Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Two posts on the same day? Monsieur, with these Rochers you're really spoiling us!

Whatever.

1½ weeks into the casual teaching which has been interesting. It's hard not really knowing what to expect on a daily basis - it makes planning really hard, and sometimes I feel I'm not really giving it my best as a consequence. I know things will be different when I have my own class, but for the moment I just have to go in and do my best.

On that note, the school has verbally offered me a year's contract for 2008, teaching kindergarten. It's great news - I had made it known that I'd quite like to work with the younger children - though I was thinking more Yrs 1 or 2 than kindy. However it'll be great experience and it's great that I don't really have to think too much about work for next year. It also means I can spend the Christmas holidays planning and programming ready to give it my best shot. I'll tell you more once it's all official like.

Otherwise, things are ticking along nicely thanks. I enjoyed my two weeks off and really did very little, but decided that was long overdue as I haven't had any long period of time off for over three years. Yay.

I've been worried about my Dad, who's had an operation to unblock one the carotid arteries in his neck - the good news is that he's on the mend, though he's still in hospital for the moment.

Love life is great. Thanks for asking.

Have a pretty free weekend this weekend coming. Now just working out what to fill it with...
The devil will find work for Idol hands to do...

Watching Australian Idol this serious has been car crash television - I personally don't think the singers are that great, but something keeps me watching. I have been fascinated with how much to me Matt Corby looks like a young Jane Fonda, but couldn't really find any pictures to prove my point. Fortunately my mate Muz did me this favour and found these two 'separated at birth' pictures:




I can't wait for Matt's workout DVD. And also given what he was wearing in the last couple of shows, I don't think it'll be too long before we see him wearing something like this:












I think I might have to be washing my hair that evening.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

iTunes meme: (Thanks to Muz)

Sort by song title:
First: The A Team - TV theme
Last: 80s medley - Stars on 45 (I would like to say I did used to share this computer with a flatmate...)

Sort by time:
Shortest: "Not Happy Jan!" - TV ad soundbite
Longest: Hedgehog 1:15:46 - this is one of my own mixes

Sort by artist:
First: Take on me by A-ha
Last: D.E.V.I.L. BY 666

Sort by album:
First: Album: Absolute Dance Move Your Body! Song: Conquering America by Bodies Without Organs
Last: Album: 70s Preservation Society Song: Disco Inferno by The Trammps

Top 5 most played songs: These are all from the same album - Trip The Light Fantastic by Sophie Ellis-Bextor. There is a good reason why this album has been played so much...
1. Me and My Imagination
2. If I Can't Dance
3. New York City Lights
4. Only One
5. If You Go

First song that plays on shuffle:
Aerodynamic by Daft Punk

Type the following into the search and how many titles come back?
Sex: 19
Love: 263
Death: 3
Fart: 0
Tardis: 1 (No farts, but I do have a "tardis"!)

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod!

Yesterday afternoon I went to the local shopping centre to have a mooch around. Having a peek at a cheap DVD stall lead me to almost gasp in disbelief. The previous night I'd been at Muz's, and we'd spent a bit of time sharing weird memories by searching for stuff on YouTube. One of my searches was for the clip from The Fast Show which parodies The Singing Ringing Tree, one of my strongest childhood TV memories. Last time I searched for the clip it wasn't there; this time it was. Muz wasn't familiar with the original show, so I spent some time trying to explain it to him to put the clip from The Fast Show in perspective. I remember it as an eastern european production of a fairy tale that ended up being quite scary.



Last time I tried to buy the original Singing Ringing Tree it was hard to find, and weirdly only available from Amazon in Germany in order to get the version with the BBC voiceover. Hence my almost gasp. There nestled amongst the $5 DVDs was a locally produced version of The Singing Ringing Tree - the cover design drew me in. So I paid my money and came away happy. I'm saving it to play when Muz is next here, so I have someone to bore to death with my memories. I particularly remember the spinning dwarf; the musical bridge; the giant fish encased in ice and the glorious 'technicolor' it was filmed in, which only added to the spookiness.


Wikipedia has this to say about The Singing Ringing Tree:

"Imagine a fairy tale conceived by Wagner and directed by Fritz Lang, with nods in the direction of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and German expressionism, and you'd be close."


See all the screen shots and read the full story of The Singing Ringing Tree here.

See the Fast Show parody here. You need to watch past the fake introduction!

Monday, October 08, 2007

Well as promised, here it is... my 666th post. So, is it the number of the beast?

According to http://www.666man.net, this is what we should know about this number...

"The number 666 comes directly from the worship practices of the city of Babylon about the time of the Bible prophet Daniel. The people of Babylon worshipped gods that were associated with the sun, moon, visible planets of our solar system, and certain of the stars involved with the practice of astrology. The Babylonians were the principal developers of astrology, as we know it today. In their worship system, they had 37 supreme gods, and one of these, the god associated with the sun, was supreme over all the other gods. These people believed that numbers in some way had power over the gods they worshipped. However, they had to create numbers that they could assign to the gods so that they could have power over them. To do this, they counted their gods and assigned a count number to each of the 36 lesser supreme gods, and then added up all of these numbers (from one to 36) and assigned the sum to the sun god. The first god they counted got the number one assigned to it, and the second god they counted got the number two assigned to it, and so on up to all 36 lesser supreme gods. Now, if you have not guessed it by now, the sum of the numbers from one to 36 totals 666, which they assigned to the god associated with the sun. They did the calculation like this:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + 33 + 34 + 35 + 36 = 666

However, they went further. They feared these gods and worried that one of them might strike them down sometime, so they made amulets with a 6 x 6 matrix of the numbers one through 36 on them. The practice of creating amulets with this arrangement of numbers as part of astrology appears to have continued well past the time of Jesus. Archeologists have found amulets with Latin Inscriptions, so we know that the Romans were indulging in this practice.

Therefore, the 666 number came about because of the pagan worship practices of the Babylonians and their practice of astrology."

The weirdest thing about all of this is that 36 is my lucky number! I never knew of the association until today, and I'd not added the numbers up to 36 together either. Odd.

Friday, October 05, 2007

I'm officially doing bugger all. It's great. Think I might do a bit of life admin and treat myself to a trip to Manly on the ferry! Also Blogger tells me that this is my 665th post. That means I have to think of something suitably evil for the next one!

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

And so it became October, and it's really starting to be warm and sunny. Estival even. In summary, summery. I digress...

I've had a great few days since the last post on here thanks for asking. As mentioned I worked on Thursday and Friday - the first day covering for teachers as they did some planning so I had about an hour with six different classes. Friday I taught the Yr 5's, and then went off to the end of term teacher meal in Leichhardt. Interesting! It all got a bit hen night/18th birthday party for my liking, but it was fun-ish whilst it lasted.

Oh, and the best news of all? School offered my five weeks casual full time work as a roving teacher - basically this means I'll fill in for teachers as and when I'm needed, but it will be fixed term rather than a day-by-day basis. Cool! There should still be casual work for the last five weeks of term too, but this is a great start. Woohoo!

Saturday was a leisurely morning and then spent the evening over with Muz on the north side. Beers and thai food. Yum. Sunday back home and cleaned and tidied the house. Muz came over later, and when we were joined by Tim we hit the Union for food and beers. More beers back here before heading off to Bad Dog. We had a blast! Muz had a couple of shiny silver body suits (don't ask!), and we slipped into them once at the party. Did we steal the show!! That lasted about 3 hours before we donned our 'civvies' and partied till the wee hours.

Yesterday was a slow, lazy, wonderful day. Sleep, trashy movies, KFC, beers... all the things to do when you don't have to do anything! Noice.

I'm now at the start of a couple of weeks holiday as mentioned, but I think today might be another of those lazy days. Don't want to rush into my 'to do' list too quickly!!