Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
It’s Meeeeee!! Floppyyyyyyyyy!!!!
I can’t believe that for years I’ve been confusing Mr Blobby and Mr Floppy.
No wonder I could never find his cover of Reckless.
(Although for the record his Wuthering Heights is far superior…)
Kusanagi on a crutch! It turns out I did lose a bunch of important data when my hard drive died a while back đ
Most of it I can reconstruct – with some hard work. What’s frustrating is that I’m sure there’s some of it that I can’t remember, which means I can’t reconstruct it, which means it’s lost forever. It’s also personally galling that I didn’t back it up in the first place – I was so certain that I’d backed up everything important, so to miss such a big chunk of data is just humiliating.
Well, I guess it’ll encourage me to be more careful with backups in future đ
At least last night’s Hamster Wheel cheered me up somewhat…
The ZurvĂĄr second (ZS) is 1.10592 seconds long.
The Zurvår minute (ZM) is 125 ZS long, for a total of 138.24 seconds or 2.304 minutes long.
The ZurvĂĄr hour (ZH) is 25 ZM or 3125 ZS long, for a total of 57.6 minutes long.
There are 25 ZH in one standard 24 hour day.
The hour count of a ZurvĂĄr day begins at sunrise and continues until the following sunrise. This means that a given day may be longer or shorter than the standard 25 hours depending on latitude and time of year.
A traditional Zurvår week lasts five days. A month is five weeks (25 days) and a year five months (125 days). The traditional calendar has been superseded by a redesigned 365 day calendar on Zurvår Arèånå, but the traditional calendar is retained for cultural and traditional purposes.
For scientific purposes the ZurvĂĄr epoch is fixed to 00:00:00 GMT on January 1st 1954. The traditional calendar has also been synchronised to sunrise on this date.
In the traditional calendar, today (Oct 22nd 2012) would be the fifth day of the fifth month, in the year 172. A person born today would be ascribed the horoscope of ‘Double Knot’, which predicts a well balanced personality skilled at problem solving.
Stumbled over this recently on the Middle-Earth in Film page on Wikipedia…
…In the 1970s John Boorman was contracted by United Artists to direct an adaptation that would have collapsed [The Lord of the Rings] into a single film. […] In the script by Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg, many new elements have been inserted or modified. Among other things, Gimli is put in a hole and beaten so he can retrieve the password to Moria from his ancestral memory [and] Frodo and Galadriel have sexual intercourse…
My initial reaction was What!? But then I discovered that John Boorman was the guy behind Zardoz, and suddenly it all made sense.
What makes the proposed film even more disturbing is that in the 1970s they wouldn’t have been able to use the digital editing that Peter Jackson used to shrink his actors, and may not have been willing to do an entire film with the complicated trick photography Jackson used when he wasn’t using CGI. So Gimli and the Hobbits would most likely have been played by dwarfs. A movie where little people are thrown into holes and beaten in between sex scenes doesn’t sound like heroic fantasy – it’s more akin to something you’d get under the counter in an ‘adult novelty’ store.
Thank the lord Boorman made Excalibur instead, which (if memory serves) features very little dwarf S&M content.
You know, I was planing to write up what I did in Melbourne this weekend – including why I was there in the first place – but I ran out of time. So instead I’m going to blog about television.
Exactly when did swamp-dwelling hillbillies become a television genre? Swamp People, Swamp Men, Turtleman – what maniac decided these were good ideas for shows, and what maniacs watch them in sufficient numbers to make them viable?
American Digger – I think this show is mis-titled. It should be called American Destroying the Archeological Record for Fun and Profit.
Caught the first episode of Black Mirror last week – the one where the British PM is blackmailed into… well you know if you watched it. They describe the series as black comedy, but I didn’t find anything comedic about it. Which is not a condemnation – I found it a taut and thought provoking thriller. I’d like to watch the others in the series, but they’re on a bit late and I need to work Tuesday mornings. No doubt they’ll be available online.
Apparently that’s all I’ve got to say about television. Hmmm.
Caught Lawless last night with Rebecca. It was actually really good – I’m astonished to relate that Shia LaBeouf can actually act. The Appalachian accents were a bit tough to decipher from time to time, and Guy Pearce’s villain was a bit over the top, but overall a damn good watch. Also, Jessica Chastain – wow (and I was thinking that before she got her kit off thank you :)).
Um, yeah. That’s all I’ve got to say.
Well, it’s ten years on from the Bali bombings.
I didn’t really feel much when the bombings happened. No anger, no terror, just a sense of dull numbness and weary resignation. I think I was still – even over a year later – in a state of shock from the September 11 attacks. I’d kind of readjusted my mind into a state of acceptance that terrorism was the new reality and that a bunch of innocent people getting horribly murdered was the kind of thing that was going to happen from now on – where and when being mere, irrelevant details.
I didn’t really snap out of it until the 7/7 attacks in London. I guess enough time had passed for the shock to wear off – the fact that I have a disproportionate love of that city no doubt helped.
Now, on the tenth anniversary, I still don’t feel much. I’m just glad that there haven’t been any more attacks on Australians as bad as Bali.
Via Nikki J’s Scrapheap…
On immigration:
1. âJesus knew that there was a place for everything and itâs not necessarily everyoneâs place to come to Australia.â
2. âThese people arenât so much seeking asylum, theyâre seeking permanent residency. If they were happy with temporary protection visas, then they might be able to argue better that they were asylum seekersâ
On rights at work:
3. âBad bosses, like bad fathers and husbands, should be tolerated because they do more good than harmâ
On women:
4. âThe problem with the Australian practice of abortion is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the motherâs convenience.â
5. âI think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasonsâ
6. âI think there does need to be give and take on both sides, and this idea that sex is kind of a womanâs right to absolutely withhold, just as the idea that sex is a manâs right to demand I think they are both they both need to be moderated, so to speakâ
7. âWhat the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially itâs going to go up in price and their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up, every yearâŚâ
On Julia Gillard:
8. âGillard wonât lie down and dieâ
On climate change:
9. âClimate change is absolute crapâ
10. âIf you want to put a price on carbon why not just do it with a simple tax.â
On homosexuality:
11. âIâd probably ⌠I feel a bit threatenedâ
12. âIf youâd asked me for advice I would have said to have â adopt a sort of âdonât ask, donât tellâ policy about all of these thingsâŚâ
On Indigenous Australia:
13. âNow, I know that there are some Aboriginal people who arenât happy with Australia Day. For them it remains Invasion Day. I think a better view is the view of Noel Pearson, who has said that Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this countryâs British Heritageâ
14. âWestern civilisation came to this country in 1788 and Iâm proud of thatâŚâ
15. âThere may not be a great job for them but whatever there is, they just have to do it, and if itâs picking up rubbish around the community, it just has to be doneâ
On Nicola Roxon:
16: âThatâs bullshit. Youâre being deliberately unpleasant. I suppose you canât help yourself, can you?â
Featuring the Spazzys
I’ve taken a day off of work to get my head in order after the Melbourne trip. Rather than spend any time blogging about it, or putting up the many photos I took, I’ve spent the day pottering about the house and listening to mp3s, one of which just happened to be See You Home Tonight from the Pictures’ 2007 release The Fantastic Sounds of the Pictures.
Not only is this a great song, but it features the vocal talents of the Spazzys, so there’s frankly no circumstances under which I could ever dislike it. That said – somewhat ironically given the album title – the sound production on the track is fairly muffled and muddy, which makes it rather difficult to pick out the lyrics. This hasn’t previously bothered me unduly, but today I was struck with a sudden desire to find them out. “No problem!” I thought “I’ll look them up on the interwebs!” but to my shock and horror, I couldn’t seem to locate them anywhere.
This is not a situation that can be allowed to stand, so I’ve just spend the last half hour playing the song over and over, and listening intently to a live version some kind soul put up on YouTube. As a result, I can now present the following lyrics, which (apart from one bit in the first verse) I am 100% certain are correct.
(The bits in italics are sung by the Spazzys, just so that’s clear…)
See You Home Tonight
by The Pictures (featuring The Spazzys)
I know you won’t want to come to my party,
But if you do we’ll throw good times away,
Dance and drink the whole night long,
Until my pal, he finally lets me say…
So I’m asking you,
‘Cause he can’t ask himself,
Can he see you home, tonight?
No he can’t,
No he can’t,
I know there must be something I missed,
If he’s too shy, for it to come to this,
Well that all might be very well,
But with the crush he got on you, well I just can’t tell!
So I’m asking you,
‘Cause he can’t ask himself,
Can he see you home, tonight?
No he can’t,
See you home tonight…
No he can’t,
Now we got the sun rise up,
It’s time to know if he’s all out of luck,
Before you run and get away,
Just give us one more chance to hear me say…
So I’m asking you,
Can he ask himself?
Can he see you home, tonight?
Can he see you home?
He can’t see me home,
Can he see you home, tonight?
No he can’t,
See you home tonight…
No he can’t,
No he can’t,
See you home tonight…
No he can’t,
Back from Melbourne.
I’ll make a more detailed post when I’ve had some sleep, but in the meantime I’m happy to report that I was witness to this on Saturday…
In fact, I’m probably visible in the background of that clip, although I was on the far side of the road, and thus you’d need a Bladerunner level of enhancement to pick me out.
Oh, and I did make it down to the Coatman and got a kickarse new coat for only $125. Brutal!
Right, getting some sleep now…
Off to Melbourne tonight. This is already stuck in my head…
