Alasdair Watson

A state of enlightenment sought in Zen meditation. A glimpse into essential truths about oneself, one’s relationship with the universe and the nature of everything. A moment of enlightenment, of perfect understanding and perfect comprehension.

In my experience, the big problem with satori is that it’s awfully hard to tell apart from mad bollocks.

I was delighted when I heard that he was putting out a new album. I was overjoyed when I heard that in fact it was not one, but two albums. I am slavering with anticipation now, because I have just downloaded the same tracks available at this site, and I really can’t wait for May 7th.

You know your meme is doing well when people are making parodies. So, I’m happy to see this, and alarmingly funny parody of They Fight Crime! done by Yami. (Found via Anna.)

So, I’m trying to get PHP to sort the order it displays some infomration in based on the last modified time of the files containing the info. It isn’t working. I’ve got PHP telling me that it knows what I’m walking about when I ask it to display the values in the array, and the keys associated with said values. The values are what I want to display, the keys are the timestamps for the lastmod dates of the files. It knows that the values are strings and the keys are integers.

So, why does ksort(arrayname) not work? If anyone out there is a PHP genius, and can give me an idea where I’m going wrong, please, please, please drop me a line.

Things they don’t tell you when you sign up to the gym: You can’t quit. Not even for a little while. Between illness and holiday, it’s been about three weeks since I last went to the gym. When I went tonight, I was expecting to be a bit behind where I was three weeks ago.

This is not “a bit behind”. Before I went on holiday, I was doing 4 miles in 25 minutes. Tonight, I barely managed 2 and a half in fifteen before needing to stop. Likewise, I was about five kilos down on all my weights. It’s going to be a month or so, just to get back to where I was, dammit.

Saw the film last night. Were it not based on a true story, it would be revoltingly schmaltzy, and I’m sure the true story has been heavily fictionalised in order to make it play well as a film, but it was an excellent film, which surprised me quite massively, as normally Akiva Goldsman’s (the writer of the screenplay) involvement in a film is a pretty clear signal that the film will be shit. But no, this was good, and well worth the time.

Went to The After Skool Club with some of the Pure crowd last night. Good night out, marred slightly by running into a bunch of folk that I went to school with on the night bus back. They were very drunk and behaved like arseholes, which was slightly embarrassing since I was trying to have a conversation with Juamei and Sarah at the time.

A while back, I was reflecting that no-one I went to school with would have any trouble identifying me – I weight a bit more, and my hair is a slightly different colour, and I’m older in the face, but I am otherwise unchanged from school – I’ve still got the long hair, and I’m still dressed in black all the time. And indeed, most of the remarks were about how I was unchanged from school.

I’m sure that if they were thinking about it, they’d have be writing that off as sad, but then, I’ve always looked how I feel comfortable, and anyway, I’m not the one that’s still going out drinking with folk from school. That’s the thing I find sad – maybe I look the same, but I’m not even close to the same person I was when I was eighteen. I got no sense from these people that they had changed (although I’m sure they have). Same social groups, same ringleaders. I can only assume that they were at the Still In Skool Klub for the night, or something.

Still, weird coincidence.

I’m back. I think I’m losing a battle with jet lag, to be honest, so this is going to be fractured…

The weather’s gone odd on me. I leave, it’s winter. I’m back, it’s time for the summer wardrobe. San Francisco in Macrocosm.

Some notes from the road:

One: Head Weather

This is the place where the hippies won, is it? This city of homeless people pushing shopping carts, and drug-fractured mental wiring? Clear blue skies, but the fog and cloud is ready to roll it at any time, obscure the way things are. This is the city where they beat The Man, apparently. There’s a Gap on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, opposite a Ben and Jerry’s.

A Beat city, or a Beaten city?

Two: Protest God

Berkley: Birthplace of student protest. There was a man with a cross dencouncing the inhabitants of the campus and sinful, and exhorting them to give thmesvles over to Jesus. Another man stopped to argue a semantic point of religion. It got heated. I thought I was going to see a proper protest. Imagine my disappointement.

Three: Stag Night Blues – Stripped Down

I was flagging when we hit Kerouac’s bar, Vesuvio. A couple of coffees and a healthy dose of whiskey, topped off with a tequila, and everything was going great guns. Then it was off the stag-night staple: a strip joint. I don’t like them. I have a friend (well, we’ve lost touch, but anyway) who worked in one. This isn’t a sob story about her being forced there: she was there because the money was good. I used to meet her after work, some nights, when she finished early.

It was interesting, hearing her talk about work. She didn’t hate these people. She didn’t feel used by them. She just felt a bit sorry for them. Sure, there were the really weird and frightening ones. There were the ones for whom this was the closest to a proper sexual experience they were going to get. She pitied them, I guess, when she wasn’t unnnerved by them. No it was the others. The normal guys. She used to wonder what it was that was wrong in their lives, that this was a satisfying sexual experience. Sure, the stag do, the lads nights out, that she could understand, sort of. But the normal guys that would come in on their own, or in ones and twos. Sober, ordinary people. People who, in her view, should not have had serious trouble getting a date. Not bad looking. Not, as far as she could tell during her (admitedly short) conversations brain damage cases. Normal people. She couldn’t see why they would chose this, this thin fake, over a chance of something better? I don’t get it either. Nor, if I’m honest, do I get why this is a stag night staple. It’s not like any groom worth marrying is going to have any serious reaction, beyond “yes, yes, very nice, now can I go back to my wife-to-be?”

Now available at the usual place. Be warned, some of them (especially of the wedding and reception) are monstrously large. I’ll re-size them when I get a few minutes.

Yes, I know I need to sort out some means of ordering the links on that directory page.

In Berkley rocked my world, so many thanks to the various people that suggested it to me. I managed to find “All Virgos Are Mad” which is a source of immense pleasure to me – I love 4AD compilation CDs. Also got albums by Le Tigre, Black Box Recorder, Indigo Girls and VNV Nation, all for cheap, which was lordly and good.