znaddanz

When my family moved to Hamilton at the end of 1989, we had a housewarming party. At this party, two kittens from down the street wandered into the yard and we fed them some little bits of sausage from the barbeque. From that moment on, we could not get rid ...

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I do regret writing a blog about the weather, but seriously, the wind outside is nuts. My work is normally situated in a sort of Euston-Road wind-tunnel anyway, even on a very calm day if you walk over to the Pret for some sushi you get an annoying gust of grit into your eyes. But today, when apparently the wind is knocking lorries over on the M6, it's a whole `nother deal. The building I work in is made primaril ...

I spent the last two days at a conference, so I spent a lot of time doodling. Bethan was up speaking. I liked Bethan, she was an ex-teacher and her job now was trying to encourage new ways of teaching and learning. "You may not realize this," she was saying to us all, as I continued to listen while I doodled "but they have now identified up to eight different learning styles, with everyone possessing different combinations, yet we continue to teach students using only one tea ...

"No-one ever died wishing they'd spent more time at work." "Hmm...what if you were a health & safety inspector and you died in a building collapse that could have been prevented if you'd spent more time checking it out for structural defects? Then you might wish you'd spent more time at work, y'know, as the building was collapsing on you." "..." ...

Hey Team, Well I have been a very busy bee lately- in the last week I think I’ve only spent one night in London, the rest of the time I’ve been jetting all over the place taking care of business. Let’s see, it all kicked off a week ago when my work had our summer ball, so I got all dressed up in a tux and had a very pleasant evening with my co-workers. Check out some photos of me looking fancy here: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/znaddanz/sets/721575941675 ...

So the people who do my printing took me out to the the races in York on Wednesday. I told my boss they were having an 'open day' rather than specifying that they were actually taking me to the races, and I've been avoiding him since then in case he asks me how it all went. ...

I wasn't originally going to tell ya'll about this because frankly it's not a story that puts me in a particularly good light. However it had a kind-of odd epilogue yesterday which has prompted me to reveal all, in spite of my shame. So the other week Ade and my two wonderful flatmates all went to see The Pipettes (who were delightful, as always- if you haven't seen them, <a href="http://static.memph ...

I shuffle uncomfortably in my chair. I have stomach cramps, so I'm at the doctors. I woke up in the morning and my stomach hurt. I figured it was some kind of indigestion, which in itself is pretty rare. I'm just the sort of guy you'd expect to get indigestion, I eat too fast, I eat too much, I eat everything and anything. But I never actually get indigestion- I figure my stomach is just used to the abuse. Still, I'd spent a whole weekend sitting in the sun eating olives and ostrich biltong, ...

Left work at 3.30am. Hit bed at 4am. Alarm went off at 7am. Back at work at 7.30am. Same schedule due today. Lovin' it! ...

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As some of you will recall, I recently contributed the answer to a Star Trek related question which was directly asked of Patrick Stewart during Chris Evans' Radio 2 show. Direct evidence of this question being asked (Patrick, sadly, did not recall) can be listened to here. (I also highly recommend listening to the entire show, which <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radi ...

What I would have been blogging about had I not been doing nanowrimo: saying goodbye to my sister I know in the past I've gone on about how I'm often awed into humble silence when I think about the incredibly t ...

Background: My flatmate works on Chris Evans' Radio show, which has a suprising number of trickle-down bonuses for me (signed copies of Stephen Fry's new book, backstage passes to Kaiser Chiefs, that sort of thing), but this is by far the greatest. Chris' guest tomorrow will be none other than Patrick Stewart. From: Mark To: Dan Dude, I want to use as one of my questions 'What was the last line ...

If there’s one thing that really pains my soul, and there are many but this one stands out quite dramatically, it’s seeing a great girl with a horrible guy. Sure, you sometimes see great guys with horrid girls, but that doesn’t pain my soul quite so bad, for some reason. Maybe because I’m not attracted to men, I dunno. Take my friend B. Not a great friend, in fact I don’t even know her last name now that I come to think of it, but we’ve met a few times at BBQ’s and clubs ...

From: me To: Lauren Laverne Hi Lauren, I just listened to 'Don't Falter' by Mint Royale and it was so good I cried right at my desk. Then I figured out that you sung it! And I've listened to you for ages and never knew that. So I was pretty amazed and thought I'd say that's pretty cool. d To: me From: Lauren Laverne Oh no! But hooray! Sorry to ...

"I guess your liver must be taking a bit of a beating here in London?" "Oh, no, we drink far more in San Francisco. This is actually a bit of a break for me." "Really? Wow. It's hard to imagine a worse drinking culture than London's." "It's not worse." "But you said you drink more?" "Yeah. Plus like the drinks are cheaper, and they give them to you in bigger servings, and the bars don't close until two." "So it's worse." "No. That's bett ...

"What happened?" "We got burgled." "WHAT?!? What's been taken?" "Sophie's laptop. Mark's laptop. Nothing else." "My stereo?" "Nope." "The DVD player?" "No." "Nothing else?" "Just two laptops. They even left digital video cameras that were just....sitting out in the open. It's super-wierd." "Was it forced entry? What happened?" "No, nothing forced, just...gone. We live on the third floor of an apartment bui ...

Croatia was fantastic, as you'd expect. Lots of beach, lots of reading, lots of drinking, lots of eating. Too much eating, in fact. I've stuck a few hundred photos here, should you care to peruse them. We also too ...

"Ah, how come whenever I want to print an A5 document with the colour printer, it comes out as A4?" "Uhm, I dunno, did you tell the printer to take paper from drawer three? "No." "Oh, okay, give that a try." "Do I have to do anything else? I mean, do I have to shrink it down or anything?" "Wait...have you actually specified that you want to print in A5?" "No. Do I have to do that?" "Are you actually asking me if you need to tell the prin ...

So, last week, my entire flat was stricken with a similar sort of of stomach-bug-like virus. At roughly the middle of the week, each of us dropped to the ground in varying degrees of severity, the symptoms mainly involving massive fluid loss from either end of the body. It's a good thing we have three toilets, let me tell you. As we all lay about the lounge, stricken, we attempted to parse together just what the hell it was that had afflicted us so. We all keep fairly different schedu ...

I guess I just kind of assume all my friends are rational and intelligent and lovely people- it took the wind right out of me to discover that one had kind of slipped under the net: "...I also went to Auschwitz, that was, just...so incredible, you've got to go there." - Uhm, yeah, I will, I mean, it's not on 'my list' or anything, but, yeah, sure, I'll probably check it out at one point or another. "Hitler had the right idea though." <st ...

What happens when gym instructors try to write signs: ...

So I'm catching the last tube home on Saturday night, and this dude staggers past me, barely able to walk. He careers to the end of the carriage and opens the first of the connecting doors. He then whips out his ding-dong and proceeds to urinate into the gap between the two doors. I suppose we should give him points for politeness- he could have just wet himself and had his urine play chase-the-fellow-commuters up and down the passenger car. But, that aside, I really was prepping myse ...

So, last weekend I went to Plymouth, and spent a good portion of Saturday leaping several stories into the ocean below, and an even larger portion of Sunday lying on the beach at Whitsands. I think I applied some form of sun cream at some point on Sunday, but obviously not enough, because I spent the entirety of Monday lying on my couch as red as a crayfish, moving only (and painfully!) to drink large quantities of water, spray myself with a mister and change DVDs. I was in a lot of ...

You might say I went to Plymouth to see my Uncle Chris. You might possibly say I went because I wanted to get one last weekend away with my little sis before she went back to NZ. You'd be stretching it things a little to say it was because I wanted to see my rellies. Perhaps it was just an excuse to get out of London and on to a beach. But that ain't the truth. The truth is: I went for this. (and maybe this) ...

I don't know about the rest of the penis-possessed population, but I'm getting a mite sick and tired of the constant accusations (mainly from Peggy in Married With Children) that men 'can't aim'. Anyone who has seen me play Grand Theft Auto knows I can shoot the eyebrows off a hillbilly with a rickety old rifle at 100 yards. Let me assure you: I can hit an enormous oval right in front of me. The problem is, most men (and by most men I mean to say: 'Me'. I haven't act ...

I've spent the better portion of today playing online Hnefatafl, which is commonly known as 'Viking Chess', but should probably really be called Nordic Chess. A friend of mine picked it when we were in Oslo earlier in the year. I'm a bit of a chess n ...

I'm currently in the city of Derby. I use the word city pretty loosely. I've been to abandoned mining towns that are more lively. (It's this whole Cathedral business. If you put a Cathedral up next to an outhouse in the middle of endless tundra, the Queen would declare it a city) I walked the main road from end to end last night, and didn't see a single soul on the streets for the entire journey. It was downright eerie. I finally saw two punters in a Walkabout and, afraid I might have missed ...

It's last Sunday. I'm standing at a bar. I'm hungover, so I'm just kind of staring into space, waiting for my Bloody Mary. Two women come up to the bar. One of them turns to the other and says what I swear sounds to me like: "What's a martini?" The other cocks her head and looks up and to her left, in an expression of what I swear looks to me like bafflement. I say: "A martini is traditionally five parts dry gin, one part vermouth. However many people prefer a ...

As you may have heard, London's under attack again. Jeez, these terrorists just don't quit, do they? Anyway, the alarming thing about this is that not only have they evacuated Warren Street tube (among others), they've made an enormous cordon around the station, which actually encompasses my entire building. We've just been told we're not allowed to leave until further notice. How am I going to get my 2.30 coke ...

Yesterday the heat finally broke me and sent me on an exploratory mission to the Hampstead Heath ponds. Man, let me tell you, if there's anything nicer than Hampstead Heath in the summer, I mean, it's got a special charm all of its own. Absolutely fucking great. As it turns out, what looked to be a day-long legendary journey actually turned out to be a pleasant twenty-minute walk from my house. ...

"Excuse me, do you know where Upper Downs Street is?" "Well, Downs Street is over there. I don't know where Up Street is." ...

Nothing much to report, it's all pretty confusing in terms of reports on what is happenning. I'm at work, but I'm pretty much by myself. I have a pretty great view of the city from my office so I can report the following: ++ The buses, at least the ones going past my building, appear to have stopped taking on passengers. This tracks with reports that there have been three (three?) explosions on buses throughout the city. The news sites are, as you'd imagine, loading very slowly, but I ...

"You seem different from the last time we met." "How so?" "I don't know, more relaxed, I guess? You seemed quite shy when we first met." "Oh, I am pretty shy, really." "You don't seem too shy now. In fact you seem really confident." "Ah- that's because the stars are with me tonight." "The stars?" "Yeah. Apparently, my love house is throbbing." <img sr ...

"Hey Dan, great presentation, thanks for that." "Ah, no problem. I got your e-mail on the changes you wanted. I made most of them, but uhm, some of them were a bit, ah, vague?" "Which one?" "Well, I had a bit of trouble with this one here." "What's wrong with that one." "Make it look better?" "Yeah. Y'know, spruce it up a little." "I don't suppose you could be a little more....specific on that?" "Uhm, yeah, you know, just, sharpe ...

[flash] ...one ...two ...three [BOOM] Three seconds. It's not raining. This isn't rain. It's walls of solid water, falling from the sky. It's outdoor swimming with little pockets of air floating around. I don't think there's a part of me that isn't wet. Hmm- my crotch is the only part of me protected by two layers, maybe that's still dry. I roll my hips. Nope, that's wet, too. Lightning forks its way across t ...

It occurs to me that blogging is really good at capturing some emotions, and not quite as good at capturing others. Joy is one of the ones it’s harder to pin down afterwards – it’s like sticking a pin through a captive butterfly and wondering why it isn’t as beautiful as when it was fluttering crookedly in the sunlight. "It's here!" Paul screamed from the the rise of the hill. < ...

About once a year, it seems, I get roped into some form of 'singles evening'. In theory, it's a really good idea. I mean, the bottom line is, it's actually fairly difficult to meet new, attractive, interesting single people in London, particularly when one half of your social circle seems to be dating the other half. So when one of your few single friends says: "Hey, Dan, join me and a room full of single women."; well, it seems pretty appealing. It must take a year for me to forget ...

So, like, I'm walking through Hampstead Heath on Sunday morning, brilliant, gorgeous day, and, do you ever, like, I thought everybody did this, but apparently it's just me, sometimes I'll sort of absent-mindedly pick some lint out of my pocket and start rolling it into a ball between my thumb and forefinger. So I'm walking along, not really conciously doing this, but doing it nonetheless, when it comes to me that the lint seems so be somewhat more moist and, well, squishy</ ...

If there's a lesson to be learned from the last 24 hours, it's that twenty minutes can make all the difference to one's commute. Go home at 5.00: Relatively empty tube, home in 20 minutes. Go home at 5.20: Spend an hour travelling in London's armpits. Blade to work at 8.00: Smooth sailing. Blade to work at 8.20: Pavement covered by hordes of what I believe taxonomists have categorized as "Don't-kno ...

It's reassuring to know that, after four years in London, I'm still learning new things. For example, in New Zealand*, if a dog runs up to you and starts yapping away, jumping all around you and nipping at your heels and generally disregarding its place in the food chain, it's a perfectly acceptable deterrent to yell: "GET OUT OF IT YA MONGREL!" and clip it sharply on the ear. Kiwi* dog owners will regard you as well trained in the ways of doggie-discipline, having to fall back on it ...

If I hadn't been drinking myself silly in Clapham Common on Saturday, you can bet your babooties that I would have been participating in the Naked Bike Ride across London- not on a bike, of course (scrotum + bike chain ...

I spent most of my weekend in various states of inebriation, thanks largely to Toast New Zealand, a sort of kiwi-themed festival that seems comprised mostly, if not entirely, of tents dedicated to New Zealand wines. There was a terribly annoying monopoly-money system in which ...

Shy geeks of the world, rejoice! Forget speed dating, internet dating, being set-up by your mother, or indeed going up to a girl in a club and awkwardly trying to spark up a conversation; for I have inadvertently stumbled on a sure-fire way to get girls to come up and talk to you. It's three easy steps: 1. Go to Cyberdog and pick up one of those tops that comes with those little scro ...

You know, you can't get a decent Coke anywhere near my office. It's true. Every single single sandwich store, convenience store, off license and snack shop sells this wacky imported brand of Turkish Coca-Cola that tastes utterly foul. Coca-cola, as everyone knows, tastes slightly different from country to country. I first noticed this when I moved to the States- the Coke they have there is much more sugary, and much less carbonated, than the coke we drink in NZ (if you skull ...

"Hey Benj, so, like, check it out, see, there's these three ex-soldiers, right? And whenever they fly, they always fly with BA..." "...Barracus?" "...Dammit!" ...

I just raced the buses to work on my blades. And won. By about ten minutes. You'd think this would be a good thing, but really, it's not. I used to feel so sanctimonious blading to work. Getting up early for starters is something I overly pat myself on the back for, like getting up thirty minutes earlier is some kind of mighty achievement. But then exercising? I'd feel like the sixty-million-dollar man. The flipside of this is that, far more frequently, my alarm would ...

"When I'm drunk, I find you really, really attractive. When I'm sober, I'm not quite sure what the appeal is." "Are you saying you want to break up?" "God no. I'm just saying I don't think I should be sober around you." ...

-Daniel! Daniel, Daniel, Daniel. Andy. -I've come up with a plan that's gonna make you a millionaire! Brilliant. I need one of those. -Okay, so this blog thing you were telling me about, with the webcam and the couch and you being caught naked and that there? Uhm, yep. -So, if I understand this corre ...

[Disclaimer: This post contains gratuitous nekkid-Dan shots. Viewers of a nervous disposition, or those who wish to remain attached to sanity, are advised not to proceed, for the path you take will lead to certain destruuuuction!] Okay, the story is this: for the past few months, blogging legend and excellent friend Adrian has been using his nifty Sky+ box to tape Star Trek: Enterprise for me. Since he wa ...

We did do some other stuff on Saturday (coffee on the canals, lunch in Liedzeplein, coffeeshops on the way home), but, for me, Saturday was all about one thing: The Supper Club The Supper Club's reputation preceded it, and justifably so. For st ...

I got in at midnight on Friday morning. Adrian was working all day Friday, so I spent the day wandering about Amsterdam. The weather was absolutely perfe ...

My doctor told me to spend the week in bed, but I came back to work anyway. I can't really put my finger on why. I guess after two weeks holiday I thought that taking another week off would be a bit of a have, plus after five days in bed I really couldn't stand the thought of another one. My doc was a funny old guy- he kept making really lame jokes, laughing, then apologising, then doing it all over again. He also had a certificate on the wall which declared him the 'Doctor of the Yea ...

Sven regarded me with the same mixture of fear and concern I imagine people in plague-ridden Britain probably had to start faking after a few months. Don't get me wrong, his expression was quite genuine: He really seemed divided on whether to fetch me chicken soup or wrap me in plastic and place me outside with an identification tag. Sven is my flatmate. He's German. He was holding a box in his hand, and our hallway was full of boxes, because he was moving out. This would probably be ...

I've forgotten my PIN number. This isn't entirely rare. See, I never really 'remembered' my PIN number- I never possessed it as a string of numbers in my head. My fingers just remembered the pattern you need to make on the keypad to make the money come out. If I walked up to a cash machine, the fingers would just do their thing to make the correct PIN number work. It was like I stored the memory in my finger muscles to save space, or something. Sometimes, usually when hungover ...

Well, (as Samwise says at the end of The Lord of the Rings) I'm back. One of the downsides of being scrupulously honest (!) is that it makes certain 'pleasantries' kind of unpleasant. Since arriving at work yesterday afternoon (only three hours after getting off my 24-hour flight, no less), I've had the following conversation about 20 times: "Hey! You're back!" "Yep." "How was your holiday?" "It was pretty rough, to be honest." "Oh, why ...

"God, look at that guy, what a poseur." "What guy?" "The dude with the ridiculous chops and the intensely greased Elvis hairdo." "Oh, with the enormous skull & crossbones earrings?" "Yeah, that's the one. What a dick. I hate people who purposefully create an over-stylized image to send out a specific message." "Doesn't everyone do that?" "No. I don't do that." "Of course you do!" "No I don't! I just wear clothes. My look is entir ...

Sometimes your brain makes a snap judgement of a situation and spurs you into action without much time for analysis or forethought. All I saw was a woman, standing in the middle of the pavement on Bayswater Road, with her pants around her ankles. She was standing in a puddle that had clearly just emitted from her own self. My immediate thought was that she was pregnant, and that her water had broken, right then and there, in the middle of the sidewalk, and she was moments away from gi ...

before after hard to believe ...

YOGA INSTRUCTOR: "Daniel, your spine is not flat against the wall, can you push it out a bit?" ME: "No, this is as far as it goes. I've always had a pretty sharply curved spine." YOGA INSTRUCTOR: "Wow, that's a really severe curve." ME: "Yeah, I think it's genetic, my dad and one of my brothers has the same thing." YOGA INSTRUCTOR: "That's okay, we can fix that." <stron ...

Writing about my trip to Oslo is somewhat hampered by the fact that I was perpetually either drunk; or recovering from being drunk, or, most frequently, in various degrees of overlap between these two states, neither of which are particularly inducive to good memory. I remember that the wind was cold, I remember that <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/ ...

[ring ring] "Hi Katie, it's Dan." "Hi Dan, what's up?" "Uhm, I'm just filling in the ah, overtime spreadie, and it keeps coming back to me saying that I work half-an-hour overtime every day. Like, even when I work my minimum hours, it says I work half an hour overtime." "Well, what are your contracted hours?" "Nine to five-fifteen with a 45 minute break for lunch." "Hang on, I'll just... [shuffle of paper] ...no, according to thi ...

Adrian, Craig & I (we're arranged alphabetically, AND by height). We're not quite as gay as we appear here. Okay, I can't really back that up. Wait: here's a picture of me and a bevy of beautiful women ...

Happy dude-getting-nailed-to-a-tree weekend! As Bill Hicks was fond of noting: "Where in the Bible do they mention a giant bunny that hands out chocolate eggs? You'd think I'd remember that bit." Anyway, I'm in Hampstead Heath on Friday, enjoying the sun with a bit of red wine, cheese, `n friends. At one point I look up and point out what appears to be either a bin lid or a very large frisbee, twirling in the air at some great height. That's interesting, I thought, rather taken aback ...

NOTE: This was written for the online magazine Pick Me Up, which last week asked its readers the question: Have you ever almost died? (along with: What is the best relationship you never had?), but I thought I'd blog it, as well. Enjoy. There have been three occasions on which I have almost died, all of which (rather suitably) make pretty neat stories, but probably would have made rather unimpressive obituarie ...

The moral of the story is: don't put your card behind the bar and then proceed to get drunk. ...

So, I'm on the tube the other day, and I'm reading over someone's shoulders, which is what I do when I have no Metro and no Palm and no book and no Sun-left-on-the-seat-isn't-Dear-Deidre-the-best? This is quite rare (and, look, if you're pregnant, I'm sorry I didn't see you. I don't look at people on the tube. I'm reading. I'll have you know I once shooed two men off their bus seats in order to seat a pregnant woman, so there). I know it's annoying to you, but have you stopped to ask why it i ...

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Oh man, I've got to learn that me and my friends' sense of humour is a lot darker than regular folks. So I'm in a meeting and we're discussing asbestos safety regulations, and someone mentions that the iron girders in the World Trade Centre were coated with an asbestos spray to 'prevent heat damage'. "It didn't work." I deadpanned, only to be met with fifteen seconds of silence and mouths gaping open in shock. The meeting then continued as I sank slowly under the tabl ...

We gather under the Marble Arch, about twenty of us, all told. If you were to stand here at this same time six months from now, there’d be over two hundred people, strapping on their boots, putting on their pads, the more bold among us chatting amiably to the more nervous. But it’s February, and it’s cold, and only the people who are dedicated are here now. Cold does not concern us- once we start moving, we’ll warm up quickly enough. We start out down Oxford Street, each of us ...

"Have you bound those files for me yet?" "Uhm, no, actually, I've been really busy. They're all printed and waiting by the binding machine, if you have some kind of low-level functionary available to bind them." "You are the low-level functionary." "Ah." ...

So, I'm walking down past Downing Street and, well, (you heard it here first!) those "wacky" guys from Fathers 4 Justice have got themselves all dolled up for action again and had climbed out on the wall of 10 Downing Street (which meant that Downing Street was blocked off which meant I couldn't ...

I don't envy this man the task ahead of him. ...

Okay, so, I went to a movie last week, and the movie started at eight, and I clocked off work around six-thirty, so I figured I had an hour or so to kill, yeah? I figured I’d like, go to Borders on Oxford Street and chill out for a bit. Get a few books filled with photos of distant galaxies and find a chair in the in-house Starbucks with something chocolatey and caffeiney and wow myself out until it was movie time (seriously- this is a good way to spend an interesting hour). So I’ ...

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under the category of things not to say to your office manager, ostensibly the most powerful person in your working life "This is the shittest Visio diagram I've ever seen. What moron put this together?" "I did." "Ah." ...

Sometimes I hate this city. Sometimes the cold seeps into my bones, and the grey of the sky shakes its fist at me and threatens to never give way. Sometimes the bus driver sneers at me for no reason and I can't help but notice the dirt on everything and I feel like I'm breathing in a mix of soot and exhaust and sweat and hatred and I'll never be clean, really clean, again. Sometimes I sit staring at Air New Zealand's website, my fi ...

I’m blessed with a life that is frequently (weekly, really. Saturdays at eight… I’m like a sitcom) both: Interesting; and Hilarious Less frequently, but still way too often (and I’ll admit this may be because I simply have a tenuous grip on reality), it dives headlong into what can only be called the downright surreal. How many times in the last four months have you fallen to your knees and screamed: “This can’t possibly be hap ...

This is Fabulicious, a New Zealand confectionary that consists of red liquorice filled with sherbet. It was so spectacularly popular when it first came out in the early 90's, there were news articles on how you couldn't get any. Dairies (that's the kiwi word for convenience store) would hike the price 500% and they'd still sell out the moment supplies hit the stores. Hordes of stoned teenagers roamed the streets of Hamilton, sear ...

It took me a while to get over my fear of locker rooms. When I first joined a gym, I used to actually change in the shower cubicles, so traumatic were my early high school locker room experiences. Then I moved flat and switched to Fitness First Brixton* and they didn't even have cubicle doors (it was like prison!) so I had to get over that. Nowadays, I'd like to think I'm pretty well locker room adjusted. I still wear a towel as I walk from, say, the sauna to the shower, but ...

So, a few weeks ago I went to a James Bond theme party and got incredibly drunk (damn you, Enormous Vodka Ice Gun!) and consequently have very few memories of the evening itself. I remember getting there. I remember winning a magnum of champange for being the best dressed male. I remember staring down the barrel of Enormous Vodka Ice Gun. I remember waking up on a fr ...

"What's this Executive Summary thing?" "Oh, it's kind of a brochure we send out ahead of the Bid, just to talk the company up a bit." "I didn't see it in the Bid Requirements." "Oh, it's not a requirement, in fact they specifically ask us not to send one, but we always send one anyway. They say they won't read it but they always do, and we often find it..." "...helps bias the judges?" "No, definitely not, there's never any money involved. In fact, that' ...

[in patronizing tone] "Oh, one more thing: the plural of Appendix is Appendices." "I know." "Then why did you write Appendicks?" "I didn't. That's an E." "Oh." ...

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I witnessed something very interesting on the tube this morning. I'm getting off at Warren Street, and walking up the left hand side of the escalator (seriously, what is with the standing people? You want to spend more time breathing in that rank air?), and there's someone standing, like, y'know, on the left side, in my way, so my upward progress is halted. It is a woman, and she's talking into this guy who is standing on the right side. And she's saying: "You grabbed my ass, ...