Tuesday 29 March
I couldn't look more punk rock if I had just drawn on myself with Nikko pen.
Which leads me to:
When I was younger I used to read Archie comics. In these comics Veronica would often get a new wardrobe. I always assumed (I think correctly) that such things only happened to the very rich. I have been sewing since last night and today I have a new wardrobe. I have 3 new and 1 newish skirts and about 6 new to newish shirts. It's very exciting. My wardrobe is going places. And right now I look very punk rock.
Which leads me to:
When it's not being washed I will take a picture of my favourite shirt. I made it last night. The idea for it came when I was going through the material in our house and I came across the most hideous item - a spotted, beige, sleeveless, velveteen crop-top. When pushed my mother admitted to making such an abhorrance, apparently just for fitting purposes. Sure. Such an item was too good to not use, so I extended it by cutting out the middle and then stripi... this is boring. Anyway what started as a joke ended up as my new favourite shirt and I'll put a picture of it up soon.

Tuesday 29 March
Kids say the darnedest things

Dear Teresa,
Hello! This is a picture of a robot:

Chloe

reply:

k thanx

Sunday 27 March 2005
*cries* I was too busy living my life to bid on the Doug Anthony Allstars comic on Ebay. I guess I'm all grown up now.

Thursday 24 March
My CD burner is seriously sick. I am trying to burn a CD for my friend and my burner is trying so hard to make it work but every few seconds it makes this unhealthy *clunk* noise and I think it's going to die soon.

Tuesday 22 March

English Genius You scored 93% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 77% Expert!

You did so extremely well, even I can't find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don't. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you're not afraid to use it properly! Way to go! Thank you so much for taking my test. I hope you enjoyed it! For the complete Answer Key, visit my blog: http://shortredhead78.blogspot.com/.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 38% on Beginner You scored higher than 37% on Intermediate You scored higher than 68% on Advanced You scored higher than 80% on Expert

Link: The Commonly Confused Words Test written by shortredhead78 on Ok Cupid

That's right, genius. In other news I hung out with James and Celeste today and Celeste and I have the best plan for a clothes stall at the Valley Markets. I can't wait to see what her clothing ideas are like. I'm sure they'll be awesome. There's a word I can never use enough. This whole stall is going to be uber awesome. In semi-related news I had to choose between five new shirts this morning. That too was awesome. I have finally gotten around to the pile of clothes to make in the box on my floor, as well as Benjamin sent me an awesome Decembrists shirt that didn't fit him, so my wardrobe's going through happy times. Happy times.

Monday 21 March

Friday 18 March
I have a weird confession to make: I kind of like being sick. To clarify, I like the short-term, physical kind of sick. Even when you feel so sick that you feel you're going to die it's so worth it for the day when you feel better. I once read a short story based on this very day and how worth it it all was and I agreed totally. So it is with a smile on my face that I tell you all - I have a cold!

An SMS conversation I had with Mark after I lent him a Manic Street Preachers tape:
Mark: Manic street preachers mostly sound like queen.
Me: I love queen
Mark: Agreed.

Wednesday 16 March
I love being a vegetarian!

Monday 14 March 2005
My mother was looking for a newspaper article to demonstrate the concept of bias and she came across this beauty.

Barbarians Running Riot
The Sunday Mail, March 6, 2005.
Sydney�s riots have proved once again that appeasement will deliver us only chaos and further violence, says ANDREW BOLT.

Another riot in another town. And again by young men so barely civilised they hardly seem human.
The television footage from Sydney�s Macquarie Fields is as shocking as it must be, to wake us.
For four straight nights it showed up to 300 men and even women, with no shame or fear of punishment, swagger up to lines of police to pelt them with rocks, timber and Molotov cocktails.
We saw the police forced to stand still, not lifting a baton to defend themselves and our laws.
Now and then another officer would crumple � to the cheers of locals watching from their doors.
On walls were scrawled war cries: �Police will die� and �We will kill you dogs�.
The politicians will, of course, try to make the mayhem seem just a four-day aberration, best forgotten.
There will be tough talk today, but another secret surrender tomorrow.
Still, what else can they do?
Who would thank them for saying we�ve gorged ourselves sick on reckless freedoms?
Who wants to hear the party�s over � that the gatecrashers have arrived, with bricks in their hands?
So here are the facts of a few recent, once unimaginable, riots.

SYDNEY:
pre-Olympics 2000
Aboriginal activists threaten violence during the Sydney Games. The late millionaire Charlie Perkins declares: �It�s �burn, baby, burn�.�
Another taxpayer-funded activist, Ray Jackson, says �innocents will probably die� and blacks will respond to any violence by �using your terrorist tools against you�.
There is no violence this time.
But Jackson�s black socialist outfit, which claims �the crime is the state�, is given $400,000 in state grants for its �social justice work� and �youth assistance strategies.�

SYDNEY: March 2003
Far-Left groups recruit students and Muslims for a �peace� march that turns ugly, with police attacked and a church trashed, apparently because illiterate protesters mistook it for a synagogue.

PERTH:
Australia Day, 2004
Up to 3000 youths, many drunk, battle police for 90 minutes after a fireworks show. Ambulances ferry 75 people to hospital, even though ambulance volunteers are roughed up so badly they have guards to protect them.

REDFERN:
February 2004
Police are falsely accused by Aborigines of having chased to his death a wanted thief on a bicycle.
More than 100 Aborigines set fire to cars and a railway station. As at Macquarie Fields, the police must stand still as rioters walk up to hurl bricks and firebombs at them, injuring 40. Taxpayer-supported activists again whip up the violence. Ray Jackson bobs up to accuse police of �sniggering� at the death of 17-year-old Thomas Hickey, and causing the riot �by driving up and down the streets�.
Left unsaid is that 80 welfare groups, all funded by nasty �whites�, work in Redfern. Hickey�s father and three uncles, meanwhile, are in jail, his mother lives elsewhere, and the teenager dies illiterate and jobless.

PERTH:
FEBRUARY 2004
Almost 30 police in riot gear are hit with bottles and rocks as they try to disperse about 120 gatecrashers at a birthday party. Eleven are injured, and a spokesman says police are being baited by crowds as never before.

PALM ISLAND:
DECEMBER 2004
Aborigines riot on an island notorious for its drunks and welfare dependency after the drunken Cameron Doomadgee apparently falls in a scuffle with police and dies.
The 300 rioters set fire to the police station, with a dozen officers still inside, and torch the courthouse, police barracks and a sergeant�s house. They urinate on belongings of the police.
Convicted brawler Murrandoo Yanner, a member of the taxpayer-funded ATSIC, tells the ABC if no police are punished, then �under the law, if you can�t get one policeman, you get another�, because �when someone�s killed, someone must be killed in return.�
After hearing his threats, Queensland�s minister for Aboriginal Policy, Liddy Clark, invites Mr Yanner to fly with her on a taxpayer-funded flight to Palm Island to do some �healing� there.

MACQUARIE FIELDS
Police spot known thieves in a stolen car and briefly give chase. The driver takes off but crashes, killing his two young passengers, one of whom is from a broken home and has spent most of his teen years behind bars.
Hoods from the housing commission slum call the police killers, and riot.
A brother of one of the dead says: �They�re saying the cops took two of our lives, so we�ll take four of theirs.�
But violence was always rife in this drug-riddled scraphead, where half the families have no dad at home, the pokies do their worst, and crime and unemployment are high.
Nearly $50 million has been spent on smartening up the area, but free cash can�t cure a cancerous �poor-me� culture.
If we look at these riots individually, we�ll learn a few lessons, not least the idiocy of herding people on handouts into communities of failure.
But we must examine the riots together to see they have something in common that�s more toxic than a welfare dump.
We are breeding an anarchic bugger-you culture that not only turns out barbarians, but makes cowards of those we�d hope would defend our civilisation.

Saturday 12 March
At first I thought that nothing could be more disheartening than losing four hours of work. Then it was revealed I would be paid for that on top of more money for doing it again tomorrow. And now I can afford Ben Folds tickets!

Friday 11 March
I want to create a genre of music with the sincerity of guitar and voice music, dirty jazz grooves and instrumentation, and synths. Fuck yes.

Tuesday 8 March
I have two very positive thoughts. The first is that I have caught and survived all of the genetic diseases in my family, so there are no more genetic diseases to catch as far as I know. I arrive at this thought with the revelation that the mental illness thing is quite prevalent in my mother's family and indeed my mother has it (thanks for telling me Mum, about freaking time) and the lung cancer of my aunt's is of no known cause and my grandma's lung cancer and heart disease are directly linked to her smoking all of her life. And before you point out the obvious there... *ahem*. And no I'm not coughing because I smoke it was meant to be sarcastic shut up shut up shut up!

Also I have been thinking about all of the good things I have inherited from my family like fast-growing hair, and that makes me happy.

The second is that my mother uses square paperclips. This is good because a couple of years ago my friend Liberty got really depressed after she watched a documentary on this subject. It seems that the someone once noticed how inefficient round paper clips were and went on to invent the far superior square paperclip. Unfortunately nobody gave a damn. Libery found the thought of someone going to all the trouble and dedicating that much of their life to creating a more efficient paperclip only to be ignored by the general public extremely depressing. She also found the follow-on thought of somebody going to the trouble of making a documentary about it only to be greeted with more public apathy even more depressing. Be depressed no more, my mother gives a damn and that's important.

Sunday 6 March
For some reason the air where I am is thick and hot. I'm somewhat annoyed with myself for saying a lot of things that I didn't want myself to say, yet I know myself and I know that it was inevitable that I would say them. I'm also angry for acting stupid, weak and defenceless like I often do because it's a bad habit and I don't think it's reflective of any kind of actual stupidity, weakness or lack of an ability to defend myself. But I am getting better at all of these things at the slow pace at which I do things. There will be a day when I won't have any more problems to solve. That will be the day that things are sorted. I look forward to this day. Centrelink please call me.

Saturday 5 March
I am so so excited about tonight. And nervous. I hate organising social outings, let alone........ !!! I'm going to the doctors today to see about my stomach and this is totally going to skew my results. I find it disheartening when livejournal asks me to confirm that I'm a human and I fail. Centrelink hasn't called yet and they need to call and tell me to move out of home. Yesterday I had to stick up for all feminism because a stupid teacher claimed that she wasn't a feminist and in fact she quite hated them despite happily accepting her equal pay and working conditions. The conversation went like:

Teacher (snidely): Who here's a feminist? Nobody wants to be a feminist do they?
Me: Aren't we all feminists? I mean you're working, aren't you, at a job which offers equal pay for both male and female teachers?
Teacher: Feminists aren't about equality, they're about getting more for women and that's unfair. (Thinking: I never got a husband because of feminism)
Me: Feminists are about equality between men and women and I think that's only fair. (Thinking: You only feel that way because you watch a Current Affair. No man could ever love you because you're such a joyless person)
Teacher: Feminists aren't about equality they're about hating men
Me: Feminists don't hate men, they only want choices. Even most men are feminists nowadays because they believe that women have the right to be equal to men and this is a wonderful thing.

At this point we both realised we were at an impasse and moved on. She thinks I'm some lefty, feminist, man-hating idiot and I think she's some righty, current-affair-watching, joyless, maths teacher. And then she got confused because I paid out a Current Affair and she'd never thought about it being biased before. While I'm on that I was watching TV the other day and one of the news shows like a Current Affair has a new tagline that appears to be a complete lie. I can't remember which news show or what the logo was so the rest is lies, but it's something like this. A Current Affair: Unbiased Reporting. Stories that Matter. Not only is this, in my opinion, a complete lie and a direct lie, but the only people who are going to believe it are the idiots who already watch the show and desperately need to believe that it's true to validate their stupid opinions. I imagine a scenario like this:

A faithful channel nine viewer is watching a Current Affair. A story comes on about their neighbour. SHOCK! Come behind the scenes as we show you immigrant slackers ripping you real aussies off from your rightful employment by eating foods that are foreign to us. The person thinks "But my neighbour isn't so bad. Perhaps there's some kind of a bias against their race of people on this show" and "What's it my business if they like meatballs in their soup?". Then they think "But I have faithfully believed every other story on this channel so I can't believe that they're wrong this time." And then they think to themselves "Oh yes, Channel nine, unbiased reporting on stories that matter" and everything's ok again. And then they go and make their children stop playing with their neighbour's children. And then they appear tearfully on next week's show. That's how it works. This post was as short on facts as a segment on one of their shows and that makes me scum.

Wednesday 2 March
Windows has now interrupted two really good games of Tetris. I don't know whether to kill myself or get Linux or both. I hate its stupid updates. It won't let me install them on any drive but C:. I'm sure Linux wouldn't assume that I was some kind of an idiot who couldn't handle installing something on a different drive to the one its setup files were saved on.

Tuesday 1 March
Good news for people who love solar thermal energy
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66694,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3

Tuesday 1 March
A triptych of sorts:

1. I wish my stomach would stop hurting so I could finish a meal.

2. I wonder, if I was given the opportunity with absolutely no consequences, how many days of my life I would spend playing Tetris and listening to music.

3. I can't finish this Chemistry.

Tuesday 1 March
The other day my Dad told me about hydrogen energy. I got really excited and changed my life plan to be a scientist in that. I just looked it up on the internet and there are people out there talking it up and also many nay-sayers. Both of them sound like they're lying, so I don't know what to believe. The thing that worries me about hydrogen fuel is that it uses oxygen and water, both of which humanity needs to survive. However, it does release oxygen so it would have to depend on how much oxygen it uses to how much oxygen it releases. And if they're thinking of using ocean water then I guess that's OK because we do have a lot of ocean. Our drinking supplies, however, are drying up fast and I don't like the idea of using them for energy. I don't trust that we'd do it sensibly at all. Also hydrogen is just a way of storing electricity as opposed to a source of electricity in itself, so it needs to be powered by something else. So its benefits would really depend on what source of energy was used to power it. Basically I need more information but I really do hope that it's a solution to our current problems of global warming because it worries me so.