3D horny HNT

This picture of how I'm feeling may be the first-ever 3D HNT. Put on your red and blue glasses to get the 3D effect. If you don't have the glasses, you can click the pic to make it go back to 2D.

Back story:

A crowd of possums have taken up residence in the roof space. I could put out rat poison but they're cute animals. The trouble is, they're nocturnal, so they spend the night pissing and shitting all over the place, and mating, fighting and screaming in the ceiling above your bed.

Anyway, I used my background in systems analysis to draw up a humane plan, using mothballs (which they apparently hate), and a 400-watt ultra-sonic screamer which I'm building.

Ingredients for the screamer project:

• one PC running Audacity (to generate high-pitched waveforms then mix them with processed random animal sounds, punk bands and bagpipe music)
  
  
• one old hi-fi amp, connected to the PC
  
  
• 15 metres of cable
  
  
• two 400-watt horn tweeters, placed at the holes in the roof where the animals go in and out.
  
  

It can't fail. I just have to carefully time the activation for when the possums are out feeding. Otherwise, switching it on when they're already in the attic would trap them in there and torture them with noise, like in Iraq.

But as any general will tell you, you need a multi-pronged attack. So first of all I'm building some nesting boxes to hang in the trees, so the animals will have somewhere new to live after eviction. You see? Carrot and stick. What the world needs now.

So one night next week I'll set the alarm for about 3am, before they come home from chewing gum trees. I just have to get up the ladder into the attic, scatter some mothballs, and switch on the screamers and the strobe lamp. When the possums return, hopefully they'll be so confused, they won't even dare come into the roof.

If there's no more posts here, assume I've fallen through the ceiling half-asleep in my pyjamas. Oh I love the night life!

putting off the inevitable

Last week the US Fed bailed out a private investment bank to the tune of $US30 billion, to save it from bankruptcy.

According to Colin Kruger, this amounts to rewarding "the very banks whose financial practices were in large part responsible for the crisis. ... It is only months since the banks paid out a combined $US33.2 billion in management bonuses. ... A big chunk of those bonuses would have been for the very deals which are now slashing balance sheets and threatening company collapses."

While some hail the bailout as the light at the end of the financial tunnel, others say the light is actually another train approaching - the bailouts can only postpone (and worsen) the bear market and recession that's coming.

Of course, it won't be the corporate high-fliers who pay the price, it'll be the taxpayer, or the little guy and his pension fund, and not only in America.

---

Thankfully, my aunt in Piddledorf is doing her best to avoid losing her assets in the meltdown - she's blowing all her savings in an orgy of spending. She can't take it with her when she goes, and what would be the point of leaving some of it for her relatives?

---

But let's end on a financial high note. I recently saw the results of an Australian poll to find the most popular country music songs. One of the top songs was:

If My Nose Was Full Of Nickels, I'd Blow It All On You

very rude HNT

Last year I posted pictures of my albino tattooed friend in the garden. I wondered why he had a tattoo on his back.




Then last week I noticed he had found a friend with exactly the same tattoo, so it must be part of the species' genetic makeup. But what could be the point of it?




I took the HNT picture above, and loaded it on the computer. On zooming in, it became clear that they were being more than just friendly:




I think slugs must be bisexual. Or do I mean hermaphrodite? Whatever, as you can see, these two had their holes open and their thingies out (possibly not the correct biological terms).

At last, I have a theory about why they have big triangular tattoos on the back. You'll notice one corner of the triangle coincides with the hole. So maybe it's to guide the other slug's willie into the right area, like runway landing lights on an airstrip.

What do you think?

I grabbed the video camera and rushed back outside to film them for upload to slugtube. But they had disappeared! Those slugs move fast.

---

If you're desperate, you can access all the old half baked thursday posts.

nearly two whole weeks off work

Monday

My working days are Mondays and Fridays. The approach of Easter means that after today, I'll have nearly two whole weeks off work. What will I do with all that glorious time? Have a lazy day in bed for one thing, sleeping and reading. Follow that with a day at the pool. Thanks to the 12-pack of energy drink I should manage another mega-swim. But I've worked out that the way I got the shoulder pain was not from an infected blog, but by overdoing the swim while caffeined and guarana-ed to the eyeballs. This is aging - everything you do does you in. Yet at the same time, everything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger. It all balances up, until you die.

cap'n kev casts off / wikipedia of the day

Wikipedia is a great place to find out stuff.

"Nerve endings in the rectum usually enable individuals to distinguish between flatus and feces, although loose stool can confuse the individual, occasionally resulting in accidental defecation."

Okay, that's the educational part of this post out of the way.

Copying and pasting other people's jokes has not only been a time-saver for me, it has pulled inthe commenters. But here goes with some more true life trivia. Just watch the comment count plummet.

It's Sunday evening. The day got off to a good start when the possum didn't come home until dawn, which meant I wasn't woken by its scamperings until 7 am. Later, I taught Capn Kev how to upload his video of himself waving himself about, to a freelance porn site. And talking of inflatables, he gave me his self-inflating camping mat to use when I'm lying on the floor watching TV with the light-bending glasses.

Also today, I made the earth move for my partner, and I didn't even have to use the halloween mask I got from Kev. And I let her win at Scrabble.

Tomorrow's the day for another psychotherapy session with electrodes. This time they're going to video the whole thing and give me a copy.

Time to sign off now and read a bit more of the wonderful Alasdair Gray's 1982 Janine.

a man's best friend

A dog is truly a man's best friend.

If you don't believe it, just try this experiment.

Put your dog and your wife in the trunk of the car for an hour.

When you open the trunk, who is really happy to see you!?

new drug side effects

I used a new drug today. Someone was handing out free cans of an "energy drink" (basically guarana/caffeine and sugar) so I used it this morning, instead of the performance-enhancing green tea, to rev myself up for the weekly swim.

The effect was impressive.

First the plus side. Normally, my swimming feels limited by my breathing. I never seem to get enough air. Today the blood must have been shooting through the lungs at high speed and picking up a double dose of oxygen, because I swam the whole mile at about 90% of my flat-out speed, without stopping. I even got cocky and decided to skip the occasional breath by swimming underwater. What a fortunate person I am to be able to do this at my age. This opens up a whole new level of fitness training for me, if I can avoid giving myself a heart attack with the jolt juice.

But of course everything balances up, and the downside included feeling nauseous for most of the swim. And there's another side effect. It makes you start up chirpy conversations with strangers, and that's always asking for trouble. In the sauna I had a long chat to a guy who speaks several languages including Mandarin, Latin and Greek. Recklessly, I let him find out where I work. Later it transpired he's not entirely on his trolley and has done some serious bin time. Several times he used "faggy" as a pejorative term, and I let it pass rather than say "If I was gay I might think you wanted to insult me". I think he's Australian so he probably doesn't know any better, a bit like Scots. At one point he said New South Caledonian doctors would be much more competent if they had trained "in that world-famous medical school in Edinburgh." I was about to explain that Edinburgh Uni is actually quite short-sighted, rejecting some of its best students. But I decided I had told him enough about myself already.

PS - this energy juice makes you type faster and better. I doubt if the actual content is improved though.