Journal Entries
From British Summer Time to GMT
Posted Oct 29, 2000
I was just fiddling about on the computer last night (2 am this morning to be more precise), when a message popped up saying something about putting the clock back - and by implication giving me permission to stay awake and continue fiddling for an extra hour.
Now it's getting dark before 5 pm. Soon it'll be dark by 4 pm. I hate that. Why can't they leave our time alone? British Summer Time and GMT . . . I've never understood why we have to have all this clock altering nonsense in the Spring and Autumn. It upsets my already far from reliable body clock. It's bad enough to have the days getting shorter and the nights getting longer without confusing my poor biorhythms even more by sucking me back an hour in the Autumn and blowing me forward an hour in the Spring.
Humbug! 
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Latest reply: Oct 29, 2000
Recycling bins
Posted Jul 29, 2000
This week our District Council has issued us with recycling bins. Hallelujah! And about time too. It's taken years. I've been saving all my bottles, cans, papers - cluttering up my house until such time as I just happen to need to go near a recycling station for some reason other than to recycle stuff. Obviously it defeats the object of recycling if you have to make a special trip in the car, thereby adding to the pollution, in order to cut down on waste and pollution.
I've had lots of sarcastic comments over the years, about the bags full of bottles outside my kitchen. Contrary to what my friends and neighbours may imagine, I'm not a secret heavy drinker - it's just that the bottles have a long time to accumulate before I deposit them. Frequently, I've got to the recycling area only to find that it hasn't been emptied for ages and there are bottles, cans and papers everywhere - so I take my recyclables home again.
Talk about apathy, though (Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz would have had a few choice word to say about this lot). Some of my neighbours aren't happy about having a recycling bin. They've never bothered to recycle before. They don't know where they're expected to keep the bin. It's all just too much trouble. How very very typical. It's depressing but unsurprising. I wonder if they'd enjoy living in the squalor, if everybody thought the same way and couldn't be arsed. There was an official announcement last November that the world's human population had reached 6 billion. It'll be 9 billion soon, then 12 billion. We could all swap diseases in a huge planet-wide favela as our population climbed and our resources ran out. Future generations could go to hell. Recycle? Why bother? Moan, moan, moan, grumble, grumble, whinge . . . "apathetic bloody planet."
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Latest reply: Jul 29, 2000
Where's all the bimbobabble gone?
Posted Jul 23, 2000
I was considering doing a guide entry on "Bimbobabble". Don't bother looking it up in the dictionary. It's just the word I use to describe the language used in adverts for women's hair and skin preparations - that sort of thing. If the advertisers can make up language, why shouldn't I? Actually, I got the idea from a book I once had called Psychobabble (where did I put that book, I wonder). The problem is, I haven't seen any adverts for ages. If I watch tv, I press the "mute" button when the adverts start. It's not that I can't stand the adverts (though most of them really are tedious rubbish). The main reason is that they're usually so much louder than the program preceding them that you have to press a button on the remote control gizmo to reduce the volume to a level where it won't damage your hearing and, if you're going to have to press a button anyway, it might as well be the "mute" button.
So I can't remember the bimbobabble words that used to have me rifling through a dictionary, only to find them missing. I've made an effort to look out for hair and skin product ads over the last couple of days and I haven't heard any of the unrecognisable-as-English gobbledegook that used to be an integral part of those adverts. Tut. My memory. Well, I think one of the words was "silkiens" and from the context of it's use, I guess the idea was that there's a swarm of nanobots mixed in with whatever the brand of shampoo was, and when the target "bimbo" washed her hair, this army of tiny robots would get to work removing all the split ends and filing down all the rough bits on the shaft of each hair.
Those adverts used to be very common. Has that style of advertising been abandoned? If so, perhaps it's because the adverts didn't work - the target bimbo was as rare as the dictionary definitions for the bimbobabble vocabulary. I'll just have to come up with another idea for a guide entry I suppose.
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Latest reply: Jul 23, 2000
Sleep
Posted Jul 15, 2000
It's Saturday so I'm going to do a journal. This one's about my craving for sleep. I never want to get up in the morning. As soon as the alarm goes off, I have the same conversation with myself, ever morning. It goes like this: "Groan, I don't want to get up." "Get up!" "I don't want to get up." "Got to get up!" "I don't want to get up." "Hard luck. Get up!" "I hate getting up." "Get the **** up!" "Oh, all right, don't keep on." "Stop drifting back off to sleep and get up!" "All right, in a minute." "WILL YOU GET OUT OF THAT ****** BED!" This can go on for half an hour before my more disciplined self wins.
It's a problem for me. We're all supposed to have a biological clock synchronized to a 24 hour day - our circadian rhythm. I think my ancestors must have evolved on a planet with a 26 hour rotation. Ideally, I'd like to be awake for 16 hour and asleep for 10 hours. What can I do? Nothing really. I live on a planet that rotates once every 24 hours and in a society with a time fixation. I'm doomed to never get enough sleep and have the same struggle with myself every morning.
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Latest reply: Jul 15, 2000
The em-dash blues
Posted Jul 6, 2000
Another journal already! If anyone has read my first journal, they may have noticed a liberal smattering of mysterious groups of characters where a single, different character would seem to make more sense. This is the group I'm referring to: – . This is not some kind of Masonic code or piece of esoterica aimed at initiates of the church of mumbo jumbo. It's what happens if you produce your journal in Word 2000 and make use of the "dash", which Word then (unhelpfully) changes to an em-dash if there is a space behind and in front of it. It's only supposed to change 2 dashes to an em-dash and leave a single dash as an en-dash but perhaps an en-dash would also be displayed as some bunch of characters that would look meaningless in the context of your journal. I just don't know.
In any case if you produce your journals in Word and you want to avoid making the same mistake that I made then, from the "Tools" menu in Word select AutoCorrect, click on the "AutoFormat As You Type" tab and uncheck the "Replace as you type" Symbol characters (--) with symbols (--) (the second bracketed symbol is a long unbroken dash, or "em-dash",by the way but I can't show that as it would be displayed as a bunch of characters when changed to plain text format). Then Microsoft will stop interfering with your dashes.
I'm a bit fed with myself for having made this mistake. If I'd clicked the "Preview" button before posting the journal permanently, I would have spotted the problem. Once a journal is posted, it seems, there's no going back, so all the gobbledegook in my very first journal will be blowing raspberries at me every time I look at my home page for as long as I live, or continue to access the page, or until H2G2 change the system so I can go and correct it. Ahhhhhh well, never mind.
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Latest reply: Jul 6, 2000
Salamander the Mugwump
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