Spanish Train

$4t4n> adwawdwwwwwwwwwwwawd sssss
$4t4n> [fuck
J3sVsBot> pwn'd
J3sVsBot> lolzw00t
Me7@7r0n> laf
Teh_Bea5t> kekeke
J3sVsBot> Nobody fckz with the J3sVsBot

Probably thanks to the prodigious Papacy-sponsored output of a full palette of Italian masters, we all feel compelled to expect Jesus as a pale, rangy fellow with long brown hair, a well-conditioned beard, and a look of untroubled beneficence. Mary's creamy complexion can only be sad and virginal, and Joseph must invariably appear kindly, familial and safely incapable of trying to impregnate anyone. Cherubs are rosy, lambs are white and fluffy. A hundred thousand swarthy Canaanites might voice concerns over these latter-day interpretations, but then who are they to question priceless Florentine masterpieces?

Everyone's favourite fall-guy, Satan, gets to be more ethnically ambiguous. Bat wings, a forked tongue, scales of shimmering crimson, etc. Not going to sneak a full trolley into the express queue at the supermarket looking like that of course, but at least it stops one being confused with just any old fallen angel.

But it would be foolish of us to expect them all to arrive in such predictable fashion come Judgement Day.

My friend Frisco first alerted me to the news via GoogleTalk:

"Turns out Satan is Lord"

This was a grave revelation, though I cannot deny that at first I was as sceptical as Thomas. After all, there had been no reliable sightings since a certain incident involving a prophet, three soon-to-be-false gods, Satan and a couple of eponymous verses. But Frisco's tone would brook no dissent, so I was obliged to suppose that the Rapture was soon to be upon us. I admit to taking a moment to regret not having been a boy scout. All Heaven was about to break loose and I was thoroughly unprepared: There was no dark chocolate left in the fridge, I only had one case of Champagne, and was entirely out of fresh underpants. Thank God for all the Muslim-owned shops down the road.

As I recalled from my schoolings on the matter, the End of Days was expected to last 6 years or so. It would begin with all the goodly Christians ascending to Heaven - not unlike when the Millennium Falcon gets caught in the tractor beam of the Death Star (although Heaven doesn't have detention blocks in which to put unco-operative princesses). I thought of J-Man's brilliant but unrealised idea for a first-person shooter, where you run around trying to take down as many Christians as possible before they can successfully rise out of range, all the while fending off demons and Hell-hounds and stuff. Divine? Ineffably. Comedy? Indubitably. Probably wouldn't be allowed to sell it to kids in the US, though...

Happily, the rather tight entrance criteria meant that pretty much everyone I know would get left behind too. All but one of my dragon boat team would probably still pitch up to training the next day, and on reflection it was unlikely that they would need to extend any project releases at work due to major staff shortages.

Yup, Cape Town, with its sizeable Jewish, Muslim, Somali, Nigerian, Zimbabwean, Congolese, Gay and Atheist communities - not to mention all the East European pole dancers, the Cape Bar, and everyone in the Media industry - would probably weather the Rapture admirably. That is, but for the rampaging forces of Hell of course.

Now Satan, having plotted his arrival for ages, would obviously want to make a dramatic entrance, and, having been blessed (by God) with a diabolical sense of dramatic irony, would most likely have chosen to appear with a flourish atop Devil's Peak, with its unparalleled view of the city and the Southern Suburbs. All could look upon him and despair. Unfortunately he hadn't reckoned on our lovely January weather: a raging southeaster and thick clouds bowling over the top. If he was up there with the minions of Hell, they were probably wandering around totally lost trying to find the path down to the Blockhouse and cursing that the cable-car was closed.

However, in the end, the fearsome spectacle of Armageddon played out somewhat unexpectedly. Realising that the world was now a much bigger place than the Levant of old, the opposing hosts instead decided to settle their differences from the comfort of their couches. A first attempt at Holy War ended badly, when, after deciding on Team Deathmatch, and choosing Starcraft (Heaven playing Terrans and Hell playing Zerg, obviously), the free-for-all ended abruptly when they were both soundly owned by a group of Koreans (playing Protoss).

In the finger-pointing and attempts to set up a secure server that ensued, the waiting faithful were forgotten, souls went unjudged, and everyone else eventually lost interest and had to go about their business.

Meanwhile, on the partly cloudy slopes of Mount Purgatory, the Lord and the Devil are now playing Counter-Strike. The Devil still cheats and wins more frags, but as for the Lord, well... He's just doing his best.

The session's up on time, and the server's back online. Oh J3sVsBot, you've got to win!

Squaaak Attack

Sometimes the combination of a desultory afternoon's coding, too much coffee, too little sleep and a splendidly dreamy view out the office window of container ships meandering lazily about the bay in the Spring sunshine can induce a sudden attack of catatonia in even the most dedicated professional developer.

It was thus with a start that I received an instant missive:

Frisco: squaaak

Whenever he surfaces from his 60-hour a week job for a daytime Squaaak like this, I get an image of a large Pteradon perched atop the spire of a cathedral on a nice Sunday morning deep in Evangelical Christian country, sunning its long, leathery wings with an evil glint in its nictating membranes as the terrified parishioners inside fall suddenly silent.

Now Frisco often enjoys squaaaking out the refrain of whatever track my Google Talk window announces that I am listening to. However, today he was flummoxed:

Frisco: The intro to KungFF is not easy to squaak

me: yes, bit fast

scat squaaking is a tricky art, and there are some numbers that may prove too challenging

Now an ordinary person might miss the opportunity here, but Frisco is no ordinary person:

Frisco: like e^pi

Which of course is a signal to down tools and engage:

me: now you're being irrational

Frisco: point taken

...and moved one point to the left (/ 10)

me: So you're a bitshifter

I'll take your point completely and render you uncountably integral

Frisco: Eigen take this no more.

me: Are you series?

I can't differentiate

Frisco: I am series. I'd lie of hunger if I didn't Fib and Gnocci.

me: I'll pour you a monotonic at once.

That is, unless you have a sawtooth?

Though they're usually linked to periods...

Frisco: I div my top hat

me: You'll expose your curl(s)

Frisco: shave an exponent or two and you'll not know the diff

much smoother, for starters

although random spikes can make operating less pleasant

Is a hairy integral?

me: There's no value in being mean

But I regress.

I think you'll only be series in time anyway

And you'll never be discrete

Frisco: being a standard deviant myself, it's hard to comment

me: You're certainly not normal.

Frisco: a stat testicular outlier, if ever there was 2

me: I knew there was a downside

Frisco: infinitely

being hetero, skedadillity is sure

certain

me: I'm surprised you can even function

Frisco: barely

I'm a surd anyway

afk coffee...

me: and a discriminant

afk urinal

(Some minutes later)

Frisco: no further irrational roots for this expressive thread?

me: I think it may be (NP) complete.

Ah, the noble sciences... How nice it is that I recall with such fondness only the good bits, and forget the violent shafting I sometimes received at the hands of things like Real Analysis, Solid State Physics and good old General Relativity.

Revitalised, I was then able to resume coding. And to think some companies block chat clients in a misguided attempt to prevent such gems. To the submersible, Frisco. First we take Manhattan.

Childhood's End

Ask any Statistical Mechanic kicking cans down on the corner: When a phase change strikes, it can be sudden, surprising, and yet predictable in retrospect. Such, it seems, are the days of our lives. One moment there was I, young and easy under the apple boughs, wondering why every day disappeared into the distance, etc. and stuff - merrily proclaiming that my generation had finally parted ways with the rituals to which our parents were bound. And then, falling slowly at first, but gathering moment, my brave new kindred began to wink out, struck down in their prime by that most perennial and silent of assassins: Matrimony.

Apparently, the Institution of Marriage is not so easily brushed aside by mere youthful bluster. Not for the first time, I have fallen afoul of second-guessing human nature, inveterate idealist that I am. In my green and carefree innocence, I failed to acknowledge the signs: relationships starting to measure in years rather than months, co-habitation, thirtieth birthdays landing thickly about, unselfish decisions.

What is this strange omnipresent force that seems to tug at us all? I had thought it to be like fleas or religion, chronic annoyances which dull the quality of life of a great many, but to which I remain blissfully impervious. But now I wonder if it waits for me too, secreted in some angle around the next corner, biding its time? Am I destined to fall softly to a damsel with a dulcimer, seduced by symphony and song - or does a femme fatale already stalk me in the dark streets? Abyssinian maid or demon of the night?

The Statistical Mechanic, in his abstract way, will warn me of a cusp event - an abrupt transition to a new state. The happy noise in which I genially meander, ending in a swift adjustment. When it happens, will I welcome it? In my starry-eyed rapture will I even pause to note the passing of my childhood, drifting slowly down that river of the windfall light?

But for the while at least, Dylan Thomas, Time still lets me hail and climb, and so I think that while I still can, I will run my heedless ways, and sing in my chains like the sea.

Quarkman & the Beast

Satan dropped by the other night as I attempted to study Capital Market Expectations. I knew him at once by the synaesthesia he weaves in the minds of the underslept.

Clip-clop.

Beyond the pickets of my sight, I saw a coolness slink by redly and dark in a blink of sulphur and an odour of black, and I tasted the bright rustle of a wandering tail. And then there he was, hot and sour, regarding me stickily. His horns were loud and his eyes ran velveteen ink.

And he blended about sumptuously.

"Come," he said, his gossamer words crawling with oily blues and purples, "You hunger smoothly. I've brought brimstone, arias, patchouli, marzipan, heroism and contentment..."

We feasted on recalcitrance and intermezzos, and he talked of temptations long past, of great endeavours and small victories, of deserts and snakes and apples and gardens. I rolled in the coaly roughness of the thick metred clauses as they glowed and coiled in my blood.

"After we fall, we should climb back up," he said goldenly, and I smiled. He spoke of good and evil and his vowels refracted and sank. At the end of a silky while, I said: "What do you want?"

"I think you should play computer games instead of studying."

I escorted him briskly to his car, tail between his legs.

Moral of the story: Never trust anyone, not even Satan.

Off on a Comet

"Ka-bam!" went Comet McNaught as it appeared majestically in the southern skies over the Atlantic.

"Oooo...! went the assembled throng on Kloof Nek.

"Ecki, ecki, ecki!" went Comet McNaught as it bounced up and down waving its tail.

Okay, not all of that happened, but that was gist of it. The most splendid comet in forty years had arrived, and was quite unexpectedly brilliant. J-Man, being a bit of an amateur astronomer, was in heaven, dropping authoritative-sounding comments about degrees of arc, Kuiper Belts, Oort Clouds, aphelions and Solar winds. Occasionally he would cast an annoyed glance at someone further up the road who had brought an even bigger telescope, but fortunately such was the magnificence of the comet, that the scopes were largely unnecessary.

We gazed in wonder as the horizon darkened and the full glory of the tail started to emerge. A car drove by and a woman stuck her head out to ask what we were all looking at. When told, she said: "Oh, I thought it was something important," and drove off. Another girl confided that she thought it was something that was going to hit the earth, but then saw everyone was smiling and so realised it was safe. In a slightly scary demonstration of terra-centricity, I heard someone mention that it was at about the same height in the sky as "that other star", thereby blanketly elevating McNaught (comet) and Venus (planet) to stellar status.

Two evenings later we were back, and now there were hundreds of people lining the top of Camps Bay Drive. The atmosphere was borderline festive. This time J-Man had the biggest telescope, and so by the unwritten laws of amateur astronomy, he was the Alpha Astronomer, and all the regular folk gravitated toward him to admire his scope and ask questions that ranged from vaguely intelligent through charmingly naive to massively ignorant. I lost count of the number of times he explained what a comet actually was, that it wasn't as big as the moon, that it wasn't going to hit us, etc., etc. By the end of the evening, his girlfriend, Col, had become an expert too, and was able to handle the Frequently Asked Questions while J-Man fussed over the optics and looked important.

Col and I thought to make some money next week up on Kloof Nek reading tarot cards, selling comet-crystals and interpreting auras. As a grande finale we may even feature a Celebrity Astrologer Deathmatch. J-Man will wear a lab-coat and bow-tie and give short presentations to anyone who's shelled out R250 for one of our comet-hats. Yasmo, or someone similarly disreputable-looking, would be hired to walk around with an "End is Nigh" sign to add credence to the whole thing.

It's a little sad to me how generally uninformed people are of things beyond our atmosphere. We live in two dimensions, never looking up. When we give any thought to the time and space beyond, it is to trivialise it with astrology or alien abductions or bad sci-fi. If life was discovered on Titan or Europa or Enceladus, how many people would know or even care what or where those completely fascinating objects are?

"Ni!" went Comet McNaught, and swung off hyperbolically into the night.

A Mesozoic Night's Dream

Suddenly everyone seems to be talking about Iguanodons. Apparently they are the new Velociraptors, and anyone who's anyone in Milan, New York, London, Paris and Tokyo is all, like, Iguanodon this and Iguanodon that.

I caught up with Issey Miyake hanging out at the Austrian Fashion Week back in September, and his words were, as always, prescient:

"All I'm seeing is recycled Pre-Raphaelite and Napoleonic velvets, angora and Mongolian fur".

That much was obvious, but I could sense from the distant look in his cultured eyes that he was holding back, and so ordered him another Gin & French.

Mr Miyake likes to wax on, but he is invariably cagey, and so we whiled away many minutes chatting idly about the heaviness of Norwegian wool and how today's man could better express his latent sensuality through low-relief brocades and the "silhouette" palettes emerging from Russia and South America. All this loosened him up to the point where he leant over to me and said:

"With all the focus on Romantic, Imperial and Baroque themes over the past few years, I can't help but think that we have all been overlooking something - and I think that something might well be the Early Cretaceous Period."

I was stunned. Of Course! I mean, Jesus Christ, that would be, what, 46 or so million years of completely unexploited material. All those chalk deposits and high sea levels, the smooth temperature gradients, burgeoning angiosperms and insects, and of course the start of the end for the great Mesozoic Era. If you thought the 80s was pretty cool with all that Metal and Britpop, then you should have seen the Mesozoic. Our current Cenozoic Era has been very drab by comparison.

From the jaunty set of his Saffron Fedora, I knew at once that he had singled out the noble Iguanodon for special consideration. And why not? It was after all the first dinosaur fossil discovered. It had spiky, upturned thumbs that it used for defence, foraging and generally agreeing enthusiastically with everything. Of course masterful artistic talent is necessary to render this magnificent herbivore in its full Cretacean splendour, and one of the best examples comes from Ashley (2nd grade), whose Iguanodon has a bold Fauvist daring so sadly uncommon in illustrated science in our conservative times:



Note the sultry Laurasian sun and the verdant grasses upon which the Iguanodon (bottom-right) nimbly treads as he forages blithely about. In fact, she was inspired to write a poem about it:

Iguanadon (sic)

Iguanadon (sic)
Do you eat grass all the time?
How many teeth do you have?
I have a lot of flat teeth!!
I don't eat grass all the time.
How sharp are your thumbs?
They are very, very sharp!!

The powerful rhetoric and cutting denouement bewilder and overwhelm. Such precocity. I showed it to Issey over a rabbit and Belgian endive salad with pomegranate confit at lunch some days later as his entourage travelled through the Alps. By the immaculate presentation of his cuticles I could tell that he was impressed. "Immediate. Timeless. Remarkable."

Then he stood, and the bise noire seemed to rise up, as if its ominous chill was presaging a dark winter collection. "Alabaster," he said, "Faux ivories, topaz, garnets and Balkan weaves."

Allowing the barest of smiles to break beneath his manicured moustache, he raised both thumbs, and said: "At dawn on the fifth day, look to the East."

And like that he was gone.

Pie Noon

Clinically obese regulars at the canteen at my former work would often gaze aghast as I forced down my second slice of post main meal cheesecake, before stumbling off to find coffee. How, their high-BMI, hungry eyes seemed to ask, did I manage to remain in such fine fettle despite such obvious binging and such flagrant disregard for all the good advice dispensed by the multi-billion dollar lifestyle industry? Tapeworms? Bulimia? High metabolism? Secret colonic irrigations?

Wrong! It’s my trademark diet. If you’re living alone and unable/unwilling/too busy to cook and wanting to not get fat, then listen up, for I here launch the Keep Your Body Guessing Diet.

A typical week:

Monday:

• Breakfast: Eat any pizza / milktart / etc. left over from the night before. Once at work, immediately have a strong cup of coffee to get the day going.
• Mid-morning: Snack on anything free/lying around, and try to get in at least two more cups of coffee before lunch. If you're doing it right your urine should be nice and transparent, and you should need to go about once an hour after lunch. This is good for your eyes as it takes them off your monitor at regular intervals.
• Lunch: Have two pies and either a muffin or doughnut. Don't have a fizzy drink else you'll feel really bloated and unable to do anything except chat online and read IMDB forums.
• Mid-afternoon. Drink at least two cups of coffee to combat the Post-Lunch Somnifery (PLS).
• Evening: Do 45 minutes hilly run to deal with the lunchtime muffin/doughnut. Go home and have a cold beer. Watch out for feeling light-headed if you drink it too fast whilst still dehydrated.
• Supper: Fast food (non super/up-sized). Use plenty of tomato sauce on your chips to cram in all those lovely anti-oxidants and eat any lettuce that falls out of your burger. Have half a slab of dark chocolate for dessert with a cup of coffee.

Tuesday:

• Breakfast: Ultramel Chocolate Custard. This stuff is frickin' fabulous and can be squeezed directly into your mouth from the carton, which is useful if you’re in a rush after hitting snooze for an hour. Don't eat the whole litre in one go, and don’t squeeze too hard when it’s near the end as it has a tendency to suddenly splatter all over your face.
• Lunch: Take the vegetarian option at the cafeteria so that you can justify having a large slice of cheesecake or similar for dessert.
• Evening: (Option One) Go for a 30 minute run followed by a 90 minute paddle with a full set of push-ups, squats, crunches, etc., followed by a supper consisting of only high-protein stuff like tuna by itself or biltong until the taste gets to you. (Option Two) Feign illness and bunk the session, instead going out and having a lavish meal at a restaurant with a lot of Champagne.

Wednesday:

• Breakfast: None - the idea is to be totally ravenous by lunchtime.
• Lunch: Take the big fat main meal option and wolf it down hungrily. This is the start of 24-hours without food – a key part of the regimen.
• Evening: 60-90 minutes aerobic exercise.
• Dinner: Ideally you will have timed things such that there is nothing in your fridge to eat. Capitalise on the fatigue from your run and go to bed early without any supper. A slight emotional low and minor hallucinations at this point are completely normal.

Thursday:

• Breakfast: Nothing. Your stomach will have shrunk, and you will feel surprisingly not hungry.
• Mid-morning: Start scouting about for someone sympathetic to take pity on you and invite you to dinner at their place. Stave off dizziness from lack of food by drinking coffee and concentrating on work.
• Lunch: You’ll find that you can’t actually eat that much due to your stomach having shrunken. Keep it small in anticipation of a big supper.
• Evening: 60 minutes brisk aerobic exercise to get you in the mood.
• Dinner: At the sympathetic friend's. Eat quickly so that you can be the first to get seconds as soon as it is polite to do so. With luck there'll be dessert too. Drink lots of red wine and don’t turn down an after-dinner whisky.

Friday:

• Breakfast: Nothing. Coffee once you get to work.
• Mid-morning: Need to start getting hydrated ahead of potential weekend boozing. Only one cup of coffee.
• Lunch: Must be a big one, as getting in a full supper before Friday night drinking is always uncertain as something is bound to pop up. At minimum two pies and two slices of cake and perhaps a chocolate. Maybe a nice (low-fat) drinking yoghurt too. You will feel stuffed after this, but no-one is remotely productive after lunch on Friday in Cape Town anyway.
• Mid-afternoon: Drink only as much coffee as is needed to stay awake until everyone leaves work (15h00-15h30 around here).
• Evening: You should by now be a couple of hours into your sundowners. Eat anything within range if you plan to keep drinking all night. Statistically, you will screw this up at least once a month, and fail to retain your supper, instead finding yourself in abject misery as you lie wretchedly on your bathroom floor. Like re-installing Windows on a regular basis, this ritualistic act of purging and rejuvenating is good for both body and disposition.

Saturday:
• Brunch: Rise late and eat muesli. It is important to have muesli lying about in case your mother visits and inspects your kitchen for signs of healthy food.
• Lunch: In lieu of food have an utterly brutal two-hour paddling session or equivalent – ideally the kind that leaves you feeling like your arms are going to fall off if you try driving afterwards. Go home and sing loudly in the shower till the hot water runs out. This soothes your muscles and helps you to warm down your lungs properly.
• Mid-afternoon: Either have a nap on your couch, or (if feeling heroic) force yourself into a sufficiently upright position to enable you to play a not too frenetic computer game.
• Evening: Indulge in whatever culinary delights present themselves for your amusements, being careful only to stick to one type of alcohol. Dining expensively will ensure that you assimilate essential trace spices, minerals, vitamins, etc. that you might otherwise miss. Restaurants where the menu is entirely in French and the staff can pronounce everything correctly are best as they are bound to have a crazed, award-winning chef whose fierce Gallic temperament was responsible for him being thrown out of the Sorbonne for seditionary behaviour, and whose amuse bouche will nourish you with exotic substances and delight whoever it is that you are attempting to seduce.

Sunday:

• Breakfast: Wake with the dawn and eat dark chocolate. Go for an early rowing session - two hours or so with at least one long steady-state piece during which you can zone out, relax your mind and contemplate your week while the others all concentrate on some or other aspect of the stroke. Be sure to shout something like: “Come guys, let’s work those quick hands away off the finish!” every ten minutes or so, so that they all think you’re paying attention to the goals of the session.
• Lunch: Bacon and egg rolls with chocolate brownies and cream soda are ideal for flooding your depleted body with sugars and fats and whatever the green stuff is in cream soda.
• Mid-afternoon: Relax.
• Evening. Go for a run. On the way home stock up on chocolate for the coming week. For supper, be sure to plan a simple yet atypical food/drink combination, e.g. Champagne and ice-cream, pineapple juice and brie or chocolate milk and salami.

Now randomise and repeat.