Category Archives: Humor

i wish there would be following Facebook buttons, besides Like:

02 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Humor

≈ 11 Comments

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1. i agree 100% with your update (whatever it is & usually it’s something highly irrelevant to the 99% of world’s population) AND i wish i thought of it myself, but then i am a non-native speaker and still couldn’t word it so neatly, so i feel tad envious too;

2. i disagree completely, more so – i almost hate you right now, but can’t remove you from friends because there is no reasonable explanation to my neurotic reaction for our mutual fb friends, thus i’ll pretend i haven’t read your status AT ALL;

3. i didn’t reply to your cry for help not because i am insensitive, but because i am in another time zone and now, 22h later,  i feel embarrassed to say anything at all;

4. i hate prolonged status updates posted late in the night, i mean, c’mmon, who has the focus for that in this ADD era?!

5. you are plain WRONG, but i am too tired to argue, so here is a passive-aggressive Like with a smirk ;

6. you post in a language i don’t speak, but you look kinda hot on your profile picture, so i Like your update & keep my fingers crossed that it isn’t about your companion being ill or something;

7. iLike your status, i really do, but it’s quite personal and i am neither sure who you are nor why i added you to friends, so i’ll pass;

8. i have no idea what you are talking about & i am too busy to read it all, but given that 78 mutual friends liked your status & commented on it Like it is!

9. despite being called ‘most anti-social invention’ by some,  a Facebook “like” is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment; “Liking” something on the social media site is a “substantive statement” being made by a user – and i don’t take those lightly, because the mere sound of the phrase is legal-power-igniting & it doesn’t matter the least that i am not sure at all what substantive statements are!

10. iLike what you are saying, it comes across as intelligent and eloquent, but i am uninformed on the topic& can’t be bothered to read extensively about it, so to comment appropriately, thus i’ll pretend that i missed this one, albeit i didn’t;

11.  i think i Like your status, but i am not sure & it’s my bedtime (i am in another time zone)

12. i like your status, but then i think your significant other won’t like yet another Like of mine on your Facebook wall;

13. you haven’t Liked any of my statuses recently & being a firm believer in Facebook reciprocity, i pass;

14. yours is a marketing douchebaggery, so no Like from me, despite the big puppy eyes you are making;

15. if i Like this, you’ll expect me to Like other stuff of yours; if i do – then you’ll invite me to Like your Facebook page, if i do that – all your Facebook friends will start nagging me to Like their respective Facebook pages and i don’t really like many of their pages, but would feel thorn apart if i liked some and wouldn’t like others and i don’t wish that kind of anguish for myself, so i pass!

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’tis all in the coffee cup

23 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Essay, Humor, Photography

≈ 27 Comments

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Coffee is big in our culture. A friend who had gone missing for a long time would call you and regretfully ask: when are you coming over for a coffee? Your crush, if you are lucky, will ask you: when are you going to buy me that coffee? (Sounds awkward, I know.) The ultimate despair is when you “don’t have with whom to share a cup of coffee.”

Morning coffee has cult-like status and if you see someone really pissed off early in the day – most probably they didn’t have the time to grab theirs. And you won’t see anyone carrying their coffee around in a plastic glass- you have to be seated to have it.

To drink coffee while standing – like many Italian does – for us would be a sign you are late, like… for your own funeral or something. It doesn’t happen. When we say to “have coffee while standing on foot” – it means the ceremony lasts less than hour – that happens seldom and is commonly frowned upon.

There is plenty of discrimination going on I must tell you. When it comes to the Balkan people and their coffee – alike does attracts alike. Cooking Turkish coffee in gezve, when done traditionally, takes some time and skills too – and if your coffee-mates have very different sugar preferences, it can become a painstaking… well, ordeal. See, you need to put the sugar first – and it’s done as soon as you placed the gezve on the stove, long before first bubbles come out (coffee itself is added only later , to the already boiling water).

When it comes to cooked coffee, timing is everything. I have a close friend whom I love, but our friendship is between the rock and the hard place – he takes his coffee at 4pm sharp and that’s whole hour after my afternoon coffee time, if I skip mine and wait for him – around half past three I already hate him with passion; if I have mine first and then another cup with him – that means I’ll spend the night counting the sheep. Another thing is that he likes his coffee “thin” and sweet and I like mine “strong” and without sugar.  It’s complicated.

Many are fixated on brands – for another friend I need to keep a bag of a local blend, as she won’t even look at any other… The thing is that coffee needs to be freshly grinded to be good, that basically means replacing the bag with a new one at least every two weeks; if you have several friends who are set in their choices – chances are that sooner or later you’ll unintentionally hurt someone. People are very sensitive when it comes to coffee – forgetting their preferences is like forgetting their own  names; presumably if you make the coffee for somebody once, you shall remember how they like it – until the end of your days. It’s quite personal, you see.

Many have their personal mugs and won’t drink from any other; often a friend will “reserve” a mug of yours and will demand their coffee to be served in it exclusively. God forbid that you brake it or forgetfully lend it to a neighbor for example (coffee is freely landed and borrowed among neighbors – and usually fetched in mugs.) It can be the proverbial hair that breaks the camel’s back – your friend will look at you, their eyes full of tears, you will know it albeit they probably won’t actually say it – that you hurt them badly, you deprived them of something rightfully theirs, you took away an essential part of their identity and they don’t feel welcomed in your home anymore. It has happened to me too and I must say that it feels awfully saddening… So, if you love them – keep their cup in a safe place, preferably locked up in a pool with piranhas,  surrounded with couple of guardian dogs, take my word on it – it’s  worth the pain.

 

Here are some more captures from Sarajevo for you:

 

100_6425 100_6426 100_6438 100_6439 100_6441

 

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my rant on punctuation

12 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by in Humor

≈ 29 Comments

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A laughing smiley in an exclamation point.

A laughing smiley in an exclamation point. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I mean, really…  Some people have written whole novels without using any! And this exclamation marks too – literate folks avoid them as a plague, they say using one is like tapping yourself on the shoulder. My favorite – semicolon – has been frowned upon as the symbol of ultimate snobbery and merely a show off that you did some college. Right. It’s common knowledge that what’s in brackets – you can skip writing all together, if you in your capacity of the author consider it less important than the rest of the text – stigmatizing it by the shameful brackets – i bet you that in this rushing ADD era (as much as i am convicted that it’s a non-existent disorder) your readers won’t bother to dwell on it. Not even for a second.

By now, you might have noticed that i adore ending my sentences with ellipsis… But, how many of those one can use in a paragraph, without crossing the line? And what to use instead? The ellipses sort of denote that you haven’t said your last word on the matter AND that, as a presumably intelligent person, you retain your right to think of something else later on  OR to add something all together very different… With FULL STOP, you don’t stand a chance.  That’s it, you pronounced yourself, you made the statement, no room for improvements or latter reflections PERIOD.

Blame it on the Greeks, ’twas Aristophanes of Byzantium who came up with full stop’s first form – it was he , who invented  single dots to separate the verses… AND it was so long ago – 3 centuries BC – that i doubt we can do anything to reverse the tragic effect of the invention on contemporary stream of consciousness writing. There, i said it! (The former exclamation mark is me high-fiving myself as it’s for a while now that i hold a grudge against renown Greek scholar AND i do feel better now that i took off my chest!)

Kudos for Chinese who only recently, in 20th century, succumbed to this devastating Western influence and who, for the best part of their written history, in poetry and traditional calligraphy, did not use any punctuation!

Hervé Bazin, French writer, known for his topics of teenage rebellion and dysfunctional families, in an essay from 1966 –  Plumons l’Oiseau (“Let’s pluck the bird”) – proposed six new punctuation marks:

  • the “love point” (point d’amour: Point d'amour.svg)
  • the “certitude point” (point de conviction: Point de certitude.svg)
  • the “authority point” (point d’autorité: Point d'autorité.svg)
  • the “acclamation point” (point d’acclamation: Point d'acclamation.svg)
  • the “doubt point” (point de doute: Point de doute.svg)

There were other more than cool suggestions, like:

Superellipses . o 0  – to indicate a dramatic pause (source: halfblog.net )

The Sinceroid – when you want to be REALLY HONEST, as in: Oh, wow! Thank you! This sweater is just what i wanted .

Not to forget interrobang ‽ which presumably denotes excited disbelief and saves you the time that you’d normally use to type down a question mark and an exclamation point… In the course of several life times, the saved time could easily climb up to as much as five minutes ?! 

The bastion of English language – The Oxford Dictionary – added ♥ as the first symbol ever to grace its pages; mind you, spokesperson clarified, “While symbols do become spelt-out words relatively frequently, it is usually only with a mundane meaning as the name of the symbol… It’s very unusual for it to happen in such an evocative and tangential way.”

(Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/03/25/the-oxford-english-dictionary-adds-3-and-lol-as-words/#ixzz2QFNZJMVv )

Personally, i am all for including (introduced by John Wallis in 1655) infinity sign to the most common written languages – firstly because i don’t believe in any other, but self-imposed limits and, secondly, because it would be quite handy when, for example, you don’t know how to end an essay  ∞

 

 

how NOT to get freshly pressed, EVER

19 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Humor, Tarot

≈ 21 Comments

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Right, it’s as if we aren’t sick of ‘keeping up with the Jones’ outside Word Press, we have this FP thing pushed on us… I must admit i do like most of the entries that do get FPed, but of all the blogs i follow and adore, only Dianne Gray and Rian got FP-ed. Mind you, both are unconventional thinkers with genius writing stile,  besides, Dianne is a pro writer who had been published (and popular) long before the Word Press craze, so no surprise there.

What does surprise me is the plethora of excellent and popular blogs that in my year or so on WP got zero promotion. Not to brag, but I am a pro writer myself, involved with all kinds of professional writers’ international activities and even happen to be the president of the national jury for EU prize for literature, so i don’t doubt all that much my own taste in writings; being a doctoral student at one of the world’s top ranked Universities  specialized in linguistics, i have some confidence in my intellectual discernment too, and i did wonder for quite a while how come the stuff i love doesn’t get any special attention… Ever.

I went through the list of topics i search regularly:

Chinese Philosophy
Daoism
I Ching
Judaism
Russia
Zen

It’s not that i am looking for something socially unacceptable and on the edge of the good taste, right?

Check out those searches for yourself, there are absolute pearls among them – and by academically recognized authorities too (honestly, those are indeed quite sub-specialized, so very few non-experts discuss them publicly.)

The thing is that we have genius Bonnie Cehovet here on Word Press, a published writer, author of remarkable micro fiction and an independent books and Tarot decks reviewer. ‘Independent’ means you can trust her opinion because she’s reviewing stuff she chooses on a pro bono basis, so there is no way you could invest into a wrong, yet expensive collector’s item because she was paid to promote it; if only for that her work deserves all the praise – let alone that her own taste and, thus, recommendations are indeed exquisite.

Mary K. Greer, worldwide known author and scholar, one of the most respected contemporary experts on the philosophy and history of the occult is blogging on Word Press too.

Among us is Lisa Frideborg Lloyd, famed mystic and Tarot educator.

Amazing Thalassa Therese joined WP recently – she’s the producer of the oldest established Tarot Symposium in the world, founder of the Daughters of Divination, and founder/CEO of Beating the Boundaries Life Strategies and Transformative Arts.

I must tell you all of them are stars with international following and have quite an impact on big group of population with certain buying power. Have I mentioned that all of those blogs are amazingly entertaining and educative too?

One of the coolest and most informative blogs on collections and collecting  is that of the famed Le Fanu – My Curious Cabinet; author’s writing style and keen observances on life in a ‘far off land’ would certainly be of interest to a wider following.

Yet, we fall in the uncategorizable category of a sub-culture and while the hard working and smart peeps behind FP selection will risk here and there to promote a post on anorexia or bipolar depression, rest assured they won’t go that far so to press any of us. And it’s absolutely fine, what’s socially acceptable changes every fifty years or so, where as those of us who are into the “obscure” occult disciplines have been around ever since the dawn of the humanity and by now we developed powerful surviving skills, like any other guerrilla does.

I’ve written before on subcultures in Skinny Bitches & Russian Ballerinas and, to be honest, i’d be utterly desperate if we suddenly became mainstream, so take this for what it is – not a rant, merely a stream of thought.

Other than that, there is this amazing blog on Russia – let alone all the ‘world’s being your oyster’ of the internet – there are still very few great blogs about Russia in English and From Russia With Love is definitely one of them.

It’s not that there are too many famous public personalities from Armenia writing in English – yet Arlen is around and at his blog you can read (among else) rare stuff on this exotic country, which is hardly available anywhere else.

That being said, mine too happens to be the only Word Press blog in English where you can read genuine stuff on Montenegro, another far off country on which culture and traditions still little is known.

And here is something else i thought of. Rian of Truth and Cake came up with the genius idea to Freshly Press yourself, hope she won’t mind mine borrowing it (ehem, well, snatching would make a more appropriate wording, but anyway ;))

So, let’s do it here as well, if you feel so inclined:

1. Pick one of your posts you take pride in;

2. Link to it in the comments section below, while adding couple of words on the content;

3. If you choose to do so – promise you’ll check out and comment on at least one entry by another blogger who linked to their respective post too. There is no FP police involved at this time, but karma is … well, mean, so make sure you do it ))

4. Comment directly on their blog and, please, don’t spam.

Have fun!

snatched from http://tfunworld.wordpress.com

snatched from http://tfunworld.wordpress.com

Random Words, Google Oracle and Daily Prompts

31 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Humor

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I am all for quality, not quantity & all that jazz, i never aimed to post daily – except on days when i suffer from incurable logorrhea which side effects include the unrestrictable desire to share random thoughts on WordPress… This happens quite random, mind you.

Thus, i mostly bypass Daily Propmts, and the current entry would be on forthcoming NanoWrimo, hadn’t i come across this very Daily Post: “Pick a random word and do Google image search on it. Check out the eleventh picture it brings up. Write about whatever that image brings to mind.”

The midnight was long gone by local time and I was packing for Moscow. I don’t have time for this, yet, just for the sake of it – i hit random word generator… This is what i got:

Interesting, is it not? Curiosity is known to be one of the leading indicators of intelligence – and also of sleepless nights wasted on aimless browsing. Nah, not me, i don’t do those…

Next thing you know i was counting heads on Google Image Result.

And i was going to sleep immediately after that, i swear… Until a deprived shaven female head yelled out to me from the computer screen. Oh, every woman’s horror! You know those dreams where you walk naked across the crowded circus (and it’s winter and of course you haven’t shaved in a while, alongside other, usual problems with walking naked along crowded circuses)?

That’s what this poor head told me about – the unusually sad story of cyber neglect, of a  digital art done in hurry and a male 3D artist who had left her hairless and sent her naked pictures into the big online word… I cringed. I felt sick in my stomach. “Didn’t bother do hair as it was just a quick project for practice”, the 3D artist says… Goodness, who does that to a cyber woman?!

I heard her plea. I understood and didn’t mind she used Google as some kind of reversed Ouija Board, so to get my attention. I would be capable of using anything to get the help i needed was i in her place… Look at that lipstick – not even a 90 years old would wear it! Not to mention that these colors are not produced for at least twenty years by now – and the girl could develop a cyber allergy from wearing expired make up!

Forget about getting sleep when your sister is in such a tragic situation! I made myself a cup of coffee and took the poor girl to http://www.taaz.com/

First i helped her get rid of that sickish tan she was given by her creator, in my opinion -a ruthless male 3D artist with no understanding of fine art of makeup.

We took off that horrible black eyeliner and removed the dreadful brown lipstick. You can’t grow hair overnight – not even online, so we opted for a wig. The poor head and myself then spent an hour or so applying concealers, shadows, mascaras and the rest of  girl’s essentials. We made her lips bigger, teeth whiter. She needed contacts, colored ones of course. The eyebrows needed fixing – i mean, those are ‘half of the face’ as my mother likes to accentuate the importance of correct plucking.

After her makeover was done, the photo itself needed some corrections too – adding some light and filters here and there.

Around 3 am both once bald cyber head with tasteless makeup and sleepless me were satisfied with the result. Here it is, judge for yourself:

Copyright Notice: The original illustration was digitally altered beyond recognition and without  prejudicial intentions, thus it can not be considered to be in breach of its creator’s intellectual and moral rights.