an essay about the logic of pirating your tits off on the internet. Basic argument one is obscurity is a far greater threat to the majority of musicians than piracy.
Perhaps our blog will one day be about synthes??? Posting some synth chowns would be a good way to start right? Synthesiser Patell had it right; this is the way all music should be, and one day will be.
Easter Sunday is on the 12th of April this year, but deciding which date Easter should fall on is complicated. Christian churches use March 21 as the starting point, from which they then find the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox. Because of the different calendars used by different faiths, for example Eastern Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar and to prevent any differences in the dating of Easter, the Catholic Church has compiled tables for Easter, and all affiliated churches celebrate Easter in accordance with these tables.
This song randomly resurfaced in my subconscious the other week, and it hasn't left yet. It's pretty much awesome, in a horribly sexist kind of way. Listen closely:
A game I've invented which will shortly take the internet by storm:
Open up your google docs account and find someone on a nearby computer who wants to have their essay writing talents pitted against your own. Both open the first document saved in your accounts, click 'tools', then 'word count'.
Youngest starts, and chooses a category in which they think their essay is likely to excel. Whoever's essay is lengthier/more complex/harder to read in the chosen category wins the round. This means the highest number in all except the 'Flesch Reading Ease' category, which goes down as the text gets more complex. Whoever wins gets a point and chooses the category on the next document. You play until one or both of you have gone through all your documents.
This game is genius because it introduces skill to the standard top trumps pot-luck. All the wins are the hard-earned wins of an essay crisis, rather than statistics for some bullshit car or simpsons character you didn't even build/create. Knowing your opponent also adds a new dimension; my paragraphs tend to be made up of a few, lengthy sentences, but my vocabulary is a polysyllabic smorgasbord of erudite lexiphanicism. Anyone who knows my style will target the 'average sentences per paragraph' but steer well clear of the 'words per sentence' or 'characters per word' categories unless they've got something to prove.
Most importantly, google docs top trumps translates your long, tedious and hitherto wasted hours of essay-writing into a fun and worthwhile game. Finally, there's a point to doing a humanities degree.
From now on I can blog from my own individ. email address and google account! Soon I will never need to do anything that I cannot do more easily using some google tool or another. Obviously this means that all my communication that isn't just talking to my friends (like I am talking to my fairly pretty friend Julia just now for instance) is done via google monolith. Thus fighting off the Nazis and all that will eventually be utterly irrelevant in the face of to monolith that is GOOGLE. The craftiest trick of the totalitarian monster is its bloody convenience. So enjoy my individ. email address, and my individuality for now it may not last much longer.
We were all present. Hannah was a minutes person, she knew her stuff. Jenny was also there, she was (arguably) the honorary flat member. The issues surrounding the vej box were agreed upon. The flat photo will happen and Alex S-O will take it. He is unaware of this, however. I need to put the shower back on the shower stand.
Nothing as dramatic as falling into a frozen lake has happened to me this week. Maybe ever. So I give you zombie chat, a stoned kid and some other thing.
1. Apparently, Hollywood studios are already bidding to make 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' into a movie. And the film of 'World War Z' is currently in development. These are exciting times for zombologists, as surely the spread of interest in zombies (documented extensively in the third and fourth installments of Charlotte and Leonore's purely factual and not at all ridiculous "Stop Laughing" radio show) can only be helpful in the coming Zombie War. In other news, I'm going to start putting tinned food and bottled water in the attic of LJ4, so guys, if the zombocalypse comes before our lease is up, that's where I'll be.
2. 'David After Dentist'. Some little Yankee kid high as a kite on meds from the dentist. My favourite part is "why is this happening to me!". Genuinely awesome.
3. Click here. From Jimmy Key, the king of late night emailing. Robin has already seen this, and while he did not laugh, he did say 'that is hilarious' in a way I found sincere. So I share it.
Love to the flat (and to Julia, who will totally read this even though she claims she won't.)
Worcester college has the nicest lake. I've seen it before and thought it'd be pretty wicked for a swim in the summer, but the thought didn't really cross my mind when I was trudging about in the snow after a punishing game of ring of fire at Ronan's this weekend.
Ronan's pal suggested we check to see if we could walk on the layer of ice covering the lake, and check I did, momentarily, before just putting my entire weight on it anyway and feeling it give way beneath me. I could even hear the crack that my first, tentative foot poke had made as I put both feet on, but by then it was too late. In the fraction of a second between realising I was going to fall into a huge frozen lake and falling into a huge frozen lake I reflected on my foolhardy nature.
I got out pretty quickly and we laughed about it for a bit then started to walk back to Ronan's. On the way we saw one of the porters at Worcester, who had been hassling us all night because Ronan didn't have a guest pass or some bullshit and we were making loads of noise and mess. Anyway, he started getting on to us about being out in the grounds, telling us that 'if someone fell in that Lake they'd be dead in about a minute', whilst failing to notice that I was soaking wet from the neck down and had obviously just fallen in the lake. Proved that wanker wrong - NOT dead. I did have to get a taxi home however, as by the time we got back to Ronan's my muscles were aching and I couldn't stop chattering my teeth.
This is probably my most noteworthy and therefore blogtastic exploit of the last week.
LAURA has a thing for zombies. I'm not sure if its a thing thing. I don't think she's got necrophilia. If she has I hope its not contagious, at least not in an air-borne way like in that film with Kevin Spacey (Outbreak, 1995). I don't think she has. Perhaps she's just scared of zombies.
Books and Zombies
Laura wants this book: Jane Austen: http://blogs.thetimes.co.za/stompies/2009/02/03/pride-prejudice-and-zombies/
She owns this book Survival Guide in case of zombie attack: http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/zombiesurvivalguide/index2.html
Download the podcast first week of Stop Laughing, Tim and Lili's Oxide show, at the following address: http://leolinejenkins.podbean.com/2009/01/30/stop-laughing-week-one/
HENRY VI WATCHATHON
Today, I'm going to watch all three Henry VI plays on DVD with alex. The total running time is over nine hours. I shouldn't really be delaying such a marathon, but I have thus far been the poorest blogger in the flat.
Here's a nice tune by Lukid:
His new album, Foma, is full of fuzzy glitchy hip hop like this and I have been enjoying it a lot this week. Some of the tracks sound like they were recorded inside the air pump of a life support machine, with soft beeps and the shuffling footsteps of doctors and nurses in the background.
A while ago we played a game of categories where the category was 'girl's names in Beatles songs'. After giving up, I decided I wanted to know how many there were and find all of them, which is as good a topic for a blog post as anything. The song name is in brackets next to the girls name:
Julia (Julia) Eleanor (Eleanor Rigby) Anna (Anna (Go To Him)) Prudence (Dear Prudence) Sadie (Sexy Sadie) Lucy (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds) Rita (Lovely Rita) Molly (Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da) Martha (Martha my Dear) Pam (Polythene Pam) McGill, Lil, Nancy (Bungalow Bill) Michelle (Michelle) Lizzy (Dizzy Miss Lizzy) Doris (Two of us) Maggie (Maggie Mae) Madonna (Lady Madonna) Yoko (The Ballad of John and Yoko) Sally (Long Tall Sally) Georgia (Back in the U.S.S.R. (not sure about this one)) Joan, Rose, Valerie (Maxwell's Silver Hammer) Penny (Penny Lane) Pam (Mean Mr. Mustard) Loretta (Get Back) Vera (When I'm 64)
28 in total. If anyone can think of any that I've missed, tell me and I'll add it and give you a toblerone.
(thanks to Laura for Pam, Loretta, Vera, Rose and Valerie)
That's quite enough blogging for now. I'm going to watch 9 hours of history plays and eat some baked potatoes.
I have more treasury tags than I can handle. I need to be shot. There are no puns here. Jenny slept in the library. Swish new colour background, here. Did we get upgraded?
Lili
Thursday 15 January 2009
Robin had a go at me about being the last flat member to blog, so here I am. Blogging. I don't have anything really flat-related to say, but I present you with the three YouTube videos I have watched today.
1) Yo Yo Ma playing the Prelude to Bach's 1st Cello Suite This piece of music would be my Desert Island Disc, if anyone ever made me pick one. My iTunes deleted my MP3 of it, so now I listen to it about four times a day on YouTube. I don't know what Salvador Dali has to do with it, but I enjoy looking at it, anyway.
2) Nouvelle Vague - Dance With Me video It's been about two years since I first saw this video, and I'm still totally hypnotised by it, and still watch it allll the time. Let's all be reminded of how completely and totally cool it is.
3) The Morecambe & Wise breakfast sketch They've got a parody of this on the TV at the minute with that guy whose name I can't remember and the monkey in a PG Tips advert. The original is way better though, and I remembered today when I saw that ad in the JCR to go and watch the original again. Genius.
I really like how it's opening up our internal flat dynamic for the whole world to see and comment on. Much like that 6 week period when I'd lost my key and was too tight to pay for a new one and we had to leave the flat door open all the time. And much like that time as yet nobody has yet come in and written cruel or insightful comments all over our walls. There's no security like general indifference to your existence.
Tim
I did not want to be the last one of the flat to write a first post for this to-be-epic blog. Second to last still sounds bad. I have three issues to address.
The first is about it being half past midnight, me being in the library, my bridge essay over the word count again and largely unfinished, one day left to do it, and the ground is moving.
Also, Tim did not come to the Oxide interview today. My superior - read not-so-superior - interview skills made sure we got a slot. I have a tute at that hour in second week. It is 2-3 on a Monday. Just after Hetty and Hugo.
And, I am so tired I have forgotten the third issue. What is the password for this thing?
Is this relevant enough to be posted?
To compensate, the ingenious [!] crossword question Jenny discovered the answer to:
State left lying around a bar.
GENIUS:
REpubLIC.
On the pun front, I made two. I am proud of these and would like to make note of them to compensate for a. not having to abide by a word count here b. my bad pun of the year - Plate-oh.
Fishing in for the Finnish: take out I and two N's. Ask Markus and Jenny for proof of this one.
Insane - sburies - I laughed for too long after this. Clare P and Jenny were witnesses.
Apologies for this note. The ground is still moving. It is 00:43.
I am assuming in writing the following that I am speaking to my ideal self selecting target audience. The root of this assumption is that people that like to read blogs will always also be people that like to (or are compelled to by a destructive ADHD* spectrum psychological malfunction) squander away their lives on fascinating bits of the internet. *Perhaps more accurately ADID when it is applied to the internet.
With that in mind, have 3 things that I have been doing lately (warning, I have found that doing these 3 things can lead to fits of despair, self loathing and tension headaches about the state of your thesis).
1. Play this game http://www.onemorelevel.com/game/n_ninja it is excellent in its online form, and there is an even better downloadable version available via google. A horribly compulsive eater of time, because it is really fun and because there are only save points every 5 or so levels, so once you've spent ages getting past a really hard level you feel compelled to carry on so as not to have 'wasted time.'
2. Do this: http://tinyurl.com/853ctf It is a greenpeace plot to stop the expansion of Heathrow, and it might well be very effective, and it is very easy to sign up for. Deets on their site, obv. This is important to do because: We only have a finite world. While most human activities use of some of the world's resources (have an impact), some actions use up far more than others. If we want the whole planet to keep on working (which we do, as so far 'The World' has been the best source of all our non-misery in an otherwise pretty bleak patch of space) then it seems fair that we divvy up its resources so that we each have about the same amount. But flying is such an intensive a use of the world's [ie our] resources that each person can only fly a few times per lifetime and still have any hope of living within their means. At the moment people in the UK fly far more than that. It is our responsibility as a society to cap the amount of flying we do at a sustainable (very low) level, and then I suggest, invent some mechanism so that we all get to make use of this wonderful resource and public utility a few times in each lifetime.
Now you can be kept up-to-speed with arguments about central heating, ping pong tournaments, ingenious punning and everything else that you always wanted to know about the residents of lj4.
We have just been reunited after a long Christmas and New Year's apart. We all got good Christmas presents. The blog has begun.
