The Fine Line Between Genius and Madness

Now on Wordpress!!!

2009-12-01T14:18:00.001+11:00

I'm now on wordpress.

Seeya there!!!!

Come Let Us Venerate...

2009-04-25T00:29:00.004+10:00

... the holy cheese toast.

Slow news day in Invercargill

2009-04-23T01:21:00.003+10:00

From my N.Z. trip:

Writer's Block and New Zealand

2009-04-21T17:04:00.009+10:00

Sorry I haven't written anything over the past month.

Firstly, I have been trying to write my academic paper on the Cornish Republican Army and the Cornish rebellion of 1497 for publication. I say "Trying to write" as I seem to get stuck every few hundred or so words suffering from a "constipation of the mind." I have this problem of knowing what I am going to write, but struggling to put it down on the page.

Also I have been on a cricket tour to the South Island of N.Z, playing matches in Christchurch, Timaru, Invercargill and Oamaru. We didn't exactly cover ourselves with glory on the cricket field, but then we did come up against players who were junior state/province representatives, or who were coached by John Wright and Dipak Patel or who have played against Shane Bond and Brendon McCullum at club level. And some of the grounds were truly awesome:

Apart from playing cricket, we visited Mt. Cook, Queenstown, Lake Te Anau (and the glow-worm caves) and Dunedin, taking in the beautiful scenery the South Island has to offer:

Pope = Arch-Reactionary Fool

2009-03-18T16:13:00.006+11:00

As I wrote before in a previous post:

Dogma makes people believe the strangest things.

As the UK activist/comedian Mark Steel wrote of the then new Pope Benedict way back in April 2005:

So if the new Pope's going to stick to papal traditions, he could manage to be the one person in history of whom it could be said as a child he was in the Hitler Youth, but once he grew up he went further to the right.

The onward surge of Groupthink!!!!!!

2009-03-13T00:56:00.007+11:00

In the wake of Nerds FC's 10-2 loss to Dirka Dirka on Monday night, Groupthink FC had to suffer one of the great sporting catastrophies to miss out. Lets face it, not even the emos of Target Practice has let through 26 goals in a game, even to our opponents last night, Purple Cobras - a team of fit, young snotty-nosed private school brats and one old bald guy (we too have one old bald guy - we have him as our keeper).* Unlike most teams in our divison, they can shoot, pass and can do arsehole-tricky things with the ball without making a right screw up of it. In the four games we have played them earlier in the season they have not only hung, drawn and quartered us, but have also par-boiled our remains and sent the heads and quarters out to be displayed in all parts of the country.

Would it be any different this time (The reader of this blog wouldn't be asking)?

Frankly, not quite....

The game had the potential of being quite ugly at half-time when the score was 6-0 the snotty-nosed brats way. But the mighty Groupthink FC never gave up the white flag and fought it out to the strange final siren they have there at the indoor sports centre. Some brilliant play from your humble poster set up Scott who put through one of the most easiest goals ever kicked in indoor soccer to put the Thinkers on the board. Later in the half, your humble match-report writer showed his class and kicked Groupthink's second. And finally Roger Rogenous kicked a goal that reminded me of this gem by Andrew Bews:

In the end we ended up having a (semi-) creditable 12-3 defeat, outscoring the Purple Cobras 2-1 in the last five minutes.

Therefore the Nerds miss out and the Mighty Groupthink FC - aiming to achieve the overthrow of bourgeois society through the medium of indoor soccer under the leadership of Chairman Jeremy - takes another long stride for the proletriat!!!

* The emos once conceded 25 goals in a game to Purple Cobras, but then they still managed to score three goals themselves.

Happy Birthday to Me!!!! (Classic Comedy Sketches 1 & 2)

2009-03-11T17:40:00.003+11:00

It's my birthday today and for your enjoyment here's a couple of classic skits from A Bit of Fry & Laurie :

Catholic Church - dogma first and foremost

2009-03-09T01:02:00.017+11:00

Well, whaddayaknow...

Catholic church prefers nine-year old to die rather than to see any of "God's Laws" broken.

The regional archbishop, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, pronounced excommunication for the mother for authorising the operation and doctors who carried it out for fear that the slim girl would not survive carrying the foetuses to term.

"God's law is above any human law. So when a human law ... is contrary to God's law, this human law has no value," Cardoso had said.

I wonder if there's anything in the bible that mentions abortion.
Or if previously the Catholic church had held different beliefs?

What about the alleged rapist - the girl's stepfather?

He (Cardoso) also said the accused stepfather would not be expelled from the church. Although the man allegedly committed "a heinous crime ... the abortion - the elimination of an innocent life - was more serious".

Therefore, according to the Catholic church raping a nine-year old girl is not as bad as aborting the fetuses in trying to save that girl's life.

Dogma makes people believe the strangest things.

Blogging and English Civil War Newsbooks

2009-02-27T23:28:00.011+11:00

I was reading a post by Mercurius at LP on the Blog wars and the "bitchy behaviour" therein, and one of Mercurius's musings caught my eye:

Bloggers in their behaviour and agenda seem to me to most closely resemble the pamphleteers of the 17th-19th centuries. There was no shortage of bitchery between writers back then, although most of what endures today from those pamphlets are the substantial articles, not the month-to-month snark of those old missives. What purposes, sociologically speaking, did pamphleteering fulfil then, and does blogging fulfil the same purposes today?

I have been musing about this for some time myself. Back in 2002, I did a 20,000 word honours thesis investigating newsbook (early of fore-runner of newspapers) reactions to the 1640s radical political group, the Levellers. As an observer (and sometimes semi-participant through comments at GrodsCorp) of the stoushes between Bloggers, the similarity with stoushes between royalist, parliamentarian and radical newsbooks of the 1640s is astonishing. I haven't got any exact examples on hand, but there was very much the "bitchiness" that Mercurius refers to. Newsbooks were continually having a go at one another and there were ones such as Mercurius Anti-Pragmaticus that were specifically set up to attack, for instance in the example given, Marchamont Needham's Royalist Mercurius Pragmaticus. A similar factor between the blogs and the notebooks was the lack of censorship controls both in the 1640s (censorship broke down during the war) and the internet today. In the 1640s, the number of newsbooks skyrocketed as anyone who could afford a printing press or a printer could publish one, much like a blog today with anyone having access to the internet could easily set up a blog.

Over the last couple of years, I have been thinking about writing an article about this topic and will try to do one this year. I have not written already due to factors such as laziness, writer's block, trips overseas and other projects such as my short stories, essays, my planned article on the 1497 Cornish rebel leader Michael Joseph An Gof and how he is a symbol of Cornish resistance to English cultural, political, social and economic domination of the county, and my memoir about Asperger's Syndrome and depression.

I think it might even be a topic for a PhD.

Graph "proof" of no global warming!!!!

2009-02-24T14:37:00.009+11:00

Jesus, Andrew!!!

If you're trying to prove that there's been no global warming since 1998, use a graph that actually supports your theory for starters!!!

And no, squiggly lines and elipses (by you or someone else) does not change the fact that the graph is showing something quite different from what you are arguing!!!

Ahhh.... Dodgy Facebook Quizzes

2009-02-24T00:12:00.007+11:00

When you're on Facebook and - somehow for the life of you - you decide to undertake one of those many quizzes that are put up by someone who seems to think that it's really, really cool to regale the rest of us with (usually) ridiculous easy pop quizzes to show off their knowledge of shithouse commercial channel TV shows and multiplex fodder.

Although, it looks like the following guy really needs to work on his knowledge of TV Programs:

Especially in regards to this question:

· Question 22
name this programme

o star terk
o star wars
o deep space nine
o deep impact
o in the galaxy

Introduction

2009-02-23T01:47:00.003+11:00

Hello There!!!!

I'm JT.

I've just started up this blog because I have this (somewhat ego-inflationary notion) that there are people out there who might actually give a shit about what I think or write.

Bugger, I can't think of anything else to write for this introduction at 2:00am.