Aquarionics

Help me make a decision:

• Elise of the Storm
• The Lights Go Out All Over

A (rare) thing not by me on here, and in fact by my brother Ben, who is teaching English in Thailand:

Day 1030 in Thailand. 9pm. Just walked downstairs to hear the quiet rushing of a mini waterfall in my front room. It seems in a bit to escape the concentration camp that is my 2′ x 1′ fish tank. My Japanese fighting fish has picked a fight with the base plate on the tank and won. Unfortunately attacking the base meant that he couldnt escape but the water could. Not only that but the water drenched the air pump which co-incidentally died a slow but painless death. Freeing the fish from his shallow ‘would be’ grave, I placed him in a bowl while I organised some temporary accomodation, for reasons only known to him, that particular bowl wasn’t quite up to his plant-filled, black and white gravel castle and escaped that too. Luckily for him I found him before greenpeace did.

My front room, sofa, chairs and christmas tree are all wet. The water even streaming down my drive into the road outside. Strange, it didnt seem that much when it was just sitting there..

The context for this was a discussion on the American healthcare system, and how everything this particular person knew about it was based on episodes of Scrubs. The response was a pretty predictable “I’ve never seen this scrubs thing, but if it’s anything like everything else Hollywood put out it’s talking bollocks”. I’m paraphrasing here, but you can see the rough idea. He’d have put comedy dollar signs in the esses in Hollywood if it had any. (Incidentally: Stop doing that. If you’re typing “Micro$oft”, even in rants about how evil they are to free software? I don’t want you on our side. It’s the satirical equivalent of comic sans).

Anyway, I think that comedy is context, pretty much, and in order to have comedy, you need the comedic thing to work the wrong way, but – and this is the key – for the rest of the universe to be predictable. Unless you’re subverting, in which case you’re living on the edge, I salute you, and if you get it right you can have a cookie. The rest of you need teapots:

Because sitcoms generally take an accepted situation and place a surreal
teapot on it to focus the humour. The sureal teapot on a fractal
landscape of spinning vortexes and melting concepts is not inherantly
funny. The sureal teapot on an elephant has a context that it is out of.

In the case of Scrubs, the hospital, patients and outside world are the
frame of reference and thus the audience need to understand and connect
with it, it does not and should not act out of “character”. The characters
and eventual situations (mostly, in Scrubs, the characters) are the teapots.

(Mostly this is here because I’m forever losing bits of text I enjoyed writing in the depths of usenet)

DELE0532

Originally uploaded by ara

For people who wanted to know what I look like when I’m in costume, this is it.

M+ V- PS+ PE Y+ PGP t 5++ X R+ tv b+++ DI+ D++ G++ e+ h— r+>++ y?

Happy New Year.

Let it snow

Originally uploaded by Aquarion

Since there’s no place to go.

I’m not sure I have a “favourite song”. Last.fm claims my top five songs of all time, by listen count, are:

1. Dire Straits – Sultans Of Swing
2. Barenaked Ladies – Upside Down
3. The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist
4. Jonathan Coulton – I Feel Fantastic
5. Barenaked Ladies – When I Fall

Although most of those are the product of brief periods of obsession. I’m suprised there’s no Divine Comedy in there. Top bands of all time:

2. The Divine Comedy
3. Barenaked Ladies
4. Eddie From Ohio
5. The Arrogant Worms
6. They Might Be Giants”Weird Al” Yankovic
7. Moxy Früvous
8. Jonathan Coulton
9. Gomez
10. Flipron

Which gets the content right, I’d guess, though I’d dispute the order.

There are two cups of tea.

The first is a caffeinated drink made of, in some form or other, tea leaves and boiling water. It’s there because it’s a cup of tea, partly a symbol, though not of anything. This tea is the tea of drinking, the point being to sit and have a cup of tea, possibly while doing something else. Writing a journal entry, for example. It’s tea. It’s quick, and it’s easy, and it’s brown, hot and wet.

The second is the ritual. Ten minutes or so to draw and boil water; assemble teapot – remember to warm it (or use paper filters or something else); spoon out the correct amount of tea leaves; pour and steep to get the best flavour. Drop in, or over, some milk and – if you wish – sugar; and go back to what you were doing before. It’s a ritual, a natural break from your task and time for your brain to process what you’re doing while your hands perform a ritual you could do in your sleep (not recommended, scalding not fun). Return to the task refreshed and with a nice cup of tea.

Hello November.

November is a time of the leaves drifting from the trees; of the colours of autumn washing out to the starkness of winter; of cold, rainy winds and bright, brittle sunshine.

It’s also the traditional months of National Novel Writing month (NaNoWriMo, write a novel in a month), the less-demanding National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo, write a blog post every day for a month), the even less demanding – on the presumption it’s possible for you – Movember (Grow a ‘tashe in a month) and a few others. It’s a time to regain your position on the tracks after the washout that was October. It has greatness, stuff will happen. It will be a Glorious November, One To Remember!

Even Guy Fawkes wanted to start the new world order in November.

Obviously, I’m participating in none of this stuff. I’m going to continue with my minor resolution to update this a bit more. I’m on the sniffly, sore throat ramp up to being horribly ill somewhere in the near future unless my immune system kicks in to overdrive, which I’ve managed to time well, since I was off work last week on holiday. If I can successfully get up every morning this month, I shall be happy with my level of success. NaGeUpMo, then. This doesn’t look like it will be particularly hard, since my brain is doing the “You will wake up now” thing at 6am.

It is, like many other things, out to get me.

So I shall sip my white tea (tea I put milk in is bad for sore throats) and watch the sun rise over east London.