Sunday, June 16, 2002

Offside!

by Suw on June 16, 2002

I can’t believe that the USA are one up against Mexico already. Wtf happened there? I mean, most Americans don’t even know what football is (i.e. it’s football, it’s not ‘soccer’), and as for America being in the World Cup, half of them are somewhat unaware that there’s a world outside of America in the first place. Unless they’re bombing it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely anti-American, just partly. Some American things are good, for example… er… um… damn… Well, ok, I won’t start on the list of things that are bad, but let’s just say I’m glad that I didn’t have to go through the American school system and suffer the total humiliation that would have been Prom. Eugh.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to come on here and whinge about either footie or America. No, I came here this morning to whinge about my cat. Who totally failed to wake me up this morning at her customary time between 4am and 5.30am with a pitiful, begging miaow outside my bedroom window. I could have handled that – I’ve trained myself to get up out of bed, let her in, and get back into bed without even so much as waking up. But this morning, a great absence of miaowing at the customary time woke me at 6am, and I ended up having to go upstairs (my house is upside down – you get used to it) to open the front door to let the little scamp in. Trouble was, I was wide, wide awake. I toyed with the idea of getting up and doing something useful, but my inner sleeper told me to go back to bed and make the most of that last hour of slumber.

So why is it then, that when my alarm goes off at 7pm (theoretically allowing me half an hour for breakfast and to shower before the footie starts), I lie there in a semi-comatose state, totally unwilling to move? I mean, an hour beforehand I was all sprightly and feeling very awake and alert. I eventually crawled up the stairs at 7.30pm, and still haven’t had breakfast, although the footie is on behind me. (Further proof that I am a stealth geek – first action of the day is to check emails and to blog, not to have breakfast… eek! Must get out more.)

Anyway, I consider this yet more proof that too much sleep is bad for you – it just makes you even more tired. I used to be able to sleep nine or 10 hours a night, regularly, without any trouble, but always felt a bit ropey. Then I cut it down to eight… and now to somewhere around seven, and I feel much better, much more energetic. But after waking up after only six hours last night, I wonder if maybe seven hours is still too many? There was a piece in the New Scientist which draws a rather scary conclusion about how much we sleep:

“People who sleep for eight hours or more every night have a higher death rate than those who average six to seven hours, according to a new US study.”

So all these years I was a right little sleep demon, I was slowly killing myself? Eek…

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Post number one

by Suw on June 16, 2002

Well, I thought I’d start up this blog as a way to empty my head of all the crap that tends to accumulate in it. You know how it is, all those thoughts that keep piling up, one upon the other. Before you know they start leaking out of your ears… most unattractive, really. So you have the choice, enjoy trawling through the random crap in my head, or go somewhere else. You’ve been warned so don’t come running to me when it doesn’t makes sense.

That said, of course, I suddenly find myself with a head emptier than Tony Blair’s. I’d love to start talking all about my thrillingly exciting life, but the truth is that I don’t get out enough. Or much. At all, in fact, at the moment, due to a rather nasty pain in the bank account. That, in turn, is due to my perpetual state of self-unemployedness: a voluntary state where one lives in hope that somehow, this latest harebrained scheme will somehow actually earn me enough to pay my rent. Which is astronomical. But that’s what you get for living in the commuter belt. Not that I would actually choose to live here if I had my choice over again, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Actually, I think I’d almost like to live back in London. Well, it’s that or North Wales. It’s cheap, I could afford a house, and it’s just beautiful there. And there’s no air pollution. And I speak a little Welsh so that would be a bonus. Right now though, I can barely afford to go to Tescos, so surfing the net for houses to buy is a kind of masochistic act designed only to make me feel wistful.

Ah, yes, see, only a couple of paragraphs into this and I’m having a nice whinge already. You know, it’s very theraputic, this. Like morning pages. If you don’t know what morning pages are, then never mind, but if you do, then you should try this public whinge thing. I always had a bit of a confessional streak in me, so this is really perfect. I’d make a good catholic if a) I was a catholic and b) it didn’t have that religious bit attached to it. But I could do the sitting in a small cubical thing, confessing my sins, my imagined sins, and all the stuff that generally went wrong today. I could really get into that. I suspect, though, that the priest would eventually ban me for talking too much. Or give me a couple of thousand Bloody Marys just to shut me up for a moment or two.

Of course, a lot of the blogs that I go and look at on a semi-regular basis have links to interesting sites on the net. Well, not this one. I’m a bit short on time, really, so my surfing’s fairly limited at the moment. Sorry. Of course, I’d love you all to think that I’m quite the most interesting person you’ve ever not met, but I think the truth is that no one will actually read all this shit. So it doesn’t really matter anyway.
But that said, I would like to mention Roswell Rods. I saw this documentary on Sky 1 about these weird things called rods which are appearing on video tape. They’re long, thin, and appear to have pairs of wings that run their length and allow them to ‘swim’ through the sky very quickly. Far to quickly to see with the naked eye. That’s why they’re only caught on film.

Of course, a lot of people think that these are just insects flying close to the camera, but my inner jury is out on that one. Some of the footage was, I admit, quite convincing, but the thing that caught my eye was a high-speed stills photo. I’ve never, ever seen an insect caught on stills film look like this thing did. They didn’t tell us just how fast the film was, but I would guess that any insect caught on normal high speed film would appear as an insect, not as a long rod-like thing. I’m not convinced at all that insects can move fast enough to create a blur on a fast film. And it can’t have been close to the camera, because it wouldn’t have then been in focus…

Hmm… anyway, there’s a programme on Sky right now about dead people. Always fascinating. But rest assured, I will come back to this rods thing later…

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