SATURDAY

Another thing I read in the news.

This is a photo of the Arrow Boys, a Sudanese militia group who defend their village against bandits. They use a variety of weapons including firearms, arrow, poisoned darts and anything else they can make or find in the forests.

These bandits are real bastards. They belong to a group known as the Lord's Resistance Army, who once had a purpose but now just murder and steal for survival. One of the local Arrow Boy chiefs Samuel Manase says, "They kill in different ways. Sometimes people are shot dead, other times men are surrounded by a circle of LRA members, beaten to death with clubs. Earlier, I saw men here being chopped up with pangas [machetes]."

While its tragic they have to resort to such measures, these Arrow Boys are amazingly badass. I mean sure, they have armed ten year old boys on patrol but seriously, this story would make a fucking good movie.


Full news article here.

WEDNESDAY

Busy from exams so here's some stuff I read in the news.

If you saw the news this morning you may have heard that there was a massive stampede in Cambodia. It was during a major festival held annually in their capital city Phnom Phen and hundreds of people were cramped on a bridge. For reasons unknown, panic erupted and over 300 people were killed in the stampede.

When I read this, my first reaction was to laugh. How does something like this even happen? You can't really imagine the tragedy and feel sympathetic for something this ridiculous. It's like when you see old photos of the Holocaust, its hard to feel sorry for the Jews because you become desensitised to the piles and piles of barely human-looking bodies.

Anyway, I read on and there were some stories of individual tragedies. Most of the victims were young 18-24 year old girls and there were many grieving mothers. Afterwards, I did feel pretty bad about the whole thing which is why I was compelled to write this post. 300 is a lot of people dead. To put it in perpsective, I barely have 300 Facebook friends.

On a lighter topic, I also saw a picture of this in the newspaper, which I thought was the coolest thing ever.

Also, apparently there's someone in our school called 'Stan Lee'. If anyone knows/sees him, you can tell him he has an awesome name.

FRIDAY

I haven't gone on the computer for the last four days. Not that it helped my productivity much. I've just switched to iPod games. For anyone interested, I just installed 'Tiny Chef', which is like an iPod version of Restaurant City. Also, I really like the new Fruit Ninja arcade mode.

I'm a little bit worried about exams because I haven't been working all that arduously over the past few weeks. Mostly it's English that worries me because that was my best subject in my last report so I don't want to ruin it. Also it's the most nerve-racking test, despite being the shortest.

Now for a funny video Louie (or Alex) found. It's a video of a reporter who can't stop laughing at a guest who's vocal chords were damaged by an operation.

Nothing to do

Wow I'm almost getting as bad as Tim with my regular postings.

Anyway, I just realised the other day that there is absolutely nothing to do on the internet that is not game/video/music/porn related. Each time I go on the internet I can almost immediately exhaust all sources of entertainment possible without raising the ire of my mother. Actually this is raising my mum's ire quite a bit right now. First I go to Wikipedia to see if the featured article is any good that day. Then it's to Facebook to see if anyone said anything interesting or anything I can twss to. After that is Roger Ebert where I check to see reviews for any new movies (most of them time there aren't any). And then it's to the Dilbert blog, where I read the comic and have a quick skim of the blog entry (I don't find them quite interesting anymore). Finally I check this and any other blogs for updates. On a good day when there is actually interesting stuff on all these pages it can take around 15 minutes before I am bored. On bad days it can be a few seconds.
Can anyone save me from this dilemma by suggesting some interesting sites to go to which are not game/video/music/porn related? Basically I'm looking for a site with lots of text and not many pictures. Also it would help if the site didn't look dodgy e.g. lots of ads for movies and games that really catch the eye.

Office Quote of the Day: The principle is sound, To avoid illness, expose yourself to germs enabling your immune system to develop antibodies. I don't know why everyone doesn't do this... Maybe they have something against living forever.

That is all.

SATURDAY

Went to food fair today. Most people reading this would have heard about the extreme weather we suffered. It was really hot and sunny with random moments when it would rain bucketloads. As kind of expected, there wasn't much to do there besides hang around and talk to people. We wondered how the hell people had the foresight to bring umbrellas when it was so unbearably hot in the morning. It was because they had brought them to use for shade.

When the weather got a bit more stable, there were some performances. The dance from Year 11 was the highlight of my day. You can find it on Facebook. I actually had a pretty good time today. It wasn't a particularly exciting day but it was enjoyable.

FRIDAY

Lately I've found myself unable to kill small insects, not even those tiny sand-grain sized gnats that float around my table lamp. This is strange because only a few months ago, I took pleasure in torturing ants by trapping them with white-out and glue. The start of this behaviour probably came when there was a fat, noisy blow-fly in my room and I couldn't bring myself to kill it. It annoyed me for at least half an hour until I decided to take down my window fly-screen and shoo it out.

I blame these sentiments on the weather. Pretty much everything about the summer weather makes me feel good. Even the nights where its so hot that you're sweating in bed and can't sleep at all and you stay up thinking about things you normally don't think about but you probably should.

Anyway, to make up for this whimsical and mostly pointless post, here's the best Youtube video ever.

THURSDAY

I really don't like the new MSN messenger emoticons. I was compelled to write this after seeing what they did to the sunglasses emoticon.

Before

 

After

Why the hell did they do this? They just turned a perfectly good smiley into a shit one. I've gotten used to the new :) and :( smileys but I don't think I'll ever be using (H) again.

The other weekend I watched A Clockwork Orange, which I thought was really great. I was blown away by the opening sequence, though you need to watch it on a large screen in a dark room to feel its full effect. Otherwise its just random colours set to trippy music. There's a lot of criticism about the lack of morality in this film, though I was too sucked in by the style to realise this while watching.

Some crazy shit going on here.

I don't think I've written this on my blog but for 4U English, my idea so far is to make a video about someone who gets imprisoned in a bathroom.

Also, I got to thinking about interesting dates like today's (11/11) and I can't believe I totally missed the palindrome date on the 1st of February this year (01.02.2010). Oh well. I'll just have to wait for the 11th of February next year.

TUESDAY

New Sucker Punch trailer!

SATURDAY

I have had an epiphany.

Let us first assume that time travel backwards has not been proven impossible.

There's this episode of 'The Big Bang Theory' where Sheldon is discussing his roommate agreement with Leonard. He says 'If either of us invent time travel we go back to five seconds from now.' He then pauses for five seconds. 'Well that's disappointing.'

So what if we got every credible scientific community in the world to set an 'International Time Travel Target.' If this became widely accepted and received massive global attention, then it could actually work if we ever invent a time machine. Imagine the suspense of watching an event like this. Imagine if we decided to set the date in the past. Mind blown.

The problem with this idea is that it's really stupid but it sounded cool when it randomly popped in my head today. Many people have probably thought of this and I'd like to know if anyone's seen any idea like this being attempted.

Cats

Wow, I haven't updated in ages. Recently I've been very busy. Watching cat videos. Here are some of my favourites:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrI7mHVHlEc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLDSE7RHvno
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_S5cXbXe-4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IytNBm8WA1c

The last one is a compilation so there are some in there that aren't that funny. Enjoy :D

Office quote of the day: You left your stove on. And the TV. Also your cat's dead. It's in the freezer.

That is all.