking of trying out for next years UK Eurovision entry. Yes, I am for real.