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.