Ah the Quiet of a Library

Right now I’m sitting in the school library pondering the great military leader and emperor that was Napoleon Bonaparte. It’s quite interesting really, but I don’t want to bore you. I mean, I’m taking a break form it! (Mostly ‘cos my eyes were getting tired, you know when that happens? Maybe it’s just me…) Anyway, so I was thinking about what to write to guys about and as I was just thinking about Bonie and his devious ploys to grab power, I was thinking about power. And seeing as how we’re studying power in English too, well I figure, give your lucky little readers a monologic discussion on power.
I find it quite fascinating to look at the way people gain power. Mostly its by getting into another’s/group’s good books and then seizing power and doing what you want. Take for example Napoleon. He worked his way up the military ladder, proving that he was absolutely brilliant at what he did. Once he was there, he staged a coup (not along the pre-defined lines above but we’ll get there), sort of like on Sea Patrol II, the coup, and then worked a new constitution where he ended up with the most power (out of the three man strong executive) and, here’s where we get it, asked the people what they thought. He asked the people what they thought about him being Consul for life too, and emperor. But, here’s where i think out and realise something else/
Napoleon gained power first under the pretext of civilian approval, but really he scared some people into it by making the votes public (i.e. not secret, and if you voted non you just knew the police would harass you later). Or it was a mix of the too. He also censored the press so his image was preserved and to limit opposition.
So there’s what you learnt about Napoleon today. Sorry, despite my previous statement it was really inevitable you learn.
Now in 1984, by George Orwell, we don’t really find out how the Party gets into their position of power, but I assume it was by much the same method, except, you know, no coup. So, let’s imagine here, they’re a party yes? Then, noting the absence of a democratic process in 1984 society, and the non-existence of other parties, I’m led to assume that they once were a party – a commie party. They get voted in, slowly collect power, and here’s the cool bit, maintain power. Despite how utterly depressing the book was, I thought the concepts actually were interesting, but Georgie boy really should have just written an essay :). They essentially, I believe, maintain power by controlling thought (no, not really, by controlling everything, but this is the important one). And they control thought through language. I thought that whole concept was quite intriguing. How did Orwell think that up? I mean, once your exposed to the concept, you see it would probably work. No words to express thoughts? Well you can’t think them, just grasp in a frustrated manner at the fleeting thought and give up cz its too hard. I dunno, read the book, its cool.
Finally, Othello. I didn’t really want to talk too much about this, just confide a great discovery I made the other day that relate quite directly to the Shakespearean play.

Svengali: A person who, with evil intent, tries to persuade another to do what is desired.

Except the definition I had even more fully described Iago the villain. I must say I liked Iago. Oh he’s evil and maybe I just liked the voice on the tape, but he’s an intelligent character too. You have to admit, he’s clever. He, like Napoleon, works his way into favour with Othello and then EXPLOITS him.

And that’s my story all. Not really what I said it would be but, wasted 20 minutes. Farwell.

A Frustrated Lament - Take What you Will

People get upset over the most insignificant things.
I'm not going to come up with examples because the list would be humiliatingly short, but its true!
Who cares if you get less than you expected on that test?
Who cares if the national team loses a match?
Who cared your favourite book was mad einto a bad movie?
Really, everyone just needs to get over it. Oh i'll admit i need to too, no claim to righteousness here, but seriously.
The world needs to get over itself - there's things more important than money and fame.

My Thus-Far Unnamed Story: Part 2

I come to you today with exactly the same motives as i did when writing part 1 of this story. So exactly the same are they, that I'm actually rather scared by it. Actually i probably shouldn't be but i am, so, let us continue hearing of the tiny little ant.

There was a certain incident, on a certain day, that changed the lives of these five friends quite significantly. I have sworn to secrecy about it though, and it is with much regret that i can only continue this story by telling you one thing: there was a disagreement between two of the friends over a death. I shall leave the rest to your imagination (to my uttermost regret you must know) but please do not imagine that the two friends who had an altercation were the owl, tiny little ant or little robin, or that the death was any was the little robin's.
There is one more thing i can and must tell you. The tiny little ant may have once escaped a stereotypical beginning to his story, but there was no way to avoid a stereotypical beginning.
This much i may tell you and this much i have. I complete my tale with an urge to take pity on every tiny little ant you see, for as we may never be certain of whether our tiny little ant has begun existing, still is existing or indeed has shuffled off this mortal coil, any you see may be him, and the events of that certain day have left him in much need of any small amount of love you could possibly spare him - his mind has become much less than it once was.
Finally i beg you, do not judge him for becoming a stereotypical ant.
But you can judge him for pushing his friend out of a tree.

Well that's more than i thought I'd write. I want you to disregard any change in the writer's tone, because I'm sure there's been some, but I'm in a very 19th century mood today. Hey, sorry if you hate the tiny little ant know, but this is the Way it is.

Get over it.

And with that i bid you farewell after the completion of a story that was begun almost two months ago. Had anyone remembered it? I hadn't - until i remembered it :)

My Story:

How did they know which way to move,when to fling up a hand, when to spin, when
to jump? When to look into their “partner’s” eyes, when to look at the floor?
There was nothing written down, did it accord to some chord change or eight bar
measure that I, in my hot discomfort And pop illiteracy simply could not hear?

-Stephen Fry on dancing
Last night i listened to Stehen Fry's second podgram, which you can read here (hopefully that link works...). Anyway, the point of this very short post is that Stephen Fry is a very funny man and i suggest you either read or download one of his podcasts. See, normally ilisten to audiobooks or podcasts while i do my maths homework, but i can't listen to Stephen Fry because he distracts me so much and i end up just sitting there laughing.
Plus, in the one i listened to yesterday he talks about Pride and Prejudice for like....one minute :)
So yes, that's my recommendation for the day.

Unpredictable Maths??

Today i stumbled across (albeit it "accidentally-on-purpose" - but in a much deeper sense than any kid had ever used it) this little piece of fact on reference.com (under the topic "controversy")

Benford's law of controversy, as expressed by science-fiction author Gregory
Genford in 1980, states "Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real
information available."

So, you know i was thinking:
a)How true, how true - generally
b)Mathematical models can be applied to psychology (because that's what I'd categorise this little nugget of "wisdom" as)??
My answer to the latter question is

NO

Because, well, human nature is unpredictable. You can't generalise a statement like that for all personality types. Some may be very contained and polite. Of course then you could argue that it simply refers to inward passion in the least - which would be comparative to other amounts of "passion" a person feels during their life - and that "polite" people are simply very good at containing tempers.
But no, i think there are people with mild characters, hence less inward passion. But the comparative thing keeps coming back at me - surely there's an issue over which someone would get heated up about? and comparative to other things it's a greater amount of passion - but i still think you can't apply maths to human nature - but I don't want to critique the quote too much, becaus ei actually think it's clever.
This, while we're on the topic (or more rather I'm on the topic), puts me in mind of a book, which i haven't read, but do know this much about: this guy gets dumped and tries to develop a formula to predict who will end a relationship and when. For your own satisfaction i will tell you that the book is called "An Abundance of Katherines" and is written by John Green (much as it would have delighted me to see some people's frustration over not knowing...)
Sorry about the probably abundance of unnecessay quotation marks littered throughout this post, but i had a thing for them today.
So does Wollognong hospital for that matter.

All My Blog Friends

Haha just a little note, i appreciate all the little anonymous comments i get, mostly because i just like comments =), but it really either a) amuses me or b) frustrates me (in all good humour), when i don't knwo who it is. Actually i really think i like the anonymous comments, cz i read the comment without knowing who it is so there's like, no bias or whatever. Not that i hate some ppl and would reject their comments if i knew who it was, jst




dont worry.....
And dont worry about telling me who it is, i like the amusement.

The Sheep, the Kanga and the One Authority - Part Two

Continued from yesterday's post about the sheep getting discriminated against, today i continue with a little discussion on the "holy universal church."

Gay death knell for the Anglican Church
So the gist of this article is basically that, firstly, in North America a "450-year old communion has little hope of holding together" - a little ambiguous because of the the use of the word "a", but anyway. Secondly, that the conference being held soon in Jerusalem is not about homosexuality, as many would probably believe. But now that I've read SMH's Good Weekend, this post is about more than just that article.
Today i was eating breakfast and spied the paper. I generally pick up Spectrum first to look uselessly at the book section (useless cz i get there and realise i don't care cz i don't know the authors and I've discovered a little dislike of the words section). But today i saw, on the front of Good Weekend a picture of two bishops and the title, "The Great Schism - is this the end of the Anglican church as we know it?" This immediately pricked my interest a) because I'm an Anglican - not a high Anglican, an evangelical Anglican and b) because of the article i just introduced you to. So i read the three page article on the issues in the Anglican Church, littered with quote from Peter Jensen, and i think it was great that i did before writing this. It's made me think much more carefully about the issues and how i approach them and what I'll say.
I've decided not to say too much, just a little.
Firstly, I just want to say that this is a tricky issue, but i think it's being handled well by our diocese. The North American church is really arguing that this whole thing is about homosexuality and the Good Weekend article seems to think so too.

"The church has held together despite Charles Darwin, the bells-and-smells
insurgents of Anglo-Catholicism, the collapse of the British Empire, the
discovery of the pill, the arrival off divorce, women as priests and even
women as bishops. But the gathering in Jerusalem (GAFCON) is intent on
'scattering' this communion of 75 million believers because the North American
church has gone soft on homosexuality"

This leads straight into my next point, but before that i have an underdeveloped thought to jot down. Thankfully John Woodhouse (principal of Moore college)makes our stance on homosexuality clear later on in the article, when he says that

. . . there is forgiveness available through Christ, but homosexuals who persist in
having sex are wicked sinners breaking God's law. . .

Of course, there's going to be misunderstanding of what we believe when its communicated to the wider non-christian community, but i think that was important to say. It also needs to be said that every sin is equally wicked in God's eyes, homosexuality is not worse than any other sin, which non-Christians often think we believe, i think. This issue is getting the Anglican church a fair amount of media time, and i just think, following on form the previous thought, that as we are speaking through this to those who aren't of the faith, we need to be careful of what we say and how it may be interpreted.
Following straight on form this and the quote form the article (before John Woodhouse's) is another point i want to make. The article in the Good Weekend seems to think the issue is over homosexuality, they made that rather explicit in the above quote. They are thus blatantly ignoring what Jensen says later int he article. "This dispute is not really about homosexuality. It's about authority and who runs the church. To most of the rest of us, God runs the church through the Bible." For that i say thank you Peter Jensen, but also, if the article is going to talk about this controversial issue, it needs to not take sides. It just looks really bad to me that they would do that. Also, i wouldn't take sides if you don't fully understand all the issues there are int he church, which i think this article doesnt. There's way more it than just morals - its an issue of theology and who is taking God as authority, and who is bending him around the society of today.
And that brings me into my last point. I just wanted to comment on the situation of the Anglican church in Australia. For those of you who don't know, the Sydney Anglican diocese is, as far as i gather, generally the only major Anglican diocese that is totally evangelical (bible believing) and not steeped in tradition. I admit i don't know heaps about the functioning of the national church but that's what i do know. I've come across some ridiculous comments made by Anglicans from other areas in Australia, such as the chief Anglican in Australia (sorry i forget his name and title) who's aid that we have no single authoritative text. My brother and i couldn't believe that the guy who said that and more was head of our denomination in Australia. Also what i found in this article. "But in many eyes its [the Sydney diocese] is hardly Anglican at all. Visitors from Melbourne worshipping in a Sydney parish might think they've wandered into a protestant chapel: where are the crosses and vestments? What's this demand that all believers be Born Again in Jesus Christ?" This is really, to me, unbelievable.

• The Anglican church is protestant. The basis of it is being saved through faith alone and being born again.

I'm not going to try and explain myself further, other than say how much such statements irk me, because I'll end up saying something wrong accidentally and i dont want to do that.

So here is whee I finish, an hour later than when i started and ready to finish staring at a screen and go do something useful. Sorry, productive -> for school. I wasn't calling my blog useless! Hope I'm not entirely misunderstood. Sorry id didnt really talk about the article. Ha ha, i just got tied up int he issues surrounding it. Later dudes.

The Sheep, the Kanga and the One Authority - Part One

Today i read the paper, and you should know it was solely for your benefit. Don't get me wrong, i like to read the paper, i just often think about it/don't have time. Anyway, point is i came across two articles that i found interesting. Two, out of the whole paper, which you may be thinking is a small number but it's actually more than usual. Which is quite sad. Anyway, without further ado they were titled:

• Adidas boycotts sheep mulesing



• Gay death knell for the Anglican communion
  

So, firstly, a little game called guess-what-the-article-is-about. So that's really easy for the first, but even i don't understand the second one and I've read the article. [Editor's note: "Gay death knell for the Anglican communion" coming at you tomorrow or Sunday, because this was long enough]

Adidas boycotts sheep mulseing
The gist of this article was that "Adidas is the latest clothing business to refuse to buy wool from Australian sheep that have been mulsed."

Main Entry: mules·ing
Pronunciation: 'myül-zi[ng]
Function: noun: the use of Mules
operation to reduce the occurrence of blowfly strike —
mulesed /'myülzd/
adjective

I have a couple of points to make here. First, about the definition, i just want to say that if that "operation" is named after a person, it needs an apostrophe. If that be the case, I'm deeply grieved at the poor editing of dictionary.com.

Secondly, i would have absolutely no problem at all with this if it weren't for what they said later on in the article. Okay that's a big lie, but i would have much less of a problem if it weren't for what they said later on in the article.

So everyone thinks that mulesing is this huge thing because its animal cruelty. Yeah, and its not cruel to just let a sheep die an "agonising death." We even figured out an alternative to cutting the tail off, a nice little clip, but Adidas doesn't like that either! Here's news:

It's a sheep.

I think we can safely say its brain isn't big enough to be too worried about a clip hanging off its backside that's stopping it dying. Really.

Here's the clincher. Adidas protests that mulseing is animal cruelty when its for a good cause, but they're happy to shoot kangaroos just to make boots. Which is better: to simply shear sheep that are being saved form death and are too stupid to realise it anyway, or shoot kangaroos for leather. Wool grows back, kangaroos die to give up leather.

And no I'm not one of those naive people who doesn't know the kangaroo is a pest. Sure shoot 'em, as long as they don't die out. I'm just not a fan of hypocrites, who do what they criticise on a higher level.

Lastly, this women argues in the end of the article that it is:

"Outrageous the Federal Government opposed whaling but sanctioned the "cruel"
kangaroo kill that supplies Adidas."

Despite the fact that she's president of the Australian Wildlife Protection Council, I'm going to ignore that, cz i get the vibe that she's just an animal loving vegan. I know that's not fair but i don't care. Whaling is killing an endangered species; kangaroo-ing is killing a pest. As long as the government has their eye on how many are allowed to be killed, it's all sweet mate.

Sorry, not lastly. PETA (People for the Ethical treatment of Animals) insists that

"there are methods other than chopping and clipping such as sheep bred with
naturally bare breech areas that do not need to have flesh cut away to protect
them from burrowing blowfly maggots"

Sorry, a sheep that's intentionally bred differently to how it was originally designed is not "natural" to me, and i think I'd rather just clip the sheep and shear it than mess with God's creation. Adidas needs to just give it up and buy our wool, or fail that, at least juts avoid the hypocrisy. I really do think they doth protest too much.

Save Us From America =)

Wow, the last post is getting really pathetic; it looks like im begging for comments. So here i am with a fresh post, its sole purpose being to stop any further degeneration of this blog's reputation (and mine).
Firstly, for any fans of House that read my blog (and i know there are none, unless someone surprises me...): how good/sad was last night?? and now we have to wqait till September at least before any new episodes!!
Secondly, i was thinking, my posts are becoming really quite random, quick and about nothing. Is it boring you, my poor little readers? Cos if you like, i could take an article from the paper each day and write what i think about, maybe that would be more exciting, except the news does get repetitive, like, being all about US presidential candidates. Actually, i have somethign to say on that, in reference to Obama's announcing victory today (or yesterday or a month ago, i can't keep up), but Hillary not conceding. The news said something about her not conceding spreading more thoughts of her wanting to be something....okay ignore that, i didn't listen enough. Let me know if it impacts the integrity of my next statement though please.
JUST CONCEDE ALREADY.
We knew ages ago you weren't going to win Hillary, just give up and take the next best deal. Vice? See that's the thing about American politics (here we go again with the America and the government): ITS STUPID. Its putts people belonging to the same party in competition with one another, when they hold the same values, so it becomes a competition of personality, and i spit ont he whoel process. Not really, but again, if you wnat to be president you have to be rich so you can promote yourself and you know you just need money which totally detracts from the basis of the republic's values: that any American citizen can be president. Oh sorry we forgot to mention that you have to be rich, which means essentially you have to come form here, here, or here, oh and the people won't elect you if you're a women or black, unless you're the only sane choice from the Democrats after a Rupublican has held office and incurred so much hate from the people that they wont elect another Republican for at least four years (.....) because our country is still so steeped in the discrimminatory ideals that Charles Darwin gave us all an excuse for.
*sigh*
You can see my frustration?
Goodnight, i have school tomorrow.