content generator from sola

[the_siobhan]

Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.

400 blows
One of my ex's once asked me if I had a theme song, and I named this one without even thinking abut it. To me it's always been a song about survival in spite of being on the losing side and about standing apart from other people because of one's experiences.

dutch chicken benchmark
bcholmes has this story she tells about working in Amsterdam and trying to come to grips with how straight forward they are about sex and talking about sex. At one point, she asked a co-worker what kind of topics might be considered to riské for mixed company. The co-worker couldn't think of anything. Gay sex? No, gay sex was fine. Kinky sex? No that was ok too.

"How about sex with an animal?"

The co-worker thought about it. Finally he conceeded that it would depend on the animal.

"So what kind of animal would be considered in bad taste?"

"Say... anything smaller than a chicken."

And so the Dutch Chicken Benchmark was born.

grippy
I'm a big Stephen Colbert fan. At the opening credits of The Colbert Report a bunch of words go by that say things like "INSPIRED" "PATRIOTIC" etc. There's one that hangs out a little longer so you can get a good look at it, and for a long time that word was "grippy".

It has since been replaced by "megamerican", "lincolnish", "superstantial" and a bunch of others. But grippy is still my favourite.

pattern matching
I am fascinated by the fact that people in general have such problems learning from their mistakes, and even more difficulty learning from the mistakes of others. Our brains are supposed to be designed to look for patterns in the way our environment works, but that talent seems to grind to a halt when it comes to human behaviour.

Being able to predict the future by looking at the successes and failures of the past is a process that really interests me.

reluctant messiahs
Originally the title of a book, but I just really took to the concept that certain people have an powerful impact on others through no volition of their own.

urban planning
Mostly because Toronto is so crap at it. There are cities that really work well and ones that really don't, and I'm really interested in how the differences come to exist.

wasp factory
A really cool book by Iain Banks, and a really cool record label in Cheltenham, UK.

Comments

[erictragedy.livejournal.com]

bad ties - I remember when I was in junior high school or thereabouts some guy was in the newspaper for having the world's largest collection of ugly ties, and I thought - what a cool thing to collect. When my mother got rid of all my dad's wretched ties from the 60s and 70s, I snatched them up - paisley, polka dotted, rings and weird patterns, some more than 6" wide at their widest point. After that whenever I found really ugly ties at garage sales or thrift stores I bought 'em. In high school I declared Friday "Tie-day" and wore a different bad tie every week, sometimes with matching bad hankerchief. Later, when I started dressing more punk, I just incorporated the ties into my personal style. I never liked when so-called punks became too uniform in dress. I finally stopped acquiring bad ties after buying a box full of hundreds at a yard sale. I have worn them very infrequently since, and just a few months ago, I finally got rid of a majority of the collection, keeping only a few prized pieces for when I really want to make a statement.

hecate - Throughout my life I've vacillated between hard core atheism, agnosticism and various forms of what Christians would call paganism. Sometimes all in one day, LOL. I have always liked Greek mythology as well, and one of the goddesses in ancient Greek religion (actually a mortal but later venerated as divine) was Hecate. She is commonly associated with witchcraft throughout the ages, and is closest to what I think of as a Goddess, when I am in a more spiritual mood. But whether a divinity, a legendary person or a character in stories, I've always just kind of thought she was cool.

visual irony - eciklb and I both really got into this around the time we first started dating. It is the use of irony in art much as it would be used in literature or song. It infuses much of my photography such as this sexualized nun entitled, Thou Shalt Remain Chaste:
(http://photobucket.com)

...visual irony is used in film a lot. Particularly in comedies. One example from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is when brought to modern California, Sigmund Freud is seen standing in a shopping mall holding a corn dog.

wd-40 - A space age solvent and lubricant. WD-40 is an amazing substance. I maintain that about 90% of everything in the world can be fixed if you have Superglue, Duct Tape and WD-40. In fact WD-40 is kind of like the antithesis of those binding agents (Duct tape and Superglue).

you're under arrest - I am not a huge fan of anime. Not all the genres appeal to me. I never really cared for knee-slapping comedies like Ranma 1/2, because I don't think the humor translates (to American culture & the English language) very well. Often the comic timing is just way off. But there is one genre of anime comedies that seem to translate perfectly for my tastes - romantic comedies. One great example is Oh! My Goddess, a kind of anime "I Dream of Jeanie", by artist Kōsuke Fujishima. Another one by Fujishima is You're Under Arrest about the life and times of two female police officers. It has everything, comedy, action and romance, and since Fujishima was an engineering draftsman, the technology - guns, cars, motorcycles and whatnot are drawn with incredibly precise lifelike detail, a nice counterpoint to the simplified anime style of the human characters.

♀♂♀ - Every guy's fantasy. 'Nuff said.

 - I've been a PC user since the original IBM PC in the early 1980s. In th late 80s I started using an Apple when the Macintosh line came out. I returned to using PCs during my college years, but rapidly became frustrated with the clunky Windows 3.1 GUI, so returned to Apple for a few years until the release of Windows '95. I was a PC user from '95 until going to design school, and becoming interested in non-linear video editing around 1999. I regularly used PCs and Macs off and on until the release of OS X. Since then, I have mostly been an Apple loyalist. I still have my PC, but almost never bother turning it on, and in fact it isn't even plugged in right now.