Kay eye ess the bee ess good bye.

Coke and Hose. (credit/blame: Choco)

In lieu of a riveting tale about me changing the notation across two hundred odd pages of the circumlocutious drivel which I call my thesis, I present the following narrative.

As I was heading through Ballarat on the way back from skiing the other weekend, I was getting a bit bored, and saw a guy hitchhiking on the side of the road, and so I picked him up, for vague reasons that escape me now. However, I wish to pre-empt any predictable withering jibes about homosexuality now by saying that I wished to copulate with him, and raise his furry hitchhiking babies on the nectar of my bosom. That aside, he thanked me for pulling over, threw his razor scooter and a big backpack in the back, and we took off. In future, I'll make sure to hop out and give any hitchhikers a good sniffing over before I let them into the car, as this guy smelt pretty bad. Not homeless guy bad, but halfway between that and nerdy guy smell bad. Nerds can smell real bad sometimes, I think they should work on that. He wanted to go to Stawell, but I said I'd take him as far as Ararat. After we'd worked that out, he engaged me in a bit of get-to-know you stuff, and he revealed (in order) that he was broke and unemployed (this was probably so I didn't ask him for any money), and had Perthes disease and so his hip and leg were fused together with a titanium plate, and that he'd lost his license for speeding. I lamented the efficiency of the Victorian police force, and he disagreed, saying that he'd done 45,000km in the last 4 months, speeding the entire time, and only been caught 3 times. "Oh,", I gently enquired, "whatever were you doing on the road so much?" to which he equally casually replied "Running drugs. The whole bit. Choof, eccies, meth, coke, you name it.", "I would have thought that you'd obey the speed limit if your car was full of drugs, yeh?" Apparently not. I couldn't get a straight answer out of him why, and he was getting edgy when I pushed it, and he ended up telling me stories of dubious authenticity about how a front-wheel drive with any engine capacity is able to outrun the more powerful rear-wheel drive police cars, on dirt or in the bush or something, and in the hands of the unsung Peter Brock he indubitably was. I was then educated in extraordinary detail on the economics of growing and running a hydroponic dope growing operation, including (but certainly not limited to!) how to conceal power use, the optimal ratios of light and dark in order to produce the illest skunk, how to obtain hydroponic equipment and chemicals without raising suspicion, and given a vision of his solar-powered hydroponic utopia. And so on, until I happily dropped him off in Ararat.

He said he was heading back to Ballarat the following day. And seemed the type who would change his clothes oh, say, biannually. Damn he had a big backpack.

Dad got a good price for the lambs, and he's going to use the money to 'invest' in the stock market, DIY style. It's something he's wanted to do for a while, and some bloke has been in his ear about it who lives in town and claims to be averaging a 46% return at the moment. He subscribed to the ASX datafeed, and got me to get him a dodgy version of the portfolio software, which is called Aquis Metastock. Having 'saved' 700 bucks on the software, he is as happy a boatload of Larrys. He continually (and unconsciously) refers to it as Megastock, which is kinda funny except when he's on the phone to the tech support for the datafeed and keeps saying Aquine Megastock. Actually that is pretty funny, it just wasn't at the time.