hedgehoggy

The weather is mad again. There was a thunderstorm in the small hours of the morning, complete with thunder and lightning and raindrops so huge and fat they landed separately and distinctly, like a small pachyderm parachute brigade. The noise on my tin bedroom roof was indescribable, I actually got out of bed and bumbled over to the window (falling, as is obligatory, over the cat) to check that it wasn't hail. (This entailed standing there starkers except for my glasses and peering outside until my vision had cleared enough to see that there were no actual drifts of hailstones on the flags. I will not invite you to picture this proceeding in the interests of mental health). The first few splats of rain left wet circles about four centimetres across. Some weirdly giant precipitation up there.

Thunderstorms make me deeply happy, enough that I didn't actually resent being woken up - I have a theory that I subliminally wake myself up deliberately so I can enjoy the sound of rain, anyway. What I did resent was the idiot who thereafter phoned my cellphone at 5.40am, waking me from a sound rediscovered sleep for a wrong number. Who the hell phones anyone at 5.40am anyway? It's not a time, it's a hideous limbo space filled with meaninglessness and the deranged, dawn-inspired tweeting of manic birds. (Manic, damp birds in this case, and serve them right). I am consequently a little fragile this morning, and am only succeeding in bribing myself through the day by copious application of chocolate biscuits. On the upside, for some weird reason sleep-deprivation makes me ungodly productive for the first half of the day. Between processing great tottering piles of credit transfers I have also managed to order more Scary Go Round T-shirts, pay my bills and read a deliriously wonderful paper by someone using Harry Potter to teach basic political science ("ethnic conflict, power political studies and dysfunctional bureaucracies").

I recommend, as a wake-up shock, today's XKCD, which is being all nostalgic about Geocities. It actually made me recoil from the screen with a shout of "Aaargh! My eyes!" Thank the gods the internet Got Better and is no longer a newt in the design stakes. Mostly.

Finally, today's happy-making discovery from Worthless Word For The Day: my subject line employed in the cause of being beautifully rude about religious bigotry. John Ruskin: "So your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture; and that nothing else is." Hee. The proceeding, for a given value of "scripture", also applies, in fact, to politics, education and popular music, and probably also to parrot-breeding and French cuisine.