Cool simile of the day: "Being stomped like a Dance Dance Revolution platform in a Samoan arcade."

Is it a bad thing when you realise that you sub-consciously try to work late in order to go home late and hence minimise your contact with your own family? It just dawned on me that, at some level, I'd rather spend 30RM on a pricey dinner near my place than go home for free dinner and experience the paterfamilial blather. That, and that it's less lonely to sit in the office chattering with colleagues after work. Vis-a-vis going home, and listening to the hum of a PC fan....

Had to endure maternal ranting because mother had difficulty comprehending the difference between Microsoft Word and Excel, how a print spooler works, how to load paper, the concept of minimizing and maximizing windows, print preview buttons, and a variety of other intellectual pitfalls involved in printing out attachments from Hotmail. Feel my pain. However, in her rage and fury at the new printer which I had placed on the floor to avoid vibration damage and mis-alignment(computer desk is VERY flimsy; placing the printer on one of the raised shelves causes the whole desk to epileptically convulse when printing), she threatened to scrap it and get a new HP laser printer. It's times like this when parental stupidity "is like nuclear power - it can be used for good or for evil. As long as you don't spill any on yourself."

Watching The Two Towers tonight! Woohoo! Shall drive straight to cinema from work. Ironically, Tolkien certainly wouldn't have appreciated the rendering of his literary project into motion picture form, even calling the legions of American meatspace fans in the 60s and 70s his "deplorable cultus". Of course, as an Oxford don undertaking an academic experiment in linguistics, I don't think he ever expected "Gandalf for President" hippie buttons.

Still, even if you strip away the academic appendices and linguistic subtleties, or the counter-cultural hijacking of Lord of the Rings' themes, it remains a crackling good fantasy saga on its own merits as a narrative, and after all these years it is still the most 'epic' work of modern fantasy fiction.

In other thoughts, I need to cut down on those listless, all-night online conversations on ICQ; they serve to exacerbate a lot of frustration. Hunger. Desperation. Not that I don't enjoy them; I do - intensely. But I wonder if such unbridled masochism is really healthy for me.

Nose back to the grindstone.

[Ed: LOTR is over rated.

And I thought you tortured and preyed on people during those late night tete a tetes - not the reverse.]