Wushu nationals and stuff

Things have calmed down a bit at work - so now I can write a bit.

Firstly, I am going to the wushu nationals in Melbourne at the end of August. Excited and nervous about it, but it’s serving as a useful prod to get myself down to the gym and to practice outside class times. I’m going to be doing Xing Yi (or Hsing I), which is good in a way, because it means I don’t have to push my body to more than in can handle, as Xing Yi is an internal martial art. This means no jumpkicks, cartwheels and so on.

Secondly, the link roundup:
Poseidon.co.jp sells models of guns. Models of guns from anime, to be precise. Now, who wouldn’t want to own a set of Ebony and Ivory (from Devil May Cry). Well, maybe many people I guess, but I’m not one of them.

Something that may be more interesting for many of this site’s readers: The American Apology Shirt. See for yourself.

For more than you every wanted to know about irony -’The final irony‘ from the Guardian.

For far, far more than you ever wanted to know about Looney Tunes cartoons: Looney Laughs, Lists, and Lyrics.

New Blogger Version and other News

Well, my blogs have finally been migrated to the new version of Blogger - thus the new Title field.

I have news:

I’m going to the wushu nationals! Woohoo!

More later - extremely busy at work atm.

OK, it’s been a while, so this will be a big one.

News:
Trang and I went to Melbourne two weekends ago. An excellent time was had, and a large number of clothes purchased for a relatively small price.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out on Saturday. I waited with Lisa and Trang to pick up a copy early Saturday, and managed to squeeze in an hour or so reading before Shay and Sal’s wedding, which was great. (The wedding, that is, although the reading was good too.) After the wedding, headed over to Trang’s place and we spent the evening reading. I finished my first time through the book then - I’m on my second time now. Oh, and the one who dies is - ah-hah, thought I was going to spoil it then, didn’t you. I quite liked it - the story is certainly growing up even more as the series goes. Now the task is to go back and try and guess what’s going to happen in the next one.

Congrats to Shay and Sal again on their nuptials. (Hah - I got to write nuptials!)

Tonight at wushu Sifu will be looking at our forms to decide whether or not we’re each ready to go to the Wushu Nationals in late August. I’m pretty nervous - I’d love to be able to go, but it will be the first time ever I’ll have been involved in a non-trivial sports contest by choice, as opposed to because-I-was-at-school-and-was-forced-to. Well, gentle reader, you’ll hear tomorrow whether or not I’m going. If I am, that will be three visits to Melbourne in three months, which is a bit weird. Holiday, Manifest, and Wushu.

Links:
A few today, as I haven’t posted in a while:
The ABC says that Book 5 is the fastest selling book of all time - apparently WH Smith in England were selling an average of eight books per second across their chain. Also, there were worries about lots of kids staying home from school to finish it on Monday.

Sam Barros is an ‘amateur scientist’ who has constructed heaps of cool stuff, including his own railgun! His Powerlabs site has the details.

If I ever win the lottery, I think I may invest in a hardened communications bunker from here - they have a number to choose from, or there’s the retired missile base option. That would be perfect for my ambition to be able to open a housewarming by saying ‘Welcome to my underground lair’ in my best Doctor Evil voice.

Here’s a good article on some of the lingering questions after Gulf War II, like ‘Is the power on yet?’, and ‘So what’s the story with the Kurds?’.

Links:
If you’ve got some time to kill, and are willing to be dazzled by the human capacity for weirdness, you’ve just gotta check out crank.net. Examples: There’s this guy, who doesn’t like zero or the negative numbers, or maybe the author of ‘NASA MOONED AMERICA’. Or maybe you’re interested in the already large list of September 11 conspiracies. In particular, there’s September 11 2001: Exploratory and Contextual Analyses, that seems to have something to do with a connection between September 11 and random number generators or something. There’s lots of graphs.

Most likely you won’t want to look at this one: MyVasectomy.com. There are pictures, which are given a squeamishness rating. When he gives a picture a squeamishness rating of 10, believe it.

Interesting: A US senator who was pro-war has published an open letter to Bush asking for an explanation for the falsified WMD information.

News:
Went to Quirindi over the long weekend for my niece’s christening. It was actually quite a lot of fun. Particularly cool was how much my Phoebe was impressed by the present Trang and I got her - a huge play-doh set. I’m not sure if she understood what was inside, but it was big, colourfully wrapped, and had a colourful box, so that was OK.

Off to Melbourne this weekend. Really looking forward to it. Although it looks like I may be getting to know Melbourne a lot better this year, as I’ll be down there at least twice, and probably three times.

Well, I’ve got a new PC.

Actually, it’s an upgraded PC. I now have an Athlon XP 2600+, for those of you who know and care about what that means. And I have Vice City, thanks to Mal. Yay. Big Yay. I need the anti-social behaviour time to make up for the time I spend wanting to do that sort of thing at work.

In case that didn’t make it clear, work is by boring and stressful. Boring, because I spend so much of my time doing grunt work, because there’s noone else, and stressful, because it has to be done right away, especially now we’ve hit June, the busiest time of year at LE.

Off to Quirindi this weekend for my niece’s christening. Quality family time. And then Melbourne the week after. Busy, busy, busy.