Dark Blue

So there was a second trip to matt's, there was a christmas, and a boxing day (or if you're in ireland, st stephen's day) and the usual holiday apathy and hiding from the light by sleeping through the days and slothing through the afternoons, nights and mornings.

It hasn't been light when I woke up since I was rudely awoken on christmas morning at about half seven, to do the usual present recieving thing, which all in all went quite well, and i obtained about six CDs, a camera, a hat, about three books, lots of chocolate and other sweet type things and maybe more things that I've forgotten (like the two T-Shirts i've just remembered - one from my brother with the relevant slogan of "Damn right I'm good in bed - I can sleep for days!" which is quite cool and i can only hope he gets only one meaning from that (what with him turning eight in a few days..)

The CDs I got were all pretty good and quite varied in style; there was the +44 "When your heart stops beating", the Billy Talent "Billy Talent II", the Jack's Mannequin "Everything in transit", the Veruca Salt "IV", the Duke Special "Songs from the deep forest" and the new bowling for soup album which I didn't actually get but have been listening to, "The great burrito extortion case".

The layout of the site is changing a little because of blogger being bought by google or something, so I've gone with what is mostly the old layout but now with more blue.

Loss of Clarity

There is a lot I could say, but I won't because I'd probably provide a biased and wholly inadequate version of events.

It could be argued that nothing is an even more inadequate version of events, but to those pedants I say "bah".

So it was an interesting week overall, with the grading to purple, the whole matt's 18th thing, the not-really-getting-any-work-done of the last few school days, and then the boredom that comes with having nothing to do and no one to talk to.

Hogfather was interesting. I shouldn't need to point out how much this word lacks in description, but I really cannot be bothered with anything else. It was the good kind of interesting, anyway.

Also; there was pizza. And in the words of Andy (And I'm paraphrasing here) "Everything's gone weird"...

I'm making a prediction here, which is a rare enough occurance in itself; Things (capital letter and all) will soon enough settle back into the norm. But then, there are always new weird things to entertain or confuse us.

Tetris

I don't, as it happens, have much of anything to say, but I want a coherent post before the hungover babblings of sunday, post matt's party, so I'm posting.

Todays comms lesson was Quite Interesting, and it concerned the mass media and the proliferation of the interwebs. Apart from such things as wikipedia and youtube (woo, crowdsourcing) some interesting points were raised; one on the issue of blogs. Blogs et al. will be useful for future social historians and so forth, as they will be readily available sources of the minutiae of western civilised lives.

which was interesting. however, my blogging is more for personal benefit than any noble goal of accurately informing the future of current events or trends or.. whatever else.

anyway.

blah

Lightning strikes twice in Oxford

after an uneventful weekend start, with much mock grading at karate, everything picked up today with the Men Women and Children giggity goodness. The day started with just some floating around until about four odd, when we went to pick up Ellis and.. be driven to Oxford.

The weather was miserable, and when we arrived near the Zodiac we were booted out of the car to fend for ourselves against the elements until the gig started at about half seven. After much initial confusion, we met up with teh dave, who is oxford-ing for interviews till tuesday (and taking a day off on wednesday, like the big ghey that he is). This was followed by further confusion as we attempted to locate the epitome of capitalist civilization in the form of those big shiny golden arches we all know and in some cases, love.

A macdonalds was found, and it became a source of much glee. I think a new term ending in -gasm was coined to describe the situation, but I digress.

the time between then and the gig was spent variously to-ing and fro-ing up and down oxford high street, finding out if dave could come to the gig, looking for a pub that would let us in for a non-alcoholic drink, before settling on a cafe/bar that was decorated with an interesting orange theme.

the gig itself was quite varied.. the first "band" played "music" which was purely atonal noise with no rythme and mangled screeching sounds. Having broken everyone's ears, the second support act "Kill The Arcade" came on, and managed to not be ompletely terrible. They also didn't have a guy in a bear suit molesting people, and were ACTUALLY playing their instruments (we knew this because they kept stopping due to instrument fuck-ups)

Men Women and Children were, in a word: Fan-Fucking-Tastic. they played most of their songs, and were just great in general. I even got some shiny badges at the end of the gig!

want to say more but am being kicked off, so maybe tomorrow.

As it's me though, probably not.

Nightfall

erg. another day. I both want to post and don't really want to talk about anything.

Luck O' The Irish

people keep complaining about me winning at poker. This is repeatedly attributed to my irishness and regarded just as good luck, but while i get the occasional good hand, most of the times I win with pairs or threes and am just playing and betting well.

I mean if i was really lucky, that time I got four of a kind today would have won me more than a penny. As it happens, it didn't. So there.

I showed up late today; it tells you a lot about comms that i was 20 minutes late to a 40 minute lesson and it hadnt started.. but both comms singles were alright. got my value and ideology essay back, with 23 out of 30.. bayliss also got 23 out of 30, and based most of his essay on the first half of mine, so it just goes to show. Warner's marking wasn't very helpful.. he hasn't said anywhere how to improve, just "good essay" written next to the mark. I shouldn't have to point out why this is unhelpful.

english was interesting. I say interesting, because two people in the whole class had done the homework, and as a result everyone else got shouted at and sent off to the library. I would like to point out that I did attempt the homework (we had to find some critical analysis of To The Lighthouse) but I couldn't find anything decent on the interweb last night. the teacher told me I should have looked at the resources in the library. she sent us to the library and gave us books she'd taken form there on TTL.. there were no other books IN the library on TTL. I shouldn't need to say anything more here either.

PSHE was a talk about finance, which wasn't very interesting and ran into my free; it did have some mildly entertaining moments though. the rest of the day was spent playing the aforementioned poker and winning small amounts of other peoples money.

The Time Traveller

Not an overly interesting day today, but as most, it had it's moments. There was the bread-headshot, for instance. Computing consisted almost entirely of "project work" which meant messing around with case studio because i have no idea what i'm doing.

this was followed by a free spent mostly playing shed, with non-hamden (ie stupid) rules, so again i had no idea what i was doing.

comms was comms. it required no effort and i'm pretty sure i didn't learn anything, so that was the usual. i did for the first time that morning know what i was doing, but as that was nothing it isnt really very impressive.

i had the rest of the day "free", although i technically had a lesson, but it didn't have a teacher, and the work set was watching a video. anyway, much time was spent playing cards on for my part losing most of the money i'd won yesterday.. cursed lemon..

lunch was the usual walk to and from tescos, with quite possibly the quote of the day from ellis, of scrubs - "I love Cox". oh how we laughed. (you see it's funny because it's true) and the intervention hammer failed to make an appearance.

Come back to texas

today was interesting, in that I pretty much had no work; I did have a lesson (yes, singular) but since it comprised entirely of watching a video (A Streetcar Named Desire which we're watching as opposed to reading because it's faster. We're doing it for our synoptic unit and have to cover as much post 1945 drama as we can), it wasn't like real work.

The rest of the day was spent playing cards, and finding devious ways to go to tescos buying alex a lemon.. he didn't want one but, and I quote him here "get me a lemon". this quote may be slightly taken out of context seeing as it was originally preceded by "do not" or some other negative form, but we had to think positive. So alex got a lemon. He claims it is a "lucky" lemon, but you know, I don't think it helped him at poker..

Karate has been fun recently, and by fun I my difficult and often painful, thanks to the whole "preparing for the grading thing" but meh. I may have decided to not go today due to tiredness, but you shouldn't believe everything you hear. it would be true in this case, but you should probably pretend it isn't anyway.

I've now seen every episode thus far released of scrubs. This depresses me in a number of ways. If you can guess how many and what they are, you might win a prize!

or a knife in the eye. it could go either way.