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Chrissie

Convert to the Ring

Well, much to my surprise, mom did finally decide to give Lord of the Rings a fair hearing. We watched the first two episodes recently. Not on the same night, okay! 🙂 She hates this kind of thing normally, but all the hype and good reviews weakened her resolve. Of course, she ended up thinking they were terrific, and we plan to see the final part at the cinema soon. (Not right now; we’re both suffering from yet another cold virus at the moment. Lovely.)

Watching The Two Towers a second time helped resolve some of my own reservations about it. I’m told the extended version has better editing, but on the whole, I enjoyed it better than the first viewing. Look, I won’t forgive Jackson for the Christopher Lee thing in a hurry, but that doesn’t mean I don’t admire this work on many levels. It’s a genuine achievement.
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Macabre Thought

I’m not sure what made me think this, really… I was just pondering all the ‘dead’ sites out there. There are loads of ’em. There’s a site out there by me, actually, that hasn’t been updated for six years, but still exists. (Just a fan site on Geocities. I’ve long since been unable to access it.)
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Searching Again

I haven’t looked at my search requests for a while. Most of them come from Google, and I get quite a lot of them these days, even if my regular readership has remained fairly static.

Here are the searches I’ve had since around 10pm last night (w/my comments added):

CHEZ CHRISSIE
Presumably, someone who knows this site’s title/URL, but prefers to surf in from Google rather than use a bookmark. Bizarre.
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Dubya

You have to love George Bush. He has an innate crudeness that is almost charmingly primitive. But not quite. The latest news is, he apparently wants to know WHY no WMDs were found in Iraq.

Well, Dubya, old buddy, that sure is a toughie. My only suggestion is: take a wild guess. It might just save you an extra few million bucks.
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He Ain’t No Human Being

I have to say that John Lydon is tremendously entertaining on the latest I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, in what is otherwise a pretty tired lineup. This, from someone who never liked the Sex Pistols. Then again, I had few thoughts about anarchy when I was seven or eight years old; the attitude probably seems more relevant today. Maybe I should go buy a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks…
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Report Schmeport

I’ve been tempted to write a lengthy ramble about the so-called Hutton Report, it being one of the few things sparking my attention in the news… but, nah, I’ll be brief (I think).

What does this report mean, anyway? Are people getting confused about the Lord in Lord Hutton? It doesn’t mean Lord as in God, you know. In my opinion, for a report of this kind to carry any kind of weight, it needs to be the result of analysis by panel (in the same way that a trial verdict is reached by jury). Even that hardly ensures true objectivity—whatever that is—but it’s probably the best we can hope for.

One man’s allegedly objective analysis simply isn’t good enough, particularly when he admits the ‘scope’ of the report is so limited as to rob the process of any genuine context. Aw, who needs a context anyway? Hilarious.
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Okay, So What Do I Do?

Speaking of all this design stuff… actually, I do have a serious problem. A problem that would make it hard for me to even do a new logo for this site, for instance.

The logo at the top of the page (at the time of writing!) was done in Photoshop 4.0 on my old computer. It was nothing fancy; two gradient fills stitched together, Black Chancery font stretched vertically a little bit, standard emboss filter. That’s as fancy as my logos get, anyway.

Then: new computer, not running Win98 but WinXP. It doesn’t like Photoshop 4.0. It hangs/exits very frequently on load and save of images. I’m sure this is due to the age of the software. So now I’m stuck with a thing called PhotoStudio (I think it came with my old scanner), which works fine but is frankly crap!
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Does a New Year Mean Anything?

I’m not sorry to see 2003 go. It was in some ways a significant year… we got the house move situation sorted out, finally, and I made the arguably foolish decision to kiss Der State Benefit System goodbye because I no longer felt my life was my own…

That said, I can no longer define a year as a unit as precisely as I felt I once could. Each year once appeared to have a particular ‘personality,’ which no longer seems to be the case (to me). Well, after all, a year is just an arbitrary unit of measurement, so the former impression was probably illusory.
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