buter's BABY blog

-----Original Message-----
From: butercup
Sent: Thursday, 24 May 2007 10:22 AM
To: My mate


Mate,

So seeing as I've stalled on reading Moby Dick ... maybe I should get it sent to my phone instead ;)

-----Original Message-----
From: Buter's mate
Sent: Thursday, 24 May 2007 10:30 AM
To: butercup

"stalled" eh? that puts you in some good company I expect: it's probably one of the most famous books that no one has ever finished ;) (along with "Ulysses")

At what point does a book become "never finished" as opposed to "still being read, just on the shelf for a while"? I suppose if you discount textbooks, the "never finished" category must be used for books that you don't find appealing or enthralling enough to even want to finish. Now I'm one of those people who will stick with a book for a while to see if it gets better, but even so there's a fair list of books I've never finished .. which I will admit to, for the first time, right here:

• Underworld by Don DeLillo - I got stuck at the decades-long description of the baseball game at the start.
• The Bride Stripped Bare by "anonymous" - hilariously, even the wikipee entry isn't finished.
• The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkein - sorry, but I loathed history in high school so why would I want to read more history, even if it is about Middle-Earth ...
• Swann's Way by Proust - oh, I tried so hard. I even went so far as to read Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life for encouragement. (yes, I did finish that one!) I've decided Proust changed my life, without having to read the whole book. Phew ..
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - I think I started this 3 or 4 times and just kept giving up. Since it turns out that the one person who kept recommending it to me had almost nothing in common with me I probably should have given up sooner.
• A Song of Stone by Iain Banks - in fact most of Iain Banks' fiction or sci-fi work just turned me off. The only one I remember finishing (and reading again, incidentally) was Against a Dark Background.
• Perfume by Patrick Suskind - just "eeeeew", really.
• The Bible - since I'm being honest, I really tried to read this, I even got a "Read the Bible in a year"guide but it still ended up on the shelf as a "thing to do later". Maybe next year.
  

Ok, that's probably enough reminiscing, after all it's not really all that much fun to think about books that never made it for me .. time to go finish off The Decameron.

Or more specifically, what rhymes with laugh and also ends in - augh?

Girraugh.

Caugh.

Umm.

So, nothing much then.

Maybe a better question is what makes you laugh (and does it end in -augh) ?

Goethe said "Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable." So I wonder what you can infer from my list ...?

Ten things that make buter laugh:

1. I often find funny things when reading other peoples' blogs. If so, they tend to make it onto my bloglines. Like, say, bash.org.


2. Dilbert comics, some of the time. A wry "That's uncomfortably true" kind of laugh.


3. The rhyming scene from The Princess Bride. "No more rhymes now, I mean it!" "Anybody want a peanut?" Every time - gets a giggle or at least a grin. And that's a lot of times.


4. That time when Buffy says "You have but face" in Season 4. Or that time when Willow says "How come the sudden calisthenics, aren't you sort of naturally buff, Buff? Hee - buff, Buff". Or the time when Willow says "I'm Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel" Or .... bugger it. Just about any episode of Buffy has me sniggering, chortling, or holding my sides.


5. When Garion says Push. I know the link is in Finnish or Swedish or something but there is a complete quote in English there. Giggleworthy.


6. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy (the book and radio series), for the most part. More like my brain is amused and I'll smile than a real belly laugh but it consistently happens. The only scene in the movie where I laughed was when they all turned to wool and someone barfed. Hey! Baugh! Hee.


7. When people say inconsistent or wrong things and the newspaper prints it as if it was normal. Like when Bazza O'Fazza said that thing about the Easter Bunny, implying that it was the point of Easter.


8. Microfortnights, and other strange units of measurement.


9. In fact in line with that last one, I find lots of word games amusing. Here's another one.


10. And finally ... myself, when I do something silly, especially if D™ starts laughing at me, then I start laughing at me, then I can't stop laughing at me until I collapse with exhaustion and breathlessness. That's a belly grabbing laugh

So. I await your analysis .....

Post inspired by the happiness project .... sometimes it's fun thinking about what makes you happy!