In which I become economical with my effort (translation: lazy) and post a whole bunch of posts in one post

So what I've noticed recently that I've been posting less and less. It's got nothing (ok, maybe a little) to do with the lack of exciting things that are going on in my life and a lot with my lack of willingness to expend effort in typing up short posts right after whatever exciting things that happened. I have no problem typing them in one huge post. So here goes the collection of possibly short posts.
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I am accused of being Un-Australian by my own sister
Gee, controversy on my blog! Gee, the drama! The Alarmist called me un-Australian because I typed "mom" instead of "mum".

I am an Australian last time I checked. I've got a piece of paper with my old name on it which says that I'm an Australian citizen. However, before I am an Australian, I am an Asian. I'm an Asian-Australian. What does that mean you might ask, well that means Pauline Hanson hates my ass and I have a quality that possibly all Asians are born with: being stingy economical.

This post is a testament to the innate thriftiness, I'm being thrifty economical with my effort. Too bad I can't be economical with my spendings. I was being economical with my effort with the "mom" thing as well. If you can touch type you'll probably know that you use your right index finger to press both the keys for the letters M and U. Now look down at your keyboard and note the position of those keys. They're on different rows. To type "mum" your index finger has to travel from "m" all the way to "u" and then back to "m" again. That's a lot of distance to travel. In the case of typing "mom" your index finger doesn't even have to move from the "m" key as the "o" is pressed by the ring finger. So it's faster to type "mom" than to type "mum".

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Drinkin 2 litres of water a day can prevent lots of condition
So I've just started working casually recently and one of many gems I've picked up lately is drinking water is good for you. Apparently it does wonders to your skin, prevent constipation (as long as you eat lots of fibre together with drinking lots of water) haemorrhoids (what is it you may ask, trust me, it's something you rather not have. Ever.) and urinary tract infection.
See the wonders of water? 2 litres per day, no less.

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WTF moment of the week: Love Seat Toilet
On a related note to the above advice on water consumption, let's talk about toilets. My sister found this thing randomly and my thought was "what the hell?"

Why anyone on this rapidly-becoming-less-green earth would want to kiss while doing number 1 or number 2 for that matter escapes me. Maybe they likes the smell? Some people have messed-up fetishes, remember the 2 girl one cup thing? I rest my case.

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WBC nuts planned to picket the funeral of Heath Ledger
According to the following flyer, these nuts are serious about this.

I hope some Ledger's fans kick their ass, literally. What the heck is picketing at someone's funeral gonna achieve? I hope someone with enough time to spare comes up with a group that picket at every picketing events these WBC nuts' are gonna do. Show them how it feels to have an annoying group of loud mouths constantly irritating them.

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Recommended movies
Last week I saw 3 movies in cinema on 3 consecutive days, the most I've seen in one week. Some recommendations:

Juno
Awesomely cute movie. It's got nominated for a bunch of Oscars too so you won't feel guilty for seeing a sort-of teen flick. After that go buy the equally awesomely cute soundtrack.

American gangsters
I thought this was good. I usually don't like movies based on real events but this one is quite enjoyable.

No country for old men
I was excited to see this movie as I read book. Speed read actually which was why the ending didn't make much sense and I was being economical with my effort yet again and didn't go back to re-read to make sense. The movie didn't clarify much for me. It's a good thriller. Read the book first though.

Some other movies I saw on DVD last week that's worth mentioning:

Thank you for smoking
Very funny movie by the director of Juno. Watch it and gain a new appreciation for spin doctors.

Superbad
First time I saw the trailer I thought that the movie was dumb and the title for the movie actually described the content. I waited until last week to check out the movie. I still think that it's a dumb movie, so do the American Pie movies, being a dumb movie doesn't mean that it can't be funny. Watch it if you absolutely don't have anything else to watch or if you feel that Michael Cera didn't get a big enough role in Juno.

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Quotes
What's more funny than out-of-the-context quotes hey?

"He was so gay, I couldn't look at him straight".
- My friend, Umbrella, on a possibly gay teacher in our high school.

"So that's what you get from having sex with your pets."
- The Alarmist, after finding out that you can get Tinea from your pets and there's a disease called Tinea of the groin.

Thought of the day

Solar powered lamps (only works when the sun is up).

I laugh so much after thinking that. I'm constantly surprising myself today, first the patience thing with the coin stacks and now my ability to entertain myself with silly thoughts.

I exercised my patience

I have a jar half full empty of five-cent coins. I think I have about 100 and something coins the last time I was stressed enough to start counting five-cent coins for relaxation. My aim was to make the jar less empty and then once in a while take the coins out to count. That was the aim until I read this blog post from Deep thoughts.

He stacked pennies as to reduce stress. Wow, why didn't I think of that before huh? I stacked all of my coins into one single column once. One very crooked column that could barely stand. Anyway, I was inspired by the aforementioned blog post so I did some of my own stacking as well and you're lucky I still have enough patience after all that coin-stacking after a whole day of drug-stacking to go find a camera, and some full batteries, and the camera cord to transfer the pictures and then upload them on the net and then writing this. Gee, I do have a lot of patience.


First attempt, a complete rip-off of Deep thoughts' stack.


Second attempt, a partial rip-off that almost got abandoned after I ran out of coins and the whole structure collapsing twice when I only have one more coin to put on. Damn, am I patient or am I patient?

I have got to see Juno

I recently saw Hard Candy and all I had to say about that movie is: "Holy cow on a holy tree! This is freaking good". So I planned to illegally download Juno once that comes out on DVD. I was gonna stick to that plan because believe it or not, I made a list of resolutions for this year and at number 10 or so is "Stick to your plans". I daresay I'm a very good planner, I just have trouble sticking to my awesome plans.

Anyhow, I was gonna stick to my plan until I heard the soundtrack for the movie. It's so very cute if you're into cute happy indie music from rather obscure bands/artists. Seriously check the soundtrack album out. I don't know where you can find it but it's definitely is not on this site. Now I plan to see this on Thursday, this time resolution number 10 or so will be uphold.

More hilariousness from my family

My grandmother has what experts (I mean me) would call "martyr complex". She thinks that no one, and may I stress no one, has suffered as she has. My aunt, who we don't really talk to now due to a "disastrous" wedding reception last year, has a more severe case of this complex but that's another story. Remember the last time I talked about my grand mother? We were in a sort of cold war then with one side: my grandmother and her cheating theory and the other side: the rest of the family members living in this house who were very well-adjusted to living with an individual who suffers from "martyr complex".

Let me tell you how to handle someone with a "martyr complex", you ignore what triggered their martyr complex outburst and hope that they'll get over themselves soon. It might sound callous but that's the only thing that works with my grandmother (not with my auntie though, that'll be like throwing gasoline into a bushfire). Consoling her just makes her cry more and longer, showing her real cases of people who actually suffered more than she had only makes her angry (something about us belittling her suffering). Ignoring it all together is only a quickfix but it works.

So we were in the middle of our very own cold war under our (and the bank's) very own roof and we were using the tried and true approach to dealing with grandma by ignoring that she's angry with us and carry on as usual. And she was retaliating by refusing to eat properly and holding about 100 sleeping pills hostage against us. So we had a cold war and a hostage situation. After a week of the standoff, my grandmother declared that the war was over. No, she didn't just forgot, she stopped the "war" because she was scared that we would put her in a nursing home. It wasn't actually a threat per se. My Mom just had enough of being worried about grandma and told her that if she didn't let us take care of her we would have to put her in a nursing home for complete strangers to take care of her. It worked like a Zyrtec(c).

So the war ended but that doesn't mean my grandma would stop talking, mainly to me, about my dad sneaking out of the house to visits his mistresses. Her new obsession now is telling other people to eat. One day she woke the Alarmist up at 7 am (extremely early for the Alarmist who is still on holiday from uni) to tell her that she should go eat breakfast immediately and then she can carry on sleeping. The Alarmist, obviously, wasn't impressed.

Another of my grandmother's new thing is calling me by the Alarmist's name, calling the Alarmist by my other sister's name and referring to my dad behind his back as what can be translated to English as "old bastard" or "old man". Vietnamese is strange that way, one word can mean bastard, man and boy at the same time and you can differentiate what the speaker meant by the tone of their voice. The way my grandma said it, she meant "old bastard".

All the name swapping that's going on in my grandma's head makes for a hilarious situation. One day my other sister called home to speak to the Alarmist. My Grandma picked up the phone and said that the Alarmist is not home. The funny thing was, the Alarmist was right there next to grandma, with her headphones on utterly oblivious to the fact that grandma was answering the phone. Grandma was quite right because as far as she was concerned the alarmist's name referred to me and I was out. Funny hey?

One good thing that comes out of this whole grandma situation is that my parents have already sworn off living with any of us kids when they're old. They said that they wouldn't want to live with us even if we invite them to. Oh, and we didn't invite my grandma to live with us, she demanded that she live with us. Old asian people, you can't understand them.

on the absence of atheistic rants

My blog is listed in an atheist blog ring. I daresay most of the traffic to my blog is generated from that blog ring. I feel bad for the people clicking on the link to my blog hoping to read opinionated atheistic thoughts on the bible, religion and god. I haven't done much of that last year. So here are the 2 main reasons why:

1. I'm not very good with putting my opinion down in words. I can do a passable job after 5-6 edits but I'm rather lazy and never do 5-6 edits per post before posting. I attempted several posts during the year but always ended up deleting everything because they sounded so stupid.

2. I had a period of self-doubt. No, it's not that God appeared to me and proved his existence or anything. I just felt that if I vehemently deny the existence of a god, it would be just the same as any fundie vehemently maintains that god does exist. I would be just as fanatical as any fundie even though I have somewhat tangible reasons to deny god's existence.
I also doubted whether I hate the organised religion part or the god part. I think I hate the former. God isn't evil, god isn't good either, nobody knows what god is. People who claim to know what god is are the people who write the bible and other religious texts which claim to be the words of god. No doubt people do crazy things because they are motivated by what these texts say, that doesn't make god evil. It only demonstrates the huge capacity to influence people by what human centuries ago put in god's mouth. Conversely, people doing good things while motivated by their religion doesn't make god good.
I didn't see the point in ridiculing what is documented in the bible anymore (which was what I did for a time). What good does it make if I do so? Everybody knows it's a human's text. Nobody can verify if it's comes from the god's own mouth. Besides, other atheist bloggers have been doing it way before me and with much more articulated thought.
I didn't see the point in posting crazy sermons and other crazy shits the crazy fundies are up to. What can that do? If you're a fundie already, my adding my own sarcastic comments beneath the embedded video wouldn't change your way of thinking. If you're doubting religions already you would just have a chuckle to yourself.
So I guess what I've been trying to say is that I've mellowed out, became more cynical and realised that I'm somewhere in between being an agnostic and an atheist during the last year which contributes to not posting much about atheism.

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Side note: If the post doesn't make sense, I've just demonstrated reason number 1. I didn't do any edits on this.