Snoskred Opinions

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A confession..

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This may turn out to be the lamest post ever on this blog but I’m going to admit it.

The last few nights, at midnight, after the other half has gone to bed, I’ve been secretly bawling my eyes out. And the reason why is..

adrg

They’ve been re-running the episodes where Dr Mark Greene dies.

What is it about Anthony Edwards that makes him so capable of creating characters who, when they die, you just can’t help but cry? Is there anyone reading this who did not shed a tear when Goose was killed in Top Gun? If there is, probably you didn’t see the movie, right? And that was a short movie, ER was 177 episodes.

goose

It’s not just about the character of Dr Greene, it was about the history of the show. I was a fan of the show from the beginning and to watch the relationships build between Dr Green and people like Carter was a thing of beauty. And I guess because I knew the show so well, I recognised a lot of the things they did during these final Dr Greene episodes, the passing of the baton from Dr Greene to Dr Carter, the scenes which were in the pilot where Dr Carter said the exact same things to a new medical student that Dr Greene had once said to him so many years before. The little things that mean a lot.

So when they played all these episodes the first time, it was on channel Nine (we call it Nein here) and really they messed it up, they played episodes out of order, they would play a new one one week, and the next week just grab any old episode to drag out the season. It didn’t really have much impact on me. In fact I didn’t manage to catch all the episodes. So much did I miss, that I thought the pay tv people were playing them out of order! But I have checked, and they are in order.

Anyway, I don’t think any of this will make much sense to someone who wasn’t a fan of the show, or to people who didn’t like Dr Greene as a character. And it’s not like it’s making me sad when the show itself isn’t on. And it’s just tv, and this is just a character and not a real person, and terrible things happen to people every day, and stuff. But I figured I would mention it, try to get it out of my system or something.

What I loved most about Dr Greene as a character was his compassion, his patience, and his passion. So I’m sad that they killed him off when he decided to leave the show. And I didn’t really watch much of the show after that happened. But I have some of the DVD’s – seasons one and two, which are just incredible writing wise and acting wise etc – and also contain George Clooney and Julianna Margulies and all the other good cast members, and you could tell they were all enjoying what they were doing as far as making this series. They’re so cheap now, I might collect the rest of the series, up until his departure anyway.

So goodbye, Dr Greene.. when that song by Iz cuts in at 2:56, that is when I haz a sad.

Sorry the video is not the best, I had to replace it when the previous one was taken down. :)

death, television shows

200th Post

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Houston, we have wetsuits.

You have to understand, the deepest I have ever been in sea water is about calf deep. This is because I saw JAWS at an early age. I am absolutely terrified. I can’t even explain it to you. But I want to give this a try.

And my wetsuit is not full length, so jellyfish could get me :(

NO FEAR!

and so be it, I guess.. :)

(jellyfish is doing a little dance in my head) (lets hope those are the only ones I see today)

About Snoskred, potential disaster, snorkelling

It is entirely possible

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that the real estate woman who is supposed to be inspecting these premises will in fact leave bundled up in a rolled up carpet in the back of her vehicle.

I don’t think I blogged about this when it happened back on the 6th, but the woman turned up here to inspect my house at 11am that day. She’d sent me a letter saying the 6th originally, then soon afterwards a new letter arrived saying the 13th, so that was when I was expecting her. Not the 6th, when I was actually fast asleep when she arrived, and the house was not clean, because duh I wasn’t expecting her.

She has a key to the property. I heard her insert the key into the door. For some reason, she did not turn the key, and she left. Then about 3:30pm, I got a pissy voicemail message saying she came here for the inspection and she was “Unable to access the property” – hello? What, couldn’t she manage to turn the key? Was some magnetic force dragging her back to the car? WTF? And the tone of her voice, well I was ready to rip off her head and you know.. leave her running around like a chook with its head cut off.

So I did not call her right away, I calmed down first, with coffee. Then I rang, at 4:55pm, and was put on hold for about 10 minutes, then she gets on the phone, I say who I am. She has the tone, again. She says “When would be a convenient time for you” and the dripping sarcasm on *convenient* almost pushes me to start treating her like I talk to the 419 scammers. However, I have to be nice, right?

So I say “How about Wednesday the 13th of December?” “I actually am not doing any inspections that day” “Oh yes you are” “What do you mean?” “I have a letter here telling me you would be here on the 13th. That’s why I was not expecting you today, on the 6th.” She loses all her pissyness, crumbles into a little ball of “I don’t know how that could have happened, it must be a mistake, the letters are printed automatically”. So we arrange the inspection for today, between 10am and mid-day.

It’s now 15 minutes left till mid-day, no sign of her, and the longer she leaves it the more pissy I get, and the other half is home here with me today and he is starting to get scared. He suggested not long ago that I go for a walk, or take the car and go *shopping*. By myself!

Ooh, the doorbell rings.. back later.

Edit to add – that was the quickest inspection in the history of man, she was here less than 5 minutes. I tried to stay in here. :) So now we can go out, yay!

bitches, renting

So a bit of an update..

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on google reader. Because if you are not using this, you should be. It’s fantastic. I went into this without having a clue how to use it. The first time I created a folder I wondered what the heck I’d done, and desperately tried to find a way to delete it.

Now I have all my blogs organised into folders (Faves, Nablopomo, Scams, Updated-Often, Rare-updated, and share ok – that’s where the bloggers who have said I can share their posts in my little side window thing are, makes it easier to keep on top of it, am I already sharing your blog? If not, can I share your blog? If yes leave a comment!) and I can read all the unread posts from the blogs in that folder just by clicking on it. This saves me a massive amount of time and effort.

It’s really easy to set up, and once you play with it and get used to it, you’ll grow to love it as much as I have. The only downside is it sometimes takes a little while for posts to turn up there, it can be up to a half hour delay. But what’s half an hour between bloggers? :)

One thing I am going to do, over the next week or so, is visit all the blogs I am reading with google reader and let them know I am still reading their posts. That’s the only downside to google reader – you don’t visit actual blog pages as often unless you want to comment. And for the last 2 weeks, I’ve been all commented out. Sorry about that!

I just made a little cheesecake and a startling confession to the other half who now wants to either disown me, or buy a cheap big screen tv so his is not defiled by me watching Desperate Housewives on it..

feed readers, google reader

Got our first Christmas Card..

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from a local church. The other half does not like religion, and he has happily gone to shred it with the paper shredder. He’s the kinda guy who would love to answer the door to religious people wearing all black with Metallica playing in the background and invite them in to sacrifice virgins. He has a particular hatred for Mormons. I don’t know why but it seems they used to knock on his door a lot where he once lived in Adelaide.

I don’t understand the going door to door in order to convert people to your religion thing personally. Maybe it’s just me. But like if people are looking for a religion, they’ll probably come to you. I find it almost as annoying as those people trying to sign everyone up to credit cards at the shopping centres. I have been known to tell them to fsck off. I just want to go about my shopping, I don’t need you in my face, thanks very much. I don’t really get mad about much, but this really irritates me.

And now they’re at every airport in the country, too. :(

religion

I figured this out..

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If you only want a short amount of your post to appear in your rss feed (meaning people have to visit your blog personally to see the rest, so you can get a better idea of how many people are reading you) you can change the settings in Blogger Settings —> Site Feed —-> Allow Blog Feed —-> change this to short. (Select Short if you only wish to syndicate the first paragraph, or approximately 255 characters, whichever is shorter). So I did this today, sorry to be a pain in the rear, but if it’s bugging you let me know in the comments.

What have I been up to? I’ve been working on some scambaiting. The scammers love to hear from me. I’ve got a new copy and paste all set up and ready to go for them which involves a busty blonde lady of European origin who wants them to love her. This should make for fun emails..

I also been doing chores round the house, and I watched The Talented Mr Ripley yesterday, it was really great.. I have not been commenting on nablopomo blogs, I thought I would give myself a bit of a break before getting back into it next week. I needed the me time, seriously!

Pieces of Mind inspired me to volunteer at an animal shelter in a recent post. I wasn’t sure about it and I actually had two other options I was considering, both of which involved animals, but of a more wild variety, Wires or Nana which are both for native Aussie animals, and also the local animal park, I had run into the guy who runs it and mentioned I missed volunteering at the zoo and that I loved reptiles, and he said he had 200 reptiles off display and they love to have volunteers.

So in the end, I’ve emailed the animal shelter, and they’ve put me down for the next induction. I’m very happy with this. I was worried about how I’ll deal with the urge to take the animals home myself, and also how to cope with the not knowing, but I think I’ll be ok with it. And I need to do something, I need to get out of this house!

So that’s the news for now.. and if you are reading me by rss, can you throw a comment on here so I know? ;) I’m going to try and do that this week to all the blogs I am reading by rss.. cheers

animals, blog housekeeping, feed readers, volunteer

The bad news..

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I’m writing this using Internet Explorer as blogger seems to work fine with it, and the issue they are having at the moment happens only in Firefox. Apparently. Well let’s hope they get it fixed soon because using IE makes me want to mutilate squirrels. And I like squirrels a lot. So I guess it’s lucky I’m in Australia where we don’t have any.

I’m really glad to see Meva is back to blogging, she vanished for a short time. This means I am finally going to post something I’ve been thinking about posting for a while now. I’m hoping that people aren’t just going to run away and stop reading this blog if I admit this. It’s not exactly cheerful reading, and this is not a trip down memory lane that I am looking forward to, but I think it has to be done.

Some years ago, I was very depressed. So much so that I could not get out of bed, most of the time. It all started when my car got broken into. I had worked for a company that sold car sound, and I had installed $7,000 worth of car audio into my car – myself.

It had a great alarm, and the people who broke into it laid under the car for over an hour with a rag stuffed into the siren while the backup battery ran down. I was furious. I wanted to kill the people who did it, but I didn’t know who they were. I was so angry, I can’t even describe it.

They were helped by the fact that my husband (yes I was married) had chosen for us to live in a house with a driveway from hell that I could not drive my car up or down, it had brick walls on both side, and it was at approximately a 45 degree angle.

Some months before he had decided to buy it – without consulting me. He told me we were buying it. I wanted to look at other houses, he refused to consider it. The house belonged to his Dad, and his Dad wanted to get rid of it. I suppose that was when I realised that I’d made a huge mistake, and this marriage thing was not the best of ideas.

So then one night soon after the car break in I went to fill up the ice cube tray, and the tap fell off the wall into my hand. Water was gushing out of the wall, I was absolutely saturated. Husband ran in and was screaming at me to go and turn off the water, I had no idea how to do that, so I said he would have to do it. He goes out, turns it off, returns, and by this time I am laughing – well, you have to, right? :)

I was completely soaking wet, and he was furious – that I was laughing, that the tap fell off the wall, and he starts yelling at me. I said “I’m not the one who decided to buy this house” and out of nowhere he just slapped me. I grabbed my car keys and left, not even stopping to get shoes. I did not go back.

That was my first run in with the black hole of depression, it certainly was not my last. There was a time in the early 2000’s when I spent over a year in there.. Everyone who has been there has a different way of describing it. To me it was like a big black hole I’d fallen into and I had no idea how to get out.

I might sometimes seem like I’m functioning well and everything is fine, but I know I am always close to the edge of that dark hole, and if I don’t work hard to keep myself out of it, I can end up back there. Seeing as it’s so hard to get out, I’ve worked out strategies over time which help me keep out of there. I’m going to share some of those with you guys over the next few weeks because I recognise they may be helpful to other people, too.

Normal people who have never been depressed will not understand the effort required to do just simple every day tasks when you’re down. Just to get up out of bed and have a shower seems like something impossible. The effort involved, to me it always seemed like someone had tied weights to my arms and legs, and it was difficult to move them. Probably most people who have been down will understand that.

So don’t think this post is looking for sympathy or anything like that, I’m not. Right now I feel like I’m flying. Things are going pretty well, except for the fact I have no job and no desire to get one, but it’s ok, we’re coping, I don’t really need to get one until I feel like it.

I just want people to know that I’ve been there, too.

I think most people end up there sometime. It’s ok to admit it, and it’s ok to ask for help – and get help. There’s plenty of it out there, if you look in the right places. :)

About Snoskred, depression, domestic violence

NaBloPoMo is over..

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But the commenting challenge is not. I’m going to continue to comment on at least 20 blogs per day until I finish the list. I’m up to S now. This could take me months but I do not care, it is worth it. I have found some amazing new blogs and enjoyed almost every minute of reading.

Jihanna’s post here reminded me.. I have taken the commenting to a new level this week.

I sent an email off to a website that had pop-up advertising, letting them know it was highly annoying and I would not be returning to their site anymore. This is something I would not have done before the commenting challenge, but now because I’m not afraid to speak up, I did it! And they got back to me –

Thank you for reporting the problem.

Spyware and popups are absolutely not allowed on the site. I will investigate where it came from and shut it down if possible. Ads are served by various third-parties, as we do not handle most of the advertising in-house.

Do you remember and more details of what it looked like or are you able to reproduce a screenshot of a page with the ad in question?

And yes, I had taken a screenshot, so I got back to them and let them know. And I went and installed adblock for firefox, too, and the other half bumped my user setting down so nothing can be installed while I am on the computer (this is a wise move when you’re a scambaiter and visiting sites which might be slightly dodgy from time to time).

Then, I love this salad dressing and I ran out. I wanted to buy more but I was having a lot of trouble finding it. So instead of just keep going to every store, I thought, why not find an email address for them and ask them where I can go to buy it? And I did, I sent them a nice little email. I got an email back telling me they no longer make it (BOO!) but inviting me to be a part of their customer club. I know the other half is going to be annoyed that I said yes, but I said yes. And I’ll stop crying about the salad dressing not being available anymore sometime, probably in 2007. ;)

It’s ok though, he thinks I’m crying because he won’t let me buy more sparkly shoes and handbags, or a gold glitter lamp.

Angry Snoskred, customer feedback, NaBloPoMo

Crikey!

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People who have arrived here looking for the Brltney Cr0tch Sh0ts that all of you are so desperately searching for, I do not have them here on my site. You can find them on What Would Tyler Durden Do – an excellent blog. Please visit there ASAP. I don’t have what you’re looking for, but I’ve told you where to find it, so please now go away! ;)

To all my normal readers, whoa, that was pretty scary. I’m number 15 on google searches for Brltney Cr0tch Sh0ts. I’m number 7 on comcast searches for Brltney Cr0tch Sh0ts. Over the last 24 hours there has been over 3,000 unique hits from people who are searching for that. Someone remind me not to post about cr0tch sh0ts again, will ya’all? :) But if you’re looking for some traffic, probably teenage boys with meat in hand raring to go, this might be something you want to post about on your site.. ;) I have over 100 people viewing this site as I type.

bitches, blog housekeeping, wrong world

Another non-religious post..

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Over at Life Is A Highway, today’s post is about chickens upsetting people. I left a comment there and this post really got me thinking, I wrote this post about a similar topic a while back. The comment I left was –

I don’t eat there either, and I won’t be anytime soon. I don’t like their food much.

If halal preparation means less nastiness for chickens then it is good, but on a serious note I do not like all this changing stuff because of religion. It’s wrong, in my opinion. When other people’s beliefs begin to intrude on every day life, that’s a bit of an issue. And no wonder the Christians and Atheists and everyone else are annoyed – they have never managed to intrude on every day life in this way, and they are jealous, I think.

I’m ok with the chicken stuff, because this seems like it is a much nicer way of killing the animals according to the RSPCA and I support that. The problem is elsewhere. The problem is the Bacon and Pork.

Let us take a journey into an entirely hypothetical world for a moment.

Lets say for example, that David Koresh had not died, that there was no shootout, that he was arrested by the FBI and then released when all his housemates refused to testify and like the weapons of mass destruction nobody could find any guns. And lets say then he is popular and not ugly and also somewhat stick thin and because of the media attention, people start joining his religion in mass numbers, all over the world.

Let’s say David sat down one evening to have a lovely meal, and ended up with severe food poisoning. So bad in fact, that he ended up in hospital in intensive care. So when he’s feeling better, he makes a sermon, and adds a new rule to his religion – NO FISH. And you can’t eat food from a restaurant that serves fish at all. And you can’t have anything to do with fish whatsoever, because the Devil tries to poison people with Fish.

So as a result, fisherman suddenly find it hard to sell their fish to restaurants. Mcdonalds says goodbye to the Filet of Fish. Fish and chip shops all over the country shut down (sorry Pauline). Fish markets close. An industry vanishes. People are out of work. This could soon happen with Pork, people. I’m not joking around here. If restaurants all choose to become Halal, it might be goodbye to our pig farming industry. This might be a good thing in some people’s opinions.

And the food poisoning scenario described above is actually not that far off what happened with this whole bit being put in the bible in the first place –

Lev 11:7 And THE PIG, because it parts the hoof and is cloven-footed but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you.
Lev 11:8 You shall not eat any of their flesh, and you shall not touch their carcasses; they are unclean to you.
ev 11:46 This is THE LAW about beast and bird and every living creature that moves through the waters and every creature that swarms on the ground,
Lev 11:47 to make a distinction between the unclean and the clean and between the living creature that may be eaten and the living creature THAT MAY NOT BE EATEN.

So you can’t eat it, and you can’t touch their carcasses – because you could get ill back in those days from doing so. My good friend Anna who I was chatting to about this explained that the bible was written mainly for people who lived in the desert, and in the desert food spoils fast, and you can get really bad diseases when that happens including triconosis which you get from under-cooked Pork.

This Wiki is really interesting and gives many reasons why the ban on pork may have been implemented.

What scares me most about religion is people choosing to live their lives based on outdated rules and information. That’s why I’m not religious. I choose not to follow the bible, the Qur’?n or any other such book. If the Halal way of killing animals is better for everyone, that’s fine and I am willing to accept it. No problems there.

However, the first time I’m told I can’t have bacon on my burger, I’m walking out – and I intend on being extremely vocal about it, too. This is Australia. If I want bacon on my burger, I should be able to get it, and NO religion should be telling me otherwise.

I’m not pretending like I’m educated on all these issues – ignorance is a part of this. I didn’t know anything about why Pork was supposedly so bad, or what Halal really meant, or how it was better for the chickens and stuff. I’ve done a bit of reading on these topics recently, so I know a little more about it now. I’m willing and prepared to accept a better way of doing things, but I also want people to respect *my* culture and beliefs, which include having bacon on a burger. I don’t want to be all “Muslims are bad” and stuff, because I don’t believe that at all.

But I will be honest with you all – it is very threatening to me when things change. I don’t like it. Most humans don’t. I’m willing to look at why I am feeling threatened and try to understand the issues and get educated on them, but a lot of people are not. A lot of people see all this stuff going on, like the Mufti saying those things about uncovered meat and women, and bacon being taken off the menu, and all these veils all over the place, and then with the whole terrorism connection and Jihad and all this scary stuff, people are freaking out.

I probably haven’t made a lot of sense on this issue. I’m finding it hard to find the words really. I am not even sure this says what I want to say.. :) But I’m out of time for now, I may revisit it later.

Angry Snoskred, Muslim, religion