Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

I'll be taking a couple of weeks off from hacking on my pet project as I'll be in the US for a friend's wedding, but in the meantime, I can still have ideas percolating in the back of my mind. What I'd like is some of your ideas percolating in the back of my mind.

Maybe you love adventure, you're bored with your home country, you prefer the politics of other countries, you want to travel, etc. Whatever your motivations, you probably have been annoyed trying to find "one stop shopping" for information about moving to other countries. Turns out it's a hard thing to do, but there's a lot of possibilities out there, if only you had the information.

Most Web sites dedicated to this topic restrict you to a single country or are old school sites like www.expatriates.com or hideous commercial sites like www.escapeartist.com with no social aspects.

I think it would be interesting to build an online community of world travellers (or would-be travellers) with an ability to share stories, experiences, tips, etc. Search for countries by ease of entry, languages spoken, government stability, job prospects, immigration laws, etc. If such a Web site appealed to you, what would you want to see in such a site?

So it turns out my trip to Portugal was more eventful than I thought. Leïla, the woman to the right, foolishly agreed to marry me. No date is set for the wedding, but given that it will be a mix of French, American, and English cultures (one of these things is not like the others), it should be interesting. I have a larger Lisbon, Portugal photoset on Flickr, if you care to see it.

We also mentioned this on Facebook. My favorite comment so far was by a French gentleman whose English appears about on par with my French. He wrote "We enjoy the weeding ceremony". Seems like a rather appropriate mistake :)

• Crocodile
• Zebra
• Kangaroo (yummy!)
• Crickets
• Creme de menthe from a bottle with a python curled up in the bottom

... and a baby bee.

* Not an exhaustive list

About once a year, I have a really bad hay fever attack. I mean, really, really bad. Sniffling, sneezing, tears running down my face. In fact, I had one exactly three years and two days ago, my first day on my first job in the UK. It was pretty embarrassing.

Now, I'm having one today. I'm typing this at work, but I think I need to go home soon. This is awful.

Last night I went back to my old house in Ealing Broadway and picked a a few remaining things, got my deposit back from the landlord and hurt my back -- again -- by being stuck standing and stooped over on an overcrowded bus for half an hour. By the time Greg and I got home, I was in a poor mood, so I bought a bottle of Bruichladdich (whiskey) and Greg and I just sat, smoked, drank and chatted the remainder of the evening away. And that's when, without warning, I said:

I once knew a girl so stupid she had her eustachian tubes tied and now she can't hear her baby crying.

It was intended as a joke and I've no idea where it came from (I think I made it up on the spot and it's not particularly funny), but that's the strange way my mind has been working lately. In fact, plenty of strange things (words) are rummaging around in my brain. The other night, while washing the dishes and doing laundry, I walked over to my computer, opened it up, and wrote a seven page short story. It all just poured out of me. It's rather bizarre and I've no idea what's going on but I expect that stress from having so many things to juggle is part of it. I won't complain about it getting me writing again. I'll just go with the strange flow for now.

Tonight we will enjoy a Tube strike lasting 48 hours. This is annoying because bright and early tomorrow morning, I need to be at the US Embassy to renew my passport. Fortunately, because I'm a BBC employee, I can walk from the embassy to the Broadcasting House (BH) and catch a shuttle to the BBC Media Village (near the Television Centre, or TVC) in which I work.

Walking from the US embassy to the Broadcasting House is a 17 minute walk and having a back injury, I'm not keen on this. If I want to save a bit of time, I could instead walk to our Marylebone High Street (MHS) offices (good luck pronouncing that correctly if you don't live here) and catch the shuttle bus there. After reading the instructions we've been sent, I've opted not to. I reprint the relevant section here, verbatim.

Customers catching the MHS shuttle going from BH to TVC are recommended to catch the earlier shuttle going from TVC to BH and then waiting on the shuttle at BH to guarantee getting a seat.

Got that? Seems Auntie Beeb has Alzheimer's.

A couple of months ago, I was buying a new pair of blue jeans and the size I tried was a bit too large for me, but other than that, they fit just fine. Being in a hurry, I just grabbed the next size down off the rack and bought them without trying them on.

Later I found out they were mislabeled and I could squeeze into them, but I couldn't fasten them around my waist. Today, I'm thinking about just donating those jeans to a charity shop. I have to pull them up constantly because they're too big for me. I've lost over a stone and a half and am over halfway to my goal of losing three stone (42 pounds). I was at 15 stone (210 pounds) when I finally decided it was time to do something about it. And I'm not writing "stone" just to be an annoying twat. I genuinely think of my weight in stone, now. It's very, very strange.

The weight loss has all just been a matter of healthy eating. Breakfast is usually a bowl of Dorset Muesli with non-fat milk. Lunch is a salad or soup and dinner is usually a healthy meal of stir-fry, a chicken breast with veggies or something else suitably low-fat. Snacks are often just peaches or apricots. I frequently "splurge", as I did last night with a dinner of baguette and a variety of lovely cheeses (and I've not given up alcohol), but my diet is good enough that it's still working quite well. It's gotten to the point where I've had to ask my girlfriend to serve me smaller portions because my appetite is so much less than it was.

Now I just have to go out and buy new clothes.

Embarrassment: when a French person asks for your help with pronunciation, don't correct them by teaching them how things are said in Texas.

I haven't been back to Texas in almost two and a half decades, so the idea that I still pronounce some things that way is a bit of a shocker.

And if you must know, the word was "genuine". The "i" is pronounced with the "i" in "pig", not "swine". She was pronouncing it like the "ea" in "wean".

The good news is that I've torn my left erector spinae, also known as the left lower back muscle. This is good news because the other reasons for my back pain tend to involve surgery.

The bad news is that my brother and his best friend are nurses and they've enjoyed explaining the downsides of my pain medication, Dicoflex. Dicoflex is the brand name for Diclofenac sodium, which apparently is Latin for "say goodbye to your stomach lining". And I'm told that the increased risk of myocardial infarction and stroke is very small. My favorite warning about diclofenac is from the wikipedia entry: "studies in Pakistan showed that diclofenac caused acute kidney failure in vultures when they ate the carcasses of animals that had recently been treated with it". There goes my dinner plans. Still, I'm grateful because Dicoflex and heating pads have kept the pain down enough that I can actually walk.

My back has been sore for two and a half weeks now. However, last Saturday, after spending an afternoon walking along the south bank of the Thames and looking for places to live, I got home and the pain started getting intense. I had trouble walking. I couldn't even take a warm bath because I discovered that getting out of a bath tub when you can't sit up is a bit humiliating.

I've now missed two days of work, but fortunately they're letting me work from home. I'm probably going to be missing a few more days of work, but hopefully I'll be back in next week and, with luck, the BBC will have a staff physiotherapist available for me. As it turns out, waiting for an NHS physio will take a couple of weeks. So far, this has been my first disappointing experience with NHS, but the doctor was able to see me the same day as I called. That, at least, was a good thing.

So far I am very, very impressed with Livemocha. People are really taking this seriously and I'm getting email and chat requests from complete strangers wanting to practice their language skills and mine. One lady from Cameroon just emailed me and told me, in English, about her day today and asked me to tell her, in French, about mine. I replied, in part:

Aujourd'hui, j'ai essayé d'apprendre le français mieux. C'est très difficile pour moi, mais, j'adore la langue et je voudrais parler couramment. Je suis allé au magasin pour acheter des livres et maintenant je veux lire un peux plus français.

I struggled with some of the words and I know it's ridiculously simple, but it's lots of fun connecting with people all over the world and practicing. Because you can record some lessons with your computer's microphone, people can hear you speak. One native French speaker even said that I sounded Parisian (my last girlfriend -- she is French -- would have laughed at that thought and she would be right -- my accent isn't that good). I'm now pretty handy at typing all of those funny characters on my Mac. As an added bonus, because I got tired of Firefox telling me I was misspelling all of those French words, I've installed a French language pack and switched to French. Now Firefox is telling me I'm misspelling all of my English words.

LiveMocha is really making language fun for me. The only annoying bit is how lazy people seem to be in their writing. Often when I'm trying to give feedback on people's English, I see stuff like this:

the man is at the store he is not at home he is going to school she does not want the cabbage

So, that's probably four grammatically correct sentences, but it's very hard to read. I usually mark stuff like that as high on spelling and grammar, but low on quality and I add a note about spelling and punctuation. I suspect that our Internet culture is harming people's communication skills.

Update: the lady from Cameroon has gotten back to me. Apparently it's not "j'ai essayé d'apprendre le français mieux", but "j'ai essayé de mieux apprendre le français." I've been corrected on this before. I should remember it.

My brother Greg (yossarian69) moved in Yesterday. We'll probably stay here for a couple of months prior to moving closer to central London. Meanwhile, my temporary housemate, Armgard, who speaks English, German and Afrikaans (she's Nigerian, if you're curious), is studying Spanish. She told Greg and myself about a wonderful Web site named LiveMocha, another social networking site. Why would I join yet another site like this? Because they are centered around offering free language lessons. So far, they seem to be pretty good. Greg and I have signed up to learn French. I thought about jumping ahead to French 102, but decided to play it safe and stick with 101. Good thing I did. The lessons are much more comprehensive than I thought.

The site requires Javascript and Flash, but that's OK because the quality of the courses is fairly rich. You'll need speakers to listen to people, but you'll also need a microphone to record your voice and let other people listen to what you say and give feedback on how well you say it. The "social networking" aspect is that you can add friends and you can ask complete strangers to review your work. This is pretty common and I've reviewed the English of people from Japan, the Russian Federation, Brazil, and quite a few other places. Enjoy!

Update: even though livemocha is a social networking site, I do find it a bit odd that you can set your "Relationship Status". If I'm looking for a relationship, I certainly wouldn't be doing that on a language learning site.

Of course, it was triggered by MySQL.

When you sleep, your muscles relax. Of course, this includes the muscles in the throat, around the larynx. Apparently, this allows your larynx and vocal cords to vibrate more freely and this is why many people have a deeper voice in the morning than the rest of the day.

I swear that some mornings I wake up and make James Earl Jones sound like he's been sucking on helium. Today has been one of those days. It's finally settling down.

Since I've started trying to avoid profanity, I keep getting asked "why" or "what do you consider profane"? I've not really been answering this because I've been struggling to understand it myself. I'm getting deeper into this understanding, so I'll try to answer your questions better.

First, I am using profanity. I don't mean to, but it's hard. The longest I've lasted is getting to "day 3", but that was only because I was off work sick for two days. It's been very disheartening realizing I have so little self-control that I can't stop using profanity. I've thought about giving up, but I haven't yet.

Second, what do I consider profane? Profanity, strictly speaking, is an irreverence or contempt for God or sacred principles or things. However, since I don't believe in a God or Gods, how can I consider anything profane? I revere life. I revere communication. I am constantly in awe of how people can interact and do great things -- along with terrible things. Thus, what many consider "obscenity", I consider "profanity" if used inappropriately. As such, while you might consider "goddamn" profane, I also consider using the word "fuck" in anger profane.

But wait! Didn't I just violate my "no profanity" pledge? When I first started, I would have said "yes". Now I don't. Carefully chosen words, deliberately picked to make a point, are part of what I honor. As such, saying "fuck" in the appropriate time or place (I can hear the jokes already) is not a violation of what I'm trying to achieve.

What's a violation of what I'm trying to achieve is the thoughtless use of profanity when communicating with other people. That's all. Do I care if other people use profanity around me? No, not if it's not directed at me in anger. I'm not trying to tell other people what to do or trying to set an example of how they should behave. This is just a personal thing to get myself back to a place I value.

I'm really not sure how this viewpoint will evolve -- or whether it will wither and die -- but so far, I like what I'm trying to achieve, even if I haven't achieved it.

That's enough of being a sanctimonious ass (deliberately chosen word!) for one day.

They needed an image for a radio program, so they used my hand. Somehow, I doubt fame will follow.

It's really easy to make it to "Day 2" of no profanity. Just get sick and not work.

The night before last, elves snuck into my mouth and took sand paper to my uvula. Not the back of my throat (which feels fine), but that dangly bit back there. Swallowing is painful and I can't recall ever having a sore throat quite this bad. Apparently this is going around, but that's not much consolation. Even with the anesthetic cough drops and the Tylenol with codeine, I still have that lethargy that comes with fighting an infection.

What's even worse is my realization that I seem to be getting sick far more often here in London than I have anywhere else. Of course, I've not actually tracked this so I can't prove it, but I really do feel like my body is saying nasty things about this part of the world.

I am, again, back on "Day 1" of no profanity. I can't believe how incredibly hard this is. My brother Greg asked me how long I was going to do this for and I replied, "I'd just be pretty happy to complete three day."

Greg replied, "You're going to have to wait an awfully long time then."

Ever since I decided to stop using profanity, I found myself failing every day. I had to start with "Day 1" three days in a row. Today I finally made it to "Day 2". Heading to a pub with a friend, I let profanity slip again. It was an innocuous conversation about an incident back in the States, but I slipped up nonetheless.

Tomorrow is Day 1 for the fourth time in five days. I knew it would be hard, but not this hard.

Today I decided to stop using profanity. It lasted all of about two hours before I found myself cursing at one of our servers. I was very disappointed in myself.

I'll try again tomorrow. I used to never cuss. Ever. It simply didn't happen. Eventually I figured I was just letting off steam, but now I realize that it's building it up. Every time I swear, I'm allowing myself to get upset. It's time to stop that. I now even cuss in the most casual of situations. I was at lunch with a colleague the other day and was amazed at how much I was cussing.

Time to stop.