Should be a page

A few years ago, I was suffering a bout of what the doctors refer to as Hemiparesis. In my particular case, the right side of my body was about 30% paralytic, with the muscular degeneration and tingly weirdness you would expect from such a condition; i.e., enough to make everyday functions uncomfortable, but not enough for unlimited visits by the Stranger.

As part of the diagnosis, a crown-to-waist MRI was requested by the head neurologist on the case. He suspected a slipped disc in my neck or upper back, and wanted to have a look around the works. He was confident, and probably would have preferred vivisection judging by the smug expression and little round glasses he wore, but the fools in the myopic scientific community would have called him mad, mad, so went instead with the MRI.

Elisson describes the process as pleasant, at least to people of his philosophical bent. I cannot say that I enjoyed it. It started innocently enough, with the warnings about being in a gigantic magnet and the effects it could have on your body. Things like ripping a pacemaker right out of your chest, dragging with it the attached heart, still beating as electric jolts continue, the device none the wiser that it is only pumping air.

Before they fed me to this monster, I was allowed to pick some music to listen to during the process. Figuring I would come across as more intellectual, and that Hank Williams probably was not one of the options, I asked for classical music. The headphones they give you obviously can't be conventional headphones, as those are based on magnetic impulses being transferred along metal cables; the twirling magnets would spin the cables around you, pulling tight until your body was crushed, shooting blood out your ears and nostrils and fingertips as you spun around in circles and nurses screamed and your loved ones banged on the glass until they fainted at the sight of what remained of you.

As I slid into the tube strapped to a table top, I found myself wondering if I had forgotten that I had metallic hip implants, or if the metal fillings I have in a few molars might be ferromagnetic. I could see my teeth getting pulled out of the gums and right through my cheeks, clacking against the tube enclosure, swirling around as they chased the giant magnetic loops that were twirling behind the plastic walls.

The table top locked into place, and everything was quiet. Then the music started. MRI headphones sound different, transferring the music as they do through a long tube, which is attached to little paper cones next to your ears. The result is unsettling; scratchy, distorted carnival music heard from a great distance, distorted by echo. The deep, bone-rattling boom, boom, boom coming from the machinery spinning around you shudders beneath it, out of sync with the music and causing a low-level unease that grows until you're spending all of your energy not to freak the fuck out.

The whole thing last either thirty minutes or a thousand years, depending on whom you ask. The output was a little animated slideshow that started from the top of my skull and ended at the sacrum, neat cross-sections of all the vile giblets that fill us and keep the meat moving. It showed no blockages to the network cabling, so the neurologist sent me to have an electromyogram. I can only assume this was done as punishment for debunking his original diagnosis.

EMGs are weird, mad-scientist puppetry best left undescribed.

I hate being ignored more than just about anything. Anything besides the sound of fingernail clippers, that is. Not nail scissors, mind you, those I have no issue with. But nail clippers drive me right up the fucking wall. I literally can't even be in the house when someone is knips knips knipsing away at their nails. When I hear that noise, it feels like my spine is trying to slither out my back and down my leg, looking for a hole to hide in until the coast is clear. But I digress.

I really try to listen when people are talking to me. If someone walks up to my desk at work, I'll acknowledge their presence; and if I'm busy or talking on the phone, I'll make awkward head tilts, hand gestures, and otherwise contort myself just to make sure they understand that I see them there, waiting to talk to me. If I know there's an SMS or iMessage waiting on my response, it weighs on me like a ton of bricks. I have no peace until I read it, respond to it, and get it off my back.

Maybe my hatred of being ignored is simply jealousy. Perhaps I'm affronted by the fact that other people can knowingly have my message sitting there in their inbox, them not giving a moment's consideration to something that would drive me to distraction.

If I walk up to someone who is on the phone, and they don't so much as look in my direction, maybe it's the admiration that I feel for their sense of utter detachment that makes me want to strangle them where they sit, preferably with their own telephone cord, should there be one. This is a downside to the ubiquity of wireless technologies: the absence of ready-made garrotes in everyday situations

So yeah, being ignored and using nail-clippers. Oh, and blowing your nose loudly in public. Fuck people, they do vex me so.

I opened a bottle and in I strode.
Now nobody can find me.
I’ve left my chair, my house, my road,
my town and my world behind me.

I’m wearing the cloak, I’ve slipped on the ring,
I’ve swallowed the magic potion.
I’ve fought with a dragon, dined with a king
and dived in a bottomless ocean.

I opened a bottle and made some friends.
I shared their tears and laughter
and followed their road with its bumps and bends
to the happily ever after.

I finished my bottle and out I came.
The cloak can no longer hide me.
My chair and my house are just the same,
but I have a bottle inside me.

With apologies to Julia Donaldson: that last part is a little creepy.

I was sitting in the train this morning, listening to music and reading something on my tablet. This was all according to my morning routine, a quiet and comfortable place, with nothing more serious to worry about than a flat iPad battery.

About 10 minutes before we reached the final stop, where I would transfer to the train that takes me onward to my own final stop, a pretty girl collapsed.

She didn't go down like a sack of potatoes, mind you. She was a class act and just sort of gently leaned, and kept on leaning. The lady next to her realized what was happening pretty quickly. She calmly caught her and gently laid her out in the floor, right by my feet. As far as collapses go, it was orderly, graceful even, like a slow-motion stage-faint.

Once she was safely on the floor, calls went out for anyone who might know first aid. A twenty-something guy in immodest cycling pants confidently stepped forward and started giving orders. He checked her pulse, made sure she was breathing, and went about arranging her body so she wouldn't choke on her tongue, should dire things indeed be happening. But she was breathing fine, and lay there on her side with her hands beneath her face, sleeping peacefully. Right by my feet.

I wasn't sure what to do. Not in a flustered or chaotic way, more like when you're speaking in public and can't figure out what to do with your hands. It's been well over twenty years since I took first aid, and I don't think you're supposed go straight to leeches and trepanning any more to treat these types of imbalances of the humors. Not knowing what else to do, I just sat there and watched her sleep.

This felt creepy almost immediately, so I turned back to my reading. I was in the middle of a Tumblr post by Cory Doctorow, something about cyberfreiheit or Disney's Haunted Mansion most likely, and wanted to get to the end of it. This was when my iPad died on me. For just a split-second, sitting there watching the device's spinning wheel of hibernation, I felt like the universe was conspiring to make me miserable, that life could be cruel and unfair. Then I remembered the young lady who was laid out unconscious at my feet, felt guilty, and checked up on her progress.

She was sitting up but groggy, with people gathered around, asking her if she knew her own name and who was Prime Minister. I realized that if I fainted and people started asking me these kinds of questions, I wouldn't be able to get more than 50% of them correct. There would probably be a lot of sad, slow head-shaking about the young man who was so out of it he doesn't who the Mayor of London was or who chuffed the lorry. Luckily, and to her credit, she was more up to speed on UK current events and was fine, if rattled. We arrived a few minutes late but I made my transfer without any hassles.

I entered the connecting train and sat down for the final 45 minute train ride into work, wondering what I was going to do with myself without a telescreen to stare at. Right before leaving the station, someone sat down across from me: it was Sleeping Beauty, and though she was ambulant she was definitely looking like something that the cat had dragged in.

I wasn't sure if her passing out on the morning train was something I should bring up. I thought it could be an ice-breaker, maybe, a way to get a conversation going and pass the time. But then I thought, she might ask what I did to help, seeing as she had been laying on top of my shoes. I was front row center to her collapse, and not only had no impulse to jump in and help, but would probably have done more harm than good had I tried.

So I put on my headphones and pretended to listen to music, sneaking the occasional glance to see if she was still shaking and pale. And for the life of me I couldn't figure out what to do with my hands.

WTF, climate, it's almost the end of April. The sun finally came out today, and the sky is blue. But it's cold. It should be 65 degrees and breezy outside. May's coming up, you fucker, now make some effort out there.

An advertisement for the Kantine bar in Augsburg, Germany. It's a bar located in the abandoned American military base close to the town.

According to legend, the city was threatening to shut them down for years. Once, they even had a closing date. But they were given a reprieve. This postcard is an invitation to the celebration party.

It has been raining cats and dogs. And there are snails. Snails and slugs are everywhere. They creep around the garden at night, as expected. But they're also shameless, flaunting themselves all throughout the day.

When I go out to smoke at night, there's all too often the crunch underfoot, another escargot falls to the Croc, crushed to paste in his little home. I usually feel pretty bad about that.

Indeed, there's a veritable snail plague underway over here in England. I guess one should expect it, with rain every day for a quarter-year straight. I'm alright with it, to be honest, they don't bother me much. Except when I accidentally crunch them, that is. Then it kind of gets to me, makes me feel bad and clumsy.

But the little lady, she's a gardener, and sees things a bit differently. Gardeners tend to have that ruthless, detached streak in them that you only otherwise see in serial killers and cattle farmers. If some creature might get in the way of their ultimate goal, be that a coat made of women's skins or a milk quota, well, God help whatever that creature might be. Measures will be taken.

A couple of days ago, she decided it was time to spruce up the edges of the garden. Plants were bought, packed in little plastic grids, destined for a lifetime of loving care. For she's a generous gardener. New homes were made for them, all along the boundaries, between the other flowers. There was just one problem: The snails would be coming, and everybody knew it. She knew it.

She brought more than tulips home from the garden shop that day. She brought snail pellets, little bright blue nuggets of horror that she could strew about the garden. They looked scary enough on their own, but there should have been a warning on the bottle. A warning to all, that it contained scenes of Armageddon, of the End Times.

Since that day, a week ago, the garden has become a charnel pit of loathing. A multitude of nails and slugs and gastropodes of all descriptions lie writhing in their own secretions outside my house at this very moment.

Whenever I dare venture outside, their blank little eyestalks stare up at me, quivering, begging my help yet hopeless of salvation, dying in a pool of slime that used to be their bodies. And they have lain there since the butchery began. Every day, there are new piles of empty shells scattered on the flagstones, settling down into the horrifying masses of goo, the remnants of dozens or even hundreds of the slugs and snails that were drawn to the Blue Death before them.

I hope her flowers survive, I really do. But I can't help wonder: at what cost!

Hence the uppity attitude.

Looks like the little lady and I will be making a rare appearance at one of these here "blog" meetups. Looks like I'll need to get my tux out of the mothballs and polish my spats.

Anybody coming who might still have my blog in their RSS feeds?

Taco Bell is being sued for using the word "beef" in the advertising for their "beef" tacos.

Now, I'm not one of these people who would eat a beef taco in any restaurant without expecting there to be actual, honest-to-jeebus beef or some kind in it. I'm just not that cynical. I expect things to be what they say and do as they're told.

Careful analysis reveals, unfortunately, that Taco Bell's "seasoned beef" filling is duplicitous and not worth your trust:

"Taco Bell's definition of 'seasoned beef' does not conform to consumers' reasonable expectation or ordinary meaning of seasoned beef, which is beef and seasonings," the suit says. Beef is the "flesh of cattle," according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Dear me. We should have seen this coming. Nevertheless, I feel unaffected as I haven't eaten at the Bell in years, and even then I was usually enjoying the (relatively harmless) Bean Burrito, with added sour cream to ensure receiving bespoke food items (Taco Bell ProTip).

So now we're left wondering: If it ain't beef. What is it then?

A second opinion may not be exactly what you're looking for. What for you is flawless and sublime might be unremarkable to those whose opinions matter to you. They might find the object of your opinions quaint, lackluster, or, worst of all, not worth commenting upon.

These things can be borne somewhat when the knowledge is yours alone. This is why you must carefully consider with whom you're going to share your likes and your dislikes. Or anything, really.

Take a good, long look before speaking.

[From Baby needs a new pair of shoes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Trent say:

My god sits in the back of the limousine
My god comes in a wrapper of cellophane
My god pouts on the cover of the magazine
My god's a shallow little bitch trying to make the scene

I have arrived and this time you should believe the hype
I listened to everyone now i know that everyone was right
I'll be there for you as long as it works for me
I play a game
It's called insincerity

Starfuckers
Starfuckers
Starfuckers, inc.
Starfuckers

I am every fucking thing and just a little more
I sold my soul but don't you dare call me a whore
And when i suck you off not a drop will go to waste
It's really not so bad you know once you get past the taste, yeah
(asskisser)

Starfuckers
Starfuckers
Starfuckers, inc.
Starfuckers

All our pain
How did we ever get by without you?
You're so vain
I bet you think this song is about you
Don't you?
Don't you?
Don't you?
Don't you?

Now i belong i'm one of the chosen ones
Now i belong i'm one of the beautiful ones

Who's not going to smoke? You telling me?

This chick kicks ass.

People of Australia: do not fear the Donut. Accept the donut.

Now for a bit of the ol' Tasmanian Tie-Dye:

And don't blink now, it's the Eye o' Perth:

According to Aussie state-run media:

It has since posted a disclaimer above the national loop feed putting the images down to "occasional interference to the radar data".

"The Bureau is currently investigating ways to reduce these interferences," the disclaimer said.

Worship the Donut!

I had no doubt whatsoever that the Democrats' (and by extension, the US media's) insistence on the character assassination would backfire:

How is it that the media's approach has changed so dramatically in just the past couple of weeks? Perhaps the Democrats simply went too far when they claimed that tea-party protesters had shouted racial slurs at black congressmen during the ObamaCare weekend.

[From Strange New Respect - WSJ.com]

I really couldn't figure out what they were trying to accomplish there. The vote was going, it was decided before the name-calling began. Public opinion obviously had no meaning once they started filing into the Capitol (and probably not before that, either).

There was no way that they could think that making shit up about the 3rd-party opposition, which the Tea Parties represent, could raise public opinion by 30 points in time for the bill signing. Was there?

The blogger in me isn't dead, it's just sleeping. A few years ago, I was what the Old Economy referred to as a Producer. Nowadays, what with the Twitter and the Facebook, it seems that everybody has become a micro-producer, and a macro-consumer.

But this kind of economy is obviously nonsense. In a situation where the consumption so completely outpaces the production, it follows (in my little analysis) that quality of what we consume decreases rapidly.

People used to jab at bloggers, saying that it wasn't worth reading because, hey, who cares what your cat is doing? But think about the endless fluff that rolls by on your Twitter feed. The Facebook statuses, while interesting to me because I know the producers, carries little actual value with them. They just make you feel good.

If I compare what my connections are doing in the social networky present to what the people on the blogroll used to put out in a day of energetic blogging, well, let's just say the world has taken a turn for the stupid.

What accounts for the discrepancy in production and consumption? Could it be that somewhere the machines are running, thumping underground, lulling us Eloi toward the dinner bell? Don't come crying to me when your Twitter roll cold-cocks you and you wake up with your feet tied and an apple stuffed in your mouth.

Not me, man, I'm gonna hip-check that witch into the oven, just like Hans showed us. I'm mixing shit up, but you know what I'm about.

Source: US Department of Energy

As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:

The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.

[From North Koreans Use Cellphones to Bare Secrets - NYTimes.com]

Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?

But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?

And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.

Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:

• Bowling
  Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
• Pool hustling
  You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
  
• Juggling
  Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
• Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced)
  I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
• Blogging
  Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
  

This creepy-ass little robot crossed with an Aibo would just about weird the shit out of anybody.

Pro tip: If you really want to feel your skin crawl, watch that video with Bauhaus's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" playing in the background.

Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:

Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.

[From FOXNews.com - Democrats Close to Vote on Jobs Package Without Bill in Hand]

And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.

When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.

I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.

It's all about hookers and blow with these people.

You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.

Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.

Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.

The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.

Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.

So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.

Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.

So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.

Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?

One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?

Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.

The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.

Which is why I have to giggle at this page.

How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.

In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.

The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.

The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.

But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.

Document image cribbed from here.

The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.

There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).

What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.

So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.

Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?

• what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
• and Home Sharing?
• Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
• Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
• Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?

I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.

But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.

I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.

Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.

This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.

Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...

I'm gearing up for the UK driver's exam, and I just came across this nugget:

Pedestrian Crossings

The correct type of crossing should be recognized and the correct procedure demonstrated. You should:

• at zebra crossings slow down and stop if anyone is waiting to cross
• give way to pedestrians on a pelican crossing when the amber lights are flashing
• give way to cyclists as well as pedestrians on a toucan crossing and act correctly at puffin crossings

I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Zebra, OK I get it, stripes. But a pelican crossing? And seriously, how can anyone be expected to act correctly at a puffin crossing? How would one go about looking up the etiquette of such a place?

I've been here now for two years, and I got my Learner's Permit just over a month ago. Now that I have a car, I will need to buck up and get the license to go with it. So far, my ignorance of the terms and conditions of the UK Provisional License has led me to break at least them most egeregiously.

What are provisional licence conditions?

As a provisional licence holder you are restricted to a maximum speed limit of 45 mph and you must display L-plates on the front and rear of your vehicle. You must have a qualified driver with you who is at least 21 years of age and who has held a full licence in that category for at least three years. You are also not allowed to drive on a motorway.

Whoops. So, I will now let the little lady drive a bit more. We can take down the L-plates, and finally top the granny speed.