Thursday | November 17, 2005

Failure

                I read an interesting, if fairly short, newspaper article yesterday about a sparrow getting shot by a bird exterminator with an air rifle. The online version is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1643475,00.html but it is lacking in information, so you’re welcome to do some searching on your own (I also found http://www.bonniewren.com/2005/sparrow-met-his-waterloo-in-domino-day-prep.htm which I commented on, so I won’t repeat much of what I wrote there here because what I was going to write here had already been written there, and you could just go there to read what I was going to write here... if you know what I mean, because I don’t think I do anymore).

                What struck me about that article was how a group of inconspicuous fans of domino chased a sparrow into a corner, called in a professional bird exterminator and let him kill it, all the while having time to think things through and choose the best decision to take (unless the time it took for the exterminator to arrive was too short for the domino team’s anger to boil down and regain their heads), and all this because it knocked over a (relatively) few dominoes. The sparrow didn’t deserve to die at all. Nothing good could come out of it. It doesn’t deter other birds from repeating the accident and it certainly does not teach the offending sparrow a lesson. It’s not as if that particular species are known to be domino haters (which would adequately explain their endangered status in the Netherlands ;-)).

                Bird lovers would condemn those people’s actions as appallingly selfish, intolerant and violent. It is easier to understand the team’s anger if you realise that it was a real world-record attempt and that they had indeed been working extremely hard on it. The bird’s fate would be little different if, for example, it made a giant wall puzzle collapse. But, landing on a computer’s power button (bad example, since they usually tend to be placed vertically) and effectively destroying a student’s unsaved 7-page essay would generally not provoke ’retaliation’. And let’s also ignore the act that the student has partly himself to blame because he really should’ve saved at least once. The student, unlike the others, is alone, which is the key difference. On his own, he can think clearly and without the direct influence of others. In a group, he bends with the wind and, if too strong, follows suit with the rest and gets blown away.
Posted by White Rabbit at 16:10:45 | Permanent Link | Comments (3) |

Wednesday | November 16, 2005

Am I really amused?

                I have a few tests next week for all the subjects I do: biology, chemistry, English and maths. The November tests will only be on work we’ve covered. It’s a progress check, the only one we will have before our proper AS exams 7 months later, in June. Who knows, maybe I’ll enjoy it, and I’ll only have about 6 tests, which should give me plenty of time to revise. The teachers have assured us, however, that we will suffer if we don’t take this seriously. (Of course, many people miss the obvious fact that the harder they push us, the more work they will have to mark, and the teachers do look slightly worn-out by now, even if it’s still 3 weeks till the Christmas holidays).

                The atmosphere at school actually still quite relaxed. A student in my year is having a party and someone else has proceeded to randomly invite people to it, claiming the party is his, so the original ‘party planner’ now doesn’t even know how many people are coming, but it will certainly be significantly more than the 20-or-so people who were invited for real. His house is going to be packed, the food will run out within 5 minutes and his parents will further their attempts of driving him out by the time he’s 18.

                If you look at it one way, you will feel sorry that his house is going to, and I’m using his words here, ‘get thrashed’. If you look at it the other way, you may find it hilarious, for exactly the same reasons. Or maybe you just wouldn’t care. I don’t know. What I do know is that most people will fit first or second categories, although not be on each category’s extreme ends. I admit I do find his predicament quite funny, but I hope that doesn’t make me seem heartless in the eyes of others. Humour has always been base on the misfortune and mockery of others, after all. When you start laughing at yourself, you know that you’ve screwed up beyond measurements (slight exaggeration *cough*),

                I think understanding and knowing this piece of information is the key to understanding humour in general. I often read comics when I was younger but I never laughed or found it funny when something bad or stupid happened to one of the characters I liked, or the characters I cared about. Despite the author’s intentions of making the comic funny, I, in fact, was often saddened or disappointed (but no, the ill-fated adventures of Donald Duck did not traumatise me as a child :-P). Caring too much does not ruin all your fun, since there is so much in the world that is fun. You already know that fun is relative. Caring is fun for some people (I don’t know how, but it is and I can’t dispute it). But I do think everyone should have the right to turn a blind eye once in a while and point and laugh (and perhaps then hasten to treat the matter with the seriousness it deserves). I would not see myself as a victim if it happened to me. I really do dislike (see, hate is such a strong word) summarising my writing at such a basic level, but this is all, in the end, just another part of life.

Edit: Also see http://teaparty.blog.com/313556/ wich is where I previously wrote about this topic.
Posted by White Rabbit at 13:06:01 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Sunday | November 13, 2005

'They Shall Not Grow Old'

                Almost 48 hours have passed since Remembrance Day, with today being Remembrance Sunday, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 when the armistice was signed and the fighting brought to a halt. My school has its own tradition on that day, which it has been practising for many years. There was a Remembrance Day assembly on Friday morning and we all entered and left in silence. During the assembly, the names of all the fallen soldiers, who were once pupils of the school, were read and the poem ‘For the Fallen’ was recited. Our teacher let us out of class early, for the Remembrance Day parade so we could get a good view but a crowd was already gathered and was steadily increasing. I still managed to find a good spot at the front line, and stood there with everyone else. The parade was performed by a selected group from our Combined Cadet Force standing in formation on the main square of the school (it is hard to explain what exactly the CCF is in a few words, so see it as a form of Junior Scouts movement combined with close contacts with Britain’s armed forces, mainly the Army). The murmur of the crowd was muted when the recruits were ordered into attention, and we remained silent until the end of the ceremony.

At 11am, the British flag, along with the banner of our school, were raised, and then slowly lowered to the ground, to the sound of ‘The Last Post’, followed by 87 strokes of the school bell, one for every year past since 1918. The signal for the 2-minute-silence ended when the flags were raised up again. For 2 minutes we all stood there, silent, listening to the sounds of rustling leaves and the blowing of the wind. I think we were all a bit cold, but nobody moved. The sky was bright, yet bleak, grey, despite patches of clear blue. I looked at the Union Jack, flapping proudly in the strong wind, and kept watching it, not knowing what I was feeling, but only that something was there. This was the first time I had been standing on the front life of spectators. I was surprised that I found myself almost yawning, or so I told myself. The regimental bagpiper played an unknown tune, after which the recruits marched away, out of sight from us. The previously unchallenged silence was quickly broken and I, too, joined the crowd and walked back into the school.


If you want to know more about Remembrance Day, try http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/Remembrance.html for information about its commemoration in Britain, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day to know more about other countries’ observances. You can also find a picture of the flag bearers of my school here: http://abingdon.org.uk/images/home/remembrance05_1.jpg

Posted by White Rabbit at 10:30:56 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Sunday | October 30, 2005

Aliens Ate My Railway

The trees are turning, the last days of October are slowly passing by, daylight savings time has ended, half-term is also drawing to a close, and this will be my last blog entry for the month. Despite the tone I am setting here, this blog entry will hopefully open up new possibilities for varied topics in future entries, rather than just tying up loose ends and forcing me to be…ugh…creative…again next month.
            I’m beginning to feel that the past week has been rather idyllic and something horrible is going to happen soon. And this has nothing to do with Halloween. I wonder if it isn’t rather cynical of me or anyone else to always, and I mean always, believe that life has two sides, and bad times will inevitably follow good times. This cycle of rotating happiness does not to give much meaning to life, however true it may seem (in fact, I think one of Buddhism’s aims is to specifically target and get rid of this life cycle), so I can’t help but think that I’ve somehow managed to pull of yet another mistake and trapped myself in this unforgiving, cynical mentality.
            How, you may ask, do I get up every morning if this is my view on life? Well, it would be a pretty horrible life, although I don’t think I am sticking very rigidly to that mentality: the far future is just plain unknown to me, with no real sign of doom and gloom; I do have some dreams I want to fulfill; most importantly, when I’m reasonably sober, I ponder whether perhaps the meaning of life has a simple twist in it, which is to find the second, more useful meaning of life. This seems comical to me because the road to the meaning of life would be a sort of U-turn, and turn back in on itself, much the same way as, e.g., the non-existence of absolute truth in the universe being itself a paradoxical absolute truth. By the way, for those “enlightened” few that are already on their way to find the second meaning, I hope the task is not so daunting that you’ve no idea where to start and, as a result, often end up doing nothing at all.
            The difficulty does not actually lie in finding the actual meaning of life, but choosing which approach you are going to take (although strictly speaking, this only covers those who have theirs chosen for them, or who had had an approach thought up at a very early age). Once chosen, you will probably be charging forward like a train towards the destination but you have most likely shed blood and tears (figuratively speaking) when determining how you’re going to go about ‘finding the second meaning of life’. I hope you realize that this can easily happen for everything you do, including such trivial things like deciding on a suitable place to get work experience or what music you’re going to listen to (did you think this  entry was really all about the meaning of life? Wrong). Some people will just not plain care, which is why I also used the ‘second meaning of life’ as an example because you are bound to be forced, one day, to make a tough decision with results you will care about.
            I for one absolutely despise getting mired in uncertainty like this. My head hurts from the thinking about and yet so little has been decided at the end that I might as well base my decisions on the shape of the clouds over northern Italy on a Wednesday morning. This is one of my great weaknesses and I will definitely have to make such decisions again in the near future. It’s also one of my few fears of life (don’t laugh) and, if my luck doesn’t hold, I’ll be face-to-face with one of these decision-monsters soon after the beginning of the next half of the Michaelmas (winter) term.

 So there it is: a real threat of serious decision-making. Hey, I should start getting good at making decisions, especially at my age…but I’m not. Not, as in, I am excessively slow at making them. ‘But you can never be too careful’, some will undoubtedly say. I have no answer to that, except ‘try telling that to me’ (which they’ve already done…argh). All right, so there it is, on one hand: a very real threat of serious decision-making. On the other hand, I watched ‘Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit’ last Saturday and it was just marvelous. The film is really unique because they are able to add so much detail and charm into it using plasticine…I couldn’t stop watching the screen at all. The humour is wonderful, with a lot of verbal as well as visual puns (‘aauhg!’, ‘nuts’ and ‘dog fighting’, anyone? ;-)). The plot is coherent and complex for a U-rated movie, with some surprises and a lot of rabbity stuff (spoiler-poke: I saw a pink rabbit in the ending credits) and it demonstrates ‘Aardman Animations’ at their creative best. I’d love to watch ‘Curse of the Were-Rabbit’ again since all the gags make it worth doing so, but time is short. I guess I’ll just have to rent it on DVD later on.
            I have recently discovered ‘X-Com: UFO Defense’ (or ‘UFO: Enemy Unknown’). It’s simply amazing, and its genre-blending is extremely impressive for a game made in 1994. It’s do good that I don’t want to keep writing stuff about it. I want to finish this blog entry and continue playing it! If you are one of the many people who have submitted to the young religion of Chris Sawyerism, you should know that the title of this blog entry is also the name of a Transport Tycoon song (for those of you that are not avid Chris Sawyerists or Transport Tycoon fans, I can tell you that the game is about starting and running a transportation company using cars, planes, ships and trains…but mainly trains). Well, Chris Sawyer was himself a huge X-Com fan and the main programmer of Transport Tycoon, so the music title is not very surprising. In fact, there are two UFO disasters in the game, involving UFOs and Earth-based aeroplanes that look very similar to the ones in X-Com. So now you know. (Useless trivia facts - every blog should have some). Oh, well, maybe I could convert some of my X-Com missions into stories and post them here (I’ll spare you all the technical things involved, like time units, fatal wounds and percentage firing accuracies). I think I'm going to go back watching the skies...

Posted by White Rabbit at 20:49:28 | Permanent Link | Comments (2) |

Friday | October 21, 2005

Trafalgar Day

            Today, the 21st of October, is the bicentenary anniversary of the British victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. I didn't take part in much celebration and, although I admit something small always gets into my eyes whenever I read or hear about Britain's historical legacy, Nelson's victory just didn't grab a lot of attention from me today. On the other hand, I have read a few interesting things about the battle that does captivate my imagination, especially how HMS Dreadnought, a 98-gun ship with a crew of 738, sailed up to the broadside of the Spanish flagship Santissima Trinidada (with 140 guns and 1200 men) without firing a shot, and consequently managed to to bombard with such a fervour that it was forced to surrender within 15 minutes. In fact, though the Royal Navy was outnumbered 33 to 27, only 16 enemy ships were left reasonably intact, while not a single British ship was lost. Chew on that while I continue writing this blog entry. :-)
             I did tell you that I was going to write all about the house singing competition and I'm already 1 day late, so I better get going... our house didn't win. There wasn't enough synchronisation and, despite our great conductor doing his best to keep us controlled, we sang it all too quickly. The other houses had both good and bad singing but, overall, the afternoon was very nice and a fitting end to the first half of the first term. I'm already enjoying my 13-week holiday and am planning to go and see 'Wallace & Gromit - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit' tomorrow simply because Wallace and Gromit's first full-length feature film is something not to be missed.
            
Posted by White Rabbit at 22:18:52 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Tuesday | October 18, 2005

Sleep, singing and not singing while sleeping

I hate having to wake up early 6 days of the week. It is horrible to wake up on a perfectly fine Saturday morning at 7am, get dressed, eat breakfast and go to school. The advantages of Saturday school are many: you get to work more and learn more; you have more opportunities to keep the mental system going (rather than just switch off and sleep through the week-end) and more lessons per week means that we get longer holidays. But sleep is important to me and I have never been able to concentrate properly during school if I don’t get at least 7 and half hours of sleep. During the last week, however, I have found it much easier to get up than normal. This is mainly due to this half of the term nearing its end, with a 13-day holiday starting on Wednesday the 19th, and a rather ‘special’ event-taking place right before it.
                I am not a very enthusiastic singer and, although I take part in choral activities every Friday (you will probably not be surprised to hear that it is compulsory) in my school chapel, I don’t sing very well either. However, I will, just like everyone else, have to take part in my school’s annual house singing competition (anyone who has ever read Harry Potter should have a clear idea of what a ‘house’ is). The competition takes place on next Wednesday at 3pm and our house will be singing ‘Faith’, by George Michael: http://www.80smusiclyrics.com/artists/georgemichael.htm The version we are going to perform is the one sung by Michael Jackson (i.e. way too high-pitched and fast for an all-boys school :-P).  On the other hand, we’re not doing badly during our rehearsals and we may just have a chance of improving from our 8th place last year (there are 9 houses in total, heh). I will post about the results on Thursday, so you can all see how badly we will need to improve…
                Life has not changed; there are ups and downs;  the medal has two sides; rain follows sun, which follows rain, and so on. Now that I am in the 6th form, the 12th year of school, the bar has been raised by several notches (this is because, technically, we are all ‘volunteers’ since mandatory education ends at the 11th year of school). I have to do a biology essay, complete some chemistry exam papers, do loads of revision for maths, and finish reading through two books for English. There will also be some tests on my 4 subjects in late November. I can feel that they are really testing our abilities. :-P
            It turns out that a lot of the things they teach you during GCSE are complete nonsense, which the teachers are trying to rectify in A-levels. For example, we’ve always been taught that elements with atomic numbers of 1 to 20 have 2 electrons in their inner shell, and 8 in their outer shells. I don’t think I need to explain why that is just completely wrong, but that is what they’ve been teaching us before A-levels. Sure, it’s suitable for GCSE level, and knowledge will be expanded when students start learning more advanced stuff, but what about those that do not choose to take chemistry or physics? What about the fact that people who do not choose to learn biology at A-level will leave school believing that a cell is only a big container with a nucleus and “some” cytoplasm? I do only biology, chemistry, English and mathematics for my A-levels so I really do wonder about the validity of my knowledge/understanding in physics, geography, and even history. I know now that this isn’t exactly a cause of alarm, since people who do not choose to continue a subject will probably never touch on it again. I suppose the Ministry of Education would just tell people to ‘go learn on their own’ if they want to fill their gaps of knowledge.

Posted by White Rabbit at 20:31:57 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Friday | October 14, 2005

ColorQuiz test results

All right, I took a personality test at ColorQuiz.com

Here are my results:

http://www.colorquiz.com/cgi-bin/results.cgi?do=print_blog&picked1=4,5,3,7,1,6,0,2,1&picked2=7,3,1,5,4,6,0,2,7&sex=Male&blog_name=White+Rabbit

I find some of what is written quite worrying and deny their silly conclusions (hey, that's what my results predicted would happen :-P).


I wish the link wasn't longer than the trans-Siberian railway.
Posted by White Rabbit at 01:45:43 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

Wednesday | October 05, 2005

Weekly updates

                I have decided that the only way to attract readers to my blog is to actively update it. The more I put in, the more I get out of it: the more I write, the more comments I will, or should, get. Now, I won't jus write about any old thing (except that his is my personal blog, so you can expect more entries about me ;-)), but I will certainly put more effort into thinking of interesting topics. The apparent lack of readers (I'm sorry, if you don't comment, I cannot know that you exist...telling me that you read but don't comment counts as a comment, so don't try that, hehe) means that I have actually no one to write for: it will just be writing that lies there and waits, until, one day, somebody comes along and goes 'ooh!'
                Every writer has his own style and interests, and I definitely hope I'll be able to stop with posting generic blog entries and begin writing what people want to read. This is, after all, a public blog, for everyone, not just me. It's self-evident that I wouldn't post anything here if I wanted to keep it strictly personal and about what would concern me only. (I hope).

                So, yes, there will be weekly updates from now on: 4 per month, if you will. I'll work it into my daily routine, which is about as rigid as a rotten plank anyway: today I just went to an IRC chat channel, on a whim, before 8am, and yesterday evening I actually did 3 pieces of homework days in advance (although I don't mean to imply that everything for Monday is usually done the night before). Oh, and I missed a chemistry lesson today as well by mixing up the timetable and going to the wrong classroom. I blame it on a bureaucratic scandal.
Most people can't find the time or willpower to write huge, long things (the kinds usually wrongly associated with the likes of this blog entry) outside school or university. They'll do it if forced to, if provoked but, for me, as long as I don't find myself going on and on and writing drivel, I'll continue writing for the sake of writing (there appears to be a lack of a better term here). Despite my 'willingness', I run low on inspiration many times, but it's just another thing for me to work on.
                All right, so now I end the blog entry with various sorts of wishy-washy 'goodbye's and a rather muffled, pathetic question, which nobody could possibly hear, in the form of....'opinions?' What is it with people and that question? Do they not have an opinion or are they never willing to share it? I'll accept anything, really...(honest!) Post more comments and opinions (please). And goodbye (said in a wishy-washy tone, obviously).

                BUT NOT YET! *sighs and groans all round* I mean what I ay or, at least, write. There are thousands upon thousands of different ways this blog entry could've been written differently. I could make this concise and rapid. It would be like a quick, tiny reminder. Alternately, I could extend it all, separate the main points and fill the gaps with miles of other information. I could write gigantic roundabout sentences, spanning across the horizon (or your computer monitor) and tell you all about why r why not you can compare the economic boom of America in the 1920s with 3 extra entries per month. Perhaps I am lucky and have already found the right style, in which I case I should keep to it, but I'm keen to experiment.
                Unlike a lot of writers, I am willing to write whatever people want to read. I don't choose readers, the readers choose me. So start commenting, or my next blog entry will not even get near to as good natured as this: if you don't comment, you will regret it.

*cough* I didn't mean that. ;-) Now, really, get commenting!

Posted by White Rabbit at 12:42:27 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

Thursday | September 22, 2005

20 minutes

Writer’s block is a constant torment for anyone sitting in front of a blank paper, pen in hand and hearing the clock ticking away. Whether you’re in an exam, writing a blog entry, doing your homework or drafting something during your free period at school, writing’s block is sure to make life sour for you. It’ll put you off vinegar for life, if only in a metaphorical sense.
           I don’t have any brilliant new ideas, or anything to refine and develop further. Nevertheless, writing this down helps to fill up the time. My teachers wouldn’t call this particularly useful but it’s only 20 minutes after all. 20 minutes left. I’m not at all surprised that, after 2 paragraphs, a revelation hits me in the face: because I’m gripped by a disease even the scribe god of Toth can’t escape from, I haven’t even got the creativity to bring up a subject. All right, I have a slight cold and am sniffing a lot during class. ‘There, there, pat on back, you’ll be fine in a few days.’ Will my mud-clear mind also improve? I certainly hope so, although right now I’m just roping in the dark, hoping to find some kind of abstract, imaginative wall to guide me through the cave.
            I demand attention! But I have long since lost control of this piece of blog entry.
            Good writers pace out their writing, and makes as much as they can as intentional as they can. Meanwhile, I am here wondering if not half the school is also suffering from a cold or the flu and, adding to that, I’m writing all of this as I go along, coming up with ideas off the bat (ahem, no need to drag cricket any further into this). I’m not taking my time because I have none. Still, the chances of squeezing something of higher quality out of my mind would be slim, even if I started to pause and think. Well, there goes the bell. I wish myself to get better soon…

Posted by White Rabbit at 22:57:54 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Wednesday | September 07, 2005

Exploring yourself

                How often do people tell you that your interests are too limited, or that you spend too much time on one thing, and that your mind will eventually become empty, devoid of pretty much everything apart from the one thing that you do, the one thing which, they claim, will engulf and control your life. If you agree, then you might as well peel your eyes off the screen and do something about it, but if your opinions differ, if you do believe that your life has significance and depth, and you are still unable to convince anyone that they are in fact wrong, all you have to do is to stop, think, and remember.

                Close your eyes or keep them open, depending on whichever helps you to concentrate. Try, without hesitation, to think about everything you know and feel at once. Give yourself a time frame of 5 seconds, and try to push literally all of your memories into one, super-dense sphere of consciousness. For me, the experience is refreshing, although occasionally unnerving. So many things, which you would never think about during a normal day, crop up, and old childhood memories are relived. Though you will most likely never succeed in thinking about it all at once, because that was just to help you to discover your most memorable experiences (I bet that you found yourself either going through your life in chronological order, or thinking about just a few things at once), it gives one of the most bird's eye view of your life you can possibly get. You will recall your mistakes and your achievements, and you can easily compare your life today to that of many years ago. If you have the free time, you could easily lose yourself in....yourself.

                Sometimes, inspecting your inner realms like this can be an effective wake-up call. For others, it may lead to complacency, and for the unfortunate few, fear. Alarmed by the fact that you must do something drastic to change your life for the better, subdued because you believe you can't perform better, and frightened by the wrongs you've committed, the wrongs you are committing, and the dark, mine-covered path back to redemption. Things don't get better if all three, and more, are felt simultaneously, and you've no idea where to turn. Sometimes, you are aware of what needs to be done, but haven't the courage to take action; you can stand up for your friends, for those who suffer, but you can't go against your own mind.

                This idea of mine, of attempting to remember and recall everything simultaneously, may sound ridiculous to some (personally, I know Buddhists reject the idea of the 'self', though ignorance on the various types Buddhism prevents me from going further). Indeed, I only know of one person who has tried it: me. In fact, I often end up thinking first and foremost about Lego, despite me laying my last Lego brick 6 years ago. This isn't a solution to life's problem. You could tell yourself that it is, and try it, but to me, it's just a good insight of your own, inner world. The whole idea is so simple to understand, and easy to perform, that I have found myself unable to write more on the subject. The real difficulty is interpreting and comprehending whatever your mind focuses on, but that's all up to you, not me.
Posted by White Rabbit at 13:53:37 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |