Flying Tonight

It was nice, but exhausting and a bit freaky, to be back on the trapeze after a seemingly-endless summer break. My hands feel very rough now, and my shins took an almighty whack from the edge of the platform on a misjudged turnaround. Ow ow ow! They're still throbbing.

The flying rig at the Circus Space has been somewhat revamped in the interim. Most significantly, the mats underneath have been replaced. They used to be about a metre high, quite wide, and rather soft and welcoming. The new ones are only half as high, narrower, and very firm. Any move that involves dropping from the trapeze (almost all of them) now feels terrifyingly different, the timing out of whack, the landing much more threatening. This unfamiliarity will soon pass, of course, but it did make tonight's class pretty uncomfortable, even before the bone-crunching collision.

I checked my stats page for the first time in ages and noticed an annoying new tendency. The log lists vast numbers of one-off referrals from random other blogs, mostly their archives or comments sections. By the looks of things, these are associated with spam comment submissions -- rejected by MT-Blacklist, of course. Presumably the spambots collect URLs they've recently attacked and submit those as their referrer when making nefarious contact. Whether the spammers hope this will sleaze them through on some kind of whitelist or are just trying to muddy the waters is unclear, but it's thoroughly stupid and annoying either way. When will those bastards just fuck off?
Posted by matt at September 7, 2004 01:09 AM