Doom, Gloom, Dead Drives and Dogging

If I hadn't been woken at 4AM this morning, I might have posted a cartoon today. I was already having a fitful sleep. Late last night, I'd been trying to teach myself how to create a 3D model of a minor celebrity (for the quite innocent purpose of voodoo) and failing miserably. I went to bed and dreamt about polygons until I was woken by a tick tick tick whrrrr sound coming from my office/work den/the Well of Lost Souls. I followed the sound until I discovered my PC, which had woken itself in the night. One of the hard drives was having a fit: drive heads banging their way destructively through my files and motors wheezing their last. The bloody thing had failed, leaving me wide awake and wondering what the hell I could do. What was on the drive? Was it work? Was it my huge collection of Richard Madeley pictures I've amassed for the purposes of satire? Thankfully, it wasn't work, though it's nearly every bit of software I need to do my work. I really need to buy a new drive but that will have to wait until I get that dreamed-of-job working in telesales, perhaps in some Manchester shithole where I can contemplate leaping from tall buildings every hour of the day. Until then, I'll have to tighten my belt and try to work on with 400Gbs missing from my system. Better news is that my animation is now up at the Film 4 Scenestealers website. I'm also now ranked Number 4 on Google for the phrase 'Burtonwood dogging', so all of you people arriving here looking for details of 'Burtonwood dogging' (and, yes, I'm looking at you in Kidlington, Oxfordshire), let me take this opportunity to tell you how much you disgust me. Oh, I could never say this to your face but isn't the world bad enough without the likes of you going off down secluded country lanes to watch some puny window cleaner banging away at some elephantine play group assistant? Get a hobby! Man up! On a more serious note, I'm really sad to see the passing of one of our few comedy greats. I have one of Eric Sykes' novels sitting on my desk (next to the dead hard drive) as I type, as if to remind me of what a comedy machine he was. His eponymous TV series was probably his most mainstream but I think his greatest achievement was in bringing silent comedy back to the masses, making the word 'rhubarb' into byword for laughs. And so, another of the few people I would have liked to have met has gone but Lenny Henry, Graham Norton, David Williams, Matt Lucas, and Miranda Hart continue to get jobs at the BBC. My hard drive is dead. Doggers prevail. Dark days, my friends. Dark days…