Dear Santa Claus
This year, I’d really like a flying saucer for Christmas. No need to drag it down the chimney, or park it under the tree. Just have one of your elves drop it off when ready. I’ll even give him a lift home afterwards, if you like.
Love, etc.
At last, I own my very own kettle braai/barbeque. Woo! Charred sausages on demand, any day (well, night, anyway) of the week.
It only took us an hour to put together (or “ten minutes” according to the box and paper directions), but that was mostly because we spent “ten minutes” searching for a lock-washer that I dropped in my newly-cut lawn. I swear, it’s easier to find things when the lawn looks more like an African jungle; I am never cutting the grass again.
Once the kettle braai was assembled, it took us another “ten minutes” to get the “easy-to-light” heat beads (a.k.a. super charcoal) to catch alight. Two thirds of a box of firelighters, half a cylinder of lighter fluid, a can of gasoline, a box of dynamite, and a tank of jet fuel later, the heat beads finally started to glow red. So did the house, the neighbour’s house, the other neighbour’s house, the house out back, and the house across the way. We did what any good neighbour would do, and ran down to Sainsburys to pick up some extra sausages. Good thing, too, because when the fire service showed up, they were really hungry…
If you could travel back in time to spend a day with someone, who would it
be and why?
Nobody. I think I spend too much time thinking about the past as it is, and I’d prefer to save my energy for something more useful, like planning for the future.
I’d like to travel into the future, though, to see how the world might look sixty, or a hundred, or even a thousand years from now. Will people be looking at this as the Stink/Pollution Age? Or will they think of us as living in a golden age, full of hope and wonder?
Then again, I remember watching James Cameron’s Aliens, and pitying Ripley because she’d slept through her daughter’s life. Here’s this woman who finally gets to sleep after an incredibly traumatic ordeal, and when she wakes, she finds herself trapped in a world she never wanted. Her family is gone, and she is alone. So, perhaps travelling to the future isn’t such a good idea. What if I can’t get home again?
1. The unknown female ringing him at odd hours is the pet goat he adopted on his travels through war-torn Africa.
2. A night spent making passionate love makes even the most insufferably arrogant man look sensitive and caring in the morning — especially when he remembers to turn on the coffee machine.
3. To really get to know somebody, you need only have two fights, a bit of snarky flirtation, and a steamy night in bed. Really, if you time it right, that works out to three point four days.
4. Deserts are full of mysterious princes, and the American midwest is populated by about a billion (plus or minus three) hunky, but angsty, cowboys. If you’re looking for a husband, those are the places to go.
5. No means no except when it means yes, and he’ll always know which one you really mean because he’s a mindreader. (Except when he’s not, but that only happens twice; see point 3 above)
5a. (Corollary:) She’ll never know what you’re thinking, so, for God’s sake, man, just spit it out and save us the thirty pages of abject misery and self-doubt before the happy ending.
6. If there’s a car to be crashed or a horse to fall off of, she’ll do it. But she’ll do it with a spirit he can’t help but admire.
7. When he says something unforgivably mean, she’ll realize she’s in love. (Also known as the WTF?! clause).
8. Nobody works for a living in romance novels. Or, if they do, they’re having it on with the super-hot boss, and not the kinda ugly person in the next cubicle.
9. If you’re a writer, an artist, a journalist, or a business prodigy, and you’re still single, don’t despair. You’re about to meet your soulmate on the next page.
10. (Mills and Boon) love is more about lust than it is laughter. Too bad, because laughter is likely to last longer and bring one more joy.
British drivers in a nutshell. Yes, VW drivers really are the British equivalent of Mercedes and BMW drivers in South Africa.
Had the oddest dream last night. I was visiting a college residence which had been taken over during the summer months by a film crew, who were filming who knows what. The college residence was part hotel, part shopping mall, and was bordered on one side by a soil-packing plant, complete with cranes and heavy machinery more likely to be associated with a large shipping port.
I didn’t have a room, so I spent my time sneaking into various crew rooms, and stealing naps on their very uncomfortable twin beds, nicking coffee from the neon-lit coffee shop, and relaxing in a cane chair in the glass-walled lounge which overlooked the soil shipping yard.
Then, all of a sudden, this huge mound of dirt just fell out of nowhere, and crushed the corrugated tin-roofed building next to the lounge, taking out two cranes and a couple of bulldozers. The lounge was half crushed, and I had to make my escape through the shipping yard because I was cut off from the door back into the college residence.
I was locked in a shipping container on my way to who knows where, when, thankfully, my alarm clock started beeping insistently. It’s not often I find myself so happy at the arrival of morning…
“The problem with lambs,” said Mary, “is that all that gambolling leads to shake-and-break brains.”
Miss Muffet leaned back against the tree trunk behind her, and sighed. “But they look so cute.”
“Cute, yes. Clever, no. Just the other day, I found them curled up in Jack Horner’s oven. He’d promised them a dinner of roast grass and mint sauce.”
Miss Muffet gasped. “He didn’t!”
Mary nodded grimly. “He was just about to turn the oven up when I walked in.”
“Really, that man thinks he can have his cake and eat it, too.”
| What Be Your Nerd Type?
Your Result: Literature Nerd
Does sitting by a nice cozy fire, with a cup of hot tea/chocolate, and a book you can read for hours even when your eyes grow red and dry and you look sort of scary sitting there with your insomniac appearance? Then you fit this category perfectly! You love the power of the written word and it’s eloquence; and you may like to read/write poetry or novels. You contribute to the smart people of today’s society, however you can probably be overly-critical of works. It’s okay. I understand. |
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| Science/Math Nerd |
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| Social Nerd |
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| Anime Nerd |
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| Drama Nerd |
|
| Gamer/Computer Nerd |
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| Musician |
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| Artistic Nerd |
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| What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace |
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Dear Virgin Media,
Thank you so much for responding to my email notifying you of a fault with my phoneline, and for reconfirming that, if I call you on 151, I can speak with your customer services team for free. Unfortunately, I have no dial tone on my Virgin phoneline. This makes the free call somewhat problematic.
No love,
Iamza
The Cloud, by Ray Hammond: The search for extraterrestrial life is finally over, or so everyone thinks when lunar-based Setiville scientists discover a signal being broadcast from the constellation Aquarius, almost fifteen light years from Earth. A return message is sent even as work begins on decrypting the alien transmission. Sadly, the decryption proves more challenging than initially thought, and thirty years pass with no significant progress being made. Then, just as Earth readies itself for a second message from Aquarius, the alien transmissions stop, and a fast-moving nebulous cloud is spotted on the fringes of the solar system. Suddenly, the idea of being alone in the galaxy starts to look more appealing…
On the whole, not a bad read. The plot ticks over nicely, and if the characters aren’t quite enough to keep one engaged, at least the story itself is reasonably entertaining.
As with so many other science fiction novels, the underlying message seems to be that, as a species, we ought to appreciate mother Earth more. Technology is all well and good, but we should limit our advances because we don’t really know what we’re messing with. And we ought to focus all our energy on Earthbound activities because space is too big and too alien and too wasteful of resources to be worth the effort. I’m not sure that I, personally, agree with any of these assessments.
There are also other bits and pieces that trouble me about the story. For one thing, the Cloud was designed to automatically seek out any and all civilizations who have developed to the extent that they are capable of generating radio waves. Apparently, this is a fundamental step on the path to developing a program of spaceflight. Earth survives because they play dead by turning off all the radios. What is to stop any other advanced civilization from doing the same? How is the Cloud able to regenerate itself? Matter has to come from somewhere, so the idea of a self-regenerating space-cloud is a little hard to swallow. Is the Cloud alone? If not, it seems terribly convenient that it happened to stumble across Earth just fifty or sixty years after SETI started searching in earnest.
If anything, for me, the Cloud reinforces the need for a viable space program. If there are multiple planets populated by human beings, we have that much less of a chance of becoming extinct. Not to be specist, or anything, but I kind of like the idea of human beings spreading amongst the stars like a virus. If nothing else, it’s sort of a cosmic, “Screw you!” to all the naysayers and doom-mongers.
Funny thing is, I remember studying for a history test when I was fourteen, and attempting to make a mental photograph of a critical page. When it came time to take the test, I found I could call up an image of that page in my mind, showing the overall shape and lay-out of the text (paragraph indentations, where the paragraphs went in or out on the unaligned left margin, how many lines of text there were, etc). Even though I couldn’t read all of the text, just having that image in my mind enabled me to answer the questions.
Alas, it was a one-time event. I’ve never been able to repeat that trick — a fact I found highly annoying when it came time to revise the three ginormous folders worth of work for my third year earth sciences course…
***
Last night, I was watching a repeat of a programme in which researchers attempt to recreate Stonehenge. It’s astounding to think that 4000 years ago, there were people who, armed only with buck antlers, logs, and stone axes, managed to move 40-ton stones with relative ease. I was especially intrigued by Gordon Pipe’s stone-rowing technique for moving giant slabs of rock. Never say you can’t learn anything of use from TV; if I ever accidentally travel back 4000 years in time, I now have a valuable piece of information to share with the locals, which should ensure that I live long enough to escape back to the future. Thanks, Mr. Pipes!
 | Greg Johnson on Dear Mona Clee |
 | jeanett666 on Sunshine in Stavanger |
 | Bradley Woods on This and that… |
 | Me too on Dear Mona Clee |
 | babychaos on Strange days |
