personalia


Sunday 30 November 2003 at 06:49 am
contents of my wallet at 01:50, sunday morning.

1 visa credit card;
1 natwest debit card;
1 wolfson college student identity card;
1 cambridge university library card;
1 scott polar research institute level 6 security access keycard;
1 blockbuster membership card;
1 norwegian driving licence;
1 weekend travelcard for the london underground (23 november);
75 euro;
100 danish kroner;
3 cypriot pounds;
56 english pounds, 59 pence;
150 norwegian kroner;
1 young persons railcard, expires july 16 2004;
3 distinctly unhealthy-looking passport photos;
4 A5 invitations to "an experimental evening of trance - transfiguration, physical phenomena", 27th november at cambridge spiritualist church;
1 doublesized photocopy of an american dollar, folded up as a paper airplane;
1 receipt for 2 months rent, paid 1 month late (600 pounds);
1 receipt for a bike, a lock and lights - 30.09.03 (91 pounds 80 pence);
5 receipts for food purchases, including 20 packets of wotsits;
1 unspecified receipt from gametron (20 pounds);
1 receipt for heroes of might and magic III complete (20 pounds);
1 receipt from blockbuster (22 pounds 55 pence);
1 specsavers receipt (85 pounds)
1 folded A4 sheet with the account details of my property management agency;
1 15 minute ticket for the internet communication centre at schiphol airport, amsterdam;
1 torn agenda entry (24 december 2001) with address and contact details for mr dave lamblein;
2 small slips of paper with university libary shelfmarks for unspecified books;
3 business cards - my friend halfdan's old card from KPMG, mr james "jimbo" fowkes, sales representative at yamanouchi, and mr ottavio di lauro, "personal pluridisciplinary consultant";
1 crumpled post-it note that says "can you see me";
and, finally, 1 small smooth but uneven lucky oval black stone.

argh


Wednesday 26 November 2003 at 10:51 pm
don't know WTF my psychological problem is at the moment. am finding it utterly impossible to do what I should be doing - instead I spend my days faffing around watching tv and making half-hearted stabs at things that never get finished. total breakdown of inner discipline. the pale hungry monkey of trivial addictions rides me, claws firmly in my back. tasteless but irresistible. it's got my soap-addicted flatmate expressing astonishment at my hollyoaks expertise. what can I say but weird, man: wonder what I'm running from.

extragalactic intelligence gets it up the *** in the mens toilet of cambridge department


Tuesday 18 November 2003 at 7:28 pm
the men's toilet in the history department of cambridge is littered with graffiti. judging from the most prominent, it also harbours some strong if not particularly articulate proto-zionism. 'fuck anti-semitism'. 'no, fuck the palestinians'. 'save the children of jerusalem'... one in particular caught my attention.

FUCK
DISRAELI

from the arrangement of the letters i'm guessing someone added the initial D and the I at the end post facto. but as if this was not enough, however... some clever clog had contemporalised the message by erasing some strategic letters:

FUCK
RAEL

a triplicate order: invisible - and partly contextual - as well as both erased and explicit. all three enmeshed in each other. so in fact the graffito (singular sp?) could be written as:

FUCK
(D[IS])RAEL(I)


eh. it made me chuckle anyway. amused by the idea of someone figuratively screwing the high priest of asexual reproduction through cloning.

on the secret trajectory of acts performed in public


Thursday 13 November 2003 at 3:25 pm
yesterday I as I biked down the pedestrian street outside the local shopping centre a group of giggling teenlets threw away a tied-up condom. the condom was caught by a gust of wind and landed on the back of a bike that was passing by. the bike belonged to a serious-looking blond woman, who looked as though she would be not at all amused by the discovery of a tied-up condom containing a small quantity of opaque liquid lodged on the back of her bike, whenever she arrived at wherever she was in the process of arriving at.

the vandal teenlets shrieked at each other and hurried off in the opposite direction, and the woman did not notice. as she was slightly in front of me I had plenty of opportunity to observe. at the end of the pedestrian street she stopped just in front of me, at the same traffic light as me. no one else seemed to notice the Object. my options were: a) "excuse me madam. you have a tied-up Object stuck on the back of your bike". b) ignore the situation, then wonder idly what would happen when she arrived and discovered the Object. I could quite vividly imagine her face wrinkling up in disgust. c) fake a seizure and contrive to dislodge the Object to save the woman her coming displeasure.

all three options seemed bizarre, and I wondered why I was entertaining any of them. produced I guess by my mildly surprising and out-of-character interest in the Object as such.

in the end, as the lights changed another gust of air blew the condom off the womans bike and she pedalled on, oblivious to the entire microdrama of the last two minutes. weirdly, in a busy public space, I was the only person in the world to witness the entire arc of the discarded Object's momentarily suspended (polluting?) path from teenybopper hands to 'disgusting garbage in the street'.

not sure why this stuck with me. I guess I still wonder how the serious-looking woman would have reacted if she had known.

idea that actually came to something!


Thursday 13 November 2003 at 12:49 am
having... dropped the falun gong stunt - principally because outdoor training sessions at 10am saturday morning barefoot in the grass in the middle of winter held very little appeal; applied for an been accepted as an editor at the DMOZ project - in the vain hope that I could radicalise internet ethnography with one fell swoop of my highly gifted hand and a thousand mass emailed questionnaires - only to leave the idea on the back burner out of laziness and some nagging doubts about the adequacy of my proposed methods; and toyed fruitlessly with a dozen ideas from welsh sheep farmers to immigrants in london...

...I've gone and started attending sessions at a spiritualist church. wow! I've started writing a notebook with fieldnotes and asking bystander questions about spirits and ghosts and suchlike. soon i might even gather courage / insolence enough to ask for proper interviews.

I am very pleased.

the internet oracle


Monday 03 November 2003 at 2:19 pm


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