We’re back

The laptop lasted for about an hour and a half last night, after which there was nothing to do. We post-post-modern people dread nothing like the lack of sensory stimuli, so I just went to bed at midnight.

It’ll be fixed in two hours, they said last night but of course it wasn’t. It wasn’t working this morning at 5AM when Sonja got up to work and it wasn’t working at 7AM when I woke up for some unexplainable reason. So I just took out my frozen pizza from the silent freezer, added some Danish blue cheese which was dying a quiet death in the warm fridge, cooked up the lot and ate it. And went back to bed.

When the alarm rang at 9.30AM, electricity was back but I was too tired to get up, so I missed the only showing of Rabbit Proof Fence. Shame, the movie seemed interesting enough.

Two things happened in the bathroom this morning. I was almost completely undressed when I realized by the way my bowel kept growling that I was going in for the big one. I started to get redressed to go downstairs to fetch some reading, before I realized that it had all the signs of obsessive compulsory paranoid schizoid whatever mental shortcoming. So in the end I didn’t.

Thing number two is that I’m quite sure I saw the letters HAL scribbled somewhere on our shower, and I swear to God that the bastard was trying to kill me. Boiling hot, then ice cold, then hot again, and I hadn’t even looked at the dial. Diabolical.

Top films

How many films in the IMDB Top 100 have you seen? I counted 62 (possibly a couple more: I’m not sure about Duck Soup, The General and Seven Samurai. Yes, I know) with some serious deficiencies, more so with older flicks. (Courtesy of Asmunder.)

Word 57: Suzerainty

These mutants thrive under a suzerainty of market-driven popular culture which allows adolescent attitudes to creep up on adults, and seep down to children.

suzerainty (n) 1: the position or authority of a suzerain 2: the domain of a suzerain – source: The Times Magazine May 10 2003, p. 7

Get a life #1

An engineer called George Bible (!) was seen in a documentary exclaiming ”Isn’t she lovely?” about an airplane wing.

Logical

From The Times Magazine’s Readers’ Notes (10.5.2003):

In John Clarke’s The Romans and Their Conquests (April 26) he stated that ”what we call normal sex is a creation of our own culture”. Really? If that’s the case, how is it that circa 56AD, the Apostle Paul who live in Rome described the sexual excesses of non-Christians as ”unnatural”.

Well, maybe because ”our own culture” is pretty much based on Christianity, especially the stuff that deals with sexuality? Alas, the writer had meant this only as a rhetoric question and therefore answered it himself:

It is not that ”normal sex” is a creation of our own culture but that it is a creation of God.

I must say I’m a bit disappointed with the Times. This piece of logic and argumentation wouldn’t be out of place on the pages of, say, Karjalan Heili, the free weekly newspaper of my beloved home town Joensuu, but on the pages of the Times… O tempora, O mores!

Word 56: Exacerbate

Never having studied a play or learnt a method of acting must exacerbate Gambon’s awkwardness with his profession.

exacerbate (v) 1: make worse [syn: worsen, aggravate, exasperate] 2: exasperate or irritate – source: The Sunday Times Magazine May 11 2003, p. 22

Word 55: Donnybrook

Then the meeting of the credentials committee, before the convention itself, turned into a donnybrook.

donnybrook (n) 1: free-for-all, brawl 2: a usually public quarrel or dispute – source: New Yorker 12.5.2003, p. 70

Comical timing

From the Independent on Sunday Review 11.5.2003, p. 28:

The man next to me laughs all through the movie – can he be imagining the same thing? I think not, but he must be one of those people who have to make their derision or approval loudly known to the rest of the audience. This is especially annoying in foreign films, when people grunt or snort their appreciation of the French with nanoseconds before the subtitles have come up.

I thought that it’s quicker to scan the subtitles than to listen to the dialogue, and therefore I’ve held back my loud acknowledgements until the precise moment of the utterance. Yes, I am an annoying person.

What was before?

You know that selling condoms only became legal in Ireland a short while ago, don’t you? Well, I’ve wondered what tourists had to do in pre-condom times if they wanted to have sex in Ireland. Did they raid pharmacists like others raid banks? Was there a black market for condoms? Did you have to show your passport at the pharmacist’s to prove you’re not from around here? Fascinating indeed.

Blogging ethics

Rebecca Blood has written about blogging ethics. Most of her notions are quite straightforward and largely derived (or similar) to generic journalistic ethics. Both are good, nay, required reading for any and all bloggers.