The phone bill...

One of Edison's contemporaries was a gentleman called Bell. Again, some people will tell you that it is he, and he alone, responsible for the electric telephone. But in point of fact there are about three possible inventors. In any case you all know about fucking telephones.

So does The Flatmate. Today I got my quarterly phone bill. By email. It has left me shaken.

Dear God. Here is a list of things I can't have, because I've paid that phone bill:

1. Ipod Nano.
2. Hash and pr0n trip to Amsterdam for the weekend.
3. Flatscreen TV.
4. Xbox360.

At this exact instant, here are a list of currencies to the same value:

1. 226.37 GBP
2. 336.49 EUR
3. 537.88 AUD
4. 2,662.26 ZAR
5. 46,489.65 JPY

This is an astonishing amount of money. Especially for something as luxurious as telephone conversations. Some of the calls made are apparently to overseas mobiles. What, in the immortal words of Ghandi, The FUCK!?! This is NOT the way of the Prophet, peace be upon him.

How is it possible to crank up this amount? Seriously, my calls were 6.73% of that total. It should have been 50%! The bitch must die! I am going to nail her bleeding corpse to the fucking wall, and shove the telephone deep inside her, reverse Caesarian style.

Today's reason I am actually sharpening an axe: My flatmate has allowed herself to spend 42 hours, 15 minutes and 10 fucking seconds talking to her degenerate family and drug fucked friends, on my telephone, at my expense, without warning or apology, without compiling an historical list of transcontinental telecommunications initiated by herself, without offer of compensation. Fuck you. I hate you.

Die.

A meditation on light

Light is conventionally thought of now as being composed of photons. Photons themselves are either particles, like the corpuscles of yore, or waves (for example, it can be diffracted a la the double slit experiment), depending how you look at them. This forces an inescapable conclusion. Light is created. It has a source. Darkness doesn't have a source, and doesn't need to be created

These considerations can give rise to weighty philosophical arguments about the nature of God and the price of Orange Roughie in the Sydney fish markets. I recommend you all to go to the Sydney fish markets, buy one of these rare and endangered fishes, and barbecue the little bastard in Bondi. Particularly good if you can surround yourself with bronzed oiled bodies on a boat away from prying eyes..

But I digress. To live, civilised man needs light. Light is created. The wisdom of the day is that the excitation of atoms by heat or electromagnetic means will liberate photons. By manipulating the conditions of same, particular types and colours of light are produced. All very entertaining so far

This was given a practical and commercial existence by an entertaining bloke called Edison. It is said that the very first lightbulbs were made decades earlier, but "Alva" was the first to turn a profit. What is not universally known is that Edison's bulbs were built upon patents he had acquired from the previous inventors. His filament was actually made of bamboo, rather than tungsten. It was with the discovery of a process allowing tungsten filaments to be made cheaply that the bulb really took off as a domestic way of creating light. They are now about 10cents

I returned to The Habitat this week to discover that in fact some of the lightbulbs has expired. Shuffled off the mortal coil, as it were... Joined the choir invisibule... I was mildly annoyed, at first. I'm sure this is the correct reaction to a dead, unreplaced bulb - a mild annoyance and a desire to smash something small and inexpensive

As I journeyed through The Habitat I grew more and more furious. An halogen down light in the kitchen was gone, as was a large screw-in spot. Three of those little ones that are supposed to look like candles were gone in the living room, one on the stairs, two in my bedroom, all the lights in the bathroom and one on the landing. Unless The Habitat has become infected with the poltergeist of an anti-social goth, then I cannot see the demise of 12 lightbulbs as anything other than some deliberate sabotage by The Flatmate. Ironically I found myself incandescent with rage in the bathroom, filled with the desire to kill and maim. It was not the simple fact of the failed bulbs, but that they had been allowed to remain unreplaced for so long

Today's reason I hate my flatmate: Over the last two hundred years some of the most intelligent scientists, industrialists and capitalists have laboured for the rest of humanity so that there might be light. These demi-gods of invention have allowed civilisation to spread down the food chain to the level of my flatmate, who completely spurns their efforts because she is a cretinous philistine and not content with insulting the endeavours of these genii, insults me by deliberately failing to replace even a single bulb in the bathroom, which is dark now from 4:43pm in the afternoon until almost 7am, and which she uses in this darkened condition, probably spreading all manner of feculent bodily filth across the room in perfect anonymity and furthermore leaving me to attend to the purchase and replacement of the said bulbs without offer of compensation or apology.

In reply...

Tempus fugit. My abiding apologies. I provide this excuse only to let my loyal readers know that I have been involved with some surprisingly enjoyable litigation and that this is the cause of my radio silence. It is of course no excuse to allow controversy and distemper to remain in the comments section of this blog, and for that I abase myself, prostrate.

Someone wants to know if I am from South Africa. I was born in a small town in the Karoo, in the Eastern Cape. I am South African. I am not in South Africa at the moment however. I am at work. I am qualified to practise law in three countries, none of which is South Africa. Some of my work involves intellectual property and copyright. It is for that reason that I would prefer people not to steal the artwork of the inestimable Kurt, but that if they do, that the appropriate props are made. For his benefit, you see. Additionally I have observed that the look and feel of these little pictures has become manifest across the blogosphere. On Kurt's behalf I take that as complementary and testamentary to Kurt's abundant skill and influence.

Kurt's work is iconic.

Please pardon that atrocious pun. I mentioned above my loyal readers. In fact, there are some several hundred of you who load up this page each day, probably with the hope that there will be some catharsis available. I am astounded constantly. Since I have been away from The Habitat for the last little while, there is nothing major to report. Oh, except for the fact that the Landlord is selling the place. This is certainly not going to prevent the necessity of my living with one of the stupider examples of humanity.

Self reference is not part of the art (it's all too post modern), and so I return you to your normal programming...