The Cry in Creativity

Because I work part time from home and my girlfriend works full time from an office that isn't at home, I am at home with our child most of the time. This is a fact that still takes some people a few seconds to compute even in 2019.

Mostly men, but also women. I think some men consider their masculinity threatened by taking care of a child. It explains the wailings that ensued when Daniel Craig was seen out with his child in a baby carrier.

"Now pay attention, 007, standard-issue baby carrier holds
a sophisticated vomit projecting device capable of emitting a loud,
piercing sound at the slightest provocation."

It's related to why some men, who are generally not very good examples of men / humans, like to force on you the fact they have never changed a nappy (diaper) in their lives. Let me tell you, I have changed nappies and I have seen unimaginable horrors that would make those so-called men weep into their snowflaky imaginary machismo.

But this is not what I wanted to talk about. Rather I wanted to discuss a preconception I had when going into this whole endeavour of being a stay-at-home dad. (BTW, the proper term for this is Day-Instructing Live-in Father, or DILF. If you tell people about me, don't forget to say you think I'm a DILF.)

I had thought, any spare time I had outside of part-time working and looking after a baby would be great creative time. The first mistake was thinking there would be any time outside of part-time working and looking after a baby. Actually the first mistake was thinking there would be any time outside of looking after a baby.

Babies fortunately do sleep a lot. They need time to convert residual energy into height and save up for tantrums. But not so much time that you can fit a part-time job in. And certainly not enough to have creative time left over, so there has to some amount of working when the baby is awake. Now, this can work fine with some of aspects of my day job, but not with creative endeavours.

I should probably say that my part-time work is as a software developer. It is not exciting but pays okay and allows me to use that part of my brain that is good at problem solving. Now, some aspects of this job that are repetitive and not so taxing on the old noodle. These things you can do with a child around you, but things that require deep thought or focussed thinking, such as solving complex problems or writing, are not good to do when there is a child around.

Add caption: dqejefw89fjfwejdmnewnewkifewfowef89fyuowhnfewfjuiwfjksdfdsoicmnoew

Those of you who know little of the workings of children, should know that every child is programmed to do as much harm to itself as possible. They are constantly trying to top themselves. What stops them is you, luck and the fact they are not very good at anything yet. A baby on a high surface will try with all it's might (which is not much in the first few months) to throw itself off. If you have sharp objects lying around toddlers will find them. They will be attracted to them no matter what array of wonderful toys that are lying around. If you ever lose your rat poison or descaling solvents, no worries, let a one-year-old loose in the house and it will track them down in no time and have the lid off in slightly more.

Because of this, you can't go into deep-focus mode when a child is around. You'll come out of it and the little horror will be under the wardrobe or head-first in the toilet bowl.

So, creatively this has not been a good time. At least not in the sphere of written things. In the arena of children's songs, however, it has been amazing. Babies like singing. They are pretty terrible at it themselves, but they love it being done to them. And as I can't remember lyrics for toffee, I am always having to make up songs on the spot. I've created hundreds and hundreds of songs, all short and mostly based on things that are going on in that moment.

I've sung about toy cars, puddles, farts, dirty clothes, food, dogs, cows, hats, crying, socks, leaves, books, mucus, stuffed pigs that look like bears, spoons, vomit, coats, sheep that look like poodles, having you face wiped and lonely dinosaurs.

This is the sheep/poodle equivalent of "that dress."

There is a whole sub-genre of “poo songs” dedicated to praising, deriding or describing the more solid contents of nappies. And let me tell you, the range of colours, volumes, textures and density of what babies can produce would make many a “macho” snowflake weep into his deepest insecurities.

A little postscript:
Anyone who is worried that I am in any way resentful of the little horror taking up so much of my time, energy and pigmented hairs has never been a father to the greatest little thing that ever crawled, puked and pooped its way across God's fair Earth.

We Want Information (Christmas Travel and Technology 2014)

In this modern era, technology gets information to us at a phenomenal rate. The main problem is that it gets correct information to us at exactly the same rate and in the same manner as incorrect information. In fact, nowadays, incorrect information can be beamed straight from the source of that misinformation direct to the phone sitting in your pocket. It's never been so easy to lie to or misinform so many people so convincingly. Believe me, smart phones will bring about more religions, not less. Notice that even the most fanatical religious people pray far less than most of us check our phones.
We were running a little behind schedule. Partly because we had to leave super-detailed instructions for our cat sitter, who I assume is some sort of robot, as I have never seen her/him/it. So when my baapp, or whatever the British Airways app is called, gleefully told us that our flight was going to leave 90 minutes later than the sages had originally predicted, we took this as providence and proof that we should hold off from worry.

We decided to take our time. If we hadn't been worried about meeting up with the cat sitter, who I guess must have laser eyes and would vaporise any non-cat creatures she might see upon entry, we would have hung about for an hour, but instead we just sauntered to the metro.

Sitting leisurely on the train, we rechecked our compact guru who was eager to inform us that the flight was now on time. On time! We were in saunter mode, planning to roll up to the gate at our leisure, well in time for a very delayed flight, but now we were the ones running behind.

I think the lesson here is always have a deep seated distrust of technology.

As it happens, the plane did end up being delayed by 20 minutes, so our arrival was not as tight as we had feared. But we were worried most of the way. And because our original plan allowed plenty of extra time to allow for delays in reprogramming the cat sitter.

Well I say 20 minutes delayed. They told us ten minutes but they started boarding 20ish minutes later. And once on board, we had to wait for a gap in the constant stream of planes and a let up in the wind that was causing all this chaos.

We, in fact, got off lightly. There were flights delayed even more than we had been originally told. Planes from the morning were still waiting to leave 3 hours later. The whole board was lit up like a Christmas tree, with baubles replaced by a rubicated "Delayed."

"Rubicated" is the dictionary word of the day and it means "marked or coloured with red." At least that's what my phone says and so it quite likely means something more like, "to be ridiculed and humiliated by a bunch of refined metals and micro-engineered plastics in what is increasingly looking like a concerted pre-takeover plot."

Yes, I know that sounds paranoid, yes, I do believe it's all part of some technological conspiracy and, yes, I do think the cat sitter is in on it too.

Keep On Moving

So, I’ve bought a house. 19-year-old me once swore to never be married, never have a mortgage and never eat muesli. 19-year-old me is now a ghost. He is as pale and deathly as he looked and was ribbed for all those years ago.

As the new place is smaller and we both have hoarder genes, we had to get rid of stuff before we moved. To some extent we were successful, however the move took about 10 times longer than estimated and we still turned up with a lot of seemingly unnecessary things, such as a million books; a box of assorted cables giving us the ability to connect any computer to any printer going back to, my guess is, 1976; and two cats. Yes, they came with us. I had suggested otherwise, but I was out-voted. Apparently the cats also have a say.

However, the first opinion of the little mites was that they hated the new place. Their immediate reaction was to run out the door and try to make their way back to the old place, just like in those old Disney animal odyssey movies. I hated those movies so I stopped them on the stairwell to save us having to go through all that.

The Dirty Dozen after a 1960s Disney rewrite.

So, while they hid, we piled up the boxes and worked out where everything should go. Where do you put a box of 40 years worth of printer cables? Especially as our printers are on the wifi now, so printer cables would seem to be obsolete. Still, supposing we suddenly had to connect a 1978 model DEC PDP-11 to a Mannesmann Tally dot-matrix printer from 1981? How do you propose we do that without a box of assorted printer cables? You guys haven’t thought this through.

It took 2 days to move our stuff and afterwards we were in that “just moved” state where you can’t find anything you need. There are efficient people who plan their packing and have all the essential stuff to hand once they’ve moved. Apparently. But who wants to meet those people? It’s quite frustrating knowing that in one of these boxes is the cutlery we need to eat our dinner; another box contains the pans required to cook that dinner. We couldn’t even find the cats who we need to complain to us whilst we try to eat. Then you start finding things and you move to that stage where you have almost the right thing, but not quite. After a few days of boiling water in a frying pan and eating everything with paper towels, you find a knife which gets used to do everything: stir coffee, screw together shelves, write notes.

Cubist Home.

Eventually, a sort of normality takes place. You have most of what you need, but missing a could of bare essentials, plus you have located some odd things that you may never need. You might not have a corkscrew, but you have the strange horse-shoe object someone got you as a present that you’ve never quite known what it does. You can’t staple papers together, but you can, of course, lay your hands on an RS232 cable.

Even the cats have emerged and decided they like the new place and feel confident enough to constantly mew for food as is their normal state. The number of boxes dwindles. Shelves appear and are filled with far too many books. Other furniture is assembled and soon the metaphorical welcome mat is dug out of the last box and placed before the door.

A new home is made. Everything has a place, even if it’s on the floor in the storage room. The cats mew their contentment by asking for more food. Being ignored, they trot off to play with their new toy, a mouse cable for a Babbage Difference Engine. We’re pretty sure we won’t be needing that anymore.

Some cable.

Operating Conditions

I've just installed an old computer from scratch. It's not difficult these days. I remember when it was, but nowadays, you throw in a DVD or what-have-you, leave it for a surprising amount of time and then fill in the time, place and inside leg measurement, then have it reboot two dozen times and it's away. But I have 2 things that are bugging me and need to vent about:

1) Virus scanner – whilst I appreciate the keenness, I'm pretty certain my computer hasn't got a virus unless you consider Windows itself a form of virus, which is arguable, so you don't need to jump in and insist on a full system scan right off the bat. At least wait until I've connected to my first Russian porn site, please.

2) Windows/Toshiba – I've installed nothing but the operating system and whatever stuff you think I might need and bundled with it, I've installed nothing extra or copied any of my own stuff to it, how come the virus scanner has to look through 180,000 files. That seems an unnecessarily huge number. I'm pretty sure the installation would take less time and the computer would run faster with a lot less than that. I'm pretty sure there's some unnecessary stuff in there. That pop-up that shows me the latest Toshiba products. I'm sure I don’t need that. That stupid block on the side with an AOL button and a 'shopping guide!' Not necessary for my daily existence, thank you. Yes, I think a bit of weeding might make the whole thing a much better experience on all fronts. 180,000 files! Oh yeah, and not one of them has a virus.

Vent over, you can all go about your business.

Battle with a Boots self-service checkout.

Picture via the awesome http://www.visitbridgend.org.uk

Boots self-service checkout: "Please place scanned item in the bags provided."

*Us struggling to open cheap plastic bag*

Boots self-service checkout: "Please place scanned item in the bags provided."

*Us struggling to open cheap plastic bag*

Boots self-service checkout: "Please place scanned item in the bags provided."

*Finally succeeding to open cheap plastic bag and put the item in it.*

Boots self-service checkout: "Unexpected item in bagging area."

Artificial intelligence it ain’t.

Friends who know friends who know friends

I recently reached 500 friends on facebook. Which is quite amazing because in real life I only really know 12 people. This is why social media is, ironically, great for the social mediocre. Facebook really is the Jesus of friends. Bring your few meagre scraps of people you haven't alienated through thinking before joking or expressing your extremist views on cats and facebook-jesus will turn them into a multitude. You can befriend the five thousand.

Even I with my brag-worthy half-a-grand of friends, stull suffer from the feeling that I have fewer friends than most of my other friends. Although suffer is a strong word. I actually think the 12 people I really do know is quite a lot of responsibility. But I do have the sense that everyone else knows more people. And that is probably true according to this article in the New York Times...

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/friends-you-can-count-on/

What this article basically says is that feelings of inadequacy are just an anomaly of statistics. And that's not just on facebook, but in other areas too. Buck up, stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's all just a statistical illusion. And in fact, statistics has just proved you are way superior than most other people. Very few people indeed have actually made it to the end of this blog post.

Netherlands: City Part Tin Can Tower

The Netherlands is a country that is continuously in danger of being engulfed in a sea of red tape. They erect great dykes to keep this sea back called Stadsdeelkantoren. This means "Local Council Offices" or, literally, "City Part Tin Can Tower" or "Town Slice Side Ears." It depends how you divide it. There is a story that the "kantoor" part of the name is a contraction of "kan niet, hoor" (Trans: "NOT possible").

These are places where forms are filled in to get permission to fill in further forms; Where a receipt for a document is longer than the original document; Where anything outside of predefined norms is not possible or at the very least, the responsibility of some other vague department that you may never get in contact with.

This departmentalising (or, more accurately, compartmentalising) can be quite extreme. My mission to the local Statsdeelkantoor today was show them my birth certificate. This was to show them that I am not merely alive (that has been proven already) but that I was born and, I guess, not created in a factory or laboratory. (Although if I had the correct paperwork for that, it would be fine.)

Unrelated elephant

This is not a normal procedure, it would seem. This is evident by a few facts. Firstly, although I had a letter confirming the appointment, it wasn't in the receptionist's system. In most organisations this would mean a screw up with the system. But the receptionist, after a few moments of perplexed searching, realised that it meant it fell outside of the norm. She took me to the next level of people. The ones who deal with most of the people who come through their doors clutching pieces of paper. It was in their system, but they had no idea what to do about it. A couple of them discussed if for a few moments. In the end, they had to take me to a third level. Now, for me, none of this was a big issue. It meant I had to wait a few minutes for someone with the authority to work around the system to become free, but they do seem to have created extra work for themselves. Plus, given 3 members of their staff some moments of confusion. But, then again, these anomalies might be what keeps them going.

In think it's all part of bigger job creation scheme. The longer it takes to process anyone, the more people are needed. Proof of this scheme is shown by the entrance and exit doors. They are automatic. Great. Except that a security guard sat behind a computer has to press a button to approve it each time before they open. So they are not, in effect, automatic at all.

Five stages of being drink on the internet

from uncyclopedia.wikia.com

1. Twipsy
2. Google-Eyed
3. Best Friends Reunited
4. Off Your Facebook
5. Vomeo

Travel: France 2/7/09: An Indifferent Pastis

There are two languages on board the newly combined KLM - Air France flights from the Netherlands to France. Dutch and English. Dutch and English. No French. You'd think planes going to and from a country would include the language of that country; especially when that country is notorious for its people often not wanting to speak other languages. It seemed very strange. Especially as the Dutch generally have such a great grasp of English and are happy to show off their linguistic skills. It would have made more sense for the languages used to have been French and English.

However, in my experience, English is not as poorly spoken in France as we are lead to believe. And we are lead to believe this by the French themselves. Whist working on an international helpdesk, on several occasions I have explained, in a mixture of my poor French and English, to someone who was demanding a French speaker that they can either wait a while to be called back by one or try to explain their problem in English. They would quite often proceed to explain how they would try to make themselves understood in what was actually very good English. It seems to reinforce the maxim that if at first a foreigner does not understand you, talk louder until they give in and admit they do speak English.

We flew to Bordeaux which turns out to be a mini hub in terms of French air traffic and we had slightly convoluted travel plans. We had a long wait for a hire car due to demand being high and people on hand to help being low. Our car turned out to have an oil-light that had a preference for glowing brightly despite the car having more oil than a Saudi desert.


It was invigorating to be back on French roads. The French drive like all existence is merde and it is better to go out with a sudden collision on a hairpin bend than to fade away in some forgotten bar over an indifferent pastis. However, they sit in bars like all existence is merde and it is better to fade away agonising over an anguished pastis than to take to the road in search of instant release.

To be doubly sure of getting to where we were going, I not only had my parents' directions but some that Google had given us. Like its other sought-after equations, Google's direction algorithm is a complete mystery. Even when presented with the results, it's almost impossible to work out how it got there. It gets you from A to B, but it seems that C, D, and E have optimised their towns or paid to somehow appear on the route. Given my parents have driven this way a few times and for part of the year live in this area, we decided to trust them over some Californian computer cluster. The day will come when we trust Californian computer clusters more than our parents. But most of us are not there yet.

We arrived at my parents' holiday farm in time to feed garbage to the recently shorn sheep. They love left-over vegetable peelings, banana skins and yesterday's bread. When every other thing you eat is grass, you'd be the same way too.

19/9/08: Travel – London Day 2

Because it was one of those classy hotels with foreign staff, we got a free newspaper. I don't remember which one, but as I remember being in a good mood, it was certainly not the Daily Malice.

I must have been in a good mood as we went shopping. And to prove that even the Gods were smiling down on us that day, as we shopped, we encountered a small camp where some young, attractive things thrust Wii controllers in our hands and commanded that we play a few games of Wii Sports. Not only that, but, if our fumbling yielded the high score of the day, we would win a Wii of our own. And because Odin was very pleased with the shelves he'd made that day, we did get high scores. However, this was quite early morning, long before lunching kids came by and no doubt trampled all over our high scores. Tsk, kids today. Trashing their elders and betters' computer game scores. When I was a young'un... oh, yeah, I used to do the same.

We had lunch at "Eat," one of those mid-market sandwich chains. The mildly pretentious order of a name made me yearn for a bar called "Drink!" an escort service called "Girls!" and an Irish Brothel called, "Feck!"

Eat's wares were very good and reminded me how great the competition is for sandwiches in London. People don't think of the sandwich as a typical London food, but sandwich places probably outnumber all other types of eatery. I have no statistics to back up this claim, but this is a blog not an encyclopaedia. If you do demand information to back up what I say, I'll have you know all relevant data is available in the only source I know and trust, More's Uncyclopaedia.

The area of our hotel is one where Japanese restaurants are locked in some kind of monumental battle. Each restaurant tries to out-psych the other by having a name that sounds most like a martial art. Nobu, Roka, Umu, Zuma. Actually, that makes no sense as, given my ignorance, most Japanese words sound like a martial art. Sushi. Teriyaki. Sake. Any one of these would beat me in a fight. I can see the proponents standing before me taking poses and naming them. "Raw Fish Roll." "Soy Sauce Cow." "Liquid Alcohol Rice."

The reason we were in London this weekend was for a wedding. Friends and former flatmates of mine were tying the knot after years of living in and around sin (and before that, East Acton).

Many, many moons ago, myself and a young trekkie called Norm joined forces with a couple of lasses who we'd met through improv and moved in together. It is the stuff that makes sitcoms. It also makes dramas. And occasionally horror stories. This was something of all three made into a musical and directed by Richard Curtis and David Lynch. Well, amidst the clutter and fallings in and out, romance bloomed for two of the household. And I don't mean myself and Crash Bandicoot, although me and that guy... we shared some times.

The wedding, like all good weddings, was a chance to meet up with people you hadn't seen for millennia. In fact many of people at the wedding I knew, it was almost like wedding in my own family.

Mitsubishi. Sanyo. Honda. "Off-Road Bike." "Wide-Screen, Surround-Sound Display." "Four-Door Family Hatchback."

I'd met Norm through a guy called Dave who ran something not unlike facebook, but way before that. This was before the web. Possibly even before the internet. As I recall it, messages were carried by young street urchins for a shilling a packet. Well, Dave started one of the longest-running internet communities on a thing called Mono. It was one of the first places I let stuff I'd written leak out. The fact that the crazy people there liked it helped me form the belief I'm not bad at it and kept me from being the greatest IT consultant the world has ever seen.

Back at the wedding, there was great food, cake, antipodean balloon artists, many, many old friends and a band that played covers. (Although they played them a lot more faithfully than I like my covers. To me covers, should be ironic or played in a completely different style to the original. But then, I'm wrong on quite a few things.) Cath and I hung out with those who refused to leave until the band had to pack up and the inflatable dingos started deflating.

Sayonara. "One Hand Wave."

Microsoft Mouse Instructions

These instructions came with a Microsoft mouse. I love their simplicity and beautifully illustrated statement of the bleeding obvious.

Sex and the Nerd

Now we all know nothing sells things like sex. It is the natural choice for advertising anything phallic (such as chocolate bars) or compensatory (such as cars or alcohol and indeed chocolate bars). But there really is no excuse to use it for IT recruitment. But that is definitely a trend I'm seeing in the Netherlands in the last couple of years, and no doubt world-wide.
This is a case in point for Peak IT, a name which in itself is practically a single entendre. The girl depicted looks unlike any programmer or system administrator I ever met. Most people doing such jobs are men, so the ad must be saying "this is what you could get if you let us find you an IT job." Because it ain't saying, "this is what most of our clients look like." At its most accurate, the statement would be, "this is what the PA to the CEO of the company you work in the basement for looks like. If you're lucky, you might get to install something on her computer, but she'll leave the room as soon as you enter it. Placing your memory stick in her laptop will never be anything more than innuendo."

This ad is for a careers event and features someone far too young to be wearing that much makeup and with a strangely distant look in her eye, giving the impression not of IT or other office work, but of child prostitution.

Even the company I work for has started a campaign to recruit young graduates featuring a "sample" of employees looking far more attractive than anyone I've seen working there. It's only going to lead to disappointment, resentment, frustration and ultimately to someone going postal one day. Fortunately the people with guns in this world are not IT professionals. People with guns work in the illegal drugs or sex industry where the money's even better and ironically it's not too difficult to score yourself a teenage girl wearing far too much make-up and a vacant stare.

OuterCyperspace

In case people think I have lost touch with the youth, I have not. I'm right behind them. I have my myspace space, I have my Hyves account, and I even have an avatar on Second Life.

For those of you who don't know hyves, it's a social networking thing like myspace, except without the spam and the sex. It's quite popular in the Netherlands, possibly more so than myspace. One difference is that in myspace most of your 'friends' are people you don't know: bands who want to look popular, hot chicks who want to sell you t-shirts and hot chicks who want you to sign up to their web site to see their titties. On Hyves pretty much all of your 'friends' are people you know. Consequently I have very few friends on Hyves compared to myspace. I always feel relatively popular on myspace. Although not compared to the hot chicks with t-shirts or tittie-sites who have thousands and thousands of friends: alot of whom are other hot chicks with tittie-sites.

It is on Second Life that I feel I have achieved more. Second Life for those of you still very much concerned with the first one is a 3D-representation of the real world where you control an 'avatar' or human graphic and explore the world. It's very much like the real modern world in that it's chock full of advertising, most of the places seem to be concerned with getting money from you and when you really want to go and do something it's frustratingly slow. I am, however, proud that in my short time in this alternative advertising reality I have managed to make money. Real money, because there is an exchange rate between First Life US Dollars and Second Life Linden Dollars that you spend on things like face-lifts and property in Second Life. (It is currently 250 Linden Dollars to 1 US Dollar.) I have earned, for ten minutes dancing, 3 Linden Dollars. It may not sound like much, but it's a lot of money to be paid for dancing when you're a short, over-weight man with a beard.

The trouble now is to find something that costs as little as 3 Linden Dollars to spend it on.

Wii all play together

Wii, the latest computer game sensation promises to go supermassivenova, I am sure. It's got a lot going for it. The name, which is pronounced "wee" has all the amusing connotations in English, Scottish, French, etc which means a lot of people are talking about it and easily remember the name. Then there is the interactive portion. Instead of using the control stick like a buttony-joystick thing as with all the other game stations, you use it exactly like the object it imitates. Thus, when you play tennis, you hold it and swing it like a tennis racquet. No doubt there will be a cricket game where you hold it like a cricket bat. There have already been a whole load of Wii-related accidents, often caused by things like 4 people playing mixed doubles tennis in a room the size of a table-tennis table and with resultant smacks in the head, etc with the controller. This will only increase as the number and diversity of games increases.

Five Wii games I would like to see all having new uses for the stick:

1. Wii Rugby (or American football) where the stick is used as the ball.
2. Wii Hide and Seek.
3. Wii Wee-Wee Wizard.
4. Wii Monkey Spanker.
5. Wii Gay Porn Star.

Is Googling the new Stalking?

Chances are, you've been googled very recently. I have recently discovered it is the new way to find out about your friends. It's cheaper than hiring a private detective, more socially acceptable than stalking and much, much easier than phone tapping.

I have a friend who seems to think the more times you are mentioned on the internet the more you exist. Alas this is merely an indication of the amount of spare time you have and how prepared you are to use it to do things on the web. Having your own website helps.

What also helps to be found is having an unusual name. If your name is Robert Smith, you will get lost in amongst all of the other Robert Smiths in the world, not to mention all of the many sites dedicated to the lead singer of The Cure.

However, if your name is Hazibob Mansolatournicapopolous, you can be pretty sure there are less people with that name, but you can also be sure people will often spell it wrong, so people may not find all the references to you.

Another secret I have realised is to post articles, pictures or trivia about famous people that internet users are obsessed with (and believe me, most of them are obsessed with something). If you post a picture of Jean-Luc Picard you painted or a song about Star Wars to the tune of a rock classic, this will get propagated around the net by a process known as Spodmosis and very soon one search for your name reveals hundreds of sites mentioning you.

It also helps a great deal if you are famous in the real world or at least have some sort of role (such as performer, writer, CEO or guru) that will mean you are mentioned by other people.

Thus the most prevalent person on the web that I know personally is Claartje van Swaaij who has everything: her own web site (www.claartjevanswaaij.com), the unusual name, she performs, she posts frequently and she paints lots of pictures of Jim Carrey.

My other friend Sarah Smith, who has great difficulties with computers, is unemployed, rarely goes out and doesn't paint or watch TV seems to not exist on the Internet at all. In fact I cannot be sure I didn't just make her up. Sorry Sarah.