Hack Cut-a-Cut

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I'm still here, just rather busy most of the time and too tired to write about it the rest of the time.

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Friday

I'm typing this on a rubber mat. No, I'm not sitting on a rubber mat typing on a keyboard - the keyboard is a rubber mat.

I've knackered at least three keyboards by packing them into bags or rucksacks and carting them around - they just get subjected to twisting and bending forces in transit, and eventually something breaks. But now I've got one of these - a flexible, rollable, portable keyboard for GBP10 - about the same price as a rigid, awkward, non-easily-portable keyboard.

And as a bonus, it's made of silicone rubber, so it takes me back to my pubescent years of using the ZX Spectrum keyboard, with it's famous "dead flesh" feel.

Actually, I've got some spectrum emulators somewhere, with a couple of hundred old speccy games. Oh the nostalgia.

There was exactly one good thing about being a ten year old gay computer nerd in 1982 - the computers. And yes, I did know.

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Wednesday

Today I got slashed and burned. It was meant to be me cutting down thorny bushes and shrubs, but they staged a plantarian revolution and cut me instead. It was meant to be the browned greenery burning in the garden incinerator, but it just emitted plumes of lung coating smoke before going out, while I nursed areas of skin splashed by hot petroleum.

The war between man and nature continues tomorrow.

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Sunday

Someone asked me if I was depressed. It took me a second to work out why. Both my wrists have livid red cut marks on the underside - the result of trying to uproot a garden of thorns without scythe, secateurs, trimmer, shears...or gloves.

Thomas Edison said something to the effect that he'd discovered nine hundred and ninety nine ways to not invent the lightbulb. My claim is more modest - I now know four ways not to burn garden refuse. One of them involves a tub of vaseline and some cardboard.

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Sill, I did get to watch the entire Eurovision Song Contest for 2008.

In 2006 eurovision lost whatever pretence of seriousness it had when a goth metal band from Finland - entered, I'm told, as a joke - won. Since then, Finland have been repeating the joke, with other heavy metal bands - and good ones at that.

In 2007 the hot favourite to win was a Ukrainian transvestite. In the event they didn't come close, but they're the only act anyone remembers - unless you're a Brit and remember the UK's execrable entry, which managed to look like it was painfully trying to be camp.

This year there was a thoroughly misguided attempt to give eurovision back its image of worthy respectability and international-understanding-through-friendly-competition. This is the image it's never had in the UK. About half the twenty six(?) entrants towed the line with completely forgettable "safe" entries - power ballads and eurodisco. The other half hoping to stand out by being...quirky. Apart from Finland's heavy metal, France gave us song which managed to be both instantly forgettable and intensely annoying, thanks to the pseudo-doowop backing singers. Romania did cafe jazz with ranting spoken interludes, the Ukraine gave us techno pirates and Bosnia-Herzegovina were...just willfully weird.

The UK broke with tradition and produced some pretty good soul-funk - but still came traditionally last.

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