Saturday, November 28, 2009

Thick and Fast



Australian Rules football is a curious game. To an extent it's an aerial game - so you need to be tall - however it is very rough - so you can't be tall and sleight like a basketballer. You have to be tall and heavily built. Buuuuut you can't be heavily built and lumbering like a weightlifter - it is also a running game - you have to be tall, heavily built and fast as lightning. It also helps if you are aggressive and not afraid of conflict.

Patterns repeat throughout all of nature - if you start selecting for too many disparate and extreme qualities something invariably has to give. See if the quotes from AFL players below give you a hint as to what might fall by the wayside in the AFL:




"Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein." Mick Malthouse - Collingwood

"I'm going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes." Peter Bell - Fremantle - on his University Law studies

"You guys line up alphabetically by height." and "You guys pair up in groups of three, then line up in a circle." Barry Hall Sydney Captain at training

Brock Maclean (Melbourne) on whether he had visited the Pyramids during his visit to Egypt: "I can't really remember the names of the clubs that we went to."

"He's a guy who gets up at six o'clock in the morning regardless of what time it is." Kevin Sheedy on James Hird

Jonathan Brown, on night Grand Finals vs Day Games "It's basically the same, just darker."

Ron Barassi talking about Gary Cowton "I told him, 'Son, what is it with you. Is it ignorance or apathy?' He said, Barass, I don't know and I don't care.'

Barry Hall (Sydney) when asked about the upcoming season: "I want to kick 70 or 80 goals this season, whichever comes first."

"Luke Hodge - the 21 year old, who turned 22 a few weeks ago"(Dermott Brereton)

"Chad had done a bit of mental arithmetic with a calculator." (Mark Williams)

"He scored that goal after only 22 seconds - totally against the run of play." (Dermott Brereton)

"We actually got the winning goal three minutes from the end but then they scored." (Ben Cousins, West Coast Eagles)

"I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body." (Luke Darcy)

"That kick was absolutely unique, except for the one before it which was identical." (Dermott Brereton)

"I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father." (Shane Wakelin)

"Sure there have been injuries and deaths in football - but none of them serious." (Adrian Anderson)

"If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again."(Andrew Demetriou)

"I would not say he (Chris Judd) is the best centreman in the AFL but there are none better." (Dermott Brereton)

"I never comment on umpires and I'm not going to break the habit of a lifetime for that prat." (Terry Wallace)

Garry Lyon: "Have you ever thought of writing your autobiography?" David Swartz: "On what?"

"Well, either side could win it, or it could be a draw."(Dermott Brereton)

"Strangely, in slow motion replay, the ball seemed to hang in the air for even longer."(Dermott Brereton)

Another thousand words.

www.informationisbeautiful.net

Examples:




Quotelets

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word I am saying.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Look what I found ...


NASA has been faffing about looking for this for ages.

Only words

Doing something on the web, probably applying for jobs, listening to Spotify: "A Chill Out Tribute to Pink Floyd". Awful, really awful.

But up comes "Time" - a favourite song. Pink Floyd were in their twenties when they wrote this, astonishing. I sit out this horrible version to listen to the lyrics - in particular to hear the lines:

"so you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
racing around to come up behind you again "

Wonderful.


So - here - in no particular order - are some snippets of pop words which I particularly like one way or another:




I want a girl with shoes that cut
and eyes that burn like cigarettes

===

and the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French-Canadians
while the overweight Americans wear their patriotic jumpsuits

===

and with its crutch, its old age, its wisdom
it whispers "No, this will be the last."

===

take your silver spoon and dig your grave

===

and wangity-wang wangity-wang, I'm a little airplane nyyeoooow

===

look - I must have a star on my door- or - better still - a door

===

stop it, stop it, it's fucking awful, i hate songs like that

===

the garden's full of furniture, the house is full of plants

===

but I swear in the days still left
we will walk in the fields of gold

===

it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain

===

there's only one girl in the world for you, and she probably lives in Tahiti

===

a plague I call a heartbeat

===

cutting up words and into sticking them lines

===

from Milan, to Yucatan

===

your loveliness goes on and on, yes it does

Friday, November 20, 2009

Quotelets

A business quote:

"He likes to dot the i's and cross the t's - but doesn't realise that someone has written 'shit' and 'tits', in 10ft letters, across the wall"

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Quotelets

"Fuck" is all very well as an exclamation mark, but it's quite poor as a comma.

Tennessee

Having dissed Twitter I now discover that it contains a rich seam of wisdom from an acerbic irascible old man.

http://twitter.com/Shitmydadsays

# "Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn't invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that."

# "You sure do like to tailgate people... Right, because it's real important you show up to the nothing you have to do on time."

# "Tennessee is nice. The first time I vomited was in Tennessee, I think."

Saturday, November 14, 2009

That's my Wonderful Town

When I first came to the UK, aeons ago, people would often spot my accent and ask where I came from. (The accent was clearly colonial, but to English ears hard to determine if it was Australian, South African or New Zealander).

On explaining that I was from Australia I would always be asked - "Oh, which city?" - which was a pointless question as most people here might be able to point to Sydney, Melbourne or perhaps Perth, but they would hardly have heard of Hobart - which is in effect a far flung medium sized country town.

Or so I thought.

Again and again I would get a snippet of terribly sung "Hobart, Tasmania - that's my wonderful town" followed by laughter.

Eventually I worked out that a London DJ had stumbled upon a cringingly provincial jingle from a pissant Hobart radio station. This had been played and guffawed over for many weeks, perfectly understandable as it is hilariously bad.

This clip, stolen from YouTube, has the jingle in all its glory - along with suitable footage.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Samorost2


Samorost2

A tiny, free, point and click game - made by a graphics design student ages ago.

Both the drawings and the puzzles are stylish and witty.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Quotelets

A series of snippets of language that I ejnoyed:

"I'm not a cynic. I'm a disillusioned romantic"

Quotelets

Starting a series of snippets of language I enjoyed:

"You were employed as a Strapper, which is one up from a dung beetle"

Air on the G String

I've already mentioned the wondrous Spotify.

Problem is that you need to be in the right country, you need to have an invitation to use it for free, and most troublesome - you need to install client software - which is not always possible. At work for example.



But Grooveshark has a similarly enormous collection of music to amble through - and runs using a browser with Flash only. Easy.

I have a penchant for popular classical music and was searching for versions of Air on the G String (stop giggling, it's just a pretty piece of music).

Anyhow - Grooveshark offers you the usual suspects - UK Symph, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Nigel Kennedy, Yo-Yo Ma etc - but also a version by "The Fucking Champs". Sadly it was a dull piece - but a glorious example of gratuitously offensive and wilfully stupid band naming.

Anyhow - Grooveshark.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Theory of Relativity, possibly Universal.



Time was, it was fervently believed that this would somehow impress.

Sadly as a medium moves through time it loses gravitas.


Don't get too excited yet.