cliche

Oh no, that's just too much:

Dead guy right now called Gerald Stiff.

Takes all the fun out of it when they make it that easy..

Turns out his occupation was 'beaterman'!

there's a Dire Straits song in there somewhere..

I'm suffering from industrial diarrhea: work is giving me the shits.

Oww! I feeel... dead

In celebrity name-alike news: James Brown is dead!

That wife-beating sweat machine, famous for such poignant lyrics as "Good God!", "Huhh!", and "I don't know karate but I know ka-razy", died of respiratory failure.

He'd also recently suffered a fractured neck of his left femur. Possibly from doing too many splits on stage.

my karma ran over my dogma

One of the main problems with my job (apart from the stultifying mundaneness) was driven home to me today.

After spending quite a lot of time over several days sorting out the details of a particular death certificate: getting the original returned & amended, finding the correct address, verifying details, placating agitated funeral directors, etc (and doing several dodgy things with the databases that aren't strictly allowed but that with any luck won't be noticed..), I
finally got the thing straight and sent off. At no extra charge to funeral director or bereaved.

What occurred to me, as the funeral director was effusively thanking me and telling me I'd made an old woman happy (the wife of the deceased)(which I doubt much since part of the problem was her advanced dementia and inability to remember anything coherently for long) and that they appreciated it too, was (sorry about theses sentences - they make sense in
*my* head), that no matter how good a job I do, how many extra miles I go, or paper-cuts I sustain in the course of my duties, my work *never* makes anyone happy. The best I can hope for is making a bad time slightly less awful.

Mine is a job of minimising pain, reducing negativity. Never actually increasing happiness.

easier to call them to dinner..

Strangest detail of a deceased today: the woman who had three children all called Pasquale.
There was an elder sibling called Francoise, but after that misfire she obviously hit upon the name that fits all.

Still, it doesn't quite top the previous record of having 5 children named Jacques..

name your pests

Apparently, according to one of my weirdo workmates, all ants are called Lucy and all cockroaches are called Neville.

I don't know if this is going to make it harder or easier to kill the little buggers:

"Die Neville! You disease carrying swine!"
etc..

fun with the deceased

*Best* occupation for a long time:

Mulder.

I think they meant to put 'moulder' but I like that one better. I wonder what sort of things are involved in that job? Formulating wild conspiracy theories, investigating weird things and hanging out with beautifulredheads...

Sounds like a hellish job.

worship the units?

From BeliefNet (who knew such a thing existed?):

The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However, even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all sharedby this faith, or vice versa.

Belief-O-Matic then lists another 26 faiths in the order of how much they have in common with your professed beliefs. The higher a faith appears onthis list, the more closely it aligns with your thinking.

Rankings:

1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Secular Humanism (99%)
3. Liberal Quakers (84%)
4. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (79%)
5. Nontheist (70%)
6. Neo-Pagan (69%)
7. Theravada Buddhism (69%)
8. New Age (57%)
9. Reform Judaism (54%)
10. Taoism (52%)
11. Bahá'í Faith (49%)
12. Mahayana Buddhism (48%)
13. Orthodox Quaker (44%)
14. New Thought (44%)
15. Scientology (43%)
16. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (42%)
17. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (41%)
18. Sikhism (39%)
19. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (31%)
20. Jainism (27%)
21. Eastern Orthodox (22%)
22. Islam (22%)
23. Orthodox Judaism (22%)
24. Roman Catholic (22%)
25. Hinduism (19%)
26. Seventh Day Adventist (18%)
27. Jehovah's Witness (16%)

So there you go. I'm a Unitarian. I've inhumed quite a few of them but I never knew what the biz was before now.

I still think it's all just a bit of a fantasy..

Props to Krimsonlake.

soul fire

Top of the list of awesome bands/performers I've missed this year: Lee "Scratch" Perry.

I'm kicking myself so hard.

I didn't even know he was down this way until Eroica called me from the gig in Christchurch the other weekend: she just held the phone up so I could get a wee taste of the Upsetter, live.

It wasn't enough.

And, dammit, his New Zealand dates were after his Australian ones so I'd already lost my chance.

You'd think, living in Sydney where all the bands play, I'd manage to get out and see more. But no: so far this year I've managed to miss Moving Units, Interpol, Spoon, Bo Diddley, Belle and Sebastian, Cat Power, Nick Cave, etc-farking-cetera.

The bugger about it is that I don't see much change in the near future due to extreme penury...

City-living is arse if you're not into the whole sell-your-soul-to-the-rat-race thing. Worst of both worlds: proximity to all the cool shit but no resources to experience them, too far away from the quiet areas to get to them in your meagre free-time.

I need to go home.

RIP Frankenstein

Who knew Frankenstein's bride was called Vera?

Or that they got married in Paris?
Ahh, how romantic: I can just see them strolling through the Arc de Triomphe, spring sunlight glinting off the bolt in his neck..