Entry tags:
Dept. of randomosity
Things I've Thought Recently
- This I believe: it is impossible to keep knit sweaters safe from disfigurement in a house with three cats.
- After checking out some clips of rugby games (don't ask - it started with YouTube clips of haka from the New Zealand All Blacks and went from there to the Rugby world championship) I am now convinced that rugby is a game that requires more skill and gut toughness than any other version of sport that could be called "football." It particularly eclipses American football (Sorry,
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supergee.) - Also? Haka are pretty amazing pieces of theater to watch and listen to and make me want to learn more about Maori history and culture.
- I have gained back much (not all, but a lot) of the weight I lost to my RA/scleroderma. I find that I don't care quite as much now as I did a few months ago. Perhaps the idea that I'm exercising regularly and attempting to be a teeny bit more active, makes me feel this way. Perhaps it's because I just can't be bothered to worry about it. Hmmmm.
- Getting anywhere at all on Chapter 26 of Hearts and Moons has proven to be very difficult. This story won't be done before the end of 2015. Bother.
- I really am liking this season of Doctor Who, although the most recent one had me violently swinging between enjoyment (Osgood! Kate Stewart!) and irritation (Doctor with little time in world-threatening crisis decides to travel trans Atlantic in a plane instead of the TARDIS. O rly?)
- Exercise is hard
- Wow. Much randomosity.
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I've been wondering what you've been thinking about this season of Doctor Who! I thought the Woman Who Lived was very patchy, with exciting possibilities. This latest one - I feel it was setting up for huge dollops of Important Moral Lesson next time. :( I hate it when they do that. (Who's to say that those small piles of ash left inside the church weren't the Zygons, hey?)
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I think this season is, overall, Capaldi's and Coleman's strongest yet, and I'm truly enjoying it. Generally, each two-parter has been stronger in the second episode than in the first episode, which is usually not the case. The only time I felt as if the writing fell back into the "pretty good first part, less good second part" pattern was with The Woman Who Lived, and even that I liked for many reasons. (Not least of which was the desperate banter between Sam Swift and the crowd. If my agingin memory is at all correct, I seem to recall that people on the gallows were allowed, up to a certain point, to banter with the crowd, in part because every minute of life is a minute of life, and in part to add to the enjoyment of the audience. It felt very 16th-17th century to me.)
I don't mind the moral lessons, because heaven knows all iterations of the Doctor have been prone to trying to teach them. This one was more ham-handed than I'm completely comfortable with - but oddly, only in how awkwardly Ishildr's sudden return to caring came across. All I could think of was "Oh, FFS, I'm pretty sure she ran into people she wanted to save between the Black Death and then. So I'm supposed to believe it's the Doctor hanging around that's different this time? Yah, sure, youbetcha."
Still and all? Good ... very good season to date, at least in my opinion.
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This is correct.
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Yes, hakas are way cool. Also, the Maori are the only indigenous people that ended up forcing the British into a treary rather than being overwhelmed militarily. Lots of interesting stories about the people from before the Brits arrived, too. And a replica of a building at the Field! (Did you ever meet my ex, the kiwi/Brit? NZ is a cool place.)
re: rugby -- In NZ, some amateur rugby players play US-type football in the off season. And end up with more injuries than when the play rugby, too. Other than that, I don't know a lot about the game.
Yay, exercise! (Um, better you than me?)
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I find myself willing to watch a whole bunch of different hakas; I've learned at least a little about the fact that there are different types of hakas, some for women, many that aren't for warlike reasons, many to mourn people, others to celebrate events, etc. etc.
I knew going in that Maori were one of the rare examples of an indigenous population getting, if not the upper hand, at least the chance to win more rights for themselves than was the case in either of the Americas.
The exercise always makes me feel better when I'm done with it. While I'm doing it, I sometimes enjoy it. But there is one particular exercise I do that I hate. I do it right at the beginning to get it over with, and to do it while I still have a lot of energy. Heh.
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What the Owl said. On eleven :D
I'm exercising regularly and attempting to be a teeny bit more active,
THIS. Believe in it. Do it. Keep doing it. Pretty much daily mileage (four of same) at one hella pace (150 steps/minute. alternated with jogs and outright proper running) is why I've not had to use my old walking stick for over half a decade now. It also undoubtedly has a lot to do with why I still wear UK size 8 jeans :-)
Exercise is hard
And fun. Using the body can bring joy. FWIW I also find I do some of my best creative thinking on the hoof!
p.s. Check your inbox - you've got me waiting on a vital piece of info...
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And I'm working on hard on continuing to exercise. The entirety of my life has been lived in opposition to, and fear of, exercise. So learning to like it at this point has been pretty surprising to me. Still, I'm happy that the desire to keep going is there; it's never been there before.
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I'm working on hard on continuing to exercise
Good on yez! BTW please don't take the impression from my love of 'exercise' that I'm some sort of gym-bunny - a sub-class of modern urban twattery upon which I rightly heap great scorn and sneering snarfles - no, I'm just one of those people who's always enjoyed being fairly active and who was blursed (portmanteau intentional) with a body that complains at me if I don't use it fairly frequently - the kind of body that can't bear to sit still for long and fidgets. I was an extreme distance runner in childhood and early-early teens for the sheer love of it, but time and busy-ness and shinsplints eventually brought that to a halt, at which point I became a hillwalker for the sheer love of it... and then a Bad ThingTM happened in my mid-twenties after I'd gone back to running several miles every morning, the result eventually being that I came to associate running (proper running, mind, not this daft jogging lark) with life-threatening illness and thus never go faster than an hour's crazed racewalk (>150 paces/minute; I often pass joggers out...) in the mornings these days :D
But yes, it was the sheer bloodyminded determination to get myself out of forced bed-dwelling and away from having to use a walking stick that made me do some sort of activity every day, even 15 or 20 minutes was all I could manage before keeling over again. And that gradually increased to the hour's crazed racewalk, plus as much other activity as I can get in, and the result is that hills don't exist now and even when my immune system is doing its regular Defcon 3 tricks I still keep the system running reasonably well...
...all of which is my long-winded way of suggesting to you that you try replacing the word exercise with the word activity in your thoughts. Exercise is something people do with conscious intent; activity is just, y'know, being active. And some activities are more fun than others but there are pretty much no unbearable bad ones. Even being a lumberjack :P
p.s. Pardon the edits - my L key appears to be having issues :D
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Three cheers for randomosity
Woohoo!
Yay!
Re: Three cheers for randomosity
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Ahh, sweetie. Sounds like life is still taking a bit of a kick at you, but you are handling well...(and rugby has always been superior - if more violent - than football...apologies to all football lovers).
*CUDDLES YOU*
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And feel free to gank/credit the icon!
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(And, ha, come on, let's face it, taking the TARDIS in a hurry can be useful, but it could also land him 10 years later, which, by and large, a plane isn't going to do. I'm such an old school fan that it never even pinged on me that it would be better to use the TARDIS - I'm still spending all my time grumbling that he seems to risk using it all the time, when clearly that's the unreliable option!)
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Oh my goodness, I hadn't thought of that; it does provide quite a reasonable explanation for the plane, at least in-story. Heh.
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Yeah, this. Every nation that plays rugby regards 'American football' as something rather ridiculous. All that padding! Real men don't need that.
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Mind you, they apparently need lots of first aid after a lot of the games. That's a little scary.
I think what impressed me about rugby, the little I've seen of it so far, is its speed (far less stop and start/stop and start than American football, or even the slightly faster and more enjoyable Canadian version of North American football), and the talent required of all the team members. American football specializes so much, and has such a narrow idea of how to do defense or offense ... let's put it this way; lateral passes aren't illegal, but no one employs them, simply because "that's not how we do things."
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True. And you can usually spot rugby players by their broken nose or cauliflower ears. However, they don't get the brain damages that American Football players suffer from - apparently the brain damage is due to the helmets, which makes the impact much worse!
lateral passes aren't illegal, but no one employs them, simply because "that's not how we do things."
Huh.
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The problem with helmets, and which, I think, makes them more dangerous to wear on an overall basis, is that when you get hit wearing a helmet, the damage is two-fold; your brain is still hitting the inner wall of your skull - but the entire head is actually hitting the inner sides of the helmet just as hard, as if the head itself were a brain being bashed around inside a skull. Voila - more damage!
And of course, people who wear helmets are apt to be far more reckless because they're consciously or subconsciously thinking that they're safe because they're wearing that helmet.
And yes, the multiple lateral passes I saw rugby teams make again and again was the first thing that impressed me. If you ever have half an hour to waste (because I wouldn't suggest you watch an entire North American style football game), watch a few minutes of NA football and watch how narrow a range of action options the teams employ.
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