WYRMLOG

Obama is true Hitler

Wednesday March 24th 2010

We get a lot of spam at work - it kind of goes with the territory. Most of it's the usual ads for male enhancement products, pleas for help from dying/persecuted millionaires and catalogues of Chinese crapware. But every now and then (for some reason) we get bombarded with poorly written missives protesting about something to do with the University of Aalborg, one Peter Axel Nielson and the hosting of student websites.

It's hard to figure out exactly what the writer is upset about because his (her?) emails are liberally peppered with barely coherent rants concerning President Obama, Hilary Clinton, Hitler and Jesus (or as the writer prefers, "Jesu"). From what I've been able to establish over the months we've been been getting this stuff, Peter Alex Nielson (maybe) moved the hosting of a student's website from the sever in his department (I think) and then called in Obama and Hilary (perhaps) to persecute said student in the United States (possibly). It's all very confusing.

In any case I've been meaning to post one of these insane screeds for months. One came in today, so enjoy!

Ice, Gale and Storm

Tuesday March 23rd 2010

Well, yesterday afternoon Perth was hit with the biggest storm in, well certainly over a decade, and according to some people since records began. While it didn't affect my part of Bayswater much, some parts of the city were absolutely pummeled with howling gales, pounding rain and hailstones the size of golf balls (yes that's a cliche, but seriously, they were actually as big as golf balls). There was flash flooding, lightning strikes and even a landslide on Mount Eliza which blocked Mounts Bay road and buried a bunch of apartments chest deep in mud.

It happened to be my day off yesterday so I missed the excitement at the office when the roof of the light well shattered under the onslaught and the storm poured in, smashing windows and flooding the ground floor. Happily my colleagues took plenty of photos which they've given me leave to put up on my Flickr stream (which I shall do in due course).

Nedlands was absolutely pummeled. The trees have been almost completely stripped of foliage, and in some cases bark. At UWA the 80 year old stained glass windows of Winthrop Hall have been almost completely destroyed and a retaining wall at the new semi-sunken library building collapsed - filling the place with at least a foot of mud. In Subiaco the pavements along Rokeby road were solid green with leaves ripped from the plane trees and both my morning and afternoon buses had to divert around roads with downed power lines. The total estimated damage is over 100 million dollars and the city has been declared an official natural disaster zone.

Fun.

Oh, and on the way back through Subiaco I saw a man chase a rat out of his store with a broom. I don't know if this was connected to the storm, but it is worthy of note. Apparently (according to the bus driver) when they demolished the old TAFE College a few months ago they didn't bother to poison all the rats first, with the result that the cheery little fellows dispersed through the surrounding area. This particular rodent took cover in the next shop along (a high class clothing boutique) and the shopkeeper seemed content with this situation, leaving it to its own devices.

Some of my storm photos are up on Flickr, the rest will be up soon. Ish.

Ebony's name is ENOBY

Monday March 22nd 2010

Call me easily amused, but the TV Tropes page on the mind-bendingly awful Harry Potter fanfic My Immortal sent my into hysterics today.

Literally, hysterics. The misspelling of "Reader Discretion" in particular had me slumped in my chair, screaming with laughter for about five minutes. My neighbours probably thought I'd gone insane and (once I recovered enough to breath) I discovered I'd given myself a nasty case of the hiccoughs.

I have no intention of reading the source material - the text parser in my head would break under the assault - but the summary is pure, radioactive comedy dynamite.

Moving with the Times

Monday March 22nd 2010

Well, America has finally moved into the 20th century. Well done guys!

I wonder how Glen Beck will react? I'm betting on incoherent gibbering, twitching and howling followed by devolution into some kind of lobster-like creature live on air.