That's How It Happened

My Life Goals In Review
When you catch up with people you haven't seen in a while they always ask: "What have you been up to." Since I've always blogged and then forgotten everything, I can never come up with anything interesting to tell them. However in the past twelve months I have actually reached some of my life goals:

1. Keep bees, and harvest honey.
2. Deliver a baby by Caesarean section unsupervised.
3. Visit the inca temples of Mexico, and Ankor Wat in Cambodia.

Three of my other life goals are progressing towards completion:

1. Collecting all 46 colourways of the Nike Air Woven. Haven't done an exact count, but I'm at almost 30 pairs.
2. Staying the night at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, Lost in Translation style. Assuming I can scrape together enough scrilla, this will actually happen in early December.
3. Take time off from medicine to be a surf-bum. This also is now a certainty, since I'm shortly to become unemployed. Sadly unlike other prominent sabbatical takers, mine isn't funded by any spare dotcom millions. However I shall be spending at least eight glorious weeks doing nothing more productive than catching waves. At least until the start of the new medical "semester" in February.

In order to add meaning and hope into my otherwise drab existence, I've concocted three new goals, of a rather more challenging nature:

1. Bowl a perfect 300 game. I'm now bowling regularly on a Monday night. If anyone reading fancies a little gentle competition, do email me. Like a monkey with a typewriter eventually 12 consecutive strikes are certain to come my way.
2. Complete the Times crossword unaided in the course of 24 hours. This isn't going well. Some days I can't manage a single clue. If I'm not showing much improvement by the end of the year, I'm going to ditch this one in favour of becoming a Scrabble pro.
3. Play pinball against Richard Linklater. I have no idea how to achieve this. I just really feel like discussing life with him over a challenging game of Medieval Madness. I guess I could either write a supplicating letter, or just hang around the pinball parlours of Austin, waiting for him to show up.

I realise that in many ways these goals are not especially ambitious. I'm planning for great success, but only on a very limited stage. However I'm an impressionable sort. Feel free to suggest better life goals via the comments.

Via DJ Waxy, clearly a google-meister, Rufus: the big black sex god.

Raj Persaud, Simon Singh, Victoria Coren, Barney the Boatman, and Patrick Marber, play poker on the radio. Much better than it sounds. (If you are a Mac user, Wiretap does a great job of ripping Real streams.)

I'm voting for our newest addition to the primates, to be called the chimpanzilla, unless it turns out to be brainier than us, in which case "Beneficent Master" will do just fine.

In other really important Winnaporean news: "I'm on top of the world right now, because everyone's going to know that I can shove more than three burgers in my mouth!"

I'm nonchalantly perusing this article about space rubbish, when I get to the bit about the guy who "dropped his glove while on space walk in 1965". That is definitely not the equivalent of popping down the pub on a cold night and accidentally leaving your scarf on the bar. For one thing space is really really cold, and also there's the problem of it being a vacuum.

The "readable" blogosphere gives you the impression that everyone is comfortably well off, literate, and middle class. So this thread about stuff people have done when they are skint, is most gratifying reading. I especially liked the guy who had sex with a punter in exchange for a tray of pasties.

And no sooner did I mention that Pagerank had stopped updating, that they bust my ass back down to a ((n) entirely deserved) 4/10.

// posted by Rufus @ 8:51 am