Silly Pasty Lady

I don’t intend for this entry to sound rude or offensive, but, depending on how it turns out, it may well be either one of those things, or indeed both of them (hopefully not). Anywho, this entry is about a Silly Pasty Lady (as I’m sure you’ll have been able to gather from the title) and it is to this Silly Pasty Lady that I don’t mean to sound insulting (not that she’ll be reading this).
This brief anecdote begins just over a year ago when I was strolling around the streets of Bath with my friend Laura. Strolling around the streets for several hours will eventually make you hungry, so after a while we visited a small pasty shop. Here’s the small exchange between myself, Laura and the Silly Pasty Lady.

Me: Hello, I’ll have a cheese and onion pasty please.
Silly Pasty Lady: Okay, and what would you like?
Laura: I’ll have a pasty too, but not cheese and onion, a different flavour. (Of course, she did ask for a specific flavour, but I can’t remember what it was, I could guess, but I’m not going to take any artistic licence).
Silly Pasty Lady: Here you go (hands us the pasties).
Me: (realising the pasty is a little cold) could you heat mine up please?
Silly Pasty Lady: Yeah sure (takes my pasty and puts it into the oven for a few minutes while we wait in silence, then gives it back once its heated).
Me: Thank you ๐Ÿ™‚
Laura: Hmm, actually, could you please heat mine up as well?
Silly Pasty Lady: (slight laugh) No, I just heated it up!
Laura: …

I had to use my Trusty Water Bottle to conceal my smirk, but luckily I didn’t have to do very much concealing as we left right after. Now, I’m not entirely sure how the pasty lady can have thought that she had just heated it up, perhaps she had a terrible memory and thought that we only had one pasty between us, or maybe she didn’t understand the way the world worked and thought that by heating up one pasty both would become warm. Who knows? Either way, it makes a very, very, very slightly acceptable story for a blog entry.
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Aether Luminiferous

For today’s entry I’m going to make another shout out. Aether Luminiferous is a YouTube channel featuring some rather funny videos about science and ‘magic’ (or deception, I suppose, would be a better word). Videos include ‘How to Win at Poker’ (which shows that it is possible to win every time at poker) ‘Pineapple Sun’ (which explains why the sun is hot) and ‘Schrödinger’s Rabbit’ (featuring an enactment and explanation of Schrödinger’s Cat). Anybody even slightly interested in science should watch these videos as they’re pretty good and accessible even to those with little scientific knowledge (like myself, well, that is if you discount Cs and Ds at GCSE level).

Here’s the link 

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Elaborate Spam

This is an extra post today which I’m making due to what I found in my spam folder on AOL. Usually spam’ll tell me I need to hold a few million dollars for a Nigerian prince for a few months, or be from a ‘dying’ woman who wants to give her fortunes away randomly. But today I got a spam message which quite impressed me, mainly due to how elaborate it was, here it is:

Federal Bureau Of Investigation Intelligence Field Unit J. Edgar Hoover Building 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington , D.C. Urgent Attention: I am special Agent John Edward from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) intelligence unit; we have just intercepted (2) trunk boxes at JFK airport New York , we are on the verge of moving them to our bureau head quarters. We started monitoring and checkmating movement of consignments after the killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, many people are virtually involve in sponsorship of terrorism knowingly and unknowingly since they participate in unsolicited and security unchecked transactions which sometimes the aftermath effect of unclaimed funds becomes wheel power for terrorist sponsorship. We have scanned those two trunk boxes and discovered the value is $5.7 Million Dollars and the backup document bears your name as the receiver of the money contained in the boxes and your email address is on the delivery manifest booklet plastered on the two trunk boxes , investigations / interrogation carried out on the diplomat that accompanied the boxes into the united states has it that he was to deliver this funds to your residence as payment which was due to you as unpaid lottery .Our priorities are tactically stated below. Some people have been victimizing over the years but our inception has corrected worst crime situations in and outside American Protect the United States and the rest of the world from terrorist attacks (see counter-terrorism);Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage (see counter-intelligence); Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes (see cyber-warfare); Combat public corruption at all levels; Protect civil rights; Combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises (see organized crime); Combat major white-collar crime; Combat significant violent crime; Support federal, state, local and international partners; We checked all legal documents in the boxes, and were about to release the consignments to the diplomat, when we found out that the boxes lack two very important documents Legal Clearance Certificate and Fund Ownership Certificate which as a result, the boxes was kept under security vault until you provide those required compulsory demanded due process documents According to section 229 subsection 31 of the 1991 constitution in tax payment, your consignment lacks proof of ownership certificate and legal clearance certificate from the joint team of the IRS and homeland security, and there for, you must contact us for direction and advise on how to procure the certificates, so that you can be relieved of the charges of evading tax and consignment abandonment which is a punishable offense under section 12 subsection 441 of constitution on tax evasion and unsolicited movement of consignments to any country all over the world. You are required within the next 72hours to secure those above mentioned certificates or face the legal consequence defined for such delivery infringement, to avoid interrogation and prosecution in the court of law for money laundry and sponsorship of terrorism. We have investigative jurisdiction over every crime both in and outside United States . Also, you must not contact any other bank or persons in Nigeria , the United Kingdom or any part of the world for any payment, because your payment is presently under our custody here in United States of America . Please don’t respond to any FBI message without this security code (FBI/WOR/CMM). We shall direct you on the process of who to contact after extensive investigation. Yours in service Agent John Edward, Regional Director Federal Bureau Of Investigation Intelligence Field Unit J. Edgar Hoover Building 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, Nw Washington , D.C. 20535-0001, USA”

(it was actually laid of in paragraphs but pasting it here seems to have changed that).

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Boating

So one day I was riding along in a canoe with my friend Christian Watkins, unfortunately he steered it into a large bramble bush beside the river and the two of us fell into the water… But that’s not the subject of today’s entry.
    Back in 2008 I was in Cornwall with a couple of friends of mine, I’ve decided I won’t mention their names in today’s entry as I don’t want to incriminate them, and we were out strolling around the darkened streets looking for something to do. My two friends were both hoping to find a source of alcohol (all of us being under the age of 18 at the time meant that it was not easy to find). I was just happy to be taking a stroll. Unfortunately for them, they eventually realised that we were not going to find any alcohol (they came close though, in a field just beside a holiday centre were several large kegs surrounded by a fence, they managed to get in there only to be disappointed when discovering that they were all empty) and as such, a new pastime had to be figured out.
    Obviously, the logical thing for them to do in that situation was to break into a boat and try and steal everything inside it. It didn’t take them long to find a boat which was docked behind a large building (hiding them from sight). They both decided to climb down into the boat (I decided it wasn’t a very good decision so just stood up on the dock so I could wait for them to finish having their fun).
    The last thing I remember hearing was one of them shouting “Oh look, a TV!” and then an alarm went off. I have a feeling that they were a little concerned about the alarm, because after it went off the two of them quickly climbed up the ladder and ran away from the dock. I think they may have momentarily forgotten that they were with me, as they both ran past me and left me there next to the broken into boat. I sighed and slowly wandered off to find the two of them, a minute or so later I got a call from one of them telling me where I could find them.
    We spent the rest of the night hiding under a bridge… Which was nice.
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The Relationships Between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and, Jake and Amir

I’m sure I’ve made some kind of grammatical error in the title of today’s post; I just thought I’d better not even pretend I know how to write that correctly. Anywho, I am currently reading the book Don Quixote and the relationship between the two main characters reminded me of the relationship between Amir Blumenfeld and Jake Hurwitz in the internet series Jake and Amir.
    In Jake and Amir, Amir is a stupid person who seems to live in his own little world, especially with the little series ‘Ace and Jocelyn’ that he makes, where he and Jake are ‘astronaut accountants’. Amir doesn’t really seem to be able to distinguish between real life and the life of Jocelyn (who he plays) for example; Jake manages to make Amir leave his girlfriend by telling her that she is a ‘rival agent’. But, while Jake may be the ‘normal’ person next to Amir, there are several episodes that show that to a normal person he really is rather unintelligent himself, misquoting things and pretending to know about things that he really doesn’t, and very occasionally Amir is the ‘normal’ person next to Jake.
    All of this is very similar to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Don Quixote is downright insane; he read so many books on knight errantry that he believes that he is a valiant knight fighting against giants and enchanters. Sancho, meanwhile, seems to be the ‘normal’ person, pointing out the flaws in Don Quixote’s logic and trying to persuade him that he is actually fighting windmills rather than giants for example. Sancho, though, just like Jake, is rather unintelligent when compared to anyone other than Don Quixote, all the other people in the novel consider him to be rather stupid. In fact, there are several instances where Sancho mispronounces fairly common words in front of Don Quixote only to then be correct by him, just as has happened between Jake and Amir. I wonder if Jake and Amir were inspired by Don Quixote… Probably not.
    And of course, one of the main similarities is that while Jake and Amir may get annoyed at one another and Don Quixote and Sancho may also get annoyed with each other, deep down they love each other :D.

P.S. I apologising for posting this entry a day off schedule.

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Dracula by Bram Stoker

DraculaI think that Dracula, despite its somewhat archaic use of language, creates a rather dark and creepy atmosphere for its story rather well. Roughly the first third of this book is really excellent, Jonathan Harker has to go and visit Count Dracula in his castle in order for them to negotiate the sale of some real estate (or something along these lines) and this whole section (written as if it were Jonathan’s journal) is very well written. Any reader today will know that Dracula is secretly a vampire, but the way that Jonathan slowly figures it out through all the weird things that Dracula does is very suspenseful. Age, and the fact that the idea of Dracula has become somewhat cliched, has done nothing to reduce the quality of this story’s opening.

The story does become slightly less enjoyable after the action moves from Dracula’s castle to London, but it is still very good. The immediate threat is lost as Dracula kind of steps into the shadows. To elaborate, I mean a body is found and it is said that Dracula is responsible, but at the start Jonathan actually has to live with Dracula so he seems much more menacing.

I hope I have written this review in a way that explains how I feel about the book without spoiling the storyline for those who aren’t aware of it. I’ll also add a little note which is specifically about the edition I read, the introduction insists that there is a lot of repressed sexual tension of the Victorian times which is subtly released in this book, something I have to disagree with. I saw nothing overtly sexual in this book apart from one very minor scene.

Hopefully this has been interesting for you, on the whole I’d rate this book as a 9/10, just like it’s sequel. If the whole thing had been of the same quality as the first third it would have gotten a 10/10 but unfortunately it was not.

Buy it here.

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The Hunt

Yesterday I was happily sat on my bed using my laptop, doing the usual internet things, you know, like The Waltons Forum and just generally being laid back and relaxing with the computer. I had been for a few hours in fact. But somehow I had missed something…

Sat beside me, rather disturbingly, was a rather large house spider. Now, I don’t have any extreme irrational fear of spiders or anything, but I do find large house spiders to be rather unpleasant. Plus, house spiders do have particularly large fangs; I imagine a bite from them would be more than slightly painful. Anywho, what drew my attention to the spider was the fact that it had started walking towards me like some kind of creepy thing that moves towards things.

Upon seeing the spider make its advance towards me, I decided to go downstairs to get a jar to catch it in. I came back upstairs with a fresh spider-catching jar in my hand and prepared to capture it. However, when I returned to my room, the dastardly spider had gone. My door had been open the whole time I had gone to collect the jar, so I just assumed that the spider had run off into the hallway or back into the wall where I wouldn’t see it again. Unfortunately I was wrong, as the old saying goes assuming makes an, well, the gist is that assuming is bad.

So that night (hours later) when I went to bed, the spider made its reappearance. Everything seemed normal, I was lying in bed in the darkness, all was silent… But then I heard a scurrying about. The strange scurrying lasted for a couple of seconds before stopping. Could it have been the spider? Surely not, I must just be paranoid after having seen it up close earlier. That would seem like a logical conclusion for me to make, but then the scurrying started again and again, seemingly getting closer. I grabbed my 3DS from my bedside table (or from the swivel chair beside my bed, as it really is) and open it to use it as a light. There I could see the spider running around in some kind of frenzy.

It was a difficult task, but I managed to walk across the room without stepping on it or having it run up my trouser leg and then I switched on light and grabbed the jar I had brought up earlier. Obviously, this spider had been caught in a jar before because as soon as I grabbed it, the spider ran under my bed, running out and going back under again over and over. As I sat on my bed with my jar, it was like it was taunting me, its scurrying had made me turn the light on about an hour ago by now, and I was just watching it running around on the ground from my bed, wide awake. The hunter had become the hunted, but unfortunately, I had been the hunter originally. Luckily though, its stamina was not infinite and before long it decided to stop for a rest… On the side of my school bag.

My school bag was a rather difficult surface to catch a spider on, so I waited a few minutes for it to move… By a few minutes I mean around twenty. At the end of this time, I thought of something to do quickly. I went onto Facebook and decided to make a status out of my spider hunting, then I realised that it would be really sad to post about it (so I decided the blog was the place for it :D). But I made quite a mistake in looking away from the spider as when I looked back to my bag, it was gone (the spider, not the bag โ€“ thank goodness).

As it had been sitting next to the way into the bag, I decided it had probably hidden in there, so I quickly grabbed my bag and tossed it into the hallway, where I hoped it would return to the walls. But even then I wasn’t convinced, I waited for a while longer to see if I spotted it, and I think I started to go insane. I was convinced every slight noise or movement was it, and while one of or two of them may have been, I never saw it clearly again. In fact, it could be in my room with me now… Watching me write this entry… Waiting to make its next move…

Fun Fact: Today’s title is ‘The Hunt’ and it’s actually also the title of an episode of The Waltons – decided to use the same title ๐Ÿ˜€

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Books

For today’s entry I’m going to write up a funny little anecdote, as I’ve done before, except this one doesn’t actually really involve me at all, it’s just a funny story my English teacher told me when I was showing them my coursework one day, and I was reminded of it just yesterday when I was riding on the bus with a good friend of mine. I’m pretty sure my teacher wouldn’t mind this story being included in my blog (I was allowed to use it in my coursework after all) but just in case I suppose I had better not put their name.
    So when my English teacher was a teenager, she began having more and more interactions with the opposite sex, as did her sibling(s) (I can’t remember how many). Her grandmother found this quite hilarious and would always tease them about it whenever they saw her. One day they decided to ask their grandmother about the teasing and she said to them this “Well you know, I’d much rather go to bed with a nice book than any person…” which is, I think, a very funny quote. I mean, reading is cool after all, and reading late at night before you go to bed is even cooler, so this is a very cool quote. In fact, I think that quote would go great on a T-shirt, especially if accompanied by a hunk-ish man in Speedos or a woman in a bikini.
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (translated by Ralph Parker)

One Day in the Life of Ivan DenisovichThis book is exactly what the title says it is, one day in the life of the character Ivan Denisovich (who’s based on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) and Denisovich is a prisoner in a Russian gulag during the reign of Stalin.

I think that it does rather well in the way that it conveys just how poor the living conditions of people there were and how monotonous their lifestyles were. Through the characters you learn about the little habits of the prisoners (which, as the author was himself held in a gulag, are highly likely to be accurate representations) all of which are very interesting to read. The ways that they all keep their morale up through their interactions with one another are especially good. Also, I don’t know why, but I always seemed to feel a little cold when I was reading this book, I guess a sign that the author has written about snow covered winter Russia rather well.

However, as always, I shall say something bad about this book. My main problem with it is that it is actually rather boring, I’m sure at the time of its publication, people would have found it totally shocking and a real page turner, unable to believe that people had been treated so harshly under Stalin. But today, everybody knows that Stalin was a very bad person and so l guess the ‘shock factor’ it had upon publication has been lost with age.

Furthermore, as I said in the title, this really is just one day in the life of a prisoner. There’s no real story and you just read how one day plays out, which can be a bit disappointing if you’re expecting some interesting plot. But then, in a way, by doing this, it has done well by not glamorising gulag life, and the final paragraph suggests to me that it may have been written to intentionally make you feel just as bored as the prisoners… But probably not.

In the end, I would rate this book as a 6/10. I hope this review (or any future or past ones) doesnโ€™t sound too critical, I force myself to say something bad about every book I review, but I still did enjoy reading every one.

Buy it here.

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TwinShadie

I’ve mentioned the internet series Jake and Amir several times before on this blog, and I’m sure you can tell I’m quite a fan of it. As such I’ve decided to use today’s entry to make a shout out to the internet series TwinShadie. This is a relatively new series that has really only just started out, so hopefully this entry will get them a few viewers. Basically, the series has a similar sense of humour to Jake and Amir but, at the same time, is different enough to be unique. So I would suggest you check them out, even if you just watch one video.
Here’s the link
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