Shopping

Most of the time I am a fairly laid back, rational person with no qualms, no scores to settle and no problems with the world around me. I've always tried to live a peaceful, happy life, but there has arisen an unavoidable, disruptive force which illicits a drastic behavioural change in me - not unlike a psychotic break. 

Everybody has their trigger. For Hitler it was Jews, for Voldemort, muggles, for pigs, truffles, but for me, the thing that metamorphis's me into a rage filled monster is Shopping Centres. 

This is, as I see it, not entirely irrational. Shopping centres are, after all, designed by evil capitalists who value revenue over morality and environmental responsibility. They bombard us with advertising on every billboard, bus stop, train station, trash receptical, website, water-bottle, newspaper, TV show/movie. Some companies have even started planting actors in public places, using them to plug their product in casual conversation. We flock to shopping centres like zombies flock to a group of quivering survivors, drawn by the promise of satisfaction, but inevitably left wanting more.

My solution? Blinkers. The driving force of consumerism is advertising. Shopping centres are designed to confuse us, disorient us so that we end up running around in circles, desperately buying things in the hope that if we buy enough things, the vicious cycle will break.

Don't play the game, invest in a pair of custom, fitted horse blinkers and never worry about being brainwashed by advertising again. Guaranteed results. The first 10 customers will receive a complimentary bit and genuine leather whip.

K

KONY 2012

There is a saying which says "To cut the head off the snake" meaning to defeat something by attacking the source.

It can be applied to many situations, but I like to think of the Joseph Kony situation as more of a pyramid type structure. To that effect, I have come up with my own saying:

"Cut off the top of a pyramid..."

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" ...and nothing much happens, because the infrastructure of the pyramid is still intact..."

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" ...and there are like a 77 million pyramids in the world. It's true. I googled it."

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But that doesn't really scan very well.

For more information about the KONY 2012 campaign, here is a link to an article about it, but you should probably read other articles too.

http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18890947431/we-got-trouble

Lord of the Gingerbreads

So, last Christmas we all got really bored and decided to make an edible tribute to Peter Jacksons "The Lord of the Rings". We explored Gingerbread as a medium.

For your enjoyment, I now present "The Lords of the Gingerbreads: Fellowship of the Gingers"

Take a special note of the tower of Baradur, complete with the eye of Sauron, Saramon the duck and the fearsome Balrog.

K

Summer: A Sonnet

Summer.

Oh for thee, you fiery dame,
You force of nature none can tame,
Weary the bone doth ye to me
And render my limbs lame.

Twas naught and 20 years ago
Upon ye I first gazed
When heavens flames and plasma core
Amongst Earth ranked and blazed.

When in it's 1st seasons angular rotation
Earth, our home, doth spin,
Optical density for the suns penetration
Is high, so it all comes in.

At least, that, is in the south of the globe,
Which is blessed with climates, temperate,
Where sweat covered brows and temporal lobes
Your light and warmth do irritate.

Shall I compare thee to a summers day?
Yes.

5 Things To Do At A Home Open

Home opens can be very educational experiences. Being inside a home that has been meticulously cleaned and polished for the purpose of masking its flaws and improving its appeal shows us a window into a world which could be our own. A shiny bathroom floor, ornamental fruit in a bowl on the counter, the fragrant scent of pine, gently wafting through the corridor. It's enough to shame even the most proud home-owner. Being in such an ambient, peaceful environment does, however, tend to inspire boredom in those less interested in the subtleties of furniture arrangement and sensible, but stylish decor. The following list is a guide to help you attain that sense of joy we receive from the ecstasy of self-induced entertainment.

1: Make a science project and present it on the kitchen counter/dining room table.

What better way to create intrigue and excitement than by exploring the intricate world of science through the clever use of paper mache, bi-carb soda, food-colouring and vinegar. Demonstrate the wonder of discovery and the innovations of modern science in the comfort of someone elses future home.

2: Have a shower.

Being in a house full of people can be stressful. The constant jostling through tight spaces, the shoulders pushed against yours, the smell of pine mingling with the sweat of 20 people in an enclosed space, it's enough to send a more sensitive person up the wall. So take a load off, cool off in the shower, wash away all the stress and discomfort with soap and warm water. Don't forget to bring a towel. The water mains is usually located at the front of the property, gas on the left side of the outside of the house.

3: Stage a home invasion.

In a lot of ways, home-opens are like really boring parties with no food. The enthusiastic chattering of a real estate agent explaining the virtues of 1970's plumbing and the gentle droning of classical music in background can all get a little bit draining after a while. Why not mix it up a little, add some excitement to the party.
What's more exciting than danger?
Don a balaclava, bring along your baseball bat or switchblade and assault the synthetic tranquility of ideological perfection.

4: Pretend to be a ghost.

Empty houses have a mystery about them, they raise questions about the circumstances of their desolation and the cause for sale. Why not amplify that mystery and build on the suspicions of those more open-minded attendees. Set up and conceal a surround sound system throughout the house, making sure to place a bass emitter in the floorboards, then tell the house guests via broadcast to "Leave this place and never return!" and also that "Death awaits ye in this house", then turn the bass right up and rattle the house. Attach pockets of fake blood to the rear side of paintings and set them to detonate via a remote signal, causing 'blood' to seep through the canvas and trickle down the walls. Alternatively you can simply run around the house wearing a white sheet over your head, shouting "Ooooh Ooooh!"

5: Make a salad.

Display homes are full of things that are fake. Fake fruit, fake bread, fake drawers and cupboards. The art of illusion, it seems, plays the biggest role in the disguises worn by average homes. Don't be taken for a fool. You see through the cheap ploys employed by deceptive people. Show them for what they are. Take a bowl of fake fruit, slice, dice or peel them and arrange them neatly on a plate. Dress them with imitation lemon juice, for added synthenticity and offer them around to fellow home-open attendees.

K

Confidence

Self confidence can sometimes be a misleading and unmanageable thing. It can lead you to think that you can do things which are clearly not possible or which do not even remotely pertain to your skill set. For someone whose skill set is very small, self confidence can be a very real problem and can lead to Compulsive Failure Syndrome (CFS), a disorder which causes you to fail at just about everything you attempt, and then feel good about yourself afterwards.

This cycle of failure, followed by self appraisal, eventually collapses on itself and leaves you feeling like a terrible, useless person. There are exceptions, of course. Daniel Radcliffe is one. His consistent failure to be a competent actor has had no effect on his disproportionate ego.

I suffer from an acute case of CFS. I like to think of my skill-set as  'specialised', focused. Specifically, my skills include puns and music. This lack of skills, however, does not prevent me from believing that I am capable of successfully undertaking any activity known to man. Constant encouragement and praise from my wife and other such supportive figures has greatly inflated my sense of self-worth.

Inevitably, an inflated ego leads to illusions of grandeur and a craving for power.

Possibly the hardest thing for someone with CFS to do is to look at his/her own accomplishments objectively. A good way to do this is to compare your own accomplishments with the accomplishments of prominent historical figures and take note of the vast, vast, vast differences between the two. For example;

  Putting batteries in a torch VS the lighthouse of Alexandria. 

or

Making a sandwhich VS Feeding 2000 people with a fish and some bread

or 

Flushing the toilet VS Inventing Hygene

I call this "Grooming your Ego".

Like many things, however, too much of it is bad. Too much Ego Grooming can result in feelings of worthlessness and insignificance. Self-confidence in moderation is the recipe for an accurate, un-exaggerated life.

K

"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you *1up*"

In the intermediate time between my last blog and the present date, many things have happened in my life. There's been drama, action, mystery, romance and a whole bunch of other stuff. In all this time, I've come to notice that certain aspects of my life have radically changed. I'm not just talking about weight, build, height and all those other physical things, but my social aptitude, personality, social status, they've all undergone a metamorphisis of fairly substantial proportions. Some time ago I discovered that each social/physical/mental improvement was the result of a continuous accumulation of experience due to the undertaking of many and varied tasks. This discovery can be summed up as such:

"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you 1UP."

Procrastination

Pro-cras-ti-nate

 verb

1.

to defer action; delay: to procrastinate until an opportunity is lost.

Procrastination. We all do it. How often have you sat down at the computer to study and somehow ended up watching a video of a bear falling out of a tree, or logging on to Facebook and spending the following hour scrolling down and down, delving into the rich, cultural goldmine of the last three days of status updates. 


It's a question which plagues us daily, "To do or not to do". And the point is this - it's a choice. As much as we may try to limit our options down to a single factor, to hone in on a single goal, to optimise our time and automate our lifestyle into a machine-like, success-creating machine, we are flawed by a fundamental human-factor. I would argue that being a human is more about our flaws than it is about our achievements as a race. 


Success is widely viewed as the accumulation of comfortable wealth and happiness, procrastination, the enemy of progress.  The end that we work towards is, more often than not, no more than the reflection of modern idealism, where the measure of a man is the number of zeroes on his/her bank statement and the size of his/her house. 

Something I've learnt this year is that I'd much rather be distracted. Procrastination is just another way of saying "paying attention to what interests you." And if I don't become a lawyer or a doctor, what have I really lost? A 6 figure salary? A predictable future? Individuality is something that is worth preserving. To sacrifice that for stability and wealth is truly a wasteful use of time - not spending four hours learning a new song, not spending your gap-year travelling the world, not taking a tap-dance class. 




Invest in the things that distract you and don't let the expectations of a materialistic world shape who your are.

K

When In Doubt, Pinky Out

There is a saying which backdates to the middle of the 18th century in England, when tea was at its most popular there. In the upper class circles of 18th century England, an etiquette around drinking tea had developed which entailed the use of all sorts of weird paraphernalia and required the feminine drinker to abandon the use of her smallest finger (pinky). This abandonment demonstrated her delicate, fragile nature. The saying, "When in doubt, pinky out", came to be a phrase which both educated the lower classes of accepted etiquette and mocked it for it's pretentiousness.


Having grown up without the context in which this phrase belongs, I've developed what now seems a peculiar habit which becomes apparent whenever I'm approached by a difficult situation.

As a side note, 

CAKE = DOUBT.

The appearance of cake without an adequate explanation always seems to result in confusion, mild panic and agitation. 

"Where did the cake come from?"

"Is it for me?"

"Will I like it?"

Cake can cause more problems than the sweetly savoured flavour can account for. Beware.

Trains

Trains. They're big. They're heavy. They have cogs and gears. They make loud noises. They travel really really fast. Is it any wonder that I'm scared of them? I mean, an ordinary passenger train with 3 cars can weigh up to 8 tonnes and travel at 200km/h. At that speed it's packing 1.6GN of force, which is the same amount of force as a person falling from a 2041km high building, which is like falling off the moon. And since it's possible to die from a fall of 10m, a single train at top speed could kill roughly 204,000 people, lined up on the tracks. That's roughly the population of Bolitvia. Imagine the damage that the thousands of trains all around the world could do if everyone in the world decided to have a picnic on some train tracks or took the movie Inception too seriously. Now, a fall of 10m is likely to cause spinal damage, which, on the pain scale, is a 10. So using completely infallable logic and totally correct science and stuff, that is the same as pulling a bandaid off a wound 10 times. So one train has the Potential Pain Energy of 2 million bandaids. That's a lot of bandaids. 

Governments are not blind to this issue. If anything they go a little bit overboard in delivering public safety advertisements in this respect. These are some of my favorite posters

I haven't always been aware of the astronomical damage that trains can cause. Trains used to be adventurous, a great mechanical feat of mankind. Whenever my parents drove parallel to a train on the highway I'd urge them to try and beat it. Travelling faster than a train was an accomplishment worthy of infinite glory. 

Unfortunately the good times were about to come to an end.


My grandparents were in town, which was a reasonably rare occurrence and they, in their infinite wisdom, thought would be funny buy me a big picture-book called 'DISASTERS'. Inside were detailed accounts of man-made tragedies; the Hindenburg, Titanic, The Black Plague, The Tay Bridge Disaster. They were all accompanied by super-dramatic artistic interpretations of the events as they unfolded.

One picture stood out. It was a picture of a burning army supply train which had derailed and caught fire after its brakes failed when going down a hill. 300 German soldiers died horrifically, some burning to death, some dying on impact. Suddenly I was hit with the realisation that trains aren't safe, that they can break down, they can derail, they catch on fire, they can run over people and squish their innards out like a rolled up tube of toothpaste! From that moment on I've been scared of trains. 

Even Thomas wasn't safe from the deceptions of my paranoid 10 year old mind.

And that's why I'm afraid of them. Them and their mysterious "Gap". "Beware the Gap" they say. What's wrong with the gap? What's down there, between the train and the platform, that we need to be afraid of? Are there ghosts? Do evil monkeys wait down there, hoping to snatch an unsuspecting infant or chomp on some careless limb?  What do they do with all those empty chip packets? Do they still have my little matchbox beamer from '97? What will it take for them to give it back?

Regardless, Trains are frightening. You should all stay away from them.

LIES

ly-ing:

-adjective: deliberately untruthful; false, misleading:

ie: I don't know how all that eggplant got under my bed

OR

No, I didn't eat all of the yoghurt in the fridge with no consideration for anyone elses desire to eat yoghurt.

Lying can be a difficult topic for some people. Misleading people can have undesired effects and often tend to the downfall of the "liar". Fortunately for me, I've developed a form of early warning system which acts as a damage control placement in my brain.

This, of course, is balanced out by all those times when I do know what I'm talking about and people don't believe it.

 ... 

Sorry, I'm doing it again. 

5 Reasons Having Big Lungs Is Totally Awesome

Lungs are great. They use miniature little Avioli balloons to absorb Oxygen into the bloodstream via Haemogloben. For Oxygen, it's like jumping into a ball-pit with blood at the bottom of it. Loads of fun.

I happen to have very large lungs. Having been exposed to various lung steroids as a medical response to childhood asthma, my lungs developed and expanded to 150% of the normal expected capacity. At first I was sour, bitter, angry at the doctors. How could they have overlooked the fact that pumping a 12 year old kid with steroids would result in such dire side-effects? Even so, it wasn't long before I began to see the positive side of having freakishly large lungs. 


Here are 5 reasons why having huge lungs is totally awesome.

Large lungs are usually accompanied by a large, menacing chest. With a chest the size of a refrigerator you can get away with pretty much anything. Frightening small children is easy when the Hindenburg is docked in your ribcage. From being clearly visible from space to barging your way through to the lifeboats of a sinking ship, a menacing appearance is an incredibly useful trait.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to discover that Buoys are called Buoys because they are buoyant, not because they look like fat little boys floating in the water. Being buoyant is incredibly useful and could even save your life some day, in the event that you are drowning or recovering underwater buried treasure and being pursued by man-eating sharks. Large lungs provide a general immunity to the schemes of Jafar, the Mafia and tidal waves.

It's common knowledge in most educated circles that the apocalypse will be largely funded by evil, power-mongering robots and that they will attempt to destroy mankind through fumigation, or, in the words of New Zealands second most popular comedy folk duo, by "poisoning our asses". This isn't a problem for those of us who are endowed with a prominent pair of oxygen retention chambers. One deep breath prior to annihilation and the apocalypse becomes a fun filled, comedic look at how futile resistance to the superior robot-beings is.

Cyclones can be really destructive. They tear up trees, destroy homes, aerate soil. In short they're a pain in the infrastructure - that is, for people who don't have awesome, over proportioned lungs. Those that do have large, formidable lungs can feel secure in knowing that they are exempt from the destructive capacity of cyclones, tornadoes, people with vacuum cleaners, gusts of wind, etc...

And that is why having big lungs is totally awesome.


K