Zut Alors!

Oh, Kids, I need new knees, I really do.

It was bad enough when they were squeaking as if they needed oiling, but for the past few days my right knee has been aching something chronic. Now most of the problem I attribute to being a lardy boy and if I could shed the couple of tons that is my consistent, if half-hearted aim, most of my knee problems would go away. Probably. We continue to persevere. Half-heartedly.

The current and immediate cause of my woe is simply because I slipped in the bath the other day and landed with a splat on my amply padded rump. Other than the mini tidal wave in the bathroom and the bruise on my ego, all seemed fine. I certainly didn’t feel anything at the time, but it’s reasonably clear than on the slide down I must have stretched, twisted or torn something and it aches like billy-o. It’s getting better and is far less annoying than it was, but it still giveth me the gyp.

Part of the problem ironically, is that whilst I am nowhere near being the most physically active person on the planet, I also do just enough walking to mean that I cannot rest my knee enough for it to get better as quickly as it might. I mean on Saturday we trailed out to HomeBase for gardening goodies, and yesterday we trailed into town for similar and then back a second time to return the hifi I bought a month ago (it kept skipping on CDs, which is rather a handicap for a CD Player, though as soon as the card refund is confirmed, I shall be out to replace the replacement). My knee aches least when I have the leg stretched out straight and slightly elevated. It aches most when I am sitting at my desk and really doesn’t enjoy the transition between sitting and standing in either direction.

Maybe I should have wheels. Or hydraulics….

Anyway, enough of this.

Two things occupy my mind today. The first is the need to replace my knackered office pass. On Friday it let me into the office but wouldn’t let me out. Today it wouldn’t let me in.

The electronic replacement system has launched me into hitherto unsuspected areas of Kafkaesque bureaucracy that is even making this grizzled veteran of administration weep with frustration.

Later!

The Horse Whisperer

The search for a new security pass is concluded. I now have a shiny new pass that the readers at the entry stiles can read and best of all, since the bloke issuing them is retiring in three weeks, he offered me the opportunity of a new photo for it, or to continue with the picture taken in 1997, before I started shaving the wisps of hair off the top of my gorgeous bonce.

It amuses me to wander around with a picture of me aged 38 on an obviously new pass. It’s recognisably me and I can pretend that it was a recent picture and that the pressure is getting to me.

It’s not much, but it amuses me.

Speaking of amusement, anyone who has a Twitter account and who uses it relatively frequently could do much worse than follow the mighty @Horse_eBooks. Horse eBooks is that rarity amongst spam bots; it is so bad at what it does that the only people bothered by it are people who choose to be bothered by it. It doesn’t seek out key words and follow you, it simply tweets into the void and since it seems to have been abandoned by the person who set it up, it just has a life of its own.

I have done minimal research using Google, but it appears that it was set up by a Russian or Ukrainian to sell bloody awful eBooks about horses. It only rarely links to anything and I understand that those links are usually dead anyway. Mainly, it quotes random bits of text from the books it is supposed to be hawking. But because there is no direction, the quotes are entirely random, often starting and stopping in the middle of sentences. Much of it is forgettable, but rather more frequently than you might imagine, @Horse_eBooks will quote an absolute peach of gnomic wisdom.

May favourite so far, has been captured in this cartoon, which appeared on a fan fiction site dedicated to the output of this marvellous spambot:



Google for more information, or go here: http://splitsider.com/2012/01/the-ballad-of-horse_ebooks