Being Mr. Kenny

So I’ve been messing around with another site. It’s over at crapspackle.co.uk. It’s basically what Goodness used to be, only better. (Who here remembers Goodness? It was a poor little section, but there was something to it, so I’ve given it its own domain in the hopes that something comes of it.)

Check it out.

Anyone who has seen me eat will tell you that I love to cover my food in hordes* of salt. (If you think I’m only exaggerating, you shouldn’t: sometimes I add more salt once I’ve eaten the top layer of food.)

Once in the dinner queue at school I was giving my meal a substantial dusting when a colleague in a year above drew my attention to the fact that too much salt was bad for you. I later saw him around the school and he cried out, “Hey! It’s Excessive Salt Man!”, a name which I have treasured to this day.

I also remember eating fish and chips for the first time when I was about three years old or something. I thought it was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. It was also the first time I’d ever eaten salt and I remember being astonished at the miraculous and delightful way it changed the flavour. Imagine my joy, then, when I was informed that salt could be applied to any food with similar effect.

So I have always had a soft spot for good old Sodium Chloride. As I grow older, however, I have learnt that it perhaps isn’t the healthiest thing in the world to be eating, and this fills me with misery. I now understand what it must feel like to give up smoking.

Reducing my salt intake has been difficult. Eating food that doesn’t taste like the sea is a strange new experience. I will never (ever!) eat chips without salt, though. That’s a line that I won’t cross. Unless I have a heart attack or something, in which case I probably won’t be eating chips any more. Well, I could chew them I suppose, but I’d have to be sure to spit them out. Now there’s a depressing thought.

In a recent health check, however, it turned out that I had low blood pressure, so maybe my body’s adapted to my high salt intake. Who knows, maybe I need to have a high salt intake. Or perhaps, and this is my favourite theory, my salt intake was never that high anyway.

Who knows, I suppose only time will tell. If I start having terrible pains in my kidneys or something, you will be the first to know. Well, the hospital will be the first, but I’ll be sure to make an entry here about it. You know, in the interests of science.

* You could also say swathes: neither word quite makes it as a metaphor, but who cares.

I was going over some old folders from my days as an errant and inattentive student, and I found this in my notes from a lecture:

It’s a character I invented called Gablabby Roslyn. She was offering me some important advice during my lecture, which was ironic for if I had not been drawing pictures of her, she would not have been able to give me that advice.

It’s like when you put two mirrors facing each other, or feedback when you hold a microphone up to a speaker. THESE ARE THE MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE.

Apparently in Japan there is, or used to be, some controversy as to whether 12 am referred to noon or midnight. I found the following anecdote on a blog and I think it’s great.

Back in 1972, a K-12 student got confused and asked the teacher which is right. The inquiry was forwarded to the principal, superintendents, all the way up to the Ministry of Education that eventually contacted Japan Clock & Watch Association(JCWA) for an official comment.

All the way up to the Ministry of Education! I love the fact that the system worked so efficiently. In England it would never have left the headteachers desk, and probably wouldn’t have got there in the first place. Read the rest of the post.

Take extra care when messing around with your partitions on your hard drive. And be sure to make backups. Ye gods, be sure to make backups!

I’ve just spent the last 7 hours recovering files from my hard drive as a result of messing around to try and get Windows and Linux to read from the same damn partition. The partitioner threw a cheerful error of the type, “Hello, something has gone wrong, buggered if I know what” and helpfully informed me that the sky might be about to fall on my head. “Good bye! Thanks for using me to royally screw up your hard drive! Have a nice day!”

The best part is that I’m not even close to finishing yet.

Shaving has long been a bugbear of mine (check it out!). I have always assumed that I had been given a special dispensation for just cutting my face to pieces and that there was nothing I could do about it. And I’m not joking here, I am rarely able to shave without coming away with another couple of scars.

This morning just about pushed me over the edge, however. I usually accumulate wounds on my chin, but today I managed to move the razor blade sideways, instead of downwards, which had the effect of giving me two, long, exactly parallel incisions just under my nose. It was surprisingly painless actually, and in all honesty I’m quite pleased since my friend did a similar thing and has a particularly nice scar that I’ve always envied, but it was clear that, no matter how nice the scar might be, this is no way to start the morning off. I simply can’t go on lacerating my face like this. For one thing, I’ve lost enough blood!

As it happens, the solution is quite simple. I just have to stop pushing so hard. That’s really it, I can’t believe it’s that easy. From now on, instead of wielding the razor blade like a knife, sword, lawnmower and dragging it down the side of my head like there’s no tomorrow, I am simply going to hold it lightly between finger and thumb and gently pull it across my skin. I found that that method is actually more effective at removing hair, plus it means that razor burn is a thing of the past.

How can it have taken me so long to discover this?!

It’s August. In the Northern hemisphere, that means it’s summer. Over here in Britain, that means it’s raining. Consequentially, we can’t hang our washing up outside. Well, we could but it would be a pointless exercise.

So anyway, I put my brain to good use today, and constructed a washing line out of a length of polyester twine I found and my wardrobes. And yes, I did mean to use the plural! (Really, one of them is just a cupboard under the stairs, but I like to think of it as a wardrobe. Well, no I don’t really, but it was easier to just write “wardrobes” and besides, it’s provided me with the opportunity to now make silly comments about my choice of words.)

That last paragraph took me ten minutes to write!

Anyway, I took a photo (underwear has been pixellated out for comic effect):

I may write to the University of Sheffield and ask them to upgrade my degree for showing applied knowledge in the field of laundromatic engineering. I also may write to them to ask them to stop including me in the term “alumni” since it makes me feel old and like I owe them some money, but that’s another matter entirely.