Crush Part 2

This strip follows on from this one. This is one of the few Finger Puppet Shows which had a test audience before I posted it, and I want to clarify something: they are hugging each other at the end, not kissing each other. Gabby does not feel the same way about Buster as he does about her. But luckily it seems that the wonderful Colin has stepped in and saved the day!

All finger puppets can be bought here.

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Driftveil Drawbridge and Super Castlevania IV

For Christmas, my brother bought me the game Pokémon White. This is an excellent game, and I’ve been spending a lot of time playing it lately, as soon as I’m finished I’ll most probably post a review on here. Just the other day, I got to an area in the game called Driftveil Drawbridge, and I realised that the music there sounds a lot like the music from the Waterfall area in Super Castlevania IV (a game I’ll review if I ever manage to beat the really hard levels at the end of the game!). They’re so similar, that I wonder if it might be intentional. But, I’ll let you decided for yourself.

Here is Super Castlevania IV’s Waterfall music:

Here is the music from Driftveil Drawbridge:
So what does everybody think? Do they sound the same to you? Could it be intentional? Coincidence? I’ll leave you to decide.
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Challenges

Following my post on a random country, my friend has challenged me to write more entries on random countries than them before the end of the year. There are two other challenges too, to write more entries on individual philosophers than them, and to write more entries on random planets (using some imagination) than them. As such, the blog schedule will change, now there will be new entries posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays too, just not regularly, they will be ‘maybe days’. Their blog is called The Kite Still Flies, and it’s very good, so I suggest you visit it. But, having said that, that kite will NOT be flying after it has been smashed to pieces by the mighty water bottle of power, nobody opposes it and lives! Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh…

Okay, sorry, I was joking, don’t hurt me.

EDIT: The planet challenge is no longer happening, though the country and philosopher ones are!

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Faroe Islands

I was speaking to a friend of mine the other day, and they suggested I make a blog entry where I pick a random country and then write using all the information I can find about it. You can see an entry on their own blog where they describe the idea here. Anywho, the country I got was the Faroe Islands, so, let me tell you about them!
    Faroe means ‘sheep’ so the place is actually called the Sheep Islands, which is quite nice, I think. However, I do think it would have been nicer if the random country I picked could turn out to be the Cow Islands (if such a place exists). The main kind of sheep on these islands are, rather unoddly, called ‘faroes’ and they can be found on everything, from stamps to the country’s coat of arms. Aside from sheep, you can find various other animals there, including seals and whales, but these aren’t quite as important, they aren’t called the Whale Islands or the Seal Islands after all are they? It’s a shame really, that they don’t care for their whales as much as their sheep, since there is a lot of whaling from the Faroe Islands.
    I like food, so I’ll tell you a little about what is traditionally eaten there. Sadly, it’s not all that exciting. Rather unsurprisingly, the people who live on the Sheep Islands, like to eat sheep. In fact, many of their traditional meals involve sheep meat in some way or another, so I can imagine that I (a vegetarian) won’t enjoy any of it. They also really like British food, such as fish and chips, so that’s not all that exciting from my point of view either.
    Since reading is cool, I’ll also tell you a little about their literature. Sadly, there’s not much that exists from more than two hundred years ago, because it’s a rather isolated country, which is a shame really, because who knows how many excellent stories may be lost due to lack of records? But, anyway, a quick search tells me that The Old Man and His Son by
Heðin Brú
and The Black Cauldron by William Heinesen are two popular books by contemporary authors from the Faroe Islands (both of them being on my book list now!).
    But, yes, that’s my overview of the Faroe Islands, and I must say that it was quite fun to research a random country. If anybody else has a suggestion for a theme or anything to write about, feel free to let me know in my suggestion box, or any other how ๐Ÿ™‚
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Guessing Names

You know what must be very hard? Guessing people’s names with no clues on the first time you meet them. Well, at the risk of sounding terribly arrogant, through some big fluke, I’ve actually managed to do this two times.
    This first was with my old friend Hayley Wiltshire. For some reason I can remember this happening in the boys’ changing room at The Corsham School, but this seems odd since, as I’m sure you can guess from her name, she is female. But, anyway, this was my first year in secondary school and I thought that she looked very similar to somebody in my primary school who was also named Hayley, so, as a joke, I called her Hayley too and, as it turns out, I was right! I remember, when she replied to that name, I said “Wow, so your name is actually Hayley!” which she thought was rather strange, and then wouldn’t believe that I guessed it when I explained.
    The second was with my friend Jon Williams (who I sadly do not have much contact with anymore). Coincidentally, this also happened in the boys’ changing room at The Corsham School (except it was the other one, there are two). I remember that my friends were all talking to some person I didn’t know, and that they all seemed to know him. As such, I decided to join into the conversation as if I knew him as well and, following my previous success, I decided to try and guess his name. Since ‘Jon’ is a very common male name, I decided to call him that, and it just so happens I was right again!
    So, yes, with two of my friends, the first time I met them I correctly guessed their names. I’m not quite sure how to end this entry, it’s not building up to me getting sexually assaulted, or any punch line or anything, as they usually do, it’s just two small anecdotes about guessing names. That’s it.
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Goodnight

Surprise! I decided to do an extra entry before the end of the year. I just got this idea before going to sleep last night and then made it today. Sorry to anybody who prefers the normal entries over the Finger Puppet Shows, that’s three in a row I’ve done now! The normal schedule of two normal entries and one Finger Puppet Show a week will be back soon. I guess I’d better explain this joke, since it’s a little obscure and only a small number of my audience might get it: That’s John-Boy Walton from The Waltons, and in The Waltons they always spend ages saying goodnight to each other at the end of the day, but Pelly the Parrot will literally never stop repeating, so he keeps the process going all night! This’ll probably be John-Boy’s only appearance in a Finger Puppet Show, for two reasons: first, he’s really hard to photograph and, second, he’s a copyrighted character, and I’d rather use characters I make up myself. I just got John-Boy as a Christmas present from my Mum and I was eager to feature him somehow on my blog; this was the result!
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Christmas Message

This is my last planned entry for this year, but I might get an idea I like so much that I have to write it right away. I hope you like this Christmas entry too, I’m certainly proud of it. I think, after the very first, this may be my best actually.

All finger puppets can be bought here.

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Newspaper Report

I must admit that I was a little lazy with today’s Finger Puppet Show, I didn’t take any new photographs for it. The pictures of Merlin and Dorium were ones that didn’t get used, but were left over, from the photos I took for this strip, which this is a follow up to, and the picture of Jingle was taken directly from this strip. I have a really good one (or at least, I’m very proud of it) due for either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day though, so, keep an eye open for it!

All finger puppets can be bought here.

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The End of the World

Remember that time when I said I’d write an entry on the 2012 doomsday predictions on December 20th of that year? If you do, well done, I am very proud of you. Anyway, as I’m sure you can tell, I also remembered and so here is my entry on that subject. I’ll go over each apocalyptic scenario that has been predicted for tomorrow and explain why they won’t happen.
    Firstly, the Biblical rapture. Even if we assume for one moment that The Bible is one hundred per cent true, there’s absolutely nothing in it which suggests that the rapture is due to occur on December 21st 2012, no date is given (if anything, The Bible implies that it should have happened years ago). Plus, The Bible says that nobody can know when the end of the world is coming, only God knows, so it would be awfully strange if there were a way to figure it out based on cryptic clues wouldn’t it? Since God knows everything, past, present and future, when it says that nobody but God knows, you can assume it means, nobody but God will ever know.
    Secondly, the Mayan calendar. December 21st is when the ancient Mayan calendar ends, and some people believe that this indicates the end of the world. Oddly though, the people who believe the calendar points to the apocalypse, are not the people who follow the old Mayan religion. Those who do follow it complain because the Mayan religion does not contain an ‘end of the world’ event, and they don’t like others imposing one on it. Researchers tend to think today, that the calendar ends on that date, because of some mathematical measurements linked to the sun and the Earth.
    Thirdly, Nibiru. Apparently a planet is going to crash into the Earth tomorrow (a bit like that time in Doctor Who when Gallifrey came back and nearly crashed into us). But this is rather silly, I mean, with the other two, they feature supernatural aspects and so you wouldn’t see signs of them coming, but if a planet was heading towards Earth it’d easily be seen in the sky. Since nobody can see one, I’d say we’re pretty safe.
    Fourth, alien invasion. Some people believe that the world leaders are secretly shape shifting alien reptilian humanoids… Accepting that alone as truth is awfully hard, but even if you do, it’s even harder to see the logic in predicting tomorrow as the day more of them arrive for a full scale alien invasion. If these shape shifters are among us, then they’d know that people have predicted tomorrow as the day of their attack, they’d know people are preparing for some kind of disaster and will be much harder to fight than on another day. Surely, it’d be easier to just come a day early or something? I’ll admit, I don’t know that much about this theory, but it just seems to have so many holes in it.
    Finally, planetary alignment. All the planets will be lined up with the sun tomorrow, so apparently that’ll put a large dose of radiation into the atmosphere, or shoot out deadly solar flares, that will wipe life from the face of the Earth. Except that, it already happened once before, and before anybody thinks it, it wasn’t when the dinosaurs went extinct, it was when humans were around. So, if it can’t even wipe out the tiny human population of thousands of years ago, why should the even bigger population of today be worried? They shouldn’t, because nothing happen because of it.

So that’s all of the main theories debunked. If anybody was worried by them, I hope I helped a little. And, on the off chance that there’s a big coincidence and tomorrow is the end of the world, I better just add, I love you dearly.

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Charity Woman

On Thursday (the 13th of December) I popped into Bath and had a tasty dinner with my good friend David Tubb. I had an extremely delicious three cheese and cranberry pie and then the pair of us headed up to the university campus in order to do a few things. Once finished on campus, we headed into town in order to look in bookshops and other such fun pastimes.

Now, in Bath, there are lots of different kinds of people out in the streets: musicians, human-statues, Satan and lots of others too. On this particular day, David and I happened to run into a charity woman. She asked me whether or not I’d like to spare a few minutes to hear about her charity, and I thought she was from Concern Universal, so I told her that I already donated to that charity and carried on walking along with David. However, I was wrong, she actually came from a charity called ActionAid, and she told me so. As such, I began to slow down a little to hear what she had to say, David, on the other hand, did not want to hear what she had to say, so he grabbed my arm and started pulling me quickly away. The charity woman, in retaliation, grabbed my other arm and started pulling me in the opposite direction with equal force. For a short while, I was just stretched out between the pair of them as they played this strange tug-of-war game.

“C’mon, let him stay, he wants to!” the woman said to David.

David then decided to relent, and let go of my arm. For the next five minutes or so, the woman told me the facts about her charity and the poverty that they helped fight. Most of it was stuff I was already aware of, but I decided I’d listen anyway, perhaps I would learn some utterly shocking fact which I had been previously unaware of (I didn’t, but…). Once she’d finished, I thought there’d be no real harm in making regular donations to another charity, so I started to sign up.

“So what’s your name?” she asked.

“Adam Randall,” I replied.

“You’re supposed to tell them your real name!” said David.

For a moment, the woman looked a little concerned, but then David added “I’m joking.”

After another five minutes or so of getting down my information, such as address, phone number and bank details, she asked me my date of birth. When I told her 11th April 1993, she told me I was too young to donate, so it seems the whole thing was quite a waste of time. But that’s not quite the end of the story.

After that was all over, David and I visited a bookshop and looked around for a little while. Once we were done we headed back the same way we’d come. There was another charity woman there now, roughly in the same place.

“Excuse me, how old are you?” she asked me.

“Unfortunately, I am 19 and so I’m too young to donate. Sorry!” I told her.

“I know, I was only joking!” she said. Which is a bit confusing, had she watched the previous encounter play out and then planned this little prank for us? I guess we’ll never know. But now itโ€™s the end of the story.

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