Tales Of Jim, #1: Hello, Jim! Is jim there?

The Tales Of Jim chronicle events that happened about a year ago when I got a new mobile phone. I posted them on a short lived blog I kept back then, but here they are again for your amusement.

Many moons ago, I got a new mobile phone. Exciting, eh? Well, not particularly. I cancelled my contract with O2 who refused to let me have the handset I wanted, and got a new, better value contract with T-Mobile. Life was good.

Then life got annoying.

Then life got quite amusing.

T-Mobile has a nice feature where if you miss a call you get sent a text message telling you that you missed a call. Very nice, especially if your phone has been off for a while. Usually these messages are accompanied by a message telling you that you have new voicemail, from the person you missed the call from.

One day, I started getting new voicemail. But I had no missed calls.

Someone else's voicemail was ending up in my voicemail.

And his name is Jim. Jimmy to his mates.

And his mates are getting more and more annoyed because Jimmy isn't returning their calls.

Call received on Nov 26th, 2:37pm.
From: a young sounding male, who I have called Colin.

Hi there, forgot to call ya at 2 o clock, bye.

Oh dear, young Colin! Jim isn't going to get your apology now, is he? I cry tears in my heart for you.

Call received on: Nov 26th, 2:43pm.
From: Man with Jamaican accent. I shall name him Winston.

Hi Jim, whats happenin bro? Just catchin up, wanna ask ya somethin, appreciate it if ya could get back to me. See ya man.

Winston. Please call Jim more often. Your voice is quite amusing.

There are two colours in my head

I guess you can never really be sure what's going on inside someone's mind.

Seaneen talks about her intrusive thoughts in a recent blog entry and it’s strange because I never knew, until relatively recently in my life, that not everybody has these type of thoughts and flashes. I have seen flashes of quite disturbing things, had thoughts that are just stuck in my head, heard voices, seen things that aren’t there etc. since I was a small child. I just presumed that it happened to everyone. Even now, I still don’t know what level of those type of things are “normal” and which I should be worried about.

For instance.

I was sat on my sofa a few weeks ago, absently staring at my foot. I suddenly got a flash of someone driving a chisel into the bottom of my foot. I mentioned this to someone at work and he reacted as if I said I’d spent the weekend drowning kittens. It was a bit of a reminder that it doesn’t happen to everyone and maybe, just maybe, next time I should keep my big mouth shut.

The law of averages

Statistics - interesting and insightful, or meaningless? (See what I did there?)

1 in 5 people in the word are Chinese.

Look around you. See 4 people that are not Chinese? Must be you, then.

On average, people have 1.999 legs.

Hurrah, I'm above average in the leg department!

16 percent of all traffic accidents are caused by drunk drivers.

That means 84 percent are caused by sober drivers. Should we lock them up instead?

Malt Loaf Saves The Day

Various mental illnesses run in my family, on one particular side. My father is schizophrenic, dissociative, and a number of other things. My grandfather started to decline into dementia at a relatively young age. My uncle was also bipolar. My cousin Simon, whom this post is mainly about, has Aspergers syndrome.

Simon would spend afternoons poring over bus timetables. On one such afternoon, my grandfather snatched the timetables out of his hands. "What on earth are you looking at those all the time for? You know nothing about buses. You don't understand these." He was astounded when Simon was able to recite the timetables perfectly and answer questions about the running times of nearly all the buses that ran in our area.

Simon would also spend hours standing in the street, seemingly staring at nothing. He would always do this with a pencil in his hand, waving it up and down with two fingers. This attracted the attention of various undesirables in the neighbourhood, who singled him out as the estate weirdo and started to bully him. They would ride around him on their bikes, throwing things at him.

One day, it all changed. All thanks to Malt Loaf.

Take a look at the picture of malt loaf on wikipedia. Imagine a very immature person taking a loaf of malt, and shaping it into a rough sausage shape. Perhaps the immature person would make it curl a bit, and taper it at one end. Then perhaps the immature person would leave it to stand for 30 seconds or so in a bowl of water. The malt loaf becomes a very, very convincing looking fake poo. So convincing that poor Simon retched and had to run to the bathroom when he saw the product of the very immature person (who shall remain unidentified) and the malt loaf.

Once Simon had calmed down and we explained to him that the dirty sausage was in fact just malt loaf, we hit on the idea that it could be the answer to his bully problem.

We stuck a lolly stick into the center of it and told Simon to take it with him when he went outside. If he saw the bullies, he was to wait until they rode up to him, then show the poop-on-a-stick to them, throw it at them if possible, or just chase them with it.

That afternoon, armed with the pooh-stick, Simon ventured out into the street to take his usual space-staring stance.

I like to think of what happened next from the bullies' point of view. There they were, ready for another fun filled afternoon of taunting the local mental. After a minute of highly enjoyable taunting, the mental produces what appears to be his own excrement on a stick. Grinning wildly, the mental chases them, pulling bits off the piped waste and throwing it at them.

Simon was never bothered by them again.

Brilliant Shopping

It was great to see in Stephen Fry's documentary, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, that he too suffers from bouts of Brilliant Shopping.

Brilliant Shopping is perhaps not constrained to people who have bipolar disorder, but seems to come out more regularly in those who do. From a post over at Ladies Who Love Dinosaurs...

This is what I went into M&S for:
Single cream
Onion

This is what I came out with:
2 packets roast beef and horseradish Christmas special crisps
Pomegranate seeds (removed from pith)
Christmas pudding flavoured yoghurt
2 Pink Lady apples (which I wanted because they are pink on the inside)
3 bean salad
Tandoori naan bread
Instant microwave porridge
Single cream
4 organic onions

Sara from My Sad Alter Ego relates...

I got it into my head that I wanted a kite after seeing one in a toy store…and then I kept buying kites that I kept finding, one after another (same day), each one more spectacular than the last. I love those kites.

Brilliant Shopping is that urge that grabs you in a shop - you need to buy these things NOW. You need that DVD boxset. It's £20.00 cheaper online, but you don't care. It's simply not the same if you have to order and wait for it. The actual act of buying it is part of the pleasure.

The "impulse buys" that shops put by the counters for you to peruse while you wait to be served are to tempt the normal shopper.

For us, the entire store is the impulse buy section.

I bought a radio controlled helicopter. I gave the charger for it away to someone who had the same model, but a broken charger. Now I have a helicopter which I can't charge up to use, and will forever sit on my desk at work.

Childhood memories #1

Many moons ago when I was young and you were even younger, Action GT released a fun, yet dangerous board game called Space Attack.

As you can see from the box art, it involves some kind of disc moving at high speed, which two enthralled children deflect from their side of the board with little plastic clips.

What the box doesn't show too clearly is that the disc is made of a rather sturdy metal, with a large spike in the center. The spike was there to stabilise the disc as you spun the red crank with all of your might. It also fails to show exactly how fast the disc could spin, or how loud it is. Imagine there's a jet engine in your living room using a karaoke machine. It also fails to show that sometimes, the disc would launch itself and miss the playing area completely, resulting in either

• a friction burned child
• a carpet with a hole in it, or
• a carpet with a hole in it, a child with friction burns from attempting to stop the spin of the disc, plus a child with a large hole in his foot from stepping on the disc.

I miss the long hours of fun and many injuries.

Its-a me! Mario!

I was going to post a "childhood memories" post here, but it got too depressing too fast.

So here's to one of my happiest memories... Super Mario!

Need a new willy? Go to argos!

Search for willy at argos.co.uk

Many other rude words too. Prizes for the most amusing!

"Oh, you must be really creative."

I was chatting with a Canadian friend and a few people she knows on msn last night. One of them was almost visibly bouncing around the chat, declaring that he was bipolar. He danced around, saying how great it is to be so creative, playing music, writing, painting. Oh, how gifted he is. Oh how lucky he is.

I told him that I, too, am bipolar.

"Wow, are you creative too?" he gushed, "It's amazing isn't it."

I didn't really know how to respond. Yes, in a certain, very narrow band of hypomania, I can produce incredible things. My mind races and things flow in such a way that I'm frustrated the rest of the time when I cannot summon it at will. I cannot sit down and say, "Today, I will be brilliant. People around me will be in awe." But there again who can?

The creativity produced by hypomania and the lower bands of mania, for me at least, are fractured and frustrating. So many thoughts. So many brilliant thoughts. Woe betide you if you do not instantly agree with all of them. Ideas and plans racing faster, falling over each other to get out of my head. I know a million riffs and can play them perfectly, but cannot string together a song and play it in its entirety. I have a thousand ideas and themes that I can interweave into the best novel you are ever likely to read, and yet I cannot finish the first sentence. I can focus on a concept with extreme clarity, and know my understanding is thorough, but I'm wrong. As wrong as can be. Yet, I cannot see it. Everyone else is an idiot, but they can't see it. Only I, with the gift of manic clarity and creativity, can.

Although we never see Marvin's manic state in The Hichhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, some of his expresssions ring oh-so-true.

"Reverse primary thrust, Marvin." That's what they say to me. "Open airlock number 3, Marvin." "Marvin, can you pick up that piece of paper?" Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper.

The long, dark teatime of the soul

I have a theory that thunderstorms affect people's behaviour without them being aware of it. It's been a very strange day. The strange fuzzy feeling in my head is not entirely unlike being drunk. I started the day in a giggley daze, wafted through it in a half awake, unthinking state, and now, watching the thunderstorm rage outside, I can feel myself sinking. Not in a metaphysical way. In the oh-so-real way that signifies the onset of one of those times. Perhaps the intense electric forces in the air can trigger changes in the brains of the unstable.

Fight Club is showing. I am Marla Singer, dragged from her apartment, staring back at it and denouncing herself. I watch her deal with the two sides of Tyler Durden and realise how the people unfortunate enough to be in my past relationships must have felt around me.

Let's see what that's done to the graph

Heyhey, kids!

Today was a good day. I laughed and laughed and laughed, but I'm not sure why. There were some photos of someone I have encountered in my day to day working life, but they don't seem that amusing now. Hmmm. Still in a great mood though!

As requested by my Emma, It is time to keep a mood graph. It might help to predict when the highs and lows are coming. Or it might not. Does anyone else do this? Does it work for you?

I had so much to write when I started this, but it's gone. I think I'm getting tired of the constantly racing thoughts... I forgot the name of one of my co-workers today. Hmmm. Not good.

Keeper of the Gems, I am.

With my shoulder pads
I have the strength
To destroy villages
Home and crops.

Stoke on Trent

I finally installed a little widget on this blog to see if anyone was reading.

Some people are. It's going to go a little quiet over the next week, most probably, so here's something to listen to in the absence of my ramblings.

This is for that one person that my visitor stats says reads from Stoke On Trent.

Putting up with the clown

This is really a post to say how random chance has operated in my favour, placing me in a profession where a certain amount of quirkiness is tolerated, and sometimes actually encouraged. This suits me quite well. Sometimes, the quirkiness is all I have.

So here's a tribute to the people who put up with me, especially my Emma, who says, "well, that's just my Mike!"

Some Things Mike Did

Ended most of his sentences with “Thaaank you! In a fabulous way!” because of this video :



Played Human Bowling (grabbing a coworker’s chair while they are still occupying it and running down the center of the office with them hanging on to the chair for dear life, then launching the chair as far as he can).

Wasted an entire pad of PostIt Notes by tearing off each one and either making an unflyable paper plane out if it, or rolling them up quite tightly, bending them into a right angle and spinning them around, making them tap rapidy on the table. (This has happend more than once.)

Changed one of his co-workers keyboard shortcuts to pop up the hilarious message "I AM GAY" then laughed uncontrollably for about an hour when it was pressed.

Performed rather weak, puerile and insulting "impressions" of people, generally while a co-worker is on the phone trying to speak seriously to one of those people.

Replied, rather unhelpfully, to the question, "Why isn't the server working?" with the answer, "Because [hosting company] are gimps."

Hilariously referred to LloydsTSB as Lloyds-Wee-S-Poo for quite some time.

The list goes on and on. From fits of laughter to weeks of silence. From calm, sane council to paranoia. From simple code that transforms the way people work, to thinking that putting a picture of a fish on a website is the BEST IDEA EVER. So thanks to everyone that puts up with this.

Too cool for school

It's been a trend in recent years for people to be too cool to like things. Cool, trendy, hip and with it people are now too cool to be able to show an interest in things.

I overheard a conversation on the bus this morning. A girl was relating to her friend how she had been called a geek for "really liking Star Wars." Apparently, the criteria for Star Wars Geekdom was knowing the names of 4 out of 6 of the films. For this entirely pitiful display of Star Wars knowledge, she was ridiculed and labelled a geek.

People used to be too cool to like stuff. Now, they're too cool to know stuff. They're too cool to learn stuff.

Drink a lot of alcohol - you're cool. Know the chemical formula for alcohol, you're a geek.

Recognise the number 93 on the front of a bus, get on the bus and play your oh-so-individual music through your tinny mobile phone speaker, while verbally abusing anyone who asks you to turn it down, because they's disrespeccin ya innit blud - you're cool. Know anything remotely technical about the MP3 that's playing - geek.

Bill Hicks highlighted this years ago. Admittedly, those were Americans he was commenting on, but we seem to get the American trends a couple of years after, albeit without any of the style.

"I was in Nashville, Tennesee last year, after the show I went to a Waffle House, I'm not proud of it, I was hungry. And I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book, right? Waitress walks over to me, "Tch tch tch tch. Hey, what you readin' for?" Is that like the weirdest question you've ever heard? Not what am I reading, but what am I reading for. Well,, you stumped me. Why do I read? Well... hmmm... I guess I read for a lot of reasons, and the main one, is so I don't end up, being a waffle waitress.

But then... this trucker in the next booth gets up, stands over me, and goes, "Well, looks like we got ourselves a reader." What's going on here? It's not like I walked into a clan rally in a Boy George outfit, it's a book!"

I'm not sure that it's the knowledge that's so repulsive to these people. They just don't want to put in the effort. If you can glide through life without having to do much or exert yourself, well done! You're a success! And cool. And you can sit next to me and talk about how much you drank last night.

Perhaps it can be summed up best this way...

Being able to do this is very cool.



Learning to do it, is not.

The lottery is a tax on stupidity - OFFICIAL

"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it."

What type of child uses the word "bosoms"?

I preferred how you said it originally

Before the connection was made between the name of the humerus bone and the word humourous, the exposed nerve at the base of the elbow now called the funny bone was referred to as the crazy bone.

I urge everyone to revert back to calling it their crazy bone.

How do you say it?

If you use a contraction for the phrase "You are not," do you say "You aren't" or "You're not"?

I've seen both used, and technically they're both correct usage. But you aren't is just wrong.

About this blog, me, and other things

If you've stumbled onto this blog via some search engine or link that offers no real explanation of what you're about to see, you're probably thinking, "What on Earth is this all about? It's all very random - as the youth of today are wont to say."

Here comes an explanation of sorts.

My name is Mike, I'm 20-30ish and have bipolar disorder. Sometimes I am unable to sleep for days with these oh so random thoughts racing around my head. Sometimes, I get very deep and ramble about many subjects at once, dancing from one to the other with the thinnest of connections. Sometimes I just need to get everything out of my mind before it forces things out of my head that I want there.

And I've just forgotten what I wanted to write next. That's extremely annoying.

Oh yes, I remember now.

Medication. As I have had sung to me on occasion, "Medication's what you need." But I've always refused, run away, lied about it and generally done anything to make the subject go away. I know how I can be. The people around me know how I can be. It can be controlled. I'm scared that if I entrust my mental state to some faceless chemical that I'm going to lose control. It might take away who I am. It might make me unmanageable. Fear of the unknown. Fear of regular blood tests. Fear of leaving the bathroom light on and the extraction fan will be going all day, burn out and force me into a lifetime of showers that leave the handle of the door too wet to turn, trapping me in the bathroom, dying of water poisoning - the first case in history of death by osmosis. Ok, so I took that a bit far. I shouldn't just keep typing whatever comes into my head.

Or maybe I should.

That's what this is all about. Some kind of therapy, an outlet, my own personal stream of unconciousness.

Join me for the ride.

Join me!

I'm a serial cereal eater

While I was trying to find out why Cinnamon Grahams changed their name to Curiously Cinnamon, I stumbled upon the fact that it's cousin cereal, Golden Grahams, contain an amount of salt per gram comparable to seawater. 3.5g/100g for seawater, 2.5g/100g for Golden Grahams.

Stepping on a snail in the dark...

...is one of the top ten worst feelings in the world.

Double letters, triple letters

There are plenty of words with double L, double T, double O... but are there any with double K? Or double H?

Yes.

Yes there are.

For double K you could have "bookkeeper." For double H you could have "hitchhiker."

But are there any words with triple letters?

Yes.

Yes there are.

But you must find them. Do I have to do everything around here?

Arranged in a quincunx

A quincunx is the arrangement of five objects in the pattern as found on dice (4 marking corners of a square, one placed centrally).

The only English word beginning with 'tm'

Tmesis. It means the insertion of a word inside another word, such as "In-flippin-credible".

A lot of you probably knew that, but I've been dreaming recently of telling Frank Butcher from Eastenders about this fact, and him reacting with great enthusiasm. So there. It's out of my head now and I can stop educating Frank Butcher.

These are the news!

It's late, and this is a bit of trivia that everyone I know seems to think is obvious, but it only just hit me recently. So meeehhhhh to them.

The word "news" started out life in the 14th centurty as a pluarlised form of "new" - literally meaning "the new things". Strange how we now treat it as singluar.

What would happen if the moon exploded?

There would be a loud BANG and we would have no more moon. There, simple.

Actually, a lot more would happen than a loud noise and the song "Moon River" becoming obsolete.

The moon effects the tides as we know them, without the tides the oceans would become giant stagnant pools, incapable of sustaining the life they currently do.

Most importantly, the moon keeps the earth titles on its axis. Think of it like someone spinning around holding a heavy bag of shopping. The bag would fly out at an angle and the spinning person would lean back at an angle. Without the bag, someone spinning around would do so perfectly vertically. Without the moon, the earth would spin in the same manner. We would lose the seasons and the earth would become divided into three sections, two incredibly cold, inhospitible frozen wastelands roughly covering the top and bottom thirds, and a scorching desert covering the middle strip.

This is because the tilt of the earth makes a location in its surface follow an arc as it rotates, making sure it gets the right amount of heat and shade to sustain life.

There would be thin sections of land that were positioned just right so that the temperature neither froze or fried you, but the wind patterns would be so altered that harsh storms would constantly rage.

It's just occurred to me that "What would happen if the moon exploded?" sounds like someone Jeremy Clarkson would say just before cutting away to one of Top Gear's more bizarre experiments. So, please, don't forward this to him.

Proud-to-be-British Summer Time

It's almost that time of year again, the last Sunday in October, when the clocks go back and we get an extra hour in bed. The good ol' British version of Daylight Savings Time is coming to an end for this year.

This got me thinking about time, and why it is how it is. What's so mean about Greenwich Mean Time? Why did it become the standard? And how long is a day?

The mean in Greenwich Mean Time means the same as a mean in mathematics. The astronomers in Greenwich would measure the time at which the sun was at it's zenith, and over the course of the year, the measurement was averaged out to give us a Mean Time for noon, as noon as measured by the sun does not occur at the same time each day.

The UK gradually adopted it as the standard from 1847, and by January 1848 the legal time for Great Britain was GMT. But why? Everyone around the country was capable of working out the time, albeit with some variance between them depending on where you were. The answer is that the rail network was growing, and it was impossible to coordinate time without a single standard time that everyone was using. No good saying that a train left Mansford-Thirtysixbrough at 10:16 and arrived in Wabsnazm at 10:21 if those times were believed to be the same moment in those localities!

GMT is no longer used as the standard time. UCT (Universal Coordinated Time) is now the standard and set by atomic clocks. This keeps the time correct within 0.9 seconds. Constant correction is required as the day is not always the same length. It's always slightly under or slightly over 24 hours.

Interestingly, before 1925, the astronomical convention was to call noon 00:00 and midnight 12:00.

So there you have it, GMT only became the force it was because of the railways.