Good news Everyone!

#We’ll steal the show, Jolly Rogers go! We are the wolves of the sea!#

Phoenix has successfully landed on Mars, and Sir Ian McKellen is signed up to the Hobbit movies. It’s a great time to be alive!

No updates over the weekend – I was busy working on other projects and watching Eurovision. You can expect a detailed summary later but it can be best summed up as Russia’s fairly dull effort winning through political voting, the best acts (involving pirates and old men yelling at the audience while scratching gramophone records) getting nowhere, and the UK coming equal last despite having a pretty good song. Next year in Moscow!

I was also supposed to catch up with Rebecca and Dom for lunch, but Rebecca got sick so we had to call it off. Hope you feel better soon Rebecca!

Better go. I have work to do.

Actually itโ€™s the other Salem

The law wants to be free!

There’s a fair bit of hooha brewing at the moment in the Pacific northwest of the United States. The government of Oregon (which I’d always considered one of the better US states, what with the Decemberists, Boring, Cascadia and Miranda – although technically she was from Washington ๐Ÿ˜‰ is trying to convince all and sundry that it owns copyright in the state’s laws. This apparently goes against years of legal precedents, and people are getting quite riled up about it.

Now, I’m not a lawyer – let alone an American lawyer – but it seems to me that there are two very important reasons that laws should be in the public domain.

The first is that laws define a code of behaviour that citizens of a state are expected to conform to. Placing restrictions on how citizens can access and distribute laws – say, by instance, copyrighting them – impedes citizens’ ability to know and understand their legal obligations. Worse, it makes it harder for citizens to know and claim their legal rights, which can lead to very dangerous situations (eternal vigilance et al.).

The second reason goes right to the heart of democratic government. The idea behind representative democracy is that the people elect representatives to act on their behalf in the governing of the state. Members of government are there to govern for the people – they write and approve laws for the people and on behalf of the people. This means that (by the purest principles of democracy) the laws already belong to the people. Copyrighting them is theft.

So that’s my view on the matter. Let’s hope the government of Oregon remembers who it works for sometime soon.

Do the chickens have large talons?

Ligers do not in fact have magical skills

Yesterday I finally got around to watching a film I’ve been meaning to for ages – Napoleon Dynamite (it was on special at JB’s and I needed something else to buy so it didn’t look like I’d gone in there just to get season four of Gilmore Girls :))

Well what, I ask you is there about this film not to like? Creepy Uncle Rico, ligers, time machines, llamas, holy statues protecting the school hallways and truly awful portraiture. It’s an exuberant paean to sheer, small town pointlessness, and probably the best thing I’ve watched all year to date.

I’m off now to brush up on my computer hacking skills!

A Drop of Wyvern’s Blood

How to win friends and poison them with mocktails.

Quite a while ago the Dragon’s Landing (which is currently on hiatus) put the call out for beverages to serve in the bar of their (completely fictional) inn. I don’t think they had much of a response, but due to a combination of boredom and caffeine craving over my two weeks off I managed to come up with one – a cocktail (or mocktail?) that I have decided to name the “Gary Gygax Wyvern’s Blood”.

(Call it my own little tribute to the master – it’ll have to do until we can get the Tomb of Horrors built for him).

The recipe is as follows…

  • 2/5ths your favourite cola beverage
  • 2/5th dark apple juice
  • 1/5th water (without this it’s way too sweet)

(If you want to go alcoholic you could possibly replace the water with some kind of spirit – in this case it should be called Dragon’s Blood)

Voila!

It’s probably only my deranged tastebuds that will ever actually like this bizarre combination, but I throw it out there in case anyone has a party coming up and needs dare/torture material.

On a similar theme Ryan alerted me to the “Skin Disease or D&D Character?” online quiz. I got 94% – I would have done better except I presumed no one would be stupid enough to name a character after an infectious plague (I was wrong :)).

That was the week that was

A weekly round up

A number of dull anecdotes from my first week back at work…

Anecdote 1: From the bus to work on Thursday morning I saw a 28. Not the number, the bird. The reason this is worthy of blogging is that – despite the fact that they were all over the place when I was a kid – I hardly ever see them these days.

(When I say they were all over the place I mean it. Once one flew into the church on a Sunday morning when I was about 10, and sat flapping its wings and screeching on top of the crucifix all through mass. The priest was moved to comment that if it got too close to him it’d be a 14 – which I thought terribly unchristian of him :))

I blame the rainbow lorikeets.

These gaudy and raucous birds escaped from UWA in the 1960s (why there were any there to begin with I have no idea) and have been spreading ever since, cutting into the territory of the 28s. If I had my way they’d be wiped out with extreme prejudice, but (apparently because they’re colourful) people seem to like having them around, rather than the “dull” 28. So I suppose I’ll have to get used to them. But I’ll still keep a look out for the occasional brave 28 holding out against the rainbow aggressor!

Anecdote 2: Only a little bit further down Nicolson Road the bus got stuck behind an ambulance. Well not behind the ambulance – at right angles to the ambulance which was parked just off the roundabout with Derby road, in such a fashion that it made it impossible for the bus to turn left (which it needed to do). The Ambos were seeing to a cyclist who’d apparently been knocked off his bike and either broken or dislocated his shoulder, and seemed oddly inclined to leave him for a few seconds to move their vehicle 20 metres further down the street.

The result was that the bus was stuck at the roundabout – completely blocking the street – for a good twenty minutes. Cars started banking up behind us, and about ten minutes in frustrated motorists started driving down the wrong side of the street just to get past. This led to a quite amusing incident where one came face to face with another bus coming around the right way and had drive up onto the pavement to let it through.

Personally I don’t know why our bus driver didn’t carry on straight, if only far enough to clear the roundabout. But he apparently preferred to sit tight and cause chaos. Perhaps independent thinking had been drummed out of him by harsh Transperth discipline? In any case the cyclist was eventually loaded into the ambulance and driven away, and we carried on, twenty minutes late.

Anecdote 3: On the train home that same day I ran into Lyndah. Or rather I saw her. She either didn’t see me, or decided to ignore me – which is fine. She and my brother seem to have had some kind of falling out, and my mad crush on her pretty much faded away once I went public about it on this very blog. She’s still very pretty (although she did look rather tired), but I no longer turn into a babbling fool in her presence ๐Ÿ™‚

Anecdote 4: On the train home today there was a girl who bore an astounding resemblance to my ex-collegue Sam. Her hair was brown instead of scarlet, her face was more rounded and she had fewer ear piercings, but apart from that they could have been twins. Very strange – I wondered momentarily if I’d fallen into some kind of alternate universe.

So that was my week. Amazing!

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