Who took the bom
I have the tune to Le Tigre’s Deceptacon stuck in my head.
I turn on TV today and I discover that there is now a dedicated sci-fi channel. I discover that this dedicated sci-fi channel is going to be screening Firefly. Excuse me while I squeal like a girl.
I watched Serenity by chance on Star Movies so I know how the series ends. Now I need to find out how it begins. I’ve always wanted to watch it ever since I discovered that in the show, trade between cultures means that in the future everybody speaks this hodgepodge of English and Mandarin and characters occasionally swear at each other in pidgin Chinese.
It’s basically spaceships meets wild west. There were only 14 episodes made before they cancelled the series, and I gotta catch ‘em all.
One of the things I miss about New York is the amount of open space there. It was really…American. Especially in Manhatten, some of the pedestrian sidewalks are so big and spacious it is actually an option to drive on them reasonably fast, if you didn’t mind bits of pedestrians getting on your hubcaps and hitting the occasional potted tree. Perversely, there was more room the further you got into central Manhatten, considering how expensive property values there are. Apparently there was some law in the city statutes about how skyscrapers can only take up so much three-dimensional space for aesthetic reasons, and if you’re building next to a tall skyscraper your average height cannot exceed a certain amount, because it wouldn’t be pretty. Or something. That is how seriously people there take their Right to Open Space.
The upper-class residential district (where Woody Allen lives, and never comes out from) actually sits directly opposite Central Park. It’s like waking up every morning to this vast pastoral idyll, except with squirrels instead of cows and more bicyclists.
It’s one of those words which is actually a little odd, if you think about it. It means the exact opposite of what its parts seem to imply.
I like language. I like synonyms in particular. Its like over the years, a mechanism was hard-coded into English to make communication more difficult. English used to be a language so relaxed, they let playwrights make shit up. These days you need to know what ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘portmanteau’ mean to be considered literate.
Sometimes, the only way I can make sense of things is to write them down. I have that line written very neatly in the notebook I always carry about, because it’s true. Words, crafted and set down, have a clarity that speech or thought can’t match up to, and I believe that. This isn’t to say that everything I write is true, but since this is a blog, I thought that that’s a distinction I should make up-front. The following is an exercise in writing, and should be read as such.
- Sam
Ernest Hemingway apparently once bet his friends $10 each that he could write a short story in six words. It went “For Sale: Baby shoes, Never Worn”. They paid up.
Wired magazine decided to ask lots of writers to have a go. I like these.

Weeping, Bush misheard Cheney’s deathbed advice.
- Gregory Maguire
Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?
- Eileen Gunn
Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
- Alan Moore
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood
Corpse parts missing. Doctor buys yacht.
- Margaret Atwood
Leia: “Baby’s yours.” Luke: “Bad news…”
- Steven Meretzky
Dorothy: “Fuck it, I’ll stay here.”
- Steven Meretzky
I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ?
- Neil Gaiman
Kirby had never eaten toes before.
- Kevin Smith
I miss Calvin and Hobbes. Life seemed…simpler back when there was a regular Calvin and Hobbes. Sure, I could read it again, but it’ll never be the same, because at the back of your mind you’ll always know that Calvin has no future. He ends. He’s not a living character anymore, and all those old comic strips are just memories, even if you’ve never seen them before.
I got the same feeling reading The Salmon of Doubt. It was the most depressing humour book I ever read next to Mostly Harmless, though I think Mostly Harmless classifies as ’sadism’ rather than ‘humour’.
Cat and Girl continue to be awesome. A lot of days, the comics are pretty hit-or-miss, and depend if your university days were spent in a cramped little shared room doing liberal arts. Today’s is great though. (The one titled ‘Model UN’)
It’s basically a run-on series of witty rejoinders mixed in with existentialism and self-deprecation.
I consider this comic to be the epitome of intelligent wit.
Started debate coaching again. I didn’t realise how much I missed it. This is going to sound going to be egotistical, but it’s nice being right about everything for once.
There’re only a couple of things I’m good at. One of them is being able to sound correct about complex problems provided I’ve got enough information to bluff my way out and the person listening doesn’t know better. The other is literature, which I enjoy, though I think I write better prose than poetry. I get a lot of questions about whether I’m psyched about uni. I guess I am, but the problem is I can’t do both the things I’m good at at once. They’re not exactly complementary fields of study, and the way I see it, anything I pick means me giving up something else I’d like to do. No, I don’t want to do philosophy. Or be a lit teacher/professor.
On the flip side, I also get that it’s a little unfair that I am good at these things, considering I’ve never worked for either. The old saying about hard work isn’t true at all. Not that I’ve never worked for anything. I have seen some smart people fail at things because they didn’t try, but I have yet to see anybody become genuinely good at the things I am good at through hard work. It’s hard to explain. If I’m looking at an issue or a passage things just…occur to me. It’s kind of like how some people are naturally intuitive about fashion, or interior decorating. I just happen to be better at academia, which is slightly more marketable.
So I’m not really complaining, just saying, is all.