I want Hermione Granger and a Rocket Ship!
Monday January 25th 2010
I'm definitely coming late to the party but if you're any kind of Harry Potter fan you owe it to yourself to check out A Very Potter Musical - an incredibly silly, completely unauthorised musical "reinterpretation" of Harry Potter put together by students at the University of Michigan last year. I could go on and on about how great it is, but all I really need to say is that it features a tap-dancing Lord Voldemort. You hear me? A tap-dancing Lord Voldemort. What the hell are you waiting for? (And what the hell is a Hufflepuff?)
The downside is I now have a crush on Draco Malfoy. Before anyone gets out Scarf of Sexual Orientation I should point out that I have a crush strictly on the AVPM version of Draco Malfoy who is played by the very cute and downright hilarious Laura Lopez (I have no idea why was she continually rolling around the stage but it was extremely amusing).
Anyway, tomorrow's Australia Day (Boo! Hooray! Boo! Hooray! Call me when you're finished) so you can expect an entry on how crap the Hottest 100 turns out to be at least ;)
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File under: Internet Ephemera
Tribes of Londinium
Tuesday January 5th 2010
Yes yes, happy new year all, I've got better things to talk about than what I did on New Years Eve (bugger all really).
I'm using some of my time off work to get some more of my holiday snaps from the UK up on Flickr. One of said photos is of a pile of the Hungerford Bridge in London, festooned with the broken carcasses of skateboards.
I presumed at the time that there was some sadistic security guard who enjoyed confiscating boards off skaters who tried to ride them across the bridge, snapped them in half then threw them onto the pile. However on later reflection it became apparent to me that it was more likely that skaters from the nearby Queen Elizabeth Hall were deliberately depositing their broken boards on the pile as a sort of graveyard, and some quick Googling today suggested that this is in fact the case.
This is great. Why? Because it's a complete throwback to the old, pagan traditions of neolithic and bronze age England!
Further upstream at Battersea there's a stretch of river that's yielded vast (well, vast for archeology :) quantities of relics. Swords, shields, spearheads, that kind of things. The sheer concentration of them leaves no explanation apart from that they were deliberately thrown into the waters as some kind of sacrifice. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the urge to commit treasured personal possessions to the river that motivates today's skaters is fundamentally the same one that motivated the ancient Britons of Battersea.
Even more interestingly this site compares the Hungerford pile to a neolithic mortuary enclosure - a separated, sacred space in which the bodies of the deceased were left to break down to just bones (which were then collected and buried). The author points out that the bridge pier is "an unreachable island in the Thames" - small islands (neither being exactly land or water) meeting the requirements for all kinds of sacred spaces. Great stuff!
Seriously people, there is a thesis in this...
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File under: More Geeky Than Usual
Not Dead
Wednesday December 30th 2009
Today's Wondermark is almost as good as Tusky McMammoth.
I survived Christmas more or less intact. More updates soon.
678
File under: Internet Ephemera
Roman Robots (that clean the floor)
Thursday December 24th 2009
Well it's that time of the year again when I desperately try to face down the reality of my own aging by voting in the Triple J Hottest 100. The process was actually fairly easy this year - in fact the only problem I faced was filling in two slots left over once I'd picked out my favourite songs. That's never happened before, obviously music is getting more and more crap as time wears on (No! It's not because I'm becoming old and irrelevant! Honestly! :)
So my top ten picks for this year (in alphabetical order of artist) are...
Two songs that almost (but not quite) got into the final two slots...
A few more notable tracks from the year...
And that's your lot!
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File under: Musical Snobbery
