Pandas Rampaging in Restaurants

Last night I finished reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss. It's a book that's now a best-seller by a woman who is a stickler for puntuation. She even went so far as to go around with a marker adding the apostrophe to the posters from the movie Two Weeks Notice (it's supposed to be Two Weeks' Notice; in this case it's indicating time). [Look at my use of the semi-colon! I'm not too sure if it's right, but it's supposed to be the bridge between two sentences that are directly related. Well, if Lynne Truss is reading this- that would be so cool- I'll happily edit anything that she finds wrong with it.]

I just wanted to put here some examples, from the book, of misplaced/missing punctuation.

Dicks in tray (I'm guessing it's supposed to be Dick's in-tray)
Glady's (on the badge of a salesgirl, who is probably named Gladys)
XMA'S TREES
apple,s, orange,s and grape,s (I guess they don't know about the apostrophe)
Your 21 today! (on a birthday card)


Look at the difference puntuation makes in these sentences:

A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: with her, man is nothing.

The convict said the judge is mad.
The convict, said the judge, is mad.

And if you're wondering what this has to do with pandas rampaging, read the book! It does go into the history of punctuation, which I strangely found interesting after a while, but I know it's not for everyone. The book is funny; it was even classfied as Reference/Humour. It's barcode number is 9781861976123 and it's ISBN is 1-86197-612-7. As you can see, I've run out if stuff to say about the book. Just go out and read it!

Unicon

I barely ever get up before 11, so it surprised even me that I managed to post something in my brain-mush stage. But there was a reason. Unicon 2004 ws held last weekend. Unicon is a role-playing and wargamming convention organised by the role-playing/wargamming clubs at RMIT, Melbourne Uni, and I think Monash as well.

I was there that early because I volunteered to sit in the canteen and sell stuff. (Nobody had food-handling certificate, so there was no hot food. I just sold drinks and chocolate and stuff). Also in the canteen were the Kaleidoscope people. Kaleidoscope is this puzzle game where you have different pieces (that look like those pieces from Tetris) and they're coloured. Red and black on one side, and blue, yellow and black on the other. You have to arrange the pieces so that not only do they fit into a sqaure box thing, but so that the coloured squares make a certain picture. I managed to do the checkerboard pretty easily, but the baby elephant took me over an hour! There's a $10 prize for anyone that can do it in under 10 minutes and a lot of people have won it. There's also a chance to win prize of $1000 worth of flowers for anyone that can make this flower thingy.

Oops, this was supposed to be about Unicon. Though I have no clue what went on really, since I was sitting in the canteen the whole time. Oh, but David Hopkins had these board games and we played one called "Deadwood" where you're a bad actor and the point of the game is to get little bit-part roles and earn money. It was really funny.

It was surprising how many people there spoke Japanese. I was one of the few Asian people there (not counting the people from the anime club who were providing anime, but I don't know that any of them were Asian either, since I didn't see them). So many of the people there had already been to Japan... I'm so jealous!

Oh, and I sad that Scott is in hospital. He seems to be alright with it so far, no complaints about bad food, but still... being in hospital isn't that much fun. He's in there because his eczema has flared up. Poor Scott. :'(

Drunkpath

No, that's not 'Drunk Path', it's supposed to be like empath, but for drunken people. Which is what I think I am. A drunken empath. That is, I act drunk around drunken people, even though I'm not. Drunk that is. (Man, the word 'drunk' is there a lot!)

[Note the time stamp on this- it's too early in the morning to form cohesive sentences!]

I'm not too sure when the thought occurred to me, but I've been thinking about it for a while now. I don't drink, even when invited to drinking parties (so sorry, Tash, and Chris!) so I don't know what I'd be like if I really were drunk, but I've just noticed that I generally talk more and say things I normally wouldn't, while around people that are drinking. And since most of the people that read my blog are doing med/dent, I figured maybe they'd know why.

Although it's possible that I'm a hypochondriac (though drunkpath-itis isn't actually a disease....yet!) because in year 10 I diagnosed myself with every possible mental disorder that I could find. And then decided that wasn't enough, so I started looking for exotic diseases that I could have. It was a pity that I didn't show symptoms of any of the deadly ones, or I could have been a walking anthrax-bomb-ish thing! Going back to 18th century terrorism techiniques.

Reunion

Jean pretty much summed up the reunion in her blog, and I'm too lazy to type up the same stuff, so just head over to there to read it: http://thoughtsfromacookiejar.blogspot.com/2004/09/telemarketers-beware.html (Telemarketers... no clue...)

Isn't she a brilliant writer?

I haven't posted in a while, since I've been spending time playing around with me new camera! Well, not so new since I've had it since Manifest, which was 14-15 of August.

I've got about 6 hours of footage, but 1 hour of it is just my relatives playing Mah Jongg, so none of it is very interesting. Though I managed to get Sharon singing. The camera was sitting right in front of her, and the red light started flashing when the tape was running out. I still can't believe she didn't see it!

There's also some footage from the reunion, but it's kinda disjointed, and I'm not too sure what to do with it. Though I did tell Jean that I would show it to William first, so I'll have to do something with it soon because Steve is asking for it.

I should be studying for the Japanese listening test tomorrow, but I'm so unmotivated at the moment, all I want to do is watch Azumanga Daioh. (for those of you who haven't heard of it, it's an anime) Osaka is so cool. It's so sad that there aren't anymore episodes. :'( OK, I'd better look at the word list at least, otherwise I'll start watching Alias and not do anything at all!

けいぐ, みんなさん!　ひらがなをよめますか？
敬具、みんなさん！　ひらがなを読めますか？

Hey, the Japanese does come up, though you might need to have it installed on your computer before you can read it. If you don't, it says, "Keigu, minnasan! Hiragana o yomemasuka?" which means, " (Keigu is some closing phrase for letters, I don't even know what it means. Dougal sensee probably told us, but I forgot), everybody! Can you read hiragana?" I put the kanji there so that anyone who knows Chinese can get the gist of the sentence, and could one of you tell me what keigu means? It's the first two characters. As you can see, I'm going to fail Japanese!!!

日本語は難しいですが、大好きです。
Nihongo wa muzukashii desuga, daisuki desu.
Japanese is difficult, but I love it.