All right, I'm a coward. There, said it.

Yes, blew my printer up. Thought I had things set up right, checked with the boys at Tandy, plugged it into a voltage regulator. Everything looked good. It started doing its annoying cleaning the ink-heads dance, and then there was a popping sound and white smoke began drifting out from the bottom. I believe the technical term is "pooched".

The really sad part is that I sold my shotgun before I left Canada. I have a pathological hatred of printers and often dreamed about shooting one to bits with a twelve gauge. Unfortunately, in this misguided country you can't just blast appliances with a firearm in your back garden. So, perhaps it's for the best.

Of course, there's always the chance that my printer is fine. I'm not completely convinced of the reality of my situation here. At any minute I expect to wake up slumped over my keyboard with Russel writing Unix device drivers beside me and Bob Mould shrieking from the living room. The other day I was sitting on the steps at the University and I heard this noise behind me. I turned around and found myself face to nasty pointed beak with a gigantic blue peacock. I started screaming of course, and everyone looked at me like I was crazy.

But the thing is, they didn't really look at me. They just ignored me. This struck me as odd. I'm not a little man. I weigh 210 pounds and stand six feet tall. And I was screaming and hopping up and down and kicking at an eight foot cobalt-colored peacock. My first thought was that the British are just way too polite to notice these things. But then I realized that maybe it was all a dream. My world has been a bit strange lately.

There are far too many bunny rabbits around for one thing. They're like cobblestones in the cow pastures. And my only male friend in this country is a parrot named Oscar. We both hang out at the same pub and neither of us likes cigarette smoke. It makes him sneeze. He talks to me and I talk to him. We're pals.

Another sign that this world is fake: chicks wear glitter on their boobs here. They have dishes of it in the bathroom. And when they start to sweat it off, the gals run off to the loo and come back looking like Barbarella. It's terrible. You're not supposed to look at anyone in this country but you're surrounded by nuclear cleavage in the clubs. Plus, it gets stuck on your tongue and ends up on your toothbrush and embarrassing questions get asked by your wife.

On the other hand, there's no snow in my world.

Cheers,