The Bargain* (*With a lot of asides)

2004-11-26 - 1:38 a.m.

Oh, I am a sad, sad man.

I'm suddenly and exhilaratingly interested in world events lately, after seeing a news clip, while watching Survivor, where the police in some country* recently sided with protestors who were declaring their presidential election a fraud. I decided that it would be a good idea to listen to the BBC to catch up on world events and to get a more international perspective than I've been getting. I listen over the internet while I do my nanowrimo stuff (I'm way behind! Aaargh!).

Anyway, while waiting for the radio to load on the BBC World Service website, I decided to see if I could listen to any rugby games (I figure it's the best way to learn how to play, now that the season's over. Also, I've quite hopefully been nominated for the position I'm holding (with "Interim" in front of it), to be decided in December by team vote. I hope I win, but I'm terrified I might, too). I get to the sports page and right in front of me is a thumbnail picture of a bare-chested rugby player in a hot tub with the caption/link/headline saying "Find out why England's rugby players love ice baths!"****

I froze, because I really wanted to find out why England's rugby players love ice baths. But then I considered: this was the reason why I'm so behind in Nanowrimo this year. I've been "Id Boy" all month, letting myself have rewards before the work gets done.

So, I compromised.

I would first see if there was a story or anything about the last game that England played Canada (I wanted to see the BBC's sports bias: some Canadian media tend to worship Toronto teams even when they're playing poorly).

Then I could oggle the half-naked rugby players all I wanted. To heck with nanowrimo (okay, okay, I'll do the wrimo after solving the ice bath conundrum. Promise).

Cheers,

The Magus

*it's late, I'm tired, and just had to look up how to spell "exhilarating", so I'm not going to look up the name of the country tonight. Assume that I'm being superficial now; I'll be deep and insightful tomorrow**.

**Yay! Semicolon/semi-colon*** use! I feel it's a little clumsy there, but I really want to get comfortable with them. I'm experimenting with my punctuation (which explains the footnotes - I was tired of using parentheses), sometimes successfully. I'll settle into something again sooner or later. Incidently this entry is insanely long because of Nanowrimo and fatigue. I'll never write like this again, I really promise on everything I've ever owned. Now, if you read footnotes in any way the same way as I do, you should be done with them so you can go back to reading about how I recently became interested in world events. I was about to talk about the BBC.

***Again, it's late, and I packed my dictionary for the move that ought to happen this weekend, and I hate using the internet to look up words. I know that "semicolon" is standard, I think in both the US and the UK, but a really stubborn part of me is gripping "semi-colon" in a life-or-death embrace. It's a little like believing Santa Claus is fake. I'll look it up when I have a dictionary or a Canadian style-guide in-hand.

****Last one, I swear; on the BBC radio thing, they just played an ad for a radio-play of "Lair of the White Worm" (I may have spelled that wrong - don't get me started), which is the name of a movie I saw that was hilariously excellent in all the wrong ways. Is this internetty thing amazing, or what?

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