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Archive: pastafarianism

Merry seasonal wintervus festivage greetings

24 December 2008 20:51

Categories: Admin, General, Personal

I am in two minds about Christmas. I adore the day itself. And despite the fact that I am a Pastafarian, I feel no contradiction in celebrating Christmas, despite what Malc says.

After all, without Christmas — or any similar winter festival — these months would be fairly rotten all round. It is good sense to inject some cheer into the long, cold, dark winter nights. It is, of course, no coincidence that Christmas just so happens to fall at the same time as an ancient Pagan festival.

But while I enjoy Christmas Day, what I really don’t like is the run-up to Christmas. This brings nothing but stress and pain. I don’t see the point in getting stressed out over something that is supposed to make you feel better. So I tend to eschew traditional elements of pre-Christmas such as Christmas cards and the like.

This year, the pre-Christmas period has brought with it an added stress: the slow and humiliating death of my workplace, Woolworths. The shelves have been largely empty for weeks now, and products have been replaced by tacky, generic (Hilco-supplied) “closing down” posters. Friends and customers frequently tell me how sad it is to see the store like that, and I have to agree with them. Christmas cheer, like many Woolworths products, has been in short supply this year.

Even though I wasn’t exactly pinning my career hopes on Woolies, I am still terribly sorry to see it go. When I got my first card this year, though, it cheered me up enough to decide to participate the the Christmas card tradition. It looks like other people have done the same. My tally of cards received has gone up from five in 2006 to nine in 2007 to twenty this year. Even then, I have given out more cards than I have received, which is unusually festive of me.

So in that spirit, I want to wish all of this blog’s readers all the very best for the Christmas period and beyond.

Apologies, too, for the radio silence. I have been extraordinarily busy recently. Despite the imminent closure of Woolies, I’m currently working there more than ever. I will be straight back to work on Boxing Day, but I won’t complain too much. I just have to make the most of it because in another couple of weeks the work won’t be there at all. I will write more about Woolworths after we close down (which, incidentally, is on 5 January, although we’ll be sticking around for a few days to convert the unit back into an empty shell for someone to buy).

As well as that, I have been juggling a couple of other projects and of course I am on the job hunt for real now. So spare time has been in short supply, meaning that the blog has been put on the back burner. This is an uncertain period of my life, and I still need to work out how the blog will fit in to my future plans. Once I figure it out, activity on the blog will hopefully increase. I have a few posts I want to squeeze out before the new year so I don’t intend on it remaining silent any more at all.

In the meantime, to bring this post back to its original point, have a merry Christmas. (Or Chrifsmas.)

3 comments

Merry Chrifsmas

24 December 2007 00:59

Categories: Blogging, Commuting, Current affairs, Economics, Edinburgh, General, Personal, Scotland, Technology, University

Put the FSM Back in Chrifsmas

Yes, I am a liberal elite atheist trying to ban Christmas, and proud of it! Not really. Everyone else can celebrate it as much as they like as far as I’m concerned. But I don’t celebrate Christmas for religious reasons, and I don’t see any point in pretending otherwise.

I am celebrating though. Wintervals are older than Christianity, and it isn’t difficult to see why. Winter is a terrible time of year, bereft of warmth and particularly sunlight. It is quite disturbing when you have sleeping patterns like mine and you end up sleeping through the entire day.

On this basis, I should really celebrate the Winter Solstice, like Adam Smith was a Socialist does. But seeing as everyone else celebrates on the 25th, that’s good enough for me.

For me, this is an opportunity to enjoy yourself at a bad time of the year. One of the things I hate most about Christmas is the way people get so stressed out about it. People need to chill out a bit and enjoy the holiday instead of running around trying to buy tat which the recipient will, on average, value between a tenth and a third less than was paid for it (PDF).

I am not being smug about it because I have fallen into the trap as well. There must be some kind of sociological law that says the more you’re supposed to be on holiday, the busier you actually are. Just more lies from society. I don’t know why I don’t just exit now.

That’s why I haven’t been blogging much over the past few days, even though I have a million things to say. Story of the year. The busyness is partly as a result of my high-flying career in retail (!). But I’ve also got a mountain of university work to do as well.

In a way, I am lucky as an Edinburgh University student. Our winter exams are done and dusted by mid-December, so we don’t have them looming over us all Christmas. Having the exams that early has its own disadvantages of course, but at least Christmas is worry-free.

Not this year though. I have a 3,000 word essay to write about changes in Scotland’s population since 1945. The module is The Scottish Economy, which is very interesting, but also a damn nuisance because there is very little reading material compared to most other modules. I really will have to pull those 3,000 words out of thin air.

I’m also tearing my hair out about my dissertation. It’s due in towards the end of February. For various reasons, I never got the work done during the year that I was hoping to, so I am behind schedule big time. Well, I’ve written nine pages out of 30, but I’m sure to cover most of the material that will have to be edited down quite a lot anyway.

The upshot of all this was that I was in Edinburgh on Friday to take back some books that I haven’t needed for weeks and to do some reading for that Scottish Economy essay. I also got out some more heavy books. And lots of climbing up and down stairs was involved.

Then, sucker that I am, I went to do some Christmas shopping. Lots of walking up and down Princes Street was involved. And the stuff I bought was ridiculously heavy. I felt like a bit of a tube in the train station, as I battled with all of that stuff.

Worst of all, the combination of heavy shopping and heavy library books has left me with a plethora of strange pains in all kinds of parts of my body. I feel like a decrepit octogenarian. Next year I will probably stick to shopping in Kirkcaldy.

Incidentally, mad busy 24/7 shitlife aside, I will not be switching off the computer over the Christmas period as some people do. I don’t really see the point in that. For me, blogging is — and always should be (unless it’s a pro- or business blog) — a leisure activity. I enjoy it. So I won’t be stopping. There’ll be fewer readers around of course, but that’s their choice. (Proof, if ever it were needed, that blogging is sustained mostly by people who are skiving off work).

I am currently facing the same Christmas cards dilemma that I had last year. Only this time, instead of receiving five cards, I’ve received nine. Clearly, either nobody cares that I didn’t give them a card last year, or they have completely forgotten. Which kind of sums up the insincerity of exchanging cards.

Anyway, my mother is currently bullying me into writing nine reciprocal cards. I was going to give to charity instead, because let’s face it — giving to charity will do a lot more good. Besides, what will happen if I don’t give them a card? Will I end up in their bad books? It didn’t happen last year, so…

Well, I just flipped a coin to decide, and it turns out that I have to write out the cards. Bah.

4 comments

It’s true — I’ve moved to the right

13 October 2007 02:30

Categories: Current affairs, General, Internet, Personal, Technology

There is this spinning woman who is doing the rounds on the internet at the moment. Thinks she’s really clever by looking like she’s turning clockwise when she’s actually turning anti-clockwise, while in actual fact she was turning clockwise all along! And anti-clockwise. At the same time.

Apparently, whether you perceive the woman to be turning clockwise or anti-clockwise tells you which side of your brain you use the most. Immediately it was obvious to me that the woman was turning clockwise. I felt a bit smug. After all, clockwise must be the side of the brain that makes me intelligent, witty, good looking and a mathematical genius.

Err.

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain…

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
“big picture” oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can “get it” (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking

Are they calling me a girl or something?

Seriously. Looking at the lists, I would have always guessed that I would have been the left side of the brain. Not that I wish to blow my own trumpet, but I always consider myself to use logic, have attention to detail, reasonably good numerical skills and reality based. I am far to strategic for my own good, in the sense that I always spend so long thinking about things that I miss the boat.

Not that the skills for the right side of the brain are that bad. But I just don’t see it. I have less spatial awareness than Stevie Wonder, a dire imagination and I’m apathetic about symbolism. I am only religious in the sense that I am a Pastafarian. As for risk-taking, I can’t climb a ladder without completely crapping myself beforehand.

As if to compound the matter, the the article states that most people see the woman turning anti-clockwise. Brilliant! Other people are mathematical genii. I do little more than believe.

I believe, and I also live in a fantasy land. So what if I believe that I am a left-brainer? Or is that just a fantasy? This was all getting a bit too much for me.

I struggled to comprehend the situation. When I first loaded the page it was patently obvious to me that the woman was turning clockwise — there were no two ways about it. But I knew that she could turn anti-clockwise as well. In order to regain a modicum of self esteem, I strained my hardest to get the woman to turn anti-clockwise. It’s Magic Eye for the noughties.

And blow me down. It worked! It happened when I began to lose my focus while staring at her neck. I started to feel a little bit sick. It’s quite earth-shattering to see someone who has only ever turned clockwise suddenly decide to turn anti-clockwise. What’s more, I was now just as adamant that the woman could only possibly ever turn anti-clockwise, and surely never clockwise.

But soon enough I was able to switch between clockwise woman and anti-clockwise woman at will, as though I was flicking between The God Channel and BBC Four. My tip: look at the shadow that the sticky-out foot makes on the floor.

Now I feel much better. I can switch between clockwise and anti-clockwise at will. This must mean that I am brilliant at everything.

Also: Hehehehe. Boobs.

Seriously though. Does the illusion fail to work if it is a boobless man? What about that funny pose she is pulling? She doesn’t know if she’s slipping on a banana or if she is a little teapot, short and stout.

Flashboy was similarly freaked out by the strange levitating woman.

Aaaannyway. How did they decide that clockwise equals the right side and vice-versa? I have not seen any solid science on this — just a crappy Digg-magnetic article on an Australian newspaper. Part of me suspects that this article either

  1. Is a pile of horseshit
  2. Got the lists for the left and right sides of the brain the wrong way round

I’ll have my eye on Ben Goldacre’s blog for this!

13 comments

FSM sex

8 February 2006 14:19

Categories: Asides, Current affairs, Internet

No! Blasphemy! Some wise guy has drawn a load of pictures of the Flying Spaghetti Monster doing some dirty sex action. Where’s the petrol, I need to burn down the internet in protest. (Via)

1 comment