Always With You

Via a range of weird and wonderful links (just don’t ask, OK?) I came across a site called “Pictures of Jesus 4 U” which really has to be seen to be (dis)believed.

For me, the worst/creepiest ones are done by a guy called Larry van Pelt, (Pelt also has his own site here) which raise bad art to a new level. Go on, go and have a look.

What’s even scarier is that (I assume) some people actually pay for these images. There’s just no accounting for taste, I suppose…


Obsessive Behaviour

Over the last few months, as I’ve written about before, we’ve been attending one of the local Slimming World groups in an effort to lose a bit of weight. Obviously I’ve got more to lose than Herself, but we’re both working on it.

So far it’s been fairly successful – we’ve both lost a stone over that time. We could, in all honesty, have lost more, and/or in less time if we followed all the rules and weighed everything obsessively.

But that’s the key word – in my opinion, there’s an awful lot of this weight-loss stuff that is actually about doing stuff obsessively. We’ve seen three (I think) “group leaders” now, all of whom have lost significant amounts of weight – and absolutely fair play to them for doing so, they’ve done fantastically well – but all of whom are (to be polite about it) just a little bit crackers. There’s a number of examples of this, although right now I can’t be arsed to list them.

The one that keeps on coming back to me, though, was the one who was still utterly obsessed by food – all she’d done was replace high-calorie foods with low-calorie ones. But there was still that slightly crackers gleam in the eye when she was talking about being able to eat “whole bowls of no-Syn trifle to yourself” and so on.

And I find I just don’t have that obsessive part to me – and to some degree it actually leaves me feeling quite uncomfortable. I’m not obsessed with food, nor do I collect anything obsessively, or really anything else. It’s simply not part of me.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, to be honest. It’s just something I’ve noticed and wanted to write about it. And maybe that’s it, maybe writing is my obsessive behaviour, whether it be D4D™ or other writing projects. In some ways I’d actually be quite happy if that were the case. I just don’t know if it is.


Ugly

Every so often, you’ll see someone and just think “Why?”. Other people create websites dedicated to that moment…

First there’s Ugly Tattoos, which does exactly what the name says. Some seriously weird and ugly tattoos where you’ve got to wonder a) why they were done in the first place , b) what the people were thinking in the first place and in some cases c) how come the tattooist didn’t get sued.

Then there’s Wedinator, with wedding events/photos that are certainly strange andsometimes just plain wrong.

Any time I wonder whether I’ve been too cynical in my estimations of people, let these sites stand as witness to the fact I can never be that cynical.


Little and Large

As it’s coming up to two years since we got them, the chickens have started doing some strange things.

They haven’t been quite as productive this year as they were in their first year – which is to be expected – as they finally got round to all moulting in the last four months, and Gladys in particular has been a broody old cow this year.

All the same, the egg I found last night was notable…

Todays egg, on the right

Todays egg, on the right

That’s a normal-sized egg on the left, and the tiny example left yesterday. Very strange. I haven’t yet opened it up to see if it’s perfectly formed inside, though.


The Hallowe’en Paradox

In some ways I feel the same about Hallowe’en as I do about The Festering Season. Mainly it’s the paradoxes that annoy me.

In the case of Hallowe’en, we’ll float past the crap about grown people dressing up like kids and so on.

But what gets me is this :

For most of the year (excluding the run-up to the Festering Season and Hallowe’en) children get told to not talk to strangers, not accept sweets from strangers, not accept anything, so forth, so fifth.  But come the Festering Season, they’re told to talk to strangers about what they want, accept presents and all that shit. And come Hallowe’en, all of a sudden it’s fine for kids to dress up, go round the neighbourhood and knock on the doors of people they don’t know and have never met, and get sweets.

Which is – to me, anyway – just really fucking weird.


Body Scanning

In another breakthrough for idiocy, I see that the ‘see through’ scanner being tested at Manchester Airport has raised a problem that no-one appears to have thought of before now.

This scanner goes through clothes, and shows what has been termed (incorrectly) an ‘X-ray image’, which is more of an MRI body-scan, as I understand it. What it does is show (in black/white ‘ghost’ form) an image of the naked body.

And lo, they’ve suddenly thought “Oh shit, what happens when young people go through the scanner? It means we can see underage bodies…” so they’ve now stopped doing the scans on all under-18s.

Absolute brilliance – in all the hype, not one person in the media (or in the project itself) has said “Hang on, what about this scenario?”.


Fading Out

Here on D4D™ the single most popular post has been one I made back in January 2005 about the government’s plan to stop the painkiller co-proxamol from being prescribed. At the time of writing, it’s got 744 comments, and became almost like a forum for people ordering c0-proxamol overseas etc.

Strangely though, it seems that everyone has stopped using that post over the last month or so.

There’s possibly a few reasons for this…

  1. The regular commenters have all gone somewhere else
  2. The issue has disappeared entirely underground now
  3. They can’t find the page since I stuffed about with the URLs a while back.

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t really mind one way or the other. It’s just odd to have gone from at least a couple of comments per day to nothing for a month.

Ah well.