Binnsy's Hovel

Extension English down. And what a good exam it was too. Very random creative question, but it was exceedingly generic and I made something up on the spot that I thought was rather good. I was asked to compose a revenge tragedy story in which the picture above was a key scene. In my story the woman was an unscrupulous entrepreneur who sought revenge on the world for ruining her life – one man in particular, who ended up in that burning wreck behind her. The essay question was just about as generic, which was grand.

Tomorrow sees me tackle my fourth and final humanities-related exam – Ancient History. Regardless of how I go tomorrow, I know I have a great assessment mark backing me up. And I’m confident I know the stuff. Hell I’ve only been studying hard at it for two years. I’ll be right.

I also recently found out I’m buggering off for the best part of four days next week down the coast. I must say that due to the fact my HSC ends at approximately 12:30pm Friday, that time will be spent doing as little as is humanly possible. I may take a book to read. I may also eat occasionally. And walk on the beach. And such. Mighty fun-ness.

Stupid Telstra. They say, ‘Here, have 30 free text messages.’ Then, when I complete all the required online forms and paraphernalia, and send off the text message to claim my SMS-y quarry, they say, ‘Sorry – you’re not eligible for this package.’ Stupid Telstra.

OH. Melbourne Cup. And here I was thinking there was nothing else to blog about. Silly Binnsy.

That great horse race that stops a nation. Great day for Melbourne, great day for Australia, great day for the world. And go Lachlan River, Makybe Diva, Dizelle and Railings. I also was able to place my own bet today at the TAB. Now I’m 18 and all. Such fun. Mind you I wouldn’t spend more time than was humanly necessary in that place. I felt decidedly out of place being a non-smoker, wearing intact clothing and having a complete set of teeth. Ugh.

Oh and that glorious Daylight Savings is back again. What fun. Oh what’s that? I couldn’t get to sleep until about 2:30 this morning because my BODY CLOCK WAS STILL ON STANDARD TIME??!!. Stupid concept. Anyhoo.

Check out the new Wiki page for Bynzekistan on NSwiki. Spent a few hours doing that over the weekend, and managed to merge the histories of Bynzekistan with some random worldbuilding and linguistics experimenting I did a few years ago. On the whole quite exciting. Check it out.

Meantime, I’ll see you on the other side of Ancient History.

Until next time…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE HOVEL!

Has it really been a year? A year since I started regularly blogging to this blog thing? It would appear so. Many months (well, 12) have passed since that inaugural post. Oh, how young and naive I was. *insert wise and omniscient chuckle*

Anyhoo. Five days to go of my HSC. Extension English tomorrow, Ancient History Tuesday and Physics Friday. And then it’s all over. Oh Lord. I can’t wait. Into it for another week, then.

Until next time…

I haven’t really been up to much that’s super-mindblowingly significant, but here’s a run down anyway.

I’ve been contributing a bit to discussions on the Flying Spaghetti Monsterism forum. I find the serious discussion enlightening and refreshing. When you’re a self-confessed cynical misanthropist, it’s hard to find decent company. But I’ve found it there.

I’ve also had a little resurgence in NationStates, after discovering my glorious nation of Bynzekistan had been deleted. A travesty, to be sure. But it’s back now, and has a population of 2.455 billion Bynzekistanis!

I’ve had many random ideas for all sorts of creative stuff. It’s weird how you have the best ideas at the one time when the opportunities and resources needed to make those ideas reality are severely diminished. Not to worry. I’ll have all the time in the world soon.

Well, that’s about it…

Until next time…

Oh, I’m sorry, you didn’t hear me all over the world when I screamed it the first time? Okay then…

NO MORE MATHS FOR ME… EVER!!!! BAHAHAGDHGSJKSDGHHJASAHG!!!!!

Maths. Over. No more maths. Ever. Ever again. For me. Never. Maths. Again. Gone. This is so very, very good. No. Maths. Yarr. Pirates. Randomly. Part of my. Analysis. Of the euphoric feeling. After. Finishing Maths. Arr. Harr. Yarr. Ahoy.

And now, I have a week off until next Monday, upon which I have English Extension, which begins my final week of exams. Arr. Extension ahoy! Bring up th’ riggin’! Thar be Physics off the starboard bow, arr! But Ancient History be closer… YARR.

Yes, I know. The HSC has made me even more insane and random than I was before. Not that it was physically possible. But apparently it is. Ah well.

Upon my random perousals of the net, you’ve no doubt picked up that I’ve come across the magical cyber-phenomenon of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You can find out all about it here. But I was interested, after doing my Religion exam, and cursing myself for forgetting about FSMism, as to what others would consider putting down for this question:

2) Describe and assess the position taken by Flying Spaghetti Monsterism in response to the following:
i) Abortion
ii) Gambling
iii) Euthanasia
iv) Sexuality
v) Poverty
vi) Contraception

Nota bene that the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” part of the question was added by me, and is not actually endorsed by the NSW Board of Studies, regardless of how ridiculously fantastic it would be if it was.

So I posted the above question on the FSM forums, and was surprised at how comprehensive a response I received. Just as an example, here’s what was posted by one person for poverty:

Poverty–Bad idea. I created the earth with enough for everyone. Then the greedy ones decided to take everything they could from the others. They started with the weak, the ill, the small children, the mothers caring for babies–the ones that couldn’t fight back. It didn’t take long for them to start trying to get what others had as well. They came up with all kinds of schemes to do it, and a lot of them included that nasty thing War. If humankind would get over Greed and learn to share and to nurture one another, then War wouldn’t happen. Greed, and the evil brother of financial Greed, the Greed for Power, will eventually make my creation blow itself up. And I will be sad, but I will have to admit that I, as Intelligent a Designer as I am, made a Fatal Flaw. I gave mankind choice, and some very Greedy people Chose, but they Chose Badly. Greed, and the fruit of Greed, Destruction and Hatred cause poverty. Maybe I should smite the Greedy until they learn to give back, at least fair wages, food and shelter for all, healtcare…a Life, not an existence. All my humans are worthy, but some of them are too Greedy to care about others. Smiting’s sounding better and better.

And the author of this actually put something down for all of the options, claiming to have been dictating it from His Noodliness himself.

In a really screwed-up kind of way, my head registers and gels more with Flying Spaghetti Monsterism than with any other religion. Yes, I’m a baptised Anglican, and I believe that there once was a man named Jesus who came down and did fancy tricks and saved humanity, and that he’ll one day come again and say, ‘What the..?’ and then save us again. But it’s the people between then and now that have fucked our religion over for the rest of us. Religion is a giant powerplay, and the most widely-used excuse for all of humankind’s frailties and weaknesses. The idea of something so completely random as an airborne deity composed entirely of pasta and meat sauce, that created the world with just a mountain, trees and a midget, seemed to make so much sense to me. It’s so ridiculous that not even a French king or a corrupt papal bureacracy could screw with it.

So I remain an Anglican, and proud of it, but I’m moonlighting as a Flying Spaghetti Monsterist… May God bless you… and May you be forever touched by His Noodly Appendage.

Amen.

If you wanna see the rest of that forum post, including heaps of other responses to that question (funny stuff), click here.

Until next time…

Well, it’s the grand eve of the tumultuous end of my career in the dastardly, destructive and depressing study of Mathematics. This time tomorrow, I will never again have to think about trigonometric ratios, identities, stupid acronyms and brain triggers like ‘All Stations To Central’ or ‘SOH-CAH-TOA’, feel my heart wrench at the thought of balancing equations, sketching graphs, determining intercepts, memorising formulae. For once and then forever onwards my life will be maths-free, leaving only a glorious golden path paved with the shimmering beauty of humanities.

You’d think I’d be stressed too. The one final chance I have to prove myself among the fraternity of calculator-punching, formula-sprouting, introspective, surprisingly extroverted and theatrical mathematicians. Yet funnily enough, here I sit, today, flicking vaguely through formula sheets and standard integrals charts, slightly perturbed but hardly hyperventilating. But I think last week served to bolster my confidence. I was extremely content with all my responses for English, and for once I think I maintained solid lines of argument throughout. And even Religion – the subject about which nobody cares, to which nobody pays any attention and into which nobody puts any effort whatsoever – I felt confident with; I may not have known everything about the topics covered, but at least I articulated my answers well, and attempted to back all my arguments up, with references to anything, no matter how vague. So with three down – and when I say down I mean nailed – I’m confident that in at least five of my seven exams I will attain a Band 5. Tomorrow in Maths I am aiming for a Band 3 or above, which I’m pretty confident I can attain. Provided I did well last week, and provided I do well in my two remaining humanities exams – English Extension and Ancient History – I should end up getting the UAI of 71 I am hoping to achieve, better still I might go higher. And if I falter somewhere, I know I’ve got a pretty good Extension II story being marked somewhere.

So if you haven’t gathered I’m pretty confident at the moment. Now, if the night before the first English exam was any indication (a week ago today), this self-esteem can be shattered in a matter of milliseconds. But I know I’ve got a strong support network around me if that happens.

I’m now just musing… The next time I post here, I will never have to do Maths ever again… Oh, pure heaven… A golden path of humanities… Follow the Yellow Brick Road… Follow the Yellow Brick Road…

Until next time…

In my neverending misanthropic quest for mediocrity in contemporary society it takes a considerable amount of effort for me to physically chuckle at something I see. However, three articles in today’s Sydney Morning Herald broke the ice.

The first was Mike Carlton’s column, titled “Big Brothers the great brown land”. I’ll admit the only reason I read it was because it was prologued by an excerpt from George Orwell’s 1984, which I’ve recently found to be an unbelievably accurate depiction of where our world is headed. And in the wake of Howard’s new counter-terrorist legislation, and having had experience of Victoria’s anti-terror measures myself, the article became all the more relevant. We are fast becoming a society driven forward only by fear. The fact is that if terrorists are going to strike, they’ll have had enough time to precisely negate any possible countermeasures any political bureacracy – hardline or not – could invariably come up with.

The next interesting piece was concerning the supposed implanting of encrypted serial numbers and other information on pages produced by printers, for use as evidence or to be examined in the occurrence of your being investigated by the ever-paranoid US government. For me this was more or less a follow-up to an article on the same subject published on Boing Boing. It’s obviously been proven to happen, so it’s just a matter of what on earth they could possibly use this for. “Trial No. 6509C in the United States Federal Court, the country versus Dan Binns, for unauthorised printing of document titled ‘Physics Homework’, dated August seventeen, two thousand five.” That’ll be the day.

The next reaction wasn’t so much a chuckle as it was an ‘It’s about time.’ I speak of an article about the papparazi finally getting their comeuppance in their ruthless pursuit of the ‘perfect shot’. I’m all for their being around at awards nights, press conferences, premieres and big happy occasions like that, but when they practically wound children while a celebrity mother tries to walk their kids around Disneyland? Come on. Give them a break. Sure, they might be famous, but they are human, and we all like a little, teency bit of privacy.

Well, that’s my round up of the paper done…

In other news English Paper 2: Modules ended up being not nearly as hard or painful as I thought it might be. The questions were rather generic and allowed for a little reinterpretation and innovation, which I always like. I felt as though I was in my element, though I would have liked to have spent a little more time on my last response, the Hamlet and R&G one. Not to worry. Where once I was lucky to squeeze out three pages for an essay, I managed to get six down for Wuthering Heights and another six for Telling the Truth (Frontline) and four down for Transformations. Overall, pretty happy with what I got done for Advanced English. And no more do I have to think about it. Ever. Mind you, knowing me I’ll probably end up teaching it somewhere.

And then yesterday I tackled Studies of Religion I, again, a brilliant Humanities subject – the area where I manage to kick ass. (I’m modest, too, did you notice?) Many a great and wide-ranging response that somehow managed to draw together Bible quotes, strange and bizarre lines of argument and bits and pieces of what we actually learned in class. The thing I love about religion as a subject is that it’s a big, fat grey area. You can say anything, and as long as you back it up and articulate your ideas well, they can’t really say you’re wrong. See had I been a complete rebel, and actually not remembered anything we learnt in class, I could have responded completely differently to this question:

See had I remembered this, my response could have been a lot mroe interesting and amusing and mark-worthy.

Ah well. Never mind. Three down, four to go.

Until next time…

After much deliberation and tracking down of random tidbits of information, I hereby present:

1. Star Wars, d. George Lucas, 1977
There’s just no way I can go past this. It was my life for most of my childhood, and random re-released videos and DVDs of the saga make up quite a significant part of my movie collection. A simple yet engrossing story, lovable and despisable characters, beautiful locales… this movie really does have it all.

2. Raiders of the Lost Ark, d. Steven Spielberg, 1981
This, along with the other two Indy movies, are just brilliant. Rollicking adventure, just the right amount of violence, sex and humour. The combination of the cinematographical, screenwriting and production minds of Spielberg and Lucas shows and delivers.

3. Thirteen Days, d. Roger Donaldson, 2000
A marvellous period and historical piece, showing the tensions and relationships between those in power during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Bruce Greenwood does justice to Kennedy, and Stephen Culp and Kevin Costner shine as Bobby and Kenny O’Donnell. Political thriller at its best.

4. The Great Escape, d. John Sturges, 1963
So it may not be all that accurate, a few of the sets may go a little wide of the mark, and the characters may not be all that realistic. But it’s still a great film, and stands as one of the greatest and most popular war movies of all time. A lot of it had to do with the portrayal of the Nazis, and the antics of Steve McQueen as the Cooler King. One that will stand forever.

5. Monty Python & The Holy Grail, d. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, 1975
A silly and hilarious historical manipulation that only the Pythons could pull off. This one just scraped in above Life of Brian, only because I’ve known about it longer, and it still makes me cack myself every time I watch it. Pure Python brilliance.

6. Singin’ in the Rain, d. Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952
Simple, stylish and stunning. Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor shine here. My favourite sequence is a close one between O’Connor’s ‘Make ‘em Laugh’ and the tapdancing in the speech training room: ‘Moses Supposes’. And your typical nice 1950’s happy ending just tops it off.

7. The Muppet Movie, d. James Frawley, 1979
The original and the best. Treasure Island came close, but not close enough. Kermit’s Rainbow Connection and the encounter with the fork in the road are just priceless. Good Muppet fun.

8. Tomorrow Never Dies, d. Roger Spottiswoode, 1997
A Bond had to be in here somewhere. It’s this one because it has it all. Everything that makes Bond what it is. A great villain (Jonathon Pryce is deliciously dirty and despisable as media mogul Elliot Carver), a few great girls (Teri Hatcher and Michelle Yeoh) and Bond, here played by Pierce Brosnan, at his absolute best. All those witty one-liners that you either giggle or groan at, a good dose of action, intrigue and adventure, and Desmond Llewellyn in one of his last stints as the Quartermaster, before his replacement by John Cleese. It’s got it all.

9. Air Force One, d. Wolfgang Petersen, 1997
Another great movie about Presidents, but surprisingly not a US flag-waving stunt. Harrison Ford proves just how good an actor he is as the President trapped on Air Force One with a bunch of terrorists. Best line of the movie: ‘Get off my plane!’ Great stuff.

10. Casablanca, d. Michael Curtiz, 1942
This one was at the top of a long list of old movies that I love. Boges at his best. All the great lines you always remember: ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…’, ‘Play it again, Sam,’ ‘Round up the usual suspects.’ It’s just plain great.

So there you have it. Books will come soon, when I can be bothered doing up another list. Probably after the HSC.

Until next time…

One down, six to go.

English Paper 1 was pretty good.

Thursday sees me tackle Paper 2.

Bring it on.

Until next time…

Well, here’s a post you weren’t expecting…

It’s the night before my first HSC exam. The house is so tense you could cut the air with a knife… Actually it’s not. I’m really quite calm and collected, which I find quite amazing.

I came to the realisation this week, after a plethora of stressouts of all sizes and shapes, that the HSC is one of the most ridiculous times in one’s life. And now I’m coping much better.

Tomorrow brings up the first of two English exams, this one on the fabled ‘Area of Study’, or ‘Journeys’. It consists of three sections, the first being a rather simple comprehension exercise: ‘Pray, dear student, look at these texts of simplicity and comment on their brilliance.’ The next section is a creative composition, perhaps the easiest question in the entire HSC. You sometimes have to respond to stimuli, like pictures, or are given a particular text type, for example a brochure or conversation. Should be okay. The next part is the beast of the exam, the essay. Our prescribed texts were several poems by Coleridge, of which we must choose two for our response. Then we are to integrate one or two pieces of our own related material into our argument. Given that I blitzed this paper in the Trials, I shouldn’t have too much worry.

Thursday’s exam is the worse of the two English papers. Three essays on three separate modules. Many a quote to learn, many an argument to refine. But I should be okay. I am an English and humanities person after all.

Friday = Religion. Much embellishment and English flair should get me through there. Then a weekend to calm down and get my head all the way round Maths, given that I’ve started studying for that exam this weekend. Once Maths is over I have the rest of that week to get over Maths and start prepping for my final week of exams, the week starting October 31. Now, that week is rather diverse and quite intense.

Monday, 31 October sees me tackle English Extension 1. Two parts, the first being a creative response, the second an essay. Our topic this year for Extension was Revenge Tragedy, our prescribed texts Euripides’ Medea, Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and Fred Zinneman’s film High Noon. The creative response, again, is all good. The essay I’m a little perturbed about, but hey, it’s English, so I should be fine.

The next day, November 1, I attack Ancient History… Three more hours of humanities glory. Remember my pharaohs, random dates, a few sources and I should be grand.

And then my apparent confidence plummets headlong, almost to the depths it will be for the Maths exam.

Friday the 4th of November. The day of reckoning. The day of judgment. My final day of exams, and what lovely paper should fall in my lap?

PHYSICS.

Oh, the horror. The sheer terror with which I shall sit in that chair on that fateful day. Two years of hard work, blood, sweat and tears, trying to get my English head around non-English work… aiee! We’ll see what happens there…

So that’s about the rundown of my next three weeks. Come the 5th of November I’ll be crawling into my bed, and I shall not emerge for about two weeks. I may occasionally alight to eat, wash and grunt in the acknowledgment of fellow human beings, but officially, I am a hermit.

So bon voyage and bonne chance to all my fellow HSC and VCE buddies – not long to go now, and it’ll all be over.

Until next time…

Sorry for not posting much. The HSC, you understand.

Rest assured I may or may not be back after November 4. Then again I may wish to sleep and do nothing for several months after I knock over the last exam.

We’ll just wait and see…

Until next time…