Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.

C Is For Camel

Travel advisory:

An over-friendly kleptomaniac camel named Twinkle is terrorising tourists in its search for love in Central Australia.

Locals at Wauchope, 400km north of Alice Springs, say the five-year-old hungry camel cow is infamous for stealing and eating whatever it can get its teeth into from cars parked nearby.

Hang on, Wauchope is where? Hey, how about that. There really is a Wauchope 400km north of Alice Springs, as well as one 400km north of Sydney. Anyway:

When unsuspecting motorists pull up outside the hotel the curious Twinkle pokes her head inside the vehicle, inspects the roof-rack and makes off with anything in sight.

But Wauchope Hotel owner Lee Richard said Twinkle's already bad behaviour changes dramatically at the sight of a swag in a visitor's car.

Really? How is that, Lee?

"She pulls swags out of the utes and mounts them as if she's copulating," he said.

Um. As far as I am aware, girl-on-top is a novel position for camels. Not that I am any expert in camel sex, mind you.

"Whenever they pull up, if she's out the front she'll grab one.

"I dare say that anything else left she grabs through an open window."

Please keep your car windows closed while visiting Australia. Thank you.

Twinkle was sold to Mr Richard for $500 in 1999 after his goat died.

Well, yes, I can see how... Uh, what?

"We've always had animals walking around the place," he said.

"We were one short so we got the camel.

It followed me home! Can we keep it?

"We let her out in the morning at 8am. She and the donkey wander around and come back around mid-afternoon."

Donkey?

Well, if Twinkle becomes too much of a problem, perhaps these people can help:

A Northern Territory company is calling for help to fill export orders, but it is not looking for coal, wool or any of the other commodities we normally send overseas.

Over the past 12 months, demand for Australian camel meat from South East Asia has skyrocketed with the Middle East and North Africa also showing promising signs.

Um, yeah, okay. Still, with an estimated 500,000 feral camels on the loose across Australia, it's clear something must be done.

Can you imagine the damage half a million swag-stealing, ute-humping camels could cause?

(News.com.au via Fark)

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Even The BBC

Even the BBC is not entirely worthless, it seems.

Not only are they bringing Doctor Who back to the screen, they are now producing a third (and fourth!) series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The new productions will feature most of the original cast, and even a cameo by Douglas Adams himself (taken from a previous recording).

This is good. This is very good.

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Q Is For Quokka

This is a quokka, a small kangaroo-like critter found on Rottnest Island off the coast of Western Australia. They are cute and tasty friendly.

But do not feed the quokkas, even if they have the appropriate coupons. They may become ill and throw up on your shoes.

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Left, Right, Up, Down

According to this little chart, I'm to the left of all but two of the current Democrat presidential candidates. (I'm also more libertarian than any of them.)

Difference being, of course, that they are idiots and I'm not. You can be an idiot no matter what your political persuasion may be. Though the reverse is not true: There are some political standpoints that are impossible to take unless you are an idiot. (Or actively evil, or insane. Or some combination of those three; it's never a good idea to forget that someone may be an evil, insane idiot.)

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Wildlife Report

Yesterday was Melbourne Cup Day. On my way to work I pass the Albert Tavern in North Sydney, and they had two shetland ponies out front. Real live ones, munching on hay with every sign of enjoyment.

What I didn't see was a shovel. Since I went past at 8 am and the race starts at 3 pm, I expect that they found one somewhere...

Also, this morning as I was leaving the house, I found [DON'T LOOK MOOKIE!!] a spider as big as my hand clinging to my front door. It was one of the long spindly ones, though, rather than one of the big fat hairy ones with enormous fangs and roughly three million eyes. It looked rather like the mothership for all the daddy longlegs you've ever seen.

I was running late or I would have gone back inside to get my camera. Next time...

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Hal Clement

Damn.

I got to meet him once - really nice guy. Time to read Mission of Gravity again.

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Productivity Negative

Warlords IV is out. It uses the (very cool) Warlords Battlecry II graphics engine, but with good old Warlords-style turn-based play.

There's a new X-Com game out too. It's like 1990 all over again, only with better graphics.

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Cleaning Up

Cleaning up for me, after the incidents at school and at my house... It must have been hard.

The school, your house, and the Great Seito Bridge. They all went through a mysterious collapse one after the other. So the media just went and conveniently connected them all.

It's season three of Tenchi Muyo! Though it does suffer from a slight case of "show the whole of season one in flashbacks in the first episode"...

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Doesn't Suck

Pixy Misa's Doesn't Suck Award today goes to my new ISP, Swiftel. Of course, the truth is that they do suck, because they have to do with computers and everything involving computers sucks. That's Pixy's First Law. Still, they win the coveted Doesn't Suck award because compared to every other ISP in Australia (and never mind Telstra's Bigpond, which is galactic-centre-black-hole-grade suck), um, compared to the rest they don't suck at all.

They just upped my download allocation again. When I signed up, it was 6GB a month (my old ISP allowed me 2.5GB). That went to 7 the next month. Then 8. Then 10. Now it's 12. Only one month since I joined that they didn't boost the allowance. And the last two days of October were free because they were installing a new usage meter. And the new usage meter allows them to have free downloads - their news server is now free.

Plus all the usual goodies they've always had - free unlimited uploads, static IP address, freedom to run servers (I have a mail server and a web server running off that line... Of course, I also have a mail server and a web server running on the mu.nu box. Everyone needs two mail servers and two web servers, right?)

And $6 per GB for excess downloads instead of $149. That's still expensive, but it's just annoying rather than terrifying. Leave the line running all weekend and the most damage I can do now is $48... With my old ISP it was more like $7000.

Yay! Swiftel! Yay!

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Still Not Dead

Though I'm rapidly running out of DVDs to burn stuff onto. I ordered another hundred last week. Where are they? Where are they?

Bloody Australia Post. If they sucked three times as much, they'd be Telstra, but that's a whole 'nother story.

Where did all these blasted flac and wav files come from, anyway? I thought I had everything converted to 256k mp3s. No wonder my [entirely legal &mdash Ed.] music stash is taking up so much room.

Oh look, there's another episode of the live action Sailor Moon series out! The one I saw at Animania back about six years ago when I had a life was the funniest thing I've seen in oh, about six years. Must download. Haha! Damn, I'm already out of bandwidth. Need a faster connection. Except that that would cost me more less money. Less money? Damn Telstra and their insane ADSL wholesale pricing. So, do I go back to a crummy 256k upstream link just so I can download twice as much three times as fast? Or... Hey, I wonder if I can get a second ADSL connection here. I mean, everyone has two ADSL connections these days, right?

Or maybe those pissants at Optusvision have come to their senses and will hook me up for cable now. I'd call them and ask except I don't feel like waiting 45 minutes to find out that they're still a bunch of morons. After all, I've dealt with Optus for years, and it's a pretty safe bet how that will turn out.

Anyway, it's November now, and I don't have two full time jobs any more... One and a half, maybe. So I expect to be run over by a bus sometime next week. Or maybe the Earth will collide with Mars... Uh, no, that's not until July.

Meanwhile, Pibgorn:

In one of the strangest events ever to transfix the city, countless thousands of people, evidently citizens of New York from the 1930s, have been walking out of the Hudson River and converging calmly on Times Square.

Overwhelmed by sheer numbers, police have ordered SWAT teams against the possibility of massive violence, although the invasion seems to be peaceful. Experts estimate that if the influx of river people continues unabated, all current residents of Manhattan will be displaced into the surounding waters by tomorow afternoon. The mayor has requested military backup, but warns that if conventional fire power is to no vail, the city may be forced to that last, grim recourse of modern civilization and summon Hollywood celebrities.

Pictures at eleven.

I told you to read Pibgorn! I told you! And you didn't listen!

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