I just bid on a print of the following picture.

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Today (yesterday, actually, but I'm posting late): two sisters want recognition as a couple, pixie dust makes a man's body part grow, a baby is horny, and some people are addicted to innuendo.

But before that, these. The following amusing links require Flash and sound.

Scrapbook Central (closing down sale? But how could they fail?!?)

I Love Horses (will likely traumatise you, whether or not you love horses)

Birmingham is ace! Ah, questionable American Anglophiles, my other one weakness.

Identity 'at risk' on Facebook

Baby white rhino makes his debut

"Dr [Brett] Mills [a lecturer in film and television studies at the University of East Anglia] says a less restrictive climate might make innuendo less necessary."

No, no, no. That's to miss the very point of Brits. Remember that humour thing? And how repressed we are? Latter is not exempt from former. In other words, we love laughing at how repressed we are. It's not a terribly serious battle of principles to sneak this stuff past the censors, or a symptom of hypocritical puritanism (for the latter, see USA). It's done for a laugh at every level. Double-entendres are one of the beauties of a mongrel language with so many homophones.

(Poor doggie had a stroke?!) (audio)

(Also, I think I deserve kudos for not making a joke like "what's a homophone then, is it one of these?")

(Then again, with a name like Lord Laidlaw, the jokes write themselves.)

Device 'spins silk like spiders'

When does kinky porn become illegal?

"There is no reason for this stuff. I can't see why people need to see it."--Liz Longhurst, in article

I agree. I also feel that way about Oasis, and I bet loads of murderers have listened to them, and it's still a REALLY STUPID reason to ban anything.

Students wear gorilla suits in order to promote gorillas art(?) to the general public

Why should people with children get special treatment? All together now, piercing East End accent: 'coz it's FAAAAAAHMLUY!

Superficial 'reviews' of GTA4 (vid), but the real prize is this related link showing

the development of the first Grand Theft Auto (vid). <3 that rap song, and yes, I can still recite along with it. "T, theft, determination, to steal what you can and run from the nation..."

Two sisters have lost a battle to have the same inheritance tax treatment as cohabiting couples.

You can bet this one irks me too.

'Pixie' dust helps finger grow (vid) (no, nothing to do with the LSD creator dying)

Four weeks? The nail looks too old...

Dan Dare 'inspired innovation' (vid)

Meanwhile, these things...

Local elections were last night. Now, Economists Don't Vote (which is shorthand for "your vote has a vanishingly small chance of affecting anything, so it's a waste of time", which, like many things that can be proved with maths, is true but would cause catastrophe if people actually acted on it; see also...) is very much false in our ward, which is always a close scrap between Lib Dem and Tory, turning on less than 100 votes the last couple of times IIRC.

My mother and brother both went to the vote count, separately: mother because she's been doing volunteer stuff for the Lib Dems and brother because he moonlights as a reader for a lady called Marie, who was going. The Lib Dem candidate got in, and by a bigger margin than previously. In the wider world Tories are generally gaining at Labour's expense (shock horror), Lib Dems slowly gaining as usual.

I saw a consultant neurologist at 10:00 today, having been lucky enough to score someone's cancelled appointment. My tremor, blast it, was behaving itself perfectly, and my speech was fine too, so I had to hope the doctor would believe me that the symptoms can get a LOT worse. Apparently my performance on the reflex, follow-my-finger-with-yours, now-touch-your-nose tests she got me to do was normal. (Even though I felt extremely clumsy, as ever, and my reaction times have always been inferior. It's possible that I'm a competitive perfectionist, in the way of a fat girl concluding she's anorexic because every time she looks in the mirror she sees a fat girl.)

There's nothing nasty left that it could be and she's not concerned about any of the symptoms. She seems to think they'll sort themselves out as I get further with my... other current course of treatment (speaking of which, next appointment is on the 16th). So she's prescribing beta-blockers and 100mg of wait and see.

And when she puts it like that, I'm curious to know if that'll turn out to be true. I could do with the depression lifting, anyway; been considering getting put back on an SSRI, but putting that off while all the other stuff's going on so's not to complicate things.

And, in a real BBC moment, I just saw Johnny Vegas in the canteen. Maybe they're making another series of Ideal up here. (Surreal comedy series about a drug dealer, filmed in a sorta realistic and grubby style.)

edit: Oh yes, that was the other thing. Our team here at work is moving to be part of a larger team, which is great for me because there'll be other geeks to talk to, and I've just been told that I'm going to get to shadow a CSD, get some training if needed and basically start doing something closer to what I consider real coding.

Which will be awesome. Perhaps I can finally shed my (deserved) self-image as a geek-lite with no skills and basically no clue what he's doing.

(Then I'd just have the other side of the self-image to deal with, the one that weeps a bit whenever I walk past any tall, slim man with perfect hair... yes, I'm that shallow some days.)