Tuesday, February 15, 2005

My own version of Star Wars: Episode III

It seems my subconscious mind has written its own version of Star Wars: Episode III. Last night I dreamed I was watching it on DVD, and I've previously dreamed I was watching it on DVD, and both times it was the same.

It starts with a dramatic action scene where there are all these flying droids (like the thing Obi-Wan grabbed onto and flew out Padme's bedroom window in the beginning of Ep. II) and each droid was assigned to track down and destroy one Jedi. A lot of Jedi were killed, but the scene culminates with Anakin destroying like six of these droids and saving the Jedi Order.

In this movie Anakin has two younger siblings, a boy and a girl, possibly twins, and they're enrolled in the Jedi Academy. However, the leaders of the Academy have become corrupt (my dream represented this by having them look like a film crew and spend all day showing the students movies instead of teaching them to be Jedi) so Anakin has to perform a daring rescue to free them from the Academy and then he has to put up with two small children tagging along for the rest of the movie.

I don't remember the rest. All I know is that it wasn't at all following the plot points that need to happen in Episode III. I just find it interesting that I've dreamed the movie in the exact same way at least twice.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Random observation

Have you ever noticed that the people who are loudest about calling for "debate" on an "issue" are always the people who most want everyone to just shut up and blindly agree with them?

Saturday, February 12, 2005

I'm such a toddler

I don't know if I'm tired or hungry.

See, I slept for 14 hours last night and woke up at 12:30, but since about 2:30 I have felt tired. I don't know if that means I need a nap or food. I tried to have a nap but didn't fall asleep. And I just had some fruit but I don't feel much better. And my eyes are tired. I don't know whether I should be lying in bed and resting or putting on my glasses and making soup.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Watch me revert to adolescence

I'm now on Pondocillin, which really messes up my hormones. So for the next couple of weeks BEWARE! I will be about as cool, rational, and zit-free as a 13-year-old!

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Not dead yet (but getting there)

I'm sick, possibly with strep throat, so don't expect much blogging of substance for the next few days. Right now I find it hard to focus on or think about anything but staying warm and drinking juice and counting the seconds until I get to sleep next. I think my teeth are rotting from all the juice and sugary lozenges, but we'll deal with that later. I have to continue going to work until the end of the week because I have a huge project due on Monday and my team's workload is such that no one can cover for me. So two more days of floating through my texts in a DayQuil-induced happyland, then a weekend of sleep and more sleep, and then hopefully I'll be better. If it gets worse I'm getting antibiotics, and if it's still around on the weekend I'm getting antibiotics

Monday, February 07, 2005

Les Jamelles Mourverdre

They say this wine goes with junkfood. I don't have any junkfood right now, but it makes me crave junkfood. Basically it's a smooth, unassuming red that would go with a lot of things. I had it with dark green veggies and it was good, and I think it would go with a lot of other stuff too. Except now I want junkfood instead of veggies.

MSN problems

My MSN won't connect. Is anyone else having problems right now?

I'm such a spaz!

I recently heard that the word "spaz" is apparently offensive. I've never heard of this before! I've spent the better part of my life bandying this word about like any child of the 80s, using it to mean "clumsy" or "flakey", usually in reference to myself. Anyone know how, why or to whom it's offensive? I never intended to go around casually using an offensive word!

Sunday, February 06, 2005

How to tell when a quiz is inaccurate

I don't usually post quiz results, but this one is just too funny.

It's called 20 Questions to being a Better Person

I got 99.85%.

You are a pleasure to be with and a pleasure to be. Your friends do not envy so much as admire you, and you lead your life with grace, honor, and dignity. This site is humbled to have you take a test on it.

Which brings one to wonder, what are you doing goofing off on the Internet?


LMAO!

This is why I don't like football

I turn on the TV to watch the Simpsons. Not surprisingly, the football is still going. They start the clock, go for 15 seconds, then stop. Then they start the clock, go for five seconds, then stop. So in five minutes of real time, they've played for 20 seconds.

The Ability to Forget by Norman Levine

This book didn't do much for me. It's a collection of short stories, all of which are decent stories by themselves, but as a collection it's too repetitive. Almost all the stories centre around what feels like the same character, who is clearly based on the author. They don't contain much in the way of plot, focusing more on bittersweet melancholic description. Again, this is perfectly fine, but it gets repetitive when the whole collection is like this. One story stands out: "The Man with the Notebook", where the subjects of a writer's stories all die shortly after he writes about them. But all the other stories are easily forgettable.

Saturday, February 05, 2005

Why I love my neighbourhood and other stories

Today I dropped off a prescription at the drugstore, went to the bank, library, post office, LCBO, grocery store, back to the drugstore to pick up my prescription, and back home. I did all this in under an hour, and all on foot. I am so glad I live where I do!

Meanwhile, Leah McLaren seems to have confused collegehumor.com with reality. I'm glad she waited until I in my own apartment (and out of full-time school) to do this - if she'd done it when I was in school full-time and living with my parents or even in res, my parents would have freaked out into a fit of over-protectiveness. It makes me feel sorry for students who have protective parents who read the Globe and Mail. Really, I think the target audience of collegehumor.com is high school students - I've been in post-secondary education since the site was founded, and it has always been quite clear that neither I nor my friends are the target audience.

Strange dream

I had a dream where an anti-same-sex marriage lobby group (now on earth do I hyphenate that? Perhaps I should just say a group lobbying against same sex marriage) bought all the public washrooms in the city where I grew up. They proceeded to knock down the walls between the men's and women's washrooms, and rearrange the cubicles so there were two toilets in each cubicle. They then put either a men's or women's washroom symbol on each cubicle. So the result was a large unisex bathroom with specific cubicles designated for men or women, and each cubicle containing two toilets. Apparently this was supposed to symbolize everything that was wrong with same-sex marriage. I don't know what my sub-conscious mind was thinking, but my conscious mind can't work out the symbolsm of that.

Friday, February 04, 2005

Brilliant Ideas that will Never Work: Maturity Test

It was mentioned in passing in a newspaper article I read recently that adolescents typically don't have a fully developed sense of consequences because of physical differences between the adolescent brain and the adult brain.

I'm not sure whether I believe this, but suppose for a moment it's true:

Then shouldn't they be able to invent a kind of brain scan to measure how mentally mature a person is? Makes sense, doesn't it? Now let's extrapolate a bit:

Different people mature at different rates, so there are probably some 16-year-old who are ready to function as full-fledged adults, while there are others who shouldn't yet be trusted behind the wheel of a car. So instead of using arbitrary ages for adult privileges, you just go in for your quarterly brain scan starting at age 9 or 12 or whatever's appropriate, and you receive your adult privileges based on the results. So people who are ready can vote at 14, and people who aren't have to wait until they're 25. They could even use it for adult privileges that are traditionally administered by the parents as opposed to the state. For example, an adolescent would go in for a brain scan, and when they come out their parents would be informed that the teen is now old enough to set their own bedtime or date or stay home alone overnight or whatever.

The only problem is the potential consequences for sibiling rivalry...

Thursday, February 03, 2005

Why the sex industry is squicky

I've always found the idea of the sex industry kind of squicky. Although I don't actually find it morally objectionable, thinking about it always made me want to shudder and vomit and curl up under the covers and cry.

I just realized why.

I have no problem with the idea of a person trading sexual services for money. I wouldn't do it myself, but the idea doesn't bother me at all.

What bothers me is the thought of people who aren't sex workers themselves making money from the sex industry. Pimps and strip club owners and porn producers who get to wear as much clothing as they want and have physical contact only with people they choose, but still make money off the backs of sex workers who have to expose themselves to and/or be pawed by any random customer, even if it's their high-school tormenter or their high-school principal or their parent's friend or their child's friend or their next-door neighbour.

Maybe people should think about that before they patronize the sex industry. I can see how a person might be okay with their money going to a sex worker, but perhaps people should also ask themselves how they would feel about most of this money going to Jabba the Hutt.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

This book tells the story of how the Oakland A's used baseball statistics to build a successful team and challenge the conventional wisdom that a team's success correlates directly with how much money it has.

Sound dull, eh?

Well, it wasn't, and that surprised me. I mean, I wasn't on the edge of my seat, but the author managed to take three subjects I'm not at all into - baseball, statistics and economics - and make a compelling story. He avoided throwing numbers around too much and instead told the backstories of all the people involved, their background and family life and what they thought about things, and the end result is actually quite readable.

One interesting thing is that the book ends at the end of the 2002 season with Billy Beane, the man behind Oakland's novel approach, leaving to work for the Boston Red Sox. I seem to recall something about the Red Sox having a rather good season sometime thereafter?

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Post your time-wasters here!

I have a friend who has to stay awake all night on Tuesday for medical testing purposes. I promised her some addictive online games to keep her busy. I have a couple, but I don't know if it's enough to get a person through a sleepless night. Do you know of any addictive online games, or other websites that are very conducive to wasting one's time? If so, please post them in my comments here!

I just hope he doesn't call 911 on me...

I was playing a web-based computer game. The phone rang. Without pausing the game, I picked up the phone. It was a quick wrong-number call. Just as I was finishing up telling the guy that he had the wrong number, I "died" in the game, triggering a sound effect that sounds like a bunch of small children screaming "NOOOOOOOOOO!"

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Only in Polish

Scene from Polish class:

A student is writing a sentence on the board. He starts writing one of the words in the sentence: "dzw..."

The prof interrupts. "No, that's incorrect. You can't start a word with 'dzw'. It would be impossible to pronounce."

The student takes a step back, looks at the board, and inserts the letter R. "drzw..."

"Yes, that's correct," the prof says.


(Incidentally, the word in question was "drzwi", meaning door.)