Today has been a day of rain, paranoia and headaches (I don’t fair well when I’m stuck inside). So this just going to be a hodgepodge of happy pictures, funny things and interesting words.
Blague – humbug; pretentious nonsense
Xanthippe – ill-tempered woman
Chasmophile – lover of nooks and crannies
Wappend – tired, incontinent, unchaste
I’m starting to suspect my Artificial Inspiration friend might be messing with my head. I mean, is this a threat?
HAL 9000: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Word of the day: parallelepiped – solid figure with each face a parallelogram
Is anyone else getting a Matrix computer vibe off these inspirational posters?
‘Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.’
Hal 9000 2001
Word of the day: Cybernate – to control by means of a computer
Walking home I reached the pedestrian crossing, where the little man was red and the cars were trundling ahead. But as I stopped at the side of the road all the cars on my side of the road also stopped. The little man didn’t change to green, but I assumed it would in a moment and started crossing. I got to the halfway point when a car came whizzing along on the other side of the road. I thought ‘What a wanker! The lights are red, it could’ve hit me!’
Then I realised the little man still hadn’t changed to green. So the cars must have stopped on one side of the road even though the lights hadn’t changed. It was a whole line of cars, but nobody honked, they simply sat waiting as I crossed the road. Odd eh?
Bizarre word of the day: Camelopard – giraffe
Yes a giraffe used to be called a camelopard (or cameleopard) because most people hadn’t seen an actual giraffe, and assumed it looked like a cross between a camel and a leopard. That idea came from the picture of a giraffe below, drawn in 1655 .
Nothing happened today. Zero. So I thought I’d share some unusual inspiration. Usually inspirational quotes make me feel lonely. Like peering through the window of a party I’m not invited to because I don’t relate to the perky thinking. Not that I’m miserable, I think life can be beautiful and people can be great and possibilities are endless if we can figure them out. But all the gushing sentiment rings hollow to me. It’s twee.
Then I discovered online artificially intelligent inspirational quotes (ie a computer creates them using existing inspirational quotes as a template). They tend more towards the bizarre, the nonsensical and the cynical, which suits me to a t. And who can disagree with ‘Choose not to be horrible’?
And this is something we all need to remember, right?
Word of the day: Afflatus – divine breath, inspiration
I don’t normally like TED talks, they often seem corporate and bland. But this one affected me for many reasons. It’s one woman’s experience of presenting as a man for many years and then transitioning. However there is a greater message about how little we know of the way other people experience the world. Let me know what you think, this is a huge topic.
Playing with StumbleUpon and it came up with this amazing video
Some more amazing photos here at the main site
inkbiotic 