Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
This is Jinsy is one of the most fascinating things I’ve seen on television in quite some time.
I eagerly await the next episode.
On another subject entirely – first day back at work, 100% cloud cover, crippling humidity, predicted maximum temperature of 39 degrees and thunderstorms. When did I get moved to the Singapore office!?
(Note: We don’t have a Singapore Office)
I know I promised a review of The Hobbit, but we’re currently on the sixth day in a row with temperatures exceeding 37 degrees, so brain no working good so much not yus.
In the meantime here’s some Lord of the Rings content to tide you over…
So, tomorrow is the end of the world! Woo-hoo!
I can tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow – nothing. That is to say plenty will happen, but none of it will be any different to any other day on planet Earth. Sure, a cycle in a calender is coming to an end, but so what? Someone’s calendar is always ticking over. What makes the Mayans so damn special?
B’ak’tun come and go – after all they only last 394 years. Did the world end in 1617? Was human consciousness lifted to a new level in 1223? All evidence points to no. I ain’t holding my breath this time around.
And sure, you can claim that the end of the 13th b’ak’tun is special. That each ‘world’ lasts 13 b’ak’tun and then ends. The problem with that is that it’s an entirely modern idea based on fundamental misinterpretations of Mayan thought. There are only two Mayan inscriptions that even mention the end of b’ak’tun 13 – one of them merely notes that it’ll happen one day, the other says it’s the festival of an almost completely unknown minor god. That’s it. No prophecies, no predictions, absolutely nothing to suggest that the commencement of b’ak’tun 14 will be any different to any other point in human existence.
The end of the 13th b’ak’tun is upon us. The world won’t end, or be transformed, the human race won’t be wiped out or redeemed, and things will carry on into the 14th b’ak’tun just the same as it ever was – except that new age con-men will need to find some other way to sell books to the gullible (I’m guessing something to do with Nibiru).
I’m still going to take the opportunity to post this though…
The old depression is absolutely killing me at the moment. I’m dragging myself into work, but spend a lot of the day just dully staring at the screen trying to remember what I’m meant to be doing. Not good, not good at all.
In any case, I have some complaints…
Westpac – it’s pretty impressive that you were able to find, let alone hire Bonnie Tyler for your latest ad, but seriously, what kind of maniac would play Total Eclipse of the Heart at a wedding? It’s a song about a relationship crashing and burning! You might as well play Deutschland über Alles at a Bar Mitzvah!
Treechange – I hate that word. I don’t know why I hate it, I just do. With a passion. If you ask me, Sigrid Thornton has a lot to answer for.
All over the news this morning is an artist in Queensland who’s using roadkill and maggots to make paintings. Any fool who thinks this is newsworthy has obviously never hung out with artists.
The Twelfth of the Twelfth Twenty-Twelve – Oh woop-de-do. Some numbers have lined up. Let’s all strip naked in the street and party. If we used base 8 or something this would be a day like any other.
That’s it. Maybe some caffeine will cheer me up.
Been dividing my time between feeling horribly run down and depressed, and building my knight titan (it’s actually starting to look pretty good). Neither are leaving much time for blogging.
But hey, worse things happen in Finland…
(It’s probably sad that I immediately identified this… thing… as being Finnish from the shots of the Sibelius Monument).
Having the kind of anxiety and depression riddled day where simply being conscious hurts.
There’s only one solution. The Pixies.
There. That’s a bit better.
Sadly, today is Dave Gorman’s last show on Absolute Radio. I’m vaguely thinking about tuning in live over the interwebs – if I can figure out the timezones and such – or I may just wait for the podcast.
In any case, one of the subjects frequently discussed on the show were ‘Penny Drops Moments’ – that is the moment when you suddenly realise something incredibly obvious that’s been staring you in the face for ages. I had one of those the other day, so thought this an auspicious date to write about it.
Many, many years back, when ah were just a lad (sorry, I seem to have gone all Yorkshire, give me a minute to apply a smack to the head… ouch!… that’s better), many years back there was a paranormal themed show named Strange Things on local radio station RTR. Every week the hosts would pick a ‘strange thing’ as a subject and put together a selection of interviews, music and general irreverent discussion about it. One week, they chose the subject of Satanism, and in between a biography of Aleister Crowley and ridiculous urban myths about Boya Quarry, they interviewed the self proclaimed ‘Pope D.K.D Cadaver’ of the Church of the Subgenius about his ‘Satanic Church of the Sacred Excrameditation Bowl and Divine Slack’.
This interview was a riot. You can actually judge for yourself just how much of a riot because one of the first things I ever posted on Wyrmworld was a transcription of it – happening to have recorded it off the radio when it was broadcast (the transcription even includes some audio files of the original ranting! Magic! :)).
I was reminiscing about this interview the other day, when I realised something. Something that had been staring me in the face for years. The name of the ‘Pope’. D.K.D = Decay D = Decayed. Pope Decayed Cadaver! An obvious reference to the Synodus Horrenda! D’oh!
The Synodus Horrenda, for those whose knowledge of weird and bizarre history isn’t quite up to scratch, is one of the strangest and most disturbing incidents in the entire strange and disturbing history of the Catholic Church. Known in English as the Cadaver Synod, it took place in 897 during one of the various power struggles that surrounded the Papacy, and involved the then Pope Stephen VI (or VII – it’s complicated) having the decaying corpse of his predecessor Pope Formosus dug up, and put on trial for various abuses of power. The trial mostly consisted of the rotting corpse being propped up on a chair while Pope Stephen yelled questions and accusations at it, and ended with the body being stripped of its Papal vestments, having its fingers cut off, and being thrown into the Tiber River.
(You may think Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair is weird – Catholicism has you beat every time!)
So there, a penny drops moment of the strangest kind!
I’ve been promising to write up what went down in Melbourne for weeks, so I’m going to damn well do it! So there! 😉
OK, first of all, the reason for the company pulling up sticks and relocating to the east coast for the weekend. One of our websites was nominated in the Australian Web Industry Association Australian Web Awards. This is the first time any of our sites have reached such lofty heights, so Dale coughed up the money for us to head over to the awards ceremony, being held at Luna Park on the evening of Saturday October 6th.
(Spoiler: We didn’t win. Boo! Hooray! Boo! Hooray! Call me when you’re finished).
While Dale did cough up money for the trip, he didn’t cough up a whole lot of it, so we ended up catching a red eye flight on an economy airline, scheduled to take off at 11:00pm on Thursday night. Due to various delays and incompetence the plane didn’t actually take off until 1:30, at which point we’d been standing around in the departure lounge for well over an hour. To make matters worse, bad planning on my part (combined with the burger I’d had at lunch not sitting too well) resulted in my having to pay $14 for a bottle of water and a ham sandwich. Bloody airports.
Anyway, we eventually boarded the plane – having to walk out across the tarmac like chumps to do so. Honestly, what is this? The middle ages?
The flight was about as comfortable as one would expect. That is to say, not very. I was able to snatch a few scattered hours of sleep, which was apparently more than the rest of my colleagues managed. We touched down at Tullamarine about 6:30, and fortuitously grabbed a maxi-taxi right outside the airport doors.
This (eventually) delivered us to the general vicinity of Hotel Tolarno. Happily all our rooms were ready, and Cleyton and I lucked out by getting the largest of the three. Dale and Janina were almost dead on their feet and immediately disappeared, while Cleyton, Bruce, Daniel and I wandered outside in search of sustenance. The hum of the city waking up in the morning sunlight was enhanced by a Paul-Kellyesque smell of burning leaves, which turned out to be a rubbish bin someone had set on fire. Welcome to St Kilda!
We located food in a bakery across the street (I indulged in one of those gigantor sized Red Bulls and a quiche), then retired to Daniel and Bruce’s room where we sat around mocking breakfast TV and shrieking theatrically every time they replayed a shot of Tony Abbot’s lycra-clad crotch (honestly, it was about every three minutes).
After a while Daniel and Bruce both started passing out, so Cleyton and I left them to get some sleep. Cleyton got his laptop up and running on the hotel’s wifi, and I set off on confront Melbourne’s tram network on a trip to the Coatman.
Happily I’d done my research and after picking up a Myki card at one of the dozen or so 7/11’s scattered along Fitzroy street found tram transport no challenge at all. I arrived in Glen Huntly just before 9:20 – and discovered that the Coatman doesn’t open until 10:00.
Derp.
I spent the next forty minutes wandering up and down Glen Huntly road, taking photographs of anything that looked even mildly interesting. Eventually the Coatman opened, and with very little fuss I was assisted in locating a very fine coat, which cost me only $125. I caught the tram back to St Kilda, feeling quite chuffed with myself, then went for a wander – mostly to check out a rather impressive church spire I’d spotted on my way down.
After some architectural appreciation I headed back to the hotel. Cleyton was asleep so I did some quiet reading, which soon evolved into some sleeping of my own. We were woken about midday by Dale who was getting everyone together to go have lunch and do some business planning so the day wouldn’t be a complete write off work-wise (he rather nicely said that I could be excused so I could go and buy my coat. The fact that I’d already done so and had time to come back and get some sleep seemed to genuinely shock him). We ended up at the Italian restaurant just across the street where I had a very nice chicken and vegetable soup, and loads of garlic bread.
Business out of the way, Bruce, Daniel, Cleyton and I caught a tram into the city and went for a stroll along the Yarra. We ended up at Federation Square where some kind of concert to save the Kimberly was being set up (I later learned that the John Butler Trio and Claire Bowditch were performing – I should have hung around). We then headed into the city proper and, rather suspiciously, kept running into places particularly suited to Daniel’s interests (Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, the Apple Store, a games shop with an entire floor devoted to Ninetendo…). We eventually ended up at Minotaur, where I quickly realised that there was absolutely no middle ground – I could either buy stuff, and end up spending hundreds of dollars, or buy nothing at all. I reluctantly bought nothing at all.
By this point it was getting towards evening. Bruce was meeting up with some mates he hadn’t seen in ages, and wanted to get back to the hotel to get cleaned up first, so we caught the tram back. Cleyton got back online and I got back to my reading. Eventually Daniel came knocking and the three of us headed out into Saint Kilda to find somewhere to eat.
This wasn’t easy. We found plenty of places, but none seemed to appeal. We followed Fitzroy street down to the bay, then continued along the Esplanade and eventually all the way down to the end of Acland Street. Eventually – sick of walking and quite hungry – we ended up at a little cafe about midway along Acland, and had quite an adequate meal before getting a tram back to the hotel at about 11:30.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Kusanagi on a crutch! It turns out I did lose a bunch of important data when my hard drive died a while back 🙁
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 🙁
At least last night’s Hamster Wheel cheered me up somewhat…
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.
