L’habit fait le moine: I’m wearing my Emily shirt today, and I ran a bird over on my way to work. Yucky.

Is that supposed to be good luck, or am I now cursed? Well, I’ll let you know.

More from the I-can’t-be-bothered-to-write-so-I’ll-blog-a-funny-mail files:

Dr Wank: “So I’m doing a search for “icecream” under google’s image database because I want a nice pic of ice cream for one of my lectures where I discuss the positive correlation between its consumption and rates of violent crime. Safe-search is on, which normally filters out porn and so on, but yet I get the following:

http://www.furry.org.au/Drhoz/melfem/drh-icecream.jpg (not really safe for work)

Now I’m a pretty open-minded guy, but that’s just fucked up. What the hell is going on here?”

Any thoughts?

From the inbox today:

“I don’t suppose any of you know how to decompose a Gaussian function into row and column vectors, eh?

Gaussian filters have a nice property in that they are separable into two vectors, but I can’t figure out how, given a Gaussian matrix, one derives the component vectors.

[Dr Wank]”

“of course i do..don’t be ridiculous everyone knows how to decompose a Gaussian Function. Don’t feed it for a week..it dies, then decomposes..simple.

M.”

Ash is standing in a ripped shirt, covered in blood, holding a shotgun with his left hand; a chainsaw now replaces his right one. He has just finished his long-awaited zombie-killing spree, drenching the entire stage in blood. Now bathed in the dancing light of a disco ball, he sings while the zombie are doing the Thriller dance behind him. My stomach hurts from the laughter. The audience, the first few rows of which are also covered in blood, is going wild.

Evil Dead 1 & 2: The Musical was the best time I’ve had in a long time.

“When she found the Dungeons and Dragons books, I tried to tell her they were somebody else’s, but she didn’t believe me. I told her I bought them for the articles.”

- from an upcoming documentary about gaming geeks.

Unfortunately, black holes are not wormholes to other dimensions, but rather, big balls of string.

They may regain some of their veneer of coolness if Hawking can find the grand cosmic space kitten to go with them.

(Merci Gamera)

Yahoo! Launch has booted me off the system for the rest of the month, because I’ve used up all I can without paying for the service. Consequently, I’m stuck listening to non-custom radio. I immediately chose the 80s channel, to maximize the likelihood of hearing stuff I know (it’s important that a tune be familiar in order for me to successfully ignore it and go about my work).

Anyway, so now I’m subjected to tracks from Whitesnake and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, which gets me thinking that a lot of stuff that we reflexively think we like (such as 80s music for me), we actually don’t really enjoy that much. I was thoroughly disappointed when I bought the Say Anything… DVD and realized I didn’t like the movie anymore. I’d been happier remembering it my way, than watching it suck now. And most of the time, I really don’t feel like drinking that third daily coffee.

We take shortcuts to make life simpler, and to free ourselves up for other processes, such as blogging (listening to something I can ignore, so I can work). But how much of what we surround ourselves with is done purely out of habit, as opposed to true liking? Are many of our relationships with things and people simple artifacts of bygone eras?

Still, I often think of the things I reflexively do not choose, the things I walk right by, that I would now love at first sight if I experienced them for the first time, without prejudice. So I’m trying to say yes to things I would normally automatically refuse. The exercise will probably lead me to sing karaoke and eat sushi (I really want to like sushi, I do), but if I can discover just one new thing I like, it may have been worth it.

Robert Sawyer once quipped that he never understood why it’s the good movies that get remade. That it is films like Dune, or The Phantom Menace that should be remade.

Well, today after the preview of The Manchurian Candidate, I saw one for the remake of Taxi, the Luc Besson movie. The new (American) version takes place in New York, and the driver is a trash-talking, uh-uh-honeying, finger-snapping Queen Latifah (as if there’s ever any other QL). And she’s helping the cop catch a gang of scantily clad supermodel bank robbers.

It was so base and trashy, I honestly thought they were joking. What were they thinking? Well, probably something along the lines of “Duuuuuuude… Yaaaaaa…”

www.subservientchicken.com

Today Bill’s talking about a woman in a beautiful pristine white dress, and the price of being such a woman. Reminds me of a spectacle I witnessed last week.

I didn’t know such soap-opera elegance existed in the real world. She wore a perfect strapless black summer dress with white polka dots, flowing long scarf around her neck, expensive-looking wide-brimmed hat and glamourous sunglasses.

I was sitting in my car, waiting at the red light in the middle of a diluvian downpour, the kind that can only last minutes. She sat at the red light in front of me, in the most studiedly stylish convertible. It was soon quite obvious the car was either not hers, or brand-spanking new, for try as she frantically might, she never did find the button to bring the top back up.