Monday, 26 October 2009

Untitled (aka Orange Clockworks)

This my favourite poetry so far, I wrote this during one of my random subconscious thought processes [sort of like, when I turn into a crazy hippie and write things without thinking]. 
There is a comma at the end because this poem is not supposed to end; when I get into another one of my weird moods I will continue writing it, but I have not updated this poem for over a year now [yes, these hippie moods are hard to come by when you are busy with so many other things].



Going to places many a times,
Looking through my head,
And know! Oh how you know,
The meaning of know,
To see many a men,
In suits,
Singing ‘oh I know’,
And to see them is to see,
Your headworks among a clockwork,
Your mates among an infinite melancholy,
Your knowing in reversal order of it,
And your machinery in disillusionment,
And your photocopies are made posh,
Your main views scrubbed,
Head made cleaner,
And oh! You many coats on hooks,
Making up solvents in heads,
Clean clean clean!
Going a many seams with plates,
On adventures,
Feeling like a Joplin,
Becoming a head washer,
Looking at the glass time go on pass,
Past seeming to loose cut,
Back to many a mathematical equations,
X is x and y is y – look further,
Look closer,
Then x becomes a sphere and y,
Looks perpendicular to the cause,
Graph made,
Looks look cleaner,
Looks like a Tchaikovsky gotten straighter,
A note gone to the waster,
Arsenic in my water,
Mercury gone silver,
Silver gotten blacker,
Pure forms mocked harder,
Seams becoming heavier,
The scarved woman looking sullier,
Duller and much dimmer,
Locking books in arms and nails,
Holes driven through wood,
Head made into a gonner,
Mates put in a locker,
Looking looking through the glass,
Which cannot break!
Nonsense nonsense!
Type up numbers solve equation,
Noise gone louder,
Animals swimming up the stairs,
The clockwork started,
Ticking at the tock,
Cogs working up the eye,
Impulses gotten flammable,

What the pavement told me

Bludgeoned lampposts set the sullen stage. They shone upon the dented aged scarlet metal, romanticising the surface. Years of negligence had taken a toll on the pavement, only now it was coloured pearl grey, sending ripples of concrete sea around our yellow white-laced footsteps. Spun into this very insignificant world, we stood there like dwarfed adults; contemplating in our minds all the little things in life, things which disappear during formation of the prosaic conditions of adulthood.

All was blurred in this perfectly deformed  architecture placed out all around us; the decay of the rusted lights weaving through sharp leaves, as if to send shadows like weapons towards these two irrelevant pinpricks in the great scheme of all things.

Damn this health

I am ill. And I am cold.

















P.S. sorry for the crappy photo, I don't have access to a scanner.

Saturday, 24 October 2009

Wordle

This is a really cool website, our CSW professor mentioned it to us during one of our lessons.
Play around with it, its really interesting to see what the different word clouds look like. Here is one I made (or the Java script made) of one of my surrealist short stories:














Its so cool to look at a story visually, you can almost see the thought process with which you chose each word.

This blog is rated...

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets


It was based on the presence of the word(s):
crap (X1)

Anyone for some JUICE?

There must be a limit. Seriously, there must be a limit to advertising. Why is it that adverts go in a completely different directions to the rest of the universe?
Coke brings you eternal happiness. Toothpaste raises your self-esteem. Insurance makes sure your kids will attend Harvard. A new television will make your husband loyal to you. Biscuits that give you an orgasm.

Now its saint juice. Yes, now they want us to drink juice straight from saints. Is it just me or does Saint Juice sound a bit wrong to you?

Watch:



Yes, this is "Juice the way God meant it to be" capital letters and all. I don't know about you, but when I think of God constructing the universe under six days, I never imagine him declaring how he wanted our juice to be like (still sounds very very wrong).
I don't quite get this ad. So what are they implying, that drinking this juice will bring you closer to God? Or make you into a saint? Or both? Hmmnn...

Anyways, my sarcastic comments aside, you can read my "serious" review of it here.

Mina - La voce de silenzio

This is fantastic:



I came across this when I was looking through random music videos on YouTube and this was in the "related videos" side-box (which is weird, how is this "related" to Muse?).

A quick Wikipedia search told me she's Italian (duh.) and that she's a pop singer since the 1950s, so I guess she looks ancient now. But I can see why she is so popular, her voice is amazing. There is so much passion there, and she looks so fresh and young (maybe not the case in 2009). The song is  beautiful, and the way she sings it is crazy but graceful at the same time. Love the jazzy overtones in the back, and she looks gorgeous with the whole black-and-white recording.

Wednesday, 21 October 2009

Random University Randomness Sad Randomness

I am bored, I should be working on a history essay and studying for a Calculus test (simultaneously?), but I am here instead. Wasting my time boring you with my random obsolete observations which are so pointless you might consider staring at a photograph of a toaster for two hours as more productive than reading this post. Anyways, if you fancy a bore, here goes a random number of photos rotting on my cell phone memory card...


I was in the bathroom when I suddenly looked up and thought, wow I never realised there was a design on the roof of the bathroom. But it wasn't a design - there is a hole in the ceiling! Seriously, this is like the equivalent of discovering an extinct species (excluding scientific the nobility and all).


Why is there a hole in the ceiling? Repairs? What you need someone to go up there and repair the bloody pipes? As this is a female bathroom, do they send a woman up there? Or do men come into the bathroom? Really, you can ask so many questions about this you might manage to derive the meaning of life itself.

I wonder what it would be like if you took a tour of the entire building via the ventilation system. This would just bullock the whole "open locked doors with you ID card" idea, as you could just enter any room at your will. It would be like maneuvering your way through a maze. I think the Business majors should consider doing a "Go Up The Ventilation" circus-ride-like-thing, where each person pays QR10 to climb into the ceiling and take a guided tour around the building. 


 Here is a photo of my name within some Maths. Damn. This is getting very sad and depressing.



Well, its not my fault, I was getting so bored, and I just have to write my name out in creative fonts  when I am bored. Doesn't everyone do that?

I just find it so amusing how it says "DECAY" right next to my name (I didn't even do that on purpose, see the grand scale of things?). Its like some great metaphorical meaning hidden in that...its like the book is trying to predict my future.


I am gaining weight, I need to stop eating and drinking this crap:


Brownies? A horrid caffeinated drink? That's not me. This looks like the afternoon snack of some twat off some whimsical Banking Street, you know, the sort of person you would find being bullocked by Donald Trump on The Apprentice.

I love Charlie Brooker <3



¿¿¿¿ HOW does he manage to make everything so entertaining ????

[p.s. i love upside-down Spanish question marks]

Tuesday, 20 October 2009

God is in the Great Details

I stared skywards for no apparent reason, only to be entranced into God’s beautiful architecture.
Dense yet clear clouds all perfectly formed into a dome of aesthetic beauty.
Something was incredibly pleasing to the eye about that one sky.

And the sun…it glowed through clusters of clouds, forming perfect allied rays of light, and God was speaking to the land. All birds; moles; rabbits; shrubs, cease to exist when such a simple declaration of heavenly powers fall on the land. Such perfect beauty is impossible to perceive into utterance of words.

It was as if God was present in all situations, in all positions, in all the atoms of red sand, all was enlightened. And I remember thinking, it doesn’t really matter if we plague each other with our minds, God is in the heavens, and as long as that is possible and imaginable to this mind, all is at peace with the universe.

Monday, 19 October 2009

I HATE iTUNES









I just lost all the songs on my iPod.
Why?
Because iTunes hates humans. Humans must be kept as miserable as possible.
Humans must be destroyed.

ARRGHHHHHH, how bloody frustrating is this.
My only source of comfort in this dangerous world is gone.

Damn you iTunes, why did you destroy my hopes and dreams?
How on Earth am I going to wake up tomorrow without stabbing myself first?
How will I navigate the Corridors of Education before class, without a great long wire glued to my ears?

How am I going to listen to music? My mobile phone? It will probably run out of battery in 20 seconds.

Damn damn damn, most of the songs I had on it are on millions of random CDs
(I burned them before the age of The Great External Hard Drive).
It will take the entire weekend to bother to put them all back in - that is if I am bothered to put them all back in.

Plus I was going to do a piece about the songs I had listened to the most since I got my humble [evil] iPod; but now all that is lost to the great abyss which is the functional uselessness of fancy Apple products.

Acid on Ink



















To keep the windows of our minds open,
Suppression must be enforced.
Only with suppression of thoughts
Is the mind able to conceive the preciousness of ideas.

Beautiful letters flowing within the domains of the mind,
Creating radical thoughts which would otherwise be
Impossible to conceive if the mind was allowed to roam free.

An idea which exists within a caged mind cannot be destroyed,
Even with acid on ink,
fire on paper,
arsenic in your water,
It will continue to exist.

Simple powerful ideas.
Born out of desperation.
The need for attention.

Freedom of thought just brings about the creation of uselessness,
People who grumble mightily against the institutions
which allow them freedom,
Thoughtless throwaway comments,
This is that, which is x,
Which is y,
Take this, add this to that,
Grey prosaic depths of the mind,
which bring about the creation of nothing,
give health to no perception,
All all all useless,
Just ramblings of old aged creatures.

Photograph: view from my desk of our uni library window

Sunday, 18 October 2009

Oman

So I went on a trip to Oman for the weekend with other university freshmen.

I will put up some photographs over the weekend when I have the time and energy to transfer them off my my cheap camera (cheap because it kept turning off like every 20 seconds. Seriously, why does technology turn into your enemy when you need it the most? Computer hates human. Human must be destroyed.)

Tuesday, 13 October 2009

FREEEEE WALLPAPER!!

Hey guys, so I want to provide some sort of a give-back service to the rest of the world for no apparent reason.
I don't have money, so I can't give to charity.

So here is a free desktop wallpaper instead.
















It was designed all by me, I spent exactly 2 minutes on it, using MS Word [2007] and the PrintScreen function.
Sorry if its a bit low-rent for you, I am not into the whole "naked women dancing on your desktop" thing. Its too crude.

With my wallpaper you can think about fishes, darkness and computers at the same time. Is there any other wallpaper in the world which can do that? I think not.

Enjoy.

Sunday, 11 October 2009

Google Translator is a miracle worker

So remember I wrote a few posts ago about wanting to watch the French movie Le Chant Des Mariees (I have typed this up so many times in Google I can spell it without even thinking).




I was so desperate to watch this movie (mainly because I think Najib Oudghiri is kinda cute) that I hounded torrent sites for an entire day to find it, until I finally came across a sort of poor-man's p2p site called RapidShare, where I slavishly downloaded the movie in three winrar files.

The joy of it...of finally watching a movie with hot popcorn and damning fizzy drinks....but alas no.

There were no subtitles.

I don't know if I have told you before, but I suck at learning languages. I wasted 9 years worth of lessons trying to learn French, only to forget it in two weeks after the exam.

So it was impossible for me to watch an entire movie in French without trying to repeatedly smash my head against a brick wall.

By now you are probably thinking how dumb I am - "there are hundreds of subtitle websites you twat!", I hear you yelling - and I searched every single one of those hundreds of websites (okay, maybe only fifteen), but no English subtitles, only Dutch ones (why do the Dutch watch French movies?).

I gave up hope of trying the watch the movie via a torrent, and tried to look for a DVD I could order online (see what you have reduced me to? Damn you Najib-the-cute-guy).

So I searched Amazon. Nothing.

E-bay. Nothing.

French Amazon. Nothing.

French E-bay. Nothing.

Seeing as all the subtitles I could find were in Dutch, I figured the Dutch probably love this movie.

Dutch Amazon. Nothing.

Dutch E-bay. Nothing.

There wasn't even any damn Dutch version of E-bay or Amazon.

I might as well search the Chinese versions for all that I can find.

So I did the saddest thing you can possibly imagine, only a desperate human's hope could lie in such despair:

  • I downloaded the subtitles in Dutch
  • Downloaded Subtitle Workshop
  • Opened up the subtitle file in Notepad
  • The pasted the entire subtitles in to GOOGLE TRANSLATE
  • Converted it all to English
  • Then created subtitles in English out of this in Subtitle Workshop (I kept the timings of the Dutch subtitles)
  • Layered these on top of the movie file (.avi)
  • And voila! English subtitles!
It worked well, the subtitles are pretty good for most of the part, except some bits here and there.

Was all this worth it for the movie? I don't know, haven't watched it yet, but if the movie is not good, I swear I will have a tantrum right here right now.

Saturday, 10 October 2009

|| goddess of turning heads ||

This is something I drew inspired by Indian art,
it is originally a nude, but I cut out the nude bits
for no apparent reason

Friday, 9 October 2009

Who do you love?


 

The person you love is 61.8 percent water.

Thursday, 8 October 2009

Playground Love

This is one of my favourite songs, its from the OS of The Virgin Suicides by Air.
Embedding is disabled, so just go to the link here

Check it out, its a very sweet song, just shows you the childish simplicity of love (in a very nice way).
And the chewing-gum blob is so cute.


And if you haven't watched the movie, then you might want to check it out, it's not exactly my favourite movie, but its a good one.

i am a bastard

I feel bad, I am ignoring and being mean to someone

God I don't know whats the matter with me,
the more someone comes closer, the further away I move :(

Wednesday, 7 October 2009

I wanna Watch

I really desperately want to watch this movie:



Le Chant Des Mariees or The Wedding Song

Unfortunately I live in the middle of nowhere, which is not a likely destination for a small budget, art house European movies to be released.

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

|| of green tea and hyperchlorite ||

So what do I do when I am stressed?

Tea and bleach.

No don't worry, I don't try to snuff it by drinking a mixture of tea and bleach (that would be a very nasty way to go).


I have just discovered the power of the simple green tea. I know I have absolutely no scientific basis for saying this (like most other "scientists"), but someone should prescribe this for insomnia - it immediately put me in to a carefree calm sleep. It was so refreshing it made me feel like I could simply put all my thoughts down and sleep.

Green tea coupled with a cucumber body lotion massage make sleep so snug and comfortable, along with my SpongeBob SquarePants pillow covers.

And then there is my bleach.

I like to CLEAN things when I am stressed. You can call me what you like (OCD patient?), but it relieves stress for me. Whenever I feel really down, I just go around pouring bleach everywhere (which makes me a bit of a annoying safety hazard for my roomie).

And it's not only bleach. I remember being incredibly ill and worried during my January high school exams (2009), and I would brush my teeth up to 7 times a day.

I am also currently obsessed with Dettol Antibacterial Wipes (used by THE QUEEN in Buckingham Palace, as it very shamelessly endorses on the package, crest included). I try to wipe down my study table with it as often as I can.



I think I need to get out more, or in four years time I will turn into a gone-case.

Monday, 5 October 2009

|| Meow-Meow Crushers ||

So yesterday I was going on my lonely abode from my dorm to the CMU library, when I saw a cat.


Ok nothing special there. Just Shan spotting a cat. There must be millions of cats all over the world, its not exactly the equivalent of discovering The Wheel is it? So you are probably telling me to buzz off for being those useless annoying people who tell you every single daily detail of their boring lives on the web.

But it looked so damn cute, it was all fluffy and black and adorable, it looked like someones well-groomed and looked-after cat. That is until I saw its 'face'. Why the use of sarcastic-quotation marks? Because it had no face.

I swear, it was the most f***-ugly animal I have ever seen. And trust me, I have seen plenty of f***-ugly animals before (everything from homeless street elephants [this miracle you will find only in Bombay] to legless horses and tons of diseased stray dogs). But this cat was so weird, there was just fluffy fur all over the face which looked all shabby and dirty and I could only make out two tiny yellow pinpricks which could be eyes, but toher than that it had no face. I think the cat ran head-first into a wall or something, because where there should be a face, it looked a bit squashed.

Anyways, I walked away cursing the bloody thing for showing up in front of me, because it reminded me of something I had literally seen in a nightmare before, and I kept thinking that I would have nightmares again that night. Call me a dull drama queen, but I don't know why the poor animal repulsed me so much.

So when I came back to my dorm and was getting ready to go out for a walk, my roomie very thankfully informed me that I should be careful of cars going by because they had just found a dead cat on the road. And also very helpfully described some grisly details  like blood and stuff.




It was my cat. The one I had hated that very evening. I felt so guilty as if I had killed the cat, the poor thing was just sitting there. Anyways, people should drive carefully              }:-(
Not fair, just because they have ultra-expensive, fuel-guzzling, Earth-destroying cars doesn't mean they should drive like maniacs.
Seriously, people drive at 100kph just IN THE CAR PARK. WTH.
There is no need to drive that fast in the car park unless someone has let loose car-destroying firecrackers, and seeing as I just made up the concept of "car-destroying firecrackers" 2 seconds ago, THERE SHOULD BE NO NEED TO DRIVE THAT FAST IN THE CAR PARK.

Sunday, 4 October 2009

colloquial mistakes

So I mentioned colloquial mistakes in other cultures in a previous post, so decided to include some quotes from Alan Fletcher's book, The Art of Looking Sideways. 

I hope I am not violating some draconian copyright law, and if I am then I hope I don't get bollocked for it.

So here is the magic list:

Drop your pants here for best results
-Bangkok dry cleaner

It is forbidded to enter a woman even a foreigner if dressed as a man
-Bangkok temple

Our wines leave you nothing to hope for
- Swiss restaurant

The manager has personally passed all the water served here
-Acapulco hotel

Special cocktails for ladies with nuts
-Tokyo bar

Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar
-Oslo bar

Please leave your values at the desk
-Paris hotel

Please do not perambulate the corridors in the hours of repose in the boots of ascension
-Austrian hotel

The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret you will be unbearable.
-Bucharest hotel

You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.
-Japanese hotel

Prostituition, whoredom, gambling, drug taking, drug dealing and anything obcene are fobiden (sic).
-Peking hotel

There will be a Moscow exhibition of arts by 15,000 Soviet Republic painters and sculptors. These were executed over the last two years.
-Soviet Weekly

Do not feed the animals. If you have any suitable food, give it to the guard on duty.
-Budapest zoo

Teeth extracted by the latest Methodists.
-Hong Kong dentist

We take your bags and send them in all directions.
-Copenhagen airline office

Iraqi head seeks arms.
-British newspaper


I find these absolutely hilarious, and here are two I found myself a few months back:

Nadal High On Grass
-Headlines Today (Indian English news channel) on Rafael Nadal winning his career’s first grass tournament

The plans will be fleshed out in the mayor’s youth strategy to help tackle social breakdown,
due in November.
-article “Plans for 10 academies announced” in the Gulf Times, “Britain” section, September 30th 2008

Saturday, 3 October 2009

For your reference


lame.

 I was looking for synonyms for the word 'happy' in Thesaurus.com and in the side links was a link to Reference.com on Ways To be Happy.

Here is the page that it opens up.

I know, I know, this post looks like one of those awkward "self-help" texts, the sort that have shiny happy people pasted all over the brochure, with big invisible arrows pointing out to their made up facts on "read this and be happy" theories. But I thought it would be nice to give others a pointer to a list of happiness, at least its better than a list of finding "hot girls in your country" like most websites.

Just look around, some of them look too happy and therefore by default [to me] creepy, but the second one is nice.

I actually don't know whats the matter with me, I have been using words like "happy" too often nowadays, maybe I should join some Goth club and start writing poetry in graveyards.

Friday, 2 October 2009

to spell disaster

Yeh, ok the title of the post sucks, I was trying to think of a pun and this was the best I could do with my feeble attempt. Anyways, here is a bit of a funny spelling catastrophe:



This reminds me of a page in Alan Fletcher's book The Art of Looking Sideways, in which he talks about some of the hilarious colloquial mistakes he came across when other cultures tried to put up signs in English.

I am not sure if this is a colloquial mistake or what, but it is funny as hell. I saw this on our KS5 Office whiteboard near the end of year 12 (roughly 2 years ago); I thought it was fantastic, so I copied it down in my notebook.
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