20090128

Bizarre Phobias (well, weirder than you average phobia anyway)

Agateophobia- Fear of insanity.

Alliumphobia- Fear of garlic.

Amathophobia- Fear of dust.

Angrophobia - Fear of anger or of becoming angry.

Apeirophobia- Fear of infinity.

Autodysomophobia- Fear of one that has a vile odor.

Botanophobia- Fear of plants.

Cathisophobia- Fear of sitting.

Dextrophobia- Fear of objects at the right side of the body.

Ephebiphobia- Fear of teenagers.

Euphobia- Fear of hearing good news.

Geniophobia- Fear of chins.

Gnosiophobia- Fear of knowledge.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia- Fear of the number 666.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia- Fear of long words. (The doctor that coined this term must have been having a laugh. Cruel really. Imagine the afflicted trying to tell their psychiatrist what condition they had. They'd end up in the emergency unit)

Kyphophobia- Fear of stooping.

Optophobia- Fear of opening one's eyes.

Peladophobia- Fear of bald people

Phronemophobia- Fear of thinking.

Zemmiphobia- Fear of the great mole rat.


[compilation thanks to http://phobialist.com/ ]

20090127

When i'm in one of my torpid states - the eyes glaze over, the hand rises up to scratch the nose absent-mindedly and the face relaxes into a post-stroke droop- an unwanted memory often seizes its chance and emerges from the whirling vortex to seize a sizable hunk of ego. One moment I'll be idly wondering who would win in a good old-fashioned fist fight between Bush and a porcipine (not that they have fists) and then suddenly *high pitched yelp of pain* an ignominous slice of self-history flies towards my face, claws unsheathed. Like a segment of conversation, for example, where I expose once again your ignorance, or some humiliating event me, star of the farce.
The memory that struck me five minutes ago?
Me. Adventure World. Water slides. Single tube. Whirlpool. Stuck. Five Minutes. Flailing desperately. Heaving. Collapsing. And there it is. You see it. That last shred of pride floating away with the breeze, passing out of view as it enters the gaping eye socket of the giant skull.

I have just unwrapped a parcel from my grandparents. A set of 'celtic' styled jewellery, for the ball, they wrote dogmatically on the card. I am grateful, i am truly very grateful indeed. The bracelet, necklace and earrings are lovely decorative ornaments, and i am certain that when they look at the pictures (as ordered) they will find their gifts glinting at the throat, wrist and ears.

Gah..! ball...won't...go away! *makes a vain attempt to hold back time by rearranging the household clocks as far away as her as possible*

20090124

Comedy is the most marvellous thing. It's what i live for. Well, watching it on youtube to the wee hours of the morn, not actually partaking in the art, bah haha, now that's a joke.

eh. No- no right now i am actually far too lazy to elaborate on that simple opener. Or even to type out this

20090120

Ah, Stephen Fry.

I say the name like i would an old friend, despite the fact i have only discovered his genius person this last week. Well, spit it out, who is he? I hear you ask. Stephen Fry is, to use an apt descriptive quote a 'veritable renaissance man'- involving himself in arts all across the cultural spectrum. He has pulled up the pantaloons as a dramatist, authoured numerous novels, been the co-creator of a hilarious comedy series, hosted a wonderfully offbeat quiz show AND- remarkably riding the technological wave- has his own highly entertaining 'podgrams'.

Back to the hilarious comedy series. I doubt you would have heard of it, but perhaps your parents have- A Bit of Fry and Laurie. The latter, first name Hugh, would perhaps be more familiar to you as his character of House.

Ah, laurie, laurie. How could you desert BBC comedy and instead fornicate with the more dubious genre of a ten drama? I feel somewhat betrayed. That commercial station has sodomised him, converted him, or at least his image. He may be more prominent in the public's eye, but since when has that social organ been credited any real taste?

While i am disappointed with the guy, i have reached some new moral depth of my soul in being able to forgive him. I am able to grant that no other offers may have sprung up, and so, grappling to sustain a successful career and earn a few dollars, he turned (it would have to be reluctantly for me to feel a jot of sympathy), no he dragged himself to that interview. And the only reason he got the part of the saturnine House was because he was feeling so gloomy, petulant and irascible at the time. And his character of the man is stellar in itself because he is innately cantankerous at being awarded the role after all.

Anyway, back to Fry.

He is, in my opinion, a literary genius; the kind of rare witty intellectual that i have never before witnessed in my life. One of the things i admire most about him is his clarity and depth and imagination when speaking. There is always life in his words. Some might classify him as a bit of a periphrastic highbrow. I'll say it once, and once only. The are wrong. On this issue there is no leniency in my breast, and i simply cannot permit anything but an opinion that is completely adjacent to my own. At least not an opinion spoken within my hearing range.



The following are two of my favourite clips watched thus far from 'qi', his quiz show:


http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=13VEonU3hWU

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Ma7bZ2dH0

By the way, you should download the perfume soundtrack. It's excellent.

I circumnavigated Monger Lake today. Rather proud really. I've been meaning to do that every since the holidays began, but the very idea rather daunted me; or at least the idea that i would collapse from sheer unfitness halfway through and some casual stroller would find me heaving on the ground like a beached whale and be forced to call an ambulance. All in all, the plan did seem to be fraught with physiological danger. But something caught me this afternoon, some ambitious whim, and as soon as i was out the door, my feet wouldn't stop until they had completed the circuit and had returned to the doorstep. No, i lie. I did stop for a while to listen to an enrapturing segment of Fry's podgram, but i don't suppose it's of any consequence. You need the odd embellishment here and there. I have ruined it by my confession, but don't worry, this blog is filled with countless other minor embellishments and exaggerations.

Are you tired of playing the role of honest purchaser?
Do you often get strong impulses just to rip the whole music industry off for your personal pleasure?
To sum it up: do you want to download a plethora of quality tracks for free, yes, that's what i said, free?

If you do, allow me to open up the avenue through which all that glorious unethicalness can be happily pumped. I myself am currently exploiting my discovery for all it's worth.

www.dailymusicsite.com

:) s'gooood.

20090117

As you may have noticed, i've customised my main display picture. I continue to be nescient of the formula for adding a decorative skin. Exasperated by my technological illiteracy? Not so much as I, trust me. But the fear evoked from the upshot of my latest attempt to bag this blog's innards (i.e. it's near extinction) has not yet eroded away with time. Perhaps some day I shall find the courage to step forth bravely into the blogosphere, on that repeated quest to clothe this here site. But not this day. It is only two years old, at most. It's budding awareness of the outside world has not ripened; it has not yet tasted the fruit of knowledge and realised the burden of shame.

pfft. Anyhoo, my new display pic is something called a fractal.

"A fractal often has the following features:[3]
It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales.
It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
It has a Hausdorff dimension which is greater than its topological dimension (although this requirement is not met by space-filling curves such as the Hilbert curve).
It has a simple and recursive definition. "
sited from Wikipedia
Ehhhh....??? Euclidean? stochastically? hilbert curve?
Esoteric jargon, she said gloomily.

sigh. i give up. maybe i'll go play gameboy, relinquish myself up to it's small, four-cornered world...
Exeggute used confusion...
Cubone is confused.
Cubone hurt itself in it's confusion.
Exeggute used headbutt.
Cubone fainted.
Exeggute gained 560 points. Exeggute grew to level 36.
What?! Exeggutor is evolving!
theme music
Congratulations! Your Exeggute evolved into Exeggutor!
screen fades. Momentary elation dies and emotional and mental blankness swarms over once more, greedily squashing any motivation to get off my arse and do something productive for once.

...this can't be good for me.

20090114

YOU MUST GO HERE:

http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2428917.htm

My alter ego: Fred Aster.

tee hee hee! So proud! My first piece of text ever to get published on a professional site!
I am genuinely appalled and dismayed at the historical evidence of national oppobrium before me:

"Exchange in federal parliament 1901:
Senator Matheson: We all admit that the black people have to live. What we say is the black people should live in their own country.
Senator Walker: This was a blackfellow's country before it was a white man's country
Senator Matheson: The honourable gentleman fails to recognise that we have taken this county from the blacks and made it a white man's country, and intend to keep it a white man's country, so that there is not earthly use in the honourable gentleman saying that 100 years ago this was a black man's country.
Senator Walker: There are still 100 000 Aborigines in Australia
Senator Matheson: We are aware of that fact and it is very regrettable and the only consolation we have is that they are gradually dying out."

Can't you hear the obnoxious sarcasm oozing from Matheson's "the honourable gentleman"? Go Walker. Go to hell Matheson. To think that such a premise as Matheson mouthed echoed in the walls of parliament. To think there was such support for this blatant display of bigotry and racism and meanness. Egalitarian my arse.
There must have been an extremely large dosage of closed-mindedness swimming around the foetid alleyways of white Australia for there to be no realisation of the lack of boyancy, lack of the crudest reason in his statements. Bah, it makes me sick.

Haha, listen to this: It was suggested that enfranchising woman at the turn of the 18th century in Australia was a risky business because they would cast their votes in favour of the most elegant looking candidate. How ironic! Did they not try to pull that ploy in America this recent election by putting forward the young and (it's a stretch, i know) handsome Palin? I mean, really, can you imagine one miserable sod throwing sympathy on Palin if she were a tired husk of a man; whiskery, jowley and lined? I think not. She had little to nothing to show for intrinsic capabilities. Not a single intellectual bullet point on her credentials that i can see. I downloaded the following video from i-tunes. Watch through to the Palin montage. Cringe-worthy. To think (once the rickety McCain had become extinct) this could have been hypothetically the most powerful person in the world...

When you think, when you meditate, when you ruminate, cogitate, ponder, mull over something, hypothesize, imgaine, theorise, reflect, deliberate, muse, contemplate or consider...does your thought pattern emerge as as a coherent stream of words? Does your style of thought pivot on images, or simply intuitive reasoning? Naturally, i am referring to the dominant form- we all think in numbers, pictures and words for a portion of the time.
But i suppose, to think in words, one would neccessitate another type of logic to coexist and pre-empt it. After all, you need to have some idea of where your going before your mental mouth lets loose the linear sentence. A millisecond before the sentence rings out, some mental device gives it the kiss of life, hoists it on it's feet, hands it a road map, and gives it a slap on the back for good luck.
I believe it is so neccessary for there to be some energetic score behind the spoken and the hidden thought. Some sparkle and rhythm which contravenes monotone- makes it leap, saunter, glide, zoom, catapault and stride; all at the appropriate times, of course. Try it. Give this sentence as much oomph as you can muster when reading it (avoiding ridiculous extravagance of course). When i imagine it, it's like the sentence is a wave, and your riding it out- on all the swells, ebbs, eddies and currents.

Well. That's it. I've chosen my dress. It took about ten minutes. Didn't even put a toe out of the house.
ha.
I'm wearing Amy's old dress.
Not the one she wore at her ball- just a random one. Tis black and sparkly. Black eh? How predictable. It irks me how all ball dresses have to be sleeveless. I don't really like wearing sleeveless clothing. I am not armed to be bare-armed!

Shoes next i spose. I'd like coloured shoes, but my mother pointed out it would look like two glaring spotlights moving about neath a shadow shroud.

20090113

I watched bambi on youtube.com last night. Such a formiddable hunk of storyline had escaped my memory, and the rush which came with those grey areas of the brain flaring up again was bliss. The music! i've had that tune drip drip drop little april shower in my head all day. I have to say the character who i recalled most fondly was owl. He's so moody and expressive, it makes me smile. Bambi was i suppose endearing, but there was too many repetitions of foolish frolics followed by the clumsy slip, and then the innocent blinking of his large, bewildered eyes. It started to get just a mite tedious. This trivial fault-finding is very captious of me, but i'm just saying. At first i thought the skunk was going to turn out gay because he had such a high voice and blushed when bambi called him a 'purty flower'. I suppose such a theme running through a kids movie in those days was unheard of. Don't get it much now either. The general consensus, if it was taken, i predict would be that the promulgation of sexual ambiguity would mess up the mechanics of those tender buds. I wonder if gay-rights advocation will be an accepted motif in future kids films? Seems a ridiculous notion, but so did short skirts to our 19th century counterparts.

My new idol: Stephen Fry. I downloaded one of his podcasts and the man is such a resplendant example of one who can blend supreme intelligence and humour. You should listen to him- particularly 'bored of the dance'. Well, i can't really say particularly because i've only heard one, but, well, you know what i mean.
Lately i have been thinking about how seriously to take life. Well, to be honest, it would be kind of stretching it to call it thinking. It's more like posing the question to myself during those quiet moments in between breathing, looking at it blankly for a few seconds more as a choking confusion corks up the throat, and then some menial detail reels me back; like turning off the shower, or examining my nails, or picking up the pencil that just dropped to the floor. Afterwards a vague satisfaction settles in, that i have somehow nudged one of those 'profound questions'. If i had a beard, i have a feeling i would stroke it importantly. Perhaps mumble some wiseacre saying into it, full of words like 'rather' and 'indeed' that any fool can learn.
Anyway, here i am, there's no escape from myself now: how seriously should one take life? I mean, there's the two common sayings that wag a finger at the extremes:
"One shouldn't take life lightly" or "life isn't a joke". And if that was north, this is south;
"You shouldn't take life too seriously [no one ever gets out alive anyway]"
I suppose the best way to wade our way through is simply to do and think in whichever way comes naturally. If you're forever attempting to ape a mindset- perhaps struggling to see metaphor at every street corner or an anecdote in every cereal box - then you'd never be at peace with yourself. That little axiom- 'do what comes naturally'- sounds like the words of a psychiatrist. But don't you think that advice bruises our capacity to grow and to learn? One way to shape ourselves into someone better is by holding back some natural impulse. That swear word grinding against your lips came naturally from your lungs, but it's best if you swallow it, or at least chew on it until you can cough it out in your closet five minutes later. That cruel laugh provoked by that poor sod who has her dress tucked into her undies- that's natural, but it isn't exactly the right reaction. Even that self-absorbed worry; that forehead crease has the potential to create a dent and a sag in the company spirit, cast an invisible net over the party and prevent it from reaching it's acme. I could say laugh when you feel like laughing, but there are probably some lewd bastards out there that would locate levity in a young girls rape.
In fact, it's likely quite a large portion of the time we conceal what comes naturally around others. Balancing the necessary pretence and the actual is vital for a credible personality.
There's a reason i like math. There can only be one answer (unless, of course, it's a quadratic, or cubic or whatever, for which there a several)
I wonder how acute the human radar for pretence is.

I found the beach in my hair this morning, and that put the beach in my head. I got to thinking of Friday evening, when my dad wouldn't have to think about work the next day. We'll drive down with the sun making orange streaks on our blue subaru, past the roiling undergrowth and the gums, who salute stiffly without a breeze to make their thousand fingers dance. Then, there it'll be- the blue under blue, the shifting mass under the still. We'll walk down the dunes, seeing if the sands memory of others that day could fit into our shoes. I'll smile as i'm smiling now, looking at the sea that gnaws hungrily at the land, the tidal teeth nattering comically, then drawing back as though slinking off to savour it's nonexistant kill. We'll bring cards, and i'll deal us all a terrible hand. Even though we'll bring a picnic blanket the sand will creep in somehow, like an army of ants attracted to the sweet smell of life. Mum will complain about it later, but it doesn't matter now. The sea will swallow the sun and the horizon will suck the saturation from the sky and leave us all breathless, us and the rest of the world.