Weird
There’s a little bit of the Devil in (almost) everything you buy
January 16th, 2011 Posted 2:04 am
Before I get into the significance behind the title of this post, firstly I must explain an encounter I had with a customer at work about 18 months ago.
One of the joys of working in a customer contact environment is that you get to talk to some interesting, bizarre, and often downright crazy people. It’s a true eye-opener into how different people can be; one call might be from a pleasant old lady who tells you her life story, and the next caller might be a complete madman who yells and swears at you.
Probably the most perplexing, and to be quite honest, frightening, of all customers I’ve ever dealt with was a middle-aged woman I spoke to when I worked in London. She didn’t speak English very well, and she called with a complaint about an order that she’d just received. Our conversation went something like this:
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Mule, Neil, Rince and Sicker went for a Bath
December 22nd, 2010 Posted 11:12 pm
I was chatting to my mate Sam at lunchtime today about the way we abbreviate people’s names, and it really left me thinking: why is it that we chop the last half off people’s names, and only ever shorten them to the first half?
For example: Samuel. Why do we call him Sam for short, but never Muel?
And my own name, Daniel. Why Dan, but never Niel?
Why Flo, and not Rence?
Why Jess, and not Sica?
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Tags: abbreviations, names, wordplay
Posted in Blog, Weird
Skyscraper (Muffins Are Bad)
April 2nd, 2010 Posted 3:55 pm
In August of last year I took a trip to Amsterdam for a long weekend:
I ate a muffin and I saw some pretty colours:
Then I floated back to my hostel room, laid my exploding head down on my fluffy white cloud, and wrote the following:
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Tags: amsterdam, drugs, europe, muffins, skyscraper, travelling
Posted in Blog, Travel, Weird
Tales from Hypnagogia
February 21st, 2010 Posted 12:51 am
Hypnagogia
noun
a term for the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, characterized by dreamlike auditory, visual, or tactile sensations when half-awake.
Many years ago, I remember waking up one morning, checking the time on my phone, and being surprised to see six weird, random words on the screen which I must have written as a note while I was asleep: “I need to talk to Gentor.”
What on earth…? It made no sense at all. I didn’t know anyone or anything called Gentor and I certainly didn’t want to speak to him/her/it. Eventually I summoned a vague memory of hearing this sentence in my head as I was trying to fall asleep the previous night, and for whatever reason I obviously must have woken up and recorded the words onto my phone.
Over the following few weeks I did some research and found that this was caused by a phenomenon known as the hypnagogic state. This is the watery, dreamlike state of consciousness your mind turns to as you are in the process of falling asleep, but not quite fully asleep just yet. During this process you may experience the randomest of images, shapes, colours, sounds, sensastions, hallucinations, or seemingly in my case, words, filtering through into the half-conscious eye of your mind – not quite with the “fullness” experienced from an actual dream, but moreso in brief bursts, and often more lucid and memorable.
Anyway, recently I’ve noticed these hypnagogic words have been coming to me two or three times a week, so over the past two months I’ve written down every one that my mind has graced me with! I’ve literally been going to bed at night, closing my eyes, drifting off, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere I’ll be hit by this short, whacked-out, extremely random sentence or question that makes barely any sense at all, sometimes even including completely made-up words that have no meaning whatsoever. I wake up and write them down as soon as this happens – and now, for your enoyment, transcribed below is this unpredictable and peculiar insight into my subconscious night-time mentality:
I first had a chicken when I was twelve.
They get all desperate to find out.
You don’t want to suit me up to be a bear?
In the process of renewing and travelling, did you go travelling?
