Boo!

Happy Halloween to all my creepy ghosts and ghouls!  I’ll be spending a wild night revising a truly scary research paper due next week.  Ohhh, now THAT would be a good costume…

“What are you supposed to be?”

“A horrendous, piece of shit draft that I wrote while under the auspices of Satan himself, packed with Adjectives of Doom and filled with Lucifer’s Dangling Participles!”

“Ahhh!!!”

(No, I don’t have anything wittier than this – suck on it.)

For the love! It’s the Saturday Roundup #8

As of last night I am no longer allowed to go out with the gals from my roller derby league if I have any hopes of keeping my liver intact.  Who knew that certain bars in Newtown don’t close until 5:00 am?  At any rate, it was all worth when one of the skaters gave me this:

Using Australian slang at every available opportunity?  By jingoes yes!

Ok, on to the good stuff:

This weeks Dirty Little Pleasure Award goes to Rex at Savage Minds for “The gap between taste and achievement”, most notably this tasty quip:

They can see what quality work is—they have a sense of it and a passion for it that motivates them to create, and yet at the same time they feel that their own capabilities are insufficient to make work that meets their own standards.

What I found most compelling about this post is how timely its advice was; it was published not 30 minutes after two fellow students and I were discussing the same phenomenon and the various insecurities therein.  It was a good conversation – an enlightening one.  Sometimes all you need is a little reassurance that you’re not alone in your confusion and that maybe, just maybe you’re not the dumbass you think you are.  (PS: There is some good stuff in the comments as well – I’d encourage you to take a look.)

On the relationship front (something profoundly important to this single soon-to-be-25-year-old as I’m supposed to have a house, a wedding ring, a steady job and possibly a baby in order to be viewed as an adult at 25) a new book claims that husband shopping is just like house shopping.  To be fair, anything that uses the words “shopping” and “spouse” together make me cringe.  Don’t get me wrong – I can “see” the metaphor, I just think it’s shit.  That’s ok though, because “relationship sex is boring” anyway. In that case I’d simply suggest porn, but it’s getting so damn degrading that you feel ashamed watching it afterward. But only after.  At least porn won’t knock you up though, and the direction some information is headed, there’s going to be a lot more unwanted children knocking about.  Why not just use birth-control?  Ask a few Virginian chemists, doing their part to save the world from the evils of pre-marital sex, especially with all those “do-me” feminists mucking about. They’ll probably end up falling for the “bad-boy” anyway. Whores.

The horror! It’s the Satur…Sunday Roundup #7

Sorry about the delay folks, I discovered the wonder and joy that is the 0.5 litre beer (see also honey soy chicken potato crisps) this weekend and have spent an inordinate amount of time getting closer with my new friend (the 0.5 litre beer) and trying to write papers at 4:00 in the morning.  This combined with a cold that I picked up (did you know they put codeine in their over-the-counters here?!) has made me a docile but decidedly spacey Dirt Warrior.  Another week, another step closer to going ape-shit crazy.  Let’s get it on!

Really? Need I say more?

This weeks Dirty Little Pleasure Award goes to the Coen Bros newest film Burn After Reading.  The first 10 minutes of this movie had me in side-clenching hysterics, which in all reality was probably due to the John Malkovich in bow-tie/liberal use of f-bombs combo, rather than actual humour.  The beauty of the film’s comedic brilliance comes from the fantastic acting of its well-assembled cast.  John Malkovich (who can still be sexy at a pasty, flabby 60) took the proverbial cake with his Princeton-educated insanity and liberal use of French pronunciation.  Brad Pitt (who is still not sexy at 40 with tan, rippling pectorals) came in a close second as a goofy, essentially brainless athletic trainer.  See it, love it.

I am endlessly fascinated by the new Australian words that crop up in conversations with fellows students and derby gals.  On Thursday, while taking a quick break during an intensely heated bout of paper writing, another student and I were discussing the Western Australian phrase “she’s apples”.  Naturally, the phrase was transformed by my horrid English to “shiz’apples” ala Snoop Dogg (who I am not, by the way, dissin’ as he threw down all hard-core in concert) much to the amusement of my fellow student.  So far I’ve incorporated words like “waffle” (of the rambling variety, not the tasty “brekkie” variety) “wagging”, “bludger”, “heaps” and “how’re ya’ going?” into my lexicon.  I’ve also taken on the guttural assent of “mmm” – a short, almost staccato utterance that is used frequently in conversation to show the speaker that you are listening and understand. Of course this got me fondly remembering my Japanese students and the “so so so so sososososo” and “eehhhHHH?!” that I picked up while in Japan. The end result when I crawled back to the States?  A hilarious mash of English and grunting that no one but I could understand.

Another Australian past-time that I have fun trying to comprehend is cricket.  No matter how hard I try, I just can’t figure it out.  Though, this helps:

Now, Australian Footie?  THAT I get.  Quadriceps in hot-pants.  Simple.  (Oh yes, I’m WAITING for the angry comments to come flooding in.)

In other news, this tower is really, really cool, more compelling reasons to use condoms, I can’t freaking WAIT for this to start, feminist stereotypes (I DO have my head up my academic ass, so I guess that’s no so much a stereotype for me), drugs n’ mummies, a really well-done post about the financial meltdown and some promising cinema. Fabulous!

Many of you know that I’m doing research on roller derby.  This means that I get to spend many hours “researching” online for things like new wheels and Blood and Thunder back issues.  But every once in a while I find something like this (warning! Contains boobies!  NOT work safe!) that makes me throw up a little in my mouth.  Though I suppose if we start the gender-specific stereotyping while they’re young then no harm no foul, right?

But I digress.

Maximilian Forte at Open Anthropology (I have not read through this blog as of yet – I suck, I know it) writes a neat little post about “a crisis of vast quantities in academia”.

While we’re discussing academia, here’s an interesting post from IvyGate.  On the one hand I couldn’t help but snigger at the email because I’ve sent emails like that more times than I’d like to admit. (Oh I’m dead serious:

“You Are Wicked Hot. Please Ignore Th Is, Very Drunk. Leaving In Txo Weeks. Heh. Awjward. No More Tdoo Mdo S.”

That gem was sent about a week before I left for Australia. I really should stop drinking.) On the other hand I felt that it was profoundly unprofessional for a fellow student (warning: unsubstantiated claim. I didn’t go too far into researching who the original poster was) to post an email like that for all the world to see. Not only does it show a tacky sort of cruelness but it tends to perpetuate the oft-quoted stereotype of the Ivy League student/graduate as a whiny, pretentious little prick.  To be fair, it looks like the blog itself is a sort of tongue-in-cheek rip-off of the Onion (and god knows I can appreciate self-depreciating humour.  And also hyphens) so a hefty grain o’ salt was consumed before reading too much into anything.  At any rate, I’m curious to see what you think.

I end this roundup with eroticfalconry.com.  Come on now – I was a falconer for many a year!  And I can tell you right now that I always wore the stylish (and yet so comfortable) pink eye bar in photos.  Pink is the new black, people!  In order to better illustrate this, I edited an old photo of me and my passage Red-tailed hawk Kacela:

So sexy.

Hate the game son, don’t hate the playa’.

All hail the conquering hero.

Some very exciting news from the Dirt Warrior Travel Department:

Air tickets have been purchased for Thailand – I’ll be departing on 27 November and heading back 29 December.  The really really exciting news is that my pal Mark will be meeting me in Siem Reap, Cambodia from 23 December to 29 December for some fun and frolic through Ankgor.  I haven’t seen him for nearly two years and I am beside myself with elation!  Though to be fair, we’re probably going to end up destroying each other in a bid to see who can shamelessly deprave themselves more.

Leave it to me – I will overdo it.

A very merry “Columbus Day” to my fellow Yanks.  If you’ve managed to piss off a bunch of people at a parade and or were jailed shortly thereafter, send me pictures so that I can live vicariously through your political action!