Now that I teach for a living, despite being English-based (which has far less problem solving, and far more ‘What do you think?’), I still spend a lot of time problem solving (particularly when it comes to tech).  The binary on my jersey is probably enough of a suggestion that they only keep me around for my geek (I doubt my dalek poster does me any favours).  As geek-in-chief for the English faculty goes, however, I solve all the tech problems:
“My internet’s not working.”
“How do I burn a disc?”
“Why isn’t the sound on?”
Admittedly, most of the time, the answer is, as so commonly portrayed on the brilliant BBC series ‘The IT Crowd” “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”  Most of the time it’s simple, and it takes me under a minute to fix, and train the user so that it (hopefully) doesn’t happen again.  Of course, there are also times when it’s not simple, when they have a request that’s so outstanding that I have to sit in front of the screen for an hour until I can repair the damage, or create what has been requested.

Yes – it sounds like work – but that’s when it gets fun.  Problems that need solving.  I love to spend hours trawling through forums and help menus, experimenting, restoring factory settings and experimenting again.  All the finding stuff is almost as fun as the product: the solution.  I find that it often frustrates people at work, who say “I’ve lost the Year 10 file – can you find it” and then realise that I’m embarking upon it like it’s my life’s mission.  Give me a problem and I’ll solve it like I’m solving world hunger – I’m go, go, go.

And then, every now and then, you get a problem that you can’t solve – because it’s too big, and you’re too small, or because regardless of which way you turn, any step will inevitably be in the wrong direction; it’s time for you to stand still.  Or, because regardless of how you feel, who you think you are, or who you want to be, ultimately, the problem is not yours to fix.  That’s when problems are less fun, and when it’s time to put away your compass and your protractor, and leave it to the experts, because if you’re wiggling the wires without knowing what you’re doing, all you’re going to leave behind is another tangle.

Bitch Stewie doesn’t bitch, he is a bitch in the sense that he does what he’s told.  Alex is a bitch in the sense that he hates Twilight, and enjoys sharing his awesome anti-Meyer bitchiness with us.  He’s all sorts of awesome, “Stupid Stephanie Meyer – This isn’t how you book!’  Whether you’ve dragged yourself through this teen sensation or not – I highly recommend his commentary.

Alex is friends with Charlie.  Charlie once talked about Twilight, but mostly he talks about himself and Doctor Who.  He is thoroughly entertaining, and even when he’s not responding to a challenge (seriously – check out the one where he eats baby food).

Babies eat baby food when they’re hungry, other people who are hungry include the characters in ‘The Hunger Games’, which was highly recommended by Alex during an anti-Twilight rant.  I think it’s absolutely addictive and I fell into it for a couple of hours today.  The essential idea is this – a bunch of poor towns are controlled by the Capitol.  Each of the towns produces something for the Capitol – but all are poor.  Every year, each town experiences ‘The Reaping’ where a male and female of each province is selected via a raffle.  If you ‘win’ the raffle – you are selected to take part in the hunger games – a huge reality tv show where you kill or be killed.  The winning party takes home riches to their town, the rest die.  I guess it sounds kind of ‘meh’, but it’s actually the opposite.  Highly recommended, despite the fact that it’s got a quote from Miss Stephanie Meyer on the cover.

Speaking of people giving recommendations, I got into Scott Pilgrim vs. The World through Joss Whedon, who stated “Scott Pilgrim is the best book ever. It is the chronicle of our time. With Kung Fu, so, yeah: perfect.”  Ahhh…hyperbole.  Still – awesome, only to be out-awesomed with the brilliance that was the film.  Admittedly, I was skeptical about the casting of Michael Cera in the position of the protagonist, but the brilliance of the film managed to balance it all out.  Seriously – best film of 2010. Go see it!

On Joss Whedon – he was in Sydney on Sunday.  The man is an amazing speaker: energetic, witty, intelligent, thoughtful, deep and downright funny.  I would love to have more to say on the matter, but that’s really all I have.  He is the head geek, and I cannot believe that I’ve been luckiest to see him speak twice.  It was a bit bizarre to be sitting in a room full of hard-core geeks (some moreso than others) who have pilgrimaged (double connection – woo!) to hear the man speak.  It’s about as close to as a religious experience as I’ll ever get, and I get how people are sucked in by all that stuff – because I could have listened to him talk about himself all day long.

I apologise for the unsatisfactory writing, and mish-mash of links.  I cleaned my desk at work today.  Here’s a picture of it (actually – half of it – bonus points if you can work out the geek references on it.):

1. This article on news.com.au, which, while frequently making me feel frustrated and angry, does regularly make me smile.  In this case, it’s an article about the City-to-Surf, with one paragraph on a man who completed the fun-run in a super man suit:

2. Mika.  Yes – I’m slow on this one, and I’m a bit confused as to whether my new appreciation for his music makes me a 12 year old girl, or a gay man, but either way, I’m really enjoying ‘Life in Cartoon Motion’ at the moment.  It has a nice balance between low and high energy, it makes me smile when I’m driving along, and ‘Any Other World’ is just a fantastic piece of music.  I love strings.

3. My steering wheel, and the wonderful ability it has to both maneuver my car, and play the part of a drumming surface when I’m enjoying my music more than usual.

4. Apples.  I love apples.  I go through phases where I can’t eat enough of them.  Red apples, green apples, chopped apples, whole apples.  They’re fantastic.

5. The Writer’s Tale. The Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook book on the new series of Doctor Who.  It’s basically their emails for two years, and it’s fantastic.  I’ve never read anything like it (structure-wise), and I’m finding it really insightful, not just on the writing process, but as a commentary on humanity.

6. Wireless Internet. Yesterday, the sun shone down on one of the most magnificent days I’ve seen in a long time.  I had some school work to do, and so I pulled up a picnic blanket in the backyard, and soaked in some rays while I did my research and lesson plans.  How amazing is that?  I forget sometimes that we’re living in the future.

7. Joss Whedon - for having such an intense influence upon me in my formative years, and continuing to do so today.  And for coming to Sydney for a second time in 5 years, so that I can bask in his glory, and have as close as I can get to a religious experience.

8. This paper toy. For being so simple, and so pretty, and so addictive.

9. Inception: For making me feel intelligent, because I didn’t find it particularly complex (despite popular opinion), and for reminding me what a brilliant film ‘Waking Life’ is.

10. David Tennant Reading Picture Books: ’nuff said.

Most of these clips aired either BEFORE or AFTER the three or four years of my life that saw me in the right age bracket for Sesame Street, though as a uni student, I definitely caught up on some in my later years.  Say what you want about the show, it has some freaking awesome guest stars who I wouldn’t have had a clue about as a four year old.  Let’s face it, this celebrity stuff is for us adult-sized six year olds who still love playing with Lego.  Here are some of my favourites (in no particular order, though, if you only have time for one – Ricky Gervais is brilliant.):

1. Feist counts to four

The song rocked, and she took it one better by turning it into a song about monsters and chickens and penguins.  My only gripe is, where is the count?  Surely counting is more his thing than a chicken thing?

2. Sir Patrick Stewart gets his Shakespeare on with a soliloquy about ‘B’.

“B, or not a B? That is the question”

The guy is brilliant.  I’d listen to him read my electricity bill. This one speaks to me because part of me really wants to teach it, and the other half knows that when I mention Shakespeare in class, some kid will inevitably mention something they saw on tv when they were a kid (or the Simpsons).  When tv stations are pumping out stuff like ‘In the Night Garden”, it’s nice to know that this kind of thing is still around.

3. REM sing Furry Happy Monsters

“Furry Happy Monsters feeling glad.”

It’s cute, it’s fun and it teaches you the difference between happy and sad.  There’s also dancing.  Nothing else needs to be said.

4. Ricky Gervais sings Elmo a Celebrity Lullabye.

This cracks me up.  Firstly because Gervais has to try and convince Elmo that he is indeed a celebrity worthy of providing a celebrity lullabye, and secondly, because the song is brilliant.  There’s a lot of funny Gervais/Elmo stuff online that’s worth having a look at, but you’re big kids and you can look it up yourself.

5. R2-D2 finds love on Sesame Street.

Uh. Yeah.  There’s not a lot to say about this one.  I don’t think that it’s even slightly educational, it just has Star Wars robots in it.  That said, that’s kind of enough.

6. Hugh Jackman teaches you to concentrate.

Yeah, yeah, obligatory Aussie.  He’s so pretty though, and if I had someone like him encouraging me to concentrate,  monotony would be far less…monotonous.  This is just really cute (in the ‘baby turtle’ sense, as well as the ‘pretty’ sense).

7. Jim Carrey has happy feet.
This one is the only one I remember seeing as a kid.  I think I was in year one or two when this aired, but as the oldest of three, Sesame Street stayed on my radar longer than most kids would admit.  It’s coming up 18 years though, and it’s impressive to see how young he was when this was filmed.  I remember thinking that it was hilarious.  I still think it’s pretty funny.

8. Neil Patrick Harris is the Shoe Fairy
Most people who know me are aware of the pedestal upon which I put Neil Patrick Harris, but this video certainly doesn’t damage his reputation.  In his role as shoe fairy, he distributes a wide variety of shoes, including some mopping shoes, to a woman, in an amusing moment of sexism .  This is kind of lovely, and I dare you to not wander the house afterwards singing about “Shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes.”

Shakespeare Sequencing Tasks
I am not adverse to talking myself up, these are pretty awesome.  Once the kids know the basic storyline, this task will take them about 50 minutes to do.  Instructions are included in the presentation.  Accompanying “art” is by me.  Use them all you want, but please don’t take my name off them and pretend they’re yours. That’d be mean.

• Romeo and Juliet PPT Sequencing Task (approx 7mb)
• Macbeth PPT Sequencing Task (approx. 8mb)

School Certificate (English) Multiple Choice for Moodle.
Use Moodle?  I’m slowly putting together a stack of practice papers from the NSW School Certificate.  There are ten there at the moment, and they all self-mark, but I’m doing more when I get the time.  You can download a backup of the course as it is now, below.

• SC Backup
  

To install, you just start a new course and import the zip.  It’s crazy simple.

More later, if I feel like it.

Now, of course, I’m old.  Or at least, I’m older, old enough to notice the fact that Grandpa Joe, despite being presented as an image of all that is good in the world, is a jerk.  For example:

1. Charlie (who is perfect and innocent and wonderful) has four grandparents who are all bedridden (fed in bed, bedpans, etc.).  He appears to have no father (I know he has one in the novel, but I’m referring to the film here), and while his mother slaves all day, he goes to school, and spends his afternoons working a paper route to help his family out.  When Charlie gets paid for his route, he buys his family a loaf of bread, and gives his change to his Grandpa Joe TO BUY TOBACCO.  That’s right – the family is starving, and the youngest member is working so his Grandfather can smoke.

2. Grandpa Joe, instead of spending the money on tobacco, somehow manages to purchase for Charlie, a chocolate bar.  Now, this may seem like a nice gesture, but how in hell did he manage to buy chocolate when he CAN’T GET OUT OF BED?  And what’s he doing buying junk food when all the family can afford to eat is broth and bread?  Buy some potatoes or something, Grandpa.  You’re supposed to use your powers for good!

3. Eventually, Charlie manages to score himself a golden ticket.  Lucky lad.  He brings it home, and decides immediately that instead of taking his loving and devoted mother who works her fingers to the bone every day, he’ll drag along bedridden Grandpa Joe, who has said woman empty his bedpan.  Seriously.  And Grandpa Joe, instead of saying “oh, no, take your lovely mother” proceeds to GET OUT OF BED.  The bed that he hasn’t left for 20 years.  He has not only the strength to stand, but the strength to dance and sing and remind his daughter that HE has a golden ticket, not her.  She’s been serving on him hand and foot for twenty years, and he climbs out of bed for a bit of chocolate.  Good to see this jerk’s got his priorities in order.

4. Grandpa Joe shows distaste at all the other children who have been invited to the factory, but unlike the other parents, when the children are asked to sign a wordy and overly complicated contract, possibly signing away their rights, Grandpa Joe is the only person who fails to question its merits.  “We’ve got nothing to lose!” he tells Charlie.  Way to look out for your grandson, Grandpa Joe.

5. Grandpa Joe shows great distaste towards the other children who have been invited to the factory.  Clearly, he has no empathy, as seen when Augustus Gloop falls into the chocolate river and is sucked into the pipe.  All parties (other than Wonka, who is insane, and Grandpa Joe, who is a jerk) show deep concern for the boy, but Grandpa Joe would rather give Charlie analogies about how a bullet is fired from a gun.  Not really the time for a science lesson, Grandpa.  A boy nearly died.

6. Grandpa fails to show any concern as the other children succumb to what could possibly be gruesome ends as the factory tour continues.  Admittedly, they’re all suffering from conclusions brought upon them by their own greed, but still, each parent shows concern as another’s child leaves the tour.  Not Grandpa though, he’s focused on having a good time now that he’s climbed out of bed.  In fact, while all other children are making bad decisions, and having their parents rush after them, it’s Grandpa Joe who decides to be ‘naughty’, stealing a swig of the anti-gravity fizzy drink, and bullying Charlie into joining him.

7. The two are nearly sliced to pieces (great idea, Grandpa!), but they make it back down and catch up with the tour, Grandpa Joe criticising the greed of the children who didn’t make it, when they themselves had committed theft.  Hypocrite.

8. Eventually, the tour ends.  Charlie is the only ‘surviving’ member of the tour, and we think that he’s going to get his lifetime supply of chocolate.  But wait! Mr Wonka points out that actually, Grandpa Joe is a jerk. He stole fizzy lifting drink, and he messed up the fan.  He voided the contract that he refused to read, and now he gets nothing.  Grandpa Joe, instead of realising that he’s a jerk, reacts violently, and screams abuse at the lovely chocolate maker.

9. And to make matters worse, he tells Charlie that he should break his vow to Mr Wonka, and give the everlasting gobstopper to Wonka’s sworn enemy, Mr Sluggworth.

10. Charlie’s not a jerk, which is surprising considering his bloodline, and he returns the gobstopper, and it turns out that it was all a test, and now Charlie owns the factory and can move in if he wants to.  Grandpa Joe isn’t satisfied with his grandson’s eternal happiness, and immediately asks “What about me?!”. Luckily, Mr Wonka isn’t a jerk, and he tells Grandpa Joe that he’s welcome to stay in the factory too.  And everyone lives happily ever after (except of course, the kids and their parents who had something awful happen to them within the factory because they happened to break one rule…which is what Grandpa Joe and Charlie did, really, so I don’t really know how they managed to get away with it).

Grandpa Joe? You lose.  Good day, sir!

Allstar to Class Act
An interesting article on Australian comedian, Tim Ferguson post DAAS, and his diagnosis with MS.

The Angel of ‘The Gap’
Articles show up every now and then on Don Ritchie, the man who has saved over 150 people from suicide, because he lives opposite Australia’s biggest suicide spot.

Junk Shadow Art
As the title suggests, these are photos from an exhibition of shadows made from ‘junk’.  They’re pretty impressive.

Church Signs at War
You know what? I don’t care if it’s photoshopped, or a set up, or real…it’s just funny.

American Child Labour
These photographs are amazing, as are the stories that go with them.  It was a different world back then.

Mister Bookseller
This is a really nice comic. 9 pages, but beautifully drawn, and sad and sweet.

Price Tag Placement
Nothing even slightly intellectual about this one. It’s just funny.

Enjoy. A proper post will follow eventually.

I just re-did everything. It was easier than trying to find, and then fix the mistake in the hex code (though I did try for over an hour).  I was also ready for a change, and I think this works.

“And you’ve come to me for help?”
“No! We will save the universe from you!…All projections correlate, all evidence concurs: the Doctor will destroy the universe.”

I’ve been away, and it’s also taken me some time to get my head around the most recent episode of Doctor Who, the first part of the season finale, entitled “The Pandorica Opens”.  I may be a geeky English teacher, but I do frequently find myself unable to cohesively form sentences when faced with something that holds a status of ‘reasonably epic’, and until today, I’ve really only been able to manage “Wow.”

I’ve really enjoyed the arc in this season, something that is particularly surprising, considering that I went into this season ready to hate Matt Smith with a passion.  Mr Tennant had been taken away from me, and I was met with not only a new Doctor (who I now love – more on that after the actual finale – I need a bit more information to make my call), a new companion (who I loved immediately, she may be my favourite ever), a new TARDIS (which I love too, the see through floor thing has made for some beautiful camera work) and a new theme song (which grew on me ever-so-slowly, but now gives me a happy, mostly because it wonderfully balances the dark that inhabits the new Doctor.

This episode saw the arc of the season rolling to a close.  It gives us the pieces of this season’s as they come together, and then wrapped around itself to show the placing of pieces we thought were already in place. One of the episode’s opening scenes – the Doctor discovering the oldest writing in the known universe is actually a note from his future “sweetie” (the previously abhorrent River Song, who I suddenly don’t mind that much, in fact, I quite like her) – is played for laughs. But it’s really a clue to the heart of the whole Pandorica mystery, in which we learn the prison box of legend isn’t opening, it’s closing, and the Doctor isn’t finding it at the end of its legend, but at its beginning. Time travel, as this series loves to remind us, can let you live your whole life hearing about an ancient something, then let you go back in time and become it.

This episode was big, and yet, even with the incredibly impressive reveals “Rory’s okay!”, “The TARDIS is going to explode!”, “Daleks!”, “Cybermen!”, “Amy’s been shot!”…the greatest and most impressive part of the episode was the reveal that the Pandorica was in fact designed for the Doctor.  On rewatch, it’s a place that we’re lead to throughout the entire episode (in fact, throughout the entire series, jump back to the episode with the Dream Lord for a moment – where he made it quite clear that the person who hated him the most in the entire universe was himself).  This episode is overloaded with the Doctor describing the contents of the Pandorica with phrases that, to our ears, sound like perfect descriptions of the Doctor himself: a “goblin or a trickster or a warrior, a nameless terrible thing soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies, the most feared being in all the cosmos.” And “If the Pandorica is here, it contains the mightiest warrior in history.”  It’s interesting that he’s made it quite clear (in his present form) that he is well aware of his own capacity for destruction.

I must comment though, that while I loved, loved, loved this episode, I always forget that this is, ultimately, a children’s series.  While I was in awe that the ‘monsters’ had locked the Doctor up, proving that his influence on the world had ultimately been more negative than positive (completely screwing with the minds of viewers like myself, who have been raised on the fact that he is ‘made of good’, the show reminds us that he’s being locked up to stop the destruction of the universe through the exploding of the TARDIS, something that, at present, is entirely out of his control.  Despite all that ‘bad’ that he has done to those races who come to put him away, his ‘goodness’ is preserved in that he is being punished for something that he hasn’t actually done (at least, yet.).  Had this been a Whedon production, (and yes, I do go back to him as the lord of all writers and directors) his previous ‘evils’ would have been clearly identified, and they would make us BELIEVE that he deserved to be locked up.  A small issue though, and probably only mine, and while it did bother me slightly, it doesn’t really take away from the magnificence of the concept, which did truly shock me.

There was plenty of stuff to confuse me though.  Rory shows up, despite, you know, having never existed and all. Moffat plays a clever misdirection here, since we (and the Doctor) spend much of the episode trying to work out how Rory can possibly exist. The Doctor says something about miracles and the great big unexplainable universe, then seems to agree to sort it all out later.  My only issue with his return though, isn’t that he returns, it’s that River found a big ol’ photo of him in one of Amy’s childhood books, and with him not existing at all, I can’t decide whether that’s a whopping continuity error, or something that will be explained next week.

Despite that one thing (which, as mentioned, could be deliberate…), the episode is very, very clever.  Even the title is there to lead you in a certain direction.  Yes, the Pandorica opens, but that’s not what’s important.  What’s important is that it closes…and oh, how beautifully Matt Smith played that scene.  He’s good this Doctor: the hero reduced to total panic, still so certain he is the universe’s best hope, while having to reconcile how all those fairy tales reduce him to the role of dark, scary villain, a terror falling from the sky.

And then there’s the final shot of the episode, in which whole galaxies are erased from view, leaving only Earth afloat, out in the black – and then the music itself stops, as if it, too, had disappeared from all of time and space.  As with so many things, this finale will either work for me, or it won’t, and after that fantastic piece of television, ‘kind of okay’ isn’t going to cut it.  Show me something big.

I like the idea of a god being so caught up with stuff like poverty and football matches that he just flips through the reports of high school kids in case there’s anything he missed. It makes me smile.