Live from Austin!

Well, I think the dentistry went well, though it’s hard to tell from the memory fragments I’m left with.

I remember laying down with a drip feed in my arm, and some sedative being introduced, and feeling a bit spacey.

And then I remember being helped into a wheelchair, putting my feet on the metal footrests.

And then I remember someone saying to be careful not to hit my head on the roof of the car as I got into the passenger seat.

I remember rothko helping me walk through the back yard to the house.

And I remember waking up in bed late yesterday afternoon.

That’s about it. I feel like I ought to remember the 20 minute drive home, or walking up the stairs, or getting undressed and into bed, but I don’t. I certainly remember nothing of steel instruments slicing into my mouth.

Something gave me hiccups yesterday, probably drugs and liquids on an otherwise empty stomach. They’ve returned twice, but today I’m eating soup so hopefully they’ll go away. I can also drink coffee now, thank the bean gods.

The mouthwash isn’t as disgusting as the stuff I had when my wisdom teeth were extracted. I can actually taste things. So that’s a plus. I feel vaguely hamster-faced, like I have Silly Putty in my cheeks. At first I thought this was because I do, in fact, have the medical version of Silly Putty in my cheeks. However, a couple of bits fell off and I threw them away, and now the left lower gum has no putty but still feels like it does.

There are also some surgical threads here and there. I’m trying to ignore them but my tongue wants to play.

This whole gum surgery thing has been hanging over me for about 4 or 5 years, so the minor discomfort is more than overshadowed by the sense of relief that I finally did something about it.

Whenever I force myself to do something necessary but unpleasant or stressful, I try to reward myself. It’s an attempt at self-directed operant conditioning. When we finish filing our taxes, we generally go out for a meal afterwards. When I go to the dentist, I might ironically reward myself with a Krispy Kreme doughnut.

Which brings me to today. In a little while I’m heading to the dentist for gum augmentation surgery. They’ll be cutting some slices of gum tissue from the roof of my mouth and grafting them to the gums on my lower jaw. Everyone in my family has bad gum recession there, but hopefully if I get it sorted now I’ll be able to keep a full set of teeth for the rest of my life, as they’re otherwise pretty healthy. (Except robotooth, but that’s another story.)

The problem is, after the surgery is over I’m going to have to use disgusting mouthwash for a week. It coats the inside of your mouth with antibacterial chemicals, which is good, but has the side effect that you can’t taste anything except the vaguely plastic taste of the mouthwash itself.

So, what trivial but important reward can I give myself? The normal edible rewards aren’t going to work.

I’m going to be heavily sedated for the procedure itself, so perhaps spending a few hours in my happy place is reward enough?

Who defined the standard width for toilet paper, and when?

Clearly at this point the standard is self-sustaining, but back in the early years of bathroom hygiene this cannot have been the case. Also, I find it curious that it’s an international standard. I mean, the USA has to differ from the rest of the world in practically every other field of human endeavor, but the toilet paper is the same width here as in every other country I’ve visited.

I wonder if it’s possible to change your name to O’;DROP DATABASE; legally?

Last week’s Hillary Clinton story in The Onion manages to be both hilarious because it’s so true, and deeply depressing because it’s so true.

And this week’s issue looks like a classic for much the same reasons, e.g. Point Counterpoint which looks like many online “debates” from 4 years ago. Some of the content is rerun, but still, it’s a cracking compilation.

Well, at the weekend I had my first SXSW experience, and it was a good one. Last year I managed to miss John Watts, but this year I was prepared. We went to The Hideout downtown about an hour early, and waited in line. The rule was SXSW badges first, then wristband holders, then if there was still space in the venue proletarians could pay $8 each to get in.

The band before Watts was Asakusa Jinta, a kind of psychedelic heavy metal marching band from Japan. They apparently had a lot of buzz, as the venue was full to capacity and there were 20 or 30 people lined up in the hope of getting in. From what we could hear from the corridor, Asakusa Jinta are indeed pretty awesome, but not necessarily a band you want to share an enclosed space with, even if you have earplugs.

Eventually the band stopped, and lots of people left. John Watts wandered past with his promoter handing out flyers. The line thinned out, and we were left standing with some Germans, and two local girls who were apparently hosting Mr Watts during his stay, but were unacquainted with his music.

Back in the late 1970s, John Watts founded Fischer-Z. At the time they were compared to Talking Heads and XTC, but for some reason they never had the commercial success of those bands. The original band broke up after 3 albums, but Watts then reformed Fischer-Z with a new lineup.

The style of music is the usual pop/rock range, but sprinkled with the musical twists that keep my interest. The lyrics are sometimes melancholy, occasionally angry, but there’s always humor there that prevents things slipping into punk (or Depeche Mode) territory.

It all strikes me as very English, but for some reason their biggest fans were in Germany. If you want to hear some Fischer-Z right now, your best bet is either to switch the iTunes music store to think you’re German (using the drop-down at the bottom of the front page), or to head to FineTunes Music Shop, a German MP3 vendor. [Update: Fischer-Z albums also available from Audio Lunchbox.]

Anyhow, John Watts has now moved into solo performance, and seems to have taken on a kind of “wandering troubadour” role. For his latest album, he bought a 30 day railcard and traveled around Europe talking to random people—and then wrote songs about their stories.

His SXSW performance was just him with an amplified acoustic guitar. I particularly appreciated that he was picky about the sound, and insisted on getting it to a loud-but-comfortable level, with the vocals clearly audible. If only all artists were prepared to argue with venue sound guys.

So all in all, one of the simplest—yet also, one of the best—live music experiences I’ve had. Hopefully he’ll be back next year.

The Wii arrived today. So far we’ve played bowling and tennis. It really is as much fun as I’d hoped; we ended up laughing and bouncing around and breaking a mild sweat. Perhaps later in the week we’ll try Rayman Raving Rabbids and smack some bunnies with rubber plungers.

The whole Wii experience is very slick, from the packaging the console comes in to the user interface of the software itself. Nintendo are the Apple of video games.

The image doing the rounds of $205 million in cash (from a drug lord’s stash) reminded me of an IKEA double bed. In fact, it’s pretty much what I like to imagine Bill Gates’ bed looking like.

I’ve had some pretty hellish experiences on plane flights. I’ve traveled from the UK to the USA while suffering from the ‘flu, on a plane filled with rowdy cheerleaders. I’ve been trapped for several hours on a motionless plane in Chicago, with all the ventilation and air conditioning turned off. However, a recent news story is putting my experiences into perspective.

An elderly woman died near the start of a flight from India. British Airways propped up the body in a spare seat in first class. The first class passengers then had to deal with not just the presence of the corpse, but also the corpse’s daughter, who spent the remainder of the 9 hour flight sobbing inconsolably.

Then once the plane landed, they all had to sit there for an extra hour until a coroner could verify that they hadn’t caught anything from the corpse.

One passenger complained to British Airways. Their official response is that he should “get over” it. Nice.

Cherry blossoms fall
Snot bubbles out of my nose
Allergy season