Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

My right knee is definitely giving me gyp. It’s not so bad when I get out of bed in a morning, but it doesn’t take much effort on my part for it to start getting achey, particularly if I am standing around rather than walking. Add to this the general creakiness I get from sitting in this excuse for a chair I have in the office and I am wondering whether I might not be better off using my kneecap as an ashtray and having my leg welded straight so I can stump around like a cross between Long John Silver and Frankenstein’s monster. Given that the kneecap feels loose, for want of a better word, perhaps First World War style puttees extended up and around the knee would help, but then that would start a strange transformation into Mummy movies.

Someone has been splicing time and space in North London again. You rarely see many operatives in the Totteridge & Whetsone area using nuclear accelerators to weld reality back in place¹, so there tends to be more obvious outbreaks of oddness on the extended reaches of the tube network than there are in the centre. Or rather, they are less controlled. I guess it’s a Men in Black thing.

Anyway, there was a woman on the tube this morning who looked like she had been assembled from various elements of Eastenders, Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and Abba, circa 1976. Imagine a middle-aged elf wearing a silvery circlet on her forehead and trying to arrange something over a mobile phone in an Essex accent and you’ll get a portion of the picture.

She disappeared mysteriously at Camden Town, just where the reality operatives start congregating in earnest, so I feel my point is made.

Creepy Swedish Guy was on the train this morning, too. First time I’ve seen him for a while. He has new reading glasses that make him look like a goblin watch repair man.

¹As a regular reader, you will recall that sometime back in the summer, it was suggested by some one in my comments section – I have it in mind that it was either jfs or littleonionz - that tourists with wheely cases are actually disguised space-time engineers who repair and maintain the fabric of reality in central London and other major cities, helping to combat alternate reality leaks that let through the occasional pieces of the past, mythology or other dimensions.

As I observed the other day, when half of you seemed to get the wrong impression and thought that I'd had a bizarre falling out with someone over "de-friending" on LJ - I didn't, it was someone else, hence the title - there are some odd people on Live Journal. What I should have said is that there are some very odd people on the web.

Notice how I managed to be more specific there, by being more general? There must be a word for that sort of thing¹.

I have, dear reader, been investigating the murky world of webcams.

Mine own webcam is rarely turned on, because quite frankly, there's nothing here to look at when I'm away, and when I'm on-line it's usually too dark for my cheapo webcam to do much more than show my silhouette to the world². Anyway, that apart, why would anyone want to log on and watch me typing and/or drinking coffee? I occasionally use it and its inbuilt mic for conversations over Messenger, Skype or some similar application, but beyond that it pretty much just gathers dust on top of my monitor.

I am clearly too unadventurous.

As I said, I have been investigating the world of the webcam³. Oh dear. Sad and lonely people everywhere; most, but by no means all of them male, many overweight and seemingly in the middle of a clothing crisis. Quite apart from various levels of quite unattractive dishabillé, there is the question, usually best left unasked, and certainly undeserving of an answer, of the things they get up to on their webcams. Suffice it to say, that just seeing unclothed fatties at the computer is comparatively welcome compared with some of the ahem bodily antics they choose to broadcast.

Why would anyone want to do this? There are enough grotesques around as it is, thank you very much, without such dysfunctional behaviour. All the wonders of the web, the miracle of technology, information resources beyond your wildest dreams, games, entertainment, the lot. It's an interesting place with much to recommend it.

But I don't think we need the Freak Porn thanks, ever so.

Maybe I'm too old and prudish, but I don't get it.

¹"Idiot", probably.
²If only I knew how to rig it for sound, I might be able to try the Mad Scientist routine, whereby my silhouette issues demands to the world.
³By which I mean that I have been looking at other people's webcams.