| Fancy some free land? |
[June 01, 2009 @ 10:13am] |
Greenpeace have bought a plot of land in the way of the proposed new runway of Heathrow Airport. If anyone fancies a little bit of it free, you can sign up here.
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| stuff and some things |
[May 18, 2009 @ 10:48pm] |
This weekend, I:
- Did very little of a constructive nature and am now feeling guilty about it. I was pretty exhausted from a 50 hour work week, but really it was mostly sheer laziness.
- Went shopping for a new campervan. All were either too expensive or too dodgy; the search continues.
- Babysat my five-year-old niece. On Saturday, I took her to the Dead Zoo, an exhibition of natural history that includes a lot of stuffed animals and dinosaur skeletons. I have moral objections to the use of animals in this way, even for research purposes, but the niece really wanted to go and I am weak. I got my karmic payback from a huge model of a scabies mite. (I have a serious insect phobia and even the thought of scabies... *shudder*) And the stuffed members of extinct species were plain sad. But the niece had a wonderful time: mission accomplished. And it was a very interesting visit. I didn't know that there were birds so small that you could fit two or three in a matchbox, for example.
- Saw the Star Trek movie. It is as good as the reviews say. I went with a hardcore Trekker and someone who has never seen an episode. All of us enjoyed it. The effects and the mad plot and the science fictiony aspects were all great, but it was the acting, particularly Karl Urban's Bones and the Kirk/Spock interaction that made it for me. It's very easy to see how modern-day slash started with K/S. The fight on the bridge? The mind meld? Yowsa.
- Went to IDAHO on Sunday, a religious service to mark the International Day Against Homophobia. It was depressing to listen to the list of Irish people who have been murdered just for being gay. But it was good to attend such an event which at least acknowledges Christianity's part in homophobia and aims to improve matters. Amusing too to hear speeches by church officials whose sweeping gilt-trimmed formal robes make them look like Darth Vader as styled by Dame Edna Everage. (Not that I should criticise anyone else's fashion sense; today I am wearing purple velvet and probably resemble a small mobile sofa.)
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| Dreamwidth invite codes |
[May 17, 2009 @ 9:16am] |
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I have two, so if you would like one, please email me (tehomet at gmail.com).
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| Simplify my... email inbox |
[May 02, 2009 @ 2:01pm] |
I'm working on simplifying so I'm going to be posting about my attempts to track my efforts and also in case you have any tips or experiences to share. These posts will always have a similar subject line (Simplify my... spice rack. Simplify my... bookshelves. Simplify my... collection of WMDs!) so you can avoid them more easily if you're not into it, plus I'll cut tag, naturally.
( To start with: My email inbox. )
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| Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia |
[April 15, 2009 @ 11:41pm] |
( Cut for length and quite a few photographs )
So! The whole trip was a bit crazy and almost nothing went as planned, the journey back was a bit of a tedious grind, being back at work isn't exactly thrilling, and now I'm totally skint. But I'm glad I went! If you haven't been, I encourage you to make the trip.
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| floating islands, random strippers, high speed frog frappe |
[March 08, 2009 @ 3:11pm] |
I've just been to Machu Picchu and it was amazing. I was expecting the
lost city of the Incas to be fascinating and awe inspiring and all
that, but I didn't expect it to be so gorgeous. I spent a lot of time
wandering its streets with my mouth open. The setting is fabulous too,
high above the rain forest. The streets are so steep and the whole
city is so high, that I kept feeling this mad impulse to chuck myself
off the edge. It was bizarre! Vertigo, I think it's called. So I kept
one hand on the wall at all times.
I was sitting on a rock having a drink of water and taking in the
scene when I caught sight of a cute guy a little bit further down the
terraces, taking his clothes off. I blinked about a million times but
when I looked back, he was still there and had been joined by another
few guys, who were also getting naked. I thought the altitude had
finally melted my remaining brain cell, but as it turned out, I wasn't
hallucinating, they were stripping off and putting on wrestler's masks
for some kind of photoshoot.
Just getting to Machu Picchu is a trip. There is no road. The only
ways to get there are to either walk the Inca Trail for four days
across the mountain passes, or get a train. Being lazy, I took the
train. It winds through the rain forest alongside a river. Everywhere
you look, there are brightly coloured birds and crazy vegetation.
Plants that are small pot plants in Ireland (like poinsettia,
forsythia, etc) are huge trees here. The air is so pure that I have
never seen so many butterflies. Once you get to the foot of the
mountain that Machu Picchu is on, you get off the train and on to a
minibus, which grinds up a track that is basically a series of hairpin
bends for half an hour up the mountain. The road is washed out in
places and the tyres can't get much grip, plus it was raining all the
time, which didn't help. At one point, the driver misjudged a bend,
the back wheels swung out close to the edge of the sheer drop, half
the people on the bus started swearing and the other half started
praying. I bit my lip and tried not to throw up. Eventually, after a
short pause consisting of half a year or so, the driver ground the
gears unmercifully and the wheels got traction again. Phew!
Another place I went to was Ollytambo, which is famous among the
locals as it is one of the few places where their ancestors managed to
defeat the invading Spanish. It's a really massive fortress built into
a mountain side. At the bottom of the mountain, there's an Inca
village, which still has the original Inca cobblestones and carved
water channels. I visited another modern town, called Julianaca, which
was built, or should I say, slapped together in the last twenty years.
While the cobblestones and water channels in Ollytambo are still going
strong after a thousand years, in Julianaca, sewage runs in the
streets, there's no piped water, and the potholes in the roads are so
bad, you could bury small cars in them. It's the worst slum I've ever
seen in my life.
A couple of days ago, I went to Lake Titicaca, which is a huge lake
where the local tribe, the Uros, live on floating islands made of
matted reeds. They retreated there to escape the Incas and they live
there still. They survive by fishing and hunting. I went out on a
fishing boat to visit and have to say, it's rare to see people with so
little to their names. They have the clothes they stand up in, a bit
of fishing equipment, the little huts they have woven out of reeds,
flat stones to build a fire on, and maybe a blanket or two. That's it.
But they are extremely cheerful people and they say that they live
peacefully together. If one family falls out with another family, they
take a blade and cut the island in two... and peace is restored!
Conversely, if a couple who live on different islands get married,
they tie their islands together with reed rope. I met a guy who was
working with a Dutch charity to provide each island with purified
water. Otherwise they use the lake for drinking water and sewage
disposal both, which as you can imagine, isn't too great for the
health.
Andrew, a guy I was travelling with (the guy in the llama picture with
the shades) was quite amusing when we were out on the lake. We were
going in the diesel fishing boat to another island, and some Uros in a
reed boat were paddling along in roughly the same direction. As we
passed them, Andrew stuck his head out the window and roared,
"Sayonara, motherfuckers! Suck on our exhaust. We'll see you in hell!"
at them. Thankfully they didn't speak English. Or at least I hope they
didn't.
Having something to eat in Peru can be a challenge for a vegetarian. I
was at a market, looking for something to munch. I saw a guy stirring
stew. Hot food is a good bet, as it is less likely to cause tummy
trouble. So I wandered over, but the guy stirred it and used his spoon
to lift the main selling point of the stew -- a whole sheep's head. I
changed direction in favour of a stall selling smoothies. I was
waiting in line for mine, and wondering what fruit the lady put in
them, when I saw her take a fat frog out of a tank, kill it by hitting
its head off the counter, skin it and drop it whole into the blender.
Kermit! What have they done to you?! The customer accepted his glass
of freshly murdered amphibian and knocked it back in one, like a shot
of tequila. I saw a hutch full of cute little guinea pigs and thought
they were intended as pets. But no -- customers can pick out the one
they want to oppress and the stallholder roasts them whole. In the
end, I didn't bother with lunch.
Some pictures ( behind the cut )
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| deepest, darkest Peru |
[March 04, 2009 @ 12:03pm] |
I am currently in Acqua Caliente, near Machu Picchu, up the mountains in Peru.
So far, I like Peru a lot. I was in Lima, the capital city, for a while and liked its variety. You can go swimming and surfing one minute (beautiful coastline), shop like a maniac the next, and then go take in a 2000 year old temple for your culture fix. It´s got a lot of poverty and a lot of armed police around the place, even a couple of lines of riot police (all chain smoking and texting like mad) and a tank or two in the main square, but the atmosphere is mellow.
The people are constantly, unrelentingly nice.
The weather is warm but not so hot I want to climb into the nearest fridge.
The scenery is gorgeous. From my window, I can see a big sweep of terracotta-roofed cottages on the side of
a green mountain. There is a river rushing loudly by and a load of chickens pecking. A clatter of little ladies in neon-bright traditional clothes and funky hats are wandering down the hillside to the market place. It is very pretty.
The local livestock are bizarre. The llamas, with their woolly coats and long necks, look like the product of a brief affair between a giraffe and a sheep.
While I like Peru, the altitude is not agreeing with me too well. I was visiting this
Inca palace yesterday, which of course is up a mountain top, and the
nurse at the ticket office took one look at my even paler than usual
face, grabbed me and dragged me off to the first aid room. There she
slapped an oxygen mask on my face and made me breathe like Darth Vader
for 15 minutes. Mortifying. But better than puking or falling over, I
think you will agree!
I am heading up to Macchu Picchu tomorrow and can´t wait, frankly.
Sorry I can not cut tag this. The keyboard is a bit tricky.
Bye for now.
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| Information Highway |
[February 21, 2009 @ 11:09pm] |
There is a message in the cold sky
burning hot with stars
compelling our imaginations
well beyond the three dimensions
There is a message in the waves of light
refracting through distances of time
into color texture sound
Language is a stream of sound
color-coding messages
running out of names for all the hues
There are no word-for-word translations
Read the bumpy universe
with the tips of your fingers
Listen to your stomach growling --
it took four billion years to learn how
You can't explain the Mystery
even to your best friend
But you can take her to the forest
after the rain
© Christine McQuiston 2000
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| hmmm |
[August 30, 2008 @ 3:19pm] |
I see that John McCain, the US presidential candidate, has chosen a woman to be his running mate/ prospective VP. That's pretty calculating, considering everyone knows what his real opinion of women is.
This puts me, a feminist, in the interesting position of hoping the team with the woman on it doesn't win. How irritating.
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| words/expressions I invented |
[July 11, 2008 @ 10:01pm] |
Rezoom: To get back to work with renewed vigour after a break.
Goblet Oblige: To feel inclined to acts of kindness and generosity mainly due to being three sheets to the wind.
Husbandit: One's complete bastard of a male significant other.
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| PSA |
[June 08, 2008 @ 10:25pm] |
I wish to mention a few things, starting with GoodSearch. It's a Yahoo-powered search engine. Enter a charity's name, (e.g. Greenpeace, not that I'm hinting or anything), in the lower field and click Verify, then (until your cache is cleared) all your searches earn money for your chosen good cause. Free to use. Video and image searches don't earn anything. Otherwise quite nifty. If nothing else, using this site will annoy Google. And that's almost as much fun as annoying Bill Gates.
Then there's the Hunger Site and its sister sites at the same link. Click a button and a small ad-supported donation is made to the various good causes. Can be used once daily. Free to use.
And finally... Match It For Pratchett. Terry Pratchett, author of the bestselling Discworld novels, has been diagnosed with a rare form of the degenerative brain condition Alzheimer's. He has donated $1 million to Alzheimer's research and appeared in the media highlighting the low levels of research funding Alzheimer's receives. Match It For Pratchett is a spontaneous, grassroots, totally unofficial campaign by loyal readers from around the world to raise money on behalf of the Alzheimer's Research Trust in the UK and Alzheimer's research in general around the world. There's a direct-donation link or a PayPal button, or if you don't want to donate/are too skint to do so (I feel your fiscal pain!), perhaps you'd pass on the link? Thank you if you do, and thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wyvernfriend for the information.
And really finally... I'd like blame thank emeraldsedai for inspiring me to declutter via her groovy Project Empty. I'm currently doing advanced archaeology on my living room. It's a slow process. I'm discovering stuff I'd forgotten I had! Some of the clutter's going up on eBay; some is going on FreeCycle, which is a mailing list for passing on stuff to others instead of chucking it on the landfill. I'm probably going to freecycle a bridge table tomorrow. Why do I have a bridge table? I don't even play cards. And why do I own a candelabra, for heaven's sake?! Who am I, Liberace?
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| hee! |
[June 08, 2008 @ 6:44pm] |
cesperanza posted this hilarious SGA vid on her Imeem page a billion years ago, but I only came across it today.
( Celine Dion! )
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| Upcoming LJ Advisory Board Elections |
[May 24, 2008 @ 8:54am] |
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If you use LJ for anything fandom-related, you may be interested to know that soon there will be elections to the advisory board. Some fen are attempting to ensure that a fannish person gets elected. Read more about the project here.
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