Down to the Local for a few beers. I gave Lauren a call and headed over for a couple of mean vodkas (Stoli Vanil and Coke, Stoli Vanil and Sprite - yummy) with her and Brad. Then we all jump into Lauren's car and head up to the Vault for more drinking and dancing. Woohoo!!

7 Nov

Season Premiere of The X-Files.

8 Nov

Beers and dinner at Houston's with Joel, followed by a beer at his hotel. And then I come home to do more work on these pages :-)

Until John rings and says "Let's go to The Chamber." Since I haven't been to HexensNacht since it's been at the Chamber, and John has never been to HexensNacht at all, I decide to go, at least to say hi to Sara (and all the others, too). So I pick John up at 11:45pm and over we head.

It's a quiet night, but we do catch up with Lauren, Brad of the purple hair, Jesse, Amanda, Brad of the red hair, Christian, Skippy Will, Ryan, Johnny, and an assortment of others. John beats me (barely) at two game of pool, and we head home so that some sleep is had before work.

10 Nov

Local with Jesse, Amanda, Brad, Lauren, Christian, Ezra, Jen. Followed by a jaunt up to MJQ for bouncing, spinnning and further merriment.

My enjoyment of the night progressed downhill from about 2:30, as the DJ played more stuff that I don't consider traditional Britpop, and seemed unlikely to play any of my requests.

12 Nov

Mexicans Night

Ouch. What a night. Jesse, Lauren and I introduce the joys of Mexicans to John, Eric, Bria, Amanda, Ron, Jen. We also watch "Romeo and Juliet" and "Full Metal Jacket" and play some Mechwarrior 3.

Unfortunately, I don't last quite as long as everyone else, as Morpheus claims me (courtesy of Dionysus and a suicide roll-off). From what I understand, festivities continued and a great night was had by all.

13 Nov

Recovery day...

Not much done today. A little reading. John and I went for a feed a Waffle House and then I proceeded to play on the computer with the old Commodore 64 emulators. Watched some Avengers episodes. John came over again later and we watched MadTV and Saturday Night Live. All in all a very slow day.

Aparently, Secret Room at Fusion was cancelled, so we didn't miss much.

14 Nov

Another sleepy day. I was planning on finishing my Christmas shopping today, but after getting caught up in chores around the apartment, and continuing reading "Rousseau and Revolution" (History of Civilization, Volume 10) and sorting out bills, I lost interest in spending money today.

Well, that's not entirely true. I have a renewal notice for my subscription to Nature (1 Yr $159, 2 Yr $275), but it's a little early, as my subs don't expire until May next year. However, these are special rates, so I may just sign up for them.

But in my Book of the Month Club catalogue this month is something that I absolutely would love to own. But is rather expensive. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. The entire 20 volume set, photoreduced into a single volume at nine original pages to one page. For $250. Oh how I want this.

And the Folio Society is offering The Oxford History of the British Empire at $125 (four volumes, normally $180). But I shall resist.

Supper at Intermezzo with Bria. This is cool. Bria is happy.

16 Nov

Dinner and a beer at the Local. Just a quiet one.

17 Nov

Wednesday night would normally be my Local and MJQ night, but I am on call, so I restrict myself to dinner and a couple of beers at the Local. It turns out that tonight is the first Trivia night.

Trivia night is a competition wherein you get into groups (or go it alone) and between songs a trivia question is asked. You write your answer along with a score you want to get for that answer (1, 3, 5 - you get three questions per set, one question you get 1 point for, one you get 3 points for, etc, but you decide how to score as you get each question) and submit your answer before the end of the song.

At the end of the game, each team's total is calculated and the winners get a bar tab. Woohoo!!

Anyways, I join Tim & Susan's team (which sometimes includes Wiki (sp?) but since she's bouncing between teams, it's a little uncertain), The Pap Smears, and we come third - a $25 bar tab. I'm not entirely sure of how many people are on our team, but I end up with $5 towards my tab, so I'm not complaining.

18 Nov

Dinner and a movie with Lindsay

Lindsay and I go for dinner at YaYa's in Decatur. YaYa's is a cajun/creole restaurant. I have the grilled blackened catfish, which also comes with jambalaya.

The catfish is a fairly tasteless white fish. The flavours come from the blackening seasonings. The jambalaya is a bit of a disappointment - too much tomato flavour overpowering the other ingredients.

After dinner we go to sea "The Bone Collector." This turns out to be an interesting film. There is quite a bit of predictibility, and the end is pure Hollywood mush, but overall the film is entertaining.

19 Nov

Durran & Christian's 1st Annual Night of Debauchery

In order to celebrate Durran's and Christian's birthdays, Atlanta's premiere strip club (since the closure of The Gold Room), The Cheetah, is invaded by a troop of gothy types.

Granted, we're not dressed particularly gothy, but there's this attitude, you know... :-)

Anyway, the group consists of: Durran, Christian, me, Stuart, Lauren, Erika, Jesse, Amanda, Jen, Russ, David, Frank, Mary, Marc and his girlfriend, David's brother-in-law, a friend of Christian's whose name I've forgotten (sorry). There may have been others.

The Cheetah is quite an experience. Girls with large breasts, girls with small breasts; girls with plastic breasts, girls with real breasts; girls that can lift their breasts, independently of the other, by muscle control alone (now that was bizarre). But I think even more entertaining than the girls on occassion are the men - staring, wide-eyed, as if they'd never seen a naked woman before. Hilarious.

We get a couple of table dances; Durran gets a lap dance (or two - hmm, same girl both times - or was that three times); Marc gets a lap dance for his girlfriend (sorry - I've forgotten her name). Amanda and I have a chat about the merits of various of the dancers. Mary plays with my nipple rings (through my shirt).

All in all, a most entertaining evening.

20 Nov

Today is spent pretty much in a sleepy haze. I play on the net, play some Mechwarrior 3, and generally just slack off.

John came round in the evening; we ate pizza, played chess (I won, woohoo!), watched TV. Nothing too exciting really.

21 Nov

Another slack day. I was going to finish my Christmas shopping, but once again that failed to happen. Das Ich were supposed to be playing at The Earl in East Atlanta, but their tour vehicle broke down in Louisiana so they didn't make it. I put together a new bookshelf and spent the rest of the day reading and playing Mechwarrior 3, and watching quality Fox television (The Simpsons, Futurama, The X-Files) was the order of the evening.

22 Nov

Back to work. In the evening I updated my web pages. Yay me.

23 Nov

Off to the Local for dinner and beer tonight. Two new books had arrived in the mail today - The Oxford Thesaurus (bound in leather, with gold accents, and printed on archive-quality paper) and Albet Einstein's "The Meaning of Relativity", similarly encased.

24 Nov

Boy oh boy oh boy. What a night.

It all started at 7:30, when I headed up to the Local to have dinner, play Trivia, and have a few beers before the main events of the evening. John brought along a couple of his friends from work, and we played under the name "Hot Clermont Action Team." This name got a good round of support, and many people told us it was the best team name of the night.

By the end of the first half of the game, Vanessa had turned up and we were in 5th place. Myra turned up soon after this point, and the merriment continued. By the end of the game, we were in 2nd place, had won a $35 bar tab, and Mary had also turned up. All in all, a very successful trivia night. But this was only the beginning.

Around 11pm, we went across the road to the Clermont, where we were wait on by the Queen of the Clermont, herself - Blondie. A round of Graveyards went down (aww yeah!) and the rest of our people started to turn up - Lauren, Sherrod & Sherrod's boy, Christian & Durran, Jill & Kevin.

After a couple more rounds of the demon shots, we made our way over to MJQ for the best in Britpop. Yet more of our posse was encountered here, including Brad and Shane. After an hour or so straight of bouncing and spinning and generally having a great dance workout, I was rather splatted. But we stayed on, and after meeting a few new people (hi Jennifer), and having a few more excursions to the dance floor, it was time to go home.

Well, almost. Brad, Jen, Lauren and I went back to Lauren's place and spent the next couple of hours being silly. Being silly is good. We all crashed about 6ish. I awoke around 8:30, decided that sleeping across the end of Lauren's bed was a little uncomfortable, and so I got up and went home.

25 Nov

Thanksgiving Day

Well, as a result of last night's festivities, I slept until about 3pm. I got up, had a shower, and went over to Arvis' for Thanksgiving Dinner. This was an excellent meal. Afterwards I went home and watched Friends, Frasier, and played on the net. I might go to the Chamber tonight - if Lauren calls me back.

As it happens, Lauren called and she wasn't up to going to the Chamber, so I went over to her place and we watched "The Lost Highway".

26 Nov

And the giving of thanks continues...

Another big sleep-in (although not as monumental as yesterday's) and it's off to Paula's for another Thanksgiving feast. As is typical with Paula's gatherings, I am the first to arrive, so we sit down to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Dinner was supposed to be served around 3:30, but for one reason or another, the other guests have been delayed, so we don't eat until much later. That's okay, because there is stuff to drink and another movie - South Park - to watch.

The South Park movie turns out to be better than I expected - it is irreverent, offensive and (of course) profane; but the content is still hilarious.

The other Givers of Thanks (Anne and Christian, Amber, Scott, Jason & some of his friends) arrive and dinner is served. The food is superb and I restock my plate multiple times - hey, the food is free and good!

Later that night, Amber and I head up to the Vault. This turns out to be a rocking good night. It's a little slow when we get there, but the crowd picks up.

Among the other Vault-goers are Lauren (of course), Jen (who can't remember anything from the other night - not even being carried up the stairs to Lauren's apartment), Purple Brad, Christian (who brought a couple of friends - Carol and Roseanne(??)), the cute girl who's always dancing at MJQ, Erica, Amanda and two of her friends (who's names I have already forgotten - bad me), Skippy Will, Mary, Kary (who was promoting a joint Pandora's Box/Nocturnia event on the 15 of December - this is a Wednesday, so it's going to clash with MJQ - bad!).

Anyway, there was drinking; there was dancing; there was much joyousness. After we got kicked out at 4am, Lauren and boy, Amanda and her buddies, Will and I all charged up to Waffle House for a feed before heading home to our respective beds. An action-packed evening come to an end.

27 Nov

After another sleep-in, I spent this afternoon doing some work on my web pages, finding links, writing up the New Orleans Halloween adventure, and generally playing on the web, looking for interesting things.

Around 9pm I headed over the Local for a bite to eat and a beer, and a had a discussion with Matt about quantum computing and many-universe theories. At about 11:30 I left the pub and headed up to the Vault.

Scads of people turn up to the Vault - at least to the front room where Durran is DJing. The main room is kind of slow, and not really all that exciting. The DJ there is playing some awful mixes and refuses to play songs that would normally fall under the mantle of Britpop, which is allegedly the theme. Oh well.

Around 2:30 I head back to Lauren's place to watch a video. After much discussion over the merits of different films in Lauren's collection, we pick Face Off (Cage and Travolta), which I had not seen before. This is a really cool film. And then I head home for some sleep a bit before six.

Here's a photo of me, Lauren and Brad, courtesy of Myra.

28 Nov

Checked the results of this weekend's general election in NZ. It appears that New Zealand is to be governed by a coalition of the Labour Party (led by Helen Clark) and the Alliance (led by Jim Anderton). I can't see any real major changes happening in the NZ economy, but hey, I've been wrong before.

30 Nov

Tonight I went up to The Local (per usual) for dinner and a beer, and to discuss with Tim and Amber how we want to go about putting together a web page for The Local. This is sorted fairly quickly. They will plan and design the page and I will write it; no worries.

Bria turned up and we had a nifty little chat about differences in female bioloogy between Western society and in hunter-gatherer cultures. Very interesting subject, and I also learned that the reason a human baby's skull is soft is so it can compress and slide slightly so that the head can pass through the mother's pelvic area. Apparently, homo sapiens is the only species where the infant's head is bigger than the mother's pevlvis. Nasty creatures, eh?

Then John and Lauren turned up and we continue to have rocking good conversations. Bria introduced her book on sexual deviancies, which provided much entertaining discussion (some very extreme foot and shoe fetishes, and spontaneous masturbation, no less).

Last to arrive were Durran and Christian.

At a later time than I really intended, I headed off home to bed. Yay bed.

By the way, today was cold. When I was getting up, the radio people said it was 32F. That's 0C. Or 278K. However you say it, it's too cold for my liking.