| "Joke" |
[Jul. 15th, 2008|03:12 pm] |
Hey, do teenaged alchemists ever experience angst over getting past first base metal with a girl?
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here until you scroll down the page. |
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| Ethical Dilemma |
[Jul. 10th, 2008|11:32 am] |
Dear Miss Morals,
Is it ethically wrong to hoard one's old bus passes, against a future date when time travel shall have been invented? |
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| Oy vey! |
[Jun. 25th, 2008|12:57 am] |
I got thrown out of Canada!
For a YEAR!
And I had to spend like 24 hours on a train from Montana to Seattle!
And I got a new job as a proofreader for a little company that publishes municipal codes!
And they're going to let me work 4 ten-hour days a week instead of 5 eights!
So I have totally no excuse for not writing my novel!
And I moved back into the same green house where I lived in 2005!
With quite a few of the same awesome people still in the house or not far away!
And I don't have any furniture as usual so I'm sleeping on the floor in a grimy basement!
And I went to the Fremont Fair this weekend and it made me give up eating meat FOREVER!
And Seattle is completely awesome!
But Tessa & Finnegan are moving to Victoria so I might have to go there!
Under cover of night because if I'm caught on Canadian soil before June 09 they will deport me!
And deportation is for life, not just for Christmas!
So that's the LAST two weeks written up. What am I going to do for the next two I wonder? |
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| Miles Time |
[Jun. 2nd, 2008|08:29 am] |
Lawrence Miles never fails to make me laugh in the mornings. From his "review of the latest Doctor Who episode", aka a brutal character dissection of incoming executive producer Steven Moffat:
To an extent, he's the Doctor Who version of Neil Gaiman, a writer who's prepared to contrive his storylines with near-clinical precision to make sure that (a) the right demographic groups are interested and (b) he gets to look like a rock star. This is probably the harshest thing I've said so far, since Gaiman is a stinking parasite who'll sink to any depths in his quest to make goth-girls cop off with him, and even Moffat isn't that desperate.
I kind of wish I'd written that. Then again, I remember the days when I was desperate to get a rise out of the internet (the cheapest kind of attention) by contradicting the popular consensus in the most forceful terms available too. As Aristophanes once said at a symposium, "people can't handle the truth, Socrates, leave them alone"... |
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| Downward Facing Dog |
[May. 21st, 2008|12:27 pm] |
Why don't people have licence plates? Just think at the amount of crime it would prevent. If someone tried to make a quick getaway after mugging you, you'd just take down their number and you'd have your property back in no time at all. And if someone was wandering around without their licence plate on, that wouldn't help them, as everyone would know they were up to no good. And human licence plates wouldn't be solely practical. Imagine the fun you could have, the ladies you could attract, with a blinged-out vanity plate.
I am aware there is some kind of lunatic fringe out there who believe that compulsory human licensing would in some way compromise our innate human rights and freedoms, blah blah blah. To these nutjobs I say: why do you condescend to have a licence plate on your vehicle, then?
Othergates, today is a milestone in my life because it is the first time I have ever worn cufflinks. They are made from the keys of an antique typewriter from 1920's Wales: on my left wrist I am sporting "SHIFT LOCK" and on my right "8". Dapper or what? Additionally, I relaxed my grudge against the auld enemy, Gillette, last month and have been shaving with a five-bladed razor lately, something I once swore I would never do, but once you've renegued on your youthful idealism by buying a gym membership or taking another human life, all sorts of things are apt to go to the wall. I am trying to grow sideburns, but they're only lopsideburns so far.
I mostly go to see Canadian artists live these days: Hawksley Workman, Danny Michel, Sarah Slean, Destroyer; Islands and Constantines tickets acquired for June. I bitterly resent the North American habit of putting headline bands onstage after midnight though, even on schoolnights. In the UK it was all over by elevenish giving everyone ample opportunity to be in bed before tomorrow. Over here it's like you have to make a choice between being cool or doing your job properly, which is no contest for me obviously, but might present a moral dilemma for others. We had to leave Destroyer early in any case, chagrin sandwiches all round.
Things I like on my iPod at the moment: The New Pornographers, Okkervil River, and Charlotte Gainsbourg's "5.55", produced by those talented boys from Air, which somehow ends up being so clearly a Black Box Recorder album that I have to check Luke Haine's isn't hiding in the CD case somewhere. The last film I saw was Iron Man, which was most endearing, and Doctor Who which I download on Saturday evenings continues to be the best show in the world ever bar none. Am I all caught up yet? |
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| 2,228 Words (Approx) |
[May. 20th, 2008|11:24 am] |
Ooh, here's a question I don't know the answer to: in Ireland/other strongly Catholic countries, is it considered fine to neuter and/or spay one's housepets, or would that constitute a blasphemy in the eyes of God?
Did I tell you the real reason why I have to marry Tessa? It is a matter of common record that I have the same birthday as John Lennon... but maybe you didn't know that she shares hers with Yoko Ono. The match was clearly written in the stars, in much the same may as my inevitable death by shooting.
Here's a picture of us being all John and Yokoey:
( behind a cut to spare those who have recently eaten the sight of naked verlaine shoulderflesh )
There you go, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) bateleur, she is REAL. |
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| A Thousand Words |
[May. 20th, 2008|10:38 am] |
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| The State, I Mean Province That I Am In |
[May. 19th, 2008|10:36 pm] |
Crikey, it's been a while since I posted on any kind of regular basis here, and for this I must humbly apologise. And then secondarily apologise for the "whirlwind tour of what's going on in my life" entry that follows; if I'd been doing my job as ace blogger verlaine properly for the past six months, none of this infodump would be necessary.
The big news I expect is that I am well and truly engaged to be married, having bought Tessa the prettiest antique ring in the world somewhere in the region of Valentine's Day. The wedding is going to be in a year's time, May 17th 2009, on a very pleasant island halfway between Vancouver and Victoria called Pender. I know it's a million miles away for most of you and my track record for attending YOUR weddings recently has been pretty poor, but if you fancy a Canadian jaunt next spring you'd be very welcome to come to British Columbia and enjoy the hospitality of my in-laws-to-be. No doubt I will invite certain of you in a more personalised manner, in order to maximise your sense of guilt when you briefly investigate the cost of plane fares and decide you'd rather just go down the pub anyway. But yeah, spring 2009, if the weight of international social obligation rests heavily on your shoulders - save the date.
The nearly-as-big news is that I have TRANSFORMED MY LIFE by the acquisition of a miniature schnauzer puppy who goes by the name of Finnegan. It's a fair cop, I tried to move amongst you cat-loving freaks without attracting suspicion for years, but I was always a dog person after all. My hands may be cut to ribbons by his savage fangs, but still I have to say that getting a dog may be the best thing that ever happened to me. Witness the benefits I enjoy. One, owning a dog turns you into an early riser (woe betide anyone who would stand in the way of puppy wanting breakfast at the crack of dawn). Two, it makes of you an active, outdoorsy individual - it's a minimum of three walks a day right now or, fizzing with righteous energy, he destroys the house. Screw faddy diets, get a dog and the pounds will just fall off. Three, and most importantly, it turns you into a tidy person! I never thought it was possible, but despite all these years turning a blind eye to my own personal filth, there's something about doggy poo, pee and shredded cardboard strewn over every surface that insists that now would be a good time to get the cleaning done. Plus, you can never fail to put anything away ever again. We have already lost a DVD, a CD, several electrical cables, part of a George Orwell book and a large box of prophylactics to the depredations of the hound. However, given that the DVD he took out was of controversial Doctor Who episode Love & Monsters, the CD the second, less good Kaiser Chiefs album, and that he stopped shredding the Orwell at *exactly* Page 1, apparently disagreeing only with the foreword, I'm not sure he is possessed of a mindless lust for destruction so much as a keenly developed critical faculty. Time will tell.
Here is a random picture of our new canine overlord:
My final piece of news, and it's so mind-boggling that I can't tell how it ranks in importance compared to the above bulletins, indeed possibly eclipses them entirely: following an argument over the provenance of Fraggle Rock, in which I brutally mocked all assertions that the show could be anything but English, it being set ON A LIGHTHOUSE OFF THE CORNISH COAST, Uncle Travelling Matt having encounters with silly people from outer space feeding paper into the maws of ROYAL MAIL POSTBOXES and so forth... I nevertheless undertook a quick investigation and discovered that Fraggle Rock was a completely different show in all the different countries it was shown in! Apart from what is obviously the canonical, lighthouse-set Fraggle Rock, the North American audience allowed itself to be persuaded that Fraggle Rock lies beneath the house of some kind of inventor called Doc, who later developed Tourette's and opened a bar in the movie Boondock Saints, effing and blinding furiously until the day he died; the French version was set beneath a bakery, and so on and so forth. Imagine if you can an infinite number of Fraggle Rocks existing simultaneously in every conceivable parallel universe, the one fixed immutable point (hence Rock, of course) in all creation, while all else around it is in flux, mere shadows cast on the cave wall by the candlelight of Gobo, Mokey, Boober, Wembley, and Red. Does that blow your mind as much as it blows mine? |
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| The Mouths of Babes |
[Apr. 23rd, 2008|01:23 pm] |
So for some reason I have been getting nostalgic for my playground days, almost a quarter of a century ago now, and the rich language we used then that is mostly now lost forever. One term that seems to have survived is "fit" for a good-looking member of the opposite sex; as such, I only cite it because it must have been ten years or more before I realised it had any linguistic correlation with muscular development and endurance. I would have used it for someone completely rubbish at sports without a second thought if I fancied them, I'm sure. And, needless to say, I never fancied anyone who was good at sports.
Other vernacular I remember from the time was "tight" or "sly" to refer to someone being cruel in any way, irrespective of the ungenerosity or deviousness involved. "That's well sly!" If you were being cruel to someone and wanted to rub their nose in their ill-fortune, you could say "Spi on you" which meant exactly the same as Nelson Muntz's "ha ha". The derivation of this remains completely mysterious to me to this day.
Most playground jargon is related to taunting of course, and there was a rich vein of derogatory terms usually implying mental handicap ("spaz", "mong" etc) or homosexual inclination ("bummer", "gaylord"). I don't remember much actual swearing as I understand it today, though there were bowdlerisations such as "wazzock", which with hindsight I assume to be a childish form of "wanker".
EDIT: I just remembered that I wanted to mention that our phrase for what Americans call "making out" was and probably still is "getting off with". Mainly because I told mercuryglass this once and she was horrified: "ugh, that's so graphic" or somesuch. Crazy Americans!
The other liberty that schoolkids take with language is of course to give their teachers inappropriate nicknames. From what I recall some of these were crude sexualisations of names (e.g. "Titflop" for Flitcroft), quite a few were beard-related ("Dickchin", "Fred Fungus"), but most, bizarrely, were based on identification with historical personages that, at that point, I had never heard of. There was "Lennie" Hutton and "Hairy" Neeves, and many years later I get those, but I'm still none the wiser about "Ben" Lyons. There was an actor called Ben Lyon who enjoyed some fame in the 20s and 30s, but such a nickname couldn't have stuck to even such a superannuated teacher for 40 or 50 years... could it?
You know the drill. Spill the beans about the lost languages of your own childhoods... |
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| Not If You Were The Last.fm On Earth |
[Apr. 15th, 2008|01:44 pm] |
I've been getting quite into last.fm recently, as something to do at work that's not as blatantly sackworthy as tooling around on Facebook or, er, posting to LiveJournal. It's a lot of fun, even if it gets a bit TOO exciting at times and I have to retreat to Charlotte Gainsbourg's Similar Artists for a while to calm down. Two especially good things about last.fm though are:
(1) Discovering that, on the Luke Haines/Cinerama/other quintessentially English irony-pop channels, they keep playing me tracks by Felt, a "hip hop duo featuring rappers Slug and MURS". I think what last.fm *means* to be playing me is the post-punk Felt featuring Lawrence of Denim and Go-Kart Mozart pseudo-fame, but I always click on the "express your love for this track!" icon anyway, hopefully ambiguating thet situation beyond the possibility of repair.
(2) Getting inspired to keep a mental list of the artists who, according to all conventional metrics, I ought to like, but who have me reaching for the "don't ever play me this track again" button faster than you can say Jack Johnson. Here are some of the unfortunates who have MADE MY LIST:
1. The Police
2. Prefab Sprout
3. Antony & The Johnsons
4. Nick Drake
There was a number 5 on that list, but I can't remember who it was at the moment, so for the sake of argument it's going to be 5. The Futureheads. F*ck the Futureheads.
Which musical acts does everyone assume that you must like, when in fact you'd rather eat boiling tar?
EDIT: I've just remembered who the actual number 5 on my list was! None other than Orlando! Love both the guys in the band, have entirely fond memories of the Romo movement (which is more than most people would own up to, I'm sure), somehow can't bear to listen to the actual tunes. Bizarre... |
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| Astronaut Paramour |
[Mar. 25th, 2008|02:01 pm] |
Do you ever have days...
...when you feel like you're an astronaut who'll never go to space? |
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| Guitar Hero |
[Mar. 19th, 2008|01:18 pm] |
On Saturday this chap here is going to be giving me a guitar lesson:
Obviously what I really want from him are image lessons, but I think it'll take me till at least our third encounter to pluck up the courage for that. |
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| House of (Thomas) Paine |
[Mar. 12th, 2008|03:12 pm] |
sosoclever points out that I don't post much here these days, so as a special treat I'll tell you what has been on my mind for the past, ooh, six months.
MOSTLY, it has been rancour over the fact that a little-known musical act called House of Pain saw fit to change the lyrics of a song I wrote for them, I mean some of them were pretty damn catchy:
I'll serve the truth like Rene Descartes,
If yours steps up, I'm discussing fine art,
The Word was with God, it's in the Prologue,
I got more qualms than the Bible's got psalms,
'Cos just like Kierkegaard I've loathed and feared...
Apparently though the chorus, "Stroke Your Beaaaaaaard, Stroke Your Beaaaaard" just wasn't deemed catchy enough to get people excited on the dancefloor. Bastards.
The only other thing I have thought about since last year, literally, is my realisation that the entire course of my life has been shaped by the fundamental suspicion that there is something weird and terrifying about shoes that fail to accurately represent the shape of the feet inside.
There you go, you weren't missing me nearly as much as you thought you were, were you. |
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| Fillums |
[Mar. 12th, 2008|12:54 pm] |
As it is written, so in truth it was: I went to the cinema to see Penelope last night, a sweet modern-day fable about a little princess cursed with the face of a pig until she can find one of her own kind to accept her for who she is. Sadly the production was marred on numerous fronts, e.g. (1) a director fairly lacking in the genius of a Gilliam or Burton, who have raised the bar for our expectations of this type of film, (2) a script without any really sparkling dialogue or really ingenious jokes, and (3) a cast that seems to be 90% comprised of British actors and comedians, who for some unknown reason are forced to affect varyingly excruciating American accents, Torchwood's lovely Burn Gorman's being the most grating, and Russell Brand to his credit not even bothering to try. But the crucial strike against the film can be handily summed up in the results of the following poll:
Poll #1153066 Here Piggy Piggy
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllChristina Ricci, unmarred but for a fairly cute pig-snout:
Thus, with the beautiful James McAvoy being largely wasted in this, I can only award Penelope two and a half snouts out of a possible five-headed pig-monstrosity. Not a patch on Enchanted, in other words, but it's innocuous fun though, would be a good movie to take any smaller relatives out to see, and does feature the bottomless talents of Peter Dinklage, the littlest hunk in Hollywood, so there you go.
Other films I have seen lately include "Be Kind Rewind", minor Gondry I guess but none the less charming for that - three and a half copyright infringements out of a possible five-alarm lawsuit, and "No Country For Old Men", a terrifying coiled spring of a suspense movie much deserving of its recent Oscar sweep: two Coen Brothers up. What should I watch next? |
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| After A Small Tragedy, You... |
[Feb. 24th, 2008|03:06 pm] |
* start numbly to pick up the pieces of your life, just because you need something to do with your hands.
* or else don't, just buy a packet of cigarettes and a lighter and suck in great lungfuls of industrially processed despair, because they go down smoother than your home-rolled variety.
* come into work on a Sunday and keep checking the desk of someone who's not going to be in today, or any other day.
* buy lunch based strictly on its nutritional merits, because enjoyment is no longer part of the equation.
* walk past a bench sporting the graffito "YOU SUCK because I tell you bitch" and marvel that the human detritus who penned it is probably feeling happier today than you.
* wonder that, despite this disaster paling in comparison to real tragedies, to real tragedies you've had in your own life even, it's no less painful to nurse in your heart.
* think about buying a $10 Leonard Cohen CD in HMV, on the grounds that if anyone has felt as bad about things as this, he probably has.
* glimpse and dismiss the ridiculous notion of "ending it all", on the grounds that while you've proven once again you have no idea how to live, you REALLY don't have a clue how to die.
* ponder where in the world you could move, fast enough to take the system by surprise and arrive a good while before your baggage does.
* remember how, in the old days, you used to write.
Don't worry, by the way, folks... you know me... only ever joking. |
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| I'm Going Out Now. I May Be Some Time. |
[Jan. 28th, 2008|02:15 pm] |
So Edmonton is revelling in temperatures of -30 degrees C at the moment... and that's before we factor in the wind chill.
I can confirm that the sensation of the hairs freezing inside your nostrils, while unnerving at first, becomes strangely addictive after a while.
How's your winter treating you? |
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| With A Small Salary Raise Comes Great Responsibility |
[Jan. 11th, 2008|11:42 am] |
Hello friends! It does pain me that my first communique of 2008 should be work-related, but after a modest payrise apparently I am expected to devote all my efforts to "blue sky thinking" or something like that, so naturally I have been staring out of the window thinking of blue skies a lot. However, it may be that I can actually achieve something worthwhile in my terrifying new predicament of having the CEO's ear, so let me put this question to you:
Put yourself in the position of a teacher or a student. If you had the opportunity to revolutionise the humble workhorse that is the educational textbook, using the recent advancement in leaps and bounds of digital technology, what would you do? Or more to the point what would you want someone else to do for you?
The first big client is a university Faculty of Engineering, so if anyone has any special clue as to what the hell engineers in particular want out of their education materials, that would be specially welcome, since speaking as a classicist I never previously thought them worthy to shine my shoes. But in the long run I think the plan is to provide cutting-edge educational resources to students of all ages in order to indoctrinate them into becoming willing slaves of our impending new world order. Any notions? |
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| The 12 Labours of Christmas |
[Dec. 18th, 2007|03:19 pm] |
Now, of course we've all watched a Ray Harryhausen movie or two, and so think we're sh*t hot at mythological knowledge, but here's a Christmas question to sort the viros from the pueros:
Poll #1108288 Laborious
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllHow many of the Twelve Labours of Hercules can you name without looking them up?
( Full List Under The Cut )
You can claim half a point for something vaguely on the right track. I scored 8.5 - B minus, must try harder, Verlaine! |
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| Who Loves You, Baby? |
[Dec. 17th, 2007|02:21 pm] |
Poll #1107704 Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All"She Loves You", by the Beatles: |
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| Domestic Crisis |
[Dec. 7th, 2007|10:20 am] |
Okay, this has now gone far enough, and a certain person's EGREGIOUS mispronunciations of simple comestible words must now be corrected. With this in mind:
Poll #1102206 Brusque Brush
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllWhat is the correct way to pronounce "bruschetta"? |
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