highlyeccentric | Entries tagged with weird

Numerous men entertain the most lurid fantasies about Mrs Mills, and bombard her with letters, questionable drawings and hilarious photographs. On the other hand, there are some people, such as Ms LB of Peterborough, who are convinced that she “must be a man” and seek reassurance. Mrs Mills replied: “Only last night Mr Mills reaffirmed my essential femininity. Several times.”
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I have just begun a relationship with a man, and everything appears to be going well. However, I would like to have some outside reassurance and thought that consulting a mystic would be a good idea. Where can I find one?

Ms GFD, Eastbourne

Very sensible, as long as you remember the other important rules: never trust a man whose name begins with a vowel; never wear red before the second Sunday after Epiphany; and always put your left shoe on first (except when south of the equator). Reputable mystics can be found in tastefully decorated caravans on the outer fringes of fairgrounds. Some sceptics say they are a poor substitute for friends, but this underestimates the power of the dark side, as the great Obi-Wan Kenobi so wisely put it.
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I am convinced that evolution has developed the human brain to ask one overriding question when people see members of the opposite sex: “Would I sleep with him/her?” I believe that men have three answers to this: “Yes”, “No”, “Possibly”. What answers do women have?

Dr JW, London

As you would expect, being more complex creatures, women have myriad responses: “Now, and don’t whimper”; “This should get that tap fixed”; “Oh, go on, then”; “If you must, at least it’ll be quick”; “All right, if I can stay awake”; “Okay, you did buy dinner”; “Certainly not. Just because you bought dinner . . .”; “After the way you referred to my mother, forget it”; and “Ha, ha, ha”.
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My wife has often told me that making love to me is rather less exciting than watching paint dry. As we near one of those red-letter anniversaries, I wondered if you had any helpful suggestions.

RT, Exeter

On your anniversary, paint the bedroom ceiling.
...

Lights on or off? What do you think, Mrs Mills?

RAM, Manchester

What a bizarre question. On, of course, otherwise I tend to bump into things, and I find it much easier to read.

The Omega Male and I on tills at work today, discussing eavesdropping- the things you overhear which remind you that you are more (or less) normal than you think you are.

Says I: I was sitting out the back of Manning with my friend Tristan the other day, waiting for someone. We weren't saying much, and I was listening to the girls at the next table talk about their boyfriends. Girl One was talking about how her boyfriend wouln't commit. Girl Two cuts in and says: I used to think Bert* was like that. But then we went out the other night, and after he'd got home he rang me. And he said "I know I don't like talking about the future with you, but I want you to know that I do think about it. I think about us taking Abnormal Psych together next year!" Whereup on she sighed, and delcared, hand to breast, "I LOVE him!"

Says the Omega Male: That's it! That's the definition of Commitment! Abnormal Psych!
I'm going to write on Susie's* birthday card this week, I'm going to write: I think about taking Abnormal Psych with you...

Says I: I dunno about Commitment, but it sounds like the definition of marriage to me- Abnormal Psychology.

Says the Omega Male: haha, yes.
So I'll say to her: Susie, let's take Abnormal Psych together. Then we'll know it's for real. That will keep her satisfied- Abnormal Psych.
If only they were all that easy to please.

*names changed to... well, actually because I forget them

looks like the London Times has a new agony aunt. one with a penchant for snark...

My mother-in-law, who is 87, has suffered from age-related hair loss for a number of years... she was eventually persuaded, by her family, of the merits of a wig. I am terrified of her next visit... What would be the better approach: “Your wig looks nice,” or: “Your hair looks nice”?
EH, Ryde, Isle of Wight

“Lovely hat.”

or this advice on romance:

...the person I am in love with is oblivious to the fact that I even like him... how does one go about telling someone of one’s affections?
AP, by e-mail

Keep quiet. Why spoil an idyllic relationship? Carry on beatifically floating through a haze of idealised romance.

Baba Brinkman raps the Canterbury Tales
(Courteously shared with me by

goblinpaladin, whom i'm most glad to discover because he means i'm no longer the only blogging undergrad medievalist at USyd. Now Jenny must mock both of us together)
Anyway, I think it's rather cool. When you think about rap you're supposed to think of da boyz in da hood, leaping into impromtu story and social critique from the margins... Which is somewhat like the image you're supposed to get from the Tales: da pilgrimz on da road, launching into story and social critique. Both of which are constructed- some pilgrims may have made up stories, and some rappers may be able to compose on the hoof, but not these ones here.
Brinkman is Canadian and will be performing at the Brisbane Writers Festival in a few weeks. How's that for popular medievalism, Dr Nokes?

Odd stuff from Slouching Towards Extimacy:
What to get the Anglo-Saxonist Who Has Everything: Viking Kitten Soft Toy
I quote from the website: This fearsome Norse Warrior loves pillaging and plundering all in his path… as he bobs around little ponds in his tiny boat. He’s 7 inches tall and has the toughest, most threatening, helmet and weaponry made purely from felt and stuffing.
And observe said kittens in a musical interlude with much testosterone

I am the Lobster, and the curse stops here...
-Kate, mishearing "I am the last one, and the curse stops here", the refrain to the Whitlam's The Curse Stops Here

"At first I thought it was I am the Lobster. I know there's a song called I am the Walrus, so I thought for a while that I might be mishearing that. Because why would you write a song about being a Lobster?"

Silly as it sounds, the Prime Minister's scare campaign is based on these two contradictory accusations: wages will go up and wages will go down.
Tany Plibersek touts the Labour line for SMH

As I get older, (and yes I'm slow on the uptake) I'm starting to realise that we're all in this together; what we do to one person, we do to ourselves and as I've said in other posts, you cannot separate women's rights from men's because they're one in the same, it's a matrix where if one half is degraded, the other suffers as well.
Sam De Brito on objectification of men in the media
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AHAHA! Anyone who knows me IRL has probably heard my spiel about all the days in the medieval year in which you could not have sex, and the humourous parrallels with the Truce of God, which listed all the days of the year in which you could not make war. Many of these line up (lent, advent, sunday, and wednesday being on both lists, i believe). This gives me a humourous image of a knight waking up one morning, realising it's one of the few days of the year in which he was allowed to do both, and then trying to decide which to do first.
Anyway. Carl Pyrdum has put up this excellent flow-chart questionaire which will help you all decided when to have medieval sex. Have fun :)

Medievalists are easily amused. First it was underpants. ( now it's flying poo )
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check out Modern Medieval on violence, religion, rhetoric, social cohesion, the middle ages and the twenty first century. Complete with bonus links to other people saying things about those things.

and a pretty poem on the blog of one Bronze John. not medieval at all, just pretty.

In an article entitled "A question of What Would Jesus Buy", by Ross Honeywill of the Centre for Customer Strategy, one finds many interesting quotes... one for your delectation this evening:
Reverend Billy has the last word on the matter, "Blessed are you who confuse consumerism with freedom, for you shall be delighted to discover the difference."

Anna Greer has an interesting article on harrassment of women and particularly feminist bloggers online. And, via Ancrene Wiseass, one of said bloggers talks about the problem and some ways to deal with it. Ancrene's post which I linked under her name has some other links in the same vein.

I can now confirm that the possum-related telephone message, last semester, was not just an incident of Ratenator Pointless Advice. An unfortunate second year did, in fact, wash a possum. (but not dry it or turn it over, since it was by the end of the wash an ex-possum)

thanks to Alex for the starter verse

In honour of Ginny and Neville

( Very minor plot spoiler here )

Snape, Snape, Severus Snape... (Dumbledore!)

no spoilers, just amusement

Someone presented a very august paper at Leeds, and the bloggers have run away with it, and now our modern literate culture is all based on underpants.

Check it out at Got Medieval
It's not as if there were piles of soiled underwear lying around the towns of medieval Europe, covering all the available surfaces, thoroughly stinking up the place, until someone finally said, "I know, we'll make paper out of them, that'll solve that problem," and then with all the paper lying around, people started reading and writing out of self defense. Then, bam, we had ourselves a Renaissance in celebration.

And also at Unlocked Wordhoard
I want to suggest that the rise of underpants wearing was driven by a market in used underwear, so that the medieval person could say, "well, I'll invest in this underwear because I know I'll be able to recoup a small part of that investment later when I sell it to be made into books."

Yes, that the new meme! Increased literacy caused people to wear underpants, not visa-versa! And I already have proof: Paris Hilton, known non-underwearer, is also not a very literate person. I, on the other hand, read a great deal, and I wear underpants every day. Indeed, when my children were illiterate, they wore diapers, not underpants, but now that they are literate, they wear underpants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFAWR6hzZek

apparently the link shifts around, so if it dies go to youtube and search "introducing the book"

all hail Carl Pyrdum of Got Medieval for this bit of humourous medieval goodness

"it is civilised to queue, it's glorious to be polite", according to the Chinese. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6351667.stm

Melanie says when she was in Beijing recently, the locals could be seen in the parks, practicing queueing. Not lining up *for* anything, per se. Just lining up.

oh wow. According to this article (http://standinaqueue.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/beijing-china/), other slogans in favour of queues include:

“Voluntarily wait in line, be polite and put other people first.”

“I care about and participate in the Olympics and set an example by queuing.”

and finally

“I am a member of the queue.”

Back on May 8, 2005, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology held the first ever Time Traveller's Convention, correctly assuming that "technically, you would only need one". Urging folk to leave details of the convention inside library books and carved on to anything non-biodegradable, the organisers hoped their knees-up would be well broadcast to people of the future. (At the time, I begged every editor I knew to send me there, explaining all I'd need was an air ticket, accommodation and enough alfoil with which to craft a convincing "future suit and hat", but, perhaps foreseeing dark futures off their own, all deferred.) As it turned out, the convention was a "mixed success", with "no confirmed time travellers" in attendance, Tina Fey of Saturday Night Live blaming the poor showing on the fact that "people from the future already know the party sucked".

-Jack Marx

I'll bet you never knew that Beowulf disproves evolution, did you?

Why, then, do so many literature critics say that Beowulf is fiction? It is because they do not believe that dinosaur creatures lived at the same time men lived. Their evolutionary worldview says that dinosaurs lived long ages before men evolved on the earth. Therefore, in their minds, this all must be fiction. But with a Biblical worldview, we can see that dinosaurs entered the ark with Noah—land species at least—and they lived on the earth again after the Flood. But the post-Flood earth was not so hospitable to large creatures and they eventually became almost extinct.

The unknown poet was a remarkable writer. He wrote with power and vivid descriptions. He wrote in pagan times, before missionaries reached the people. God and the devil are mentioned, and Adam and Cain. These pagans knew some of that ancient history, but they knew nothing of Christ or of New Testament teachings. Pagans valued human strength, vengeance, boasting, and treasure gained by plunder. The poem extols all of these and not Christian virtues.

May I draw your attention to the last paragraph, and it's startling twists of logic? This segment came from a section 'proving' that Beowulf was not a product of Christian England, but an authentic survival of pagan denmark.
1) the pagan Danes in 495 are highly unlikely to have know anything of Judaeo-Christian mythology, but if they did it's far more likely to have been 'something of Christ or New Testament teachings', since if they had bumped into a Romano-Christian at any time, he would've been a Christian. Mind you the chances of that are pretty slim- Denmark is a good long way north of the scary pagan Germanic groups the Romans dealt with.
2) the Beowulf poem, if I remember Melanies lectures correctly, mentions Christ. So that shoots that argument right down anyway ;)

More oddball washing instructions (Column 8, since last week), this time from Susan Lewis, of Randwick: "My daughter has a top which has extensive washing instructions, in several languages, including: 'If printed on, do not iron', 'If decorated, do not iron', followed, inexplicably, by 'If captured, say nothing'."

-who else but Column 8?

Rivers Clothing Co. certainly understand their role in consumer society- providing distressed wives and daughters somewhere to turn when the menfolk in their lives couldn't care less what they look like. Rivers, if my father is anything to go on, provides clothes which satisfy your average aussie dagg's desires for comfort and not looking too good, while providing for women a man with whom it is not mortifying to be seen.

Their Father's Day posters in the window of the Mid City Centre store read

If He Really Loves You, He'll Wear Whatever You Give Him.

Just what we've all bee wondering.... Is google God?

and if you've been convinced by that logic, then it's time to observe... The Ten Commandments of Google:

Thou shalt have no other Search Engine before me, neither Yahoo nor Lycos, AltaVista nor Metacrawler. Thou shalt worship only me, and come to Google only for answers.
Thou shalt not build thy own commercial-free Search Engine, for I am a jealous Engine, bringing law suits and plagues against the fathers of the children unto the third and fourth generations.
Thou shalt not use Google as a verb.
Thou shalt remember each passing day and use thy time as an opportunity to gain knowledge of the unknown.
Thou shalt honor thy fellow humans, regardless of gender, sexual orientation or race, for each has invaluable experience and knowledge to contribute toward humankind.
Thou shalt not misspell.
Thou shalt not hotlink.
Thou shalt not plagiarise or take undue credit for others work.
Thou shalt not use reciprocal links nor link farms, for I am a vengeful but fair engine and will diminish thy PageRank. The Google Dance shall cometh.
Thou shalt not manipulate Search Results. Search Engine Optimization is but the work of Microsoft.

(clearly Google doesn't require grammatical talents from Her followers- see points 8 and 9)

1.Phantom Sock: Some people lose socks in common laundries. I've even lost one myself since I've been here. But the overwhelming sock-factor in my college laundry experience is the phantom sock. This sock is black. This sock is not mine. But no matter what I do, it ends up in my washing at least once a fortnight. I fish it out and put it on the "unloved underwear" shelf, but it finds its way back into my laundry pile. Sometimes it makes it all the way to my sock basket, from whence i'll fish it out some days later and return it to the laundry, where the whole cycle begins again.

I complained to my neighbours about this sock. So what does Reena do? On seeing me leave the laundry, with my washing going round and round in the mashine, she goes over to the Unloved Undie Shelf and finds a sock. A sock which is not black, but is nevertheless not mine. So that night, when I'm sorting my washing, looking for the phantom sock, there's a different phantom sock in there.
The distress this causes me cannot be underestimated.

2. Mismatched documents: when printing from Grizzly Bear, the student printer, it often happens that along with your assigment you'll pick up bits and pieces of other people's printing.
Quote of the day from something I picked up along with my assignment on medieval liturgy:
He said there were other places he'd rather be than in my vagina.

My vagina was saddened by this news.

That really says it all, doesn't it?

All the worst Australian band names compiled here in one amusing list.

Highlights include-

Gonzo's Moonwomb
A trio from Melbourne. I'll defer to their website: "a schismatic meld of unique instrumentation...aggression juxtaposed with funkiness...dirty fat angry Bass, filthy electronically contorted and distorted chunky analogue Keyboard, frantic maniacal Trumpet, wrenching screaming Vocals, and cataclysmic Drums - twisting, deviating, contrasting, and interchanging with funkified Organ and Bass, hard-edged Trumpet, grooving beats, heartfelt Vocals..."

Simian Gibbet
Sounding like something that might dangle from chimpanzee's arse, Melbourne band Simian Gibbet eventually caught up with the rest of the world in realising their name was absolutely terrible. They've wisely changed it, and are now in search of a drummer who'd like to play in a band called Extra Virgin.

Bring Phillip
Who is "Phillip"? To what should we "bring" him and why? These are the questions with which this experimental synth band from the 80s wished we would all nurse ourselves to sleep at nights. That they're nowhere to be found today is testament, in part, to the brilliance of the name.

and a little Tim Freedman trivia:

Penguins on Safari
Before The Whitlams, Tim Freedman was involved in a fistful of bands with dreadful names. Itchy Feet was a particular stinker, but Penguins on Safari was by far the most woeful.

then there are these:

Lubricated Goat
Legendary band from the 80s and 90s famed for playing nude. Less said the better.

People With Chairs Up Their Noses
Too much information - implausible at that - from this Melbourne band from the very early 80s, though their page at e-pop.com features the erroneous claim: "The name gives you some idea of the bands sound."

my personal favourite:

This Is Serious Mum
It suited this band of Melbourne idiots. Still, ridiculous.

just as well Silverchair went with the CS Lewis reference (never did figure out why though)... or Warm Fish Milkshake would be right now topping that list.

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Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I shall wing it, I have wung it

Entries tagged with weird

Mrs Mills strikes again...

Commitment: Eavesdroppings Discussed With the Omega Male

o_0

Popular Medievalism and Stuffed Toys

Mondegreen of the Day

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Poo, and other things on a tuesday

Wash the possum, dry the possum, turn the possum over!

aaand we come back to Harry...

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Forget Sex. It's all about medieval underpants

Introducing... THE BOOK!

Line up! Line up! Line up for Civilisation!

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Rivers Know Their Place

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strange quirks of college life

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