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My good friend Rob (@halfscottishguy) and I decided to have an MSN limerick battle, semi-inspired by this xkcdb quote. It's nowhere near as witty, of course, but I still thought that it was worth posting.

(19:12:25) Rob Cameron: the limerick fight there is so pwn
(19:12:30) Rob Cameron: i'd like to have one of my own
(19:12:34) Rob Cameron: but if it's you who I fight
(19:12:40) Rob Cameron: you will not beat my might
(19:12:54) Rob Cameron: you will not kick me from my thrown

(19:17:55) Tim: a limerick battle? well, we can see
(19:17:59) Tim: it worked for the guys at #xkcd
(19:18:02) Tim: sure, you've got wit
(19:18:06) Tim: and your lines seem to fit
(19:18:13) Tim: but you've never battled the likes of me

(19:18:37) Rob Cameron: I realise I now must confess
(19:18:42) Rob Cameron: my past spelling was not at its best
(19:18:48) Rob Cameron: It is personally known
(19:18:54) Rob Cameron: I misspelt the word throne
(19:19:20) Rob Cameron: but at least my limericks have zest!

(19:30:44) Tim: i admit i saw your little mistake
(19:30:49) Tim: no one would make such an error while awake
(19:30:51) Tim: but it's easy to tell
(19:30:54) Tim: you've gotta learn to spell
(19:30:57) Tim: if in a limerick fight you partake

(19:31:23) Rob Cameron: you try oh so hard little tim
(19:31:30) Rob Cameron: but I'm sure your rhymes soon will run thin
(19:31:36) Rob Cameron: I shall toss you aside
(19:31:41) Rob Cameron: kick you out on your hide
(19:31:46) Rob Cameron: and I shall remain limerick king

(19:35:35) Tim: poor rob tries to write limericks in vain
(19:35:39) Tim: the effort drives the poor man insane
(19:35:42) Tim: for as he types with glee
(19:35:45) Tim: he just fails to see
(19:35:50) Tim: that limericks remain tim's domain

(19:45:15) Rob Cameron: Is this is really the best you can do?
(19:45:21) Rob Cameron: then this battle soon will be through
(19:45:25) Rob Cameron: you won't beat my bite
(19:45:30) Rob Cameron: so give up on this fight
(19:45:37) Rob Cameron: and leave me the rhymes left to do

(19:45:56) Rob Cameron: if you wish to be limerick king
(19:46:01) Rob Cameron: you must follow the rules of my kin
(19:46:06) Rob Cameron: through your attempts do amuse
(19:46:14) Rob Cameron: too many syllables are used
(19:46:19) Rob Cameron: and we cannot allow such a thing

(19:46:51) Tim: i admit that i'd started to dread
(19:46:56) Tim: that you'd abandoned our fight and fled
(19:46:58) Tim: but then, in a tick
(19:47:04) Tim: you replied - "that was quick!"
(19:47:08) Tim: but the last line is sadly what she said

(19:49:58) Rob Cameron: What she says to YOU my dear friend
(19:50:02) Rob Cameron: when your escapades quickly do end
(19:50:06) Rob Cameron: you leave women disappointed
(19:50:11) Rob Cameron: while I leave them exhausted
(19:50:20) Rob Cameron: and to the doctors it's them I do send

(19:53:28) Tim: you seem to have got it quite wrong
(19:53:32) Tim: you'll find that i last for quite long
(19:53:35) Tim: my prowess in bed
(19:53:38) Tim: DESPITE what she said
(19:53:45) Tim: has women queuing all day long

(20:01:52) Rob Cameron: for now may we call this a draw
for dinner, I'm being called for
we can continue this later
so don't get all hater
or I will rhyme you to the floor

(20:02:17) Tim: your departure seems to be a sign
(20:02:21) Tim: of your secret desire to resign
(20:02:24) Tim: just as you've shivered
(20:02:27) Tim: from a reply i've delivered,
(20:02:32) Tim: "rob cameron is [sadly] offline"

Tim

I noticed this paragraph as an answer for a Facebook quiz entitled "Which Teenage Stereotype Do You Fill?":

Having grown up with some of the most lax and intelligent parents, the Introspective Musical Word Lover has liked everything cool... before you did. You liked Neutral Milk Hotel before ITAOTS, you know where to put the exclamation point in Godspeed You! Black Emperor, you call The Smiths Morrissey, you have a band under every letter in your Ipod Touch, and you've even listened to Radiohead's Pablo Honey album. Your recent favorite authors include Chuck Palahniuk, David Sedaris, Isaac Asimov, and you just love talking about how good Ender's Game is. You would prefer just to stay home and sip on your Earl Grey while reading Perks Of Being A Wallflower for the third time and listening to Animal Collective's Hollinndagain album than to hang out with your so called friends. Oh how disappointed you are that Hagrid has never taken you to Hogwarts on any of your birthdays!.

And here was me thinking that I was a unique snowflake.

It seems that this style of individuality has become just as much a stereotype as anything else. But goddammit, it's a stereotype that I'm proud to (partially) belong to. (at this moment, I am, in fact, reading Chuck Palahniuk and listening to Animal Collective)

So if anyone asks about what sort of person I am, just say that I'm an introspective musical word lover. I'll take it as a compliment.

Tim

The BBC believes that on average, the population has read just 6 of these 100 books. Quite disappointing, don't you think? Why not go through the list and see how many you've read.

(I can't seem to find the original source for this. If anyone could find it, that'd be great. Also, there seems to be more than one list - others, for example, have the Harry Potter books as separate entries.)

Bold are the books that I've read.

01 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -
02 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -
03 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -
04 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -
05 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -
06 The Bible -
07 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -
08 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -
09 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -
34 Emma - Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis -
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas-
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie –
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante -
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt –

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl -
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

So I've read a quarter of the books on the list. How many have you read, and how do you compare to an "average" person?

Tim

Cross-posted here.

I hate to post a blog entry that's just a quote, but I think that nonetheless, it's a quote that's awe-inspiring and speaks volumes.

This is a photo taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990. The dot that you see in the centre is planet Earth.

Dubbed the "Pale Blue Dot", Carl Sagan had the following to say in regards to this photograph in his book of the same name:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.