Dance Move of the Week 2

Your second edition of Dance Move of the Week- in the magical extra special location that is Nikki Bone's flat.

This is a move first used probably by dear darling Neil Ashley and myself, probably in some wonderfully cheesy club in leeds, such as Baja Beach Club, which now tragically is a Wetherspoons.

Love to all.

Debts and Swing Geekery

Debt

First of all: this is not a nasty comment on anyone, and is not to imply that anyone is petty or has even *asked* for a sandwich! It only developed out of comedy value and because I wanted to create the picture below :)

Last night in the pub we were discussing the subject of owings. Various different things were owed to other people within the group. For example: I owe Seb Sikora a sandwich. Hello Seb. I'm aware I owe you a sandwich. However considering I regularly drive Seb and others various places, can a sandwich just equate to some retrospective petropennies? However it also seems that Seb owes Nikki £20. So maybe that means I actually owe Nikki a sandwich, and then Seb owes her approx £18?


Well. By the suggestion of various people I have made Seb a sandwich.

As you can see it contains super noodles, cilit bang, and condoms. But they're flavoured so that's ok. So Seb. Do you want a sandwich?


Here are some brilliant musings upon debt by David Mitchell. Personally I want to meet some of these people who like to wave away debt. So I can borrow lots of money off them.

Swing Geekery!

We who swing know that swing is a geek dance. Right? It seems to attract relatively clever people who want to have fun (rather than stroke each other like more Salsa-ish types.) But look at this glorious example of swing geekery.

Yep. It's a balboa HTML joke in t-shirt form modelled by Linda. She had a lindy one too, but people thought it was her name spelt wrong so she had to give it away.

I did just write a long diatribe on my theory as to why swing is more geeky, but it turned out not to be funny, so it has gone the way of common decency and community spirity in urban areas. It's dead. very dead.

So now look i have all this space to fill as the new blogger writing wotsit won't let me put photos next to each other! Stupid blogger. Why is that? grrrrr...

Ummm.... so. Filler....

The above two ladies are Linda in the geek-shirt, and Svetlana who has a difficult surname. Svetlana and Harry are BalboaNorth. Learning balboa is quite fun... Most importantly they have free tea and biscuits!!! This is very very important.






BIG GAP







Lots of love!!

A plea for visable affection

I would really quite like it if some people followed my blog. It'd give me a wonderful feeling of affirmation. I know people have been reading it too because people have mentionned things about it to me, but having only 2 followers does NOT make my blog look cool and wonderful and successful. And that's problematic for me, for as although I know it is generally better to live by your own standards of success etc, my standards of success pretty much equal other people realising/thinking I am successful.

Like swing dancing for instance. I'm aware I'm not the best dancer. But I have been putting in much effort into making my dancing LOOK better. Even if my technique is questionable, if I can add little twiddly bits with my hands and feet to look cooler than I am, it's all good.

This is also v much like how I dress: I put a LOT of effort into dressing to make myself look thinner than I actually am. I would like to be actually thinner, but as this is quite difficult to acheive, I can at least try to fool the world into thinking I am of a more beautiful slender shape.

The point is- follow me, so that I look cooler to others, and as a result they follow me, and then i look cooler to others, and they follow me, and then they tell their friends, and they follow me, and i look cooler to everyone, and everyone follows me. That's the way it should be.

So I suppose I should give you a reason to follow me then. Something to demonstrate that it'd be worth your while?
Um....

Looky a fun website!

Seen this already. Seen the whole internet already? Nothing left to do in your pointless empty meaningless life? Trying to distract yourself from self harm/suicide/watching bargain hunt/other extremely harmful activities that can occur due to boredom? This is the pointless waste of time for you!

Loads of love to all. Tomorrow I shall do Dance Move of the Week!! xx

Birthday!

Today I had three different types of cake for breakfast. BECAUSE IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!!!! So there.

This week it has been my birthday. Yes. Well not quite a week:
Thursday- pretend birthday with mum, dad and youngest sister- see the cake in the previous post.
Friday- Lindy Hop Heaven where I got a birthday jam- Hurrah!
Saturday- little party at my house as (selectedly) pictured here (frog cake+thalidomide balloon, and various people). We made the frog cake red on the inside because real frogs are red on the inside, and no-one I invited was horrified. Or at least, no-one was too horrified to eat the cake.











Sunday...continuation of birthday cake and some swing,
Monday- today- my actual birthday.

Hurray. That's lots of birthday. Today is likely to be a lot less exciting but that's ok as lots of excitement has already happened. Karma gave me a couple of presents today in the form of some good books (Tom Holt's "The Better Mousetrap", and The Mighty Book of Boosh) being as new from the Oxfam bookshop. I also cashed some birthday cheques. Huzzah!!

Oxfam shops are brilliant. They mean I can go shopping and buy cheap things for me, and still feel like I'm being selfless and helping the world. Everyone wins. Hurrah! I highly recommend the world of the charity shop. Except for Mind in Headingley which smells like a 25 stone jogger has done a marathon, pooed himself, and then died under the table, 6 weeks ago.

Today I also opened my Gran's presents, which consisted of a book for 4 year olds about a witch called "No Room on the Broom", and a bird box. Going a bit do-lally? I shall continue to monitor this carefully. I don't know what to do with either item.

Other things.

I am extremely happy to see another series of That Mitchell and Webb Look. I love them both. but mostly David Mitchell. I enjoy ranty intelligent wit. We would host brilliant dinner parties. But would not feature on Come Dine With Me, because that show is *tripe*. I also don't mind his haircut, despite it's potential facism.

I am currently not at fencing because IT IS HOT and fencing is also hot, therefore to be fencing whilst it's hot is very unpleasant due to having to wear all protective clothing so as not to be skewered/horribly bruised. It's no Kendo, but it's also not curling. Curling would be more fun in this weather.
This means that I will finish my fencing lessons having no idea what is going on at all... hopefully Christina will teach me how to fence when it's not so hot.

Environmental Supplement:

I would like to encourage people to have a lil look at this site:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/breathingplaces/
If you have free time here are some little practical things you can do to encourage biodiversity. Things like leaving a corner of wild garden are particularly helpful if you have wild flowers with accessible pollen for bees (i.e. things that do not have tight flowers they can't get into). I would love a hedgehog home but I don't think really that Burley is a great place for them.

Light releif bit:

If you haven't seen this before, by Dan and Dan, it is exellent in many ways. Love.

xxx

Fish Update, and Pretend Birthday

Hello Y'all

Fish Update: The other fish died this morning. The tank is now empty, my father has dealt with all the dead fish water. I don't think they are going to get any more fish until my little sister next inadvisably brings one home from a fair. Everyone has reached my conclusion that fish are fairly ignored until they die. Ick.

Very excitingly today was my Official birthday- you know like the queen has two birthdays? Well I today was my birthday with my mum, dad, and sister-who-lives-at-home, Amelia. Mum, Dad and I went to Canterbury to look at pretty things, and I bought nice things. Also got nice presents. But nothing could be more exciting than this! I told Amelia that I wanted a dragon birthday cake. I was expecting a birthday cake with DRAGON written on in writing icing tbh because I didn't think anyone would have time/effort to do anything amaaazing.

BUT I GOT THIS!




ISN'T IT THE MOST AMAZING THING IN THE WORLD EVER!? This is where I get my mad cake making skillz. My mum even managed to find 24 candles!



Well done Mummy. No-one has wanted to cut up dragon yet, but will have to carve him to go back to Leeds tomorrow. Sad times for dragon. In case you were wondering, he is guarding a hoard of fudge. Mum and I had an argument which went something like this:

Me: Oh look! he could be guarding his treasure of fudge pieces!
Mum: He should have gold coins or something
Me: No, he should have fudge.
Mum: Dragons don't like fudge.
Me: I've never met a dragon that doesn't love fudge.

Thus I won.

Love!

Musings upon fish, the burka and dance move of the week!!

Greetings loved ones, let's take a journey...
(this isn't really implying, as it may seem, that my note will be a transformational masterpeice that will reshape your world, but more homage to Mr Snoop Dogg, whom I greatly like. So let's drop it like it's relatively temperate:)

Fish: one of our fish at home-home-family-home has been looking a lil ill for a while apparently. This morning it was dead, and my dad buried it in the garden somewhere.

I have come to the conclusion in the last few years that fish are extremely pointless as pets, as all they seem to do is swim around, ignored and forgotten, using electricity and water, until they die. Although I do enjoy comic naming of fish- RIP Ron. Also as they die and then soak in the fishtank until you find them, which if you're a busy person at work etc could be 24 hours feasably, until you next feed them. By this point they have been slowly creating dead fish consomme in your lounge. Surely a dead fish is subject to osmosis, as the concentration of dead fish moves from more dead fish to less dead fish through various increasingly permeable membranes.

If you have other fish you then have to deal with the dead fish consomme, change the water, inevitably dripping it all in the carpet and getting it all over yourself, and/or disinfect in some manner etc, because they have essentially been swimming around with and breathing through the soup of their dead friend, probably also knocking into its floating corpse.

So anyway. Fish as pets- pointless. They are ignored. Then they die. Go some way to becoming stock, depending on how long it is before you notice. Then you have to deal with corpse- hopefully not via toilets because they cause sewage problems. Then you have to sort out the fish corpse juice. All kinds of horrors.

However- I *love* the pretty little fish at the side of my blog!! <--- Look! They follow your mouse if you hover over it! How cute!! They are all called Eric.

The Veil: Today French leaders voted to ban veils which obscure the face. This is a bit surprising for me, as I thought the xenophobic/multi-cultural leftie sides were at least slightly more even. Personally I like that people want to preserve their heritage by observing their cultural traditions. I understand why some people dislike this as they feel that their heritage is threatened by having people observing other cultures out of their original geographical location, but I'm of the opinion that multiculturalism makes life more colourful, people more tolerant, and food more interesting!!

Regarding the veil, I don't think that security concerns are really the reason that the French have taken this stand. This is the country that also has a society to prevent it's language evolving or using external influences too. Perhaps it is the deciding factor for the more tolerant leftie Francais, but in many cases I think it's often zenophobia and the fear of Islam which lurks quietly under the surface of modern Western societies.
In the French lower house of parliament, only one person out of 336 did NOT vote to ban the veil in public in France. This is very surprising to me. I hope this will not come to pass in Britain in the near future, as I hope we are a more tolerant nation who acknowledges it's origins: I.e. about 6 or 7 primary immigrating national groups...

I also hope that others also think, like me, that we shouldn't punish whole cultural groups by disallowing their cultural tradition, because a small number of people who share that religion (not even that nationality, or that type of clothing, etc) have inspired fear of terrorism.

I know I'm wrong about this, but hopefully by continuing with these ideas I can encourage other people to think of it in a more tolerant manner...? Fingers crossed!

Evolutionary processes: Oh My God. This, as well as the link on my previous post- evolution related. Surely drinking is an evolutionary process? Even if you don't decide to try to ride a crocodile- you may trip over in the road, or fall into the river? This is surprisingly common in Leeds particularly as people think they can swim in the Aire or fall in when a little bit wobbly.
I would expect that if you're reading this I know you, as I'm not yet a billionnaire internationally famous blogger/comedienne- therefore I probably like you. Therefore please drink moderately and don't try to sit on any dangerous carnivores, so your wonderousness can remain in the gene pool? That'd be lovely.

MISC- Here is a scene I found funny at the aquarian. Poor dear owls desparately outnumbered. You can see the terror in their eyes...

With BP's latest attempt to stop the flow of oil into the ocean, we are all hoping this may be the end. Wouldn't it be easier if we didn't drill for oil? This is an over-simplistic way of looking at the problem, but it's a simple and hopeful message. Put international pressure on Obama to move towards cleaner more sustainable fuels here.



Here is another treat for you. Yes. It's a dancemove to play with at home, from the guest-location of my family's dining room. Complete with sister's friend's stick insects. They didn't feel like participating.





LOVE AND HUGS!!!

Minor points

A few little things to tell the world-

1) I *love* xkcd

2) I am currently writing a song about what will happen when Christ returns. Watch this space. Especially if you enjoy shit.

3) Today I have eaten five packets of crisps. Is that too much?

Look! A BLOG!! WOW!! HELENA'S BLOG? I *must* look at that!

Yes. Hello dear ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere. Helena here. Known for some short while at least, often as Wise Helayna. Hence I now have a useful username I can think of which alleiviates the problems of nameing oneself.

In case you wondered, the reason I first aquired this name, was that I suggested that rather than hiccups going away because you forgot them, you forgot them because they had gone away. Therefore, I was labelled, wise.

So in this blog I shall attempt, for your delictation and delight, to ponder upon life's great questions; (for example, why it is is that male housemates are incapable of changing the empty toilet roll!) to provide you with wonderful and amusing anecdotes; (e.g. the continual distress that is caused to me by the time I trod on a dead squirrel over two years ago :( ,) and to give you useful tips for life, the universe and everything (e.g. wonderful dance moves I have made up based on the actions of, for example, household appliances).
I will also doubtless be discussing various leftie things too, as part of my mission in life to make other people love the world.

So as this is the first blog I should probably do one of these things in order to set the tone.

Actually no- Party ahoy! Should have left already and everything. Randings and tips for life shall occur soon, but I shall begin to fulfil these promises today- because here is an enjoyable and educational song!!

Enjoy.

Love!