Tie of the Week

At my work, Friday is casual day, but the rest of the time I abide by the unofficial but strongly encouraged part of the company dress-code that suggests that a gentleman should wear a necktie at all times. Sadly, me wearing a necktie doesn't make me look any more professional, it just makes me look like I'm a goof wearing a necktie.

Thankfully, though, somewhere along the way I discovered that I liked wearing neckties, and have amassed a somewhat larger-than-required selection. They have thus become a regular gift for birthdays and Christmasses and the like, which only serves to amplify the problem.


This most recent birthday, I received the little gem of a necktie above (pictured here with my purple Thursday shirt on the basis that I get the most comments on my ties when they are paired with my purple Thursday shirt. You can't really see it all that well due to the erratic photography style that I practice, but it portrays Tintin, investigative reporter extraordinaire, expressing his mild suprise at the rather novel experience of being shot at with arrows. He is one bad-ass dude.

It is my new favourite tie, and so I wore it every day this week. I plan to do the same with all the other ties in my collection, good, bad and oh-so-ugly, in the coming year or so, therefore lauching yet another of the vain and pointless exercises that are becoming a staple of the leaflocker. So:

Tie Number:001
Designation: Oh Tintin, my Tintin
Provenance: Birthday present 2011
Manufacture: Citime, Italy
No. of Comments: 12 (New personal best)
Most Favourable Comment: "Ooh, I love Tintin, let me lend you my boxed set!" (I sense another little project coming on)
Least Favourable Comment: "That tie clashes that horrible shirt of yours. Doesn't your mother dress you properly in the morning?"
Observations: Most people don't find this tie as funny as I do. Weird.

Tune in next week for another, less interesting, tie-related post.

Wreck This Journal - Part One

In news unrelated to this post, myself and some friends are looking for a seventh for a "friendly" little game of diplomacy online. If you're keen, drop me a line in the comments.

Like most bibliophiles, I am fiercely protective of my books. I snap at those who carelessly open them to an angle of more than forty degrees, I keep them vertically as much as possible to reduce the stress on the spines, and I am meticulous about book repairs (at least as much as possible for a lazy guy with little free time).
Thus you might find it suprising that when I first saw a copy of Keri Smith's Wreck This Journal you might think that I would cringe at the very thought, but the reality is quite the opposite. Here was a book that I could destroy, let go of my neanderthal instincts and just run wild with, and have a lot of fun along the way. It wanted me to obliterate it, crush it beneath my heel (literally), devour it piece by piece. Unfortunately, though, the owner of it was reluctant to let me mutilate part of her library, no matter how manic the grin on my face became.

So you can imagine my joy, when for my most recent birthday I received a copy of my very own, to destroy however I saw fit, and I have since taken great joy in various modes of distruction, taking care not to do too much at any one time, so that I can keep the journal for a little while and not end up spending all my money on new versions just so that I could destroy it a little more.

First, I vicously cracked the spine in as many ways as I could think of, stamping, folding, karate chopping. Damage was being done, I was harm that most precious of God's creations, a book, and it should have felt glorious, but instead it but strangely unsatisfying. There wasn't even any good little popping noises like one comes to expect from handling library hardcovers.

Next I tried pure destruction, ripping and tearing, but it was too neat, too sensible.

The washing machine was next, and this at least produced a satisfying result (and a bit of a mess in the machine...), obviously water was a good thing for this poor little journal, which left the next step painfully obvious...

Shower time. Get the journal good and soapy, make sure it gets a nice shampoo and everything too, so that it comes out fresh and clean and smelling of chemicals.

Then, of course, I had a wet journal to deal with, so I left it on the wood heater to dry out over the course of several days, changing the page it was open to regularly. Then various family members found it, and following the instructions they opened to a random page and performed the function for me, hence the red wine stain through some of the central pages.

A curious red mould is growing on some of the pages, I guess I left it damp for too long...unexpected natural destruction, nice!

Time to contribute a little of my own with a few little notes...

I was beginning to feel a little bit like a sheep, just following along doing everything the book tells me, but hey, the world needs a few sheep, anyway.

Go, you brave little spine!

Hrmm, starting to look a little tatty, for some reason.

Well, that's the beginning of what I hope will be an interesting little series. Of course, other people have done this so so much better than me that it seems hardly worth trying, but I'm having fun with it for now. Other people scare me, anyway.

Wanna know what else I got for my birthday? You'll just have to wait until tomorrow.

The Longest Quiz

Thanks to the wonders of the infinite canvas, here is the complete quiz for your delectation, a mere 14 hours later than intended. Simply let us know in the comments what each string of flags represents, and earn the admiration and respect of some people on the internet. The gentleman's agreement mentioned in this morning's post still stands.

STRING 1:
STRING 2:
STRING 3:
STRING 4:
STRING 5:
STRING 6:
STRING 7:
STRING 8:
STRING 9:

STRING 10:


My advice? Why, I'm flattered that you asked. Think logically, take your time, eliminate the impossible, and then guess wildly if required. I won't judge you, much.

If you're still not satisfied will all this quizzing and need some more, Uncle5000 has a quiz on today, too.

The Latest Quiz

Yes, it's Wednesday here in beautiful downtown Adelaide, and Wednesday means quizzes. But unfortunately this week's quiz is not quite ready due to me somehow managing to lose all the files. Thus it will be delayed by as much as twelve hours, while I get home from work and start again.
While you're waiting, though, here's an example of the sort of thing that we'll be dealing with. The quiz is a series of strings of flags, like a virtual parade-route, and each string of flags represents a historical progression of events, with the top flag being the oldest in the string, and the bottom flag being the most recent in the string.

Let me remind you at this point that there is a code of honour amongst gentlemen which precludes the use of references and collaboration of any kind when participating in high-stakes competitions such as Leaflocker quizzes. Let us match wits, you and I.

STRING 0: (considerably harder than the quiz itself)
What does this string of flags represent?


If you're still looking for something to do, everyone in Monday's post, as well as James, whose bidding weaknesses I have not been made aware of, has made their first steps in the August Blagofest, so there's plenty of new stuff out here on the internet.

Content With My Failure / Read: A Dance With Dragons

If you're one of my irregular readers, and I must assume that you are, you may be aware that some months ago I embarked on my reading project, an attempt to curb my rampant expediture in the vicinity of bookstores. The idea, for those of you with short memories, was that I would refrain from buying any new books until I had disposed of all the books on my list, and this noble aim lasted about as long as the next time I passed by my local newsagent.
Well, a little while ago, while rearranging funiture and going through my collection and realising that the problem was more serious than I'd previously realised (to the tune of some fifty volumes), I devised a more realistic system that I have since managed to keep to.


These are my shelves of unread books. All the volumes here are part of my library, but for various reasons are yet to be read. The new system is simple, I may not exceed the free space on the unread shelves with any new purchases. Thus, I must read in order to expand my library. Books that I have begun but not finished are in the top left, and it is my intention to finish these and then begin working left to right. This will allow me some choice, as I can pick from any of the three shelves, but should ensure that no volumes will be left to rot. In the interests of full disclosure I feel compelled to mention the disclaimer that reference books are immune to these conditions, and may be purchased with impunity, and that gift books that overfill the bookshelf are allowed, but must be added to the shelves before new aquisitions can be made (the idea of virtual shelves seemed to me to be a cunning little loophole, for a while). This system has the tentative approval of certain other parties concerned in the expenditure and mass in my reading material, which is a tactical victory, I assure you.

I will seek to continue the reading project (there's quite the backlog of read books to share with you, dear readers), and give you regular updates on the state of the shelves.


One of those books that I have read during my absence from the internet is the ridiculously long-awaited Dance of Dragons. It has a long and chequered history, but is basically the other half of a book published way back in 2005. In 2005 I was still in high school, which makes me feel like it was a very long time ago. I'm tempted to enter into a long whining missive on the unreliability and even downright meanness of the man to keep me waiting this long, but I won't. Firstly because I am aware that George R.R. Martin is not my bitch, and secondly because I have way too much respect for the guy that brought me back to fantasy fiction when I thought for a long time that it had died with Tolkien.

For those of you not familiar with the story, A Song of Ice and Fire is an epic fantasy series that began as a trilogy and has so far spanned five books. It tracks the land of Westeros, where great houses vie for power between themselves in mostly devious and downright nasty ways, and honourable people (and dishounourable ones too, let's admit it) have an unfortunate way of up and dying just as soon as the reader gets attached to them. Over the course of the last four books, two kings and four pretenders to the throne of the Seven Kingdoms have died in various mean and terible ways, a scion of the old royal family has made her absurdly ponderously way home, and many, many, many thousands of people have died. Honourable men turn out to be less than honourable, villains get redeemed, and absolutely nothing, nothing, is what it seems. It's actually rather good.

Page 123:

They found the lord alone in the gloom of his hall, making a supper of bread and beer and sister's stew. Twenty iron sconces were mounted along his thick stone walls, but only four held torches, and none of them was lit. Two fat tallow candles gave a meagre, flickering light.

I'll stop there, because any more could be considered spoilers for those of you who are eagerly awaiting news on this particular POV character... :p But it does give you an example of the style. I actually tried reading some of this book aloud to a captive audience, but had to abandon the attempt when I couldn't stop giggling at the ridiculous pomposity of the dialogue. That's fantasy for you, no wonder the other genres don't take us seriously.

Although I found the book itself to be slow and even comparatively uninteresting (I actually slept between the time I acquired it and I finished reading it, the first time that I can say that for the series), it was good to get some of the rest of the story. It still felt like nothing happened, because almost everything significant had already occured in the last book (it takes an awful lot of nothing to fill about 1000 pages, let me tell you), but it was still good enough that I'll be eagerly waiting in line for the next one when it comes out too, provided I am still capable of standing and moving around by that point.

The best thing about it was that I got an excuse to re-read the rest of the series again just to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. There sure are some badasses in Westeros, and I am partial to a badass. It took up a bunch of my designated reading time, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, unless he's a badass, in which case he can do whatever the hell he wants.

Reading List Progress:
Number of Books read: 3 (ok, there's more, but hopefully we'll get to them this month)
Australian quotient: 1.045
Fantasy quotient: 2
Biography quotient: 1
Next Up: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Testing

The Augustinians

It’s been a long time between drinks here at the Leaflocker, but now that one major distraction is out of the way and the other is about to flee the country after some traumatising experiences, I figure that it’s time for a more regular diet of miscellanea to keep me occupied in the twilight hours.

To such an end, beginning today, the first of August, the Leaflocker will be take up a blag chollenge of producing new content at a rate of at least five posts a week. To aid me in this task, goad me on to new heights, and heckle continuously, allow me to introduce you to my three fellow participants, who just happen to be my regular late-night cards opponents (whether they’re playing on my team or not) and also happen to have blogs almost as irregularly updated as mine.

John , aside from his unfortunate tendency to bid no trumps instead of real suits, keeps a writing blog that puts my meandering prose to shame. If his work for an upcoming Advance Wars hack that makes my fanboy senses tingle isn’t enough for you, he apparently does some other writing that’s pretty good, or something. Anyway, he’s also aiming for five posts a week, but unlike here at the Leaflocker, they’ll be five inventive, intelligent and interesting pieces of quality prose. That won’t prevent me heckling him mercilessly if he fails to reach this ambitious target, however.

Ale , despite suffering from a chronic disease that causes her to bid misère at any and every perceived oppportunity, keeps an art blog that occasionally even has art on it. Suprising, right? Speaking for the artless, it's generally a pretty informative and interesting little number, much like the lady herself. She's going for three posts a week, which is a steep ask if you ask me. Then a again, any updates at all is a steep ask if you look through the archives here at the Leaflocker.

Jimmy, though he couldn't make an indication bid to save his life, is a pretty competent programmer, or at least he's good enough to fool a neophyte. He comes home from coding all day and then makes code for fun, which he shares with the rest of us. Or would, if he could ever be bothered actually posting. I'm pretty sure that most of the jokes go over my head. Jimmy isn't so sure about this blogging thing ,so we'll wait and see whether we can goad him into actually doing anything.

And I, aside from hypocritically complaining about bidding styles, will be restarting on the "jack of all trades, master of none" routine, with ramblings, quizzes, crosswords, pope jokes and assorted miscellania made up of half thought out content and mind-numbing filler like this little number until all seven of you are heartily sick of me. In other words, I might manage about a week if I'm really well behaved.

If you'd care to join us, get writing, or drawing, or coding, or whatever it is that you people do, and drop us a line in the comments so that we can heckle to our hearts content. It promises to be a lot of fun.