Sitting alone in a first year Biology lecture could never be fun; but today I feel an extra burst of boredom that is so familiar this year. Staring blankly at the projection of slides on the wall, listening to a woman speak about something that I learnt more than two years ago, and trying not to think about the recent 'freedom' that I have from couple life is not my idea of a fun day. As I sat and stared and tried not to fall asleep, I wondered if I could write a blog in the remaining 30 minutes of my lesson. "That's too hard" I said to myself, and so I decided to show that annoying me that I can do whatever I want. I decided that logging onto my blog would be slightly less counter productive than hanging around on Facebook for the rest of the lecture, and Damacus has long been harrassing me to post something new on this neglected blog. It is because of this that I am not drawing Punett squares on my lecture slides.
So, to begin my now 25 minute long blog, I should first say that I am running out of things to wear to uni. Almost every combination of clothes in my cupboard has been worn, I have been raiding the drawers of my sister, and both my parents, and it is only week 5. Oh the wonder of the free dress days that we so looked forward to once a term in high school has become the annoyance and curse of no uniform university. When will people stop trying and start wearing tracksuit pants every day? I long for the day when I can wear comfortable pants and not be looked at with judging eyes; that day will come, I hope, in Winter.
Not only do we have freedom of what we wear, but we have freedom in the classes that we attend and pay attention to. Last week the only class I attended was Medieval History. I was ill on Thursday so I missed my Lab sessions, I did not attend Criminology because the lecturer has the most boring voice of all time, I skipped Biology because, as I said, the course content to this point is the same as what my sister si learning in year 11 Biology, and I missed Chemistry because physical chem is not my topic of choice. That leaves History; the only subject that I chose for fun that has no effect on my career. This freedom to miss lectures without anyone noticing that you are gone may seem great for all of you year 12 students reading this, but trust me, I am not learning anything. As much as the lazy folk like me hated the fact that attendance at school was so strictly monitered, this 'come and go as you please' attitude is hard to get used to, and if I fail to adapt I will most likely fail all of my courses.
We have the freedom to drink between classes; we have a bar and on occasion some societies will give out free alcohol to its members. $1 pots at 1pm on a Thursday at Sir John's Bar, but I have a three hour Chemistry lab after it, what is stopping me from being completely intoxicated and playing with dangerous chemicals?
University brags about the new and undiscovered freedom for ex-high school sutdents that will jump at the chance to have a lazy year after the horror and stress that VCE thrust upon them, but how many of us will drown in this freedom, jump in too deep and be unable to save themselves even by using uni-survival backstroke? I think, or hope, that I have realised in time that I can no longer see the beach of responsibility, the land of my future, that I still know in which direction to swim-study to safety, and that the current of sleep-ins, parties, and televisons series on DVD that I have always wanted to watch will not drag me out to forever me lost in the vast ocean of lazyness and unemployment. Save yourselves; the floaties of high school and the boogey board of teachers can no longer help you get to shore. Learn to swim before it is to late, I hope that I do. I think that metaphor has now officialy been killed.
With only 5 minutes left (yes that last part took me a while but I was actually looking at the pictures on the slides; I like pedigrees, ok), all I have to say is that too much freedom can never be a good thing. I must now pack up and be disappointed with how short this was, but I did my best with the time given and that annoying noise in the background; yes I mean the lecturer. Thanks for reading.
-Renji
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Friday, March 19, 2010
And the Weird Blogging Hack Came Back
Don't pretend you didn't miss me. Blogging as a medium decays in my absence. Crucible Tongs has come back, adorned in that trademark garb you've come to associate with worldly security. The gleaming diving helmet throbbing with neon lights and encapsulating the timeless German rave scene, the sharp tuxedo and white gloves, the snowy ruffle and obsidian briefcase of depth indeterminable... Yeah, I kind of fell in love with an alter ego in there somewhere, but affections for fictitious characters is like throbbing biological urges in priests, they're cool so long as you don't act on them... and you will, so enjoy dreading the absolute downfall of all your amassed credibility while you're at it...
*Ahem* I am so unbelievably glad I can blame that intro on my blogging slump of late. That way it can't be dredged up as evidence for the raging 'Crucible Tongs vs Bram Stoker's Estate'... of which claims of over 400 calls demanding to know where I should address mail to one M. Harker are completely unsubstantiated... *Ahem... because sometimes a paragraph's gotten so defamatory you've retched up some of the most grotesque 'Fishing Chips' (Which are NOT SUSTENANCE!!!) you'll definitely encounter next weekend when they're on the table waiting for you when you get home, and had to clear your throat once more*. I've got no idea where this is going and this line is often the harbinger of some of my more... 'eccentric' work on Musings Of Tong, check it out if you haven't, you'll probably NEVER be able to speak to me face to face again, but I like to gauge the reactions nonetheless. Nevertheless I'll keep it 'clean' and try to keep the name dropping to a minimum.
'Why haven't you been blogging, Mr Tongs?', I bet you're all asking, as my overflowing charisma has been known to require three successive greetings before one can truly consider themselves capable of comprehending my overwhelming personage. The answer is simple, it's called a cocktail of stress, anxiety, borderline nervous breakdown, Nirvana (The state of being AND the band!), hallucinations, illness, tragedy, large scale property damage, chronic isolation and a Typically Tongian Transcendence of today's value system... with Tiringly Terrible Tongian alliteration for good measure... However I'm getting quite sick of saying life's sucked for the last few weeks and so can't be screwed now. Instead I will detail my absence because this is blogging, you'll sit down and enjoy what I tell you to enjoy...
So strap yourself in reaaaaal tight... don't mind the wires and tape keeping your eyes ajar... because here's my 'Ode to (eventual temporary) Joy'...
The storm.
THE storm.
THA storm.
You know, the one that didn't reach it's full potential for media frenzy as measured by comparing my mother's level of indignation to that of the tabloids. As you all would have guessed with a startling degree of accuracy, no doubt, is that a 'deeply troubled' (sounds so much cooler than 'potentially dangerous' in conversations with women, trust me... because my conversations with women are the stuff of legend... almost to the point where I wish humanity could collectively forget them...) and, shamelessly overt, melancholic youth such as myself sees an intensely ferocious, yet empathetic poetic beauty to a well timed downpour. The heavens break for you, they cry the tears you couldn't shed like a best friend, they drown out the uncaring world in a constant perfect rhythm... and delivers a comforting yet commanding voice in thunder, as a fantastic Shakespearian precursor to unfathomable tragedy. King Lear, THIS MAY, GET HYPED, GET SNIDE AND PRETENTIOUS, GET TICKETS... then get wasted on red wine & cheap caviar and despair at the day your future daughters come and destroy your life with their grotesque, hereditary, karmic, ignorance...
Well THAT storm, which became ridiculously serious because it singlehandedly ruined Moomba, shocking all that a celebration for something as dead as the Yarra had to be buried by divine intervention... Well I was home, on the phone to a confused and threatened Mr Phistocoles, the greengrocer, about trading my permanent essence for the culinary skills to develop what later became the greatest vegetarian bolognaise sauce the world will ever see. To cut a long story short, the iceman indeed cometh in the form of a middle eastern mob evidently without sin. Here's where the heroics come in, if anybody still plays Brass instruments now would be a good time, or that lacking, the Indiana Jones theme will do just fine. I have a dog, my sister has a rabbit. The dog's a genius, he knows life's about food, sleep, poignant misery for attention, snappy outfits and sating those pesky male loins with anything you can squint enough to make appear female. The rabbit is vermin, it layers our backyard in it's 'leavings' (I love that word in that context, it's so classy) which adds that extra layer of disgusting challenge to an already distressing occupation of hanging out the washing... seriously, handling people's clothes is way too 'stalky' for anyone under 35 and engaged in... your mantra becomes, 'I'm just holding clothes, they're for wearing, not for ME to wear though! Oh lordy no, although they might fit your... *shakes head violently grits teeth and resumes the psychological torture*'. I digress from cool heroics, which will get their own paragraph for emphasis.
*Click, Click... Click, *curse* backspace* Excellent, well evidently I loathe my sister's rodent companion, as an ignorant, deadbeat, talent squandering young male willing to fake dedication for attention and overstaying my welcome, I dragged the dog inside. Hail explodes on garage roofs situated next to porches like shrapnel. It was the least I could do for the only company I had for the weekend... who I'd neglected to feed until one that morning thanks to stupid uni timetable and fear of abandonment from schoolyard chums. I had guilt on my mind so I saved him... by opening a door and shouting, but that's sort of all they do for avalanche survivors too. 'OH MY GOD!!! ARE YOU ALIVE?!?!?!' as the victims sudden blindness, deafness and unceremonious shovel wound to the forehead are inflicted and carried for the rest of their, admittedly lucky, lives. Well the dog was inside barking, which I often immaturely associate with canine cursing for cheap lulz and out of an intense shared hatred for morning birds. 'A mighty fine job Tongs', said my imaginary colonel or military horn player... I consider knowing nothing of military rank or weapon numbering one of my finest traits, the prospective engineers I spend my week with think otherwise... It also helped that i was wearing my awesome lazing around weekend cargo pants that I swear were designed for covert operations or something else a six year old openly considers cool before he thinly represses it for the rest of his inadequate, non maiden-rescuing/dragon-slaying/Nazi-trouncing manhood. I'm wearing them now actually... I think I took blogging to a new disturbing level... Yeah, I'm wearing my action pants right now... nice and loose, as I frantically wait for people who are out enjoying their Friday night to comment on my facebook status and put up with my dad's disturbingly audible sleep apnea from the other side of the house... yeah, this is why I'll need tertiary education to get by...
Okay, so my rescue is complete so I stand on the porch amid the shards of ice in the rain howling in victory like the barbaric and rugged 57kg beast of a omegamale I am... when I see my sister's goddamn rabbit. Lewis Carrol was onto something (Someone will point out the implications there, come on, there's a Disney tie-in, someone apart from Damacus owes it to themselves to get this, because I was sick of his adoration within a minute of meeting him...)... *hints shamelessly out of fear of not being acknowledged and draining any miserable immature humour this gag had left due to breach of brevity* No, not little girls, but why you should NEVER FOLLOW WHITE RABBITS... Me being the brilliantly heroic, yet stoic (Don't ever touch me...), but charming (...Eeeeeehh!!!!), combat hardened (seriously, never touch me...) and intensely dashing individual that I am, I threw caution to the wind, and offered a helping hand to my much maligned, myxomatosis proofed malefactor. I have a brain, he tells me to do some really bad things, in this case he reminded me he's in a prime position to take some serious damage right about now and he's in charge of my delicate balance between playful randomness and schizophrenic depravity so I listened, and put a battered washing basket over my head. Screaming like the only person I have the build to appear remotely like... Xena, I bolted for one of those ancient plastic clam shell paddle pools that lies in a pile of junk from an age when it was cool for toys to have 78% Lead concentration. It was the only way to break the bonds of trademarking and have the Ninja Turtles ACTUALLY fight Transformers and a trio of Batmen with Pokemon, complete with your own predetermined winner based on what you were more into at the time. Giggling and screaming hysterically, high on chemical-laden paints and Peyote loaded juice while wearing shorts for ridiculousness is probably why our generation is so fucked up... and by that I mean AWESOME! OK so I'm fumbling with a slab of plastic that's in a state of decay. Paddle pools must have become non-profitable ages ago thanks to child obesity... Well as I fumble I learned a great lesson from my cosmic-gnostic-mech-god/imaginary friend. The fusion of testosterone, dopamine and adrenaline's short lived effects are karmic punishment for inherent disappointing male sexual performance. It's about here where I start wetting myself with whatever fluids my body has to offer. It doesn't help that I get hit on the hand by a Yeti's tennis ball with a troposphere for Newtonian acceleration. Now the Xena scream is this messy amalgam curse... which from memory wasn't even cursing but more like vocabulary leakage. I run straight for the rabbit hutch as the thing springs about like it ate... or watched Flubber. The rabbit can smell my hatred, it panics and recoils as I run adorned with a washing basket, bleeding from mother nature's stigmata and holding a giant menacing blue shell while screaming 'Mothertrainfootgrasseyescakeloveelevensickcardcoldadverbnottrydonecouldwoodenstalepragmatistcolonialisedrakefortbedjuxtaposition!!!!'
Well I got there and I placed the shell over a cage which in hindsight was probably doing a good enough job protecting an animal too dumb to realise it's actually safe in the steel shelter box despite the roaring being ten times as loud. Not happy with the orientation (Terrible time for OCD to get you, I know) I shifted it around, the basket was nailed with what I now assume are flaming meteors. I yelp like a small girl spliced with a chipmunk and bolt for the safety of inside. Well that's my elaborate rescue in a coconut shell.
I'd wrap this up now, but my computer says 'Vampire Hunter D' won't be done downloading for another 2 hours and Damacus, despite saying so, knows his previous posts absurd length (aided by videos, crazy formatting and other cheap nonsense) was a crazy challenge to my kingly authority over this blog during my absence... Need I remind him it was MY crazy latenight MSN conversation idea initially to convert Dracula's (3rd nightwalker mention, because it ain't a D.I.D. post without vampires!!!) diary and letter format to that of weblogs and e-mail, for our own despicably pretentious and subversive sense of humour. Actually I don't mean to boast or anything, but those late night Crucible-Damacus Brainstorming sessions unfurl some of... no... THE GREATEST CONCEPTS THE WORLD WILL EVER SEE... admittedly he drops the ball most times, but my influence pulls him into line. Actually I think I'll check to see if I've got any saved to pass the time. Afterall, you've got another hour and a half of my story to wade through, you've deserved your catharsis... of basking in my detestable ego masturbation!!!
Well I can't find anything, sorry, I actually looked. You'll just have to believe that neither of us have anything better to do with our time than contemplate character scenarios brimming with references to things we're experts on thanks to wikipedia, then growing increasingly disturbing and angsty until we both realise we're writing ourselves into a subversive phantasmagorical dystopia as a weakly concealed allegory for the tragedies (note the plural) we've faced living unemployed in peaceful suburbia but are experts on because we know words like 'angst' and 'melancholy' and can recite the names of all the demons from 'The Lesser Key of Solomon' and personify them appropriately as institutions and corporations we keep coming crawling back to...
Well since I started this only one person liked one of my four facebook statuses churned out in the space of a minute. Which goddamn genius decided to develop another means to gain perceived acceptance? As if I needed somewhere else to make a fool of myself for the sake of sweet, sweet praise... Hmm, how about making a status about the fact that I'm typing up a blog post...2 minutes later I netted two comments for it. Fantastic, this is what I've worked all night for. Now to use anything that was said as a ridiculous counter. Girl Scout killings due to decreased levels of blindness in society will do nicely... Now to await the fish to take the bait. The bait has been taken, now to kick it up a notch. You know how in Western's the cliche villain ties the cliched broad to a cliched rail line, then the train that runs on cliches comes around the corner and the cliched hero shoots some cliches and saves her... only to have the hero die anyway in the cliche final stand in the ending. This WILL get a response. And a response it got... hmm... maybe some electricity... sleep deprivation... yeah, I've found my conversation for tonight, I don't need blogging anymore, so uh... bye!
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
*Ahem* I am so unbelievably glad I can blame that intro on my blogging slump of late. That way it can't be dredged up as evidence for the raging 'Crucible Tongs vs Bram Stoker's Estate'... of which claims of over 400 calls demanding to know where I should address mail to one M. Harker are completely unsubstantiated... *Ahem... because sometimes a paragraph's gotten so defamatory you've retched up some of the most grotesque 'Fishing Chips' (Which are NOT SUSTENANCE!!!) you'll definitely encounter next weekend when they're on the table waiting for you when you get home, and had to clear your throat once more*. I've got no idea where this is going and this line is often the harbinger of some of my more... 'eccentric' work on Musings Of Tong, check it out if you haven't, you'll probably NEVER be able to speak to me face to face again, but I like to gauge the reactions nonetheless. Nevertheless I'll keep it 'clean' and try to keep the name dropping to a minimum.
'Why haven't you been blogging, Mr Tongs?', I bet you're all asking, as my overflowing charisma has been known to require three successive greetings before one can truly consider themselves capable of comprehending my overwhelming personage. The answer is simple, it's called a cocktail of stress, anxiety, borderline nervous breakdown, Nirvana (The state of being AND the band!), hallucinations, illness, tragedy, large scale property damage, chronic isolation and a Typically Tongian Transcendence of today's value system... with Tiringly Terrible Tongian alliteration for good measure... However I'm getting quite sick of saying life's sucked for the last few weeks and so can't be screwed now. Instead I will detail my absence because this is blogging, you'll sit down and enjoy what I tell you to enjoy...
So strap yourself in reaaaaal tight... don't mind the wires and tape keeping your eyes ajar... because here's my 'Ode to (eventual temporary) Joy'...
The storm.
THE storm.
THA storm.
You know, the one that didn't reach it's full potential for media frenzy as measured by comparing my mother's level of indignation to that of the tabloids. As you all would have guessed with a startling degree of accuracy, no doubt, is that a 'deeply troubled' (sounds so much cooler than 'potentially dangerous' in conversations with women, trust me... because my conversations with women are the stuff of legend... almost to the point where I wish humanity could collectively forget them...) and, shamelessly overt, melancholic youth such as myself sees an intensely ferocious, yet empathetic poetic beauty to a well timed downpour. The heavens break for you, they cry the tears you couldn't shed like a best friend, they drown out the uncaring world in a constant perfect rhythm... and delivers a comforting yet commanding voice in thunder, as a fantastic Shakespearian precursor to unfathomable tragedy. King Lear, THIS MAY, GET HYPED, GET SNIDE AND PRETENTIOUS, GET TICKETS... then get wasted on red wine & cheap caviar and despair at the day your future daughters come and destroy your life with their grotesque, hereditary, karmic, ignorance...
Well THAT storm, which became ridiculously serious because it singlehandedly ruined Moomba, shocking all that a celebration for something as dead as the Yarra had to be buried by divine intervention... Well I was home, on the phone to a confused and threatened Mr Phistocoles, the greengrocer, about trading my permanent essence for the culinary skills to develop what later became the greatest vegetarian bolognaise sauce the world will ever see. To cut a long story short, the iceman indeed cometh in the form of a middle eastern mob evidently without sin. Here's where the heroics come in, if anybody still plays Brass instruments now would be a good time, or that lacking, the Indiana Jones theme will do just fine. I have a dog, my sister has a rabbit. The dog's a genius, he knows life's about food, sleep, poignant misery for attention, snappy outfits and sating those pesky male loins with anything you can squint enough to make appear female. The rabbit is vermin, it layers our backyard in it's 'leavings' (I love that word in that context, it's so classy) which adds that extra layer of disgusting challenge to an already distressing occupation of hanging out the washing... seriously, handling people's clothes is way too 'stalky' for anyone under 35 and engaged in... your mantra becomes, 'I'm just holding clothes, they're for wearing, not for ME to wear though! Oh lordy no, although they might fit your... *shakes head violently grits teeth and resumes the psychological torture*'. I digress from cool heroics, which will get their own paragraph for emphasis.
*Click, Click... Click, *curse* backspace* Excellent, well evidently I loathe my sister's rodent companion, as an ignorant, deadbeat, talent squandering young male willing to fake dedication for attention and overstaying my welcome, I dragged the dog inside. Hail explodes on garage roofs situated next to porches like shrapnel. It was the least I could do for the only company I had for the weekend... who I'd neglected to feed until one that morning thanks to stupid uni timetable and fear of abandonment from schoolyard chums. I had guilt on my mind so I saved him... by opening a door and shouting, but that's sort of all they do for avalanche survivors too. 'OH MY GOD!!! ARE YOU ALIVE?!?!?!' as the victims sudden blindness, deafness and unceremonious shovel wound to the forehead are inflicted and carried for the rest of their, admittedly lucky, lives. Well the dog was inside barking, which I often immaturely associate with canine cursing for cheap lulz and out of an intense shared hatred for morning birds. 'A mighty fine job Tongs', said my imaginary colonel or military horn player... I consider knowing nothing of military rank or weapon numbering one of my finest traits, the prospective engineers I spend my week with think otherwise... It also helped that i was wearing my awesome lazing around weekend cargo pants that I swear were designed for covert operations or something else a six year old openly considers cool before he thinly represses it for the rest of his inadequate, non maiden-rescuing/dragon-slaying/Nazi-trouncing manhood. I'm wearing them now actually... I think I took blogging to a new disturbing level... Yeah, I'm wearing my action pants right now... nice and loose, as I frantically wait for people who are out enjoying their Friday night to comment on my facebook status and put up with my dad's disturbingly audible sleep apnea from the other side of the house... yeah, this is why I'll need tertiary education to get by...
Okay, so my rescue is complete so I stand on the porch amid the shards of ice in the rain howling in victory like the barbaric and rugged 57kg beast of a omegamale I am... when I see my sister's goddamn rabbit. Lewis Carrol was onto something (Someone will point out the implications there, come on, there's a Disney tie-in, someone apart from Damacus owes it to themselves to get this, because I was sick of his adoration within a minute of meeting him...)... *hints shamelessly out of fear of not being acknowledged and draining any miserable immature humour this gag had left due to breach of brevity* No, not little girls, but why you should NEVER FOLLOW WHITE RABBITS... Me being the brilliantly heroic, yet stoic (Don't ever touch me...), but charming (...Eeeeeehh!!!!), combat hardened (seriously, never touch me...) and intensely dashing individual that I am, I threw caution to the wind, and offered a helping hand to my much maligned, myxomatosis proofed malefactor. I have a brain, he tells me to do some really bad things, in this case he reminded me he's in a prime position to take some serious damage right about now and he's in charge of my delicate balance between playful randomness and schizophrenic depravity so I listened, and put a battered washing basket over my head. Screaming like the only person I have the build to appear remotely like... Xena, I bolted for one of those ancient plastic clam shell paddle pools that lies in a pile of junk from an age when it was cool for toys to have 78% Lead concentration. It was the only way to break the bonds of trademarking and have the Ninja Turtles ACTUALLY fight Transformers and a trio of Batmen with Pokemon, complete with your own predetermined winner based on what you were more into at the time. Giggling and screaming hysterically, high on chemical-laden paints and Peyote loaded juice while wearing shorts for ridiculousness is probably why our generation is so fucked up... and by that I mean AWESOME! OK so I'm fumbling with a slab of plastic that's in a state of decay. Paddle pools must have become non-profitable ages ago thanks to child obesity... Well as I fumble I learned a great lesson from my cosmic-gnostic-mech-god/imaginary friend. The fusion of testosterone, dopamine and adrenaline's short lived effects are karmic punishment for inherent disappointing male sexual performance. It's about here where I start wetting myself with whatever fluids my body has to offer. It doesn't help that I get hit on the hand by a Yeti's tennis ball with a troposphere for Newtonian acceleration. Now the Xena scream is this messy amalgam curse... which from memory wasn't even cursing but more like vocabulary leakage. I run straight for the rabbit hutch as the thing springs about like it ate... or watched Flubber. The rabbit can smell my hatred, it panics and recoils as I run adorned with a washing basket, bleeding from mother nature's stigmata and holding a giant menacing blue shell while screaming 'Mothertrainfootgrasseyescakeloveelevensickcardcoldadverbnottrydonecouldwoodenstalepragmatistcolonialisedrakefortbedjuxtaposition!!!!'
Well I got there and I placed the shell over a cage which in hindsight was probably doing a good enough job protecting an animal too dumb to realise it's actually safe in the steel shelter box despite the roaring being ten times as loud. Not happy with the orientation (Terrible time for OCD to get you, I know) I shifted it around, the basket was nailed with what I now assume are flaming meteors. I yelp like a small girl spliced with a chipmunk and bolt for the safety of inside. Well that's my elaborate rescue in a coconut shell.
I'd wrap this up now, but my computer says 'Vampire Hunter D' won't be done downloading for another 2 hours and Damacus, despite saying so, knows his previous posts absurd length (aided by videos, crazy formatting and other cheap nonsense) was a crazy challenge to my kingly authority over this blog during my absence... Need I remind him it was MY crazy latenight MSN conversation idea initially to convert Dracula's (3rd nightwalker mention, because it ain't a D.I.D. post without vampires!!!) diary and letter format to that of weblogs and e-mail, for our own despicably pretentious and subversive sense of humour. Actually I don't mean to boast or anything, but those late night Crucible-Damacus Brainstorming sessions unfurl some of... no... THE GREATEST CONCEPTS THE WORLD WILL EVER SEE... admittedly he drops the ball most times, but my influence pulls him into line. Actually I think I'll check to see if I've got any saved to pass the time. Afterall, you've got another hour and a half of my story to wade through, you've deserved your catharsis... of basking in my detestable ego masturbation!!!
Well I can't find anything, sorry, I actually looked. You'll just have to believe that neither of us have anything better to do with our time than contemplate character scenarios brimming with references to things we're experts on thanks to wikipedia, then growing increasingly disturbing and angsty until we both realise we're writing ourselves into a subversive phantasmagorical dystopia as a weakly concealed allegory for the tragedies (note the plural) we've faced living unemployed in peaceful suburbia but are experts on because we know words like 'angst' and 'melancholy' and can recite the names of all the demons from 'The Lesser Key of Solomon' and personify them appropriately as institutions and corporations we keep coming crawling back to...
Well since I started this only one person liked one of my four facebook statuses churned out in the space of a minute. Which goddamn genius decided to develop another means to gain perceived acceptance? As if I needed somewhere else to make a fool of myself for the sake of sweet, sweet praise... Hmm, how about making a status about the fact that I'm typing up a blog post...2 minutes later I netted two comments for it. Fantastic, this is what I've worked all night for. Now to use anything that was said as a ridiculous counter. Girl Scout killings due to decreased levels of blindness in society will do nicely... Now to await the fish to take the bait. The bait has been taken, now to kick it up a notch. You know how in Western's the cliche villain ties the cliched broad to a cliched rail line, then the train that runs on cliches comes around the corner and the cliched hero shoots some cliches and saves her... only to have the hero die anyway in the cliche final stand in the ending. This WILL get a response. And a response it got... hmm... maybe some electricity... sleep deprivation... yeah, I've found my conversation for tonight, I don't need blogging anymore, so uh... bye!
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
Thursday, March 18, 2010
The Banana Man can — me vs Creationism
Well Howdy! Thought we needed a temporary visual change, I’m sorry that the banner's a bit bleak for what’s normally an entertaining and thought provoking blog. Kudos to Mr Pablo Picasso, painter of the above piece(though I screwed with the colours), who’s lawyers have already boarded a flight from Spain and are now licking their lips and flexing their post-cubist fingers.
To those of you wondering why haven’t Didled for a while (coined that just then, like?), I’ve spent the last week working on this behemoth. I’ve loosely split it into three parts with †††, if anyone would prefer I posted them separately I can. I’m sorry if this offends anyone, I’d love you to comment and discuss anything with me and would sincerely appreciate disagreement. Everyone has an opinion on these issues, it would be awesome if we could discuss them. Here goes.
Ray Comfort: The Atheist's Nightmare
I saw a creationist physically assault a student at uni.
Last Tuesday, outside Melbourne University on Swanston Street, in front of an old man trying to sell The Big Issue, a group of beaming 20-year-olds were handing out free copies of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species. The book, with it’s obscure 19th century scientific vocabulary (think Isaac Newton times Crucible Tongs, but rational) is all there. Well except for four chapters, but still. The cover is totally inconspicuous, even if the font of the text in side is miniscule. The blurb is a little unusual, but not sus:
“A wealth of scientific discoveries since 1971 give a resounding answer to whether Darwin’s theory has been proved”.
Perfectly normal copies of one of the most important books of modern science ever.
Oh, and these copies of Origin of Species also had a 50 page, large print “Special Introduction” by Evangelical Fundamentalist and Young Earth Creationist Reverend Ray Comfort.
His radical Christian ministry, “The Way of The Master Ministry” (unfortunately not Star Wars related), also happens to publish the edition, with the express purpose of spreading creationist propaganda to unwitting people curious about evolution. Before we get started, Young Earth Creationism is the belief that the Bible and Genesis are literally true, that evolution is not real, and that the earth is less 10,000 years old, and that cancer, earthquakes, tsunamis and suffering happens because the devil turned into a snake and told a woman made from a rib to give some fruit to her husband, which he took and ate.
A bit uncertain about that last bit? Well here’s Ray Comfort explaining why! From inside the matrix! And then on a box in the middle of the road!
That’s a very mild Comfort Clip but I thought I’d start nicely. Yes, he’s a sickly saccharine cross-breed between a deranged, extremist preacher and Murray from Flight of the Conchords.
A little bit of a digression for something that I thought I'd comment on. Some of you might have noticed that Professor Richard Dawkins has been in town lately, copping a lot of praise and criticism. I’ve read one of his books and seen him in quite a few interviews, and he’s nowhere near as arrogant as short clips suggest and nowhere near as vicious as media sound-bites make him sound. He’s generally eloquent, poignant and extremely convincing, and I recommend you check him out before passing judgement. Personally, I agree with what he has to say on God and the supernatural, even if I strongly disagree with his disapproval of fantasy and fairy tales. If you’re looking for a comprehensive and rational criticism on the existence of God, or want to justify your faith by honestly being able to say that you’ve considered the alternatives, look no further than “The God Delusion”. That said, he’s can still be a douchebag: I think he spends too much time amongst lunatic fundamentalists to see that moderate and personal religion or spirituality is often benign or benevolent. And the whole “atheism movement” thing makes me cringe a bit as well, I don’t consider atheism a belief but rather a lack of one.
Anyway, Dawkins dubbed our good friend Ray Comfort “The Bananaman”, due to this thoroughly convincing video, 'The Atheist's Nightmare':
If I was a cynic, I’d point out that the pineapple, which is just as tasty and nutritious is also covered with vicious spines, or that there are hundreds of just as easily accessible and appealing fruits that are fatally poisonous to humans. Or that people are the perfect size and shape to eat bananas and distribute their seeds, allowing them to reproduce, making humanity evidence for a Banana God that cares for it’s chosen yellow species. Or the fact that every one of those factors making bananas seemingly human-tailored are there because humans tailored them through millennia of selective breeding, and that the wild banana looks like this:
Or that this video is so hysterically laden with innuendo that even Thomas Aquinas would be smirking.
††††††††††††††
Let me take you back to last Tuesday.
I had an idea about this very dodgy publication because I’d read about it on the internet, but with my morbid love of being outraged, I took one anyway.
A flick through,some raging and a few minutes later I went back, annoyed, righteous and ready to argue. There were more than a dozen of them, with books in hand, terrifying youth-group grins on faces and regurgitated fundamentalist sound bites stockpiled inside their heads, safely insulated against reality. (… for the sake of my simile, not by Peter Garret. I think everyone’s being pretty harsh on him. He insulated those houses asbestos he could!)
They lurked around the main Swanston street entrance to the campus, close to the tram stop where a lot of students off at, trying to pick off stragglers like lions around a heard of zebras. A handful of the satchel-clad quadrupeds were cornered, eyes flicking desperately for escape as they were barraged with lines “Some people will go to any length to deny God, but blood of Jesus is flowing through your veins!” delivered with mega condescending smiles. A few of the god-botherers were filming the grizzly spectacle with professional camera gear, undoubtedly for some sordid youtube account or self-congratulatory cable channel.
Only a few idiots like me tried to challenge them, which they relish in: their responses are well practiced and loud, and they are totally impervious to reason. Unfortunately for my rage-duct but probably fortunately for me, I happened to chose a really nice one, and just kind of felt guilty the whole time I was talking to her. I wasn’t on good form, and I while I wanted a debate she wanted mild-mannered conversion. Still, by the end I’d just about managed to convince her to read some Richard Dawkins to ‘strengthen her faith’. When she said that she hopes she never changes her opinion I politely left. Regardless of what someone thinks or believes about anything, you can’t really reply to that sort of desperate stubbornness with anything except a sigh.
Rayman starts his picture-filled intro with a seven page history of Charles Darwin, the only moderately objective part of his sermon. That’s because Comfort didn’t write it, it was stolen almost verbatim from a professor called Ted Guffrey who’s now planning legal action. Yep, if this was a grade 4 assignment Ray would have already failed from copy-and-paste plagiarism. He then goes on to fail science, rudimentary common sense and life.
Ol' Charlie went on to offer effectively a whole chapter on to discuss this occurred, and since then, numerous gradations from a simple eye to a complex one have been thoroughly and repeatedly proven to exist.
Comfort goes there on page 26, and cherrypicks the website Understanding Evolution to say that mutations “did not occur because the organism was placed in a situation where the mutation would be useful.” he then writes:
Comfort includes some whimsical portraits of Darwin such as this, to subtly and intellectually demonstrate the hypothesis that he was a stupid godless monkey.
To those of you wondering why haven’t Didled for a while (coined that just then, like?), I’ve spent the last week working on this behemoth. I’ve loosely split it into three parts with †††, if anyone would prefer I posted them separately I can. I’m sorry if this offends anyone, I’d love you to comment and discuss anything with me and would sincerely appreciate disagreement. Everyone has an opinion on these issues, it would be awesome if we could discuss them. Here goes.
Ray Comfort: The Atheist's NightmareI saw a creationist physically assault a student at uni.
Last Tuesday, outside Melbourne University on Swanston Street, in front of an old man trying to sell The Big Issue, a group of beaming 20-year-olds were handing out free copies of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species. The book, with it’s obscure 19th century scientific vocabulary (think Isaac Newton times Crucible Tongs, but rational) is all there. Well except for four chapters, but still. The cover is totally inconspicuous, even if the font of the text in side is miniscule. The blurb is a little unusual, but not sus:
“A wealth of scientific discoveries since 1971 give a resounding answer to whether Darwin’s theory has been proved”.
Perfectly normal copies of one of the most important books of modern science ever.
Oh, and these copies of Origin of Species also had a 50 page, large print “Special Introduction” by Evangelical Fundamentalist and Young Earth Creationist Reverend Ray Comfort.
His radical Christian ministry, “The Way of The Master Ministry” (unfortunately not Star Wars related), also happens to publish the edition, with the express purpose of spreading creationist propaganda to unwitting people curious about evolution. Before we get started, Young Earth Creationism is the belief that the Bible and Genesis are literally true, that evolution is not real, and that the earth is less 10,000 years old, and that cancer, earthquakes, tsunamis and suffering happens because the devil turned into a snake and told a woman made from a rib to give some fruit to her husband, which he took and ate.
A bit uncertain about that last bit? Well here’s Ray Comfort explaining why! From inside the matrix! And then on a box in the middle of the road!
That’s a very mild Comfort Clip but I thought I’d start nicely. Yes, he’s a sickly saccharine cross-breed between a deranged, extremist preacher and Murray from Flight of the Conchords.
A little bit of a digression for something that I thought I'd comment on. Some of you might have noticed that Professor Richard Dawkins has been in town lately, copping a lot of praise and criticism. I’ve read one of his books and seen him in quite a few interviews, and he’s nowhere near as arrogant as short clips suggest and nowhere near as vicious as media sound-bites make him sound. He’s generally eloquent, poignant and extremely convincing, and I recommend you check him out before passing judgement. Personally, I agree with what he has to say on God and the supernatural, even if I strongly disagree with his disapproval of fantasy and fairy tales. If you’re looking for a comprehensive and rational criticism on the existence of God, or want to justify your faith by honestly being able to say that you’ve considered the alternatives, look no further than “The God Delusion”. That said, he’s can still be a douchebag: I think he spends too much time amongst lunatic fundamentalists to see that moderate and personal religion or spirituality is often benign or benevolent. And the whole “atheism movement” thing makes me cringe a bit as well, I don’t consider atheism a belief but rather a lack of one.
Anyway, Dawkins dubbed our good friend Ray Comfort “The Bananaman”, due to this thoroughly convincing video, 'The Atheist's Nightmare':
If I was a cynic, I’d point out that the pineapple, which is just as tasty and nutritious is also covered with vicious spines, or that there are hundreds of just as easily accessible and appealing fruits that are fatally poisonous to humans. Or that people are the perfect size and shape to eat bananas and distribute their seeds, allowing them to reproduce, making humanity evidence for a Banana God that cares for it’s chosen yellow species. Or the fact that every one of those factors making bananas seemingly human-tailored are there because humans tailored them through millennia of selective breeding, and that the wild banana looks like this:
Or that this video is so hysterically laden with innuendo that even Thomas Aquinas would be smirking.††††††††††††††
Let me take you back to last Tuesday.
I had an idea about this very dodgy publication because I’d read about it on the internet, but with my morbid love of being outraged, I took one anyway.
A flick through,some raging and a few minutes later I went back, annoyed, righteous and ready to argue. There were more than a dozen of them, with books in hand, terrifying youth-group grins on faces and regurgitated fundamentalist sound bites stockpiled inside their heads, safely insulated against reality. (… for the sake of my simile, not by Peter Garret. I think everyone’s being pretty harsh on him. He insulated those houses asbestos he could!)
They lurked around the main Swanston street entrance to the campus, close to the tram stop where a lot of students off at, trying to pick off stragglers like lions around a heard of zebras. A handful of the satchel-clad quadrupeds were cornered, eyes flicking desperately for escape as they were barraged with lines “Some people will go to any length to deny God, but blood of Jesus is flowing through your veins!” delivered with mega condescending smiles. A few of the god-botherers were filming the grizzly spectacle with professional camera gear, undoubtedly for some sordid youtube account or self-congratulatory cable channel.
Only a few idiots like me tried to challenge them, which they relish in: their responses are well practiced and loud, and they are totally impervious to reason. Unfortunately for my rage-duct but probably fortunately for me, I happened to chose a really nice one, and just kind of felt guilty the whole time I was talking to her. I wasn’t on good form, and I while I wanted a debate she wanted mild-mannered conversion. Still, by the end I’d just about managed to convince her to read some Richard Dawkins to ‘strengthen her faith’. When she said that she hopes she never changes her opinion I politely left. Regardless of what someone thinks or believes about anything, you can’t really reply to that sort of desperate stubbornness with anything except a sigh.
I met up with a couple of new unifriends and started to leave. As we walked past, one kid, a first year, though he looked maybe 16, took one of the books, realised what it was and went to throw it in the bin. One of the creationists, a guy with a shaved head, taller than me and much bulkier, grabbed him and pushed him to the ground. He got up physically shaking. ‘He pushed me to the ground’, he repeated over and over again, ‘that’s fucked up man’.
The guy didn’t deny it, screaming, ‘You shouldn’t have put it in the bin! Take one, but don’t put it in the bin!”. The others creationists, rather than trying to calm down the situation, actually continued trying hand the first year copies of the book, to the point where at least four where surrounding them . The camera kept filming. I uncertainly tried to tell them to give him space, and one of them realised that it was serious, telling the kid that he should go see someone and asking me if I was his friend. The first year kept hovering uncertainly, had gone pale and had a look on his face of someone about to go into shock. I stupidly got scared that I’d get caught up in something serious and scampered of cowardly, and still regret it. Fortunately, I saw him walking a bit later, flanked by two friends, so he must have been alright in the end. For the rest of the day I was distracted by anger and disgust.
††††††††††††††††
Well for your own personal benefit, I read through Comfort’s 50 pages of drivel, and I’m going to debunk his arguments with my secondary education and access to the internet. Yes, I know this means I’m grossly overqualified. The forward starts subtly and develops; moving from “misleading” to “grossly inaccurate” to “ludicrous, barely-contained preaching” and ending with “hokey, delusional, woaaah this guy is a nutjob fires-of-hell hysteria”. Here’s a breakdown and some rebuttal.
The guy didn’t deny it, screaming, ‘You shouldn’t have put it in the bin! Take one, but don’t put it in the bin!”. The others creationists, rather than trying to calm down the situation, actually continued trying hand the first year copies of the book, to the point where at least four where surrounding them . The camera kept filming. I uncertainly tried to tell them to give him space, and one of them realised that it was serious, telling the kid that he should go see someone and asking me if I was his friend. The first year kept hovering uncertainly, had gone pale and had a look on his face of someone about to go into shock. I stupidly got scared that I’d get caught up in something serious and scampered of cowardly, and still regret it. Fortunately, I saw him walking a bit later, flanked by two friends, so he must have been alright in the end. For the rest of the day I was distracted by anger and disgust.
††††††††††††††††
Well for your own personal benefit, I read through Comfort’s 50 pages of drivel, and I’m going to debunk his arguments with my secondary education and access to the internet. Yes, I know this means I’m grossly overqualified. The forward starts subtly and develops; moving from “misleading” to “grossly inaccurate” to “ludicrous, barely-contained preaching” and ending with “hokey, delusional, woaaah this guy is a nutjob fires-of-hell hysteria”. Here’s a breakdown and some rebuttal.
Rayman starts his picture-filled intro with a seven page history of Charles Darwin, the only moderately objective part of his sermon. That’s because Comfort didn’t write it, it was stolen almost verbatim from a professor called Ted Guffrey who’s now planning legal action. Yep, if this was a grade 4 assignment Ray would have already failed from copy-and-paste plagiarism. He then goes on to fail science, rudimentary common sense and life.
Let’s have a look at his third paragraph:
“Aside from the immense volume of information that your DNA contains, consider the likelihood of all the intricate, interrelated parts of his “Book” coming together by sheer chance. Critics (ie. Ray Comfort) claim that would be comparable to believing this publication happened by accident”
Did you just feel an involuntary jerk in your neck? That’s the overwhelming urge to smash your head against the desk until it’s a bloody pulp , a phenomena which the almighty Ray Comfort definitely did create. He goes on with his “Books can’t appear from nowhere! That’s silly!” comparison for the next two pages, then confusedly starts talking about DNA, which he seems to believe in, and why just because we share 97% of our DNA with chimps doesn’t mean we’re related to them. To prove this he provides a totally out of context quote from biologist Steve Jones: “We also share 50% of our DNA with bananas and that doesn’t make us half bananas…” It’s at this bizarre point that we realise that Ray Comfort has a serious banana obsession. Personally, I think he can have whatever fetish he choses, though some of his religious buddies might insist that it’s an abomanananation.
Southern Comfort (that would be so much wittier if he was from Texas rather than New Zealand) then spends seven pages insisting that evolution doesn’t hold up because apparently, there aren’t any “transitional forms’ between species. This argument is a favourite of Bananaman’s padawan, former child star and current wacko Kirk Crocoduck Cameron:
…Oh my god is right. Every time I watch that, a little piece of me breaks off and plummets into the abyss. Did you spot Ray? He was the only other person in the room who didn’t look like they wanted to drink drain cleaner. Sorry, I’m doing a lot of cynicism but not much debunking. There are a plethora of transitional form discovered by modern science, and mentioning the occasional fossil that happened to be cheap fake 50 years ago doesn’t in any way discredit the thousands of others, from Australopithecus to Homo Erectus (stop sniggering) and everything else in between, that have been consistently and repeatedly proven to be real by a myriad of modern scientific technologies. I’m not going to into that in detail, but if you’re interested or doubtful I challenge you to have a thorough look here and for humans in particular, here.
I should probably mention that Ray constantly gives what almost looks like evidence with often misunderstood, largely out of context quotes from a variety of sources, both credible scientists and diploma-mill creationists. Darwin himself made it a little hard for himself in the very book comfort is introducing (and which I STRONGLY suspect neither me or him have read in full) by his writing style, which often involves dramatically saying what appears to be a hole in his theory, then carefully rebutting it. This allows creationists like Ray to use half- quotes such as:
"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree…"
To argue that complex structures such as eyes could never have developed through gradual processes. But the rest of that same quote tells a different story:
“…When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ["the voice of the people = the voice of God "], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."
Ol' Charlie went on to offer effectively a whole chapter on to discuss this occurred, and since then, numerous gradations from a simple eye to a complex one have been thoroughly and repeatedly proven to exist.
“Again, mutations have been found to be completely random and not based on the environment. So with no evidence to show that mutations could cause creatures to evolve gradually over millions of years, what is the scientific basis for proposing that they could make very significant changes very rapidly?”
THAT’S A BINGO. Ray just made it excruciatingly clear is that he doesn’t actually understand the of modern concept of evolution. This subtle fallacy, I think, is in of almost every criticism of evolution I’ve read. Evolution doesn’t mean that a fish that needs to walk will concentrate really hard and suddenly grow legs, because it needs them in that environment. Mutations are always random. A tiny amount of these many random mutations will happen to be beneficial in a given situation, by total chance. But because of this benefit, the organism with this mutation will have a greater likelihood of surviving and reproducing, passing on the mutation. That part ISN’T chance. That’s… well that’s natural selection. Evolution is an enormous, 3 billion year exercise in trial and error, stuff that’s good at surviving survives and makes more of itself, and stuff that isn’t… doesn’t. Evolution doesn’t mean, as Ray suggests, that “everything came from nothing”. Rather, it suggests that everything came from a previous something. The only advocate of spontaneous generation here is Ray, who believes that god turned nothing into everything. Comfort’s knock out argument against evolution, and final even attempted argument on the subject is on page 31:
“Did you realize that if we could simply make one blade of grass without using existing materials, we could solve the world's hunger problem? If we could make a blade of grass, we could then create a lot more grass, feed the green material through a machine that does what the common cow does, and have pure white full cream milk, then smooth cream, delicious yogurt, tasty cheese, and smooth butter. But we can't make even one blade of grass from nothing, let alone giving it the ability to reproduce after its own kind, as regular grass does. We have no idea where to begin when it comes to creating. If that's true, how intellectually dishonest is it to say that this entire incredible creation in which we live, came into existence with no Intelligent Designer?”
…WTF?! Delicious Yoghurt?
All that proves, if anything, is the limits of intelligent design in every form that humanity has ever encountered it. I still don’t understand what he means here… is he suggesting that blades of grass do not appear from pre-existing materials, just conjured suddenly by god rather than growing from a seed that’s absorbed various nutrients and sunlight? Nothing currently existing in the world that wasn’t previously something else, as Comfort himself almost said when he wrongly accused evolution of stating that “everything came from nothing”. It’s called the Law of Conservation of Mass (and energy). Perhaps Ray is trying to suggest that there must have been an initial cause for all that mass, a bastardised version of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, which pretty much goes as follows: Everything is caused by something prior, so there must have been an original cause to start the chain, and this cause must be inherently self-explaining, and doesn’t need to have been created (like God) That’s interesting, and could be harped on extensively, but it’s effectively irrelevant to Bananaman’s Premise because of these major problems:
1. Even if there was a self-explaining initial cause for the universe, it does not necesarily follow that that cause was intelligent or in anyway deliberate designed anything. It is possibly that the big bang itself was a completely self-justifying cause. That sounds counterintuitive, but is actually less unlikely than an omniscient, physics transcending deity. To say that the fact that universe had an initial cause is evidence of a wrathful, anthropomorphic, non-catholic Christian God is a pretty huge leap.
2. Even if there was an initial cause that was intelligent, this does not in any way refute evolution, as things are known to have a chain of prior causes. For example, ‘delicious youghurt” was once grass, that grass came from a seed that came from another blade of grass, which came from a seed that came from another blade of grass, etc. Nothing suggests that there was no variation or evolution in that causal chain of blades of grass, in fact, all evidence ever gathered suggests that there was.
Wow, sorry, even lost me there. Back to Bananaman (BM). you might think I’ve been harsh, but I’ve actually portrayed his arguments reasonably generously by focusing on the ones I have. The other half of his introduction is despicable slander and emotional blackmail. BM moves into contemptibly low blow field with depressing ease. He talks about Darwin’s incidental racism (obviously despicable by todays standards, but it was a total must have for anyone in the 19th century, and BM even acknowledges that he was actually quite progressive for his time) as if Darwin’s personal views in any way has any bearing whatsoever on the scientific veracity of modern Evolutionary Theory.
Next is how Evolution=Hitler. I refuse to dignify this with a response.
And finally, when BM makes the shift between shonky disinformation to deranged preaching, he writes this:
“Perhaps the thought of going to Hell doesn’t scare you, because you don’t believe in it. That’s like standing in the open door of a plane 10,000 feet off the ground and saying, “I don’t believe there will be any consequences if I jump without a parachute.” To say that there will be no consequences for breaking God’s Law is to say that God is unjust, that He is evil. This is why.
On February 24, 2005, a nine-year-old girl was reported missing from her home in Homosassa, Florida. Three weeks later, police discovered that she had been kidnapped, brutally raped, and then buried alive. Little Jessica Lunsford
was found tied up, in a kneeling position, clutching a stuffed toy. How do you feel toward the man who murdered that helpless little girl in such an unspeakably cruel way? Are you angered? I hope so. I hope you are outraged. If you were completely indifferent to her fate, it would reveal something horrible about your character. Do you think that God is indifferent to such acts of evil? You can bet your precious soul He is not. He is outraged by them. The fury of Almighty God against evil is evidence of His goodness.”
No Ray. No. All this is evidence of is your reprehensible exploitation of a child’s murder. How you could use this example to suggest the goodness of an omnipotent God who could have stopped the act in the first place is also totally unfathomable.
People can personally believe what they chose. But when people like Comfort, and the horde of others like him, shamelessly lie, slander, guilt-monger, sew disinformation and emotionally blackmail people to advance superstitious agendas, a line has been well and truly crossed. This is line is crossed when a man would throw an eighteen year old to the ground for throwing out his propaganda. This line is crossed when creationists with a total contempt for science wrestle control of the education system in Texas. This line is crossed when religious institutions causes the oppression of minorities, the cleaving of families, the manipulation of the emotionally vulnerable and the destruction of countless lives. Yes, there is a line were faith becomes no-longer benign, when reason is vanadalised, morality sacrificed and where personal belief transforms into public lies that jeopordise the advancement of humanity. And Ray Comfort and his ilk have crossed that line a hundred of times.
Thankyou for actually getting through this...
And finally, some religious wisdom of the day from American pastor Marc Driscoll on why the movie Avatar is satanic propaganda:
Go in peace to love and serve the lord!
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Fuelled By Caffeine.
Today, I waited until five PM to have my first coffee of the day.
This is a new record, I think.
For those of you that aren't aware, I am a being entirely fuelled by stimulants. My life is driven by that next hit of caffeine or sugar, the happy jitters it induces in my fingers, and the (somewhat more than usual) crazed babbling and yelling it has a tendency to create.
Yes. I am a Slave to my Addiction. A Dependent. An Addict.
I'm that person that comes into your tute at ten AM in one of two states:
1. Sleep deprived, but with coffee permanently in one hand, eyes flicking back and forth from notebook to said coffee with disturbing frequency, pupils dilating hugely with every manic sip (or chug, depending on HOW sleep deprived).
2. Sleep deprived, and coffee-less, having driven from early morning work to uni, raced to said tute in a frenzy of post-traffic-jam rage, curled up meekly in a corner (possibly in the foetal position), and rocking back and forth while muttering vaguely ominous bitternesses under breath.
I fully understand that upon seeing me in other of these states, at either of these times of the morning, one would gain the impression of me as the kind of person likely to one day snap and chop people into little bits and hide them in the crawl space of the walls.
But it's not my fault. It's the coffee.
And I categorically deny that I am a murderous crazy with homicidal tendencies. Just a bitter caffeine dependent.
It's a problem. This a recognise. My brain slows down substantially without three coffees a day, and speeds up with such sudden severity that I start saying things backwards and can't hold my pen properly when I write - my fingers jitter like caterpillars on acid and make my writing more scribbly and illegible than ever before.
People (usually the various other music geeks in my course) shake their heads at me when I enter a room with a coffee in my hand, or detour when running late to class to pick one up. They tell me the reasons it is detrimental to my health.
"That stuff is so bad for your skin."
Okay. But, like, so is smoking. And drinking. And eating chocolate. And living in the city. And swimming in chlorinated pools. And not drinking enough water. AND DO I SEE YOU REMEDYING ALL OF THOSE ASPECTS OF YOUR LIFE SO YOU CAN HAVE SKIN AS SUPPLE AND UNNERVINGLY SMOOTH AS THE BALD HEAD OF A NEWBORN UGLY FOETUS CHILD?!?!?! No. So shut the fuck up.
"Drinking more than three coffees a day makes you infertile."
See the above outburst about ugly foetuses. I don't really like children. I mean, okay, I work in childcare (see: part of the cause of my sleep deprivation as my body clock decides I want to go to bed at 2am, but said work makes me wake up at 6am), but I don't necessarily LIKE children. they're okay. They're better than retail customers who berate you for not getting that photo frame down from that very high shelf with that teetering ladder .0008 of a second after they've asked for it. When children berate you, it helps that they're very small, and their rage is akin to watching a jockey try to take on a large bouncer. The point is, I'm not particularly keen on owning one myself, or having one, unless they become a barista from the get go, which i think is called a conflict of interest anyway, or whatever.
"Caffeine messes with your body clock and stops you sleeping."
OH HELLO INSOMNIA. I've heard this one, but case in point:
My father used to have ten cups of coffee a day. I shit you not. TEN CUPS. He would conclude the day by having a cup before he went to bed. THE MAN SLEEPS LIKE A GODDAMN SNORLAX.
Thus, I conclude, my insomnia is a cause of my general neurotic anxiousness, nothing more. Plus, the night is more interesting than the day.
And sleep is for the weak. I can sleep when I'm dead.
"It creates caffeine dependence and raises your heart rate."
............................................
Is there ANOTHER reason I drink coffee? Because it sure isn't for the spine-tinglingly good taste. I fail to see the negative of this so called "issue" and laugh raucously at your weak argument.
"High levels of caffeine consumption can increase your chances of developing anxiety."
Okay. So I get that this one's not so good. I am an anxiety sufferer. Social situations make me nervous. Public transport makes me nervous. Small enclosed spaces make me so nervous that I end up picking my nails and fingers to shreds and shaking uncontrollably. Deep sea creatures and submarines induce similar affects.
The point is, my happy caffeine dependence (see above) has created a comforting warm and fuzzy feeling whenever I consume caffeine. I feel all happy inside. Thus, I can't see coffee making my neurotic and (possibly) unfounded fears of things that lurk in the depths of the ocean any worse.
Anyway. So now you understand. It's a happy, non-harmful addiction to coffee. A symbiotic relationship if you will. In a sense. Coffee makes me feel good, and I therefore spruik coffee's benefits to everyone I know.
And I could be doing worse things. I could be an alcoholic, or that stoner at your high school whose eyes are permanently albino-pink and can't stop staring at the buzzing lightglobe in the science room.
So please. Leave me and my coffee alone for some quality time. I'm happy, it's happy (I assume), and if you're not happy because of my caffeine-related happiness, shut up and go crawling back to your chlorinated pools and your stuyvesant smooths. You should be warned though. I hear that shit is bad for your skin.
Anna
xx
This is a new record, I think.
For those of you that aren't aware, I am a being entirely fuelled by stimulants. My life is driven by that next hit of caffeine or sugar, the happy jitters it induces in my fingers, and the (somewhat more than usual) crazed babbling and yelling it has a tendency to create.
Yes. I am a Slave to my Addiction. A Dependent. An Addict.
I'm that person that comes into your tute at ten AM in one of two states:
1. Sleep deprived, but with coffee permanently in one hand, eyes flicking back and forth from notebook to said coffee with disturbing frequency, pupils dilating hugely with every manic sip (or chug, depending on HOW sleep deprived).
2. Sleep deprived, and coffee-less, having driven from early morning work to uni, raced to said tute in a frenzy of post-traffic-jam rage, curled up meekly in a corner (possibly in the foetal position), and rocking back and forth while muttering vaguely ominous bitternesses under breath.
I fully understand that upon seeing me in other of these states, at either of these times of the morning, one would gain the impression of me as the kind of person likely to one day snap and chop people into little bits and hide them in the crawl space of the walls.
But it's not my fault. It's the coffee.
And I categorically deny that I am a murderous crazy with homicidal tendencies. Just a bitter caffeine dependent.
It's a problem. This a recognise. My brain slows down substantially without three coffees a day, and speeds up with such sudden severity that I start saying things backwards and can't hold my pen properly when I write - my fingers jitter like caterpillars on acid and make my writing more scribbly and illegible than ever before.
People (usually the various other music geeks in my course) shake their heads at me when I enter a room with a coffee in my hand, or detour when running late to class to pick one up. They tell me the reasons it is detrimental to my health.
"That stuff is so bad for your skin."
Okay. But, like, so is smoking. And drinking. And eating chocolate. And living in the city. And swimming in chlorinated pools. And not drinking enough water. AND DO I SEE YOU REMEDYING ALL OF THOSE ASPECTS OF YOUR LIFE SO YOU CAN HAVE SKIN AS SUPPLE AND UNNERVINGLY SMOOTH AS THE BALD HEAD OF A NEWBORN UGLY FOETUS CHILD?!?!?! No. So shut the fuck up.
"Drinking more than three coffees a day makes you infertile."
See the above outburst about ugly foetuses. I don't really like children. I mean, okay, I work in childcare (see: part of the cause of my sleep deprivation as my body clock decides I want to go to bed at 2am, but said work makes me wake up at 6am), but I don't necessarily LIKE children. they're okay. They're better than retail customers who berate you for not getting that photo frame down from that very high shelf with that teetering ladder .0008 of a second after they've asked for it. When children berate you, it helps that they're very small, and their rage is akin to watching a jockey try to take on a large bouncer. The point is, I'm not particularly keen on owning one myself, or having one, unless they become a barista from the get go, which i think is called a conflict of interest anyway, or whatever.
"Caffeine messes with your body clock and stops you sleeping."
OH HELLO INSOMNIA. I've heard this one, but case in point:
My father used to have ten cups of coffee a day. I shit you not. TEN CUPS. He would conclude the day by having a cup before he went to bed. THE MAN SLEEPS LIKE A GODDAMN SNORLAX.
Thus, I conclude, my insomnia is a cause of my general neurotic anxiousness, nothing more. Plus, the night is more interesting than the day.
And sleep is for the weak. I can sleep when I'm dead.
"It creates caffeine dependence and raises your heart rate."
............................................
Is there ANOTHER reason I drink coffee? Because it sure isn't for the spine-tinglingly good taste. I fail to see the negative of this so called "issue" and laugh raucously at your weak argument.
"High levels of caffeine consumption can increase your chances of developing anxiety."
Okay. So I get that this one's not so good. I am an anxiety sufferer. Social situations make me nervous. Public transport makes me nervous. Small enclosed spaces make me so nervous that I end up picking my nails and fingers to shreds and shaking uncontrollably. Deep sea creatures and submarines induce similar affects.
The point is, my happy caffeine dependence (see above) has created a comforting warm and fuzzy feeling whenever I consume caffeine. I feel all happy inside. Thus, I can't see coffee making my neurotic and (possibly) unfounded fears of things that lurk in the depths of the ocean any worse.
Anyway. So now you understand. It's a happy, non-harmful addiction to coffee. A symbiotic relationship if you will. In a sense. Coffee makes me feel good, and I therefore spruik coffee's benefits to everyone I know.
And I could be doing worse things. I could be an alcoholic, or that stoner at your high school whose eyes are permanently albino-pink and can't stop staring at the buzzing lightglobe in the science room.
So please. Leave me and my coffee alone for some quality time. I'm happy, it's happy (I assume), and if you're not happy because of my caffeine-related happiness, shut up and go crawling back to your chlorinated pools and your stuyvesant smooths. You should be warned though. I hear that shit is bad for your skin.
Anna
xx
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Ahoy hoy from the boring state - Canberra! it has been a long time coming and i'm sure that many of you had spent a great deal of your 1am-4am time slot marinating in solitude and self indulgent blogging wishing that i would never permeate the...perhaps questionable credibility of this blog. Alas, the day has come and i'm going to take you on a ride - ACT STYLE!
I've thankfully made it through the festive fervor of O-week and after bathing in an arguably 75% sewage creek and finding myself in a gay bar draped in drag (yes perhaps this does answer a lot of questions about me) with 200 other students i've made it into the 3rd week of University. Canberra's ever present left bent is starting to become more and more prevalent in my classes which is rather annoying but unescapable as most of the ANU lecturers - especially for politics all seem to be raging socialists. Around a week ago we had a 'guest lecture' by one of the leading advocates for Marxism in Australia and wasn't that a hoot! Sporting a moustache that was so immense it was arguably aware of itself and capable of free thought, "Rick Coon" or "Dick Poon" as he was affectionately known by the horde of adoring students spent an hour berating his marxist views around the lecture theatre until around 40% of the students had walked out in disgust - myself included. Ironically, the lecture was about power and frankly, i've seen a slug exert more influence over me - and without the ridiculous moustache.
To further reinforce the insidious left wing stance, the Chancellor decided to flex his political muscles and get Bob Hawke to come and speak to the first years. After around 40 minutes of "Bobby's" attempts to coerce us into believing his senile rants about burying the world's nuclear waste in the centre of Australia - which i have yet to research yet and find out if the idea has any validity, feel free to do so if you have the time it would be interesting to see if the man still has any brain function undamaged by years of alcohol abuse and passive cigarette smoke from the mobs of "Bobby's Girls" cheap whore groupies.
The consistently sterotypical idea that is University was exemplified yet again when during the speech a group of the arts students began protesting against something or other. I find it funny that the whole idea of coming to University was supposed to somewhat alleviate my 'cultural cringe' however it has rather just developed it and engaged another facet of it.
That being said though, the other 90% of the experience has been great and the carefree independence of living by myself has been great. Canberra has very much shown me the three reasons that people go there: marijuana, porn and fireworks. The oddly unnecessary random fireworks show all around the city have become a tad stale but the former are more than prevalent around the town. A recent trip into 'Fyshwick' actually left me shuddering at the depths that the porn industry will plumb to sell a measly dvd. Here i was thinking that it wasn't physically possible for a woman to be penetrated through the ear by a blue whale - but oh how ignorant i was.
Anyway, i hope this reasonably boring account of the boring state has made you all feel a little bit better about the monotony of your mediocre existences. If not, as in the case of Crucible Tongs i suggest you try going outside for a little bit and perhaps get your mother to introduce you to some of her friend's "lovely daughters".
I've thankfully made it through the festive fervor of O-week and after bathing in an arguably 75% sewage creek and finding myself in a gay bar draped in drag (yes perhaps this does answer a lot of questions about me) with 200 other students i've made it into the 3rd week of University. Canberra's ever present left bent is starting to become more and more prevalent in my classes which is rather annoying but unescapable as most of the ANU lecturers - especially for politics all seem to be raging socialists. Around a week ago we had a 'guest lecture' by one of the leading advocates for Marxism in Australia and wasn't that a hoot! Sporting a moustache that was so immense it was arguably aware of itself and capable of free thought, "Rick Coon" or "Dick Poon" as he was affectionately known by the horde of adoring students spent an hour berating his marxist views around the lecture theatre until around 40% of the students had walked out in disgust - myself included. Ironically, the lecture was about power and frankly, i've seen a slug exert more influence over me - and without the ridiculous moustache.
To further reinforce the insidious left wing stance, the Chancellor decided to flex his political muscles and get Bob Hawke to come and speak to the first years. After around 40 minutes of "Bobby's" attempts to coerce us into believing his senile rants about burying the world's nuclear waste in the centre of Australia - which i have yet to research yet and find out if the idea has any validity, feel free to do so if you have the time it would be interesting to see if the man still has any brain function undamaged by years of alcohol abuse and passive cigarette smoke from the mobs of "Bobby's Girls" cheap whore groupies.
The consistently sterotypical idea that is University was exemplified yet again when during the speech a group of the arts students began protesting against something or other. I find it funny that the whole idea of coming to University was supposed to somewhat alleviate my 'cultural cringe' however it has rather just developed it and engaged another facet of it.
That being said though, the other 90% of the experience has been great and the carefree independence of living by myself has been great. Canberra has very much shown me the three reasons that people go there: marijuana, porn and fireworks. The oddly unnecessary random fireworks show all around the city have become a tad stale but the former are more than prevalent around the town. A recent trip into 'Fyshwick' actually left me shuddering at the depths that the porn industry will plumb to sell a measly dvd. Here i was thinking that it wasn't physically possible for a woman to be penetrated through the ear by a blue whale - but oh how ignorant i was.
Anyway, i hope this reasonably boring account of the boring state has made you all feel a little bit better about the monotony of your mediocre existences. If not, as in the case of Crucible Tongs i suggest you try going outside for a little bit and perhaps get your mother to introduce you to some of her friend's "lovely daughters".
Thursday, March 11, 2010
entertain me
Firstly I would like to apologise for my extended absence from this blog. I was busy destroying horcruxes with some friends and the whole thing got a bit out of hand, I mean, people lost body parts and there were a few deaths. It's all fine now though; I got them all.
A few of the lovely boys who are contributors to this blog have told me that I should post something new because the last post by Mysterious Follower has been at the top of the page for far too long, and I have been MIA for far too long. The recent post from Frankly did make me pause and wonder if I should post, but I had already written my first paragraph so I thought I may as well continue. This prompted me, as usual, to search my brain for interesting things that have happened to me in recent times that I could possible write about. After many long hours of thinking (while doing other stuff of course, I didn't just sit and stare at the computer) I came to the conclusion that nothing interesting or exciting ever happens to me; so why not write a post about that?
That's not to say that my life is boring; I do many things that I enjoy at the time, but looking back on them, they really aren't that exciting. I know that many people can relate to the idea of a non-eventful life. As Follower just said; "my life is that uninteresting I want to read about someone else's boring life". Now, I am quite sure that there are people out there whose everyday events are ridiculously exciting, but the question is: who are these people, and does anyone have some sort of brain switching device so that I can, perhaps for only one day, live a life of T0t3z Ep1C-ness so that I may provide you readers with something awe inspiring rather than running out of ideas as I am sure will happen sooner or later? Now I originally had a full stop at the end of that sentence rather than a question mark, but I then realised that I began the sentence with the intention of it being a question before it developed into more of a statement. This problem arises quite often since my sentences usually drag on to the point of lunacy, which results in forgetting how it started, forgetting the initial intentions, changing topics completely without adding important aspects, the overuse of commas, brackets, and semi colons (which, as you know, are my absolute favourite forms of punctuation), and the general loss of any noticeable sentence structure.
So, disregarding my complete lack of any direction in the previous paragraph, we can move on to the slightly more interesting topic of nothing interesting; sounds interesting I think. Well let's all think about this for one moment; is anyone's life really that interesting? I want to know how many times that this website, not this particular blog but the BlogSpot site in general, has shown posts about exactly the same thing. A good, recent example of this is the incredibly large mass of posts about OWeek. On this blog alone, five different posts on this, and closely related, early-uni topics, have been written from different perspectives. There must be MILLIONS (that's right, millions, no exaggeration) of different people posting at least one (possibly more; THE HORROR) post about starting university and the array of condoms and bottle openers being thrust upon them. Readers will have seen this topic over and over again, and yet they still read because even such uninteresting events that seem so perfectly easy to write about that they become repeatedly used topics can be oh so fun to read about. I am not sure if 'fun' is the right word here, but it cannot merely be a method of passing the time or all of these people would be reading inappropriately sexual Harry Potter fan fiction which should be far more entertaining. Is it possible that people in internet land actually want to read about our mundane and frighteningly similar lives because we know exactly how to please a reader and how to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary? That's unlikely; my posts rarely make things sound extraordinary. Perhaps it is the fact that they want to know that other people have the same monotonous days as they do, but know how to create entertainment out of it using clever wording, hilariously irritating rambling, fantastic vocabulary (obviously not in my case), stupid examples that are often quite far from the point, and badly written rhetorical questions that prolong a sentence and confuse the writer as to the type of punctuation that should be used at the end of it.
For my own happiness, I guess I should ask for something GOOD interesting to happen to me; something that can entertain the readers while at the same time making my life a little better, but does it need to be GOOD interesting? Perhaps something BAD interesting would be better. Although this wouldn’t make me happy at the time, I’m certain that it would make a deliciously delightful story for the blog. Embarrassing or painful stories are always a big hit with the public, which is why Funniest Home Videos has managed to stay on the air for so long; come on, it isn’t very clever. The problem is, neither of these types of interesting things has happened to me recently, but I still manage to write a blog, so are things worth writing about necessarily worth doing? This post, I hope, was fairly interesting to read, so it looks like the uninteresting is the new interesting. Thanks for reading.
-Renji
Thursday, March 4, 2010
filler piece
So time to have a deep look into the strangely amazing university lifestyle. I now am a member of the elusive world of higher education and all the perks that seem to flow along with it. No descriptions can really describe what it is like till you really start to live it. So let me begin my little story...
So it all begins with the orientation week or o-week as it is known by the hipsters. This is a time where a mass of 1st years sit through a bunch of boring pointless information sessions and then get bombarded with free products and pleas to join all sorts of groups and societies that generally they have no interest in. Though it works out well because if I have start getting some action again I will be well supplied in the area of condoms and with assorted entertain labels too. So the boring lectures aside and a general party atmosphere developing uni was starting to look good but a pervious investment in a MESS camp (engineering camp) was about to open my eyes to a whole new world.
So I rock up to uni with a few things ready for this three day camp and I slip into the group of 100 odd students all a bit lost and confused about the weekend’s events. Then out comes the beer bong and our parents (the name given to group leaders) begin peer pressuring campees into pouring copious amounts of beer and udls down their throats. All of sudden things start to get full on as we are given nicknames and separated into families and introduced to our parents where an odd assortment of kid’s tricycles and beer kegs suddenly become obvious to us. So the trip began as we boarded a bus and set off to somewhere that was a nowhere. On arrival our alcoholic orders were made and after a swim in a muddy dam and some fairly average meet and great games the actual idea of the camp was made clear. Drink and don’t stop. Drinking games followed drinking games and making a fool of yourself was required. The trivia point system was well different to the norm. The more stupid things you did for the judges the more points you got and it reached its climax with a guy eating a whole wax strip of pubes with the fabric and all just for a measly 8 points. Then it was party time and hell it was one of the craziest I had ever seen and this is where the night really reminded me I was on an engineering camp. We played more drinking games before bed to ensure a good solid sleep.
The day of Beer Olympics arrived and in training competitors started the day with a morning beer bong some of whom decided one would not be enough and were drunk once again by 8am. A scavenger hunt had people shaving their own eyebrows and cutting mullets in their hair and soon enough nudity began to surface something I am keen to forget and does not need to be retold. The Olympics saw the greatest drinkers compete in activities that all ended in celebrated puking. American pie all of sudden became very real and it was clear the university had began. Then the first day came around I was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed my subject selection and fell in love the university lifestyle on the spot. I also found it funny how much those stereotypes really were true after talking to friend and seeing he really was getting into the university arts lifestyle. I have gotten to know so many new people and instantly forgotten who 90% of them are but it really is going to be a great 5 years. I am sorry that this piece is not amazing intellectual soap story but I has done anything in days so I rushed something fresh out enjoy.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
'I Dreamed A Dream' - The cat and the... *amalgam profanity reserved for witnessing anything lovecraftian*
Alright, noone's posted for a couple of days, meaning I've been existing in this cheerless perceived eternity... and when that happens my subconscious reminds me just how nefarious it can be when loosed...
Today we introduce my new segment, 'I Dreamed A Dream' where I will briefly call my nightmarish visitors into collective perception... so they can hassle you about childhood regrets and the like, I'm quite fed up with them... And yes the title is a reference to haggard songstress, 'Susan Boyle'... and my developing suspicions of her being THE 'Black Annis'. Confused? Have a wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Annis, it may shed some light on my theory.
Well without further ado, I shall begin. As anyone who reads my solo blog may already know, I keep a dream journal, it's a fantastic reference when you really need to assert your sense of self loathing sometimes. As one of those people who enjoys looking for bizarre symbolism and over-analyzing to the point of hilarious conjecture, I find noting the placement and incline of every staircase I dream about a fascinating experience. I figured I'd share some of the more bizarre dreams I've had and leave them open for interpretation or something.
Well to get us started here's a hasty 2am sketch of a vivid memory I had upon waking a few nights ago.
Yes, the subconscious is a worrisome thing.
Now I'd like to get some audience participation going, so whether we can maintain an MSN discussion, facebook comments on the inevitable plug I'll post or on the comments section here, any interpretation is welcome. I will cover some of the links and symbolisms I've noted only, to leave a bit of a gap for you to play with the core of my being... like the sadistic puppet masters we all are deep down... I don't know, if this takes off we should regularly just get some piece of work like a painting, short film, or poem or something and come up with why it's the author's desperate appeal to the audience for organs he harbours fears of needing replaced.
Anyway, I recollect very little from this dream, I just remember a comic book style experience involving these four panels. Concerning the first panel we have one catty bastard and a creature that should be sealed in an iron and silver box, glued shut with holy wafer paste and thrown into the sea. Now the cat to me seemed immensely smug, his... minimal... attire was black and reminded me of that of a magician. For some reason I likened him to Garfield despite not recalling him saying anything and obvious physiological differences... maybe they're distant relations?
Garfield, for anyone who doesn't know... I know you're out there, you freaks who rejected pop culture for a fulfilling afterlife...
Well the magician attire gave an implication of illusion, a degree of mystique, also he only appears in one 'dream-panel' and isn't visibly as hanging from the roof as the other subject by the end. I took him to exemplify sarcasm or cynicism, his clothing as a mockery of the suspension of disbelief of the performer. Now onto the second subject... *shudders violently* there is seriously something worrying about imagining this. The white mask of unfathomable fear unchanging and transcending time, the pitch black body... and the ghoulish anatomy... those... arms... This thing just seems to steal the show, it's the only one who speaks and it's present in nearly all panels. I found it's dialogue disconcerting, 'If the artist should die then we die too' almost seemed to present him as 'teaching' magic garfield. Not to mention the possible religious undertones of life without a creator being like living death. This could possibly be attributable to my often dropped out of shameless pretense Nietzschism, 'God is Dead' but altered from a worshippers perspective. As for the 'incarnate nightmare's appearance, I believe it could be drawn from three sources.
Firstly and probably most obviously, Edvard Munch's 'The Scream'
I'm way too much in love with this painting for my own good... evidently
Now the scream is good because the second panel has the figure appearing to scream in a portrait scale. The 'Terror Spirals' where purple and black and far more psychedelic and inhaling than my terrible 2am drawing skills... What I also like about the potential for 'The Scream' is the fact that I tried my hand at painting it in Year 10 and it sits against the wall in my room, I walk past it everyday, giving it plenty of opportunity to embed it's spirit of angst in my subconscious...
Secondly I've realised a likeness between the face and Pink in the animated Trial scene of Pink Floyd's rock opera 'The Wall'
The trial scene is a psychedelic animated self assessment of the main character Pink, which ends in the deconstruction of his metaphorical wall alienating him from other people. The whole psychedelic factor just adds to the possibility along with the theme. The death of the thing at the end, symbolic of the collapse of the wall or something maybe?
And thirdly, and quite possibly the most obscure, the 'THING' appears alot like the character, 'Arakune' from the japanese awesome grammatical nightmare of a fighting game 'Blazblue'.
Arakune for the uninformed, which I expect and hope should be everyone...
I normally would've omitted this because of how little influence 2D Fighting Games that must be imported to enjoy have on 'normal people', but some of the similarities I found were quite awesome. Arakune is some guy who researched something like the nature of existence itself, learned too much, went crazy and saw the repository of all human knowledge in a nutshell and now spends his time launching insects out of his gloopy body and eating people for their knowledge... yeah, wierd, but ridiculously fun. Anyway, his penchant for outbursts of single lines of unadulterated and unprovoked madness really reminded me of the 'mental atrocity's' line. Arakune spews forth such lunacy as 'Fear more love hate ! Let self crumble away, pathetic mediary' and my personal favourite 'Don't see you and I, pointlesspointlesspointlessPOINTLESS!!! *shrill nightmare goo laugh*'. That and the fact that anytime I wind up taking far-too-effeminate-homosexual-swordsmen into fights with him, I kind of panic and get mauled by bugs from all over... NOT PLEASANT... but this is how I geek out and spend (read waste) MY time and money.
Oh and those boots, I have no idea... it sounds insane but the only thing I can think of is this...
That's right, The Boosh is loose... and it's rewiring your inner being without you realising... there's hope for humanity yet.
Well the only thing I haven't talked about is what were chronologically the last panels, the noose and the suspended boots. Notice in the background that black shape I conveyed horribly with the drawing skills of an inebriated toddler. In the dream it was a doorway, but instead of flooding the room with light, darkness was coming out. Yes, that's right... the door was leaking FRIGGEN' DARKNESS AND MOVING. I can't say I have any idea, I thought briefly 'The Monolith' from '2001: A Space Odyssey'... but in all honesty I'm not sure.
The Monolith... shining symbol of forced progression of mankind... maybe, I always liked the idea that it represented the Ubermensch, or 'Over-man' who would lead humanity to the betterment of itself... although then we've got a pair of Nietzsche references from 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'... aka. The King Crucible Bible...
And now the hanging, visually, well, I mean it's execution... or suicide, definitely of the 'Lovecraftian Bogey Man from Space'. As for the cat, I got a feeling of his tragic passing as well, but it wasn't shown visually, like I said before this image is all I vividly remember, anyway, it's fitting as a symbolic conclusion.
Alright, so now it's over to you, dear reader, I have put forward what each symbol means to me and tipped out the jigsaw puzzle of introspection onto the table, now it is your turn as the pensioner of the soul to reassemble this and determine it's deeper meaning. Are cat's magical? Do I need to kill my inner Nietzsche-fanboy? Should I stop listening to psychedelic rock before sleeping? Or just never sleep again? This is in your hands, and if you didn't understand my explanations... then lie your heart out, go crazy, that's the idea, screw with MY head for a change...
Well, this is Crucible Tongs, leaving you with another Tannenism,
'Marty, here's your keys. You're all waxed up, ready for tonight.'
Today we introduce my new segment, 'I Dreamed A Dream' where I will briefly call my nightmarish visitors into collective perception... so they can hassle you about childhood regrets and the like, I'm quite fed up with them... And yes the title is a reference to haggard songstress, 'Susan Boyle'... and my developing suspicions of her being THE 'Black Annis'. Confused? Have a wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Annis, it may shed some light on my theory.
Well without further ado, I shall begin. As anyone who reads my solo blog may already know, I keep a dream journal, it's a fantastic reference when you really need to assert your sense of self loathing sometimes. As one of those people who enjoys looking for bizarre symbolism and over-analyzing to the point of hilarious conjecture, I find noting the placement and incline of every staircase I dream about a fascinating experience. I figured I'd share some of the more bizarre dreams I've had and leave them open for interpretation or something.
Well to get us started here's a hasty 2am sketch of a vivid memory I had upon waking a few nights ago.
Yes, the subconscious is a worrisome thing.
Now I'd like to get some audience participation going, so whether we can maintain an MSN discussion, facebook comments on the inevitable plug I'll post or on the comments section here, any interpretation is welcome. I will cover some of the links and symbolisms I've noted only, to leave a bit of a gap for you to play with the core of my being... like the sadistic puppet masters we all are deep down... I don't know, if this takes off we should regularly just get some piece of work like a painting, short film, or poem or something and come up with why it's the author's desperate appeal to the audience for organs he harbours fears of needing replaced.
Anyway, I recollect very little from this dream, I just remember a comic book style experience involving these four panels. Concerning the first panel we have one catty bastard and a creature that should be sealed in an iron and silver box, glued shut with holy wafer paste and thrown into the sea. Now the cat to me seemed immensely smug, his... minimal... attire was black and reminded me of that of a magician. For some reason I likened him to Garfield despite not recalling him saying anything and obvious physiological differences... maybe they're distant relations?
Garfield, for anyone who doesn't know... I know you're out there, you freaks who rejected pop culture for a fulfilling afterlife...
Well the magician attire gave an implication of illusion, a degree of mystique, also he only appears in one 'dream-panel' and isn't visibly as hanging from the roof as the other subject by the end. I took him to exemplify sarcasm or cynicism, his clothing as a mockery of the suspension of disbelief of the performer. Now onto the second subject... *shudders violently* there is seriously something worrying about imagining this. The white mask of unfathomable fear unchanging and transcending time, the pitch black body... and the ghoulish anatomy... those... arms... This thing just seems to steal the show, it's the only one who speaks and it's present in nearly all panels. I found it's dialogue disconcerting, 'If the artist should die then we die too' almost seemed to present him as 'teaching' magic garfield. Not to mention the possible religious undertones of life without a creator being like living death. This could possibly be attributable to my often dropped out of shameless pretense Nietzschism, 'God is Dead' but altered from a worshippers perspective. As for the 'incarnate nightmare's appearance, I believe it could be drawn from three sources.
Firstly and probably most obviously, Edvard Munch's 'The Scream'
I'm way too much in love with this painting for my own good... evidently
Now the scream is good because the second panel has the figure appearing to scream in a portrait scale. The 'Terror Spirals' where purple and black and far more psychedelic and inhaling than my terrible 2am drawing skills... What I also like about the potential for 'The Scream' is the fact that I tried my hand at painting it in Year 10 and it sits against the wall in my room, I walk past it everyday, giving it plenty of opportunity to embed it's spirit of angst in my subconscious...
Secondly I've realised a likeness between the face and Pink in the animated Trial scene of Pink Floyd's rock opera 'The Wall'
The trial scene is a psychedelic animated self assessment of the main character Pink, which ends in the deconstruction of his metaphorical wall alienating him from other people. The whole psychedelic factor just adds to the possibility along with the theme. The death of the thing at the end, symbolic of the collapse of the wall or something maybe?
And thirdly, and quite possibly the most obscure, the 'THING' appears alot like the character, 'Arakune' from the japanese awesome grammatical nightmare of a fighting game 'Blazblue'.
Arakune for the uninformed, which I expect and hope should be everyone...
I normally would've omitted this because of how little influence 2D Fighting Games that must be imported to enjoy have on 'normal people', but some of the similarities I found were quite awesome. Arakune is some guy who researched something like the nature of existence itself, learned too much, went crazy and saw the repository of all human knowledge in a nutshell and now spends his time launching insects out of his gloopy body and eating people for their knowledge... yeah, wierd, but ridiculously fun. Anyway, his penchant for outbursts of single lines of unadulterated and unprovoked madness really reminded me of the 'mental atrocity's' line. Arakune spews forth such lunacy as 'Fear more love hate ! Let self crumble away, pathetic mediary' and my personal favourite 'Don't see you and I, pointlesspointlesspointlessPOINTLESS!!! *shrill nightmare goo laugh*'. That and the fact that anytime I wind up taking far-too-effeminate-homosexual-swordsmen into fights with him, I kind of panic and get mauled by bugs from all over... NOT PLEASANT... but this is how I geek out and spend (read waste) MY time and money.
Oh and those boots, I have no idea... it sounds insane but the only thing I can think of is this...
That's right, The Boosh is loose... and it's rewiring your inner being without you realising... there's hope for humanity yet.
Well the only thing I haven't talked about is what were chronologically the last panels, the noose and the suspended boots. Notice in the background that black shape I conveyed horribly with the drawing skills of an inebriated toddler. In the dream it was a doorway, but instead of flooding the room with light, darkness was coming out. Yes, that's right... the door was leaking FRIGGEN' DARKNESS AND MOVING. I can't say I have any idea, I thought briefly 'The Monolith' from '2001: A Space Odyssey'... but in all honesty I'm not sure.
The Monolith... shining symbol of forced progression of mankind... maybe, I always liked the idea that it represented the Ubermensch, or 'Over-man' who would lead humanity to the betterment of itself... although then we've got a pair of Nietzsche references from 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'... aka. The King Crucible Bible...
And now the hanging, visually, well, I mean it's execution... or suicide, definitely of the 'Lovecraftian Bogey Man from Space'. As for the cat, I got a feeling of his tragic passing as well, but it wasn't shown visually, like I said before this image is all I vividly remember, anyway, it's fitting as a symbolic conclusion.
Alright, so now it's over to you, dear reader, I have put forward what each symbol means to me and tipped out the jigsaw puzzle of introspection onto the table, now it is your turn as the pensioner of the soul to reassemble this and determine it's deeper meaning. Are cat's magical? Do I need to kill my inner Nietzsche-fanboy? Should I stop listening to psychedelic rock before sleeping? Or just never sleep again? This is in your hands, and if you didn't understand my explanations... then lie your heart out, go crazy, that's the idea, screw with MY head for a change...
Well, this is Crucible Tongs, leaving you with another Tannenism,
'Marty, here's your keys. You're all waxed up, ready for tonight.'
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