A List Of My Favourite Lists

I can't express how much I love wikipedia. There's nothing I enjoy more than interesting facts and if I'm craving a big tasty bowl of Knowledge Pops, all I need to do is hit that 'random article' button to find out that the study of neuroscience and free will is totally interesting or that Rufus Wainwright parties like a motherfreakin' rockstar. Then I follow the links from those pages and it's all one big learning adventure.

I particularly like the lists on Wikipedia. Mainly because they're usually well organised collections of relevant links, but sometimes because, well, they're just... amazing. Over the last few months I've been collecting a few of my favourites in a list of my own. The one that inspired me to start taking note of these lists was their category of Fictional Characters who Can Duplicate Themselves, a surprisingly long list that includes the likes of Gumby, Shredder and the T-1000. It wasn't the content of the list that amazed me so much as the fact that at least one person cares about this subject enough to compile a detailed list for the internet. I couldn't help but wonder what purpose this could possibly serve, why anyone would find themselves thinking 'Quick! I need the names of at least ten fictional characters who can duplicate themselves and I need them NOW!' without then waking up and realising that it was all a dream.

Then I remembered that this is the internet, where "purpose" is an irrelevant concept. If you ever ask 'Why?' the only necessary answer is 'Who cares why? Check it out!', one of the many things I love about this wacky world wide web.

Following the duplicators on my list were another few that were just plain old interesting, such as the lists of Messiah Claimants or Sole Survivors. I wish I could say I was surprised to see how many people are claiming to be the Messiah, but gee whiz, Christianity really did leave itself wide open for that one. I also found the list of Feral Children notable for only having eleven entries. I guess Wikipedia has a much narrower definition of 'Feral' than I do.

Of course, the real joy comes when you get down to the really oddly specific ones. I could barely contain myself when I discovered that some wonderful human being/robot had created a list of Ships Named The S.S. Lesbian. I know there's only three on the list, but that's enough for me. The list of Eponymous Laws provided me with a bunch of great new phrases to use, among them the wonderful 'Hanlon's Razor' ("Do not invoke conspiracy as explanation when ignorance and incompetence will suffice") as well as something to do with physics which I liked because it appear to be named after someone with the same last name as me, along with another guy with the last name 'Beer'. I don't care what the actual law is, I now use it when I need to answer the ever-present question of 'Should I have a beer?'. Just FYI the answer, according to the law, is yes. 


But possibly the most entertaining list of them all is the List of Ice Hockey Nicknames. The list eases you in with the type of name you'd expect, but I guess somewhere along the line they realised that they can't all be named Ace. So then you start seeing names like Dipsy-Doodle-Dandy and the very confusing Baby Dominator, who I 'm assuming was a roller derby player who wandered into the wrong building and went along with it. Then, a few names that are actually a bit clever such as 'The Puck Goes Inski' (Steve Buzinski) and 'Net Detective' (Jim Carey). Well, when I say 'clever', you have to take into account that these are people who basically get hit in the head for a living. You need to cut them a little slack. On top of that are the ones I find simply baffling, such as Cheesy, Grapes and Darryl, which I found confusing as a nickname for a guy whose name was actually Sidney Crosby. And those are just my highlights: the list itself is longer than your attention span could possibly be. 




-Smackie Onassis




P.S. I have decided to use my polls to name the band that I am eventually going to form. I have a list of adequate names, the only hard part is narrowing it down, which I will be doing in heats because there is just SO MUCH GOLD. In Heat One, you fine folk will be choosing between Goddamn the Rhythm!, The Sentient Entities, The Sexy Fenders (GEDDIT), and Parsley Disaster.

Facebook: A Public Service Announcement

I'm going to go right ahead and say it: I have never been as opinionated in my life as I am right now. I have always been fairly passionate, but at the moment I seem to have an opinion on pretty much every subject.

There's a reason for this sudden influx of ideas. Like most things happening in my life at the moment, it can be traced back to that dreaded CFI*. You see, before the Incident I had always been a terribly busy person. It was all study and work and theatre and music and writing and on and on and on. Then, suddenly, I find myself all holed up on the couch scarcely able to make myself a sandwich, let alone any of those other things. I spent a good majority of that time reading about issues and then forming opinions. As a result, I've got opinions coming out of all major orifices at the moment.

Of course, it wasn't the only thing I did with my time. I also watched a great deal of youtube clips and as a result, I no longer have anything resembling an attention span when it comes to movies. If a movie can sensibly be measured in hour units, I find myself wondering, 'Do they have anything closer to the three minute mark? Preferably featuring a pug?'. I could give you a full list of pug-themed youtube clips off the top of my head. I think that when they sell pugs, they come in a deal with a video camera and a youtube account. Which is just fine by me.

Due to the constant thinking, reading, evaluating and opinion forming, the way I use other aspects of the internet has changed. After noticing that I rarely spoke to a huge portion of people on my facebook list, I made the decision to do a mass cull. It seemed irrelevant to have more than a hundred people classed as my 'friends' who I never even communicated with. I even felt used, like little more than a cog in a wheel fueled by self-indulgence and false popularity. So I cut them from the team.

But it wasn't just that. There was also an element of self-preservation. You see, I have this debilitating condition that is unfortunately prolific on the internet. You see people afflicted with this disease on every messageboard, every discussion forum, every corner of the internet that some poor fool has allowed people to comment on. This condition means that if I see someone, anyone, express an opinion, no matter how unimportant, and I think they're wrong, I must say something. I have no choice in the matter; I simply need to call them on it. And, quite frankly, it was getting a tad inappropriate. I mean, when you haven't spoken to your sister in over a year and suddenly you're all up in her internet, informing her that whatever unimportant sentiment she has expressed is sadly misinformed, it does start to feel slightly awkward.

So I thinned the numbers. Cut a few from the team. And it felt good. The more secure, more select shortlist of people. It felt like some kind of elite group. Some kind of elite group whose membership was decided solely by me.

It was a buzz.

After that, I would skim my list of remaining friends every now and then, evaluating who could stay and who could go. I was like the mad and all powerful judge in some kind of awful reality tv show. I told myself that this was all just me being very sensible. I told myself that no longer would I be used to bolster some cockknuckle's gargantuan number of friends. No longer would my friendship be treated as a commodity. No longer would I fall victim to this online popularity contest that social networking has become!

But after a while, I found these deleting "sessions" becoming more and more frequent. I'd had a sniff of the power usually only experienced by Endemol producers and Southern US Governers: the power to kick people out of an elite group at will, with no real pre-requisites other than because I said so.

Soon enough, I found myself looking for faults, waiting for another person to slip up so I could slam my finger down on that button and declare to the world, 'NO FRIENDSHIP FOR YOU'. A power trap that I'm sure more than a few people have fallen victim to since Facebook's inception in the early 2000s, back when it was known as Facemash (seriously).

So I urge any of you, if you start to feel yourself drifting into this pattern, just... just let it go, man. Are you blocking that person because you honestly don't want them to be all up in your business on the internet, or because when someone says something stupid it feels good to punish them, damnit. Before too long you might find yourself doling out timed banishment sentences for minor grammatical offences.

So by all means, delete the jerk who updates three times a day with the same cut/pasted piece of self-promotion. Delete the guy who hasn't replied to your comments in just over 8 months.

But, be careful. Because by the time you realise that you're trapped, it will already be too late.

-Smackie Onassis

*The now standard abbreviation for the Circus Flip Incident. I feel it makes me sound just slightly less ridiculous.

Useless But Interesting: Fact Of The Day

Joshua Radin is an excellent singer/songwriter who most people would be familiar with, even if they don't know his name. He came onto the music scene when a rough demo of the first song he ever wrote made its way to Zach Braff, who featured it almost in its entirety in an episode of Scrubs. His music has since been featured in a long list of other shows such as House, Home & Away, One Tree Hill and Castle to name a few.