Wikipedia

Jquarry

Joined 7 March 2005

Welcome to my Wikipedia page. Hope it: (a) Doesn't bore you to the point of wanting to chew your own arm off, and (b) Cause you to loathe the ground I walk on.


Vital Stats

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I am an Aussie. Within that I'm a Queenslander, also known affectionately as a "banana bender". I don't particularly like the taste of bananas, although I don't mind them mooshed up into something.

I have an interest in many diverse fields, too numerous to mention here, mainly because I haven't explored them all myself yet. I'm getting around to it.

By training I'm a computer engineer, but I'm thoroughly bored with that corrupt industry. I'm hoping to ditch it and follow my lifelong dream of being a professional dilettante.

Favourite Sayings

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  • No matter where you go, there you are.
  • I need a synonymn for a word that's similar to another.
  • My linguistic skills used to be really bad, but now they're like whatever.

Chief Meme

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If you don't make the most of your life, some Cosmic authority might erase your existence and give someone else a go. (Score 10 points if you can identify the source...)

Pet Likes

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Pet Hates

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Ultra Pet Hate

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Computers. Yep, hate computers. Bloody hate them. Totally. Just ask my dad.

Extreme Pet Hate

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Recent Australianism where the ly digraph is pronounced lazily or not at all; eg. "Australia" becomes "Austray-a", and "million" becomes "mew-yun", or (worse) "mee-yun". Bloody awful.

Über Pet Hate

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Political Correctness. An angry and embittered schoolmaster, ready to whip the child who dares speak out of turn. There is no Gestapo organisation, no Stalinist regime which has been more successful at destroying free thinking and liberty than PC.


Some Unencyclopedic Stuff I Wrote

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When I was at high school it was compulsory to do English. All the other subjects were elective, but you had to do English. I hated English. I absolutely loathed it. I hated reading the boring dusty old "classics" in the curriculum, with their interminable narratives and stilted language, none of which had single a space ship or a sword fight in them (except Shakespeare.) I hated the poems, nothing but senseless stream-of-consciousness spillages of twisted concepts and indecernable imagery. Worse still I hated spending countless hours writing pointless essays discussing some meaningless theme in these tomes, only to get some hurtfully small mark.

English was my worst subject academically. I was scoring a 80-90% in the rest of my subjects, like chemistry and physics, where I did cool stuff like play with lasers and make toxic gases. But in English, where I was lucky to stay awake, I was borderline failing. At the beginning of Year 11 my teacher said I showed real promise in English, if I would just focus, and she was probably right. So in spite of my feelings toward the subject I chose the more difficult stream for the HSC. This no doubt contributed to my deplorable results. It really dragged my overall HSC mark down, not to mention my confidence.

Nevertheless I passed the HSC with a reasonably good mark, and was all set to do a degree in engineering at University. I celebrated that I would never have to read another "classic", wade through another poem, scrawl another essay, or "discuss" another irrelevant theme for the rest of my happy life.

So what does this exercise in nostalgic whinging have to do with anything? Well, here I am, twenty-odd years down the track. Those dusty old classics? I love them. I love their soapy themes and lacy dialogue. I have read them all, and watched the corresponding 98-episode TV remakes starring Colin Firth and the fat guy who played Hyacinth Bucket's brother-in-law. I love Shakespeare. I love that archaic mode of speech, his imagery, and the words he coined. He really was the greatest English writer. I love Tolkien. I love the fact that he invented his own languages, then created an entire mythological cycle to breath life into them.

Most of all I love to write. I am a man of few spoken words, but many written. Some people create pictures with brush and paints, I use words. Like my old woodwork teacher, Mr Tate, used to say, "A word is worth a thousand pictures." (Although at the time he was admonishing kids for pronouncing words lazily.)

All this makes me a goddam idiot. If Mrs McInerny could see me now, she'd laugh that witch-cackle of hers, I'm sure.

(Although, like abstract art, I still don't get poetry. When people ask why I don't try my hand I tell them I'd rather write good prose than bad poetry.)

Anyway, below are a couple of things I have penned (typed in.)

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