SLOW

So, last night, I finally won an online poker tournament. 45 people, one stack of chips, all mine! It was fun and I was lucky.

In an ironic twist of fate, in this game of No Limit Texas Hold 'Em, my final opponent was from Houston. He eventually decided to bet all his chips with AJ offsuit. I called with a suited 98. I paired off my both my cards - game over.

Last night, as I was driving home after another enjoyable evening of poker, something strange happened to me, for the second time in my life. I'm driving, at normal speed, quite sober, when something started crawling across my windscreen. On the outside! It was a spider. A big, pretty, white spider. Slowly walking diagonally across my windscreen from my side to the passenger's side.

I'm not particularly scared of spiders. I've learned to respect them. I consider them lucky, auspicious, when they cross my path. But when they enter my line of sight, and I'm trying to concentrate, they can be very distracting.

Obviously the spider was looking to keep warm and has been lounging in my bonnet since earlier the evening. When the engine started heating up, it got too hot, and it had to move. Since it has amazing holding-on, G-force resisting, capabilities, it could simply walk across my windcreen while I was driving, unperturbed by me slowing down, speeding up and swerving within the limits of the law and safety.

All I could do was drive home, quickly get out of my car, and go to bed. The spider caught a free ride, ended up far from its previous home, and is now lurking around my yard somewhere. I don't mind. It can live. It was smart, and got away with it.

Has this happened to anyone else? Am I the only one with freaky hitchhiking spiders? The really strange thing is that this was the second time this has happened to me. The first time the spider was crawling up my window, the driver's window, just as I was pulling away. That time, I had passengers and witnesses. Other people that could express their shock and amusement, while I could simply drive on.

All I can say is, nobody was harmed. We, the spider and I, have a story to tell. I'm going to be on the lookout for any mediumsized white spiders in my home. The spider's possibly going to spread the word: get on the metal and hike your way to a new home.

I'm all for the right to strike, especially against employers or companies that pay feeble wages, but when the strikers start trashing the streets, it stops being cool.

Yesterday, leaving Johannesburg city centre, I was approaching a robot when a mob decided to neatly block of my progress with a barricade of rubbish. The sum of the parts was certainly much more than the whole. A couple of rubbish bags so efficiently blocked the road that I had to turn back and take a different route. I thought if the police can go roaring after strikers down a one-way, then I can go quietly down a one-way away from the strikers.

So now all this has to be cleaned up by the poor municipal workers who are just returning to work after their own strike, which happened to be equally trashy. Absurd.

... keep out of Chancery ... it's being ground to bits in a slow mill; it's being roasted at a slow fire; it's being stung to death by single bees; it's being drowned by drops; it's going mad by grains.

Bleak House, Charles Dickens

Sometimes, I feel like I'm from the future, living in the present as a ghost, unable to affect anything, with all my knowledge of the future, without being able to act upon it. Expecting things to be the status quo when in reality they are a couple of years from being actualised.

In this case, why are there no dvds with both movies and games on? Surely there should be many? Make the movie, make a game of the movie, bring it out on dvd, there you go! A couple of weeks ago, I got my first dvd player (yeah, yeah, I know), which happens to be a PS2. I got it so I could both play games and rent dvds.

Two night ago I rented and watched Elektra. Instead of, or alongside, the deleted scenes and other special futures, they could have had a preview of the game or a small (or complete) version of it.

Surely this would benefit the creators of the dvd. They would get playtime, could possibly have higher rental price and would do a lot to promote the movie (and the game). It could've done wonders for the movie too if they had an Elektra game.

So, I'll just wait for Sony to wake up and start targetting people like me with their movie / game crossovers.