A tale of two friends-part 1
(these events are not based on a true story. But they could be. In fact, let's say they are)
Bob:Hey Mike
Bob thinks:Oh look, theres Mike!Mike:Hey Bob! Hey, I've got your christmas present
Mike thinks: Bob! I will give him my presentBob:Oh.... thanks
Bob thinks:Crap, I didn't get him a present. Crap Crap crap.Mike:That's alright. Go ahead and open it.
Mike thinks:He's gonna love this present.Bob:Oh, a DVD! Thanks. Now I feel really bad.... I didn't get you anything
Bob thinks: What a great present. Crap.Mike:Oh that's alright, it's no big deal.
Mike thinks: That bastard didn't get me a present! I paid £20 for that!Bob:Are... you sure?
Bob thinks: Ah, he does not seem to mind too much.Mike:Yeah, it's fine. I have to be off anyway...
Mike thinks:That bastard didn't get me a present!Bob:Oh, ok. See you later!
Bob thinks:How nice.Mike thinks:That bastard didn't get me a present
My brain commited suicide
Today, mid revision. I rather wish it wold not do that to me, it's very unpleasent. Ah well, I'll live. Who needs a brain anyway?
So I hope you all had good christmases (or whatevereses), and you got what you wanted, as long as it wasn't a weapon designed to destroy the very earth itself. 'Cause that's just plain mean, to be honest.
I would like to point out at this point that I have beaten my sister's boyfriend at both chess and poker. Bwa ha ha! Not that I'm one to be smug (HA), but every now and then one has to involve in a little bit of petty one upmanship.
Anyway, it's a new year soon, so it's time to come up with some resolutions ya 'al won't keep. I did mine- cut my hair, became a vegetarian, and... well I can't remember the others i made. I suspect one might have been to do with doing more excercise, but I hear that if you exercise you increase the chance of contracting cancer at some kind of point in your life.
Oddly not hungover
It's a christmas miracle, although I should make a note to try and shut my mouth when drunk. Only madness can come from my drunken ramblings/stupidity. Yes, thar were a pub crawl yesterday, and yea, it is written, many pubs were visited, and joy was had. Yea.
Anyway, in the case I don't post nothing tomorrow, merry christmas to you all.
We are the NRA
The NRA sends christmas greetings!. Via the always excellent
xoverboard.
(actually, let's be fair, it's not the NRA. But the name is far too long anyway....)
Too all those searchers
Who go to msn search and find me by typing in "lonely"
A-don't use MSN search, it's rubbish.
B-Don't be lonely. Have a hug
C-Get a blog and get extreme tracker! It's such a fun toy!
I'd also like to point out that I am the number 8 hit for the quotation search "electocution game" on google.
Ah, toys, they're so much fun.
I do feel kind of guilty that this get's a lot of hits on msn for lonely. It also is there for "funny country music", which you all know I'm an expert on.
Seriously. Hours of fun. Well. Minutes. But still, theres fun involved anyways.
5000 page views!
Heh, I was the 5000th view. Never mind. Anyways, thanks for reading, please continue doing so. In fact, if you're very impressed you can link me to your friends and family, and then I can become so popular that I influence governments. Hey, it could happen!
Rules for the cinema
1-Turn off your phone. Unless you have a relative on the verge of death/are a doctor who might be paged/something equally urgent you have no excuse for leaving it on. The cinema will remind you more than once. The film will last a maximum of 4 hours. You were capable of being incommunicado BEFORE mobile phones. You can manage it now.
2-If you must buy food, please try and eat it early. And for christ sake, don't eat it during the quiet bits.
3-Sit where your ticket tells you to sit unless the cinema is empty.
4-If you have a choice as to where to sit.... don't sit right in front, or next, or behind strangers. That's rude and weird.
5-If you're going to watch the credits, please let the people who want to go to the toilets out of the bloody cinema
6-Kicking the seat in front is never appreciated, and may result in the loss of said appendage
7-Arrive on time for the film. It's really not that hard.
8-most important of all SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Seriously now. I went to see King Kong yesterday. It is a good film- at least, as far as I could tell. Unfortunately I went to a 3 o'clock showing in the multiplex (vue). There was a group of about 14 10-14 year olds situated around the cinema who DID NOT STOP TALKING. Normally you expect them to stop momentarily, but these children did not. It got so bad that the heavily pregnant woman in front of us first called in staff to expel them, then, after they insulted her, she went INSANE and started to threatening to "have them". Possibly not the most productive of attitudes to be fully honest, but then she WAS heavily pregnant after all. Still, you'd think after she and several irritating gits left people would stop talking, but no. For the rest of the film as long as the manager left the room muttering kept continuing.
If you are not enjoying the movie you are free to leave. People have paid to watch the film, not listen to your private conversation. Also, are you incapable of whispering? Believe me, you are not as interesting as you think you are.Goddamnit.
Ctrl Alt Delete
I have sttopped reading it because not only has the comic become deeply tiresome of late, the writer of the comic has proven himself to be a rather pathetic individual (eg,
link, threatening to sue a kid for making a tribute film about CAD, and destroying a guild on Wow 'cause he had a hissie fit. For crying out loud).
board games
So, board games. What I like about board games are how many there are of them. Some of you may have heard of Westminster. Some of you may have even played it. For those of you who have done neither, Westminster is a game where the aim is to take control of the British parliament. Through fair means. Not foul. You start off by bidding for every single seat in England (well... maybe only 50 or so). This takes an hour or so. I actually don't know what happens next because we'd all got bored at this point, especially as one of us had managed to get knocked out in what was meant to be the preliminary stages of the game. A lot of unpopular games have this flaw, ludicrous length- Scotland Yard, a game in which you have to catch the mysterious Mr X proved to be practically impossible to finish, and a game I once played about air traffic control... well to be honest I think we stopped that one pretty quickly.
We played a board game about zombies today, which, while enjoyable, did stretch on, in the kind of soul destroying way those kind of things can. The initial joy of killing zombies was soon overwhelmed by the less joyful event of continually killing zombies. Forever, if you will. Still, I have played worse games. They are listed above. It was actually fun, while Westminster... hmm, westminster.
Why is shooting fish in a barrel a catchphrase? I mean, i'll agree that that's easy, but so is getting dressed, or, for that matter, hitting a barn door. Sayings are pretty random of course, and it's entirely possible to find sayings that contradict each other. Unfortunately they do not cancel out on contact, so we must forever be cursed with pithy bits of wisdom.
Incompetent design
Because enough arguments against intelligent design don't exist...
Via
blood and treasure
Fun with tracking
It's fun to have a decent web tracker, so one can learn such things as "funny christmas stories" getting this site as the number 2 hit on msn search. Probably a tiny bit disappointing to the fellow in question, there are not that many funny christmas stories. Perhaps I should tell some to make the link more accurate.
Although I'm not sure I have any. Christmas, as many have noted, is a time for unique food. Unless you are from the USA (when you've got thanksgiving too, you lucky things), this is the time when turkey is eaten (a LOT of turkey), but, more importantly, the eternal brussel sprout, which appears to be endemically marked on christmas meals. I wonder if anyone knows why.
I do always enjoy the crackers, exploitation never having looked so tacky. The hats, uncomfortable, and normally to small to fit my head, the jokes, often with gramattical and/or spelling errors, and, of course, the toy. Sometimes you get those incredibly posh crackers in which you get occasionally useful things like bottle openers and.... actually I suspect that's it in terms of useful things that come out of crackers. Bottle openers. Whoop de do.
I'm worryingly using all my christmas material very early, which means come christmas itself I'll probably have reached Easter. I guess I'm beginning to emulate shops in my "old age"
Huh
Apparently female preying mantises do not
always eat the head of their mates. That's nice.
Revision
It begins, it begins. You may notice on the right task bar a little planet thingy with a circly thing around it (a ring, I hear they're called). That's another webcounter thing, which provides exciting details about unique hits and searches resulting in this site. Becuase one can never have enough random statistics.
So yeah, leaving Bath in a few days time, and in celebration I will probably getting drunk once or twice. On a budget! I found £5 on the street the other day, which is surely a sign that I should buy more beer. Either that, or it was some kind of elaborate plot by the government to follow my every movement by planting a chip in the £5. Actually, while that wouldn't work, it would be deeply fun to do- follow the journey of the plucky note as it got spent all over the country: for beer, for food, for drugs, for the use in snorting drugs, until it is ripped up in a drug frenzy. Did you know that 90% of banknotes have cocaine traces on them? I didn't, and it's almost certainly not true, but it's fun to quote stupid urban legends and see how many people will repeat them afterwards. Most things, if said with sufficient authority, are believable. Provided your target is gullible enough, and considering that an amazingly large proportion of people still think that everyone swallows 8 spiders a year, that's probably everyone.
I wonder who could claim to be the longest remember human? By that, I mean someone who, if you mention their name people will go "oh them.". Jesus gets a good 2000 years to him (oh, I mean actual historically existing people here. And Jesus is, even if he was not the son of God), but then you've got to think of Egyptian kings- Tutenkahmun (if that's spelt correct I'll give myself a million pounds), who has probably got a thousand years or so on Jesus. In fact, he's probably our winner.... unless you count michocondrial eve, the woman who is the ancestor of us all (she got around). I think she dates back some serious time. Of course, if we start talking about species instead of humans, then the dinosaurs are sitting pretty, laughing at the saber toothed tiger they preceed by several million years. I love the idea of the sabre toothed tiger, which I think actually DID exist (I could check, but that would be smart), just because the word sabre is amusing to me. Also, animated versions of this critter made it look distinctly freakish, with a massive tooth sticking out like the kid who you just know is going to spend their childhood in braces.
More links
This is a great article on... suicide actually.
On conversations and christmas shopping
Ah, now I'm feeling a little less tired I can perhaps craft a post that reads a little more eloquently than my last one....
Well, my weekend in York went well, although on the journey home someone decided to talk to me. Urgh. I read the paper, I look uninviting.... what more do I need to do to put people off? Truth be told, she was quite an interesting person, she came from Egypt and is doing a phd in physics at Bristol, but I don't LIKE being talked to on trains. I am not by nature a man who likes to chat with strangers- in fact my psychosis on this level runs to the point that I dislike talking to people I vaguely know.... Oh well, at least she wasn't the man in front, who was complaining about pupils with special needs....
On the topic of idiots talking about things, an overheard conversation from the bus.
"She said something about sex, and I said I wouldn't touch that... She like looked at me..."
"Yeah, her friend's hot isn't she?"
"Yeah but she's welsh." Says a third
"Yeah, she said something to me, I said, 'I'm sorry, I don't speak welsh!'" Says the original speaker
Ah, racism for the masses. Lovely. Just lovely. Those people were probably students too- our nations finest and brightest! Apparently.
In a final note of random trivia from the day, I noticed a replica of the Lord of the Rings "One Ring" on sale. The price?
250 pounds. For crying out loud. Even more inanely you could get one in silver for £100. Which would be incorrect. I mean, if you are going to spend a small fortune on something that ridiculous, you might as well go the extra mile and get an accurate one! I want to see someone propose with it.... or maybe use it as a wedding ring....
A gamers manifesto
I love
this, especially the portion on artifically making a game hard. Man does that annoy me.... if you want to make your game longer, why not try designing some actual content....
Hehe
As true confessions go,
this one is pretty damn funnny
Christmas is going!
WE MUST SAVE CHRISTMAS! APPARENTLY SOME PEOPLE IN SOME PLACES ARE NOW NOT CALLING CHRISTMAS CHRISTMAS ANYMORE!!!
Now it might seem to be some over sensitive people occasionally, in some very small instances, not mentioning christmas, but do not be fooled. This is a lesbian, hippie, commie, political correctness gone mad scheme to BAN CHRISTMAS. That's right, read the right papers and apparently, christmas will soon be banned. Who'd have thought.
Seriously... I can't believe this kind of stuff makes headlines...
another weekend
Away. It's almost like... some sort of fortnightly thing. Nah, can't be... that'd be too simple!
Anyways, so yeah, I have been working hard in the past few days, putting in lot's of extra revision to save myself time. Hehe, I do make myself last. I'm not exactly a last minute reviser, but I find it difficult enough to concentrate when time IS pressing than to do anything when it's not.
Nah, instead I've been playing a lot of LAN, whichI hear is very much the new black this season. Out of interest, has anyone ever had the phrase "BLANK is the new black" used on them before in total seriousness? Because that'd be a story to tell the kids.
I was thinking the other day that we are gonna have trouble when we have grandchildren. I mean, currently grandparents for the most part lived through a war, and thus have many bragging rights to impress and or bore their grandchildren with. But what's this generation going to talk about? I mean, we even managed to skip out the cold war! I 'spose we've got the war on terror, but in terms of fear levels, the minute possiblity of being involved in a terrorist incident vs the very real possibility of getting bombed in ww2, or even the deep fear of nuclear destruction in the cold war... So yeah stories are much less fun. We could just make it up, but in the future we will probably be able to read each other's minds and fly. Probably.
You do have to wonder about CND's goals in the cold war. I mean, as a plan, disarming all your nukes and just hoping the Russians would do similar sees hopelessly naieve. Even if I cannot spell the damn word. While I am not particularly for the expansion of aggressive nuclear technology, it seems like a very bad idea to me to disarm.. I don't particulalry want to be held to ransom by any punk country which has got it's hand on a nuclear weapon.
films
Chronicles of Narnia is coming out soon. I'm rather excited. Undoubtedly I will be a tad disappointed, because I loved those books when I read them. Looking back, and I haven't actually read them through, they look like pretty slim volumes. This, however, is ideal- the major problem with book adaptions is their tendency to run on for... well for ever really.
Theres also a trailer of the new Xman film
here, which I am moderately excited about it, although I can't actually get the trailer to work. Of course, number 3 tends to be about where super hero films start failing (batman, superman etc (I say etc because I know of no other examples)) so we shall see. We shall see.
Apparently they are making this Pirates of the Carribean film. I have no idea how that's going to work: despite the original film's contention, it IS sort of difficult to be a pirate and not be a murderer really. Oh well, could be enjoyable, Jonny Depp is always entertaining to watch.
I'm also very interested in
mirrormask, which is a film written by Neil Gaiman, a writer who I am very fond of, and I've heard good things about. It got released in the US absolutely ages ago.. I'm not sure when it's coming out in the UK. Stupid distributors...
SCIENCE
Anon linked me
science in the last post, and I think it answers most questions. And also clearly demonstrates the last theorem. I'm a mathematician, after all, so I know what constitutes a proof. Even if my lecturers might choose to disagree. They are short sighted.
Today marks the end of lectures, although whether it marks an increase in the frequency of posts remains to be seen. Next next weekend I shall be returning home, for christmas, and much rejoicing. I'm attempting to persuade my mother to use onion gravy during christmas dinner, mostly to irritate my sister, who, in response to my vegetarianariaiairiasm, has become a deep set meat eater, much as I was before I thought about what I was doing more clearly.
I always find arguments that rationalise after the fact much weaker. I think the one for eating meat is one of those, and certainly for downloading music illegally. The primary reason you do these things is not some kind of moral imperative, it's that you rather enjoy them, and, when challenged, you decide you must not have been wrong and must justify something you did not even think about. It may be that your argument is correct, but it is something you never felt the need to argue about. It's something we all do, certainly, just assume a practice is fine- perhaps because everyone else does it, until we are challenged to defend that practice. The reaction, as I had is to try and defend what you are doing, but I hope most people will join me in researching what we are saying later on. It could turn out that your arguments are fine- at least for you- or it could turn out that your assumptions may be invalid.
I know many people will find this amusing from me, those who know me, for I am willing to defend a point to death, even when I suspect that I am wrong. However, I HAVE been known to back down, and I HAVE been known to change my mind about something.
But anyway, it's nearly christmas (only 20 days), and it is time to be merry, and kill a lot of turkeys! You bastards.
Progress
This is good news. I have little more to say on this subject, although I still suspect the sectioning of it into civil partnership is a little opressive.
The humble crisp
So, crisps. Rich (who has not updated his blog for ages, so shall not be linked here. Bwa ha ha. Honestly, people think they can write a list of 101 things about themselves and never update again), was claiming that crisps are a rubbish snack food. I think he's wrong, and I'm about to prove it. Using SCIENCE.
The humble crisp was first made in 1843 by Lord Cramblebee, who was an enthusiastic chef. Initially he wanted it to be called the Crambelebee, and indeed marketed it as such, but soon enough it got called a crisp. Apart from in America, where it was called chips, because American's just HAVE to be different. Stupid Americans, with their being the richest country in the world. Think they're so smart!
But I digress. The humble crambelbee came only in salted format, although there was a brief excursion into the concept of sugared crips. These were not popular. Things continued this way until Marcus Walker, in 1873, discovered that adding vinegar to salt would make it ready salted. And, also if you put cheese and onion in, it would become cheese and onion. The latter initally posed problems as it was quite hard to get the cheese to stay on the crisp. After some brainstorming, however, it was solved.
And so the crisp went into ascendancy, becoming the most popular snack food, and arguably winning not only the second world war, but the cold war as well. During the 80's, someone came up with the idea of hedgehog flavoured crisps. NO-ONE KNOWS WHY.
So there you have it, the crisp, is, in fact, the finest snack food around. Proven with SCIENCE!
Some links
'cause it's easier than actually writing a post. Some blogs you should check out, that I'm pretty sure I'v never mentioned before.
First off, the
Language Guy, who's posts are... profound and interesting. Much thanks to... well
Phil Plasma ultimately for introducing me through a set of links to a community of some very interesting bloggers.
Next, and finally 'cause I didn't think through the pacing of this post when I started it, is the brilliant
celibate in the city. For the life of me I cannot remember how I found it. Check it out.
Anyway, I am sorry for being bad in my posting these days. What can I say... I'm busy!
