Friday, 22 February 2008

B-line Blog

This blog is a blog with purpose.
In this sense it is like a man with a ticket, in every other sense it is totally dissimilar.

This is a blog about balderdash, the actual game not general piffle.

This weekend I made the long journey back to Brighton to see my family as it is the weekend of both my father's and brother's birthdays. I bought my father some sheepskin slippers, not at all unlike the slippers I bestowed upon Benjamin R. Waterhouse by way of celebration. For my brother I got weight lifting gloves because he seems bent on getting buff.

Anyhow, I digress. After dinner is coffee and board games in the Byrne household and the game of choice was "Balderdash". I love this game as it is a glorious opportunity for both lying and creative writing. Not only this, it is hugely informative, who knew a grunk was somebody who is grumpy and disgruntled!? Certainly I didn't until tonight. My fake definition for "grunk" was "a tool used in taxidermy", my fathers was "another name for earwax"! "Ugh, did you see his grunk!?". Similarly, I did not know a "prunella" was a fabric used in religious clothing, I put forward that it was a special cake tin and my brother tried to get us to think it was one of the moons of jupiter through tricks.
Other words included sacromancy (fortune telling using ripe figs), buldering (I can't remember the actual defenition, but mine was "to hunch and cower from the cold") and tchick, which is the noise you make when you click your tongue using the vacuum between it and the roof of your mouth!

Anyhow, to round up, Jane lost. Mother had superior lie detecting, as she always does, and father has special tricks: 1. Pretend to be writing more than he is, 2. pretend his is funny, 3. comment on the genre of the word i.e. "this word sounds italian". I fell for all of these and so lost.

Now for my valediction: *tips hat*
Bye bye now, bye bye

Wednesday, 20 February 2008

A maunder in Jane's brain box

Evening!

(Is how I would greet you right now, but in actual fact this may be read at any time of day).

I am going to start my blog writing career by writing about my favorite things and places so that maybe an opinion of my character may be formed.

Of course, like any self respecting youth, I love music. Probably a little bit more than my cat and a little bit less than my sister. I am not very genre specific though, that is to say, I havn't become hooked on Evenescence and as a result use shipments of eyeliner on a daily basis. In fact, I like an eclectic variety, some popular, some discredited and some because I feel obliged. I will give you a taster of what I like by giving you my top...say...five: 1. Emiliana Torrini 2. Morrissey 3. Joanna Newsome 4. Acoustic Ladyland, and 5, IAMX. That is in no particular order, I like them all similarly, just at different times.

Now onto another thing which I like, more, probably, than music (but again, less than my sister), books. I like books that have been read before, moth eaten and preferably hardbacked but that have lost the crappy paper cover and maybe has gathered a few coffee stains on the inside front page. Even better than this is a book which has got a note in the front from a friend telling you why they thought you would like it and which bits they think you will enjoy most. Many such books have been distributed, not many received. I am genre specific about books, I like cult fiction, classic novels and epic poems. Very willing to read other types but it will not take a lot for me to become disengaged from it and loose interest in the plight of the characters.

The third thing I like the most is exercise, the kind where you don't have to think about a lot because you are trying to hard to not fall off the machine.

I also become attached to letters. Ones which have clippings and extracts from books in. I get weekly ones from my father containing unsettling animal pictures and tips on exercise along with bits of poems he has read and thinks I would like. He is an interesting man, keeps his loose change in a sock.

So, places I like. The place I love the most I have only been to once, It is the tairn at the top of the Old Man of Conisten. The water was completely clear and there was a sea of tiny white flowers carpeting the bottom, I had nor have since, seen anything quite so lovely. Other than that, I like most of the famous mountains in Britain, Pennygent has a panoramic veiw of the lake district, the Cairngorms have looming ruggedness and the Beacons have soft and dewy peaks. I like them all.

Art also is one of my favorite things. But I have been forced to become an appreciator rather than a practicer. This is due to my incapacity to produce anything that doesn't make critics sick down their fronts. I don't like any specific kind, but do dislike paintings of fruit, why paint fruit? Unless of course, you are passionate about fruit, maybe Degas had an unnatural relationship with his fruit basket, we can only speculate.

Anyhow, I think that this is where I shall end my wander through my thoughts.
Probably will write again when something interesting happens to me, not much interesting happens to me, so....until my wedding, bye! x