tea and symphony

fuckyeahdwmacros:

But in our continuing series of Doctor Who photos that need no captions whatsoever… :)

there is no inappropriate time for this, ever

chicksdigthephoenix:

LOOK AT THE FUCKING CONCENTRATION ON THEIR FACES GODDAMN

HAPPY LATE 09.10.11 ????????????????

somebody take this tablet away from me

If I could do one thing differently…

When the first bus pulled away from the stop without me on it, I knew at once that this was about to be one of those days people always say their mothers warned them about, which just goes to show you how many people actually listen to their mothers.

I knew it was hopeless. If, on the off chance that one of the buses dispatched from the station ever returned to take me to my destination (which was, in fact, the very station to which I was previously referring, hence why I chose to maintain polite scepticism at it ever returning at all, because public buses don’t work like that), I would probably end up detained by a lynch mob of angry mothers who would demand to know exactly what I was doing outside on a day like today, when it was clearly the wrong thing to do.

You’re probably thinking one thing right now, and you’re absolutely right.

It was, clearly, the wrong thing to do.

Once you have missed a bus where I live, you might as well move to another city because a bus will never come on time for you ever again.

Hell, I thought, I’m a go-getter. I can tempt fate. I decided, in the end, to keep my appointment. No sooner had I resolved to do this than another bus, emblazoned with the number of the bus I’d just determined I missed, cheerfully approached me from the distant horizon. I could see the driver cheerfully silhouetted inside, and he gave me a cheerful wave.

Then, he cheerfully drove by the the bus stop, made a “California stop” (which doesn’t include any actual stopping and makes me think that maybe time moves in reverse down in California, except I’ve been there and that’s way too normal for them), and kept on cheerfully driving down the road.

It is a little known fact that modern day bus transport is a direct evolutionary descendant of a form of torture that our Neanderthal cousins outlawed because it was too cruel a punishment to even be given a name, let alone have in a place where people were at least civilised enough to know where to sit and which stick to use when poking someone important (hint: not on the right and not the big one). The object of this was to take the Neanderthal who was to be tortured and set him within a cluster of disreputable cavemen who happened to be riding aimlessly around the wastelands and stopping at every stop that wasn’t his. This would naturally drive the Neanderthal - quite literally - out of his head. Of course, all that’s left to do after that is assist in driving the next victim out of his head, and eventually just keep going until you either run out of sane people or invent Key West. (This has been postulated as the sole reason why politicians are especially fond of rallying support for public transport, because while being an ancient and all-powerful force, it could still benefit from being made more evil through civil engineering.)

Oddly, none of this struck down my optimism, which was admittedly far too cocky at this point, and determined that my next course of action was to track down a bus of my own, timetables be damned.

And so I did. It didn’t take too long, all things considered. “Hello?” I said, knocking patiently at the door. “Are you going to the transit centre?”

I held up my bus pass - patiently - and waited for the door to open.

“No,” mouthed the driver. She instructed some children to go to the back, which was an odd thing to do, I thought, if she wasn’t going to let me on. “Go away.”

Refusing to be disillusioned, I spoke calmly and slowly, illustrating how patient I had been and how patient I was willing to be. “This is a Yakima Bus Pass. Are you not,” I enunciated, “a Yakima Bus?”

“Nope,” said the driver, and drove her school bus away.

If I weren’t such a stable person, I’d end up with a complex.

My last effort to catch a bus was actually quite successful, but it turned out to be because I was no longer trying to catch a particular bus; any bus would do. Hey, you have to take your victories where you can get ‘em. The bus cheerfully took me ten miles opposite the direction I wanted to go and then cheerfully disappeared, never to be heard from again, and especially not by the station.

The moral of this story? Listen to your mother. Just stay home.

Complete Compendium of Child-Rearing

I have long since observed that the people least qualified to give you advice on different matters are, in fact, the most likely to give you advice on the very matters which they are least capable of advising you.

That said, I am a self-proclaimed expert on child-rearing. My meta-analyses are so painstaking that I feel a small existential tingle-and-release sensation every time I carry one out from start to finish, and I bet if I carried one out from finish to start, it would be so painstaking that I would end up writing a counter-meta-analysis resulting in my concurrent expertise with the elderly.

But for now: child-rearing. Here are my expert thoughts on the issue:

1) Never, ever rear a child. As noted above, the best and fastest way to become an expert in something is to have nothing at all to do with it. Therefore, to make it more likely that you will be the best parent you can be, it would be wise to put it firmly out of your mind for ever.

2) Never, ever have a child. The logical follow-up from the previous thought is that if you put the thought of having a child out of your mind, you are not likely to have one to rear later on. It should be noted that, firstly, the notion of logic when speaking on the subject of children is laughable. Children do not obey or even acknowledge the concept of gravity, let alone the “rule” supposedly forbidding faster-than-light travel, and would certainly balk (“balk” in this context is defined as “gleefully urinate”) at an abstract idea like logic. Secondly, children tend to form at intervals where thought is peculiarly absent from its usual post. One might draw correlation between these data. One might even venture far enough to say that, logically, we should all be suspicious.

3) If you have a child (see #2), never, ever let it turn into an teenager. Those of you who are reading this far: it isn’t too late. There is still time to convince everyone around you that you’re a good parent. All you have to do is thoroughly neglect to rear your child and then notify the appropriate authorities; more likely than not, they will respond to such a heartwarming display of your intentions by removing the offending child from your care, thus ensuring you stay on the right track to becoming an expert in child-rearing.

4) If you have a teenager (see #3, then #2), there is no hope. More than likely, you’re now at a point in your life when the children no longer care about (and, in fact, seem angered by) their own existence, and they have chosen this time to let you know that it was your fault all along. Not only that, but they have been successful in convincing you that - despite all of the above - you still want them around. A creature that can accomplish this while voluntarily assaulting itself with all manner of radiation and disturbing imagery is a creature that is to be feared. At this point, you’re just hoping that one day your teenager will be miraculously replaced by an adult, which you’re sure you must have hallucinated somewhere between #3 and #4 because there are snowballs in Hell, and they are laughing at you. 

If your teenager is replaced by an adult, just remember that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or makes you require stronger drink, whatever those crazy kids are calling it these days.

ahahahahahaha oh god

(August 2011. Fourth Seattle vlog. wtf is up with my haaaair)

Aww. Sober me had no idea. She’s so cute because she’s totally clueless. And now she’s talking about herself in the third person. (August 2011. Third Seattle vlog.)

I EAT THEM

(via raidthecabinet)

Racking up some insane health karma.

There’s something truly heartbreaking about waking up with your skin on fire due to some first-world wasting illness (or maybe it’s just a cold, but telling someone who’s sick that someone is sicker than them is akin to taking any empathy they have for the world straight out of them and pissing pure sulfuric acid on it), being greeted by one’s cat, and having to say “no, you can’t lick my hand, because my skin is on fire and your tongue is like coarse-grain sandpaper.”

I think McKay forgives me, but only because I scratch his bum. This is the closest I will ever get to having a normal relationship.

I would much rather be eating preservatives and chemical sugars.

Check out this latest ego-masturbatory dust storm centered around how people spend what the government has made available of its own volition:

Hipsters on Food Stamps (image source KOMO News):

http://www.salon.com/life/pinched/2010/03/15/hipsters_food_stamps_pinched

A quick breakdown, if we may:

It is (almost - gotta include the crazies) universally accepted that getting fresh, local food and cooking it in your own kitchen is better for you than buying pesticide-infused GMOs and preservative-bathed goods from huge industrial farms and factories.

Government organisations have spent MILLIONS of dollars on nutrition education for all individuals, regardless of their income bracket. (See Nutrition.gov for more information.)

So … what’s the deal?

Apparently, according to the article’s comments, it’s only okay to have access to these healthier options if you are able to pay for them with cash. I think that’s total shit. But what do I know? I’m on food stamps.

Patriotism =/= total lack of sanity. I think.

Tomorrow is the ten-year anniversary of al Qaeda’s attacks on the US, and we Americans are approaching this fact about as can be expected: by going totally and completely batshit insane for about a week, drinking heavily, and shouting “GO ‘MURKA!” 

I can understand being raucous on Independence Day, because it’s supposed to be like a big birthday party. But occasions like this, if they’re given attention, should be attended to with either solemn subtlety or wry self-deprecation. There’s nothing to celebrate about innocent people dying. Conversely, people who wail on obsessively about terrorism make me want to ask, “dudes, did you die or something?”

I’ve been told that there really is no middle ground for an issue like this; you’re either someone stuck in the past, or you’ve moved on too quickly. Maybe that’s correct. Other, older countries have suffered far more, but to decry the importance of human suffering in growth would be to shun evolution altogether - and that isn’t very liberal, is it?

Here’s where I’m going to slice off the obligatory political bit. You’ve (whoever you are) heard it all before. Instead, here are a few more things that happened on various September 11ths throughout history:

1847 - “Oh, Susanna!” is first performed

1985 - Pete Rose scores his 4,192nd career hit, breaking Ty Cobb’s record

1997 - NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor finally reaches Mars

… plus a lot of people died, even more people were born, some more bad stuff happened, and some good stuff happened as well. 

Which is really the way it should be. And that alone is worth celebrating.