24 July 2003
The title of my last post is a reference to Captain Beefheart. I found my copy of Trout Mask Replica (not manuscript replica [c…c…c-c-c-cut it!]), having given it up for dead over a year ago, when removing my PC, nineteen-inch monitor and all, to take to a friend’s house and play networked games. It was hiding beneath a lot of dust and my network hub, which moved when I was trying to figure out which network cable was which.
Actually, journey to said house was entertaining. The scene: three people, and each person has a computer. Each computer has a monitor: one nineteen inches, one fifteen inches, and one twenty-one inches and big with it. All this, plus tennis racquets, peripherals, Gamecube accessories, DVDs, food, etc. had to fit in one Nissan Primera saloon car that’s getting on a bit and has the strangest locking system you’ll ever see.
I ended up wedged on a back seat with no legroom (my computer was taking that space) and no space to either side. In addition to this, I had the one window that was broken and didn’t wind down. At least it wasn’t my keyboard that got left on the roof and fell off as we cruised down a busy road, though.
Once we got there I lost my first ever networked game of Age of Mythology, and as my favourite combination (Egyptians, Isis). It’s probably no coincidence that I wasn’t playing on my PC, with the detail low and an optical mouse. We also played some other stuff, but I was still in shock. And then, having dismissed a sofa bed as ‘for pansies,’ I slept a couple of hours on the floor, got up, thrashed the AI a couple of times at Winning Eleven (hardest difficulty, even teams, no idea how I did it).
I’ve ‘borrowed’ two pairs of sunglasses in the last day.The first pair were rimless, purple-tinted ones which I wore mostly indoors and often in the dark. The second are almost wrap-around shades that apparently only look good on their owner, but I wore to play tennis. I think I’m getting addicted to other people’s sunglasses.
Question: the general standard of written English presumably improved in the last century to its highest level ever. Will it decline this century, and has anything similar happened to any other language?
Former labelmates of The Decemberists, Noise For Pretend have an album, Happy You Near, that has — in reverse order — a brilliant, a very good, and a good song for its opening trio, and a mostly average half hour after that. Such disappointment after the peak of Go Figure, Another Warm Day In Paradise.