String nextPost = rand.nextRandomThought();
 

Sorry, I've been doing a whole bunch of programming in the last couple days. Programming can get annoying for me because of it's inherent logic. I appreciate the logical structure, but I'm inherently illogical, so it's a big effort for me to work this way.

So, I thought I'd try* to start a set of posts here that reminds me just how random the world can actually be. If you would be so kind, can you please quickly post the next random thing that comes to mind?

*I say try because the logical part of my mind thinks this thread will likely fail...heck, if it works, that will probably be random enough for me, eh?:p

Straight from my head "Je suis muy sleepy-o" *wtf*
Im doing my geography project, but for some reason i started thinking about my french lesson tomorrow and then about my spanish test that i had today, and then i remembered that im ridiculously tired, hence my random thought.

I can see this thread turning into something truly spectacular and weird at the same time :D

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I envisioned a two-page spread on historical non-religious Easter cards, say over the last hundred years or so, for a magazine I edit. T’would be fascinating to see the evolution in illustrational styles and the contrasting symbols used.

Oddly, your remark on non-religious easter cards reminded me of easter eggs, which always reminds me of Russian easter eggs.

This, in turn, reminded me about Tetris, which was made in Russia. Which, in turn, reminds me that my friends and I were theorizing, in jest, that Tetris was probably just communist propaganda, and that the falling blocks were there to symbolize the fall of Capitalism.

Great stuff! For some reason when I read "next random thing" I thought of turtles.
Which made me think of the story (which has variations) of someone asking about the Hindu idea that the world is a plate resting on an elephant which is standing on the back of giant turtle. When asked what the turtle is resting on he/she replies "It's turtles all the way down".

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Ah! Which brings to mind Gary Snyder’s wonderful book Turtle Island. Giving a voice to all those beings who do not have a voice... Check it out!

which is making me think of books, then films then cloverfield, then i remembered its my birthday today :D

I don't know why, but the thread titled "An engineer in Med School" made me think of "An American in Paris."

oh thanks, youve reminded me that i have a page of french vocab to learn :(

Catter-walling cats are annoying at 7:00 am on a Sunday. :eek:

He he, and my neighbor complain that I go to warm up the car at 6:50 or so in the morning.

Inspire you of think the elephant dint

Is that "din't", as in "Oh no he din't!" or am I missing something here?

Oh--from today-- What is the taste of purple tenacity?

Oh my God, the purple tentacles are...

Ouch! Loud scraping of a snow plow on asphalt. I hope the tractor doesn’t push piles of last night’s thick wet snow into my beech hedge, breaking the lower branches. Time to snag the driver before he does some damage.

Time to leave the city for a weekend. We're having a spell of great weather, so I'm hoping for some barbecue and beer/vodka with my friends

On a long enough timeline, the life expectancy for everyone drops to zero.

If I could understand the depths of my own mind, my thoughts, technically, would not be random anymore.

Philosophy is very controvercial. In fact, all the thoughts of humanity and certain individuals sometimes look miserable in the scale of universe

It was printed on this Chinese kids activity pack they were selling at the newsagent. Anyone got a reverse translator? There has to be an art to making a perfectly incomprehensible sentence.

Use the translator widget and throw things back and forth between english and some other language. It eventually becomes beyond weird...

Is it really true that male and female philosophy and attitude towards life differ so greatly? Sometimes think that women are the creatures from another planet. Not all of course, but a few of them definitely are!

I've never met a person that knew as much as a mushroom. ;) :cool:

"My God, it’s full of stars!
Hey, man, that must have been a magic mushroom."

Italian food is great, but do you really want want pasta from a plumber who finds magic mushrooms by climbing through his own pipes?

There's nothing better than a can of favourite beer chilled and a couple of fried chicken-wings. Best served on friday evenings

I love the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves of a sheoak.

alcohol = bad tut tut

mmmm chicken wings, and some bbq sauce, thats some good food right there..

Green tea is the only thing that really relaxes me after a long day...

Water always tastes better during finals week.

Gonorrhea can lift 100,000 times it's body weight.

Cooperative Retraction of Bundled Type IV Pili Enables Nanonewton Force Generation

( I guess this should have gone in interesting but useless facts. )

Random is as random does ;)

Hobbies include: untying knots

Planarity

Dentists must be on the receiving end of some really bad breath.

I like keesh!

I dont like school

on a side note, how is this any better then chuck norris?

Men are like cache, women are like backups.

Trouble is "Argument.doc" keeps reverting to previous versions.

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I once heard someone jokingly use the term my fetus transporter when referring to his pregnant wife.

Knowing the many moods of pregnant women I'm going to assume he was out of ear-shot of said transporter.

Quite the contrary. She stood right next to him -- and he said it with pride and love in his eyes!

But, granted, with a partner whom one fails to share a special humour, this would likely get you hung, drawn and quartered. :cool:

Work and school are like oil and water. Except the oil is on fire and the water is evaporating.

dfhsadfhsafshdahjksaadjsj;qw hoiqwhptiuqwterphiu gar hipuagsdh puias hinaew

Had to happen at some point, just think of it as a reference to my last random thought.

How dare you say that about my mother!




:p

You know, every now and then I worry that I'm typing something in a foreign language I am not familiar with when I do that. See, when I think foreign language, I think this.

僕わ日本語がわかるね。。。だいがくに勉強するから。

So, usually I'm not too worried that I'm speaking a foreign language because that (see above), is what a foreign language is to me.
*

Anyone got a thousand monkeys handy?




Please note that I am in no way implying that Zalister is a typing monkey :D

Wouldn't be the first...

トーストがおおいしだね。。。with jam especially.

Nice bit of animation here: Resonant Chamber (and here Animusic: Resonant Chamber)

LOL Mikey, that's about as random as they come.

I like Jam, Eddie Izzard likes Jam, that makes me funny, right?

If you lie beneath the sky you will eventually see the moon.

next random thought
a haiku by mikey

pondering the thread
thinking about its title
java really sucks

~fin~

Tried suckin' java even tho' I'm not in Japan .... figure I'll stick to suppin' as the weird looks are turnin' to crazy angry ...

Borders have an interesting offer. Buy one book and get 50% off a second. I just can't think of a use for the half a second outside of professional sport?

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There is that. And then there is the howls of protest from the cashier if you try to "take three" in addition to "paying for two" items.

Robert Wilensky: "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the internet, we know that is not true."

enough said.

but you know (since you wanted a random thought), I'm very tired of life. not that I dislike being alive - generally I enjoy being alive; life is a good thing - but I'm tired of the constant chaffing and champing at the bit that seems to occupy everyone else on the planet. I'm sick of the lousy signal to noise ratio. I wish there were some decent, comfortable caves left in the world, so that I could go sit in one and studiously ignore everyone and everything for a good long while. that would make me happy.

but alas, no. :(

Ever read Brave New World?


If you tried that someone would probably want to medicate you :rolleyes:. Plus the constant stream of cavers would probably get annoying.

Isn’t that about noise being utilised so as to prevent bothersome signals from reaching society?

For contrast, read Ivan Illich’s essay: Silence Is a Commons.
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Drugs silence the voices in my head, but never the music.

that's a weird confluence - 'Brave New World' comes from Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' (not typed by monkeys) which is about a wizard-type who retreats from the world to his own little cave (well... island, but private islands are in even shorter supply than caves) to get away from the noise of the world. and the Tempest was the loose inspiration for the cheesy sci-fi classic 'Forbidden Planet' which I just watched recently.

hey, maybe that's the key. I'll sign up for the Forestry service, and then the government will pay me to sit in a cave and play traffic cop for the spelunkers. I'll just put up a sign saying they have to maintain absolute silence so they don't scare the bats, and life will be good. :D

ArcticStones: I'm going to avoid (for once) the temptation to get political. ;)

Hermits, hobo's and others of such ilk are just a little smarter than the rest of us.

As I enter the golden years and look back over life, I find the greatest regrets are not the mistakes I made but rather the risky things I should have done and didn't. Two people in particular really, really deserved to be punched out.... and I sincerely regret not giving them what they clearly had coming!

I've been thinking a lot about being schizoid. Or rather, not being schizoid. I'm an oddity, even within that circle, as most schizoids do not recognize they have a problem, or if they do, do not see a need to rectify it. We're rather funny that way. We tend to fix all problems internally, and not see the need for any external help. This very ability is our strength, and yet is the cause of our problems.
It's a challenge learning how to communicate and interact with people in a meaningful way, and not to see everyone as merely autonomous objects. To equate others' feelings with the words coming out of your mouth, and even the intonation of those words.
Harder still, to bypass the internalization process, and allow out feelings we may have and even <shudder> to verbalize them.

My contribution to randomness for today.

That particular difficulty is probably a universal guy thing.

I hate all of you and I hope this forum burns to the ground. See, that wasn't hard at all! :D

(okay, maybe I'm better at lying than expressing my feelings)

I have to say posting on a forum is so much easier for me than real time conversation. My wife has learned to allow me a 10-15 second delay in conversation for me to consider my responses. In wider social settings this requirement kind of leaves me floundering. At a party it is even worse because there is little structure to conversation with people contributing ad-hoc. Unless there is an opportune break in the flow for me to formulate a reply and overcome my self-loathing enough to express it I'm pretty much sunk :o.

Among other things, that is precisely why I won't have anything to do with Chat and other similar technologies, but stick to e-mail and board postings. Seems to me that IRC just reproduces the worst features of cocktail party conversation without any of the best ones.

Well, if it makes you feel any better: I'm, one of the ones that is able to dominant a party conversation if I choose. The secret is pretty simple, just don't think before you speak. The problem is that this is also a terribly bad habit that I wish I could drop (the not thinking bit), but I seem to lack the patience to actually wait around to think my responses through... Diarrhea of the mouth I think they call it. It comes out fast and it's all #$@$.

I'm a little similar (depending on mood) and often wish that I was one of those people that can process the subtext of a conversation while also being in it. It's often after a pleasant conversation that I'll think to myself either A) Oh, no! I said that? I now realise that could come across badly or B) Hang on...now I get why they were saying XYZ, those bastards!

But instead, I'm cursed with being able garbage on the fly, but not always seeing the context of what I or others are really saying!

eh, party talk isn't so bad if you remember that most social conversation is emotional, not informational. most everything said at a party is intended to create, affirm, or adjust social relationships, and all you really need to do is validate what people around you say, and say things that people around you can validate. worst thing you can do at a party is open your mouth with some particular aim; parties are for creating a social fabric which will allow (later) any particular social goals you have to develop naturally.

it's like they used to say: a wise application of bullcrap is useful for getting the grass to grow.

my issue is dysthymia. I love parties, up until the point where the utter meaningless of life intrudes itself into the mix, which - for me - it always does. kind of a mood-killer, that. ;)

Damn those things. The bain-marie of my existence.


There's my new word for the day :D.

My issue is more panic related. I had some major party-related freak outs when I was younger and they kind of dampened my enthusiasm for the concept.

Yeah, well the jerk store called... :)

Sorry, couldn't resist a Seinfeld reference.

I got that word tucked in under my hat-band, unfortunately.

yeah, well, acid will do that to you - context is everything, dude. <heh heh heh>

I'll tell you, when I have friendly chats with my undergrads, I always advise them to stay away from the average 'mob-scene' UG party, and to throw dinner parties instead. mobbish parties are always going to fill you with low-grade uncertainty and dread (too many people, and too much going on from too many different angles - half the reason they crank the music up so high is to give people something to hide behind). dinner parties are structured almost to the point of being choreographed, you're forced to talk to people, and it's a slightly snobby experience to boot, all of which works well for the UG mindset. it's almost impossible to have a freak out at a dinner party.

unless the host makes the mistake of serving escargot, that is. yeeeEEeeeee...

Cue Brian Eno...

Why am I getting flash-backs to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover?

hmmm... few of my undergrads are sociopathic crime lords. cannibals I'm not so sure about.

That you know of... ;)

Ah, mood disorders, is there nothing you can't ruin?

Party freak-outs can be great exercise motivators... speaking as someone who in his youth ran in the middle of the night from a party house to the train station... 8km away (about 4 miles). Did I mention I was young?

Stupid Penguins.

as long as they don't explode...

Don't know if any of the links still work but you can work out your issues here :)

Based solely on the popularity of the Twilight series it seems that what women want is an old fashioned gentleman capable of killing them who chooses not to :confused:.

I knew Justin Timberlake was a vampire!

This paper was submitted by some clearly frustrated recipients of spam solicitations for research papers (warning language): GMOYFML.

Pumpkin Soup

Ingredients

1 x Leek - Sliced
2 x Cloves Garlic - Sliced
3 x Tomatoes - Diced
1/2 x Butternut Pumpkin - Diced
2/3 Cup x Red Lentils - Cleaned, sorted and rinsed
4 Teaspoons x Stock Powder
1 Teaspoon x Ground Cumin
1/3 Teaspoon x Ground Turmeric
Black Pepper Ground to taste
Olive Oil
Boiled water

Cover the bottom of a large soup pot with olive oil. Brown the leek and garlic. Add the chopped tomatoes and stir into leek and garlic. Add pumpkin and enough boiled water to cover the pumpkin. Stir and add lentils, cumin, turmeric and pepper. Cover and simmer for about an hour. Stir frequently to avoid lentils sticking to the bottom. Add more water as required.

Prior to serving use a stick blender to blend all ingredients to a thick, creamy consistency.

Yaay mangoes are coming into season.

It's hard to eat Lime Yogurt during cold season, reminds me too much of what's coming out of my nose...

It's funny they need a six digit pin to access my phone messages but only four digits to access my money.

I think one of the most annoying phrases in current use is "... to raise awareness ....". What the hell's that mean?

Every now and again, I feel my phone ringing (vibrating) and I reach into my pocket only to find out that the phone is on the desk in front of me. What is wrong with me?

Maybe it's like a phantom limb thing? You may be getting too attached to your phone :D.

And I've only had this iPhone for two weeks...

It's syncing with your consciousness...

yeow - I always knew that someday technology would tap into Jung's collective unconscious, but I thought I had a few years yet...

I get this all the time too. It's like your brain pays more attention to the nerves in the part of your leg which the phone rests against and the result is lots of false-positives.

That's not a bad theory at all. Makes me want to ask a neurologist...

I think a lot more things like that get programmed in. When a nursing mother's baby cries, she begins to dribble milk; ready to roll.

If the world's leading scientists want to come to my house and explain global warming, they're going to need a dog team and a sled to do it !

I presume that somewhere on their way back from your house they will discover that one data point is all that's needed to prove or disprove a scientific theory.

I'm with AEH :) ditto the dog sled. We're getting the Northern version of the storm that's dumping on him.

Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. it dropped almost to 55 here last night. horrible, just horrible.