Like a Dog

Christina C wants MS Office replacing with MS Works, because it crashes less often on her old PC. Fair enough - my emoluement will be the usual vegetarian meal, endless cups of tea, and eccentric company.

Last time I was there, I was attempting get Matthew the youngest son out from under the coffee table (what?) when Buster, the family's elderly dog, decided to relive his frisky youth. I've never had a Great Dane attempt to mate with me before.

Matthew let of a squeal of delight and started shouting "GBS! GBS!". It took us a few minutes to get the nine-year-old to tell us what it meant. Gay Bum Sex. Yep.

I'll find time sometime next week - hopefully Hailey will have had her baby by then. And Buster will be asleep.
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Simon M and I do not actually live together. It's just that every time his burgeoning ebay business needs technical help - which can be two or three times a week - I'm the I.T department.

The plan is: Spend two hours setting up auctions for bodybuilding pills (Creatine and Krysin, I think), then explore the mysteries of cooking, and watch The Wicker Man - a film which offends everyone who believes in religious tolerance.
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Paul T on Saturday. Composing instrumental techno and guitar tracks. I'm supposed to have come up with some basslines and beats.
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Is this clever? As a way of translating endnote references in articles into their HTML equivalents. Make a macro that does the following:

(1) Cut the currently highlighted text
(2) write <a href="#
(3) paste the cut text (presumably a number)
(4) write >[
(5) paste the number again
(6) write ]</a>

When you find a footnote number, select it, and press the assigned function key, turning (say) 36 into <a href="#36">[36]</a> in one keystroke.

Something similar for bold, italic, blockquote sections, subheadings and the endnotes themselves. It took me two days trying out various systems of macros to come up with it. I think it's quite neat.
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Pestalozzi have sent me their christmas catalogue. Asking me to fund their charity by buying their kitchy christmas cards. Included is their Village News magazine, full of breezy reader's-digest-type articles, and pictures of happy smiling youngsters from many nations in their national dress.

It's all a bit spooky. The way they spell Village with a capital V, the insistance on Harmony and Tolerance, the way everyone is smiling, the complete lack of content in the articles.

Where am I?
In The Village.
What do you want?
Multicultural paradise, westernised diversity and a strange kind of officious blandness.
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Gareth E consulted me last night about his ferociously philosophical PHd on the notion of Play, and it's relation to unalienated labour.

Taking his cue from the aphorism that Sport is alienated adult Play, he's trying to reconstruct the unalienated form from clues found in artistic expression, displacement activity, experiences of joy and hobbies.

I'm thinking about 'Dark Play' - bullying, self harm, and fighting.

No one seems to have gone down this precise road before, but there's a lot of parallel routes and intersections with other disiplines.