Merry Christmas, You Arse

Don't get me wrong here.  Unlike Scary Oliver (Cromwell, not Jamie), I'm not anti-Christmas - by all means, eat yourself sick, fight with your family, have a snowball fight if you're in the northern hemisphere or dunk your hot feet in the pool if you're in the southern hemisphere. I love all these things - as long as I can make up with my family afterward, and we can go back to 'drinking wine and talking shit', as my dear Papa likes to say. I have to say though, I come down on the side of anti-crazy.  What is it about this nowadays mostly psudo-religious festival that seems to bring out the cray-zay in usually perfectly sane people?

White Witch + Ebenezer Scrooge + Fancy Armour = Bad News if Your Name is Charles I

Personally, I blame the gift cycle. 

The gift cycle is where you get a gift from someone, maybe they don't know you real well, like in a Secret Santa thing, or maybe they're just having an off day, or maybe they're just jerks, and the short straw of it is that they pick out something for you that is slightly off-target at best, woefully inappropriate at worst.  It sits on your floor for either a few weeks (if you're a Trade-Me-phile), or up to a year (if you're a re-gifter, like I am), when you can finally get rid of the damn thing.  But what the reciever of said crappy gift often doesn't realise is that if it's me giving them that gift, I've stressed my little brain out thinking of a good 'un, and that was the best I could come up with.  It's giving me palpatations just thinking of it, quite frankly. 

In quite unrelated news, I had a wee baking related disaster on Tuesday.  Coming off the untold glory that was my pistachio, honey and white chocolate French macaroons, I figured that I'd make raspberry French macaroons for a work thing that we were having.  Little did I realise that humidity really screws the hell out of French macaroons, so I was left with a big, expensive, sticky, raspberry mess.  They tasted good, but Damn!  They were sticky.  So I ate them all, and ended up like Edward in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - big red face all sticky, but not sitting next to a witch who was trying to get me to tell her about my siblings.  Or eyeing the bottom of the box in the hope of finding more sticky goodness there - no, I was more trying not to puke my sugary load all over the house.

So, I made good old cheese scones instead, and they went down a treat.

If this ends up being my last post for 2010, hope y'all have a spendid wee holiday, whether you're in the sun or the snow.  I'll be in Hamz, kicking it with the Lad and my family, so we'll be on restricted water rations (ho-hum, that just means more alcohol, poor wittle us...), we'll be road-trippin' it up the country and then back down again.  So either fun times! or horrible, horrible mistake... I'll let you know.

Views and Reviews

The more observant amongst you, my massive audience, will have noticed that I'm kind of fooling around with the look of the blog.  So bear with me a bit, because I'm re-jigging where you can find things and what I'm doing and all that.  I've also got some new sections, Rants (which I'm planning to just be sort of informed opinion pieces), and Reviews (which I'm hoping is fairly self explanitory).

Invasion of the Killer Brains

Wouldn't that be a great title for a B-movie?  Maybe it already is... but anyway, I'm trying to retrain my brain.  Hard ask with a brain such as mine, but if I'm going to be studying again next year, it's good to get used to reading in an academic type format again... goodbye, sweet novels, I knew you well.

So, that having been said, I'm reading some pretty interesting stuff at the moment.  I mean, it doesn't all have to be stuffy toff reading!  Okay, so I am reading Karl Marx's Theory of History: a defence by G.A. Cohen... maybe not everyone's idea of exciting bedtime reading, but still... makes quite the change from Sookie Stackhouse, that's for sure.  And Fight the Power by Chuck D from Public Enemy (they are touring out to lil' ol' EnnZed next year, and I've always meant to read this book... every time I check it into the library, I try to get it out, but it always has a hold on it.  Not this time though).  Also I've just started Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Theory by Patricia Melzer.  Which is super interesting, though it's mostly about SF-type films rather than books.  I'm not fussy though.

Digressing back to SF-esque writing now, despite Ray Bradbury scaring the pants off me when I was a kid (I didn't sleep properly for nearly a month after reading Something Wicked This Way Comes), I still love him.  And I love him even more after reading this article, which was published in the New York Times in June 2009. There has been a lot of kerfuffle in the library community about closures and restrictions and price increases and stuff.  It would be real easy for me to go, 'Aww, that's just the States'... but the fact is that the recession has affected the whole world, which creeps me out no end, you know, how it really is becoming like the economic version of Chaos Theory, where a butterfly flaps it's wings in the Amazon and Wall Street crumbles.  I know it's a lot more complex than that, but it just seems that way to me.

Scary Shit... Look out for the Dust Witch!!