The New York Times featured an article about the Large Hadron Collider and how it may be being sabotaged by time travelers. The theory goes that perhaps the sequence of malfunctions to befall the complicated device recently are intentional, orchestrated by the future because the LHC "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider ... like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."

It is a theory that even the author concludes is far-fetched - he is quoted as saying "The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

As I lay splayed on my bed this afternoon, trying to stretch out this Summer's knee injury while dealing with the cast from last Summer's wrist injury a similar thought crossed my mind. After 2006's back prolapse injury crippled me a few years ago I thought it was only a setback and I would soon be on a longterm schedule of smashing protons together, probably in the form of something bigger. However now I too am at the stage where I suspect sabotage. There was a time I believed I might make a model for God. Perhaps answer the most complex questions mankind has asked. I had an ego. One it seems may have been so abhorrent to nature it required time travelers sabotaging me. If true it's worked, wincing everytime you use shift teaches humility. The question is not if this theory is crazy, it's if it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

Whatever fragments of the delusion I was Scottish I had left were ground to dust this morning. I was interviewing the drummer from a Scottish rock band and his accent completely destroyed me. And his last name didn't even start with "Mc". I thought I had 15 minutes worth of questions but he bellowed out his answers with rapid mirth in about eight. It's going to take me days to translate. I was hopeful for kinship; I guess I'll be less frugal from this point on.

Result of my drive home:
Google Search for "Men's Parasol" returns only 10 results.
eBay search for "Men's Parasol" returns 'Did you mean "Hat"?'

Thank you whoever you are in China who worked tirelessly to produce my $14 fan from Bunnings.

http://ben.casnocha.com/2009/11/contrasts-in-how-google-suggets-searches.html

Maxibons: unrelated, but I ate one today on the way home from the beach and I'm pretty sure I'll eat one tomorrow if it's just as hot.

-Grooveshark link to song-

How did I never listen to this song before this weekend?
I got stuck doing a release for work at 6pm Friday night that finished at 10:45am this morning. There was a short gap for sleeping. At some point during the early part of the work I stumbled upon this song and it's got a fair thrashing since.

One of the pitfalls of music reviewing is that you spend so much time listening to new stuff that it takes some effort to listen to old stuff. That's probably why in 2006 when I bought Silent Shout I never bothered checking out any back catalogue.

Sometimes in moments like this I wonder how my life might have been different right now if I'd first liked this song in 2003. Could it have shoved my musical tastes onto a completely different path? A butterfly effect/homer-and-the-toaster phenomena? Would the influence music has on the rest of my life lead to differences as a result of following this new path? Where would I be?

Conclusion: I'd probably be exactly the same as I am now, but when the cover of this song in the Bravia commercial made the Knife popular I might have got to scoff pretentiously that I'd been into them before they were big.

I really want to smash something. Wait, relax, not in an angry way. I want to demolish something constructively.

I used to think about how much energy was generated by the weights room in a single day. If there was some way you could easily tap into all that locomotion plug stuff into it. I couldn't think of any, but smashing weights is constructive.

Smashing weights takes a long time though, and I'm craving the smashing of something that is quick and satisfying. Like the demolishing of a cold beer on a warm evening. But I want something on a much larger scale.

I just want to smash. Constructively. The bigger the better. Something where more commotion means more functionality. Smash a book? Smash out a journal entry? I just can't smash my finger on it. Maybe tomorrow.

Yesterday I said I wanted to smash a book. A week earlier I ordered some hardcover editions of a bunch of books from Fishpond.com.au which managed to match the cheapness of Amazon at the moment PLUS they did staged shipments which meant my library increment wasn't hinged on the new Robert Crumb book's release date.

Anyway this morning my attention was momentarily grabbed by a package being hurled over my gate with a thud. It was my first book. It survived but I'm not sure that throwing over the gate should be the primary option of the postal guy, ahead of options like 'open the gate'; 'slide package under the gate'; 'bring package to the door. But it worked out very nicely in the end.

In other strong Australian dollar news I saw that Roomba's are only $129 USD online (!!!) but they're still $600 in Australia. Is it worth importing one and buying a plug adapter for the charging station? Is my motivation for wanting one at least 50% sourced from Arrested Development? Yes. I think that show may have also pushed my love of Maxibons past a tipping point.

Going for a drive at lunch time is the new going for a walk at lunch time.
And getting through the queue out the car park is the new waiting for the elevator.
And playing Sudoku in the parking lot at Coles because you have nothing else to do to drag out your lunch break near half an hour* is the new... I miss the city.

*this is not true, I bought all these books lately and now am at a stage since I haven't been since the last time I went to the library as a kid, before I got a computer. Big pile of books to read, but it's hard to announce "I'm going to the shops, I'm just bringing this novel from my bag in case the line at the checkout is really long."

On Thursday I waited for WebLogic servers to block for 2 minutes over and over again as I tried to finalise a build script.
During one of those moments I browsed to the AV Club to discover their article The Best Books of the '00s.

I've found this whole 'best of the decade' thing that so many internet sites are doing at the moment far more educational than I was expecting. I always lump the past in a too hard basket, so it's been super convenient having someone lead me to water on some classics I've missed. And I noticed a few of the titles hear I had on unplayed audio books on my hard drive.
'Beauty', I thought, 'I'll start some of these on the weekend.'

Then I noticed they also had a best video games of the decade. This was even more attention grabbing as I'm about six years behind when it comes to video games. I haven't even played Half Life 2 yet. I was always a few years late in hardware, and then when I bought my high end laptop in 2007 I got too busy with other things to play games again. Probably, I may just have been unable to install them on Vista. So any games that get mentioned as "great" and also "pre-2008" I'm immediately enticed by.

It's quite late Friday night now and I have read zero words of best books, but I've almost finished Braid and I downloaded the demo of BioShock.

I watched 500 Days of Summer tonight after work. It was a nice movie with a good plot device, nothing spectacular. It had good music though and it made me want to write. Then my wrist hurt. This is my life lately. One way is going to win eventually.