Retrospective... and the Rorschach Banana Test

Current mood: Retrospective
Current music: Led Zeppelin, would you believe

I am APPALLED at how long it has been since my last post. Good grief! Where has my YEAR gone?! Did I get a visit from the Thieves of Time? *Shock, horror* Here we are, a month into 2009, and my poor little blog has been mouldering away for aeons in hopes of attention...

Of course, my relentless, infernal busyness has been preventing me from doing things like blogging and hanging around social networking sites - the latter, in particular, is entertaining but addictive, and therefore a huge time waster. I name no names, but those of you in the know will realise which website I am wagging a disapproving finger at. Anyway, my life appears to be one long cycle of work-class-coursework, with items such as 'eat', 'sleep', and unfortunately, 'exam' and 'project' thrown in somewhere. Grrrr.

Anyway, the major highlight of the past 12 months was (for me, at any rate) my trip to Sydney (as you see, I did go back for more), which was as lovely as ever. I visited all the usual touristy spots that I missed last time, like the Sydney Tower and the Aquarium. Better yet, I went dolphin watching and sand-boarding at a place called Port Stephens, a few hours away from the city. The dolphins were rather apathetic that day and didn't bother peeking out of the water, which was a shame; but the sand-boarding was brilliant, and I highly recommend it. Its premise is simplicity itself - you wax the bottom of a board to make it slippery, you position it at the top of a sand dune, and then you sit on the board and slide down the dune. Whoosh! How hard is that? The trickiest part of the process is getting back up the shifting slope of sand with your board. What goes down must jolly well come up again, or else they'll drive off without you...

Other highlights (in an artistic vein) included going to an excellent gig by Harry Connick Jr. early in 2008, and much more recently, a Big Band Fest with five different big bands playing swing all afternoon. It's a shame there wasn't a dance floor; it would've been fun to bop along, and I reckon the audience was up for it. I also saw an excellent theatrical production of 'The 39 Steps'. If you're in London or New York, I definitely recommend watching the play, which won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2007 (should you set any store by that sort of thing). It's a faithful but comedic treatment of Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 film of the same name. The 'comedy thriller' has a plot of the espionage variety, complete with shady spies, a mysterious yet glamorous woman, murders, and chase scenes across train roofs and wild moors. Don't take any of this seriously, though, because the delivery is laugh-out-loud funny - much of the humour arises from the ingenuity and hilarity that come with not being able to use the many elaborate sets and props usually employed in film. Well, that and the fact that there were only 4 actors playing some 150 different parts! Furthermore, if you're a film buff, you could sit there spotting one Hitchcock reference after another. I believe it is still showing at the West End and on Broadway - just check out http://www.love39steps.com/ for more.

What else did I do in the intervening time? My mind seems to have drawn a blank. I think I can be said to have an 'external photographic memory', in the sense that I can't actually remember anything that happens unless I have the photographs I took to prove it. [Consults photographs] It would appear that apart from the above, I've mostly been hanging out with friends in whatever free time I have...

OK, so I exaggerate, my memory isn't exactly like that of a goldfish. Perhaps I'm just going slightly off my rockers with stress. The other day I spotted dinosaurs on a bunch of bananas. I wonder what Rorschach (of inkblot test fame) might have said. Then again, a guy who was preoccupied with first splotching ink onto paper and folding it in half, and then forcing other people to see things in the resultant mess, might have said anything, so you shouldn't really take his word for it. Wikipedia claimed that Hermann Rorschach made 'inkblots his life's work'; compared to him, I seem pretty normal!

Anyway, here are the prehistoric bananas, labelled for your benefit:

Images of pteranodon (top) and parasaurolophus (bottom) mysteriously imprinted on the fruit of Musa × paradisiaca

I'd be interested to know what other people see in those curiously shaped blotches on the banana peels. Does anyone else envision creatures of the Cretaceous, or is my watching 'Jurassic Park' at an impressionable age to blame?

While we're in a bananary frame of mind, I thought I'd throw in my tribute to René Magritte, who of course painted the iconic 'La Trahison des Images':

The original by Magritte

My interpretation as a non-smoker

A little while ago, I was discussing with a friend how I came to know the somewhat uncommon (these days, at least) word 'suet', which generally appears alongside 'pudding' or 'dumpling' in the context of traditional British foodstuffs. My only explanation for my knowledge of esoteric terms is the fact that I read a lot, and tend to pick up unusual words from books or sometimes straight from the dictionary. Hey, I like unusual words! Here are some of my favourites:

1. Mellifluous
2. Tintinnabulation
3. Susurrus
4. Effervescent
5. Scintillate
6. Serendipity
7. Discombobulate
8. Contraindicated
9. Eviscerate
10. Floccinaucinihilipilification

Oh, and 'pusillanimous' is a good insult.

Mind you, these are all words that I like as words - they sound pleasing, interesting, or amusing - and may or may not necessarily fit into an everyday conversation. For example, 'eviscerate' is quite a nice sounding word, but it actually turns out to mean 'disembowel'. Now how often does that come up, unless you're talking shop with your butcher?

So, dear readers (and I hope there are some of you left!), what are some of your favourite words? Comments in the comments box, please... Thank you. Thank you very much.