ANZAC Day

Anzac Day was my undoing. My unspoken pledge to myself to blog every day- shattered by the amount of alcohol I drank.

I'm Australian, and for anyone who doesn't know, Anzac day is when we commemorate the Australian and New Zealand forces who died at Gallipoli, and at more recent conflicts.

I didn't go to any of the dawn services as 4am is a foreign country to me, but I went with a friend to a 10am service in a tiny country town called Lyndurst,  (population 385) where a travelling pipe band lead a march half a block to the town hall. It was very nice, very peaceful and kind of sad.

There was a church service that bored me, but was lightened immeasurably by an old lady who kept calling out corrections to the man leading the service. (Not yet, do this first, his name is henry not harry etc)

Then my friend (who I'm going to call Taj because it's a nice short name,) and I, ate curried egg sandwhiches with the people of lyndhurst, who were all friendly and all rather old.

Anyway, when we finally went back to my hometown, we went on a pub crawl. This is the other traditional way of celebrating ANZAC day and unfortunately we ended up drinking from about 2pm till 10, at which point I was so drunk I had to go home. I remembering looking at my laptop and thinking, I'm sure there's something I have to do today, but then I fell asleep on the carpet in front of the fire, so it became something of a moot point.

The World is Ending!

Stop the presses, we're all going to die.

I know, for too long we've all thought the world was ending on the 21st of December, 2012. Those Mayans promised us. But since they're all dead now, the world really ended a long time ago for them.


Now, a new date has been proposed.

The 21st May, 2011. That's right people, only 27 more days to rap up all your unfinished business.

This is the genius idea of (who else) a rightwing American nutjob with too much money and too little sense. Family Radio network founder Harold Camping. He also prosephied that the world would end in 1994, but later admitted to doing his adding wrong or forgetting to carry the 1. He's sure his Maths is right this time though. Ruly-truly.

If you feel the need, search for his page, it's full of bizarre claims basically taking random numbers from random Bible excerpts and then using those numbers to make a date for the End Days.


Allow me to use my prophetic powers in order to determine the true date the world will end.
I am the Ungodly Prophet, and I see.....


My favourite number is 17. I am currently 22. I feel like the oldest I will ever be is 37.

(1+7) x (2+2) =  32
=
3/2/37

The world will end on the third of February 2037.
(Guess I will live past 37)

(Or, if God really is American, than maybe it'll be the 2nd of March 2037.)

If you do feel the need to prepare for the rapture, apparently there are actually books designed to prepare you for this.

How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It: Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times

The End of the World: Stories of the Apocalypse

End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life


I can't tell you anything about them because I don't think the world is going to end, except that they're cheap, (which definitely says nothing about their quality. O_O ) so might be good for a laugh.


So, what do y'all think? Is the world really ending? Anyone packing up a swiss army knife and a supply of canned food and heading for the hills?

A book

Now I'm not in the habit of doing this, it's kind of tacky, but I want you to read this book. If you can't find it in you local library, or secondhand somewhere, then you should buy it.

The God Delusion

It is made of win. Dawkins, who appears in so many YouTube clips as a witty man with a slight tendency to stutter, reveals himself as a really amusing writer. It's clever, it will help you win arguments with deists...and hey, if you are a deist, you know, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc, maybe you'll have your own little period of Enlightenment. :D

Easter

Happy Eostre y'all.

Have lots of chocolate on my behalf. (I forgot to buy any and the shops are all closed.)


The modern English term Easter developed from the Old English word Ēastre or Ēostre (IPA: [ˈæːɑstre, ˈeːostre]), which itself developed prior to 899. The name refers to Eostur-monath (Old English "Ēostre month"), a month of the Germanic calendar attested by Bede, who writes that the month is named after the goddess Ēostre of Anglo-Saxon paganism.^[4] Bede notes that Ēostur-monath was the equivalent to the month of April, yet that feasts held in her honor during Ēostur-monath had gone out of use by the time of his writing and had been replaced with the Christian custom of "Paschal season
(stolen from Wikipedia)


Pretty, right? The Pagan gods are so much more creative than the Abrahamic God. Personally, I like the commercial god we've created, the Easter Bunny.

2 seconds on YouTube though and I've found proof that our new God can be pretty malevolent too! Just to even out the score, and because it makes more sense if the bunny is female (the whole fertility motif), we're going to decide that in the clip you are about to see, we're looking at a Goddess.

The Bible- the fun bits

Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!” 24 When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number (2 Kings 2:23-25)

I will bear (geddit?) this in mind if I ever suffer the scourge that is female pattern baldness.

Maths. Not Math

Hey y'all

I have a question for the universe, or for the three Americans who, according to my stats counter thingy, have actually looked at this blog.

Why do you call Mathematics 'Math'?

I hear it on American TV shows all the time and it makes me cringe.
See, in Australia, we say "Maths', because it's a shortening of 'Mathematics' not 'Mathematic.'

(I feel like i have a spelling error somewhere up there, ^^^ but meh.

So, I'm just curious, if anyone wants to leave a comment and explain this mystery to me?

It is Easter Saturday. One of the days Jesus supposedly spent dead in a tomb, 2000 years ago. In honor of this sacrifice, thousands of customers who eat at Mcdonald's over the Easter weeked will order fillet-o-fish burgers.

(I work at the dread store, as a casual while I finish uni. The acrid reek of deep fried fish is never so pungent as on Good Friday.)

I know, the Jesus story is nice, and some people find truth and beauty in it. For me, there's too much darkness hidden in the Bible for me to ever see it as the Holy Book.

I find truth and beauty and meaning in science, in my year 9 biology textbook, in the maths books I was never dedicated enough to decipher, in chemistry and physics.

Some people might think you can't find the meaning of life in a world without God, and to those people, I offer these two clips. One is an excerpt from a speech by Richard Dawkins that I got off YouTube, and the other is Carl Sagan's 'Pale Blue Dot'.

They are worth the 2 and 4mins it will take to watch them.