Saturday May 30 2009 Raiding the Archives [ ] [ mood | tired ] [ music | Eight Days a Week - The Beatles ] After the realization (which occurred about twelve seconds ago) that I may be very close to forgetting how to write, I have formulated a plan. I don't mean I'm forgetting how to write persuasive, witty commentary -- you can't lose something you never had. What I mean is, I'm actually forgetting how to write in the quite literal sense; sentence formulation being at the base of it. I could blame the system. I could blame the government. I could blame this world (for making a good man evil). But I won't do that. I think mostly I'll blame my university degree. What with communicating entirely in either predicate calculus or clingfilm wrapped around a banana and painted orange with a shoehorn stuck in it to represent life itself, there hasn't been much room for the English language. So my plan is this: no one has to read this entry. I'm quite confident everyone will abide by those guidelines anyway. But what I am going to do (see? There I go, beginning a sentence with a conjunction. Damned amateur!) is raid the writer's block archives and provide a one-paragraph answer to as many as I can before I fall asleep at the wheel. Hopefully I'll slowly be able to maneuver my way back through the canyons and crags of the written word or, failing that, at least get in some good rocking spelling practise. First prompt: Robert Frost speculated about the world ending in fire or in ice. Which do you think is likely to end us all: meteorite, global warming, nuclear weapons, zombies, or the superflu? Thought I'd pick a nice cheery one to start things off. But then I didn't. My opinion has always been; none of the above. I'm no expert on the matter of the apocalypse, but it seems to me that with stars exploding all over the place and planets being destroyed, what gives Earth the right to think that it's exempt from the unbridled forces of the universe just because it sustains a bit of life on it? I am by no means qualified to have an opinion, but I think the universe is perfectly capable of destroying itself, thank you very much. Our friends don't always know us as well as they think, particularly when it comes to likes and dislikes. Which popular book, movie, band, food, TV show, etc. would your friends be surprised to hear that you don't like? My friends know very well which foods I don't like, but never cease to appear surprised. One of the great assaults on the taste-buds, in my opinion, is tomato sauce -- which obviously poses a problem, being that I've lived my entire life in New Zealand and never touched more than a rosebud of the stuff. I also don't like pasta or any other sort of food with a spaghettiesque structure. I don't like sushi, rice or baked beans. I don't like quiche or, indeed, anything which comprises itself almost wholly of a fluffy egg texture. I should stop now, before I get uninvited from all your dinner parties. To actually answer the question, though, I think my friends - those who I haven't already told - would be surprised to hear that I didn't like reading The DaVinci Code, nor do I (and this is where I really seal my fate), apart from a handful of songs, very much like Led Zeppelin as a whole. And (there I go again with the conjunctions) I really can't stand the Red Hot Chili Peppers. If you could live in any era of history, which one would you choose? I think I would have chosen, whilst being no historian, from the late 1950s-early 1960s onwards. I wouldn't want to go too far back, because then you've got hangings and witch-burning's to deal with knowing my luck. The middle of the 20th century seemed to have the most kick before mankind sort of tapered off into a dormant state for the turn of the milennium. People tried to get things done. I'm not saying they succeeded (clearly), but the spark of certainty that one was actually alive and functioning at a conscious level seemed not yet to have been entirely extinguished. Do you ever do anything now which you swore you would never do when you were younger? What is it? When I was nine, like every nine-year-old, I swore I would never like boys. I'm beginning, now, to move away from that way of thinking. It's Limerick Day! Share a favorite or compose your own humorous five-line poem with an AABBA structure. There once was a student from Auckland Who had to write a limerick in shorthand But couldn't think up Any aural link-up Or anything that rhymed with 'lemons'

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