Psychonaut's Journal

My computer, polecat, died the night of Saturday, 26 April 2008. Fortunately, I had made a full backup three days before, so I haven't lost much, though if you e-mailed me between 23 and 26 April then you should probably re-send as it's possible I won't be able to recover the data from those three days. In the meantime, it may be difficult to reach me by e-mail.

Yesterday I made arrangements to obtain a new system. It will be a Dell Inspiron 1525 with a 2.40 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of memory, and a 250 GB hard drive. It comes with Windows Vista, though as I use GNU/Linux almost exclusively I may try to get a refund for Windows. (Back in 2000 I successfully got a Windows refund from, I think, HP.) I'm told it may take two weeks for delivery. The computer has not yet been named, but it will be done in accordance with the mustelid naming scheme I devised. (Besides polecat, names already in use are otter, weasel, badger, ermine, and marten.) The new computer is supposed to be jet black in colour, so I am leaning towards "sable".

Anyway, now I am off to quatsch with German-speaking friends at the Pembury.

Her name is Valerie McLeod and she fronts a band called Val Halla. Check out her video below. Oh, and buy her CDs!

Fretchen II is my pet ferret. She is almost five years old, 57 cm

long, 700 g in weight, and has a beautiful, soft sable coat. Her favourite activities include sleeping, dooking, chasing tennis balls, sleeping, attacking defenceless German Shepherds and other dogs, sleeping, riding the bus, going for walks, sleeping, and doing the Weasel War Dance. Her favourite treats are whipped cream, kiwis, grasshoppers, giant pretzels, and raisins. Her only fear is sceptres. She loves to go for walks in the city to meet people and other animals, or in the forest where she climbs into and meticulously explores every hole and hollow tree. She's a good hunter and has

Frettchen II is also known as:

• Frettchen
• Frettchen Frettchen
• Frettchen Rättchen
• Diplom-Iltis Frettchen von Rättchen II
• Frettchen Rättch
• Frettch Rättch
• Frettch
• Frettch Baby
• Frettcher
• Rättch
• Frettchepei
• Rättchepei
• Frettchepei Rättchepei
• Freddy Frettchen
• Freddy Frettch
• Freddy
• Ready Freddy
• Ready Rättch
• Baby
• Baby Rättch
• Wretch
• Ready Wretch
• Fuzzy
• Fuzzy Wuzzy
• Fuzzedy Wuzzedy
• Fuzzy-pie Wuzzy-pie
• Fuzzbutt
• Fuzzbucket
• Buzzfucket
• Fuzzy-Booboo
• Fuzzy-boo
• Fuzz Baby
• Fuzz Nose
• Fuzz
• Wuzz
• Cutie
• Sweetie
• Cutie Pie
• Sweetie Pie
• Cuteness Pie
• Sweetness Pie
• Little one
• Animal
• Aminal
• Bunny rabbit
• Bunny
• Bunny-wunny
• Bunny Baby
• Bunny-noo
• Banoo
• Booboo
• Boo
• Boober
• Booner
• Fuzz Booner
• Fuzz Banana
• Banana
• Banana Boat
• Its-bits
• Its
• Bits
• Bitsy
• Bitsy-pie

Icelandic's long been on my list of languages to learn (along with

Interlingua, Arabic, Michif, Russian, Polish, Luxembourgish, Latin, and

In case you're not convinced, here are just some of the many reasons why you should learn Icelandic:

• As it's a Germanic language, it's relatively easy for English speakers to learn.
• You'll join an elite group of just 300 000 other speakers.
• You'll be able to read all the cool Norse sagas and Eddas in their original language.
• You'll finally have an excuse to use the cool archaic English letters æ, þ, and ð.
• You still won't understand a single word that Sigur Rós are singing.
• If Björk should unexpectedly pop over for tea, you'll be able to converse without listening to that horrid accent of hers.
• Bara til skemmtunar!

What an eventful week:

• Last month, after hours of careful study, I was able to proclaim with a high degree of confidence that I had discovered the most beautiful girl in the world. On Thursday my heart was broken when I learned that she is not interested in pursuing relationships. But we are friends, so I still get to make her laugh on occasion. :)
• On Friday morning I discovered that the most beautiful girl in Kaiserslautern is now the most beautiful girl in London. (This superlative was not particularly difficult to attain in the former settlement, a town of 100 000, but it's quite a feat when competing with 8 million Londoners.) We spoke on the phone and now we are looking forward to seeing each other again.
• On Friday night I went out with squirmelia, an awesome person of whom, for some inexplicable reason, I am completely and utterly scared to death. (I am apparently not alone in thinking she is a scary person; see the very first sentence of her unofficial fan page.) Miraculously I did not end up dying of fright.
• On Saturday, after some considerably exaggerated public moaning and gnashing of teeth about having a broken heart, and also rather paradoxically being mistaken for someone in a polyamorous relationship with ewtikins, I was quite unexpectedly asked out by a lovely girl at battlekitty's birthday party. This has never happened to me before. (Being asked out, that is. I get mistaken for a heartbroken polyamorist all the time.)
• On Tuesday, I discovered that the most beautiful girl in Kaliningrad is now the most beautiful girl in St. Petersburg. After some dispute as to whether that title was accurate (she insisted instead that she was merely the "sexiest" girl in St. Petersburg), I received an invitation to visit.

I wish to assure everyone that, appearances to the contrary, I do not normally have so much interaction with such extraordinary and/or beautiful women. Mind you, it is a not-unwelcome anomaly.

sam brown, explodingdog

In 1999, a little-known band called the Bloodhound Gang released the single "The Bad Touch", a hormone-fueled lust song whose catchy chorus propelled it to the top of the American charts:

You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals
So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel
Do it again now
You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals
So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel
Gettin' horny now

So why am I talking about this song at all? Well, four years before "The Bad Touch", an even littler-known band pulled the exact same stunt, except they got it right. The band in question is Die Schröders, a German punk band which is pretty much unknown among English speakers, and their song, "Laß uns schmutzig Liebe machen" ("Let's Make Dirty Love") hit the top of the German pop charts in 1995. The chorus, which also contains an invitation to indulge in wild, horny animal sex, is similar enough to "The Bad Touch" that one wonders if the Bloodhound Gang ripped off the idea. But whereas "The Bad Touch" comes across as pretentiously macho, "Laß uns…" is quirky, coy, and charming. That may not be apparent from the lyrics and rough translation I've posted below, because most of the song's magic comes from its delivery. The arrangement is bouncy, jangly, and upbeat, with lots of "la la la"s, drunken cheering and chattering, and even a tuba thrown in for good measure. You can almost hear the goofy grin on the singer's face as he belts out his ha-ha-only-serious sexual imprecations.

Anyway, even if you don't understand German, the song's well worth a listen. It's really catchy, and is one of my favourites.

OK, for those of you who don't know, in December 1999 I wrote an

article entitled "Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend", a humorous mathematical paper using statistics to show why I will never find true love. The tone is rather tongue-in-cheek but the actual numbers and math are correct, which is kind of scary. (More on that in a future post, though.) The article was initially published on my website, and then subsequently in the Annals of Improbable Research and, for some strange reason, in a

So anyway, the article is widely enough known that I get quite a lot of e-mail about it; even today I get comments, compliments, commiseration, criticism, and even requests for dates from random strangers every couple of days. Contrary to what it says on my web page, lately (meaning, since moving to London two years ago) I really don't have time to read all my e-mail, let alone respond to it, so all this "fan mail" (for want of a better word) keeps piling up. I've currently got 269 unread messages dating back to 2005. Last year I felt so guilty about not having the time to respond to it that I sent out a form letter to everyone who had written to me apologising for not getting back to them. I figured a form letter telling people that I got their e-mail and appreciated it would be better than simply ignoring it altogether, but judging from the angry responses I received I guess I was wrong. Now I feel even more guilty. Gawd, it must be terrible for real celebrities who get thousands of letters a day; I can't even handle 100 a year.

So I've decided to go through my "fan mail" and start responding to it, or at least reading through it. I've only made it through the most recent half-dozen or so and have already encountered some real gems. This one made me happy, so I thought I'd share it here:

Subject: Statistical Love
     To: psychonaut@nothingisreal.com
   Date: 2008-03-20 01:14

So for my senior year I decided to take AP Statistics. Turns out that
was a bad choice on my part. However, reading your analysis about
finding the right girl has made me smile. I'm hoping to show your
article to my stats teacher, perhaps he will get a kick out of this
too. However, the reason I am writing you is because I want to thank
you. I was speaking to a young male friend of mine and he reads to me
your charming article. He then proceeds to tell me about how he agrees
with you. My interest is sparked. We begin a disscussion of your
analysis and wonder if a similar study could be done for women. We
then start speaking of how hopeless both our chances of finding
someone are. At this point in time my young friend says to me that I
meet all of his three cryteria, and I admit that he seems to meet mine
(both of us speaking purly in statistical terms). He then proceeds to
admit to me that he has feelings for me and asks me out. We are now
dating and I am so incredibly greatfull to have him in my life. So
thank you, thank you for giving my dear boy courage. I don't think he
ever would have, had he not seen this article.
I figured since your article brightened my day/ life, that it would
only be fair to tell you our story and hope it brightens yours.

Well, I guess it's nice to know that even if I will never have a girlfriend, I'm at least helping other people get them. :)

Why, yes, I still use Usenet. Or at least it seems I used it quite a bit between 2002 and 2006. For no particular reason, I have compiled some statistics on my Usenet posting habits, which I present below using tables and pretty graphs. (If anyone is curious, I did this with some really ugly shell scripts which parsed my KNode "sent messages" folder and scraped Google Groups for messages I posted before I started using KNode; the script called Ploticus to make the charts.)

General statistics

Posts over time

Averages

Posts by hierarchy

Posts by newsgroup (top 100)

So I ate a squirrel yesterday. A colleague and I headed over to St. John Bread & Wine after work which has all kinds of strange and wonderful things on the menu. I ordered the potted squirrel, thinking that I would be getting some sort of vaguely squirrel-shaped carcass which I could pick apart at. No such luck. What I got more closely resembled a skinned rodent tossed in a blender. That, coupled with the fact that it was served at room temperature, gave the dish the overall appearance of tinned cat food. The taste wasn't too bad — a bit like rabbit, or very strong chicken, but it was really hard to get over the appearance. It's really too bad they weren't serving whole squirrel, or I would have bought an extra serving and taken it to the Pembury today in lieu of Frettchen as an April Fool's Joke.

On Saturday took ewtikins out to dinner at a Romanian restaurant near Old Bailey. Good thing neither of us is vegetarian, as there wasn't a single main dish on the menu that did not include a generous helping of meat. We ordered the meat appetizer (mititei, sausages, chicken liver, breaded fried camembert, sautéed mushrooms, and fries) to start, and then she had the fish of the day (salmon) and I had the Romanian stew, which isn't really stew at all but just a bunch of assorted fried meats (pork chops, sausages, and bacon) with a side of polenta smothered with a fried egg and copious amounts of mild shredded cheese. For dessert we had something the waiter insisted was a traditional Romanian pastry cream, but which I immediately identified as Hungarian krémes.

Afterwards we went to timeplease's birthday party at his flat above his pub. Many people in attendance, most of whom I knew (and some of whom I did not), including blue_mai, doseybat, hazyjayne, shermarama, abigailb, pfy, karen2205, ruthi, fluffymark, pplfichi, and a brief semi-appearance by special virtual guest ladymysla. Amazing how many people I know from real life have LiveJournal accounts; makes me wonder if I'm the only one who didn't meet everyone else through LJ. Anyway, much eating, singing, ferret-stroking, and merry-making was done by all.

Here's a multilingual masterpiece which I have so far been at a loss to translate into English. Anyone care to try their hand?

Here's the original German:

Frettchen Rättchen ist ein Tier
Frettchen Rättchen g'hört zu mir
Frettchen Rättchen ist so nett
O wie ich lieb' mein kleines Frett!

And in French:

Frettchen Rättchen est une bête
Frettchen Rättchen est si chouette
Sans Frettchen je n'suis pas complet
O comme j'adore mon p'tit furet!

And a Hungarian version courtesy of my grandfather:

A Trisztánnak van egy Frettje,
És ettol Neki jó a kedve.
Frettchen szeret játszadozni,
Ő meg róla álmodozni!

Any other translations would be welcome. :)

Below is a map of a proposed underground public transit system for Regina, modelled after the famous Tube map for the London Underground. I created it because Regina, like most cities in North America, lacks a good public transit system, and as a former resident I would have found such a subway system extremely useful (particularly in the bitterly cold winters).

View larger map

There are five lines:

• The Albert Line is named for the city's main north–south street, which it follows for the street's entire length. At the northern end of Albert Street, the line turns west. Amenities and attractions served include (from north to south) the Northgate Mall, Regina's Market Square, the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, the Saskatchewan Legislative Building, the Golden Mile Shopping Centre, and the Southland Mall.
• The Victoria Line is named for the city's main east–west avenue, which it roughly follows from the eastern border of city westward. In the west, the line splits into two short branches, one veering north to the Dieppe neighbourhood and the other heading towards the airport. Other amenities served include the Victoria Square Mall and Regina Market Square.
• The Arcola Line runs northwest–southeast and follows much of Arcola Avenue. The line has stops at the Sherwood Village Mall, the Normanview Mall, Regina Exhibition Park, Taylor Field, Regina Market Square, and Union Station.
• The University Line links the neighbourhoods in the north and northwest to the university and technical college campuses in the centre and southeast. Inbetween the line follows Broad Street, a major north–south road, with stops at Regina Market Square and Union Station.
• The Circle Line forms a ring linking several southern neighbourhoods, Southland Mall, the main university campus, the eastern neighbourhoods, Victoria Square Mall, the industrial zone in the northeast, and Pasqua Hospital and Regina Exhibition Park in the west.

Most of the stations are at major amenities, or in the centre or at boundaries of major neighbourhoods. There are a couple of exceptions, such as the 25th Avenue stop, which are on major roads but not particularly near any businesses or residential areas; these were positioned on the assumption that the presence of a subway station would spur commercial growth.

Another stop which deserves special explanation is Union Station, which is listed on the map as a long-distance rail and bus station. Though the Saskatchewan Transportation Company is opening a new bus depot at this location, Regina's VIA Rail station was closed in the 1990s as a result of cutbacks to rail services. The building was repurposed as a casino in 1996. My subway design assumes that Union Station will reopen as a dedicated long-distance rail station.

I made the map by first plotting the stops and lines with Google Maps, as follows:

View Larger Map

I then did a screen capture, loaded it into Inkscape, traced the lines, and shuffled them around to make them as straight as possible. (The London Tube map has all turns in multiples of 45 degrees.) I then added nubs and labels for the stations, and fiddled with the alignments so that they were spaced evenly, or at least aesthetically. The entire process took me about a week, working a few hours a day.

A spelling alphabet (also known as a phonetic alphabet or a telephone alphabet) is a set of words which are used to stand for letters of the alphabet; they're typically used when spelling out words over the telephone or in other noisy or low-bandwidth environments. The most widely used spelling alphabet in English is the NATO phonetic alphabet, which starts, "Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo…". In a typical spelling alphabet, each word starts with the letter it is meant to represent (e.g., "D as in delta"), and the words are selected such that they are unlikely to be confused with similar-sounding words (and especially other words in the spelling alphabet). Things get pretty interesting when you bend or break these rules. For example, here's a spelling alphabet where each word begins with the letter it represents, but none of the letters have their usual phonetic values:

Admittedly, I had to cheat somewhat by using some abbreviations (Rx = prescription), Roman numerals (VIII = eighth), and the authentic Welsh pronunciation of Floyd. Just imagine if this spelling alphabet were standard and someone named Mr. Grysbol had to spell his name over the telephone: "Yes, operator, my name is Augustus Grysbol. That's G for gnome, R for prescription, Y for Yves, S for tin, B for bdellium, O for oecology, and L for sixty-sixth."

We can construct an even more confusing spelling alphabet by dispensing with the requirement of starting each word with the letter it represents (though the word must still contain the letter), and by choosing words which sound just like other letters, or (rather uselessly) like themselves. We might then end up with something like the following:

To get an idea of how ridiculously prone to fault this system is, consider the case of a Mr. Paddy West spelling his name over the telephone: "P as in pea, A as in aye, double D as in zed, Y as in ay, then W as in owe, E as in ewe, S as in sea, and T as in aitch." The person on the other end may well end up writing poor Mr. West's name as "Pizza Ouch".

My very own lolferret, starring Frettchen Rättchen:

Courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com's lolcat builder.

I don't know why I'm starting this journal, as I detest writing about myself. Nor do I know whether I will continue to update it, as I am not particularly self-disciplined. But I do enjoy writing in general, and hopefully if I can garner some sort of audience here it will give me a reason to establish a routine. I have also met such wonderful, interesting people through reading their online journals, so perhaps like will attract like and some wonderful, interesting people will meet me through this one. I think that if I can occasionally produce prose a tenth as interesting as that sunnybananas produces on a nearly daily basis, then this project will have served its purpose.

Since, as I mentioned, I don't like writing about myself, I'll start off by briefly listing some of the other journals I read and why:

__ophelia__

My cousin; she doesn't post nearly as often as she ought to.

abigailb

My friend Abi, whom I met at a Wikipedia meetup and was then kind enough to introduce me to the Pembury, a pub she, and now I, frequent.

sunnybananas

Prolific writer of the first online journal I read with any regularity.

rokica

A friend who I met through her journal, and then in person in Budapest.

doseybat and squirmelia

Two of the many interesting people I met via Abi at the Pembury.

ewtikins

An old acquaintance of mine from my home town, who quite suddenly and unexpectedly turned up at the Pembury.

arkady and reddragdiva

A couple I met via Wikipedia, who also frequent the Pembury (though less often now that they have a little one to take care of).

crankydoll

One of the most stunningly attractive women I've never had the pleasure of knowing.