Halloween Dinner

The annual Kennedy Halloween dinner was, as normal, highly doubtful in the quality of the course names but met with high acclaim from those lucky enough to get a position around the table.

Other courses were:

STARTER
Primeval sludge of the netherworld


NIBBLE
Eye of newt, gall of goat,
fillet of a fenny snake,
does this little nibble make.


MAIN
Delicately poached portion of a witch’s inner thigh,
served with pate of the gonads of felix niger.

Aren't you sorry you missed it?
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Pipe Hotel

Cute. But no thanks.
...

Oh no, not another one...

Meggie has tagged me with one of those dreaded memes. Funny, I always though she was my friend. No, I'm joking, Meggie. She also awarded me a distressingly pink, but appreciated nonetheless, prize:


So how could I not do her meme? OK, here goes Meggie.

1. Name one person who made you laugh last night?
Arnold Schwarzenegger claiming that marijuana was a leaf, not a drug.

2. What were you doing at 0800?
Sitting in bed, drinking coffee, reading the paper. I'm a student. We do that sort of thing.

3. What were you doing 30 minutes ago?
Watching the news.

4. What happened to you in 2006?
The cat died, finished Graduate Diploma of Psychology, went to New Caledonia, 25th wedding anniversary, had a nipple pierced, went to Scotland for my niece’s funeral, audited a chocolate factory.

5. What was the last thing you said out loud?
“Thank you.”

6. How many beverages did you have today?
Coffee, decaf, water, soup (does that count?), beer, more decaf.

7. What colour is your hairbrush?
Yellow. Do you have a problem with that?

8. What was the last thing you paid for?
Coffee – tall latte.

9.Where were you last night?
Home.

10. What colour is your front door?
Brunswick green with stained glass inserts.

11. Where do you keep your change?
I drop it in local playgrounds to give the children a cheap thrill.

12. What’s the weather like today?
Sunny, mild, windy.

13. What’s the best ice-cream flavour?
Vanilla.

14. What excites you?
What sort of excitement? Are you talking about getting me agitated? Then it would include lying politicians (tautology?), climate change deniers, slick salesmen and door-to-door purveyors of fine religion. Are you talking about jumping up and down cheering? Nothing really. Are you talking excited, as in aroused? The feel of skin on skin.

15. Do you want to cut your hair?
No. Had a haircut on Tuesday. Actually, I had them all cut on Tuesday.

16. Are you over the age of 25?
Years?

17. Do you talk a lot?
Enough.

18. Do you watch the O.C.?
I have no idea what the O.C. is.

19. Do you know anyone named Steven?
Yes. A few.

20. Do you make up your own words?
Squurrox.

21. Are you a jealous person?
I don’t think so. A little envious, at times.

22. Name a friend whose name starts with the letter ‘A’.
Alan. I also know an Aïda.

23. Name a friend whose name starts with the letter ‘K’.
Kaye.

24. Who’s the first person on your received call list?
Beats me. What’s a received call list? (Who's writing this list?)

25. What does the last text message you received say?
“Excellent. I’ll see if she’s free. A plus tard!”

26. Do you chew on your straw?
No. Don’t use straws.

7. Do you have curly hair?
Some.

28. Where’s the next place you’re going to?
I assume you don’t mean bed or the shops. Thailand.

29. Who’s the rudest person in your life?
The Liberal Party, en masse. No, sorry, the Liberal Party, excluding Petro Georgio.

30. What was the last thing you ate?
Hot corned beef and mustard sandwich. With a beer.

31. Will you get married in the future?
No plans to.

32. What’s the best movie you’ve seen in the past 2 weeks?
The best because it is also the only one. “Sleeping with the Enemy”. DVD. My wife was doing a family violence assignment.

33. Is there anyone you like right now?
Yes. (Shhhh!)

34. When was the last time you did the dishes?
Yeah…whatever.

35. Are you currently depressed?
No.

36. Did you cry today?
No.

37. Why did you answer and post this?
I’m starting to wonder that myself. Is there anyone still awake out there?

38. Tag 5 people who would do this survey…
No.

OK Meggie, that's the best I can do.
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The Cultivator

This is Cannabis sativa, commonly called marijuana. And a wide assortment of other names.



This is Arnold Schwarzenegger, commonly called the Governator. And a wide assortment of other names.

Now it has been reported that the Governator has decreed that marijuana is not a drug.

It is a leaf.

A fine distinction, Arnie.

Does that mean that opium is not a drug, it is just a seed pod?

That cocaine is also just a leaf?

That mescaline is just a cactus?

That psilocybin is just a mushroom?

That nicotine is also just a leaf?

Arnie, I suspect that you have been standing down wind of some pretty dodgy fires of late.

Light at the end...

One exam to go and the course is finished!

Well, this stage of it, anyway.

...

Good news!

We have just been told that, after his chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Margaret's brother has been declared cancer free.

◊◊◊

On a related note, the standard procedure is to say that the patient is in 'remission'.

From the psychology point of view, I don't like the term

It implies that you are on borrowed time, that it (IT!) may return, like some marauding creature from the swamp. If you do get cancer again, the temptation to feel that you have 'lost' because it has returned will be very strong and very depressing. With 'remission' it is just one on-going fight and you are never declared the winner.

On the other hand if you say "OK, I beat it! Move on!", you will be in a much better position if you do get cancer again. The thought in your mind will be "I beat the last one, I will beat this one". A totally new fight with no baggage.

...

As ye sow...

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

I had a very interesting lunch yesterday. J Cosmo Newbery and I went to the city and had lunch with Brazilian pilot, Gustavo, his wife Helena and their young daughter, Karen.

So why was this so special? Well, we had never met these people before, you see.

But many years ago, a seed had been planted...

Cosmo had a period in his life, prior to his poetry efforts, where he spent his idle moments teasing Nigerian conmen. On his site, Sweetchillisauce, he records an amazing string of correspondences he had with these guys. Most people on the internet have met up with the Nigerian Scams; you get an email that offers you amazing amounts of money if you help in a rather dodgy financial deal. Sadly people do fall for the story and it is a multimillion dollar business. For more information see Cosmo's Nigerian Scams FAQ and his Scam Test.

So, how did this lead us to be having lunch with Gustavo and his family?

Gustavo had visited Cosmo's site, read the letters, and decided to try his hand at teasing these guys too. With considerable success, it appears. As he happened to be in Melbourne on holiday he contacted Cosmo, hoping to have a chat.

Now, anyone who deals with lots of money, the way the Nigerians do, is likely to be dangerous. Think Mafia. Think mobs. Think danger. I think Cosmo took me along as protection! Certainly Gustavo knew that danger may have crossed Cosmo's mind - he offered to meet him in a police station! As it was, we opted for a Chinese restaurant.

My point in all this? It's over 10 years since Cosmo first got up the courage to write to a Nigerian scammer. Nothing crossed his mind at the time to suggest that it may result in striking up a friendship so many years later.

Robert Louis Stevenson said not to judge your days by what you harvest but by what you plant.

But it is truly amazing where things take root sometimes.

Photo courtesy J Cosmo Newbery.
...

Murphy's Law

Today, Tuesday, I am required to submit the empirical half of my thesis for marking.

By midday.

Last night, I got the above message on my printer. It seems it decided that it needed a service and it needed it NOW and no way would it print anything until it felt the warm and comforting hands of a service engineer. That was at about 10:30pm.

Through the wonders of Skype and 3¢/min world wide phone calls, I called Epson US to see if there was a way around it. I am still not sure whether I got a person or a computer as the-voice-was-ver-ry-e-ven-ly-mod-u-la-ted but the only advice they could offer was to ring Epson Australian service.

Poo.

So I went to Simon's room and dusted off his old printer and brought it through to use.

It ran out of colour ink.

Then it ran out of black ink.

But eventually I got the thing printed.

Murphy's Law, "If something can go wrong it will" is quoted often enough but what people fail to realise is that Murphy was an optimist.

Mind you, I haven't walked down to the University to submit the report yet.

Who knkows what still might happen?

...

What's 38 years between friends?

Exhibit A:

Two school boys in a 1969 photo at Healesville High School.

Exhibit B:

The same two boys, 38 years later.

Damien and his wife, Fran, came to dinner tonight. First time I had seen Damien since year 10 at high school.

Neither of us had changed a bit.
...

Last requests...

Top eight most common requests to funeral directors:

1. To be cremated with their pet's ashes;
(I hope Fluffy was dead too.)

2. To have a mobile phone in the coffin;
(What message would they have on it? "Sorry, I can't take your call at the moment...")

3. To ensure they are dead;
([bang!] "OK, now what?")

4. For a mirror to be held over the face to check for signs of breathing;
(OK, I'll accept that.)

5. To be cremated naked;
(You are always naked, underneath all your clothes.)

6. To be buried in their own garden;
(I hope they don't have a dog. "Mum, Mutsy's dug up Granny again!".)

7. To be buried with their teeth in;
(In what?)

8. To be buried with all their savings.
(Will they accept a cheque?)

...

Four stages of life

Someone, Meggie?, sent me the above picture of liquids that are supposed to represent the four stages of life.

On reflection I suspect they have missed some:










...

Against the spin...

Interesting.

The blurb about the dancing lady suggests that most people see her spinning anti-clockwise and yet nearly everyone who commented on my last post saw her spinning clockwise.

Obviously I have a lot of very individual, right-brained readers!
...

The Dancer and the Brain.

It's the great Right Brain vs Left Brain Test ...

Do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS	RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic	uses feeling
detail oriented	"big picture" oriented
facts rule	imagination rules
words and language	symbols and images
present and past	present and future
maths and science	philosophy & religion
can comprehend	can "get it" (i.e. meaning)
knowing	believes
acknowledges	appreciates
order/pattern perception	spatial perception
knows object name	knows object function
reality based	fantasy based
forms strategies	presents possibilities
practical	impetuous
safe	risk taking

The Ig Nobel Prizes - 2007

The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
For achievements that first make people LAUGH then make them THINK

MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."

PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.

BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.

CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.

LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.

LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.

PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.

NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.

ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
...

The Death Penalty

Today, Wednesday 10 October, is World Day Against the Death Penalty.

A bit of a mouthful but I agree with the sentiment.
Should you wish to sign a petition, you can do so here .

This topic is a bit too polarising for A Curate's Egg so, if you are interested, it is continued on my 'political' blog here.

Trivia: When I went to the site to sign the petition, it was in French (you can change it to English) but it was apparent from the context that the French phrase "la peine de mort" means "Death penalty".

Presumably it is the origin of the English phrase "to do something under the pain of death".
...