Book stores are dangerous places for me. Especially the new kind of book stores, the kind that are more akin to miniature cities. Yesterday I wandered into one, looking for a particular CD (a peculiar logic at best). I just get immersed. I look at the special offers, to see if there's anything that looks vaguely readable. I look at the big new hardback books, the critically acclaimed stuff, the works by my favourite authors (not that I won't have already read all their books, it's mostly just so I can be sure that they haven't tried to sneak something out without my noticing. Repeat this process for CD's. And DVD's.

Worse still is when I see something that engages my interest. Yesterday it was Bigger Deal, the sequel to it's predecessor, which was named (would you believe) Big Deal.

Now I do play poker, albeit without any particular skill, but I would never consider buying a book about it. In my opinion it's half common sense, betting with good cards and not betting with bad ones, and half a mental game, which is something that I doubt a book could ever teach you. But what really piqued my interest in this book was the size. This thing was big. I'm talking dictionary big. I'm always amazed when someone is able to write a book as big as a fair-sized desk draw about a subject as mundane as a card game. Odder still is that the author has written two of them.

So I'm flicking through this book, thinking that it's so generic that if other poker books are like this then you could probably make a composite book out of pages from other assorted poker texts and few people would notice, when I take a glance at my watch. With barely a few weeks until end of year exams, I've just wasted well over half an hour in a book store.

That's why book stores are hazardous to me. Without being careful I can quite easily lose hours in there. But my long winded question is thus. What makes you lose track of time?

Also, to commemorate the release of the new spiderman film today, I have borrowed this new theme from the Multiply Customised Themes group. There's some decent stuff there, but it suggests strongly that far too much of Multiply is heavily into My Chemical Romance. I actually quite like the colour scheme for this theme and might keep it after I find a better picture to replace the spiderman banner, any suggestions?

After a recent spate of waking up, turning off my alarm and promptly going back to sleep, I was conceiving of a halfbakery idea for a bed that tilts to evict you when you need to be up. Then someone told me that Wallace and Gromit had already beaten me to it. For some reason this makes me feel better.


I've been doing work for yet another essay lately. This means one thing: hours and hours of using Wikipedia. I took a look at one of the articles that I'd been relying extensively and it turns out that one of the heavy contributors was HB's [futurebird]. There's no real point here. Just seems interesting is all.


Having essay deadlines just makes my procrastination levels go haywire. I'm likely to post another entry about it soon. Because of this, in a worrying twist, I'm actually procrastinating by reading about procrastination. This in itself is bad, but what's worse is that I now know it to be Type B procrastination.


I'm increasingly being convinced that the greatest method of imparting trivial knowledge is the pub quiz. Just yesterday, I learnt for the first time about that lipogrammatical (see, you can learn new words too) masterpiece, Gadsby (which I was pleasantly surprised to find online in its entirety, and I plan to read it when I get the chance). The lesson (if you'd call it that) is that you should attend as many pub quizzes as you possibly can (and using brackets plenty of times in a paragraph makes you look very organised).


I've seen a lot of good films lately but yesterday's one, City of God/Cicade de Deus was just fantastic. You won't see many films where the director is so dedicated as to order an actor to bully a child actor for weeks to 'increase the tension between them'.

It's a commonly held perception that there are 5 stages of grief. Extensive research has taught me that there are other things that come in stages.

The Five Stages of Procrastination

1. Denial - An important deadline? No worries, you've got plenty of time to deal with it. You don't need to start until tomorrow. Next week even.

2. Preparation - How can you be expected to start now? You're nowhere near ready. You should probably draw up a timetable to give yourself an idea of your time limits. And what if you get hungry? You should probably make a bacon sandwich. No bacon? I guess you'll have to go to the shops then.

3. Distraction - You're finally ready to start working. But look at all of the other things that need to be done. Few people are ever more productive than when they're in this stage, as your supposedly focused mind turns on your surroundings with the precision and finesse of a shotgun. Entire houses will be cleaned, you'll finally come up with that invention that'll make you a millionaire, and in extreme cases, you'll even end up writing Multiply entries. You will suddenly find that every other piece of work seems far more appealing than the important one. (On the other hand; if you ever manage to find and capture someone in this state, they can be very useful)

4. Despair - Recognised by the sinking feel you get when you realise that the number of hours remaining until the deadline will severely tax your word-per-minute skills. This stage can only be dealt with by finding someone who's done even less work than you (or of course, just doing the work, but if it were that simple, you probably wouldn't be at this point)

5. Successfully Doing your Work - I really hope that this is the fifth stage. I have less than two days to find out.

In the middle of applying for vacation scheme placements for the summer, it was quite nice to find this distracting little mental test. I did pretty badly the first time, but I attribute part of that to being frazzled by the sheer number of forms I'd been filling out.