Thursday, October 28, 2004

Licensed to Ill

It all sucks. I'm in the middle of my exam period, with 6000 words due in a week, and I am too illin' to move my head. How can I be expected to do my anal-retentive daily work schedule if I can't move my head? Fuck. Luckily I got an extension on my practical ethics exam till the 8th, but that will make it impossible to study for my logic test on the 9th, and my renaissance essay on the last supper still looms. Argh! FUCK.

If only being sick in the non-streetwise sense was this cool.

In other slightly less depressing news, apple has just released a new iPod which is 60GB, has 15h battery life (that's twice mine) and, oh yeah, is colour, displays photos and album art! Album art!? I love album art. Damnit. I would give anything for that function. And also it impacts upon a key component of the art history honours thesis which I am (might be) going to write next year on album art (thanks to alys for the awesome idea). I was going to talk about how the digital music revolution, mainly iPods, impacted upon artwork, since on the text only iPod screen, all albums are equally represented. Oh well.

"The sun fell down again last night on my frustration" (generic emo band).

Ok so the last news was depressing too. Well finally some spring cheer. The other day I was in SoMusic on King St buying the Wedding Planner soundtrack, and this woman came up to me and asked what nationality I was. I replied that I was Australian. She was like "no, no you're not. You're Polish". So I said, "well some people have mistaken me as Swedish before". And then she was all (sorry, running out of ways to express talking) "no no Sweden is too far west. I am talking about East Europe. That is where you are from". So I replied "maybe I was adpoted", and it appeared to her that that was the only explanation.
Anyway, soon enough her boyfriend came up and said "I apologise, her nationality is stupidity". In her defense, my Australian nationality has always been a point of contention. Apart from the Jian Swedish incident, there was my "Dolph" nickname at Timbertop, which was given to me because I looked like Scandinavian F-grade movie star Dolph Lundgren:

Does this mean that I too am 'master of the universe'?
Welcome to the superbonustime hidden blog: Look, I made a links section! I have been secretly practicing skateboarding on my balcony haha! Also, I just ordered the entire OC first season on DVD for Alice's birthday, but it will be getting here early so I can watch all 27 episodes in a row (Australia is only up to episode 16). Le cagou!

Sunday, October 24, 2004

Give the dog a bonafide drink success!

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Gullible

This morning at 6:30am, I was happily sleeping in bed. When suddenly, my dream about friends (the tv show, of course) took a strange turn. Monica started dancing around flapping her arms like a chicken. Then Ross kept on hitting her on the head with a frying pan. What was going on? Then I realised that it was actually one of those things where noises you hear from the outside world enter and change your dreams. But what noises could cause such a strange detour from the normal funtastic misadventures of six hip new yorkers?

Well... A BIRD WAS FLYING AROUND IN MY ROOM AND HEABUTTING THE MIRROR! ARGH! A bird had gotten in through my window and was creating havock! What could I do? I think this little dramatisation will help you understand what really went down:





Note: some pants were hurt in the making of this fly recreation.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Monsters be here

Somewhere, deep down inside, I actually believed that if I left the mess from my August 21nd End-O-Lease party in the sink long enough, it would just disintegrate and everything would be happy and non-smelly again. I was wrong.

What was growing in the sink scared me every night I went to sleep. I feared that some sort of evil gelatinous monster, created from congealed m&ms and classic taste cola, would rise up out of the sink and devour me in my sleep. Plus it smelt bad. Really bad. So I just let it grow in the sink for months, choosing to make peace with the hideousness that was no doubt living in my kitchen.

That was, until tonight. Tonight I deceided to tackle the fiend head on and take back my kitchen for myself! Finally I would be able to use the taps again! So, armed with a trusty poking-mop and a whole bottle of detergent, I approached the sink. Who knows? Maybe it would all be ok and there would be no mouldy sea creature hiding beneath the 20-high stack of dishes waiting to eat me.

I was wrong again. As soon as I lifted up 3 plates, it leaped out at me!!!:

A horrible mould creature... moulded out of clay!!!!!

Actually it looked even worse than that. I swear there were little jellyfish formed out of mould and old banana that were swimming in a large bowl at the bottom of the dish stack. I just aimed my detergent at it and prodded it with my mop until they all went down the drain. The thought of it still sends a shiver down my spine. But I won. And now I can use my kitchen again. Until the next time Gumby!!!

Oh and while I was at it I cleaned out God's bowl. Moses was covered with slime so I gave him a shower:

You can't part THAT water can you?
God is looking very happy in his new, clean water. I know this because I can actually see him for the first time in weeks.

Also, it comes to my attention that I should have called my "End-O-Lease Baking Shit" party the "Last but not Leased" party. Oh well, next time.

Saturday, October 16, 2004

Sans Sheriff

Ok, so I lied in my previous entry. I did stand up. But wait! No, I didn't do it because I discovered that it would be good for my esteem or be a rewarding challenge or anything like that. No. I did it for cold hard union cash. $20. I sold my soul and I am proud.

Pat is in the middle of campaigning for editing Vertigo (UTS student magazine) next year. His team name is the Wolfgang (not this one) and he has made some very awesome stencils to place on his bag (way to heart the MAN pat!!!!). Have a look:

Wolfgang: this is one that I traced (of course had nothing to do with the colouring choices...). But in summary, this is pat's wolf stencil that he has put on his pack (PUN)! Go pat with your election win against the bullshit liberal lingo team! More like, their lingo is "we are shit and we don't like talking John Howard moving mouth lies posters". Yep.

You know, I thought I was angry about the federal election results. But believe it or not, there are some people out there who are angry enough to actually go out there and do something about it. And these people appear to be librarians. Check it:

Research librarians: This photo hopefully also won't have to apply for pat's Vertigo election. Fuckers. I will research you!

Alys, Georgie and I went to see 'Shaun of the Dead' tonight (I like this whole romzom idea. It would be awesome to see other romantic comedies in which most of the characters get killed by the flesh eating living dead. Unless that character was played by Hugh Grant. Because he is king). Needless to say, as expected, Alys was scared by the typical scary noises and the old standing-in- front-of-the-bathroom-mirror-then-opening-it-then-closing- it-and-there's-
a-zombie-standing-there-where-there-wasn't-one-before trick. Before you mock her for this you have to understand that, even now, I am too scared to stay at home alone. Who is the more wussy now? To disclaim this, my house does have the scariest thing EVER in it. ARGH! ARGH! ARGH! Damn now I won't be able to sleep. ARGH! If you want to know how to scare me more than ever (in fact, when I get ridiculously scared, like that time I was in the shower after being awake for 50 hours doing schenanigans last year and a cat walked past the window, I make a weird inhaling noise and faint), just stick that horrible plague mask up with tape (may I suggest, masking tape?) on the wall or in my bed and I will explode. There you have it.

I know this isn't really related, but I think this image of the wussy Dashboard Confessional guy really fits with the whole zombie, brain eating thing:

You killed emo, jerk!

Oh, and I got out of Jury Duty so I could do my tut presentation. I had to ring up the sheriff to find this out, and now I have an entry in my phone's contacts list under "Sheriff". I now feel complete... and that one step closer to knowing Walker: Texas Ranger.

And now, some final words from pat:
PAT SAYSV HI THERE !!!!@@!@@!!@!!!!!*(((


bYE

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

No longer a stand up guy

I dropped out of stand up. I was going to, um, stand up in front in front of manning on thursday and humiliate myself for 5 minutes and get heckled in what would surely be a life-crushing affair for all. But I wimped out. Oh well. Want to know what my routine would have been? Here are my two "best" stand up jokes (the others were "too "good"" to give away to you here...):

What are you meant to do when you are sitting on the toilet in a packed Hoyts bathroom and suddenly you get a call from someone really important, a call that you totally shouldn't miss? What do you do? Do you take the call and pray that nobody around you flushes, thus clueing the person on the phone in on your embarrassing location? Do you yell out to everyone around you not to flush for at least 3 minutes while you take this important call? What if they don't comply? How do you explain away a flush? Say that you're in a toilet shop? (At this point my face hopefully starts getting flushed, giving people a hilarious visual pun)

Still with sitting, it's a known fact that when you are sitting on the couch, you are in the only position in the world where somebody can come up to you and say something completely non-sensical and you would without a doubt understand them. See, if you're standing at a bar and I come up to you and ask you to "please gloopism for me", the most likely outcome is that i get some sort of beverage thrown on me. But if you're on a couch and I ask you to scudge, spifto, ginkunge or quidge, you will immediatley comply and move over a bit to make room for me.

Hilarious.

... those little airline peanuts?

I have a powerbook! And now there is much powerbook nerdery to be conducted by me. For instance, I took it to Renaissance class to take notes, thus joining the rare breed of absolute wankers at Sydney Uni. Unfortunatley, I got out wankered by a mature age student who not only took notes on her computer, but recorded it with an mp3 player.


Traksewt, from the Herd. I played Cranium with him, and believe you me he does an awesome Buffy impersonation.

OMG! Neighbours action! Bubba just told Serena something about her boyf: "Lukah is your brother. The love you have is impossible". Nice Star Wars reference by Ali Ali (Neighbours scriptwriter).

Saturday, October 09, 2004

Leave a Mark please...

Election Updates.
6:08pm:
Mood: No faith
Polls just closed. Fuck! A swing to Libitchfaces in Tasmania! This is horrible. I need to have chips to fix this sorrow.

7:56pm:
Mood: Situation Cunteyes
Labor has lost 8 seats and is polling less than 40% of the natioal vote. Everything is fucked. It has all gone to hell. Fuck you all Australia. Why do you let these fucking librarians take power?

8:57pm:
Mood: There is no hope for anything anymore
FUCK. If I hear the phrase "swing to the coalition" one more time I will go insane. More like baseball bat swing to the coalition. Fuck every holden-buying, VB drinking, picture-of-the-Queen worshipping fucker in Australia. I can't believe over 60% of the people who voted today would have been HAPPY with this coalition win.

10:21pm
Mood: Firebomb
If those scumbag fucks gain control of the senate I will... well get really angry. The world is fucked again. Isn't it depressing that with all the anti-howard sentiment held by not just university students but nearly every public figure, the coalition actually gained popularity. Just goes to show how futile any resistance is.

Obsessed with SARS prevention

9 months ago I began compiling, for no particular reason, a list of homograms. Basically, these are words which have two different pronounciations. It drove me to the brink of insanity, there were many nights when I just lay there going through all the words I knew to see if they could have more than one pronounciation. I even managed to get a few other people to break themselves searching for them. And now, I present you with the results. Have fun and see which pronounciation you instinctivley choose first, given that all words are free of any context:

Can you think of any more? If so, you are awesome!


Last night was Sum 41 night! They were rad, and rocked about as hard as people who hadn't slept for three days could possibly manage. There was even time for their 80s Hair Metal alter egos to make an appearance. I was the oldest person there... in fact, the sum of everyone else's age there was probably 41. Also I had a gut feeling that somebody headbutted me in the stomach. But I still managed to take an awesome photo. (If by awesome I mean that it is not a blur or a picture of someone's hand, which seem to make up most of my concert photos).

Also, look at this crazy site where a nerd actualises crazy emotions that are sent to him via email. Election today. The world is fucked.

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Ol' Arch knows which way the wind blows

Now, my album "listening cycle"...
It has to be explained.
Those of you who thought I could actually be sane are FOOLS!
Here's how it works. I usually buy a new release album by a band that I like on the day it is released (officially a monday, but sometimes sundays if the store is down with the distributor). I will listen to this album once a week (I don't [usually] write a calendar or anything, I just remember the day I listen to each album and aim to roughly listen to it on the same day the next week) until I am sick of it. During this time I can't skip a track, since this would go against the original intended running sequence of the artists. I try to appreciate the album as a whole, not just a collection of tracks. If, in this once a week listening period I happen to hear a song from the album on the radio, I will turn the radio off so as to not get sick of said song. The once a week thing worked itself out about 5 years ago when I noticed that if I listened to a new album every day, then I would get sick of it. Listening to an album once a week gives me usually about 2 months of enjoyment for a standard album (Franz Ferdinand), with the better ones getting up to 4 months, the shittest ones sometimes about 2 weeks (the new SPOD album, Liam Lynch). The awesome thing about the once a week is that if I really like a song or the entire album, I have to wait a whole week to hear its awesomeness again. So by the time the next week comes, I can hardly wait to hear the album. It's sort of like a built in self restraint so I lose the excitement of listening to a particular album, and since every album makes me feel a particular way when I listen to it (this feeling usually only lasts until the once a week period is up... once I get sick of it any feeling is replaced by an unbearable feeling of restlessness, thus kicking it out of the cycle).

After the once a week period ends, I usually put the cd to rest for a while, to be ocassionaly pulled out for a listen once every few months. Sometimes a cd may experience a renaissance that kicks it back into the the once a week cycle (the Cooper Temple Clause's awesome Kick Up the Fire and Let the Flames Break Loose). Other times a cd may stay in a rough weekly cycle for up to a year, usually getting listened to once every 2-3 week (Brand New's Deja Entendu, Funeral for a Friend or the self titled Phantom Planet). A few albums exist outside the cycle and I listen to them when I am in a particular mood (such as Stereophonics' You Gotta Go There To Come Back, Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American and REM's UP). And then there are albums such as Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots which are so brilliant that they never die. Also, after a cd is out of the listening cd, I feel free to pick and choose any songs from the album and listen to them by themselves, since there is no chance my feelings about the cd will be ruined because I already know it so well.

Now, the thing with me and music is that if I am even vaguely interested in a band, I buy their cd. Usually on the release day. If a band that I really like has a cd coming up (something that usually happens only once every 2 years for any given band) I get a sense of anticipation that I don't really feel for anything else. Well, it just so happens that I am FUCKED at the moment. So many awesome bands are releasing cds that I and my schizophrenic listening cycle and wallet can't keep up. Here are the cds that I've gotten in the last 20 days:

WHAMMO! I got greedy. And to listen to each of these once a week? That's a lot of pointless long-cuts on the way to uni so I can fit them in. And do you know what is even more fucked? This month's release schedule reads like a dream list of awesomeness. New cds from REM, Cake, Sum 41, Jimmy Eat World, Fatboy Slim, Machine Gun Fellatio, 28 Days, Elliot Smith, Robbie Williams (his new song kicks ass). Not to mention the Brian Wilson rerecording of Smile which is meant to kick ass, as well as the apparently brain-meltingly good new William Shatner album (yeah... ) which was cowritten by Ben Folds.

Help me.