January 2011
44 posts
linocut asked: Before I checked the expression 'I've got your six' I thought you meant my house number, which went missing a few months ago. Balaclavas lead to creepy thinking.
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Charming...
As myself and two of my siblings shopped for dinner a few days ago, Jane recounted for me a story that features just the kind of rural strangeness I’ve come to love about Ireland. Jane told me a story about a woman named, as far as I can remember, “Tog.”
Tog was a strange old woman who lived near a friend of ours, who was, as Jane put it, “not all there.” At some...
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“You look like you’ve lost weight; have you been working out?”
– There are moments in my life when I’m faced with two equally shameful options. In this case:
1) Well, no, but I have been coughing a lot.
2) I did five chin ups yesterday during a bit of an existential crisis.
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“This troper is an…interesting example. She has two different...”
– TVTropes is where the internet will go to die.
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How Rural...
I don’t often visit the countryside, so when I do I tend to take a tremendous amount of relish in the little things. I enjoy that towns are smaller, or quieter, or whatever particular twist it is that any town has to offer when you find yourself out of your comfort zone.
My sister is back in Ireland again, after living in New York these last few months. I guess there’s a certain...
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Ennui
Me: Ahhhh, fuck. I'm awash with reasonless melancholy
Fudd: Why?
Me: I just feel as though I've never achieved anything with my life
Fudd: So? Life's not for achievements.
Me: What should I do?
Fudd: You've got two choices; keep doing what you're doing, have faith in the plan... or do something different.
Me: I kind of meant now... instant hit of achievement
Fudd: Go for a walk?
Me: Chin ups!
Minutes later
Fudd: Did you do ONE chin up?
Me: FIVE chin ups! In the rain! Feel like BATMAN!
Fudd: Simple as
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Dear Lord
I spent about twenty minutes of today mopping up milk from the inside of our malfunctioning fridge. Something precipitated a minor milk explosion, leaving milk running down the walls in rivulets of white-on-white that made the whole thing look more as though it was melting than than messy.
I attempted to soak the milk up, but encountered shapeless masses throughout, strange, lumpen things. They...
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Hash
Katie: I cant find my hash sign. There are two on the keyboard, on one the three button, above and left of the three and one on a random signs button between the escape and the 1 key. on the 3 key to the bottom right there is also a pound sign. no combination of shift/alt/ctrl/fn will give me a hash sign instead of a pound sign. on all the other buttons when I press shift I get the symbol that is above and left of the number, but just with the three i get the one below and right.
Me: Alt + 3? No?
Katie: Nope! I'm assuming this is because my computer is French Canadian...
Me: Okay... for the time being...
Me: #
Katie: How will I hashtag pointless things on Twitter? Ah! Ok! Solved!
I am nothing if not a charitable older brother.
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Holograms
I can’t wait until we live in a world with holograms and voice recognition. Eventually, we won’t even have to search Wikipedia…
We’ll just shout questions at the titanic, disembodied head of Jimmy Wales, floating over town, while he cries and asks us for money. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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Shamanism
I’ve spent the best part of today reading about studies of shamanism in the late fifties and sixties. It’s a topic I’ve got a kind of professional fascination in, but since so much of the discipline does, I’m hoping it doesn’t make me a bad anthropologist person.
So I’ve been checking off the things I need to be a shaman.
Step 1: Outlandish haircut [check]
...
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My Time With Ray
It’s hard for me to explain what it is that I love so much about my friend Ray, but I’ll try to do so. I guess a decent introduction, for the uninitiated, would be this conversation, which took place during lunchtime yesterday. It happened at a pace that link probably can’t communicate, neither party took any time to think of their frightening analogies or subjects. It was...
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Ray and James
Ray: You won't get a hangover... worst case scenario, a bit of creamy bum.
James: Creamy bum!? Last time you said that I had an arse like a Japanese flag!
Ray: Well, you'll wanna put the toilet roll in the freezer the night before alright...
James: Does it not taste shite?
Ray: It tastes like fuckin' friendship!
James: You always say this...
Ray: This isn't like the time I told you to drink through your arse though
James: You'd need to find a way to do that on your own, there's no way I've got friends good enough to feed beers into my arse
Ray: Yeah, but the brother'll be there
James: I bet he's done a few arse beers...
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I have a dream...
It seems a very grand thing, to be the first point of contact between two cultures previously unaware of one another’s existence. It’s something that gets focused on a lot in introductions to anthropology, those lectures in the first year or two that really establish a love of the subject.
Really often, there’s a focus on the mythologies of those first interactions, and the...
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Prion Research
I’ve spent a lot of today reading about prion research and the immensely impressive Dr. Carleton Gajdusek again. The topic of the anthropological paper I am to write is whether or not scientific ‘facts,’ as constructed things, constitute ‘truths’ and I can’t stop thinking of Gajdusek’s slow virus theories of prion disorders.
When they eventually...
Momentary Panic
Me: Oh.... fuck-
Fudd: What?
Me: No matter how much I search, I can't find a paper I need to reference
Fudd: Oh. I guess it's time to drop out, become a plumber?
Me: Got it
Fudd: Nevermind
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Proposition
So, it seems that around five ministers have resigned in the last 24 hours, giving me the impression that the government is getting to be a bit rudderless.
With that in mind, I’m applying to be Minister for Rave:
They’ll need a man who can dance.
A man who isn’t afraid of getting strobe light related skin-and-brain-damage.
A man for whom a petit mal seizure is...
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Poison
During the summer just gone, myself, my brother and Ross, who may as well be another brother, went on a walk around the government compound we grew up on. During that walk, we wandered into the tucked-away little back courtyard that had been storage before it caught fire in the eighties. Having been there a hundred years already, there wasn’t much a fire could do to it. It’s still...
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I sometimes wonder...
If quantum mechanics dictates that a probability wave only collapses on observation, does that mean that the reason we haven’t had some kind of mass-extinction event yet is because there’d be nobody left to see the after-effects and collapse the probabilty?
How many planets have we depopulated by examining them with telescopes?
As in so many things, it turns out the real monster...
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Brain Poison
On Tuesday, I insisted that my brother watch The Empire Strikes Back. I won’t apologise for it, I just love the direction and the gloom. It’s a lot of fun. Sadly, the price I paid for his fine company while we watched it was that I had to sit through a film of his choosing.
He opted for Star Crash, an apparently french-made (though entirely in English) movie, with editing so sloppy...
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Magic Literacy
I’ve spent the best part of today sunk in a study of Ecuadorian magic-literacy, as described by a lad called Peter Wogan. As seems always to be the way with these subjects, I spend ages putting off study until, eventually, I pick up a few research papers and find myself utterly spellbound.
Today, I found a list of things that can be used to tie a person to a witches book, used to curse...
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Astrology
I’m sure everyone has already had their fill of the purported astrological snafu that would have seen us all juggling star signs as though there were no tomorrow, but I’ve been thinking about it, perhaps more than is healthy, and I feel it might be a grand opportunity.
One of the reasons people dismiss astrology is that it’s so inaccurate, but now, if we’re all just...
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I have a condition...
So, I’m back in a house where there’s an internet connection, and I’m feeling bamboozled. Until today I’d been able to read Tumblr and send email only by using my phone as a modem - an operation so addled with needless complication that the act gave me that Macgyver feeling I secretly feel all men need a hit of from time to time.
At the same time, now that I’m back...
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Flash in Name Only: Dublin Sayings →
flashinnameonly:
I was reminded by a post by the charming http://sirjolt.tumblr.com/of the colourful Dublin saying and phrases that I remember from when I was a chisler (child, see there’s one right there). I worry that they’re dying out now though.
Hard Chaw - “Look at ye, acting like you’re a real hard chaw” - No idea where it comes from but it means a tough guy or a thug, I think.
Stop...
loscheiner asked: I'll take my compliments where I can get them. Also you speak Irish/Gaeilge (never seen that spelling before)? That's incredibly cool. I mostly speak Long Island...
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In Want of Information
My home internet connection has been dead for about a week now, and I’m not really sure how I’m handling it. I’m reading a lot more, and not just fiction, anything I can lay my hands on. I found myself leaving through the Oxford Dictionary of Euphemisms this morning, just because I needed something to soak up.
I’ve also started listening to the radio, and been exposed...
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“Avante-garde dubstep loses the wobble… and discovers that all dubstep ever...”
– Pearls of wisdom from my younger brother
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My Day
Have you ever laughed at something someone nearby has said, then tried to lean your elbow on the desk, jaw planted in your open hand, only to miss the desk entirely with your elbow?
Pitched forward suddenly, forehead slams into desk.
Swivel chair is on wheels, and so the impact and subsequent jolt, dislodges it from its grooves in the carpet, sending it trundling backward, depositing my still...
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“Of all the social blogging platforms in all the world, you had to Tumblr into...”
– Casatumblr
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Oh Hey There: Guy with the world's worst taste in... →
Dave? Dave? Stop Dave… Dave? My mind is going.
alexlitel:
1) Baja Men - “Who Let The Dogs Out?”
Anna, this song means a whole lot to me and has always been my favorite song since I heard it ten years ago. It is a perfect representation of our relationship because it was like the dogs were being let out when I met you and everything went…
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2011
I’ve started this year by climbing into the clothes I partied too hard in last night, like a hermit crab, unable to find a new shell, simply crawling its way back into the old one and giving up on ever growing.
I feel like I was 2010’s bitch for so long that this year won’t have me.