Had a good (almost outdoor BBQ!) party at my place over the weekend for V’s 23rd.

Left to right: Sarah, Lara, Rob, Tessa, Pete, Andy, V, Bex, Me, Andy, Carrie, Ben, Royston. More images here.

“Other people’s heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat.”

Schopenhauer, Parerga And Paralipomena (1851)

Often, to pass the time, sailors
Will catch albatrosses, those great seabirds
Which nonchalantly chaperone ships
Across bitter gulfs.

Hardly have they set them down on the deck
Than these monarchs of the sky, awkward and ashamed,
Piteously let their great white wings
Drag at their sides like pairs of unshipped oars.

How gauche and weak becomes this winged traveller!
How weak and awkward, even comical
He who was but lately so adroit!
One deckhand teases his beak with a branding iron,
Another mimics, by limping, the cripple that once flew!

The Poet is like this sovereign of the clouds,
Riding the storm above the marksman’s range;
In exile on earth, hooted and jeered at,
He cannot walk because of his great wings.

Charles Baudelaire

The social categorisation of young people according to Frank, a free confidential drugs information hotline.

Click here for the definitive test.

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Subj: are you the real mike pinder?
Date: 1/28/2005 4:09:28 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: ??xxx??
To: MikePinder

are you the real mike pinder who has played with the Moody Blues?

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The Times 22 Oct 2004

To kick someone to death is the physical eruption of their insensate rage that boils like magma below (and not very far below) their thin crust.

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If you imagine the entire existence of the Earth were condensed down to one year, then the human race has been on the planet for one second of that entire year.