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Missing Time

After a late night I woke up and presently noticed it was 12 o'clock. Half an hour until the repeat of Radio 4's funny News Quiz with Sandy Toksvig. For some reason I was idly daydreaming about Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles, whilst the melancholy song Wasurenaide ("I Won't Forget", the end theme from Kimikiss) ran through my mind.

Suddenly I was awake again. It seemed I had dozed off for a moment, but it could only have been a moment, because Wasurenaide was still playing in my head and I was still thinking of Tsubasa. But when I looked at my watch, it was 1:30pm! Somehow 90 minutes had elapsed in the space of less than a single song, and the News Quiz was long gone.

Q. Is the heart soluble in tears? Design an experiment to find the answer in 24 episodes or less.

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OK so a week ago I started to talk about the latest anime series I’ve been watching. Maybe a recipe for vanilla vodka doesn’t sound like a discussion about anime, but as they say, every journey begins with a single step, or failing that, a drink.



Now that's what I call a foxy girl!
Mitsuki Shijou in KimiKiss
KimiKiss Pure Rouge is one of those series that I took one look at and then dumped for being cute and vacuous, it was a story about a couple of lads who are determined to get a girlfriend by the end of term, and find themselves faced by a bevvy of cute female stereotypes: the older sister figure, the younger sister figure, the shy girl, the sporty girl, the emotionless genius girl, the strict/cross girl, and the filthy rich girl (pictured right, cosplaying a fox spirit). I particularly loathe the pernicious stereotype of intelligent or scientific people being emotionless (and indeed I never did really warm to that character even after I changed my mind about the series).

But anyhow, several months later I decided to take another look at the one episode I'd downloaded before deleting it, and for some reason something clicked and I ended up downloading the whole 24 episodes over the course of a couple of days. It still looked lightweight, with its bouncy feelgood OP song, Aozora Loop (Blue sky loop), and the characters were still stereotypes, but somehow the interactions between them felt real, I could identify with the tribulations of trying to get somewhere with a person you think you like but actually don't even know.

But I was oh so wrong about what kind of story it was. Maybe the ED song should have tipped me off, since it has a completely different tone to the OP. After consulting Roget's Thesaurus, I have concluded that the term I am looking for (which isn't actually in Roget), is emofest. By mid-series, all the main characters have smoothly got the person they were after. But all it proves is that you can get what you want and still not be happy. All of a sudden, people are beginning to realise who it was they really likes all along. Yes, it's the classic romantic triangle or even quadrilateral. Since the series resolutely sticks to a realistic slice of life approach, it inevitably ends with a string of broken hearts as everything starts to unravel.

But I still haven't really described what actually happens or even who it happens to. I think I'll leave that until my next post.

How to make Vanilla Vodka

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Take a shot glass and fill it with two parts vodka to one part water. Add three drops* of vanilla essence. Serve with generous helping of cute but tragic anime such as Kimikiss Pure Rouge. Repeat dosage as necessary.

* (If using natural vanilla, I would suggest doubling the amount as I find it has a more subtle flavour than synthetic vanilla.)

Did you know that the vanilla plant is a type of orchid? It's amazing what you can learn from a label.

F U CN RD THS...

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The world is divided into two sorts of people: those who understand why I am posting this clipping; and those who don't.



And so the World Otakunisation Project inches forward, millimetre by millimetre.

Designs on a Grand Hotel

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For some reason I started thinking about the viability of Hotel Hilbert today. Hilbert was a mathematician, and his idea was for an infinite hotel which even when full could always find room for one more person. Now in a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, there is the problem that you can’t simply send each guest to the next available room at the end of the corridor, since it would take them longer and longer—and eventually infinitely long—to check in. So Hilbert’s clever wheeze was instead to get everyone to move down a room when a new guest arrived, leaving room 1 free for the new arrival. Thus the rooms at infinity would only be approached very gradually, one room at a time, and no-one would have to take an inifinite walk.

So far so good, but what happens when someone wants to leave? Depending on how long they’ve been there, it could be a very long walk back to reception! Hilbert never addresses this problem, which is surely critical to a viable hotel. After a while it occurred to me that instead of getting people to move down a room every time a new guest arrives, the rooms themselves could move. I think the solution is to have an endless loop of rooms, like the compartments of a paternoster lift. Not only does this remove the hassle of having to change rooms all the time, it also means that on the return side of the loop there is a stready stream of empty rooms heading back towards reception. When half way through your stay, you simply switch to one of the returning ones, and hey presto you arrive back at reception just in time to leave!

This doesn’t solve everything however. For instance in most hotels people want to come and go during their stay, and not just stay in their room for the whole visit. I’m still working on that one, but I am confident I will have a solution by the time the first infinite hotel has finished being built!

Common phobia for vampires?

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I recently met a girl who has a fear of mirrors. She was at first diagnosed with Body Dysmorphic Disorder which is about self image, but she said in fact her fear is the reverse: when she looks in a mirror she’s scared that she won’t have a reflection! It sounds kind of weird but at the same time it seemed to make sense in a weird sort of way. (Luckily she’s not the type who wears much makeup!) She’s now been diagnosed with Eisoptrophobia, however this simply seems to mean “fear of mirrors”, so it doesn’t actually explain her condition.

I asked her if she’d ever found bite marks on her neck or experienced missing time, but she didn’t think so. She does have a certain sense of humour about it, but the dread she experiences on approaching a mirror seems very real, we were walking through a shopping arcade where there was a shopfront with a line of mirrored pillars, and she insisted on walking so that I was between her and the mirrors, and she clutched me the whole time and looked the other way until we were well past them.

I noticed though that she didn’t have this issue with reflections in windows, I think it’s that mirrors are like openings into other worlds whereas you can see through the reflections in normal glass. Looking the phobia up online I see that a fear of mirrors is surprisingly common, with the notion that the reflection is really of another parallel world being quite a dominant theme. But most people’s fear seems to be that some weird creature will look out at them rather than that they themselves won’t have a reflection.

I recall seeing a Dracula film once where this guy is shaving and Dracula comes up behind him. When the guy notices Dracula isn’t reflected in his shaving mirror, Dracula simply taps the mirror and says “unreliable things” and then tosses the mirror out of the window. From his casual air, he evidently he didn’t suffer from Eisoptrophobia!

Bee Happy

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I’ve been away for a while recently, and visited a place which is heaven for bees but hell if you suffer bee-phobia. Every plant in Harlow Carr Gardens in Yorkshire was covered in bees, making the most of the gaps between rain showers. I took my chances and got a few close ups, only centimetres from the flowers.
a copyright photograph by the author

This next one is my favourite shot though, these flowers are so strange, reminiscent of dandelion clocks. The scene also reminded me of what is said to have been the first Impressionist photograph, “The Onion Field” by George Davison.
a copyright photograph by the author

These flowers look like open mouths complete with teeth! They’re from the foxglove family I think, but would make good triffids.
a copyright photograph by the author


I also went on a mysterious woodland walk high above The Strid, a place where the River Wharfe (which is normally about 20 metres wide at that point) is funnelled into a rocky gorge narrow enough (about 1.5m) to stride across (hence the name). (However many people have drowned jumping The Strid, since the rocks tend to be slippy, and slope back towards the water, which is deep and fast as it courses through the narrows.)
a copyright photograph by the author

Well that’s all for now, I’ll do a few more later and try and catch up on the bloggysphere too.

2*12 WTF

It seems that come the year 2012 we’re all f*cked as we won’t be able to use the year in our blogs or indeed at all! (At least in the UK). According to this site about the 2*12 Olymp*cs the number “2012” (also “London 2012”) has become a "Games' Mark" and no-one may use it, punishable by summary execution or somesuch.

So not only are they filching my money via the Council Tax but they’re going to stop me writing the date any more! Hmm, I guess that means that during the Olymp*c year I won’t be able to write out any Council Tax cheques, so maybe the scoundrels won’t get their addict’s fix of cash from me that year....

Go Random!

Here's a literally random thing to do! Paste this code into a text file and save it as "random.html"
<HTML><HEAD><NAME="Frameset">
<title>random</TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="59">
</head>
<FRAMESET ROWS="*" units=pixels border=0>
<FRAME NAME=r SRC="http://www.randomwebsite.net/random/" 
SCROLLING=yes Frameborder="no" border=0>
</FRAMESET>
</HTML>

— Alternatively you can download this zip file containing one I made earlier. random.zip

Now drag the file into your browser and bookmark it for future reference. Whenever you load it, it will load a randomly chosen webpage that changes every 59 seconds! (You can set the META Refresh to a different number of seconds or remove that line altogether if you like, but please don't make it too short so as not to hammer the random website server).

There are actually several websites around which will serve up random webpages, another URL you could use in the above file is http://www.randomwebsite.com/cgi-bin/random.pl

(Note: the reason for wrapping the URL in a frameset is because otherwise a timed refresh (or pressing the "reload" button on your browser) will just reload whatever random website you first got instead of fetching a new one.)

If you google "random website" you will find several more. I find it's a fun thing to have loaded in a tab, every now and then I check to see what's turned up, there are often interesting sites and blogs I would never have known about.... and just once it even loaded up a site I was already familiar with!

Before the rain

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Before this week’s rain it was sunny.... copyright photograph by the author
... so I went cycling along the canals...
October 2008
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