favourite things mememe

From the wonderful Chasing Daisy and Birdy…

Mysteries in novels and dashing brave heros

Studying emperors as crazy as Nero

Tacklin’ the tragedist who wrote about kings

These are a few of my favourite things

Over priced tee shirts and flashy new gadgets

British tv shows, especially about magic*

Emails and texts and telephone rings

These are a few of my favourite things

Fleecy warm clothing and tight fitting jeans

Hard yoga classes taught by hellish fiends

Starbuck, Apollo and Friday nights in

These are a few of my favourite things

When your job bites

When the wind stings

I simply remember my favourite things

And then I don’t feel so bad….

*Jonathan Creek rather than Paul Daniels

correspondence from my brother

I saw this graphic tee on threadless and it kicked off the following email chain**.

Flaming Zinc – I must buy this tee when I get paid

Younger Brother – That’s a shocking tee! Bears would never do that!

Flaming Zinc – So you don’t want one and will I be lynched by a mob of rowdy bears if I dare to wear the tee?

Younger Brother- It will be like the Danish cartoons but the protesters will be shorter and furry

Flaming Zinc – Hehehe

enter Husband – Hahaha! And the protest will consist of a lot of shuffling around instead of stone throwing…

Younger Brother – You will end up with the Teddy Bears Picnic calling a furry jihad on your arse!

Flaming Zinc – I am so buying that tee 🙂 I am trying to read Greek lyric chick on chick poetry and am not getting it

Younger Brother – Sounds cool, what’s the poems about? PE teachers in comfortable shoes?

Flaming Zinc – Older women and girls frolicking in olive oil and drinking oozo

Younger Brother – Sounds like a regular night in the Vanborough Tavern

** In the interests of entertainment the original wording may be slightly tinkered with, spellings corrected and a general culling of exclamations.

Half baked

I am feeling a little saner. I’ve made butter cookies, iced them and sprinkled ridiculously expensive red sugar (Dean and Deluca) over them. They look quite festive, which is not surprising since the only cookie cutters I owe are Christmas ones ! I restrained myself to stars this evening. I think a trip to a kitchen store is in order, maybe I’ll get some Halloween shaped cutters and some expensive black sugar to make next weekends batch look particularly ghoulish!

Mind muddle

My western brain is finding it hard to digest ancient philosophers musings….Anaximander’s apeiron has a touch of the Blackadder about it (the episode involving “finest green”). Okay, not really since apeiron is an abstract concept of “first principle” (think building blocks of life and the universe), and green was alchemy gone wild. But, you know what I mean!

Personally I think the whole concept of apeiron came from a drunken night out with the boys from Milesians: Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes (or philosopher 1, philosopher 2 and philosopher 3). The wine was flowing and Thales (philosopher 1) put forth his suggestion that first principle was water. Then Anaximenes (philosopher 3) piped up with air, or perhaps intelligent air? Then at some point between “air” and the kebab shop Anaximander (philosopher 2) decided to blind side them with apeiron.

Apeiron is different from all other elements, it is divine and the source of everything. Me thinks that apeiron is Greek for “chili sauce”. In kebab shops sauces do tend to defy the laws of nature and have infinite sell by dates, they can taste divine (when consumed drunk) and at others times can be considered indigestible (=indestructible).

I think I need a break from the books.

one more thing

(and then I really will turn in for the night)

When you are away from you regular routine and haunts, you can be forgiven for thinking that everything crashes to a halt the moment you step out. Of course this is nonsense, the world keeps turning and all that greets me is far too much information/articles/posts to process and no idea what the date is. For such an anal person it makes no sense that when I jack out for a day or six I loose track of days/dates/months. I am quite alarmed to discover that is September 18th already, practically my birthday 🙂

out of touch

I don’t know who or what Crazy Frog is (and I don’t care). I thought Franz Ferdinand was a footballer. I got very confused, and slightly concerned, when I found out that Fergie was a member of the Black Eyed Peas.

What I do know is it that technically Oedipus didn’t have an Oedipus complex. Ancient Greek sculptors and vase painters roll off my tongue as if they were members of a boy band, and I dream that one day I’ll read Homer the original Klingon.

insubordination

My brother is sassing me long distance, here is his latest email:

Hi Farty, 

How’s you back, my was a bit sore after carrying a whole load of bricks, wood, cement… umpaloopa’s … you got yours by opening a window, how big was window?

Here is the next bit of film of the Decking and a clean kitchen window.

Jonty

X

In my defense it was larger than a porthole. In the past emailing my brother has been a one way thing, with my communicates being sucked into the black hole of sibling indifference. But, over the past few weeks he’s sent me six or so 20 sec home video attachments detailing the progress of “landscaping” our mum’s back garden. The quality isn’t great, he appears to be under the impression that he is filming a vox pop for MTV (lots of swirly drunken camera shots), but it is nice to see what is going on the homestead.

care package s.o.s

Dear Mum,

I know you are knee dip in decking and breeze blocks, and landscaping your sprawling urban 0.00005 acres. But, when you get a moment could you please pick up these trifles for your off-shored daughter and son-in-law. (And I’ll over look you eating our Easter eggs before they made it to the Post Office.)

• Chocolate of the milk, dark or white variety (but, with a no girly filling request from Alex)
• Bassetts Fruit Allsorts (several packets)
• Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts (one packet)
• Chocolate Gingers
• Doctor Who: Series 1, Volume 3 (green cover with a picture of some “cheapy” alien costume on it) on DVD

Always your loving and dutiful daughter.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

blind ambition

In about eight weeks, or so, school starts for me. Technically since it is a correspondence course I can kick it off when ever the study materials materialize materialise (no, I just couldn’t do it). I am starting to panic that I will be biting off more than I can chew, and I am trying to remember the work loads of the arts students that I used to scoff at in Manchester. The science departments pretty much had a full time week of lectures, practicals and reading. Of course if I did more of the reading then I might not have found myself in a perpetual daze, wondering when things would start to make sense and get slightly more interesting (who’d have thought that the study of volcanos could be so tedious). Whereas my chums in the arts block appeared to only have 7 or so hours of lectures per week, plus a hefty dose of reading and essay writing. Naive me used to think that reading novels, plays or poetry was a soft option to staring down a microscope trying to figure out what type of feldspar I was looking at (x polarisation and twinning drift into my consciousness.

I really don’t know what to expect. In theory I have over twenty hours of potential study time (comprised of 5 lunch hours, 4 two hour week day sessions, and at least ten hrs spread over the weekend), but that does not take into consideration procrastinating and navel gazing. But, this would give me five hours per subject per week.

I am anxious that I might be tearing my hair out my Christmas, but the opposite could be true too. The structure and brain activity might be the kick up the arse I need to put a little pep in my step.

going, going, gone

After two plus years of diligently growing my hair, I can now report that I am the proud owner of a chic bob. I suffered a momentary Samson like fear that once my locks were lying lifeless on the salon floor I would loose the super powers I had gained over the past few years. I was being silly. Of course I can still leap tall buildings in a single bound and run faster than a speeding bullet, no wait, that’s superman. Shucks, well at least I feel more at easy with this length (and I’ve still got the x-ray vision thing working for me). It was nice being Rapunzel for a while, it does feel weird not having to plait my hair before going to sleep and I am not looking forward to having to start washing my neck again now that it is back on public display.