Watercooler Sub Zero: Ice Capades

Eek. Sorry Kate. I *will* shut up now, completely. And talk about model railways or something instead.

Oh kate, what's up now? I know it's Monday morning, and we're all grumpy, but still . . .

(remembers who I'm talking to)

. . . but of course, if you demand less Gothtalk, then it shall be done, oh great one. (fans kate with a palm leaf while peeling her grapes)

I don't really care, FP, I'm just jealous and cranky. You can talk about whatever you like, just ignore me growling. I'm not 100% serious.

Or I could whinge about how I broke my home PC by trying to upgrade from Gnome 2.14 to 2.16 - well, I didn't really break it, but I forgot if I did it part-way then lots of packages would end up not working, so much so that logging into Gnome would be impossible until it was completed.

Grrrr.

Oh, and how is it that women with gorgeous figures (ie, the goth, and just about every other non-obese woman i know) thinks they actually have a terrible figure and are really just a big bloaty monster when they're really really not?

yeah, tmai!

xpost wait whereas obese women usually think they have a great body?

And raging assholes always think they're funny posters?

FP, you speak the truth - about gorgeous women, not about Gnome, on which topic I am not qualified to speak upon, although some may say I'm not qualified to talk about gorgeous women either. Most women seem to think they're body shape is all wrong, when nine times out of 10 they're fucking amazing, and they just don't know it. The fact that most women don't have a clue as to how amazing they are is a source of constant anguish to me.

On A Certain Lady At Court
Alexander Pope

I know a thing that’s most uncommon;
(Envy, be silent and attend!)
I know a reasonable woman,
Handsome and witty, yet a friend.

Not warp’d by passion, awed by rumour;
Not grave through pride, nor gay through folly;
An equal mixture of good-humour
And sensible soft melancholy.

‘Has she no faults then (Envy says), Sir?’
Yes, she has one, I must aver:
When all the world conspires to praise her,
The woman’s deaf, and does not hear.

The Narrowboat is entirely too Darling Buds of May for my tastes, but then, I would make a very poor judge of that sort of contest :)

apologies for the they're/their mixup, I need more coffee.

Maybe that's what I need. Coffee.

raging assholes?

what a great poem, Johnney B.

And my brother didn't take the bait about being wound up himself, and decided to wind me up with him Tom Cruise anti-psychiatric rants instead. ::rolls eyes::

And no one answered my question about FAPping between Xmas and New Years.

God, Alan Hovhaness' music is so great.

Other than that, it's nothing. existed. here

THE ANNUAL FREAKYTRIGGER INCORPORATING PUMPKIN PUBLOG 29th PUB CRAWL: THE BOROUGH BOUNDED AREA! Final route being finalised but for the first time we are South Of The River drinking in some loverly boozers. 29th December in Borough. MORE DETAILS TO FOLLOW

Where did you get that from? The Other Place?

I'm up for fun and FAPPING right through.

no it wasn't from Cambridge. It was from here.

Kate, midway between Xmas and New Year I will probably be so fed up with the parents that I probably *would* be up for driving down to London to FAP if I could find somewhere to crash.

A sofa, I mean, not whilst driving.

JB, that is a great poem! I've never read any Pope but I have this impression that he has a bit of a boring reputation.

Ah!

Ed, my mum would like sausages and bacon. Can you oblige her, maybe Wednesday or Thursday this week?

I don't think he's ever boring, I think that the problem with Pope is that he is very much *of his time* in most of his works. That poem has a timeless quality, but when you consider that a very famous Pope quote "A little learning is a dangerous thing" is followed by the line "Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring" you can see what I mean. WTF is a Pierian spring??? One hopes his C18th audience knew.

The only Pope I've ever read is The Rape of the Lock, but I remember being more interested in the Aubrey Beardsly illustrations than the poetry.

18th Century educated persons had access to/knowledge of a heck of a lot more obscure, often mythological, symbolism than we did. Sometimes I think we are missing out, not having that knowledge. But then I think of all the things that we have to remember these days that 18th Century poets didn't have to have any knowledge of.

Possibly thursday.

That would be good. She is running off with my godmum tomorrow. Lord knows what the two of them will get up to!

I love reading old poetry in one tab with wiki in the other tab so I can cross-reference archaic words and references. It reminds me of when I was little with my cheap encyclopedia and Dylan albums.

Let's not talk about Dylan albums, it will only make me sad. :-(

What I really hate is when you are reading an archaic book and all the footnotes are in the back, so you have to keep flipping back and forth, maybe even keep two bookmarks. I far prefer when they're at the bottom of the page, as footnotes should be, so they do not disrupt the flow of reading.

So what is a Pieran spring?

A pedant writes: if they're at the back they're not footnotes, they're endnotes.

That's not pedantry, that's wanting a job in publishing!

whenever I hear anyone mention footnotes I always think back to the style guide from when I was writing my dissertation at uni. There was a supserscript 1 in the midst of the text and at the foot of the page the footnote read "1Don't use footnotes."

I have read books in my time when the footnote is longer than the text above the horizontal rule, which is just silly.

so superscript tags don't work here. I see.

A spring in Ancient Greece that was sacred to the Muses and inspired poets and the like if you drank it.

I've read books where the footnote takes up a page and a half! Just make it another section, fool!

of course such horrors would never be allowed in one of our publications.

It's usually science books that have the mega-long footnotes that go on for pages. Those can go in the back of the book. But it's like those one-liners that define archaic words or explain current events that are being referenced which really should just go at the bottom of the page.

do you prefer the Vancouver or Harvard referencing style, Kate?

I don't even know what that means.

Vancouver - references are numbered throughout the text in sequence and then are listed numerically in the bibliography

Harvard - the name of the author (or authors, though et al is more common for more than two) and date are given throughout the text and the bibliography is listed alphabetically by authors' surnames.

Ann Coulter is very good with endnotes

I dont' give a shit about bibliographical footnotes! (Though I always used the Vancouver method when I still bothered writing papers.) I just care about the ones that explain what archaic 18th Century words mean!

Vancouver does rule. Harvard, although the older and preferred system, suffers from the disadvantage that if Smith & Jones wrote a huge corpus of work during 2005 and the author of the paper or book wants to cite several of these works, then you then have to employ (Smith & Jones, 2005a), (Smith & Jones, 2005b), ect ect. And what if there are two A. Smiths and you want to quote both of them???

We had to use the Harvard style at university, and no footnotes at all. If you studied history, though, you had to put your references in footnotes.

the one thing that you can guarantee is that authors will totally ignore the link on yr website that says INSTRUCTIONS TO AUTHORS. Still, if they didn't then the people who write text manipulation software for automatically converting Harvard to Vancouver or vice versa would be out of a job.

Ha ha ha!

Every year at work the company buys loads of white stressballs and we have a "snowball fight" in the office. It's organised fun of the worse kind, but still. The safety email that's just been sent out liberally made use of the phrase "snowballing", which I remember from Clerks. It casts the whole safety notice into a new light . . .

Safety points to note:

Snowballing is a voluntary exercise, so join in at your own risk.

Have a quick warm up before going from a period of sedentary work to sudden activity. We don't want anyone to hurt their shoulders and retaliation won't be possible if you are out of the game!

Please be careful snowballing around people who are wearing glasses.

Have respect for those who don't wish to participate.

Water and electricity don't mix so remove drinks, etc from the desk before the games begin.

I have no idea what the Clerks definition of "snowballing" is. Sigh.

Why am I feeling so rub today? I just feel more and more down as the day goes on. It's not normal Monday blues.

Here is the link, SFW if you don't have a computer checking naughty words: http://www.answers.com/topic/snowballing

I feel terrible today. The weather's not helping either, cold and wet and grey.

don't worry Johnney, pub soon!

Lack of crush is definitely up there. The bad, negative side of the happy upswing of crushing. When it wears off, and the world seems like a cold, grey place again.

And the reality of no more band sinking in. It's hard to get my head around. The amount of email that used to go back and forth every day, OK, it was a big hard to handle at times, but at least it made me feel 1) like I was important and 2) like I actually had friends. Now no one writes me at all any more. And it just reinforces that feeling of "Oh, we weren't actually friends. You just hung around me because of what I could *do* for you. And now I'm not *doing* anything for you any more, you have no reason to talk to me."

Which is a horrible feeling.

I've been feeling awful sleepy the past few days - was in bed to sleep at half-eight on Saturday night, and half-nine Sunday.