Author Archives: Alex Andronov

Jul 26 2007
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Thoughts

The 6 million dollar bottom

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better… stronger… faster

So they rebuilt him, and everyone always goes on about the legs and the eye and stuff, but what about the other bionic bits? Did he have a bionic bottom? It would have meant he spent less time on the toilet therefore getting him back out in the action. Surely that would be useful?

Anyone else have a bionic suggestion?

Jul 24 2007
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Fiction, Short

You know the feeling

You’re sitting there reading this and you know that feeling like there is something on your ankle. Something that feels slightly heavy. Something attached. Like there’s something crawling. Something slimey that’s sliding up and over your ankle bump right now. Something that shouldn’t be there. Something that doesn’t know the difference between your leg and what it usually eats.

Do you know that feeling?

Jul 20 2007
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Fiction, Long, Out to sea, Pirates

Pirates – Out to Sea – Part 3

[This is Part 3 of 4 in Pirates!: Out to Sea. If you’re interested then you may want to read Part 1 and Part 2 first.]

Marshall looked and looked hoping for a sign he was wrong. He was a proud man, a man that loved to be proved right. And yet he was also a man who didn’t want to fall into a trap. He looked, and everything on the ship looked normal, absolutely normal, a normal that could only mean that it was being orchestrated. What should he do? He wanted to see Pete, he wanted to know that old Coalface was behind it. But he couldn’t wait for that. He couldn’t. Marshall’s men had just been on leave, they had been just sleeping with women, eating and drinking. They would be fat and lazy, ready for nothing, not his usual ready team he could rely on. This was the opportune moment to attack. He should have been thinking of that this morning and yet he hadn’t. He never, ever, normally didn’t think of the opposition position. And yet… And yet he’d been fucking distracted by fucking a woman. He’d been sleeping with his wife last night for the first time in a year. The first time they’d made bed together. And just as you’d imagine it had been earache from start to finish.

Marshall was still holding the glass to his eye and by the time he saw Coalface Pete disguised as a Merchant Seaman it almost didn’t matter. Marshall was already onto something else. Already thinking ahead. Already planning what he could do.

Marshall, quickly went downship, onto the main deck and found his first mate. “Killen, I have a headache,” Marshall explained, “you get us back on course”.
Marshall vaguely heard the, “Aye Captain”, behind him as he headed into the Captain’s room.

Once their he found the piece of leather he’d been rather unsuccessfully using as a bookmark. He put it between his teeth. Then he unsheathed his sword and stabbed himself in the leg falling back into his bed. The white linen rapidly started soaking up his blood.

Up on deck things seemed to be going even worse. Killen had ordered the ship to turn portwise and the other ship, unseen by Killen had turned to starboard. Before Killen even knew he was in a battle cannon were firing upon him. The pirates of the pirates kept turning and turning and firing upon Marshall’s ship while Killen was too timid to do anything about it, and through it all Marshall stayed below bleeding.

[What will happen next? Tune in next Friday to find out.]

Jul 18 2007
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Articles

Social Schmocial

The problem with social networks these days is that there’s too much and too little compartmentalising.

I have a lot of friends in several different groups. If I sign up to Facebook or MySpace then all of these groups will very likely collapse into one. Now I’m a lot less bothered about this than I once was but certainly I used to not like my cool music friends to meet my geeky programmer friends. Now my cool music friends are often as not married with kids friends and my geeky programmer friends go to more gigs than I do. Perhaps it’s a function of growing up or time changing things but I worry that on these social networking sites there isn’t a way to compartmentalise in this way.

I wasn’t willing to give up my first love of computers but I did deny it several times. And because people come to things at different times I probably you have had to de-friend my geeky pals to seem hipper had Facebook been around. Something I wouldn’t have wanted to do. I don’t see how you avoid it except to hope that all of your friends in one group use bebo and the others friendster.

But this leads to the second problem. Now that I don’t mind my friends meeting across the groups I want all of my friends to be able to find me easily. The fact that there is a new social network popping up every five seconds seems to be a bit of a barrier to this. It would be great if someone solved this problem but there seems to be almost too much personal self interest in that for that to work.

The final problem of social networks is the de-friending process. People naturally drift apart in the real world. They see less and less of each other and then you kind of stop being friends. Nothing harsh or dramatic it just happens. There is no equivalent on these systems. Here you have to declare that you have stopped being friends. Perhaps it’s less honest but it’s certainly more socially awkward. Perhaps friends you don’t interact for over a year should quietly fall off of the list?

As my feed from this blog gets repeated on facebook I would just like to add that if you are reading this on facebook then let me assure you that I’m not talking about you.

Jul 17 2007
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Admin, Articles

A gamboling problem

I have decided to change a few things around here, for my own sanity. I am on holiday at the moment, which partly drew my attention to the issue but it’s been a more general thing that’s been occurring to me.

I’m writing too much on gamboling I’m pretty sure, and it makes it hard for everyone to keep up. By being that prolific I’m almost certainly reducing the average quality level of my work. Also when there are good things written then I’m pretty sure they can get lost easily.

I will still probably write a couple of times a week on here. But the main thing that I will be attempting to work on are a novel and a script. When I started writing gamboling I wrote that blurb that’s been sitting up in the top left. I have been using gamboling to try and find some focus and to get the number of words I was writing a week up to a higher number. The aim being that I would then be able to harness that to finish at least some of the scripts and novels. Gamboling has been going for 4 years and that hasn’t really happened. So something is going to have to change.

I think this can be good for both of us. I’ll be writing more of the stuff that’s important and you as a reader will have more time to recover between each article and story.

Let me know what you think. As always I really appreciate any comments.

Jul 13 2007
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Fiction, Long, Out to sea, Pirates

Pirates! – Out to Sea – Part 2

[This is Part 2 of 4 in Pirates!: Out to Sea. If you’re interested then you may want to read Part 1 first.]

“Wait. Turn back.” Marshall shouted.

“Back to port?”

“Back starboard. Belay that last order.”

“Yes Sir, Cap’n sir.”

Marshall wanted to turn back to face the other ship. They hadn’t been plotting that direction. But Marshall was intrigued. He had to see what happened. He wanted it to not be a wreck not simply because it would have been a senseless waste of life, but mainly because he would feel compelled to help. Or at least his crew would. He had control over his crew, but a pirate crew were more apt to mutiny than a regular one. It was something he’d seen, something he’d instigated, too often in a crew. And this was one of those divisive situations. Half the crew would hate him for not helping, half the crew would hate him for helping. Basically the only thing they were united on ended with gold for them. And this had no gold associated. So Marshall hoped it wasn’t something like that.

Most other captains would have sailed the other way. He knew that. Certainly all other pirate captains, but he wasn’t the rest, he knew a signal when he saw it. Or at least he thought he did. If it wasn’t a wreck it was a signal for Marshall. So while he wanted for it not to be a wreck he couldn’t see a good way for this thing to finish. Like he would have said if he could have trusted his crew, he wasn’t happy about this, but he had to know, no matter that everyone else would run away.

The ships were sailing dead towards each other now. There was no doubt that he was falling straight into the trap that the other captain was setting. They wanted him, they knew he would, sail straight towards them, they knew he would have seen him.

It was that moment that Marshall knew it had to be Coalface Peter.

“Bring me my looking-glass.”

[Check back next week for Part 3]

Jul 12 2007
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Jokes

Why couldn’t the pirate play cards?

Because he was sitting on the deck.

Jul 11 2007
2 Comments
Articles

No Need to Wine

Although of course it doesn’t happen very often chez Andronov sometimes you are left in a situation where you have some wine left over. Because it doesn’t happen very often I never seem able to find a stopper to close the wine. I have recently been asked what to do in this situation so I came up with this handy list of dos and don’ts.

Don’t

  • Pour the wine back in the bottle from the glass. The wine in the glass has had an awful lot of air near it and that air will all be going back in the wine. That will cause the wine in the bottle to continue opening up over night which is exactly what you don’t want. Oh and it’s probably got spit in it – urgh.
  • Use the cork you just took out of the bottle (or any other cork for that matter). Because of the way the cork comes out you always end up with one end wider than the other. And the wider end is the end that used to be in the bottle. This leads to the temptation to put the dirty end of the cork into the bottle. The stuff on the cork mixes with the air inside the bottle and can make the wine go to vinegar very quickly.

Do

  • use a vac u vin this solves all of the problems of air in the wine. Or if you don’t have one of these a glass or metal stopper is great too. But what if you don’t have a stopper?
  • use cling film. It works really well and you almost always have some in the house.
  • put the wine in the ice cube tray. Now you won’t probably be drinking it again if you do this but it is an excellent way to add wine while cooking later. And it also gets you out of the problem of having to open wine you don’t really want to drink just to cook. Thanks to Nigella for that one.

Or you could stop being such a wuss and just drink it.

Jul 10 2007
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Jokes

A man goes into a doctors surgery

The doctor says to him, “well I’m afraid you’re going to have to stop masturbating”.

“Why?” asks the shocked man, “what’s wrong Doc?”

“Well, for a start, you’re in a doctors surgery.”

Jul 09 2007
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Fiction, Short

Shrugger

A man is standing on a platform eating a croissant and drinking a bottle of coke. He looks bored and he doesn’t seem to notice that the flakes of the croissant are falling down his jacket.

A woman walks up to him and asks him if this is the right platform for somewhere. He doesn’t even listen to the end of the sentence and when she finishes speaking he doesn’t even react. She starts getting louder as though speaking louder will get him to understand. In the end the man just shrugs his shoulders and the woman walks off not knowing if he didn’t understand the question, if he didn’t know the answer or if he just didn’t care. That’s the problem with shrugs, they can haunt you for the rest of your life.

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