Category: Random

“Good manners reflect something from inside – an innate sense of consideration for others and respect for self”
My arse!

With reference to this post:

“Police begin campaign to run down jaywalkers” Jason Theriault | www.dispossessed.com

• Lord Voldemort
• Sirius Black
• Draco Malfoy
• Severus Snape
• Tom Marvolo Riddle
• Remus Lupin
  
• Cornelius Fudge

• Rubeus Hagrid
• Salazar Slytherin
• Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington

• Go to the Gym
  It’s been over a week since I last went to the gym and I am feeling ridiculously lardy and gross (the two may not be related, of course). Hence, time to go do some exercise.

• Combat Trousers
  I have to go to the Army Surplus in Camden to buy some combat trousers. I’ve been meaning to do it for weeks, but never seem to get around to it.

• ****** ******* *
  ** ** **** ** ********* ** **** ** ***** ** ******** **** ** *** *** *** ** * **** ******** ** **** *** ** **** ***** *** ***** ********.

• Washing
  Flatmates arrive back on Tuesday from their holiday. Their sheets have to be washed by then (my family was staying their rooms), plus I have to get all my washing done because they are girls and they have just come back from holiday and access to the washing machine is going to be pretty limited, I fear.

After four weeks and three evictions, finally we have an escapee with some bloody opinions, who isn’t afraid to give some good headline:

BBC: “Big Brother’s Caroline vows revenge“
   Ousted Big Brother contestant Caroline O’Shea has vowed get her own back on “evil” fellow contestant Nicholas Bateman, who she has branded her “betrayer”.
   The blonde brummie said she will vote for his eviction if he is nominated and would like to “knock his block off”.
   She described Tom as “dull”, Darren “arrogant” and said Mel was a “pain in the arse”, who was only interested in the men in the house.
   And all the males in the house were branded Neanderthals.
   “At least the women have something to offer – there’s a creative streak,” she said.

Work Well Together [via metafilter]
“Step 3: Catch a bunch of flies. Put them in a jar and put the jar in the freezer. In a few seconds the flies will be chilled out completely. This is called cryogenics, and it has its drawbacks. For example, the flies will be dead flies if you freeze them too long. Dead flies are no good. So if you’re a tinkerer, refrigerate your flies. It takes longer to make them comatose, but they have a higher recovery rate than the ones you leave in the freezer next to the burritos.”

• “thank”
  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, JK Rowling

• “in”
  The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

• “and”
  The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster

• “it”
  The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud

• “much”
  The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

• “building”
  The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris

• “lens”
  The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart

• “top”
  The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges

• “is”
  A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

• “the”
  A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes

• “knew”
  Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut

• “and”
  One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey

• “composed”
  Against Nature, J.-K. Huysmans

• “average”
  The Soft Machine, William S Burroughs

• “you”
  Flatland, Edwin A Abbott

• “atoms”
  Engines of Creation, K. Eric Drexler

• “veracity”
  Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche

• “way”
  Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

• “next”
  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe

(*Chapter headings, Prefaces, Prologues, Introductions, Initial Quotes etc. excluded)

What’s next, one wonders, when Big Brother judders finally to its close. Well, I’ve got an idea. How about you get, like, 14 people, and then you put them in an astronaut training camp and throw out one a week, and the one who’s left gets stuck in a rocket and sent up to the Mir space-station. What’s that you say? Someone’s already thought of it? You have got to be kidding me…

Which brings me to my current predicament. I have just won two tickets to the Gala Première and After-Show Party of X-men, to be held on Tuesday night in Leicester Square, and later in the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. I can’t get in touch with Glyn or Simon at all, and even if I could I could only take one of them (assuming that they could get down here on a weekday night). So at one level I really shouldn’t go – I made a commitment to go with them. But let’s be honest. What are the chances that I’m not going to go?

When I was at school, I was really good friends with Glyn and Simon. We shared some (relatively geeky) passions, which in some cases we still do. When school finished, I took a year out before going to University. Glyn went off to York and Simon went off to Hull. York and Hull are quite close to one another so they kept in pretty regular contact. I kept in contact too, although slightly less regularly, and occasionally mooched up north to see them.

Our contact became slightly more sporadic when I went to University. I was in Bristol, and Bristol is not close to either York or Hull. So I tended only to see them during University vacations – particularly Christmas. When I stayed on at Bristol to do postgraduate work, I stopped going back to Norfolk for vacations and only saw them at Christmas when they were summoned back to their respective families.

Now, sensible people at this point would have prevailed upon e-mail as the perfect answer to this problem. Unfortunately, Simon wouldn’t buy a computer, and started working for the Ministry of Defence (and his e-mail suddenly became secret) – Glyn was a just a bit more hopeless, only apparently logging on about once every three to four weeks. I have friends in Mexico and Los Angeles who I am in better contact with.

Anyway. Nearly a year passed with absolutely no contact whatsoever, until suddenly a few months ago, Glyn announced that he was getting married. I went up to Leicester for the occasion, watched the ceremony and chatted to everyone there. It was a wonderful, bizarre, experience. And the strangest part of the whole day was when Glyn turned around to me about half an hour after the ceremony was complete and said, “I know this is the first time that we’ve really seen each other in like two or three years, but it’s great to see you. Which reminds me, there’s another fundamental reason we must meet up again. When’s the X-men movie coming out?“