The Pyshco … ahem … Psychopath Test
Sunday 13 October 2013, 8.10am HKT
(Updated same day with extra photo; corrected for typos)
SOME parts of this post will disturb, so grow up.
(adapted from The People Group)
Rurdy-Turdy Thursday: One Word Answer
Thursday 23 August 2012, 4.54am HKT
THIS is a new posting category: Rurdy-Turdy Thursday comes out irregularly but always on a Thursday (obviously).
It’s crap.
It’s fun.
It’s stuff you’d rather bin but never got round to it.
It’s stuff all nosey parkers like to read.
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ONE WORD ANSWER
Rubric (that’s old-fashioned for ‘Instructions’)
Answer all with one-word answers. Time limit: Preferably within our lifetime, if not yours. Don’t spoil the fun for others: copy and paste into your own “About” page or something, type in your answers, and tag a bunch of people (including me). Answering them is harder than you think, so up to three words are allowable.
My answers:
Where is your mobile/cell phone …………………. Right
Your hair colour ………………………………….. Deciduous
Your mother ……………………………………… Oldtype
Your father ………………………………………. Newoldtype
Your favourite thing ……………………………… Paper
Your dream last night ……………………………. Awake
Your favourite drink ……………………………… Coffee
Your dream/goal …………………………………. Partying
The room you’re in ………………………………. Stacked
Your fear ………………………………………… Choicelessness
Where do you want to be in 6 years ……………. Abroad
Muffins …………………………………………… Crap
One of your wishlist items ……………………….. Etc
Where you grew up ……………………………… Timely
What are you wearing …………………………… Pinstripe
Your TV ………………………………………….. Movies
Your pets ………………………………………… Gone
Your computer …………………………………… IBM
Your life ………………………………………….. Emergency
Your mood ……………………………………….. Easy
Missing someone ………………………………… Supposedly
Your car …………………………………………. Flogged
Favourite store …………………………………. Laurence Corner
Your summer ……………………………………. Lolligagging
Your favourite colour …………………………… The Red, White and Boring
Last time you laughed ………………………….. Today
Last time you cried ……………………………… Unrecallable
Three people who email me …………………….. Bill the Bills Biller
Three of my favourite foods ……………………. Italian, French, Levantine
Three places I’d rather be right now ……………. Somewhere, Everywhere, Anywhere
Three people I think will do this …………………. Anybody
Your favourite one word ……………………….. Fabulous
And my own cheeky additions:
Your favourite vice ……………………………… Listening
Your favourite good habit ………………………. Observing
Your least favourite virtue ……………………… Gregariousness (big word, huh?)
Favourite English first name ……………………. Ashley
Favourite non-English first name ………………. Fabio (Italian)
Favourite surname …………………………….. Fortescue (for-tis-skew) (English)
Name that stuck after first hearing ……………. B. Speight (spayt)
What’s in your wallet …………………………… Receipts
Top or bottom ………………………………….. Spherical
Your favourite ink colour …………………………………….. Green
Ink colour that makes your handwriting look fabulous ………. Black
Ink colour you’d rather drink …………………………………. Blue
Ballpoint pen nib size …………………………………………. 1 mm (broad)
Highlighter colour …………………………………………….. Blue
Are you the jealous type ……………………….. You?
Favourite meal ………………………………….. Breakfast
Favourite piece of cutlery ………………………. Spoon
What you do for kicks …………………………… Sleep
Favourite aspect of your favourite people ……… Slack
Flight or invisibility ………………………………. Teleportation
Snow White or Goldilocks ……………………….. TRONwhores
Bollocks for you …………………………………. Gentrification (big word again, no?)
Your bollocks that they can’t stand …………….. Everydayness (polysyllabic, no?)
Are you metric ………………………………….. Yes
Are you imperial ………………………………… Yes
Choices come in ………………………………… Fours
You count numbers in ………………………….. German
You think the rest in ……………………………. Any
What animal are you …………………………… Alive
Favourite all-time author (surname only:
multi-barrelled acceptable) …………………….. Mikes
What’s your nickname for yourself ……………. Spanky Pants
Meaning of Life ……………………………….. 42 – xyz(23) to the power of olive oil
(inspiration from this Facebook note)
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© The Naked Listener’s Weblog, 2012. Image via Cynthia L. (B12262)
Updated 29 Sept 2012 (formatting fixes)
What’s it been? Venting (4/5)
Tuesday 6 March 2012, 12.15pm HKT
This is another tl;dr instalment. Woe betide you if you forego reading it, for it contains a number of broadsides that may actually affect YOUR blogging activities.
* * *
VENTING
This is the right time to speak up.
Normally I don’t like to hit back, not especially at blogs anyway, since, as a renegade blogger myself, I know full well how brain-damaged the whole exercise can be.
But man has his limits, as Detective ‘Dirty Harry’ Calahan once put it.
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A little about my personality
You need to know something about me first so you know overall why I’m venting here:—
Be surprised to learn that I’m actually a Type A personality.
You’d never thought so just by the way I mostly carry on, but many people actually think I’m a milquetoast (a timid, unassertive person for those unused to americanisms) because of the way I let things pass 99% of the time.
That is, until they get up my nose long enough. Then they find to their terror that I have a high-velocity explosive temper with a physical speed and agility to match.
- That sociologist on Job No. B08045 received my ‘hairdryer treatment’ at 50% capacity and, boy, was scared fartless.
- That pushy sonofabitch salesperson who tried to sell me barely existent 100gsm-weight coated woodfree paper for US$1,500 a reel (double the market spot price) got a faceful of my 75% temper and almost felt he was being garrotted with No. 3 Piano Wire.
But 99% of the time, I just let it be. Pushing back isn’t automatic even for Type A personalities, you know. Type A’s aren’t psychopaths. Many Type A’s are really patient, easygoing people — so that Type A/Type B theory can go straight into the dustbin.
My life is one long emergency and I don’t have the time or energy to go ballistic at the slightest provocation. I leave that to the great masses of uncontrollable animals elsewhere.
‘They are what they are’
Intellectual discussions don’t normally scare me — not even those well outside my education or training. Trust me, I’m no intellectual. I’m an educated man but I can’t speak intelligently about the habits of others engaged in intellectual discourse. But then again, if you’re like me,** just about nothing should scare you.
** A chopper biker, legally trained, mum telling you to wear long hair after she died, 37 months on crutches, two months in a neck brace, and 114 years of printing legal documents for government-approved financial scams IPOs.
Personally, I’m not terribly fond of intellectuals or academics, especially the more egregious types. They are what they are, as the Italian phrase puts it rather well. I take their facelessness at face value, enjoy their foggy and oracular discussions for what they’re worth, have a larff, and move on.
Not to bottle things up
People who know me even for five minutes will know I’m not the type who holds a grudge against anyone — for sure not over the Internet — mainly because I operate on two principles:
- outlive them so I take pleasure in seeing them squeal and die before I do
- die early myself so I don’t have to breathe the same air as they do
However, I tend not to bottle things up. Yet I’m not exactly disposed to implement advice like ‘Don’t hold back’ either.
Truth is, I’m 88% easier-going than 95% of Type A personalities, 77% of lawyers, or 51% of bikers (of the motorcycle variety).
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A little about 1.67%
Like I mentioned in Part 3 already, I’ve been following some 300 blogs and mailing lists of all types (via email, naturally) for (much, much) more than a year — and only 1.67% of them manages to upset me. But it’s out-and-out 99% upset.
They’re only blogs, right?! What the hell?!?
You’d be surprised just how talented some bloggers are at disruptive behaviour. You’ve got to hand it to them to actually get others to lose their rag over the Internet.
Out of my 300+ follows:
- around 50 on language, grammar and/or linguistics
- maybe 25 on various countries or other languages
- maybe 25 on China
- a dozen or so on Hong Kong
- the rest are on cool stuff that pleases me (food, drink, bikes, chicks, cats, graphic arts, travel, music, gigs, news, porn, etc).
Certain issues need to be addressed regarding 1.67% of those blogs.
Tense humour and ‘the pits’
My biggest source of dismay and consternation (in a word, distemper, in the English literary sense, not the biomedical one) have been:
- linguistics sites or blogs
- China-watching or related sites or blogs
At the meeting point between those two, the worst has been
- China-related linguistics blogs or sites from inside China written by foreigners who think they are ‘Chinese’
While I admire their confidence and knowledgeability in their own spheres, I do not admire their tense humour and the inanity of their commentary.
(I can handle racism, I can handle lack of humour, but I just can’t handle tense humour.)
It IS truly amazing that the Great Firewall of China hasn’t managed to stop those blogs from invading out onto us. Not one bit, given that that firewall has the ability to practically block sunlight.
‘They are the pits’ is my John McEnroe’esque assessment.
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A little about linguanophiles
If you care to pay any attention at all, linguistics, translation studies and pedagogy (education) are highly rigid and rigidised fields.
Of the lot, linguistics is the most rigid and rigidised.
The most hotly contested (and heated) debates in academia today are in linguistics, which fact should help you infer the type of people who populate that field.
Read the sidebar for the key reasons for intellectual rigidity and rigidisation.
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A little about comportment
The most galling thing on many of those lingo blogs is the way the bloggers and their regular dogpile of commenters actually go to extremes and deliberately exclude newcomers or those who simply hold different (though often non-dissenting) viewpoints.
I’m reminded of someone’s insight that, if The Establishment feel so fearful and threatened by a 76-year-old retired gynaecologist like Ron Paul (the American politician), there must be something seriously wrong about your turf.
Offensive antics
One of their more offensive antics is the blogger and his (usually it’s a ‘his’) favourite commenters collude behind the scenes, so to speak, to plot a comment dialogue done in such a way that’s deliberately littered with arcane technicalities that newcomers or uitlanders cannot possibly join in.
If you’ve ever been to boarding school and have constantly been abused there (not sexually, I’m embarrassed to say) or have been handed purposely designed ‘aggro’ as I have been, it becomes extremely easy how to figure out who’s colluding with who. Over time, it becomes second nature and you could do it ‘by remote,’ so to speak.
‘Uncooperative’
This pattern of bad behaviour is not one-off. It’s frequently seen in just about every academically related blog and Facebook thread that I’ve ever visited or got sucked into. The same takes place with some regularity on sites and Facebook groups that discuss sociology, translation studies and pedagogy (education).
Indeed, I myself have been solicited by some lingo bloggers or Facebookers to do just that against some unsuspecting victim. “Give ’em a break,” I say to these characters, “We’re still young enough to do that.” And then they brand me ‘uncooperative.’
Shaken to the core
I’ve been following a variety of linguistics, language, translation, sociology and pedagogy sites for well nigh on 10 years on a regular basis — in addition to having handled their authors for print publications for roughly the same amount of time. The same repertoire of antics are repeated time and time again. I’ve learnt to time it when antics start kicking in.
It’s disgusting. It’s offensive. It’s highly prejudiced. And these people aren’t even aware that they’re doing this themselves.
I lose my rag, and I really do have it in me to tell them to f@#k off, go to hell, and don’t come back.
Any inherent faith inside you in the goodness of people easily becomes shaken to the core because of seeing or knowing that.
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A little about grace, if not face
The English aristocracy are famous for their grace — the ability to make a person feel really welcomed.
Clearly, the people who run blogs about linguistics, language, sociology, pedagogy and translation studies did not know how to learn that.
Tsk, tsk, tsk. Such swell intellectualism, and yet ignorant of these simple rules:—
The Golden Rule
Treat others as you yourself like to be treated.
The Silver Rule
Don’t treat others in ways that you wouldn’t like to be treated.
Not unless you’re a sado-masochist, in which case you WOULD enjoy begging to receive pain whilst also enjoying being refused it.
Try mine:—
The Naked Listener’s Malleable Copper Alloy Rule
Go easy on those who think, speak, eat and shat differently than you do because they don’t necessarily have your loaf, gob, eating irons or your porcelain shatware.
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A little about face-off
Sometimes there’s just no way out.
The Naked Listener offers some timely advice:—
The Wax-On/Wax-Off Maxim
“That is the way I do things. If you don’t like it, then find me a driver who WILL comply with the way I do things.”
The English Displeasure and Reprisal-in-Kind Rule
“If my presence here is not up to your standards or expectations, I would appreciate it if you be so kind as to step away from your cheese and crackers for a minute and tell me directly what your requirements or particular preferences are for my presence to be acceptable.”
And remember this:
“If you tolerate this, your children will be next.” (English proverb)
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Your question now must be, why continue with them?
That question is perhaps easier to answer if you care for broadly aimed broadsides in the next part.
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© The Naked Listener’s Weblog, 2012.
Images: Keep Calm/Screw Calm via Sarah C. | “I have nothing to say” via Cascade Web Development | Good Habits/Bad Habits Signpost via Marketing Leadership Council | “Once we hit capacity…” via Eddie Codel/Flickr.
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