[Update notice: Black Ink has new content]

I have been aware for some time now that there are a distubring number of people in the world who look like me – my friends keep telling me about spotting them. I’m not sure what we all did in past lives to wind up with this affliction, but the fact remains, there are a good number of us. One of my friends suffers from the terrible affliction of running into me on his holidays – it’s happened to him a couple of times, including one occaision where he went on holiday to Norway, and found me running the hotel he was staying in. And this version didn’t just look like me – he spoken English with my accent, and apparently had similar mannerisms and demeanour.

The poor sod was almost put off his Akavit, but reported that a few glasses soon cured the shock he was feeling, so that was all right. I’m still slightly worried about it, but he enjoyed his holiday.

However, what I had not realised until this morning is that not only are there people who look like me out there, but that there is at least one man out there with exactly the same name as me. This is a little troubling, as it turns out that there’s been a mix-up at some point, and that for most of my working life, I have been paying my National Insurance contributions into his account. I think it’s all more or less sorted now (although I need to call the national insurance people in October to confirm a few things) but still, how hard can identity theft be, if this sort of thing happens by accident? It’s taken them six bloody years to notice that while I’ve been employed and paying tax, I haven’t been paying national insurance, for Christ’s sake!

Actually it’s very sad given that this is what I do for my living, but I’ve spent the last few days writing a couple of class files, that, all told, come to most of 1000 lines of code. Not wildly unusual. But today I’ve started plugging them in to the pages that’re going to need them, fully expecting to spend an annoying hour or two fixing typos, chasing missing brackets, and inserting semi-colons, as one does when one writes a lot of code without testing it as one goes along.

Not a single parse error in the lot of it. Of course, I have no idea if it’ll all do what it’s supposed to yet, but at least there aren’t any typos in it.

I told you it was sad.

Going to bed.

Who’s going to B Movie on Friday, then?

So I’m playing around with Launchcast, Yahoo’s customisable streaming radio service, and I have to say, I’m bloody impressed. A couple of hours of fine tuning and teaching it what I like (chiefly by rating songs, and then skipping to the next track, so it may take longer if you actually listen to all the early tunes it throws at you), and it’s doing pretty well at getting my music taste nailed – certainly better than any of the other “customisable” stations that I’ve tried, which all balked at the fact that I quite like five track lump that goes George Carlin -> Rancid -> Bjork -> Aphex Twin -> Tom Waits. It’s doing equally well at throwing me stuff I’ve not heard, but that it thinks I’d like.

Yahoo seems to have cracked it. So all I’ve got to do now is get one of those apps that MP3’s whatever’s coming out of your computer’s audio, and I’m going to be back to taping songs off the radio.

Plus ca change, eh?

[Update Notice: Black Ink has new content.]

And, because I’m bored I’m going to do that weird meme/music thing I’ve seen other people doing. Under the cut are my favourite lines/couple of lines from the first 20 songs on a random playlist shuffle (or at least, from the first 20 that have lyrics) . Can you name that tune?

Sing along at home…

Like everyone else, I’ve just been to see Van Helsing.

I loved it. It was the stupidest movie I’ve seen in ages. The script honked, the direction was uninspired, the CGI was laughable. There are plot holes large enough to drive a coach and a team of six horses through. Actually, I’m not sure it has a plot, so much as a selection of holes. And even the bits that might, charitably, not be plot holes, are just bloody stupid.

But I got to watch the Wolfman fighting Dracula. And I got to watch Hugh Jackman fight with everything. And Kate Beckinsale looked pretty. I got exactly what I was expecting out of this film, which was entertainment on a LXG level. Perhaps even better. The plot was made up of holes that justified the next fight scene and that’s it, and that’s what I wanted. And I got to watch the Wolfman smack the shit out of Dracula. I’m not sure how anyone could expect more, having seen the trailer, and knowing it was by the guy that made The Mummy, which is a shit film that seems to have fooled people into thinking it’s in some way good.

In other news, I saw another film today, and if The Saddest Music In The World is playing near you, you shoudl go and see it. It tries to be a little too clever in places, but nonetheless, it’s a interesting examination of the ways nations and families express grief and compete for symapthy, set in Winnipeg in the great depresssion. And Isabellia Rosellini plays a woman with no legs whose prosthetic replacments are filled with beer.

Can anyone out there tell me what “viaje” and “la mesilla” mean? I’m just curious, as I got Jason‘s latest album last night, and it’s a sort of mirror of his first album. Where the first began with “Prelude” and ended with “August Closing His Mouth After A Long Summer’s Yawn”, this begins with “February Relaxing Her Fingers After A Brief Winter’s Grip” and ends with “Coda”, and the tracks along the way mirror each other as well – “Without”/”With”, “Halloween”/”May Day” and so on, but I have no idea what if anything “Viaje” and “La Mesilla” mean, and I’m curious…

I was woken from my early-evening doze in a rather unceremonious manner, as the bus driver’s dulcet tones overrode my iPod’s rather more appropriate offering of Thelonious Monk, to inform me that my transport home was stopping about a mile and half short of my home, rather than more or less outside my front door, as had been advertised when I got aboard and paid my shiny pound for the priviledge of travelling by London Omnibus.

I was, as you might imagine, more than a little put out with this. It substantially cut down my chances of getting the dinner I wanted from M&S from one thing, to say nothing of having been stiffed out of a quid by London Transport. And it looked like it was about to piss down with rain, like it had all the rest of the day.

So it was with uncharitable thoughts about the world and everyone in it that I set off on my impromptu forced march – I had ten minutes to cover about half that distance, and get to M&S before it shut, and if it hadn’t started to piss it down by then, cover the same again to get home. Well, OK, if had started to piss it down, I wasn’t going to be in as much of a hurry, but it was going to be unpleasant.

Thanks to an astonishing turn of speed, I made it to M&S (undampened by rain) in time to grab my dinner, noting as I dived in that there seemed to be an awful lot of police about.

I left M&S, still in a foul mood – they hadn’t had what I wanted, so I grabbed a quick sandwich instead.

At that point, I saw the cause of the cancelled bus, and the police. There’d been an accident, and the police were sealing the road off in both directions. The accident had involved a motorbike and, I think, a bus. It did not look like the kind of motorbike accident that the rider walks away from with scrapes.

I made it home unrained on.

A little lesson in perspective, I think. If the worst I have to complain about is an unplanned brisk walk, and the fact that the rather nice dinner I had wasn’t the rather nice dinner I’d had in mind, I’m think I’m doing pretty well.

I hope that the poor bastard on the bike recovers.

Saw it. Loved it. Am inclined to agree with burge, although I didn’t find the ending sad, just really, really moving. Thus far, this and Lost in Translation are my favourites for the year.

For those keeping score, I fell asleep shortly after midnight, although I did wake up within the time period that redscharlach predicted, which would a lot creepier if it had been a smaller window of time. Still, I say we burn her as a witch, just to be on the safe side, as she clearly sent some kind of horrible demony-thing to plague me in my sleep.