Life Tips Daily

Most cities are alive with festivals, especially in the summer. If you usually ignore mention of the latest festival that is happening in your town, city or a neighbouring area, you may want to make time to attend a festival or two. Here are some great reasons to check out a local festival:

You may discover someone or something new
If it is a music festival, you are sometimes offered fantastic deals if you buy tickets for the duration of the entire festival, instead of buying individual tickets for the shows you want to see. Take advantage of your all access pass to check out talent that you ordinarily wouldn’t see–you may find something you like!

If the festival involves other cultures, you may be introduced a new form of dance, or a new food, for example. Why not try it? You may discover something that you make a part of your everyday life.

Cure boredom
Despite waiting all winter for summer to arrive, it can sometimes be a bit of a letdown, especially if one doesn’t have many plans for the summer months. Checking out a festival might be just what is needed to cure the case of boredom troubling you.

Meet new people
If you attend a festival that is centered around a specific thing, you’re bound to meet people–in your own city!–who share this interest. Embrace the chance to make new friends.

Contribute to the economy
After gorging on popcorn and cotton candy, and fresh squeezed lemonade that costs a fortune, you may return home and curse all the money you spent. Instead of thinking of that, think of all the others who may have come from out of town to spend their money, and think of how much you are helping out the economy!

festivals, attend festivals, reasons to attend festivals, attend a festival

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We all have pet words that we can’t spell correctly for the life of us. Please find below words that I seen spelled incorrectly by friends and words that I regularly misspell. I challenge you to select the correct spelling of each of the words below (no cheating!). Please leave your answers in the comments:

definitely or definately
calender or calendar
seperate or separate
fuchsia or fuschia
maintainance or maintenance
receive or recieve
jewlery or jewellery or jewelry
restraunt or restaurant
committee or comittee or commitee
diffrent or different

If you find my list pretty wimpy, here is a fantastic list of 100 commonly mispelled misspelled words. Enjoy!

Which words are the bane of your existence?

Answers below:
(more…)

Yesterday at work, we had enjoyed an Easter potluck, and the along with our gastronmic delights, we made some time for physical activity too. No walking for us: we had an Wii competition.

For the uninitiated: the Wii is Nintendo’s latest game console, and boasts wireless controllers, which gives the user a wider range of motion than was prevously possible with its wired controllers. The game console comes with a sports pack of games, which includes bowling, boxing, golf, baseball and tennis, and it is this latter game that my colleagues and I enjoyed.

For someone like me, who would much rather surf the web than engage in anything that smacks of gaming, I was genuinely surprised at how much fun I had using this system. While previous sports games require the user to fumble through pressing series of buttons in order to swing a tennis racket, for example, all you have to do to do is swing your Wii (once you have strapped on your wrist strap, that is) and if you time it right your “racket” connects with the ball and over it goes to your opponent’s side of the court.

After a glorious defeat of my colleague, I was suprised to find that my cheeks were warm and I could feel the efforts of my exertion. It’s no surprise: this article (based on a BBC News report) claims that the use of consoles such as Wii is related to weight loss! In fact, very regular use (12.2 hours a week, the typical gamer’s average) could lead to a loss of approximately 1800 calories a week! I can see parents choosing this game console over others, much in the way they sneak vegetables into their child’s favourite dishes. And best of all, I can see parents and children alike clamouring to use the console!

In fact, for the first time in my life, I may have to consider gaming a new hobby!

Wii, video games, health, exercise

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I would like to present you all with a short bit of writing which compares the work of good and evil in a strange and somewhat funny way. I wrote it, and it’s not intended to express my opinion necessarily; simply to take a look at the subject in an accessible way.

~*~

It was a dark and stormy night. Beyond that, there wasn’t much remarkable about this setting. In fact, considering it was London, the dark and stormy wasn’t particularly remarkable either.

A casual observer might not even have noticed the short, drenched figure hobbling quietly in what was probably intended to be a straight line down the street. Periodically, the hunched figure broke off its wavering path and walked up to the doors of an apartment where it would produce a paintbrush from the folds of its coat and hastily inscribe a series of concentric circles on the door. Well, may as well be nice and clear about things; no use beating about the bush.

A casual observer was also likely to miss the small tail protruding from the underside of the the dilapidated coat which covered the figure from top to bottom. It would be difficult to say “head to foot” because, with the cloak on, there didn’t seem to be a discernible difference beyond the fact that one area seemed responsible for locomotion. The tail switshed back and forth lazily, occasionally pausing to hover still for a brief second before continuing to bob with the movement.

When it reached the end of the street, the figure pulled out a small device and tapped at it until it made a rewarding electronic ding noise. Seemingly satisfied, it turned briefly to examine the street it had come from, smirked and continued on its way, making sure to look both ways before crossing the street. After all, even demons could be killed in car accidents.

Back on the opposite side of the street, a tall, austere-looking gentleman in a startlingly white suit was making his way along the same path. Well, perhaps a little straighter. Miraculously, the rain seemed to avoid his elegant and well-pressed suit, leaving him quite dry.

Walking up the steps to the first house, the gentleman sighed and opened his briefcase, removing a damp sponge. He used this to meticulously scrub off the red circles, returning the door to its previous dirty brown. Observing his work, the man realized that, ironically, the door had looked better with the circles on. Shaking his head and putting the sponge away, he reminded himself that the owners of the houses would most likely prefer the ugly brown to the alternative if they knew.

In this way, the gentleman in the white successfully erased all of the markings and proceeded into the street where he was hit by a bus turning the corner. In a flash of light, he was gone, and the bus’ startled and worried occupants hardly noticed the small, hunched figure making its way back across the street and along its previous path.

Contrary to popular belief, Evil, it figured, would always triumph over Good because Good was stupid and had trouble keeping up with the times. The hollow sound of its chuckling was heard by no one else as it produced the paint brush and once again marked the doors of the houses on the street.

For those of you who are not yet aware of this entertaining little internet gem, I will have to introduce you to a very neat little site called leekspin, or “Loituma Girl”.

Go ahead and click HERE to open it so that it’s running while you read this. Got it? Cool. So what you’re listening to is a funny little song while watching an anime character spin a leek. Immediately, you will notice that this song is extremely catchy and that there’s a little timer at the bottom of the page to help you tell all your friends about just HOW addictive it is.

Since I know that some of my readers will be curious, I have done a little searching and discovered the origins of this cute little apparition. Apparently, it popped onto the internet in April of 2006 and almost immediately became among the most popular videos on the net, drawing over a million viewers.

The melody is a Finnish polka called the “Ievan Polkka”, written by Eino Kettunen in the early 1930s. Specifically, it’s the arranged a capella performance of it by the popular Finnish quartet known as “Loituma”. The section used in this animation is the second half of the fifth stanza and the sixth stanza. Obviously, this section features gibberish as the text, as opposed to the rest of the piece which is sung in Finnish. It’s actually a fairly nice story, for those of you who know Finnish, so you may want to also watch the video HERE where you can see the entire performance.

Also, just to prove that some people have far too much time on their hands, you can find a link to a Flash clock which features the song and the familiar leek theme HERE, where you can conceivably set it to full screen and use it as an extremely aggravating time telling device.

Anyways, enjoy and try not to stay up all night!

Hello again, here are some more humorous and occasionally philosophical quotations from the works of acclaimed fantasy/comedy author Terry Pratchett:

People came to Ankh-Morpork to seek their fortune. Unfortunately, other
people sought it too.

– (Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

– (Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)

The Patrician was a pragmatist. He never tried to fix things that worked.
Things that didn’t work, however, got broken.

– (Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)

“Yes,” said the skull. “Quit while you’re a head, that’s what I say.”

– (Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)

Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in
another forty-four.

– (Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times)

“Luck is my middle name,” said Rincewind, indistinctly. “Mind you, my first
name is Bad.”

– (Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times)

Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial
moment tended to ask themselves questions like “What is my purpose in
life?” very quickly lacked both.

– (Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times)

The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a young
woman. There was no possible way that she could have been mistaken for a
young man in any language, especially Braille.

– The goddess with the nice earrings
(Terry Pratchett, Maskerade)

He had a unique stride: it looked as though his body was being dragged
forward and his legs had to flail around underneath it, landing wherever
they could find room. It wasn’t so much a walk as a collapse, indefinitely
postponed.

– (Terry Pratchett, Maskerade)

Instead, people would take pains to tell her that beauty was only
skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys.

– (Terry Pratchett, Maskerade)

After you’d known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself
fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight
coming the other way.

– (Terry Pratchett, Maskerade)

I AM DEATH, NOT TAXES. I TURN UP ONLY ONCE.

– (Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay)

There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like
installing smoke detectors in Hell.

– (Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay)

“Just because someone’s a member of an ethnic minority doesn’t mean they’re
not a nasty small-minded little jerk […]”

– (Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay)

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made
you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

– (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)

“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”

– Bursar 1 - Hex 0
(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)

Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people
have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They
wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of
dictionaries look up the spelling of words.

– (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)

“Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s
warm for the rest of his life.”

– (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

PEOPLE’S WHOLE LIVES DO PASS IN FRONT OF THEIR EYES BEFORE THEY DIE. THE
PROCESS IS CALLED ‘LIVING’.

– (Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent)

Lancre operated on the feudal system, which was to say, everyone feuded all
the time and handed on the fight to their descendants.

– (Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum)

Sam Vimes could parallel process. Most husbands can. They learn to follow
their own line of thought while at the same time listening to what their
wives say. And the listening is important, because at any time they could
be challenged and must be ready to quote the last sentence in full. A vital
additional skill is being able to scan the dialogue for telltale phrases
such as “and they can deliver it tomorrow” or “so I’ve invited them for
dinner?” or “they can do it in blue, really quite cheaply.”

– (Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant)

As castles went, this one looked as though it could be taken by a small
squad of not very efficient soldiers. For defence, putting a blanket over
your head might be marginally safer.

– (Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant)

“Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again.
That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes.”

– (Terry Pratchett, Night Watch)

- “You’re Hells Angels, then? What chapter are you from?”

- REVELATIONS, CHAPTER SIX.

– Death in conversation with a biker
(Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)

Death was Nature’s way of telling you to slow down.

– (Terry Pratchett, Strata)

AIRPORTS: A place where people hurry up and wait.

– (Terry Pratchett, Wings)

SCIENCE: A way of finding things out and then making them work. Science
explains what is happening around us the whole time. So does RELIGION, but
science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when
it is wrong. There is a lot more Science than you think.

– (Terry Pratchett, Wings)

“You’re not allowed to call them dinosaurs anymore.” said Yo-less. “It’s
speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.”

– (Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Bomb)

“He’s a man of few words, and he doesn’t know what either of them mean,”
people said, but not when he was within hearing.

– (Terry Pratchett, The Carpet People)

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when
there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

– (Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to
understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language
devised for telling one another where the best fruit is.

– (Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett)

That’s all of them that I wanted to share, I hope I’ve inspired you to check out some of the books because they’re really fantastic reads when you’re looking for something light-hearted and entertaining.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with an author named Terry Pratchett, you’d do well to become acquainted with some of his work. He writes what can be called fantasy, parody, humour, satire, philosophy…it all depends what you take from it. He is the man responsible for the infamous Discworld series as well as a number of other works.

I mention him because I want to offer you a series of humorous and sometimes thought-provoking quotations from his Discworld book series.

Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant “idiot”.

– (Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic)

- “Pull me up, then,” he hinted.
- “I think that might be sort of difficult,” grunted Twoflower. “I don’t
actually think I can do it, in fact.”
- “What are you holding on to, then?”
- “You.”
- “I mean besides me.”
- “What do you mean, besides you?” said Twoflower.

– (Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic)

- “If you’re going to suggest I try dropping twenty feet down a pitch dark
tower in the hope of hitting a couple of greasy little steps which might
not even still be there, you can forget it,” said Rincewind sharply.
- “There is an alternative, then.”
- “Out with it, man.”
- “You could drop five hundred feet down a pitch black tower and hit stones
which certainly are there,” said Twoflower.
Dead silence from below him. Then Rincewind said, accusingly, “That
was sarcasm.”

– (Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic)

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to
(a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

– (Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites)

“It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,” he
said. “Have you thought of going into teaching?”

– (Terry Pratchett, Mort)

There were a few seconds of total silence as everyone waited to see what
would happen next. And then Nijel uttered the battle cry that Rincewind
would never quite forget to the end of his life. “Erm,” he said, “excuse
me…”

– (Terry Pratchett, Sourcery)

Of course, Ankh-Morpork’s citizens had always claimed that the river water
was incredibly pure. Any water that had passed through so many kidneys,
they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed.

– (Terry Pratchett, Sourcery)

It wasn’t blood in general he couldn’t stand the sight of, it was just his
blood in particular that was so upsetting.

– (Terry Pratchett, Sourcery)

The Ephebians made wine out of anything they could put in a bucket, and ate
anything that couldn’t climb out of one.

– (Terry Pratchett, Pyramids)

Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them neatly away so that
they don’t upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including
vacuums, ships called the “Marie Celeste”, and the chuck keys for electric
drills.

– (Terry Pratchett, Pyramids)

Lady Ramkin’s bosom rose and fell like an empire.

– (Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)

- “There’s a door”
- “Where does it go?”
- “It stays where it is, I think.”

– (Terry Pratchett, Eric)

- “So we’re surrounded by absolutely nothing. There’s a word for it. It’s
what you get when there’s nothing left and everything’s been used up.”
- “Yes. I think it’s called the bill.”

– (Terry Pratchett, Eric)

The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of
the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in
their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they
don’t know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot
missionaries on sight.

– (Terry Pratchett, Eric)

By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered
so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.

– (Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)

“If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter.”

– Popcorn comes to the Discworld
(Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)

“Why’s it called Ming?” said the Archchancellor, on cue.
The Bursar tapped the pot. It went “ming“.

– Discworld archeology revealed
(Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)

In retrospect, Victor was always a little unclear about those next few
minutes. That’s the way it goes. The moments that change your life are
the ones that happen suddenly, like the one where you die.

– (Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)

“Dock-a-loodle-fod!”

– Dyslexic roosters are a sad sight
(Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man)

The Yen Buddhists are the richest religious sect in the universe. They hold
that the accumulation of money is a great evil and a burden to the soul.
They therefore, regardless of personal hazard, see it as their unpleasant
duty to acquire as much as possible in order to reduce the risk to innocent
people.

– (Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad)

Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because — what with trolls and
dwarfs and so on — speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived
in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.

– (Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad)

“You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people
can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage.”

– (Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad)

Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of authority turned.

– (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

“Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave,” said
Vorbis.
“So I understand,” said the Tyrant. “I imagine that fish have no
word for water.”

– (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

– (Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies)

The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery is hidden in a really
cool and laid-back valley in the lower Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a
novice. He is taken into a room full of all types of clothing and asked: Yo,
my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear? And the correct
answer is: Hey, whatever I select.

– (Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies)

If the Creator had said, “Let there be light” in Ankh-Morpork, he’d have
gotten no further because of all the people saying “What colour?”

– (Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms)

More to come later, that’s all for now folks! If you like what you’ve read, check out the Discworld series on amazon or pick some up from your local library and give them a read.

In my constant search for better things to do with my time (i.e procrastinating), I tend to come across a variety of interesting and sometimes very useful websites. I feel obliged to share some of them with you, dear readers, so that you can all enjoy some of the lesser-known gems of the internet.

• http://gpsinformation.net/exe/harvest-moon.jpg A very interesting decorating idea for those of you still busy preparing for Halloween; I’d recommend perhaps adding a small spotlight from below to enhance the effect and make sure it’s visible in the dark.
• http://www.asifproductions.com/systems/world_systems.html Fed up with real life? This is a fairly extensive list of avatar-based virtual worlds; places on the internet where you can create a virtual identity and engage in various activities. Some of them can be a good escape.
• http://www.paradoxes.co.uk/ I, for one, love to hurt my brain occasionally with some riddles and paradoxes. Sometimes, it’s a very good exercise in lateral thinking. That’s why I recommend that you take a look at this site, it’s got a whole list of paradoxes which make for a very interesting read-through.
• http://www.mailtic.com/ Brilliant little service here that allows you to create a free email for use as a disposable address when signing up for a new account somewhere. It helps avoid unnecessary spam and keeps you from having to keep track of excess email accounts. Say goodbye to the “forums” email address!

That’s all for now folks, stay tuned for more as I come across them.