28 February 2013

Ballads, Block Dude and Bainting! (and Boetry, too!)

Today's been rather a tumult for me.

I've been rather taciturn the last couple days. First off, I've found a new album, by Natalie Merchant, called Leave Your Sleep. It's pretty epic. Natalie Merchant took 26 children's rhymes or just random poems and turned them into song form.

There's The Blind Men and the Elephant, by John Godfrey Saxe (one of my favorites, in Lemony Snicket), The Adventures of Isabel (which is so Chuck-Norris-boss-like, it's not even funny. Well, actually, it is), Bleezer's Ice Cream, which I remember reading as a kid by the epic Jack Prelutsky. Prelutsky is a genius.

So I've been devoting the latter days listening to this album. It's really rather interesting.

Next is my good friend Cesar's graphing calculator. I consider myself a nerd in that which I compare my graphing calculator to my friends'. Mine is a TI-89 Titanium, one of the best on the market. Most people I know use the piddly TI-83s. *scoff* But some have TI-84s, silver edition, nonetheless. And it is there I discovered Block Dude, by Brandon Sterner.

My friend and I scoffed at it. Block Dude? The very name had implications of a Mario-like-two pixel early '80s game. It sounded pathetic. How wrong we were.

For the past week or so my friend has been attempting to pass Block Dude's various interesting and tititllating levels. I myself only got the hang of the game yesterday, and today we reached Level 5. A neat thing about the game is each level has a password and so if you lose you can punch in the password and get the level you were at. It's brilliant. Which leads us to...

My "Immortal Last Words" quote book which came in the mail yesterday. It's by Terry Breverton, one of my favorite authors, even though including this book, the only other book I have by him is "Immortal Words", which I got at Borders when it was still around.

My only regret with this wonderful book is that many of the quotes and epitaphs can be found in the latter book. For example it has Benjamin Franklin's epitaph, Hilaire Belloc, Thomas Jefferson, etc...However it still has interesting anecdotes and quotes which make Breverton an amazing scholar.

"I hate bainting, and boetry too! Neither one nor the other ever did any good," said George II, responding in fury to a painter.

'George II spoke notoriously poor English and wasn't the most cultured of individuals', says Breverton. I'll say. His father wasn't so bright either. Both were born in Hanover and spoke at least 10 times more German and English. And both these Georges were kings of England. Such is the way the monarchy works. The whole "oh you're a Catholic we have to kill you and we're just Protestant." Oh, Henry VIII...

Well, that's my musings for today. There's plenty more going on, which I may or may not elaborate on tomorrow or sooner.

To the next!
-Rob

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