Archive for Random ramblings & reflections
I have ordered a new leather jacket, the old one mysteriously having become several sizes too large, and it got me thinking about how useful those online parcel tracking services that any shipment company with self-respect has nowadays really are. I really don’t have any use for the knowledge of where between points A and B my leather jacket is, but still I check the link every few hours to see what’s going on. Maybe it has a positive psychological effect on some people, but I’m not one of them. And especially not in this case, when there’s a weekend involved, and the status has read “The parcel is on the way to the recipient’s Post-agent*” since Friday. It could as well have said “Yeah, we moved your parcel to the right stack, but we decided to let it sit at the loading bay for a few days to annoy you, you restless twat” for all I care.
*) The Swedish Post doesn’t deliver parcels to individuals anymore, it only transports them. Shortly after it became a government-owned company in the 90′s, they decided to save money by closing all post-offices and delegate the consumer services like stamp sales and parcel-handling to local businesses like convenience stores and gas stations. I’m pretty sure they would have replaced the mailmen with trained monkeys if it weren’t for the animal rights-people.
Tags: random, thoughts
May 28, 2006 at 5:08 am · Filed under Random ramblings & reflections
Last weekend ago I watched Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – one of the best movies ever, very brilliant satire, Kubrick was a genius and so on – but it had an annoying side effext, namely the tune “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” (I found a midi here). It’s sort of the theme song for all the scenes taking place in the bomber. It’s quite catchy. Too damned catchy, to be honest. I had that fucking tune in my head for days, and after a while it got as annoying as having an itch on the nuts while standing in front of a crowd. I thought I had gotten rid of it yesterday, only leaving the question of where I had heard it before…
…but I got an answer to that tonight, when I had nothing better to than watch tv and the best thing on was Die Hard: With a Vengeance. Quite entertaining, both for an action movie and a second sequel. But there it was. And now it’s back in my head… Johnny marching back home again… well, with a vengeance. I need to find something to help me get rid of it, or I’ll go crazy. Really crazy. Any suggestions for good music I should listen to while trying to purge it? Any similar experiences?
Oh, and I’m mostly posting this because people have reminded me that I havn’t updated the blog in a long time. It’s not that I lack ideas of things to write about, but more that I have a black belt in the Art of Procrastination… I’ll see if I can find some CDs or books to review, or something.
And some links for those who feel inspired to get the movies or just to be infected with the tune themselves:
Amazon.com: Dr. Strangelove
| Die Hard with a Vengeance
Amazon.co.uk: Dr. Strangelove
| Die Hard With A Vengeance
Tags: movies, Music, random, thoughts
April 7, 2006 at 10:32 pm · Filed under Entertainment & Culture, Random ramblings & reflections
I was thinking about the Saddam Hussein trials for some reason, and I think that inspired this idea about how to solve the problem of unemployment. No, I’m not suggesting that we make all people who are out of work dictators and depose them – there’s not enough countries to go around, and if they would have to share them they wouldn’t be dictators anyway.
The idea has to do with the trial itself. If all court procedures were based on the example of those against former heads of state they would keep a lot of people busy for a long time. With enough shenanigans like critisizing the authority of the court, threatening the judges and hunger-striking a trial for petty theft could take a month, murder cases and large financial messes several years.
But, you may say, a large part of the unemployed population doesn’t have a job because they are unable to get a higher education, so there’s no way all of them could achieve a degree in law. Well, that is easily solved by requiring different levels of education depending on the severity of the crime. At the top of the list you would require a degree from a prestigious university, but to defend (or prosecute) someone for shoplifting or parking violations you would only need a basic education from a franchised law firm. People could get their basic degrees at Hamburger & Law University, and you would only have to go to the nearest McDonald’s and supersize your meal with the level of defense you need.
It could be that this solution only last for a while, since eliminating unemployment surely would reduce the crime-rate drastically. But for some reason I don’t think that would be a problem with all those lawyers around.
Tags: thoughts
February 21, 2006 at 12:51 am · Filed under Random ramblings & reflections
I’m not going down to the wharf to work on the longboat today, mostly since some of the neighbours decided that heating the buildings and using electrical tools at the block’s wharf are an uneccessary luxuries that we do well without. Personally, I prefer a bit of comfort when I’m working, and I don’t really see the point of carving boats anyway. I am, however, going to enjoy the mug of coffee I just made, and it will definitely not be the last.
I’m still compliant with one of the three things associated with Swedes on the Prejudice Map from Google Blogoscoped (by way of The Presurfer). Data-mining can be interesting.
Tags: random
January 12, 2006 at 10:24 am · Filed under Random ramblings & reflections
I was lazily staring at my TV, more specifically the Late Show (yes, we get all the social commentary from Letterman, Leno and O’Brien here as well – but with a week’s lag), and they had a “holiday shopping in New York quiz” – one of those things with two logical options and one comical. There was one showing a woman eating, and asking if she had stopped to get:
- a) Hot cocoa
- b) Soup and a sandwich
- c) Reindeer kabobs
…and it took me a few seconds to realize what the joke was supposed to be, because around here eating reindeer is nothing strange. Here in the northern parts, it’s probably a standard item on many people’s julbord as well (and yes, the traditional Swedish christmas meal comes in the form of a smörgÃ¥sbord)
So, how do people who have grown up with an image of reindeer only as the (sometimes) red-nosed animals in front of Santa’s sleigh feel about the tought of eating one? Say, compared to a cat? If there’s one thing I’d never eat, it’s cat… no matter what the Chinese say…
By the way, how would you feel about (someone) having sex with a reindeer? Compared to, for example, having sex with a horse? How does one do it with a horse, by the way? Do you need something to stand on, or is it a matter of taking a steady hold of the sattle and sort of hang over the beast’s butt? Or do people engaged in that sort of things prefer to hook up with small ponies? Is my conception of the horse’s.. uhm.. glory hole.. being somewhere at chest level wrong? Are perhaps stallions preferred, so it’s a matter of getting beneath the animal? Wouldn’t it be more practical to have sex with a reindeer, or is bigger better when it comes to animals? Many are the questions…
Sorry, I’m just horsing around – it turns out that the year’s most read online article in Seattle Times was about a guy who died after doing it, or rather being done, horsy style (I can’t figure out any other way it could lead to a perforated colon…) And Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing suggests articles about sweet equine luving as a way to increase traffic… so well, I’m getting on the horse-humping bandwagon as well. Be sure about that.
I wonder if Hollywood will see the possibilities in the subject? I mean, they did open the path for movies about sexually deviant cowboys this year.
Tags: news, thoughts, tv
December 31, 2005 at 2:01 am · Filed under Random ramblings & reflections
I was thinking… and it struck me that it would be kind of stupid to enter the sequence 4 8 15 16 23 42 into a lottery. Becuase then you’d end up being cursed like the people on Lost. No, that’s not it… but if you entered those numbers, and it actually happens that they are the winning numbers for the 100+ million jackpot – then you’ll feel really stupid when you realize that the jackpot will be split with the thousands of others who also used the same numbers.
Tags: lost, random, tv
December 29, 2005 at 11:52 pm · Filed under General, Random ramblings & reflections
Sometimes I wonder if I’m really a nice guy. Mostly becuase I come up with little sadistic schemes all the time. Not that I ever would go through with them, but I still wonder how I come up with them. This idea came to me when I noticed that as we are going towards the peak of the holiday shopping season, the stacks of junkmail dropped through my mail slot are getting ever larger by the day.
The idea is a game that requires only a few key components: a door with a mail slot and peephole (can be excluded but requires faster reactions), and an ETA of the junkmail delivery person. The course of the game is to wait by the door, preferably dressed as if to go out, until the deliverer is outside the door – and then swing the door open with full force. I guess I have to work out some sort of scoring system. It could also be interesting to join up with a few others in the building, to see who disables the target first.
I don’t suppose this would become a truly international sport, since while doors open outwards here in Sweden, that doesn’t seem to be the case everywhere.
Tags: sports, thoughts
November 30, 2005 at 5:17 pm · Filed under Random ramblings & reflections
Having nothing better to do, I got stuck watching a little of a Discovery Channel documentary about the construction of a new Airbus jet. It looked pretty impressive, until the head test pilot said “It’s actually quite easy to fly, almost like a bicycle.” Like a bicycle? I’m not going further than the gate if I see that plane outside – last time I checked, bicycles were as far from easy to fly as anything can be.
Tags: language, random
November 26, 2005 at 3:47 pm · Filed under Random ramblings & reflections
I keep wondering what the reality show makers will come up with next. Why not just brush up something old? In Brats in Chopper County Paul Teutul Sr., his sons and employees at Orange County Choppers, known from Discovery Channel’s popular series American Chopper, will be assisted by eight girls who never have operated more advanced tools than a nail file – until they got their own credit cards and could hire people to do that too. Maybe could end up like this:
Summary of episode 3: The girs are making a slight progress in adjusting to their new environment, but still can’t be convinced into doing anything practical, except for Amanda’s ordeal with cleaning up the “contribution” her Chihuahua made to a seat cover in the last episode. There’s also seems to be a general reluctance towards interacting with the shop’s regular staff, although Michaela seems to find it amusing to convince Mikey to bring her things.
In a sudden burst of creativity Tiffany gets out her nailpolish and adds a red design to the tank for one of the bikes under construction, the other girls agree that it “looks like something that that kind of people would like”. Jennifer returns, having recovered most of her eyesight after having stared to long into a welding torch. Rick is still annoyed over her “my father is rich so don’t tell me what to do” attitude.
Paul Sr. gets into the worst fit of rage ever shown on television when punching a clueless Paulie in the face even before asking how he could come up with the idea of putting a blood splatter design on the “Stay Alive” bike they are building in honour of the troops in Iraq.
Now that’s good television, isn’t it…?
Tags: thoughts, tv
November 18, 2005 at 1:36 am · Filed under Random ramblings & reflections
I almost thought I was getting kicked out from my PC earlier. When I booted it I got a message along the lines that “the hardware configuration has been considerably altered since Windows was verified on this computer”. That’s kind of interesting. Yes, I have changed hardware in the computer, but that was only adding a hard disk and a DVD-burner. And I reinstalled Windows two months ago, and then the verification went just fine, and I havn’t changed anything since then.
So, I start the activation thing, only to find out that there’s no activations left for my product key.
Next step, phonecall to Microsoft, where a machine asked me to enter the installation ID. Of course I got one digit wrong. What are the chances of that? I mean, it’s only a tiny 42 digit affair… I really must be retarded to get that wrong.
Well, at that point I’m glad that I’m being transferred to real living person. But of course I forgot one thing… being put on hold. So I had to spend 15 minutes listening to crappy pop music, Ricky Martin or something and other similar somethings. I wonder what was up with all the static and noises, by the way – it sounded like they got the music from an untuned radio in an auto-workshop. Has some bright record industry type come up with the suspicion that people would call support centers only to make bootleg music recordings?
When I finally get connected I get to talk to a Norwegian person. Well, I’m Swedish and our languages are similar – actually, I even think it’s quite attractive when spoken by women – but after being faced with the threat of being thrown out of my own computer, there’s enough differences to make it something you don’t need to end up with at the end of the telephone maze. Thankfully, that was the end of the problems.
But I think the main problem is that there was a problem. It feels so wrong having to to through all that to use a software license I own. If I had used a pirate version it would probably never have happened. But here I am, being punished by annoying verification systems for having bought the product.
Tags: software, tech
November 16, 2005 at 12:37 am · Filed under Computing & techiness, Random ramblings & reflections
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