oh yeah, baby

It turns out strong language skills early in life mean a lower risk of alzheimers

My brother and I spend a good 10 minutes coming up with synonyms for how astounding and generally delightful this is. We stop when we hit ’splendiferous’ and ‘wondertastic’

more kasabian

I remember watching this video back in secondary school. It’s odd the things you remember.

It would be quite awesome if brit prison jerseys actually read HER MAJESTY’S PRISONER

thanks ali

uncertain

I am secretly a little terrified that I will never write anything. I will come up with occasional doggerel and little aphorisms and they will go straight onto this blog and die there. Each year, a little less. Every new day, a mind eating of itself. I know it is possible to fail. I’m not sure if one day I’ll decide to ‘grow up’ or change my mind, or maybe realise that I am actually quite a shitty writer who can only take from things he has read somewhere else. These are very real possibilities.

If I didn’t believe in God thinking like this would crush me. Honest. Almost literally. It would mean that I committed myself to believing in something at a young age and had more idealism than ability, and consequently I would have nothing. I’ve read enough to know that the only thing more crushing than giving up your dreams is having them wither in your hands. At least in the first case you could pretend you only lacked the bravery to go out and seize them.

But I forget, sometimes. I can’t divorce myself from my Christianity (or rather, I can’t divorce myself from God). I believe, really I do, that I am looked after and that everything around me has a meaning. I realise this might sound naive. But the strangest thing is that believing what I believe, I think I could fail at doing what I want and still be okay about it, because I believe that God will put me in the best possible place. I’m not what I do, but I’m also not what I dream about. I’m…whatever I’m supposed to be, and I’m okay with not knowing whatever that is right now.

I wish I could tell you how liberating that is. I know non-christians sometimes get horribly offended when evangelicals impose, but from my point of view it’s selfish keeping what I know to myself. It’s not a Dogma. It is literally the reason I am okay with waking up and having no idea what is going to happen to me.

night

There’s something about empty cities at night that’s strange magic. Not the kind of magic that makes pumpkins into coaches, more the half-unrealised sort that lurks in the narrow spaces between moments.

Anything can mean anything. A flickering neon signboard. A man dragging a heavy black bag out of an alley. An abandoned car made eerie in streetlight. A group of chain-smoking insomniacs in mohawks. Pulsing beats out of a narrow doorway. What are these things? Where do they come from? It’s like you’re in a strange kind of Wonderland where everything is heavy with meaning.

Anything can happen in a city at night, somewhere deep among the lights and the flares. You want something to happen as you wander from one lonely street to the next, always on the cusp of something you cannot see.

In the morning nothing feels quite real about the last night, and maybe you can laugh over an anecdote of the time you wandered the streets of _ , but really, deep down you know the city is alive.

so literal

So I read that Jack Neo is releasing a horror film called ‘Where Got Ghost’. It is an omnibus featuring the ingeniously titled three shorts: Forest Got Ghost, Roadside Got Ghost and House Got Ghost.

Ingenious! It is so efficient. All the useful information about these short stories are up there in the title. From now on this is the naming convention for horror films. Watch this: Emily Rose Got Ghost, TV Got Ghost, Patrick Swayze Got Ghost.

WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM A MOVIE TITLE

squeal.

it’s like drinking chicken souls

the label practically screams it

a survivalist’s guide to vic lit

It’s 5 am. I have just slogged through the last three hundred pages of Portrait of a Lady from 11 pm last night. It is some of the saddest shit ever, since I read Hundred Years of Solitude.

I googled the book for some sense of resolution. Instead I get shitty post-60s American lit analysis that insists sexuality is a ‘major theme’, I guess because the phrase ‘hard manhood’ is used once to describe Caspar Goodwood. Spare me.

Shitty lit analysis annoys me because the subject already has enough reputation for flakiness as it is, without people trying to impress their lit professors by dragging out every pop-lit issue they can think of.

It’s perhaps a mark of Henry James’ ability that I find myself deeply annoyed at fictional characters for their fictional life decisions. Weird.

dresden dolls

Cheng links me to the Dresden Dolls, who are rather awesomely self-described ‘Brechtian Punk Cabaret’.

Bowler hats! Weimar Republic! Mime faces!