buter's BABY blog

I seem to have run out of words so I'm going to make a habit of just posting funny things I find floating around the internet.

.... sigh.

We watched Heroes recently - 23 episodes of fun and drama, highly recommended viewing btw. And since the ending of Season 3 of Veronica Mars and its subsequent cancellation, we are now hanging out for Season 2 of Heroes as well as hunting round for new TV to be interested in, which means I'm watching DVDs of Gilmore Girls and Buffy.

One of the lovely things about being home all day (apart from 24 hour Buffy marathons) is that I can wander around the internet to see what new wonders of interconnectedness are being created every day. And now it appears that Veronica Mars was going to appear on Lost but they lost her to Heroes and so there's even more reason to hang out for the new season. Yay for interconnectedness!!

But now I must pause and consider the possibility that I'm addicted to the internet. Luckily, though, one of my regular reads is Mind Hacks, and they've recently written that there's no such thing as internet addiction.

...

I'm not working at the moment.

I don't realise how little I've done each day until about noon - at which point I have some lunch, and then ponder going out, during another couple of games of solitaire, so sometimes it's about 3pm before I manage to even go outside.

I used to be such an organised, busy person. This time wasting thing is really weird and yet strangely comforting. There's just nothing that needs doing more than sitting here on the lounge with my feet up. Time enough to have things to worry about later.

... and it's back to the game.

As we get better at the refinement we will be able to remove virgin rape from the process.

....errrr ?

Either McDonalds has finally admitted there is something sinister behind the slightly evil-looking clown motif, or the comment above was taken out of context. You can figure it out for yourself, but meanwhile it seems the big D is going to use their own waste cooking oil to drive their trucks. Yep that's right, it's a new take on an old joke.

Q: What has 4 wheels and fries?
A: A Macca's truck driving on biodiesel.

Thankyou, thankyou. I'm here all week - try the veal.

It's been raining a lot lately. So I've been watching Weeds. No, not the garden kind (though that happens too after rain) but the TV kind - a cute little show from the US about a housewife in one of those suburban communities where all the houses are rammed up next to one another and are all built according to the same set of plans. You know the ones. The theme song has been running through my head for *days* now and it's driving not just me but D™ insane. As he puts it, it's bad enough getting a song stuck in your head. It's so much worse when the song stuck is not the actual song but someone else's (i.e. mine) poor reproduction of it.

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, all the same.

There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

Of course the song was written about American suburban development but as in all things cheap and nasty we Australians have to follow suit. Think fast food - until the American franchises started here we had our own excellent burgers at all the local takeaway shops. Burgers should have salad on them. With beetroot. And fresh minced steak. Not plastic cheese in a sweet bun with a frozen semi-meat patty slapped on.

So I'm (still) really glad that we were able to move somewhere that isn't made of ticky tacky but is all bricky bricky. Even though we haven't got a lot of heating yet and as I write this I can see my breath. Indoors. At 9am. I have lots of warm clothes!

Apparently this is the coldest Sydney winter for 8 years. Combine that with our recent moving house experience (from an air conditioned, carpeted townhouse to a double brick, polished floorboards, no heating, awesomely cute freestanding house) - it's *rooly* hard to get out of bed in the mornings.

AFAIK D™ is still *in* bed. He worked late last night on some photo editing for work and decided that entitles him to a sleep-in.

Sigh.

So, you might have heard at some point that one of my favourite flicks is Clueless, for several reasons, if you know me, you'll know why the film appeals, and if you don't know me or you haven't seen it then there's no point explaining it to you!

It's full of American cultural references that I didn't understand the first time I saw it, but because of clever writing that doesn't really matter - the context makes it obvious. But as I've gone through experiencing life (or at least experiencing the internet) I've come to understand more and more of it. I wouldn't say the references have enriched the movie, but I find it highly amusing that a film I saw in 1995 is the first time I heard some of these terms.

Ok, so rather than bore you any more with the slow slow workings of my mind, here's what I mean.

MEL : Which reminds me, where's your report card?

CHER : It's not ready yet.

MEL : What do you mean, "it's not ready yet?"

CHER : Well, some teachers are trying to low-ball me, Daddy.

For years I thought she said the teachers were trying to lobe on her. No idea what that meant. But once I figured out the bidding thing on EBay, I got it.

And now, thanks to the Goog, I've finally got this line:

CHER : Here's the 411 on Mr. Hall. He's single, he's 47, and he earns minor duckets for a thankless job.

411 !! Information !! I get it !!

I still don't get "duckets" but at least the urban dictionary is always ready to offer a helping hand.

Oh, it's all very sad and ridiculous isn't it. But seriously, surely I'm not the only one out there who just lets things slide if you don't understand them, and if they don't seem that important. I mean, how often (in Australia) do you hear - or use - the term 411 in conversation? Really? So cultural references in film don't always translate, come to think of it, nor do they translate in books particularly well. How many non-Aussies find The Castle incomprehensible, for instance?

And then the other day I heard that the ad man who created the "shrimp on the barbie" campaign to send to America had passed away. But what got me was what the original campaign was about.

AD GUY 1 : How are we gonna advertise Oz to the Yanks?
AD GUY 2 : Guess we could invite them over for a couple of snags on the barbie?
AD GUY 1 : Hmm, good idea, but will they know what a snag is?
AD GUY 2 : Umm - "Banger on the barbie"?
AD GUY 1 : And we want to show that we have access to great seafood rather than just gristle and fat encased in sheep intestines. Might remind them that we're all convicts or something.
AD GUY 2 : Right. "Prawn on the barbie"?
AD GUY 1 : Prawn... prawn... would they know what that is?

And lo and behold, rather than reeducate the masses as to what a prawn is, they all come here wondering where all the shrimp are. No 411 there.

<sigh>

... you decide to do one of those internetty quizzes because you saw it on a blog you tend to actually respect now and then just to fill up a blog post.

1. Where is your cell phone? Elsewhere.
2. Describe your boyfriend/girlfriend? Smashing.
3. Your hair? Comfortable.
4. Your mother? Practical.
5. Your father? Kind.
6. Your favourite item? Pendant.
7. Your dream last night? Snored.
8. Your favourite drink? Milk.
9. Your dream car? Silver.
10. The room you are in? Kitchen.
11. Your ex? Dull.
12. Your fear? Ignorance.
13. What do you want to be in 10 years? Older.
14. Who did you hang out with last night? D™
15. What you're not? Infertile.
19. The last thing you did? Dinner.
20. What are you wearing? PJ's
22. Your favourite book? Magician.
23. The last thing you ate? Bread.
24. Your life? Full.
25. Your mood? Calm.
26. Your friends? Gorgeous.
27. What are you thinking about right now? Chocolate.
28. Your car? Maxy.
29. What are you doing at the moment? Wondering.
30. Your summer? Humid.
31. Your relationship status? Married.
32. What is on your tv? Mythbusters.
33. When is the last time you laughed? Now.
34. Last time you cried? Then.
35. School? Private.

Copy.
Paste.
Answer.
Questions.
In.
One.
Word.

Yeah, I did it.

Nice to have a few hours to mess with the template, seeing as I'm home waiting till it's time to go to an appointment.

Reminds me of waiting to go to afternoon exams at uni. You never quite know when to leave, because you don't want to be late, but you don't want to be hanging around at uni for hours until the exam starts.

Oh well. Luckily futzing with my template has killed some time.

If you don't like it, suggest a different free template and I'll follow it up.

I was just perusing my bloglines, as you do, for something to read, and came across photojojo's latest post about making cubular photos. I quite like photojojo for supplying my needs in photography: namely, to have stuff to talk to D™ about over dinner... Like the awesomeness of the GorillaPod (in our house, now known as the drillerpod, for reasons best left unexplored) which ended up being an awesome Christmas present for D™ - up till then I'd had the exciting options of socks, jocks, or a box (of nothing).

Anyway back onto photojojo, they also often post links to other sites - like the runningfromcamera dude. They just make me giggle, which is always a good side benefit of using the InterWeb.

So today they had this story about DIY cubular photos but they linked to a story from 2001 about cubular watermelons. Watermelons. Squared. For ¥10,000 each. That's about $105 aussie. Yikes! I like my watermelon round, if that's the price of cubed! Reminds me of that Donald Duck story about Square Aigs....

Which in turns puts me in mind of one of my dad's favourite jokes. Or is it one of my favourite dad jokes. Anyway.

Q: How do you know how many pies to buy for lunch?

.. wait for it ..

..

..

A: Oh, 2 Π R enough to go around.

Hehe.

Do you remember that Far Side comic that had an individualistic penguin standing up in a crowded rookery singing "I just gotta be me!!!" ?

Ok so maybe it's just me but that's always stuck in my head. Anyway tonight D™ and I are planning to go see Happy Feet, yes, the penguin movie. According to my mum (who does not have English as her first language) they are actually penquins, which is a lot cuter. And she'd know seeing as she and my dad have just returned from the superduper Antarctica boat trip where they saw millyuns and billyuns of penquins eating, sleeping, ice sliding, swimming, regurgitating, basically anything short of flying. (duh).

Penquins seem to be a theme in today's media. There's March of the Pengs, Happy Feetsies, and now the book publisher has started a wiki called amillionpenguins where they have launched the somewhat ambitious project of the world's first web-based collaborative novel.

I don't know whether I feel it will succeed or fail. Maybe a bit of both - after all, wikipedia is the prime example of how web-based collaborative resources that "anyone can edit" can have truly good bits, and truly bad bits.

Oh well, I might read some of it one day so I'll reserve my judgement till then.

So having written such a wimpy post last time, I'm in the utterly unenviable position of having to write a good one to make up for it, which I will feel much better about leaving to rot on the front page of the blog for a few days/weeks/months.

Unfortunately, I *still* don't have much useful to say. I read an article yesterday which talks about why men are funnier than women. The conclusion was that men have all this energy to spend on impressing women (or killing each other) in order to reproduce (which doesn't take much, now, does it) so there's oodles available for being funny, while women have essentially no energy left after saving it all for reproducing, so they don't bother.

Does anyone laugh when they read my blog? Am I funny? I think I might be funny = strange, but not funny = haha, at least not in the way of, say, Girl vs Pig. So I guess it might be true, and especially must be so, because one of my little-known New Year's Revosolutions is that I have decided to live by the statement "I found it on the internet, so it's true". Think about it.

I've shamelessly stolen a blog post title from jarv - because it's the internet, and I can - but luckily she doesn't have a copyright statement so I'll never get sued .... (fingers crossed) ...

Anyway in all the foofaraw and hullabaloo of the end of the year and the start of the new one, I've decided it's time for a spring (summer) clean of upstairs, you know the place, the home of memory and thought and repository of all weird electrical connections that make us who we are ...

See what I mean about needing a spring clean?

Other people might call it a new year's resolution, or revolution, or evolution, but I'm going for something that is a bit more thorough while at the same time knowing that it's going to have to be done again.

It's a focus thing. This year I'm going to focus on reading new things, rather than trying to stick to a genre with which I am already comfortable, I'm going to focus on being a calmer person, and I'm going to focus on keeping up with friends. I know I tried to do that last year, and I sort of did ok, but I'm going to try to keep it up! After all just because a new year resolution did ok in year n, doesn't mean you can't dust it off and keep going at it in year n+1 does it?

So to start off with, I've been reading a bunch of books by James Clavell. In my wild teenage years I read a whole bunch of old adventure/thriller books my dad had picked up when someone left his work - Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth, that kind of stuff. I tried reading Clive Cussler when I moved in with D™, but after the first book you kind of know the formula so the second, third and etc books are a bit .. predictable. Since then (about 7 years ago) I've not picked up an adventure book let alone read a saga of them. Enter James Clavell. A dude at work suggested I read Sho-Gun, which is a tome, when I'd mentioned to him that I thoroughly enjoyed reading Musashi a while back.

I finished that over Christmas (at Lorne, the coldest wettest beach to spend an Australian summer, *ever*) and so perused the local (only) secondhand bookshop to find more. I ended up with King Rat and Whirlwind, but I'm still missing Tai-Pan, Noble House and Gai-Jin. I'll get there - these books are *good*. There's action, adventure, drama, all that, there's a whole lot of history, politics, real-world tie-ins, and they're well written into the bargain. So this weekend I'm going to another second hand bookstore to try to fill my James Clavell bookshelf.

After that I thought I might try to read Gormenghast again. I tried for the first time about 10 years ago. Maybe I have matured enough to try again. Or maybe I'll end up spending more time with friends instead. Who knows.


Edit: my horoscope today says:


Hmm.

You might think from my Monday that I was suffering from a weekend of shenanigans. But no...

Fri night - a lovely 2-hour train journey home. Bloody cancelled trains stupid telopea train line random connections missing grumble grumble. (oh, and D™ took the car to Canberra..)
Sat day - gave blood, did some book shopping, went to a baby shower in glebe (remind me next time that it's not a good idea to walk from central to glebe in 27-degree-heat after giving blood..) then got on the 6pm bus to go to canberra.
Sat night - weird woozy feeling not at all helped by sleeping on the floor in a house full of paint fumes. In Canberra.
Sun day - woke up cricknecked, painted Someone.Else's.House. all day. In Canberra. Then drove back to Sydney with D™, arrived home 8pm.
Sun night - got to bed around 9.30, woke up at 11.40 when a FIRE ENGINE was flashing its lights and reversing down the fire trail in the reserve opposite our bedroom window (random? maybe!) then woke again at 1.30 with the wind rising, then woke again at 5.20 with the kookaburras then finally woke -again- just after 6 to go to work.

*sigh*

today it's better. Had a good night's sleep, no fire engines, no kookaburras, and I've found this ... I love this one which made me actively chortle. Hehe. I just looked at it again and I chortled again. I love the internet. Time's a-wastin'! (that's in the declarative sense)

Oh and if you're curious about the books I bought - they were tomes:

• Underground by Haruki Murakami.


• Swann's Way by Proust.


• On Seeing and Noticing by Alain de Botton.

I don't understand yodelling. I don't understand how you do it, why you do it, and why you'd listen to it.

Wikipedia says:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word yodel is derived from a German word jodeln (originally Bavarian) meaning "to utter the syllable jo".

yoy

That being said, last night we were watching Spicks and Specks - which concluded with a demonstration of classical yodelling. What's that? You thought that meant "yodelling in the classical style" as opposed to "yodelling in the latest alternative-grunge-punk-hip/hop-folk-groove style"? No, no you're mistaken. It means yodelling to classical music. The yodeller yodelled her way through the William Tell Overture.

It was astounding.

As pastimes go though, I suppose her childhood of hanging around in mango trees, yodelling, is better than some. Me, I prefer listening to things other than yodels on my iriver. Did I mention that I don't own an iPod? Well these iPod covers almost make me want one. As Cher would say "I wonder if they have that in my size.."


ed: thought for the day - seeing as we all have blogs and we can be self-published geniuses all over the world, why is it so gratifying to see yourself linked on someone else's blog?

As D™ says:
Now you have to blog about being quoted in a blog and so the intenet fills up just that little bit more with junk.
*sigh*

Just to continue a theme, here's some light reading:

Pluto is the outermost planet of the solar system, and the end of the process of breaking down the reality structure of normal consciousness begun by Uranus.

Riiiight. So, after exiting Uranus it's quite likely that you'll lose your reality structure. Uh-huh. <nods>

So, if reality is broken down, does it really matter that Pluto is no longer considered a planet?

I guess not.

This week August 28 through September 3

Aquarius
<snip>

Mars also moves to square Pluto, and this could cause aggravation, possibly even some anger. Don't give way to your baser emotions. Try and diffuse the situation and see it from a more enlightened perspective.

Diffuse?

Come to think of it, I was feeling a little focused.

sorry for the toilet humour, it's that kind of day ...

Latest news: Pluto is not a planet.

After 76 years, poor lil' Pluto has been globally realigned and is no longer classified as a planet but instead is a Kuiper Belt Object. While slightly disturbing to astronomers, and potentially world-shaking to astrologers, I feel the impact of this change has been underestimated when you think of the thousands of school children currently making solar system models for school projects.

Think about it. You've worked hard for weeks, finding or making spheroids representing 9 planets and the sun .. you've been painting ping pong balls, tennis balls, soccer balls, maybe even the odd football for fun ... and then some random astronomy bunch decides to remove one!

This morning a 12-year old rang up parent radio and complained that her diorama, due today, would have to have Pluto removed in emergency surgery. What's more disturbing is that we just don't know whether her teacher knows about Pluto - will she be marked down for missing a planet?

But being pragmatic, I expect most 12-year olds will be happy that it's one less planet to memorise .

Let me see ...

Many Very Excellent Men Jump Straight Up Near Paris

now becomes

Many Very Excellent Men Just Said Utter Nonsense

I can live with that.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. It looks wrong. It should be trooper shouldn't it?

Apparently not .

Speaking of trooping though, the other day I caught the train from Telopea with a dozen hand-picked fellow commuters. Not that it was my hand doing the picking, but they all chose to be there that morning.

I've caught that train before, and you come to recognise people on the platform. Commuters, you see them every day, but you never say anything to them, that would be weird.

Like, the guy with the soccer ball.

And the lady in the long black coat.

And the Chinese guys who park their car opposite the petrol station in the closest parking spot to the station. I only mention them because they're the only people I've ever seen who actually drive to Telopea Station. Everyone else walks. If you have a car, you'd drive to a different station, at the very least. Telopea is just above the arse-end of stations (as in, it's one stop closer to the city than Carlingford station).

So anyway, I always see these two well-dressed business ladies, probably in their early to mid twenties. They have immaculate hair and very classy outfits, usually a skirt with a business jacket, and spiky heel shoes of course. They always arrive together. And then get on the train together. And then sit together. And then listen to their (singular) iPod together. Yes, one ear each. And then chat together till about Rosehill (2, maybe 3 stops along).

And then they fall asleep. Together. With their heads tilted. Together.

I can only assume that they doze off while thinking "mustn't.. pull.. earpod.. out.." which is why their heads always rest together.

It's very cute.

... well, if they don't make it worse, at the very least they don't make it all better either. My loyal following will recall that I've had headaches off-n-on since about March this year, and that the headache when it comes will last for days, and nothing seems to relieve it. Painkilling medication doesn't actually "kill" the pain, just makes it so that though you can feel it, it's not ruling your life.

I could review the painkillers I've been taking in terms of their headache removability:
1. aspirin, pretty commonly regarded as "good for what ails ya" but in fact it's only really good for hangovers or dehydration headaches. Not for my special kind. But at least it didn't make it worse ...

2. paracetamol, always recommended as a first choice after aspirin, but didn't have a huge impact on the headache either.

3. ibuprofen, well this was not too bad. The neurologist recommended taking it as soon as the headache started and it seemed to reduce its severity - but then I'd have to take another dose or combine with another drug for full functionality so it's not awesome - but a good standby and very cheap.

4. "nurofen tension headache" - this is ibuprofen lysine. The pharmacist (whom I asked for advice, as you're meant to) said "oh, well it works better than normal nurofen because it's targeted specifically for the tension headache." Funnily enough the package next to it, " Migraine pain" was the same dosage and same everything except "targeted specifically for the migraine headache". She knew nothing, so I researched it a little bit and it's meant to act faster than straight ibuprofen. It was ok, acting faster is fine but the net effect was the same as the regular stuff. And it's twice as expensive as homebrand ibuprofen which brings its rating down to

5. prodeine forte (a strong paracetamol/codeine blend also marketed as panadeine forte) - wow, now we're getting into the strong stuff. Its main side effect is incredible wooziness, though it's also very effective at helping you ignore the pain. In fact you can ignore just about anything! So I would recommend taking it if the pain is stopping you sleeping, but that's about it. And then the sleep you do get when you have taken one, is pretty weird (you'll notice the same effect with codral night time tablets) so it gets

6. tramadol ( Zydol, or Tramal) - or as I like to call them, "tiny little capsules of joy". These were the most effective, least side-effective of all the drugs I tried. They work reasonably fast, you can combine them with nurofen, and they don't cause any weird drowsiness or hallucinations. So two thumbs up and from me.

Unfortunately as you'd probably gathered from the title of the post, in the end though the drugs weren't solving the problem, only addressing the symptom. I'd been to see my GP a couple of times, with no conclusive diagnosis, a neurologist who said it *might* be a migraine brought about from muscle tension, and I'd had CT and MRI scans which showed nothing abnormal. So despite being reassured that there wasn't anything wrong, and being about $600 poorer for the knowledge, in fact I still didn't know anything at all. (Relax, this story has a happy ending - I went to medicare and got nearly $400 back so I'm only $200 poorer after all.)

So this week when I had a debilitating headache on Tuesday, I went to a physio recommended to me by a good friend. The physio poked me in my neck and said "does it hurt here?". When I recovered from the intense pain of said poking, she informed me that the headache was probably referred from tension in my neck and that my neck shouldn't actually feel like a solid lump of bone but should feel like the soft tissue which it in fact is. When I told her I'd been renovating and this so far involved repainting our house, she said "well there's your problem" and told me to stop painting for a few weeks. (what a pity!)

So here I am, two physio treatments later and drug free and loving it. I'm going back for more treatments quite possibly for the next couple of months as there are neck, shoulder and back muscle issues that she has yet to deal with. But in general ... I'd say it's a good outcome! And for the physio!