Why I hate Sudoku

10,000 years ago - which is just a few years before Rolf Harris learnt how to manouvre a piece of butcher's paper to elicit noise because he couldn't play a guitar - a Chinaman sat alone on a hill, probably somewhere in the hills in China, and wondered what to do with his day. 

He was bored, you see, kind of how Westerners feel when an inconsiderate thunderstorm screws with their internet reception and they can't spend the afternoon LOLing at I Can Haz Cheeseburger cats. Except the Chinaman didn't have electricity or Google, he barely had dial-up internet access, so he was really bloody bored as shit.  

So what did he do?  The little bastard decided to invent Sudoku, didn't he.  Nothing to do, so let's create a monstrosity of a cryptic puzzle that no-one can ever solve because they aren't friggin' mindreaders, they don't have a spare 53 days to complete a stupid brainteaser and they aren't blessed with the patience of a Buddhist. 

Only someone who can focus the mind on meditating for hours and hours and hours has the patience for this shit.  Humour me while I curse some more - I FUCKING HATE THIS GAME. (Disclaimer: Probably because I am really shite at it)

I first discovered Sudoku last year, when I was stranded in an airport in Florida as a ferocious hurricane threatened to blow the state away.  Apparently planes don't do hurricanes.  My internet refused to work, so I resorted to the delightfully quaint and old-fashioned pen and paper to entertain me. 

I started about 24 easy games of Sudoku, and felt a vague sense of achievement and satisfaction each time I gave up and looked at the answers.  Sometimes you just gotta keep your expectations low.  Plus shit gets done a whole lot quicker with this approach.

I'm currently trying to complete a hard Sudoku.  I don't know why - but I did emerge from a Coles supermarket today with a touch of a headache, so maybe I was abducted by fresh food aliens in the fruit and veggie patch, curious at why anyone would ever voluntarily eat celery.  I'm also trying to complete the cryptothon without cheating.  I honestly don't know what's come over me.  Maybe the Sudoku's inherent Buddhist teachings are rubbing off.



Can this game possibly get any more annoying? I need a game plan.  Would butcher's paper help?  It's got Rolf out of many a sticky situation.  What would Jack Bauer do? He'd glue some C4 to the page and blow it all the way back to Beijing.  Alternatively, I could just watch some telly.



Too much Sudoku



Ramping Up

I haven't blogged for three-ish weeks. What's with that? Let's see, what's happened in that time. I went to Mustique, I got papped on the beach by some boganey bogans, I got called a 'shop window mannequin' by some depressing author who pens books in a novel, publishable-type manner, and then I did this and that and stuff and thing.

I quite frankly can't be bothered to construct complete sentences, but who can blame me, I am a royal after all. Oh, hang on, sorry, I think I'm getting my life muddled with that of Duchess Kate.

In the last three weeks I have been to the dentist. So there, Duchess Kate. Our paths are so eerily similar is shocks me. But shit got weird today. Very, very viard. Everything was just ticketyboo until I accidently drove up a ramp onto the back of the truck. I know. Weird.

Like there aren't enough things to worry about when I'm whooshing around in my Toyota; now I have haphazard ramps to add to the list. Rampophobia; look it up people. If anyone from AAMI is reading this, you're not really in a position to pass judgement, because I've seen your ads. You would insure a tractor-driving monkey if it could afford comprehensive.

So-called Sport of Golf

I found myself in a spot of boredom this afternoon, so I flicked on the televisual contraption and came across something that loosely resembled what I discerned as a golfing fixture. Aside from the fact that I'm super sharp, I called it out as golf because there was lots of kidney-shaped grassy knolls, and lots of people in stupid-looking Scottish slacks holding golf rackets, which was probably the giveaway to be honest.

I can't get my head around golf.  Every type of point is named after a chicken or fowl or something, and that's just stupid. Can't they just add points up like real sports? And then you have the handicap fixation, which to me means you get to swindle your opponents, right?

I don't know much about the so-called sport of golf, except that its most famous contender is now more famed for being a skanky whorebag.  I understand women chasing after Formula One drivers; they live on the edge of the edge of the chichane, and their jobs are extremely dangerous and hugely exciting, if not fairly stupid. But golfers? Really?

This particular match is called the Farmers Insurance Open, which raises some questions - most notably - how can a farmers’ body afford to sponsor a golf tournament that skanky Tiger plays in?  Australian farmers don't get out of bed for anything less than a hefty subsidy, so I couldn't see them scraping together a couple of dollars to run even a lemonade stand.  Perhaps the generosity of the American taxpayers knows no bounds.

I jumped onto The Google to look up these mysteriously wealthy farmers and discovered that Farmers Insurance are just like AAMI or the NRMA, but started out insuring the vehicles of rural farmers like 500 years ago, hence the name.  Didn't want to change your name to something that makes sense then?

Although I think this is a non-sport, you gotta give some credit to the old golfing players. Unlike the ATP Tour players at the Australian Tennis Open, who whinge and whine about distractions, like a fluttering butterfly, to the chair umpire constantly ("quiet please butterfly, quiet please"), Tiger and his cohorts have to contend with caddies whispering in their ear, being chased up the fairway by their fans, annoying paragliders lurking twenty metres above their heads, and high waisted tweed tartan knickerbockers, replete with a Nike logo in Tiger's case.

Rockets and Oranges

I live in a first world country, which means I don't have to worry about food, water or sanitation, at least until I go to an open air loo in a hick country town.

So basically, for the most part, my mind is free to concern itself with such pointless matters as the vagaries of my mood on any given day (usually Monday to Friday, funnily enough), the hideousness of the shock frocks at the Golden Globes, or, tonight, the outrageous bright orangeness of the outfits of the linepeoples at the Australian Open tennis in Melbourne. 

Think of the most radiant orange day-glo neon hue you can possibly imagine and then go ten times brighter, shine 18 big arse sporting lights on it and stick a couple of high-voltage neon lamps down their pants for that blinding effect.

I guess if Mothership Earth has a power outage we'll at least have Rod Laver Arena to guide us back to orbit or whatever happens when we turn the lights out at night.  I don't know, I'm not an astronauteer.  Plus I don't need to know about science; that's what Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory are for.

Despite the fact that I've almost mastered a high-level (see: very basic) understanding of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics - which is in fact a true story - my grasp of anything else related to science or math is akin to that of a kindergartener, perhaps even leaning toward advanced preschool level.

My brain just refuses to acknowledge that science and math make any sense whatsoever.  The other day my sister and I watched one of those disastrous disaster movies made by the special effects trainees at Universal Studios.  My sister possesses a university degree in some brain debilitatingly boring science shit and found it necessary to laugh raucously throughout at the actors lack of understanding of the basics of physics as they tossed out lines like "magnetic activity is unpredictable". 

Okay, given, magnets don't really surprise you that often with their behaviour, but which science is phsyics again?  I know; embarrassing.  Science actually hurts my brain and math leaves even more collateral damage.

What's that Skip?

Lately I have been exercising up a storm, up a mountain, during the night.  It's the latest thing, you know.  I love late twilight in the bush - it's just me, the kangaroos and the 150 or so other people with the exact same gameplan.  I have no idea when exercisement became so fashionable, but fortunately for them all, me and the roos are mostly more than happy to share our mountain.

So last night I went for my exercise roam at nightfall, when it was still a balmy 32 degrees under the shade of a eucalypt tree.  It was still a highly uncivilised weather situation, but I ain’t going for no run at midnight, and I don't do mornings, so what's a girl gonna do?  

On my descent from the mountain I came face-to-hairy-face with a chocolate poodle who I can only describe as a bouncy midget horse.  Abbey was most likely a standard poodle, but she was ginormous, super friendly and was dragging her leash behind her.  I stayed with her for around ten minutes until we both realised she was by herself so we started to walk back down to find her parental units with me holding her leash, unaware that I needed to buckle myself in for the ride. 

Abbey was so thrilled to meet me, or something, that she decided that we had to run really fast down the mountain and we also had to torpedo ourselves randomly and erratically into the bush whenever we laid eyes on a kangaroo, especially when we neared a dangerous cliff face.  These were the rules.  There are about 750 kangaroos per square metre at that time of day, so that was exciting.

We eventually found Abbey’s dad - who was beside himself with stress – while Abbey continued to try and chase everything that bounced.  I reluctantly said goodbye to her while she completely ignored me.  Great, now I think I want a poodle.  I'm a total sucker for dogs.  And kangaroos.  I LOVE  kangaroos.  I could sit and watch them for hours.  Or maybe for ten minutes; they don't really do a great deal.

Just in case a cyber-person-who-isn’t-that-cluey from someplace-that-isn't-Australia reads this post, I don't actually have a pet kangaroo.  No-one in Australia does, except for those weirdos who have pet roos.  Kangaroos are wild and free, plus they really don't care for human interaction at all. They would make a really sucky pet actually, but they are beautiful.

Every now and then my stupid local government decides that it’s best if we have a cull of kangaroos, because apparently you can have too many of them, which is just utter bollocks.  You can never, ever have too many kangaroos.  Humans just have to make way for them, that's all.

These politicised fools never carry out human 'bogan' culls, mind you, and there are definitely too many of them.  The whole idea of a roo cull is disgusting, but a bogan cull seems to be a perfectly acceptable and agreeable way to get rid of feral pests if you ask me.

Snakes and Manners

I love nature; really I do.  It's all natural and stuff and the absolute best thing about venturing into nature is that it is largely devoid of annoying humanoids, probably the same ones who insist on using supermarkets and highways the same freakin' time as I do.  But as much as I love being in nature's aura, I refuse to spend the night with it, because that's what houses are for.

I write of nature because today I saw my seventh hissy snake of the 2012-13 snakey season.  I regularly walk up a mountain - think Everest, and then decrease the enormity just a fraction - so I am accustomed to a world of creepy, Jurassic Park-type creatures and their crazy, creepy ways.  I wonder if there are any type of snake or lizard that all the other snakes and lizards find weird and creepy?  Only us humans, probably.

Me and snakes get along just tickety boo.  When I say tickety boo, I mean we tolerate each other. Like most marriages. Like ebony and ivory, we live togther in perfect harmony. Until we don't.  In actual fact snakes are shit scared of me and I must admit that my heart rate goes through the roof when we encounter each other.  I'm not scared of them as such, but I would be okay if they didn't always throw me a surprise party whenever I showed up on their mountain. That's all. 

It's not like I don't plan ahead and practice good mountain etiquette.  A few years ago I decided that I would warn my snake buddies of my arrival on the mountain by basically stomping along as I walked up the mountain.  It's just good manners.  They are supposed to feel the vibrations and stay the fuck away from me.  These were the rules.  They were good rules.  Everyone knew the rules.  But apparently a new family of snakes have moved into the neighbourhood and don't know about the body corporate. 

Why are there so many snakes? I think they need to implement a one child policy in the reptilian world. Why the hell would anyone want 40 children anyway?  It's not like they get a baby bonus.  Or do they?

That is all. Good day.

When Christmas and Zombies Attack

It's that wonderfully special time of the year, where everyone you meet is tired and crankypants and just wants to go home and not play with anyone anymore ever.  That's Christmas; the most magical time of the year.  Every year I forget that the year before I swore to myself that I should not work the week before Christmas because it totally, totally sucks, but here I am, yet again.

It's completely draining.  I'm pretty sure I had a microsleep on the way up in the elevator this morning somewhere between floors six and ten, and every hour of the day feels like a lifetime.  It's like being forced to watch a whole season of Keeping Up With the Carcrashians in a day, except no-one wears baggy leather slut pants and, according to my corporate directory, there are no men called Kanye in the house, yo.  Although sometimes my life feels like a reality trash carcrash.

Shopping centres are also hardcore at this time of the year, but imagine how Santa feels?  The man's gotta be a sadist, willingly inviting all those little terrorists to sit on his lap all day.  Who does that? Fortunately for us suckers enduring this last working week before Christmas, it'll all be over by Friday, when the day of reckoning is upon us and the zombie alpacas will come and suck our brains out.  I can't imagine that anyone will be able to tell the difference, to be honest.

You Only Live Twice

I've been posting about the big J-Bondo a bit recently.  I'm not obsessed.  I'M NOT.  Although I have recently watched all of the Sean Connery era flicks again, because someone has lent them to me and they are not going to just watch themselves.

You Only Live Twice is one of the stupidest book/movie titles, because I’m pretty sure only about 60% of people get to live twice.  Although stupid titles are always a useful and credible red flag that indicates the ensuing book/movie is going to be shite as well, and this one is no exception.

But it's James Bond and it's Ian Fleming and it's... James Bond, so you just have to cut them some slack and play the hand you're dealt.  There are one thousand and fifty two things I thought were outright ridunkulous in this movie, and here are a few:

All the personnel on the rocket launching pad that was located in the inactive volcano were colour coordinated. Cute.  Speaking of teletubbies, Bond's Japanese ninja friends were all dressed in fifty shades of volcano crater grey, for obvious reasons, and came complete with bonus suction pads.  And it worked a treat, until it didn't, and they all died.  But they did blow a massive crater in the massive crater.

There are a lot of opportunities in life where you can wing it, but I'm pretty sure driving a space rocket is not one of them, James Bond.

The Japanese Bond girl gets about in a white bra and knickers for the majority of the flick but is suddenly and gratiously afforded a (buttonless) shirt by the wardrobe department when all hell breaks loose.  But she still doesn't have any pants.  I don't understand why they can never organise a budget for clothes for the Bond girl.

Later, in the crater, she loses her shirt that she spent all movie working towards, so she's back to her bra and knickers. No clothesure for her then. Bond movies should do a deal with Bonds undies.

At least Sean Connery relinquished his beloved baby blue terrytowelling shorts jumpsuit he so loved wearing in EVERY FILM for this particular movie.  And thank goodness the white boyleg shorts that he wore for nighttime deepsea scuba diving reconnaissance in Thunderball didn't make an appearance.  They were great camouflage under the flourescent light of the moon, and indeed their genius was magnified when combined with an orange leotard.  Yes, an orange leotard.

Thunderball is the movie where the fighter jet doubles as a submarine.  The Australia Defence Forces need to dump the Joint Strike Fighter program and focus on the acquisition of flying submarines.

In You Only Live Twice, Bond's crazy arse bad boy nemesis - who is relentlessly mocked in the Austin Powers flicks - has a nice and cosy base-of-a-volcanic-crater loungeroom made of slate, old lava and traditional volcanic floating floorboards, along with an artfully decorated pond full of piranha.  Like a boss.

Alas, the makers of Austin Powers didn’t really have to dig that deep.

FauxTan - Beyond the Pale

Despite what Nicole Kidman says, pale skin is horrible. Although Kidman was married to renowned professional nutjob Tom Cruise for over a decade, so how good can her judgment be anyway?  While I don't generally look to movie star actresses for my health and safety bulletins, Kidman is a great, unintentional role model for the skin cancer cause.

One is not amused by pale skin, the type of which one was distressingly born with. If my lineage had the indecency to thrust pale skin upon me, it could at least have gone full circle and provided it with a translucency that rivalled Nic's.  On the plus side, at night I don't glow like a cheap and tacky christmas tree angel with a fur tree pole stuck up my arse.

Having said that, I’m all for avoiding the sun at all costs (my life is full of inconsistencies. I just roll with it). Despite its life-giving properties, the sun really is a massive pain-in-the-arse, with its key attributes falling more into column A (bad) than column B (good) when it comes to human contact.

The incidence of skin cancer stats freak me out a little bit, so I try not to think about it other than always slipping, slopping and slapping before, during and after sun exposure. It really is a burden but, hey, I don’t want to die from sun. Apparently two in three Australians will be diagnosed with skin cancer by the time they are 70, so that’s just great.

The person who brain-washed women into believing a particular hue of tanned skin is more pleasant than white skin should be slapped hard in the face.  My desire for tanned, brown skin and my terror of sunbaking do not really correlate.

To get around this, for years I have invested in a good fake tan product that I apply myself.  I have never really been that bothered over the years applying this fake tan, but I’ve recently bought a new product – Johnson & Johnson’s Holiday Skin Body Lotion - that alleges to blend a moisturiser with a fake tan, that “gradually builds a beautiful, light tan”, which is proving to be a complete annoyance.

Of course I was sucked in by this nonsense, and I'm sure it works a treat, but here’s my beef. This product says it provides “24 hour moisturisation”, but also says to “avoid contact with clothes and other items until the lotion is fully absorbed”. So if it takes 24 hours to “fully absorb”, when am I supposed to sleep? It would be helpful if the big cheese of this multinational had used the product before marketing it to millions of women who now only get to sleep in winter.

Her Majesty's Secret Cashcow

*SPOILERS, SUCKERS*

Today I watched the latest instalment in the Bond franchise juggernaut.  It's called Skyfall and it's the 230th movie in the James Bond series.  Or maybe it's the 23rd, who can keep up with it all.  Bloody good flick though; back to the traditional Bond style.  And in traditional action genre style, the storyline goes a little something like this - protagonist and antagonist spend 128 minutes trying to kill each other.

While Bond creator Ian Fleming passed on in the 1960's, and other writers have continued his legacy, I think it's safe to say that during his years working for the British Government, while his fellow civil servants pretended to be engaged in superspy subterfuge while they were really just filing boring, unclassified pieces of paper and writing dull emails in that old-fashioned pen, paper and envelope retro style, Fleming's imagination was going apeshit. 

I for one am glad that he was so bored and uninspired working in an office job in the public sector, Gov'ner.  Never mind the bollocks, eh wot!  Y'allreet?  Wass goin' on?  Sorry, got distracted by British slang that no Brit says ever unless they work for Eastenders.  Circling back to topic right now, innit.

A few things I noted in Skyfall:

Everyone knows that the best special super-effect for dark movies is real-life, non-CGI dark gloomy weather, ideally so dark that the audience need to don night vision goggles to know what the heck is going on.

The inherent risk of missing one Oscar encouragement award-worthy raised eyebrow or a half-smile is that you may lose track of the entire storyline.  Although with a Bond movie it's safe to assume that if there is gunfire or mortars, someone just died, and if there is no gunfire or mortars, someone is about to die.

So, weather-wise, I was a little surprised that much of the movie was filmed in a country renowned for its fun, sunny, balmy climate.  England.  It must have been boring for the film crew to have to wait around on set until it rained in London.  Shit weather is such a rare event in England that the director must have been tearing his hair out with the stress of it all.

In actual fact, the chance of it raining in London on any given day of the whole year is literally so excellent that one would put many quids, pounds, shillings or euros on it.  Probably not euros; nobody understands euros.  That's just how London rolls, innit. 

While London's weather may be complete bollocks at the best of times, the film crew were again just really lucky with the overcast gloominess and general malaise that greeted them when the film set relocated to the cheery Scottish moors.  Casting Scotland as 007's weather antagonist is certainly not going to win any friends at the Scottish Tourism Board, what with that country's fine track record of endless, sun-drenched summer days.

For me, the movie's best kept secret was the addition of Ralph Fiennes right at the end as the new M!  As much as I loved Dame Judi in that role, I approve of his casting because I heart Lord Voldermort. I suppose now the Harry Potter cashcow has dried up Fiennes had to find a new franchise teat to milk.  It makes sense for actors to sign up to multi-million dollar movie franchises. 

It's just like the good ol' golden days of Hollywood, when actors were signed to movie studios and were therefore unable to say no when the studio said you were going to be in a movie where you were required to wear an outfit made of panels of tin sheets for months and months and your co-stars, a dog actor called Terry (stage name Toto) and a pair of red sparkly shoes became far more famous than you'll ever be. 

But Fiennes is no fool.  He has worn a prosthetic non-nose in Harry Potter, a bandaged face in The English Patient, a Tom Cruise mask to play Maverick in Top Gun, and who can forget his body of work aboard a Qantas flight in 2007.  Through those roles, Fiennes avoided becoming typecast as anything more than the guy who likes wearing rubber.

Bond goes Gaza

There's heaps of angry bird stuff going on in the world at the moment. For example, the Middle Earth terrorists are blowing up shit again, but it's going to be a-okay because Daniel Craig has got his Bond on and has negotiated a ceasefire, which will last for approximately two days. 

The mainstream media is reporting that the psychotically-challenged serial killers, Hamas, the charming Muslim Brotherhood outfit who control the Gaza Crispy Strip©, have agreed to stop bombing the crap out of poor old Israel because of a deal struck by Hillary(ous) Clinton, but we all know that 007 had something to do with it.  Have you not seen his movies, CNN?  You don't mess with Bond.

I haven't seen the new flick yet but I'm gonna guess that Bond, James Bond gets accosted by an angry pod of terrorists, the boss of which has been facially deformed by having his head shoved into a Magic Bullet blender, the Personal, Versatile Countertop Magician.  Or maybe he accidently watched the Magic Bullet infomercial on late night television and voluntarily stuck his face into the speeding chopping blades.

The terrorists, just for a new innovative script twist, want to annihilate Bond and his multi-million gazillion dollar, dirty, capitalist movie franchise and arrogantly possess the lofty goal of wanting to destroy the whole entire world, one Aston Martin at a time.  Then bang, bang, boom, boom, ouch, ahhh, blood, gross, baddies die or flee to an Adam Sandler movie. 

Then Bond gets all Petraeus-esque sidetracked by a non-English speaking, psychotic, nuclear scientist supermodel, nearly dies, and then sails into the distance on a yacht with a different bikini-clad femme fatale whorebag, because, after 25 or so films, the scriptwriters have never been able to come up with a new closing scene befitting a superspy.

The Twinkie is Sinky

The company that makes Twinkies, the sugary snack that Americans love for reasons I cannot fathom, is going bust.  And, surprise, surprise, it is the fault of a workers' union, after striking workers failed to hit a deadline to go back to work at the advice of their union, and now 18,000 people don't have a job.  A union that costs workers their jobs isn't much of a union.  Which part of the word "union" do unions not understand?

The post-Twinkie world is, unsurprisingly, causing great distress to many folk in the United States because they just don't have that many options of sickly, sugary crap to stuff their faces with.  People in Australia don't really care about Twinkies or their demise.  But I do know what Twinkies are, having been exposed to their mass marketing techniques when I was but a child, and I was just as grossed out by them then as I am now.

My familiarity with Twinkies comes from observing Jughead Jones and Aunt Hilda as they gorged themselves stupid on creamy, sponge cake goo on the advertisement pages of my Archie Comics in the 1980s.  I never felt a need to go anywhere near a Twinkie after that.  And the comic also tried to flog sea monkeys through some ponzi scheme, where you could weirdly purchase a middle-class family of midget crustaceans.  Totally freaked me out.  They still try and sell those things.

While we are on topic, let me tell you what really gets my goat.  American bread.  They put sugar in normal, average, garden variety bread in the United States!  Bread is not supposed to taste like a Twinkie.  It's so distasteful that on my recent sojourn to Florida I was forced to spit that shit out (such a way with words today).  No wonder the United States has a collective weight problem.

I admit that America is an ongoing, moving target of my cynicism and negativity, but, what can I say, it's an easy target.  If questioned I will use the 'Twinkie Defense (sic)", a compelling argument made by a U.S. man who blamed the sugar in Twinkies for giving him depression which caused him to murder someone.  Like I said; easy target.

Lawn Bowls



The best part about meeting British HRHness is telling
constitutional republicans about it and watching their heads
spin around and then explode in a fit of rage.  Heh.



Stupid Clock Face

I was at the gym the other day and something happened that left me completely dejected, as opposed to the usual depression slash melancholy of having to watch 20-year-old girls getting more lithe and more fitter than anyone needs to be. 

Note to self: you are probably at the age when it is probably best to not compare your body shape with 20-year-olds.  But, hey, I'm a chick and that's what we do, to our detriment of course.

Anyway, blah, blah, blah, that wasn't the main source of my deflation.  I was finishing up stretching and I leant on the wall and came face to face with a ticking timebomb.  Well it was a ticking clock, but it was one of those ticking clocks with moving hands that provide an annoying continuous sweep for the minute hand rather than the much slower and less stressful tick, tick, tick.

There's nothing like a minute hand flying at a breakneck pace to let you know that time is running out.  Just, you know, in general.  Now these clocks have me completely psyched out, as if I'll look over and they'll have unexpectedly bent the space time continuum and I'll be trapped in a timewarp circa June 2028.  I hope they don't wear 80's fashion in 2028.  It sucked the first time around.

That out of control minute hand caused me some fleeting widespread panic and alarm, and then I went home.

I know; blog post fail.  It really is quite mind-boggling the things I find worthy of words in blog posts.

The Luckiest Fly in the World

Cocobean may just be the luckiest little fly in the world.  What? Oh, you want some context?  Well maybe just maybe I don't want to give you any.  The End.  Oh, fine then. 

Do you remember that titillating scene of Karate Kid where Mr Miagi pretended to be able to catch a fly with a set of dull chopcticks while meditating?  Well I did that yesterday, except I wasn't meditating and I didn't have any chopsticks, but I did catch Cocobean with a Spider Catcher Unit Thingy.

Cocobean was my pet fly, for about 10 minutes, before I managed to catch him and set him free.  What I realised is that trying to catch a fly for ten minutes will drive you completely mad.  I don't know why I was trying to achieve by catching a fly.  I guess we'll never know. 

It might be due to my inability to kill shit. It's really hard for me, because I know that all the bugs that freak me out - like spiders, cockroaches and the like - have families that want to see them at Christmas time, or for Thanksgiving if they are visiting from America.

Anyway, it's hard work.  Fly-catching.  Your head starts to spin on its axis with all that bloody buzzing and your eyes start squirting blood and you start yelling and cursing at nothing but thin air as it whooshes past your ears.  Had it been filmed I would definitely have been looking at some serious padded cell time.  Why are flies so damn chaotic in their flight patterns?  There is just no thought given to navigation, moving obstacles in the sky or walls.

Cocobean is free now.  Fly, Cocobean, fly.  Fly away and piss off the neighbours who are trying to cook sausages on their barbecue.

Excellent.  Another pointless blog post to add to my collection.