Note to self: Dear Brain; when you have an idea at 4am which you think is either a] the secret of the universe or b] will make you rich and famous and adored by everybody, you're wrong. You should know this by now. For instance, your notion last night to make, market and sell leather saris. Must do better.

Okay, it's not quite up there with William James [after a night on the nitrous oxide, he thought he had uncovered the secret of the universe, wrote it down, then went back to sleep; on awakening, he found he'd written; "Hogamous, Higamous; Men are polygamous. Higamous, Hogamous; Women monogamous"] but it's still a bloody stupid idea.

I wouldn't mind one for myself though.

Reading list updated, courtesy of the Oxfam bookshop in nearby nice middle-class town with a better class of donations.

It was one of those days where I couldn't take six steps without someone going "Oh, hello Fish! What are you doing here?" Four times that happened in only two hundred metres' walk from car to bookshop then back to car.

Three of them were people who I know semi-professionally, and whilst I don't much care for them I was pleasant and polite, whilst the fourth, despite being a friend, had big news: his father had [not unexpectedly] died on Wednesday night, so I felt duty-bound to give him ten minutes' worth of my ear, as well as to offer what general support I can in these situations.

One of the things I've learnt, especially since Pete's death, is that the best support one can offer is often just a reassurance that whatever the person is going through is normal. This person was in the initial "shock/numbness" stage of the natural bereavement process, which can sometimes engender guilt: "I'm not feeling anything. Why am I not feeling anything?"

Once his brain is less tired from the initial running round the hospital, he'll start to feel stuff, probably very powerfully.

And if he needs me then, he knows my number.

soundtracktotodaysentryisonethousandtearsofatarantula

F., junior waitress at the cafe, had a couple of spare hours today, so she started writing a list of "100 Things To Do Before You Die". She only got up to number 29.

I'm not sure she quite appreciated my surreptitious additions to the list, along the lines of "Point at Moira Stuart for two months", "Invent a new sandwich filling, smear yourself with it, and run through the monkey cage at Colchester Zoo" or "Devote your existence to hitting squirrels with a banjo".

I must be feeling much better.

Your suggestions for the list?

"An encyclopaedia is like a motorbike sandwich."

Sometime about seven am, I remember waking up with that phrase on my lips and thinking that it was really bloody important and had to be engraved into my memory.

I have absolutely no froggin' idea why, or what it means.

Anybody?

Killer Facts Of The Day:

1] According to the two women from "unnamedsmalltowndropin" who went on a St John's First Aid course yesterday, you are no longer taught [as I was] to do CPR by doing chest pumps whilst counting to fifteen, then fifteen more.

Instead they tell you to sing the chorus of "Nellie The Elephant" in your head twice over whilst you're doing it, to get the right rhythm; "Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to the cir-cus, off she went with a trumpety-trump, trump, trump trump" providing the fifteen count required.

…I wonder if they know of the punk version of that song?

2] According to my newspaper this morning, female trout fake orgasms.

Damn. Apparently my performance as waiter [not waitress, Zo: I save that for private parties only ] was good enough for Sarah to ask me to work for her every Thursday until my new job [whatever that turns out to be] starts. Well, fine, I guess: the cash will come in handy, and a large lunch will be supplied, so I ain't complaining.

It may perhaps seem strange that I've accepted a job that involves serving people with large amounts of fried dead pig, given my occasional rants against some parts of the food industry.

I have never claimed to be perfect ((unless you count my hair and my legs )) and I don't do so now. However, I am at least aware of the dodginess of this, which is a heck of a lot more than many people. I just judge in this instance that the benefits of helping to keep the cafe open during a mini-staff-crisis [and the social networking that flows therefrom] temporarily outweigh my personal commitment to trying to avoid animals being slaughtered where there's a viable alternative.

Such an approach can be decried as "pragmatism" – the temporary abandonment of ideology [or "morals"] for "the greater good" [whatever that is], which some say leads to illogical compromises and nasty bodge-jobs. And sure, you shouldn't totally avoid ideology, or you just end up drifiting in the wind like an abandoned plastic bag; but a little pragmatism is sometimes a good thing: we've seen what a strict ideological position does sometimes – like the massive negative effects of our insane drugs policies, coming directly from the fixed idea that chemical compounds are something you can wage a war on.

In other words; "hey, don't blame me, it's not my friggin' bacon."

A rhea (rhea americana) yesterday.
No points will be awarded for "rhea / rear" homophone ((or for jokes about homo phones with ringtones that play "It's Raining Men", come to that.)) jokes.

Fine: let's gloss over the question of what the hell a farmer in Southeast England was doing with a South American flightless bird; we'll instead go onto what she told the BBC in the first story linked above; "Generally they're placid but it's when they get spooked that they can become a different bird and I wouldn't want to grapple with one unless I was a professional."

Which kind of begs the question: how does one become a professional rhea-grappler? Does the Open Uni offer courses on it? Damn, that'd be a heck of a tutorial…

shoenotes

Today's post consists of nothing but ocelots.

Click for biggeryness.

Because, ummm…..