Premonitions

Last night, after a series of obscure dreams involving a huge house (a trap set by slenderman) that had a club in the basement (where I met first a young, then an old George Lucas who is apparently not working on the new movies), at about four in the morning, I woke up realising that I had forgotten to do an abstract for the coursework I finished and handed in a couple of days ago.

What the fuck, brain?

How does something like that even happen, at four in the morning, when it’s already been passed on days before? And what the hell kind of trippy dream leads one to remember that they’ve forgotten something completely unrelated.

The really confusing thing about this is that I spent many hours editing that piece and just happened not to notice the heading ‘abstract’ with nothing underneath it just before I began my introduction.

Truly I am not as clever as last year’s grades suggested, and I woefully mourn the hope of getting onto a masters degree.

Don’t make the same mistake as me, if there are any fellow science students out there. Remember to do an abstract, because if you don’t, you’ll be reminded by pyramid head in a club underneath a mansion, and you won’t even be drunk.

Write Faster Plx

Alright then, I just finished reading A Dance With Dragons (the latest chapter in A Song Of Ice And Fire by George R R Martin (the source material for the awesome, jizz-inducing, wacky grin inspiring series Game Of Thrones on HBO)) and I think I’m going to have to now come out as an addict. If my girlfriend wasn’t at this moment half way through the first book I would have picked it up again and once again read the series all the way through straight away.

I’ll sound like just the sort of obsessive annoying fanboy that GRRM is probably sick of by now if I make an open letter to him asking him to please write the last two books faster, but really I think I’m going to struggle with the waiting periods.

There are a couple of sample chapters floating around from the next one coming up, and the guy’s hard at work I’m sure, and I know that in my experience I can only manage a maximum of about 300 pages a year but I’m not a professional and therefore I’m allowed to fling my ignorance everywhere and wonder why the guy hasn’t yet released the final chapters of his amazing series in an amount of time that it’s impossible to write so much in unless your name is Stephen King.

I confess that I would like to, but I will not… I’ll just heavily hint at it and make the title of this blog post imply that the nagging at a hard working author is in fact exactly what I intended to do with today’s blog.

Trying For A Bush

I’m going to go ahead and pretend that I didn’t just sleep in and lose about five hours of productivity in the process, if that’s okay with you.

So, George W Bush is a war criminal. How many of you saw that one coming?

I wonder if there’s going to be an elaboration on this. Will Tony Blair be charged with equally horrific crimes for bending over for the ex-US president? Will action be taken to actually try to capture him? Because the crimes he’s being accused of are actually pretty horrific, and, unfortunately, a lot of money goes into those enterprises that could be spent on, I don’t know, charities, science, exploration, healthcare, education.

You know, those unimportant things that sap the military’s obviously much deserved money.

If you can’t tell that I have an anti-war bias right now you should probably get examined.

What would the procedure even be for arresting someone of that high esteem? Would it even be possible? How badly would Obama fight to save his predecessor from prison in Kuala Lumpur? (Which I assume is some kind of three hundred metre diameter tiger pit littered with bear traps.)

If there’s any way to be sure to lose votes, it’s to let the ex-president be taken away to be tried for human rights violation.

And really, that’s the point I think I’m trying to make here, because that’s a little fucked up.

Surely, if he’s being accused of these crimes he should be given a trial, and if he’s not guilty then there would surely be nothing to worry about? Sometimes I wish that the world was as simple as that. No doubt Bush doesn’t have a lot of friends in his own country, never mind overseas.

The human mind, or at least my human mind, is very eager to simplify, eager to declare things as easily solvable, black and white, and it’s sometimes pretty difficult to inject some real sense into that, especially with international issues, very powerful men and questionable motives.

And once you bring politics in you risk a flame war with every comment as well.

And that ain’t healthy.

The Memory Game

Hello again republic of internet!

You know, since I’ve got my head down in studies I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to forget information that we deem important. There must be at least fifty lectures that have been completely flushed from my head, undoubtedly replaced by elder scrolls, game of thrones and places that sell cheap drinks; you know, the stuff that you probably don’t need to remember that much, seeing as they’re not going to impact your future in any significant way.

Unless I suppose I meet George R R Martin and after playing Elder Scrolls with him for a good couple of hours he decides he needs a drink and only has a fiver to spend.

But that scenario, as nice as it might be to imagine, is probably not ever going to materialise into reality.

I suppose that if this next book I’m writing does get me an agent I’d do well to remember my influences but then again, it’s not often you have to sit an exam on fantasy fiction.

Should I be worried that, with a few weeks to spare, I must again refill my head with all the bioscience that threatened to spill out of my ears in some kind of backdoor exodus? I suppose that if I should start worrying about it it’ll probably be when I have a couple of days left, and then only if I haven’t covered everything, but judging by the amount of information being shoved into two weeks of exams…

I’m a little anxious.

A Recipe For Snake Oil?

So, here comes today’s break from doing spreadsheets and worrying about my next driving test.

I’ve just come back from some strange corner of the internet where tables sit on ceilings, birds swim, sharks fly, cats dig up their own shit and a bunch of children have forced a guy called Kony to become their one-man army.

And while I would love to keep making stupid remarks about this reverse world, only in Soviet Russia does a blog write me, so I’d better explain myself.

In the prescientific world of 1796, a physician known as Samuel Hahnemann in Germany proposed the basic laws of a practice we all know today as homeopathy. This practice was based on the ‘law of similars’; the idea that ‘like can be cured by like’, which, as we all know, must mean that eating lots of cake cures type 2 diabetes.

Well no, it’s not like that, because according to the principles of homeopathy the more diluted a substance is, the stronger its effect. So the natural progression from that would turn out to be something like…

You will need:

-1 slice of cake
-shitloads of water
-shitloads more water
-an assload of water
-ridiculous amounts of water

step 1: first, take your slice of cake and add shitloads of water. Stir until there are but crumbs of cake in very sparse areas of the mixture.

step 2: then, take your mixture and add shitloads more water. By this point there should only be a few molecules of cake in each area of the mixture, but just in case, mix until there is basically no active ingredient.

step 3: add an assload of water; just in case there’s any chance of there being anything apart from water in this solution.

step 4: finish off your recipe with ridiculous amounts of water; making sure to take note of how many times it has been diluted; remember, diabetes is a thing of the past when you can drink water. I wonder why medical science didn’t think of this, I mean the stuff’s been around for a couple of hundred years now!

So in this strange world outside the republic of internet and in the strange district of the blogosphere known as ‘homeopath avenue’ there are strong criticisms being pushed towards people who are skeptical of these ideas.

And why wouldn’t there be? Obviously these ideas make perfect sense! Pharmaceutical companies should continue to make lots of money out of selling basically nothing!

I think on this issue it’s hard for me not to start taking the piss, mostly because I’m still baffled at how widespread homeopathy is in Britain.

The royal family doesn’t really help, but to be honest I’m not sure there’s a lot they do help with.

I fear that I am not yet done here.

Only A Sith…

Why do I still see myself so often falling into the traps of gullibility?

Even when I claim to be honing a rational mind I still feel my brain wishing to stick itself back into the pattern of gnosticism.

When in truth I can never truly know anything out of my control, I’ve been folly to these things so many times believing that certain people live as absolutes.

Whereas if I had ever listened carefully to Obi-Wan I would know that only a Sith deals in absolutes.

And if you didn’t get that reference then I can only assume you hated the star wars prequels so much you refused to watch episode three, which was about as close to the quality of the originals as you could get with a ridiculous budget and by having Hayden Christensen as the lead actor.

What were you thinking Mr. Lucas? My God.

Anyway, I was actually getting somewhere halfway meaningful there so I should probably carry on.

People are by their very essence incredibly malleable, and by that I don’t mean that they can stretch their necks around corners like in Scooby Doo. No, I’m talking about personality-wise.

Unpredictable?

Not as such, everyone’s essentially the same, but that is not to say we can make any reliable predictions that anything can last forever, because as similar as people are, people change, and not necessarily in the ways you would expect had you only had one data point to go on.

Why am I trying to make human emotions sound empirical?

I suppose it makes me feel a little more comfortable with them, I may just be giving myself the mirage of understanding them, but for me, that’s better than being left completely in the dark.

Because I am, and always have been, after the truth, and something as fundamental as a two person connection should be a lot easier to understand than it is, at least according to my often ridiculous brain.

So, does this make me a Sith?

I suppose I’d have to believe in the force to start with so I suppose I can’t really argue that I am, however, I wish I could deal in absolutes, and who am I to argue with George Lucas?

Or Ewan McGregor for that matter?

We Got Him!

So Osama Bin Laden is dead.

Almost ten years have gone by since people saw red at the sight of his picture in the news and now he’s no more.

Now it’s time for me to piss off every right wing leaning person in America.

You know how many better and more entertaining things you could have done with him? Would it not have been better to see him with a gun to his temple hosting a television show like mythbusters or brainiac? After all, he seems to really get a hard on for explosions, this way he could have done it every day without any harm coming to the innocent people that we all knew and loved.

Or, we could have got him to star in a sitcom about three dictators that live under one special little roof and are the best of friends. It wouldn’t be called friends obviously because then the network would have got sued, I think it would have been named: I.N.F.I.D.E.L.S does that not sound like a great idea to you?

We could exchange a cease fire in Libya for Gaddafi’s involvement and I’m sure that once he sees the popularity of this most awesome television show that Kim Jong Il will just be dying to get involved.

(I know there’s a good chance I spelled a couple of names wrong here, but I’m not going to look them up just in case my accuracy incurs their wrath… and nuclear weapons)

Would this not have been a better use of Osama Bin Laden than taking his life?

Seriously guys I know that he was a twat and I know that eliminating this threat was a priority, but think about all the comedic possibilities!

Personally I would have liked to have seen a movie where George Bush and Osama Bin Laden just stare at each other with lust in their eyes for hours, even now the ex-president is mummifying his body so that it can be used as his personal blow-up doll.

Or a Dog The Bounty Hunter style show with Fred Phelps and Bin Laden called ‘Extremist!’ Where they go around fighting crime and spreading their message of hate rather than Jesus holding their hands.

On this note I know I should really cease typing and at the end of this paragraph I probably will but I just really think a great opportunity was shattered last night. How good would it have been to have brought him back to America alive, the moral high ground would certainly be leaning more towards the west. I know it would have been an impossible task, but it would show to the rest of the world, in my opinion, that America is a kinder nation than much of the world seems to think. It doesn’t have the best reputation in the world, but it is a beautiful and inspiring place, and had they taken him back alive the nations that have a bad taste in their mouth might just have started to have second thoughts about their assumptions, and the more we can encourage people to think freely the better.

And now for the inevitable kittens.