Christmas Spirit

It seems we may have reached that time of year when Christmas is really starting to make itself known.  Not that it hasn't been in stores for a while - I overheard a conversation in a local supermarket about whether they could reduce the Christmas display to make room for the Halloween one this year.

However, as of this week the shops down the road from me have been putting Christmas pictures in the window, you know those kids colouring pictures that everyone makes a big deal about even though most of them look like a rainbow vomited all over the page. These are mostly like that except that some of the images are free drawings.
Mostly the drawings have been, well, pretty much what you'd expect but with more unicorns, but today I noticed a new one that made me lol right there surrounded by people who probably thought I was mentally deficient or something.  The picture was dominated by a rather good drawing of a Pikachu doing some sort of electric shock attack to Sant Claus while some kid (I'm assuming it's a self portrait) who is holding a poké ball makes off with a stack of presents.  Now I'm all for creativity and to be honest it was a very good picture but it was pride of place in this store's display and I couldn't help but wonder how this store thought they were portraying their view of Christmas when they chose this for the window.
Also, Santa had an expression of quite severe pain on his face, which makes me worried about this kid.  I don't think I know anyone who didn't think about stealing Santa's sack with all the toys, but no one actually wants to cause him pain.  That's kinda screwed up.

20 Something Bloggers Take 1

Well I'm now part of 20SB but it's probably going to be the weekend before I actually do anything about making the most of this.  This is due mainly to the weather which is the hottest recorded November day on record for much of Victoria which basically means it is too hot for my brain to work.

For now I'm just going to melt quietly in a corner somewhere.

Double Standards

As someone who hasn't smoked for almost a year now, I understand how difficult it is to quit.  I also like to think that I'm not one of those people who point out that because they've quit everyone else should as well - like snap your fingers and its done or something.

This is as an introduction to a rant, because I was sitting on the bus today and a woman sat down in her seat plus half of mine.  So I'm now squashed against the window, trying my best not to get annoyed with her overly loud admonitions to her kid who isn't listening anyway.  About two minutes after she sat down the woman announced that her kid's grubby handprints on her tracksuit pants stank so this resulted in more yelling at her kid and a squirt of perfume

Followed by another 17 squirts (yes, I counted) in quick succession, all aimed across her face so that it went practically straight into mine.  After the fifth squirt I asked her to please stop and she informed me that it was a free country and if I don't like her perfume then I could get off the bus - quite ignoring the fact that as I was partially wedged under her bulk I could do no such thing.  When I said something again another five or so squirts along, this time asking if she had considered that someone nearby might have an allergy to the perfume, she didn't even bother to reply and just kept squirting without pause.  I would have said more but other passengers were giving ME some fairly dirty looks.

At this point I think she decided that she had a terrible taste in her mouth because she started waving her tongue about and wiping it with a tissue before putting some gum in her mouth and chewing it without closing her mouth.  Really loudly.  In my ear.

Now when I was smoking I had to put up with people complaining about my habit and I mostly tried to not have a problem with it, even when people would try and tell me that I was a complete asshole because having a puff over ten metres away downwind of them was going to give them cancer and it would all be my fault, even when I'd been standing there for considerable time and they'd walked up and decided to complain, even when I was in a designated smoking area.  The reason I mostly tried to not have a problem with it was that as soon as I opened my mouth to point out any of these perfectly reasonable factors, every single non-smoker present would instantly have an even bigger issue with me because not only was I a filthy terrible smoker who was going to kill everyone with cancer, I was also rude about it.  I put up with this because I knew that it was a bad habit that, on occassion, could have pretty serious effects on those around me.

While chewing loudly and encroaching on other people's personal space with your girth are annoying they are pretty much guaranteed to have long term implications for no one, the perfume spraying almost killed someone because when I got home I discovered that my brother's girlfriend was over and she is very seriously allergic to aerosol propellant, as in hospitalisation, so before I could go and say hi to her I had to put all the clothes I was wearing in the washing machine and have a shower.  What I hadn't thought to do, though, was leave outside the bag I had been carrying and if it hadn't been for my brother going to the hallway before his girlfriend and smelling the very strong perfume smell (this was over half an hour later, which hopefully gives you an idea of how much was sprayed).

It is essentially a form of discrimination that a person could be trying to do completely the right thing and still be considered some kind of devil spawn purely because it was nicotine related, while most other people can be particularly rude and inconsiderate and it is the person who makes a fuss who is considered evil.

This is pretty rambly even for me and is unlikely to make a great deal of sense to anyone, I know, but I am just so very angry at the moment - over five hours later at this point.  I needed an outlet and you're it, so thanks for that.

On a happier note, this is another first for this blog, the first time I've mentioned family members.  Yay!

Currently

So in my effort to better understand internet culture I'm doing a "Currently" post because according to a couple of blogs I'm following this is a trend and is meme-ing (or possibly the other way around) on blogs everywhere.

WATCHING:
QandA, and thinking the panel is pretty good except for Barnaby Joyce.  Shut up and let Jonathon Biggins, Penny Wong and Stella Young talk, hell I'd even prefer listening to Janet Albrechtson at this point although this may well change once she opens her mouth.
Janet you just proved me correct.
Also watched 48 Shades on the weekend, the film adaptation of Nick Earls's 48 Shades of Brown.  This film is fantastic and I would recommend it strongly to anyone with an open mind and a love of good storytelling.

LISTENING TO:
The audience ask questions and the panel answering them.  Also the music to the game my brother is playing in the other room with the volume set far too loud.
Although I'm not listening to it right at this moment, I'm getting back into The Cat Empire at the moment and, as always, listening to many musical theatre soundtracks, especially Avenue Q, JC Superstar, Little Shop of Horrors and basically anything by the Stephens - Sondheim and Schwartz.

PLANNING:
Right now I'm taking a break from planning anything, just finished sorting accommodation in America and have a lot sorted out for the rest of my placement.  About the only thing I've planned all day has been my transport for tomorrow.

THINKING ABOUT:
How a great many issues raised on QandA tonight have changed very little in the almost ten years which I have been voting.  And now I'm thinking that it is a very depressing thought and a worrying situation.

LOOKING FORWARD TO:

America, as it is my first time leaving the country.

Les Misérables, Hugh Jackman meets Shönberg and Boublil?  Heaven!

I know it sounds pretty naff, but the rest of my placement - I am honestly loving every minute of it,

READING:
Just finished the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy and the particularly interesting The Greatest Lies in History.  I am about to start a Doctor Who novel called The Silent Stars Go By, although Murakami's 1Q84 is calling me as well.

MAKING ME HAPPY:
Having reached the end of QandA, Randy and Sammy J's beautiful song is currently making me exceedingly happy.

What are you currently up to?

The Real World

Well, the first two days of my placement are now complete and I'm tired but loving it!

I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be a 'productive member of society' because I have had so much trouble finding work over the past few years.  It's a good feeling to be doing something that people can clearly see is useful.

This isn't to say that I'm not useful the rest of the time, it just feels different when you're studying or staying home to look after sick relatives or fruitlessly pursuing a job search that has long since become a farce.  Also, it is rather a lot of work to pull yourself out of emotional doldrums when you're in a holding pattern that consists of doing the same thing over and over again, sometimes in the vain hope that the results will change.

The other side of this coin, though, is the stress that comes from me being fairly sure - based on no reasoning whatsoever except social phobia - that I'm going to do something to completely stuff up and get kicked out or something similar.  This, however, I will not focus on, in fact I'm hoping this is the only time I'll have to acknowledge it at all - just the once to get it off my chest.

More Trivia

As I said in the first post, I am going to the US of A in January and this has got me paying very close attention to my actions whenever I cross the road because I'm convinced I'm going to be in the country for about ten minutes before I get hit by a car driving on the WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD!!

For all of you out there who just went, "well we think YOU drive on the wrong side of the road, and please stop shouting at us" I have to say that I'm not basing this on personal preference but on historical fact.  Let us take a trip back, back, all the way to before there were things like internal combustion engines - this meant people had to use other means of transport, such as carts, horses and peasants.  Now while peasants and carts didn't mind which side you mounted and dismounted from, horses were, and apparently are, a little more finicky.

I can't say with any great certainty as to the truth of this, seeing as I live in a time well after the invention of the aforementioned internal combustion engine, so I have no need to mount and/or dismount a horse, from either side, but I am reliably informed that all horses are mounted from the left side, this is because most horses are left handed (hoofed) and they prefer this method.  All equipment is apparently designed with this in mind.

So because horses are mounted from the left side, it was very quickly understood that riding on the left side of the road meant that a horse could pull up on the side of the road and the rider could get off in safety without being run down by all the other horses on the road.  This theory is still applied, albeit in an altered fashion, to modern cars - in countries where cars drive on the right side of the road the driver is on the left side of the car and the passenger is on the right, making it safe for passengers who don't have the benefit of mirrors and the like when deciding whether or not to open their doors, in countries where cars drive on the correct left side of the road, this is reversed.

This is less of a problem with cars than horses, because cars can be designed either way, but why did this split happen in the first place?

It is all because of the French.  Not all of the French, mainly just Napoleon, really.  Napoleon was annoyed with the English because at the time he was Emperor of something like the entirety of Europe and the English told him, "No thanks, we're all good here with the system of monarchy that has been working for us since, you know, we've existed."

In retaliation for this snub, Napoleon decreed that overnight all roads would run in opposite directions, to distinguish the noble Europeans from the barbaric English.  This caused quite a lot of confusion and probably, although I have no evidence to back this up, much injury to both horses and riders.

When America decided it didn't want to be associated with England anymore they decided that the European road system, devised by a guy who ended his days exiled and alone, was the one to go with.  This apparently seemed like a good idea at the time.

So next time you're thinking about which side of the road you drive on, remember that the reason there is the divide at all is because a bully was petulant that someone stood up to him so he changed it from the left to the right side.

That's probably enough trivia for today now, thanks for reading my word vomit to the very end.

A simple request

I just finished writing a ridiculously long post, which I'm not going to upload because I'm still not sure how well this whole semi-anonymous blogging is going to go and the whole once something is in your digital footprint it is there for good scares me.

What I wrote was a long rant against two companies that have been making things difficult for me recently and I found it cathartic - even if I didn't post it.  This has happened a couple of times now, although this was the first time I actually got to the point of writing a post about it.  I don't want to not post things but I'm fairly concerned about the whole coming back to bite me in the ass thing.

I use a different name here to the one I use in real life, partly this is because blogging under the name JR makes me feel like I have a secret identity which makes the comic book nerd in me geek out.  The majority of it, though, is in case I slip up and post something that I don't want to hurt me in future - although it doesn't mean I'm not planning on at least attempting to keep myself accountable for what I say here.

The problem here is that I don't know enough about how internet anonymity (or lack thereof) works.  If anyone has advice on this for me I'd love to hear from you.

Not Perfect

Although I like to think I have tremendous amounts of patience with others, I'm not so good at the whole patience with myself thing.

Usually this isn't a problem and in fact it is often quite a good thing because it helps me to motivate myself to work on necessary but unpleasant tasks when I'd rather be doing something else.  At the moment, though, it is definitely a problem and this is because I see all these other blogs from people who have been blogging for a very long time and my first reaction tends to be "ooh, so good, why can't I make interesting and easily readable posts like them?"

The answer being, of course, that they have been blogging for a very long time, usually several years, while I have been blogging for a little over a week now.  That doesn't stop it from being extremely frustrating.

I don't particularly like showing work to anyone until it is perfect and because of that I often don't end up doing anything with it at all, this is one of the reasons I started blogging, so that I can get used to putting stuff out there that maybe isn't as polished as I'd like because it doesn't need to be perfect for this forum.

However, I'm not doing particularly well at this, I don't find it easy to actually post entries.  The writing is fine, but the posting is not as easy.  This post I'm writing now is on its third fourth draft, and I have spent far longer than I intended to.  Somehow, even though I am inflicting a fairly labourious editing process on myself the posts still feel pretty stream of consciousness which feels good because I haven't done much stream of consciousness writing and its good to know I can do it, or at least kinda fake it.

So yeah, I'll keep blogging, and try not to spend as much time editing as I do writing it all in future.  Mainly because while I'm not so good at patience with myself, I'm even worse at quitting things before I'm done - even when I probably should.

Also, bonus points if you knew the title was a Tim Minchin reference, because that song rather sums up how I feel about the blog so far, "Its not perfect, but its mine."

An Appointment with the Doctor

Well I finally got around to watching the new trailer for the Doctor Who christmas special and I have one thing and one thing only to say about it - Damn you Moffat!  Also damn you Matt Smith and damn you Jenna-Louise Coleman!

I'm sure there will be people out there who say "but the trailer only came out two days ago, how does this count as finally?"  To all of those people I say you deeply underestimate my epic levels of squeeing, fangirl-esque love of Doctor Who!

I've had this on my computer for some considerable time and don't remember where I found it.

This isn't where I'd planned to go with this post, but the gif made me wonder again about how people can make a fuss about which doctor was their doctor.  Although I have liked some actors better than others they are all the Doctor and the Doctor is awesome - even when played by Colin Baker.

People who say this doctor or that doctor, usually David Tennant these days, was the 'best' or 'real' doctor need to understand that they are all the same character, and without the previous ten incarnations the version portrayed by Matt Smith wouldn't be the same without Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, Baker, Davison, Baker, McCoy, McGann, Eccleston and Tennant.  If you pay attention you can see traces of all of them in the current doctor's personality, attitude and mannerisms.

The same goes for every doctor stretching right back to Patrick Troughton, they build on the character developed by all of the previous doctors.  So please stop telling me how much you miss number 10 and how much better he was than his, as Hartnell would put it, 'replacement' and just enjoy the show which is still the best thing on television.

PS. The same goes for Amy, Rory and our new companion who may or may not be Oswin or Clara or someone else entirely, again damn you Moffat!

Why be a Librarian?

I was asked again today why I'm studying to be a librarian.  It seems that people don't think you're cut out to be a librarian unless you look like this:

From lolbrarian, seriously check it out.

This got me wondering how librarians have such a bad rap for most people, because when I think of librarians in popular culture I think of:

Barbara Gordon, librarian.  Source

Rupert Giles, librarian.  Source

Ezekiel of the Dark Angels, librarian.  Source

An Orangutan, librarian.  Source

Something all these characters have in common is that they are particularly competent characters, who not only have vast intellects but can easily find out new information as the situation requires.  The orangutan can even cross dimensional barriers using nothing more than his mad librarian skillz!

I know that there are some other librarians with less than stellar reputations and appearances, think Sophie's Choice for one, but on the whole it seems fictional librarians are helpful, caring and generally useful people who do their best to be, if not the heroes the at least the good guys.

I can't really understand this stereotype spawning from real life either, because the librarians I have been in contact with (and as a library student I have some considerable contact with librarians) have almost without fail been cheerful, connected, competent and friendly.  Rarely have I found someone in this profession who is not interested in helping others and I don't think I've ever actually seen a librarian with a tight bun or tweed suit.

Essentially what I'm saying is that I want to be a librarian because LIBRARIANS ARE AWESOME!!!

Why you want me on your trivia team

So I was talking on the phone to a friend earlier today and unexpectedly and the conversation turned, I'm not entirely sure how, to Mahatma Gandhi.  I happened to mention that today is the anniversary of the execution of Nathuram Godse, the man who shot him at point blank range as he was on his way to a prayer meeting.

This was of little interest to my friend and also of little interest, though he humoured me through it, was that when Nathuram was sentenced to death among those who protested were the first Prime Minister of India, who in large part owed his position to the work of Gandhi, and Gandhi's own two sons.  This may sound strange, but it was because the death penalty was something the Mahatma was staunchly opposed to, but it lead to a rather unusual situation whereby those closest to the deceased were asking for the killer's life to be spared while others pushed for his death.

I finished explaining how this situation (despite the terrible crime, the effect it must have had on those involved and its long term repercussions for India and Pakistan) is interesting to me because of the irony of the children of a man who was killed in a political assassination asking for the death penalty to be stayed because it goes against the victim's political ideals.  The response from my friend was something along the lines of "you know you think about these things far too much, and you're weird" which made me think I should probably record it here (which makes this the first time I've posted about thinking about the blog in real life).

The other thing he said was "you are full of these strange facts, next time I'm at one of those pub quiz trivia nights I want you on my team!"  Which is fine, just don't expect me to be any help whatsoever in the sports round.

Still, I guess I can't be too weird, I had to look up the spelling of Nathuram Godse.

I Want a Pet Bad Idea Bear!

Yes it is the title but I feel it needs repeating - I really want a pet Bad Idea Bear!  For those of you who don't obsess about musical theatre quite as much as I do, they would be cute puppet teddy bears who say things like "More drinks, more fun!"  Here they are for your reference:

Source

Now this doesn't just come from the fact that they are from a fairly awesome musical - Avenue Q, which has such fantastic songs as If You Were Gay, Everyone's a Little Bit Racist, The Internet Is for Porn and You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You're Makin' Love).  It is because their entire role in the show is simply to suggest bad ideas to other characters.

Can you imagine how useful it would be to have a bad idea bear saying "You should definitely do that thing you're about to do" when you're about to do something that is clearly a bad idea but you haven't noticed that yet?  Instant understanding that THIS IS A BAD IDEA!!!  It probably wouldn't stop me or anything, but at least I'd go into it knowing that it will be what many people like to think of as 'a learning experience' and be better prepared for all the consequences.

This thought occurred because I did something phenomenally silly recently that people thought would be fun to let me do while they watched and laughed - thanks guys - and then told me afterwards, "But I thought you knew what you were doing."  And now I probably won't be able to go there for a couple of months.

As I said, I'd probably have done it anyway, but I would now be less annoyed with my friends.

Fun with Comic Sans

So for those of you who don't know, I'm something of a language nerd, I tend to be a little like Stephen Fry in the following:

Except that I cannot manage to say capable in such a wonderful way (and yes I tried for at least thrity seconds) and I am occasionally somewhat more obsessive about my love of language.

What is less well know is that I am a also a bit of a font nerd, not in the way that gets me strange looks at dinner parties because I'm going all Mr DeMartino about how IKEA should have stuck with Futura rather than switching to Verdana (and yes I do know people like that, eye popping and all), but rather in that this book has pride of place on my bookshelves:

The fact that I already happened to have an image of the cover on my computer speaks volumes doesn't it?

This rather long and possibly confusing introduction to the topic of this post is merely leading to my contention that Comic Sans (yes, I know, hideous, evil, etc.) isn't as bad as everyone would have you believe, it just hasn't found its niche yet.  I personally, am not much of a fan of this font and it seems Blogger isn't either as it isn't an option for this space, but I was thinking about this today while reading a pamphlet which claimed to be from a legitimate company and was mostly written in Comic Sans.

The only conclusion I was coming to was that somehow I'd ended up the on the receiving end of some sort of joke and I was simply not reading enough sarcasm into the statements.  It was at this point I had an epiphany.  I've heard many people claim that what the internet desperately needs is a sarcasm font and I agree, the people who use the internet the most seem to be the people who want to be sarcastic the most, and I reckon that Comic Sans could be the right font for the job.

So we let us all come together to get Comic Sans out of the font dole queue and working as a useful and respected way of giving meaning to this most treasured thing we humans do - writing.

Enough to be going on with

So, with one post down which explained virtually nothing about me or my blog, despite being all about me blogging.  I thought I'd dedicate this post to some kind of (probably half-assed) explanation of these topics.

First, me.  I am a person of the male persuasion from sunny Melbourne, Australia, for those of you who know Melbourne I say sunny because for at least five minutes now the sun has been out and as this is surely some sort of record for consistent weather I hereby add the appropriate epithet.  I am studying a masters in Information Management (librarianship for all you laymen (and laywomen? although that sounds vaguely sexist for some reason... (also, yay for nesting brackets!))) which actually has a hope of finding me a job unlike my BA in creative writing and media studies and honours in adaptation studies.

I have many interests including Doctor Who, Star Trek, using big and unusual words, musical theatre anything by Joss Whedon and reading (yes jsut reading, although I have favoured authors I felt it was unfair to my overall love of the printed word to single anyone out).  This is by no means a complete list of things that interest me, but its probably enough to be going on with.  Oh, also pirates.

Second, blog.  I think I might actually have said this last post, but I don't really know what I'm going to put here except that consistency between posts is unlikely and I make no apologies for changing opinions from one post to the next (I know weird for a blog, right?).

There is no intended theme for ths blog except my strange ramblings but that isn't to say that one won't develop in future. Stay tuned for further developments as they occur and refer to the previous paragraph on apologies for details about this.

Third, me blogging.  Ok, the majority of what I know of internet culture comes from the film Hackers and what has generally passed into everyday offline, face to face parlance.  That and Lolcats.  So to sum this up my knowledge of the interwebs esstially consists of the knowledge that animated gifs are:

Shamlessly stolen from A Quick Sucession of Busy Nothings

So there is my first animated gif, my first Tom Hiddleston reference and my first acknowledgement of another blogger, all in my second post.  I seem to be clocking this game!


As a final note to leave you with I was planning on labelling all my various references, both to pop culture and other, but I figured that would result in a ridiculous cloud with little relevance to anything.  So I won't, I will instead only label what I deem to be sufficiently well covered in a post to be noteworthy based on my mood at the time of posting.

Hello World!

Okay, so while I'm not actually a computer program, this seemed like a suitable title for my very first post evar. This is by way of explaining that various references are likely to occur more frequently here than in Sunnydale so those of you who have something against obscure homages (but, you know, pronounced alliteratively) should, um, probably stick around anyway because, er, coz i says so, yeah!

Now that that is out of the way I should probably spend the rest of this post telling my reader(s) - I'm optimistic - all about me and why I'm blogging. Instead of this and possibly in an attempt to maintain the supposed weirdness suggested by the title I shall rant about how all the good URLs for blogs seem to be gone.


So here's how it all went down. I decided I should give in to peer pressure and maybe start a blog, now fast forward something like two and a half years, so I started a blog - tadaa. I signed up and everything was going really well until I got to the part where I was trying to work out what a good name for this would be. I figured putting loquacious, verbose or sesquipedalian in there somewhere was probably a sensible warning, but predictably these were all taken - as were many different variations on this theme. My next thoughts were along the lines of verbalism, which means to say very little in very many words. This still caused me trouble because the only URL along these lines that wasn't already taken was ihavenothinginterestingorusefultosay which was far too long for me to remember, let alone try and get other people interested in .


Given that I was having so much trouble I decided to have a think and come back to it. This brought with it the realisation that although I want to be as brilliant a wordsmith as Shakespeare, or at least Dr Seuss, that this is unlikely and I shouldn't worry so much about what it is called. This lasted about as long as it took me to return to trying to come up with a title. I should probably point out that the title itself was a problem in and of itself, but in order to remember the URL I wanted it to actually have some sort of connection with it so I played around with a wide range of themes including ramblings, confusions and randomness, none of which gave me any love. It was about this time that I started thinking about what I'm actually going to put in here and realised I have no idea, probably something about films I watch and books I read, almost certainly stuff about a trip to America I'm going on in January. Generally I figured it was just somewhere that all the stuff that gets me called weird if I say it to actual real people (as opposed to my, in all probability, imaginary readership) could call home.

Thus the Home of Weird was born. If you're wondering how I can possibly say that all the good URLs are gone when I have managed to snag this nifty one, I will point out that I'm pretty sure I got the last one. Some sort of smug victory gif would seem appropriate here but as I don't have any smug victory gifs I shall instead just write "Ha Ha!" and leave you to provide the Nelson Muntz image associated with it using your imagination.


And that is the story of my blog so far, post one and already I'm getting all meta by blogging the story of my blogging, this either bodes very well or very poorly for the blog as a whole. If anyone knows which then be sure to let me know.