mr oCean's Estuary
... where the silt of my thoughts diffuses into the electric sea...
This blog may or may not exist. Despite existing in only a fictional sense, mr oCean can be infuriatingly and embarrassingly loud. Now listen here...
on Oct. 2 2007
Herr Meer's German Phrasebook
12:28 pm ~ Oct 2007 ~ Week of 10/01/07
The essential things other phrasebooks neglect
Das geht direkt ins Billardzimmer. That's going straight to the pool-room.
Sag ihm, er träumt. Tell him he's dreaming.
Gerade auf den Fleisch des Schlägers. Right off the meat of the bat.
Das ist ein zeitgenössisches Thema. That's a contemporary issue.
Sieht er/sie wie Bert Newton aus? Does he/she look like Bert Newton?
angenehm Pleasant
Gefahr! Danger!
Das gleiche ist dein Gesicht. So's your face.
Bitte ruf einen Krankenwagen an! Please call an ambulance.
Du musst am Feld am tiefen dritten Mann versteckt werden. You need to be hidden in the field at deep third man. (A veiled insult)
Kann deine Mutter nähen? Can your mother sew? (A lovely veiled threat that sounds brilliant in Scottish accent)
Erzähl deine Geschichte zu Fuss. Tell your story walking.
More soon!
on Mar. 9 2009
Newton's Gravity
07:49 pm ~ Mar. 2009 ~ Week of 03/09/09
(advertising feature)
Newton's Finest Gravity: holding stuff down since 1687.
Accept no imitations!
on Sep. 27 2008
On the nature of my head
12:21 am ~ Sep. 2008 ~ Week of 09/22/08
Some people believe people were made from clay. Even if we were, I'm glad we didn't stay that way.
I'm glad my head's not made of Plasticine. If it were, I'd always be fiddling with it, making adjustments to my face, never quite content. And not only that: like a hirsuit chap always worried about getting food caught in his beard, I'd always be checking that bits hadn't been squished or moved out of place. And of course, in checking everything was in order, I would inevitably squish some key feature out of shape.
on June 10 2008
Complex Notation for Complex People
08:45 pm ~ June 2008 ~ Week of 06/09/08
People are complex, especially the interesting ones.
This is obvious. But it occurred to me that this is true in two senses, in that complex people, like complex numbers, have real and imaginary components.
In mathematics, this may be written generally as Re + i Im, where Re and Im are the magnitudes of the real and imaginary compenents respectively. I would not for a moment think it practical to measure the magnitude of a person, so I propose expressing the relative imaginarity of a person as a unit vector, ie the sum of squares of the real and imaginary components = 1. Taking Re and Im as axes, we can simply express this unit vector as an angle.
I prefer to remain > 45°, and find the same most appealing in other people. When work gets intense, I probably drop to around 30°; when I am at my most contented and/or cheerful, I exceed 60°.
90° indicates Fey. >180° (or less than 0°) people should be avoided at all costs! I'm not sure what people with a negative real component are all about, but if that means they can negate reality, that's pretty cool, providing they also have a positive imaginary component...
on Jan. 24 2008
Dizzy
06:52 pm ~ Jan. 2008 ~ Week of 01/21/08
Sometimes a lame attempt at wit sounds like a proverb. Sometimes a lame attempt at a proverb sounds like a lame attempt at humour.
If you balance yourself on too fine a point, your feet lose their grip on the ground. When this happens, because the Earth is spinning, your lack of torsional stability will send you spinning in the opposite direction, resulting in the feeling that the whole world is turning against you.
on Dec. 4 2007
More evidence that Germans have a decent sense of humour...
09:44 pm ~ Dec. 2007 ~ Week of 12/03/07
whether they know it or not!
There's a research group where I work called "KAOS"!!! I need to find out if their group leader has grey hair, a moustache and a scar on his cheek 
on Dec. 2 2007
Blerk
07:16 pm ~ Dec. 2007 ~ Week of 12/03/07
My words were sad, so I swallowed them before they could bring everybody down.
But now I feel ill. Probably should have spat them out and set fire to them instead. That's probably a lesson for the kiddies.
on Nov. 13 2007
A Question for the People of Germany (Eine Frage für die Leute Deutschlands)
10:16 pm ~ Nov. 2007 ~ Week of 11/12/07
"Why are you so embarrassed by refrigerators?"
Two signs that the Germans (and the Swiss, and possibly the entire world outside Australia, for all I know: I've led a very sheltered life ) are embarrassed by fridges:1. They hide them. They are disguised as a kitchen cupboard. This is impractical, because it doesn't allow the heat to escape properly from the condenser coil, which makes it run less efficiently, and because the confinement can set up nasty resonances, creating maddening standing waves in the home.
2. They still find the flavours of food preservation disturbingly appealing. There was no doubt a time when the only way to keep food for more than a couple of days or weeks was to either pickle it in an acidic solution or to salt it mercilessly. Now, despite many decades of household refrigeration, people here still have a strong taste for the sour and the salty.
Ich finde das ein bisschen komisch.
(recognising, of course, that (a) I am considered something of an oddity even at home, and (b) that I am a passionate exponent of the "chocolate and cheeseburger sundae" and the "PBN")
on Oct. 25 2007
Special sporting goods
06:24 pm ~ Oct 2007 ~ Week of 10/22/07
I used to have a tennis racquet.
It was all with the high-tech. It wasn't allowed in competitions, but it was cool. It had a stiff elastic material between the big bit and the handle. This allowed the head to twist and return the energy to the ball even harder than it would normally. It made it much harder to send the ball where you wanted it, but had I been concerned with such, I would have given up long before I got the Torsion Racquet (for such it was called).
But alas, it broke. Now it's an ex-torsion racquet. And its repair demands a lot of money.
Note to my fellow Aarghbrainzers: we should probably an "even worse than bad humour" section as well as the poetry one...
on Oct. 24 2007
Another positive about sharing an office...
04:02 pm ~ Oct 2007 ~ Week of 10/22/07
... is the way apparently random things spontaneously appear on your desk while you're away or not looking.
I hold fast to the belief that all of these objects will be absolutely necessary in a desperate situation that is to come, just like in bad early computer games where you'd pick up random objects because you knew they must have been put there for a reason.
The same goes for the things that randomly *vanish* from desks. I wonder what extraordinary adventures that square piece of perspex is having, and wonder if its twin, remaining put, is jealous.
- Stay tuned
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