This blog hasn’t updated in ages, but a lot has gone on lately. Do not despair though. I will be updating this blog regularly again, starting soon next week, which is not too far away. Thanks for understanding, Ethan.

Sorry for not updating my blog in awhile. Life’s been a bit busy lately, and I had to give up something to allow myself more time. I couldn’t refuse to add up the new video of Evanescence though. The song is called Good Enough and the video (and the song) are quite spectacular. The video has been awaited for a long time, so obviously the unedited version, without the special effects, has been added to Youtube and eager fans have already praised and rated, and commented on it.

It’s hard to tell, as it’s not quite finished yet and the timer/add notes to the CG programmers are distracting sometimes, but it seems like a really good music video all the same.

Why is everywhere flooding at the moment?

Whether you live in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Australia or South-east Asian regions you would have noticed severe and damaging floods and flooding in many parts of those areas in only the past few days and weeks in the month of June. Surely not all areas of the world are prone to this amount of flooding, considering that many of them are halfway across the world from one another? Normally the whole world does not begin to flood coincidentally, all at the same time.

Or does it?

Consider Australia – it has been prone to devastating drought for the last five years and longer, but now all of a sudden it has switched in the opposite direction – floods ruining livestock, houses, and cities and even threatening water supplies with plumes of infected floodwater. You may well be thinking that it is a good thing for New South Wales and Victoria, the major flooding affected states of Australia, to finally be getting some rain and raising the dam levels, but doesn’t that make you wonder why it’s happening now? What could have caused this to radically change the climate? This is the wettest June in Australia’s history and rain at this time of year is moderately off season; something seems amiss…

Texas in the United States of America has also been severely affected by these floods. Multiple deaths and record-breaking rainfall have brought global media attention to the area. Just like in Victoria, Australia, Texas is still awaiting even more flood waters and the emergency teams have a hard time expecting when or where the next outbreak will happen. Austin airport recorded the wettest year ever, and the area has been in drought since late 2004. See the trend?

In the United Kingdom the outlook isn’t much better…

Hundreds of families are still unable to return to their homes as floods continue to affect parts of Yorkshire and the Midlands.

And to no surprise, Southern and Eastern England has been in terrible drought for quite some time. The government even had to enforce water restrictions and hosepipe bans to reduce water usage in residential and non-commercial areas.

This is getting a little bit repetitive; so let’s speed thing up a little.

Pakistan – worst drought in its history – cyclone causes floods

Solomon Islands – severe droughts, Australia government provides assistance – heavy flooding

And so on. Remember these floods all took place in June – all at incredibly similar time frames.

But this leads me to think – What could possibly be causing all these droughts followed by severe amounts of flooding? At the same time, all across the globe?

I only have two options in my mind for the cause. The first option leads me the La Niña and El Niño cycle.

Here is a quote from Wikipedia:

El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a global coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon … Their effect on climate in the southern hemisphere is profound … Warm water spreads from the west Pacific and the Indian Ocean to the east Pacific. It takes the rain with it, causing rainfall in normally dry areas and extensive drought in eastern areas.

Well that accounts for the droughts in Australia – but wait a second – weren’t there droughts in the United States as well – at the same time? Isn’t this cycle meant to cause opposite climate conditions across the Pacific Ocean, not natural disasters of the same type at the opposite ends of the world?

Something isn’t right. I’ll disregard that theory and hope for the best with my last option – the most infamous and notorious of all scientific theories to the present day.

Global Warming.

Lately we have been reading Shakespeare in English, which I rather enjoy doing. Last year we read the Merchant of Venice, and this time around we are studying Macbeth. Anyway, the teacher thought showing us a video might give us a feel of what we were reading in the text in context of real life, so we watched Macbeth, the movie version. It was alright and all, but it was a bit boring and dated. I felt as though I’d rather read the script instead. Halfway through the video though, it caught more of my attention.

Lady Macbeth, one of the main characters of the play and wife of Macbeth, was acting strange. Trying to figure out why she was acting out of character and not in flow with what had happened in the first half of the video, I suddenly realised she was sleepwalking.

“Abnormal” behaviours have always struck interest in me and I wondered why she was speaking and sleepwalking at the same time. Lady Macbeth had just helped Macbeth murder the king of Scotland, so it was plausible that stress caused her to sleepwalk, but talking in long, descriptive Shakespearean sentences didn’t seem all that plausible…

So, that still in my mind, I went home and researched sleepwalking on the Internet. Apparently people can talk or “converse” quite easily when sleepwalking. The thing that caught my interest though is the website mentioning that people when sleepwalking are “highly suggestible”. I knew I heard that before and I remembered it had been mentioned loads of times during descriptions of hypnosis. It is widespread and almost everyone knows that when you are in a hypnotic trance, you are more willing to do things that you would not normally do.

This leads me to examine the possibility that sleepwalking and a hypnotic trance are the same thing. You may wonder how that could be so? I’ll explain my theory further…

Lets take a typical person being put into hypnosis and call him Tim.

Tim is fully awake and aware of his surroundings as he enters the room. He is asked to sit down by the hypnotist and slowly he is asked to close his eyes and relax his body, and/or focus on something in his mind or something that the hypnotist is saying to him. Tim calms down, becomes more relaxed, and as he does so the hypnotist ask Tim a few questions, testing how aware he is. After around ten or so minutes, Tim becomes under a trance and the hypnotist continues on until Tim is fully hypnotised, and so on, performing tasks he would not usually and more open about his emotions and personal information. Tim wakes after around twenty minutes and feels relaxed, a fair bit dazed and hardly any recollection of the actual hypnosis.

Now I’ll liken that situation to another; involving Bianca who sleepwalks quite often.

Bianca has yet another stressful day at the office. She doesn’t like her work but she has to remain there because the income is satisfactory and supports her family’s lifestyle. Her boss is extremely strict and has threatened her job on Bianca being repeatedly late on several occasions. Bianca works six days a week and hardly gets to see her husband or two children and she feels guilty for not being around enough. She finishes her shift and drives home, exhausted and ready for bed, knowing that she has to wake up early again the next morning. She goes to bed and within around fifteen minutes is asleep. Bianca’s sleep cycle starts and as she reaches the SSW stage or “Deep Sleep”, Bianca awakens and walks out of her bedroom while talking nonsense. Her husband, used to this kind of thing by now, follows her to make sure she does not harm herself. Bianca walks out of her house and opens her car, sitting in the driver’s seat and trying to turn keys that aren’t there. After about a minute her husband notices that she is steering the car as if it is moving and tries to get her to go back to bed. Her husband guides her back and she stays in bed and has no recollection of the events that occurred when morning breaks.

In both these situations the patients were both engaged with the physical environment. Tim wasn’t as aware as Bianca was though prior to the trance stage, and because of Bianca’s stress, her brain was stimulated as she was falling asleep. This makes up for the time that Bianca was asleep, but remember, “deep sleep” occurs fairly early on in the night, before the REM or “dream” stage begins, so Bianca’s mind still hadn’t had much chance to unwind, so to speak. In both cases they were put into a trance, Bianca’s involving constantly thinking of one subject; almost the same as Tim entered his trance.

Please note that traumatic stress may not be present prior to going to sleep or during the day, but still effects the patient. This is also linked as to how patients can overcome fears and fearful experiences – hypnosis is used for this somewhat effectively – as it tackles the main area of where subconscious stress and anxiety is expressed.

Now here comes the hard part… why did Bianca get up in the first place? It was obvious that suggestibility was the cause for Tim to do his actions, but Bianca had no external stimuli. My theory is that Bianca’s brain, which is proven to lack in some areas as with all sleepwalkers, became suggestible to her own subconscious through an abnormal malfunction – which is always like this but only interprets her subconscious when she is under heavy stress or excessive negative stimulation. This might explain why sleepwalkers mostly do actions related somewhat to their stress. In this case, Bianca was stressed about having to drive to work and fulfilled these actions, while a sleepwalker might excessively clean or other such “day-to-day” actions. Now this might raise the question, “Can all people sleepwalk then?” And the simple answer that I would think correct is no. It’s roughly about 15% of people who have experienced sleepwalking, and most of them generally have a family history. So I think, unless you carry the necessary gene or trait, no matter how much stress you are under, you will not be susceptible to sleepwalk. Assessing my theory on how Bianca’s brain and subconscious were “internally” suggestible might raise the another question. “Can I hypnotise someone in the deep sleep phase?” And the simple answer to that again is probably not. The only reason that Bianca was susceptible to sleepwalking was because of the trait which allowed her subconscious to fulfill those actions. While you are asleep external stimuli and the likes are toned down. And although you might be able to suggest things to a sleepwalker, you would be unable to do the same to someone who couldn’t sleepwalk or similarly, someone who could sleepwalk and wasn’t stressed.

But there’s still one thing that might be flawed with my argument. How can hypnosis and sleepwalking be the same sort of “trance”. To explain this, I’ll draw up a comparison. Lets say something like… writing an essay. Some people write for enjoyment and their own free will, often calm, experimental and emotional when doing so. And sometimes we have to write essays for work, which often are direct, straight to the point, and impersonal – often when the topic doesn’t interest them. This is exactly like hypnosis and sleepwalking. Hypnosis done under a calm situation, relaxing, “light” trance rather than deep, a free-choice exercise and is not normally demanding, while sleepwalking is undertaken under stressful, goal-orientated situations, often “having” to complete a task for no apparent reason. So, essentially, hypnosis is a “light” trance compared to sleepwalking, just as is writing an essay for free will and being forced to do one for work or school. Both examples differ in the situations and ways in which they occur, but are essentially one and the same as each other.

Also, you may be wondering about why people may be able to commit to hypnosis but may not be a susceptible sleepwalker. But I don’t think that is the case at all – it’s possible that everyone who can be hypnotised can sleepwalk and vice versa, but not one without the other. Statistics show around 15% of people respond well to hypnosis, the exact same percentage of those who are known to or suspected to sleepwalk at some time in their life. Coincidence? I think not…

Please note all statistics and information concerning the genes and traits are information taken from reputable websites, but all the theories linking those situations together with hypnosis and sleepwalking are my own, gained from my research and general knowledge. Also, please note that the patients in the situations are an average and relatively normal situation a sleepwalker and hypnosis patient might experience with these trances.

I’m really sick of painting the sets today. It’s gotten really monotonous lately, and the worst thing is that I know it goes on for at least another three days. At least it’s the start of the school break after Friday, because school’s just got so much more boring in the last few weeks. We also got back our half-yearly reports at the end of last week. My best subject was English, as I got a mark of around 98/100, but I lagged in Japanese and Mathematics, getting only just above the average mark of that subject. Other than that though, most of my comments were alright and I didn’t worry about what my teachers had to say too much. That’s about it for school and everything else to do with it – except for the fact that I have a CPR assessment practical in Health on Wednesday and Thursday that I have to study up on.

By the way, I haven’t looked back since joining WordPress. I’ve got so many more hits and comments compared to Blogger and it’s so much easier to find blogs I want and to comment on those ones too. Hopefully in the next couple of days I’ll get even more familiar with WordPress though, as I still find myself a bit lost when managing my settings every so often.

I’ve also decided I’m going to update my header image once in a while, but not with Google images or anything like that. I’m only going to update my header with my images that I have photographed to keep it more interesting, so watch that space.

Also, because my image for Buddy wasn’t so clear the last time I posted it, here’s another version that I took yesterday.

I looked down at the Sunday newspaper this morning. I skipped past the front cover madness of journalistic mumblings and witty headlines and saw there was a free pull-out poster. Being the freebie that I am, I skipped to page one hundred and something and pulled out a rough and highly printed piece of paper.

It was The Simpsons Movie. I got a fair-bit excited as I knew the movie was set to be released soon. I scanned the rest of the poster – July 26th to be exact.

Trying to ignore the fact that a crummy A3 piece of paper didn’t count as a poster by definition or any other measure, the thought of how this movie performed crossed my mind. Would it do okay at the movies… or not? Being somewhat of a Simpsons fan for most of my life, I had noticed that the program has been lacking something extra, especially in the newer series.

On a number of occasions I have clearly noticed the jokes used have been used before. Not in other cartoon series as one might expect, but in previous episodes of The Simpsons itself. Myself, and I assume a few other fans, have been ignoring this lack of creativity and uniqueness in The Simspons episodes, and just waiting for the next episode to force that out of our memories. But that hasn’t happened…

Episode after episode I have waited for a brilliant episode of The Simpsons to come out of the pile of overused pop culture, celebrity and ‘wacky’ plot lines. And now it is crunch time. With the announcement of The Simpsons coming out in mid 2007, fans, including myself, has put aside their harsh criticism and awaited the movie with high expectations. Have all the jokes, plot-lines and creatively humorous situations that were lacking in the newer seasons been shoved into one movie to grace all movies before it?

Let’s step back for a second and assume the latter is the case…

The Simpsons Movie premieres around the world. Critics rave about how ingenious and innovate the movie is and it wins countless awards and nominations at the end of the year. Fans are bestowed with a new liking and fascination with The Simpsons and eagerly await the return of the next season on prime-time television. The new season airs, and fans are disappointed at the rushed quality and dragged out scenes in the episodes. The episodes are of the same quality as before The Simpsons Movie but fans a dealt a bigger blow because of the success of the movie. Ratings sharply fall and the production crew go back and start production of a new series to try and regain fans. The next season airs and even more fans loose interest. The series is cancelled mid-way through and re-runs are shown as before. The re-runs are still overly successful and The Simpsons continues to be on television for a long time to come…

But why are the re-runs still successful in my situation?

This part is simple but extremely complicated. The re-runs are successful because The Simpsons is a successful series. Make sense? I’ll explain it further…

If anyone has looked at the previous seasons on the Simpsons they will notice that they all have a lot in common. In the initial seasons, the producers had to develop and maintain the characters identities in the episodes. Because of this, most characters grew and developed in the early stages of production, rather in the later like some other series. This rapid growth in characters immersed viewers immediately. An implication of all this character development is also how the characters interact with each other. How can you say Bart and Lisa hate each other without episodes having to back this up?

So simply, the Simpsons lack the balance between compassion and creative humour that is obvious in the earlier seasons. Once the characters grew out of their social situations and the fans had a reasonably good idea with one character’s relationship between the rest of the characters, the producers stopped the ‘main plot line’ and adopted a method which shows no character development and a standstill in time which can be described as ‘a day replaying over and over again’. This is why Bart and Lisa never grow older, and while this provides support for the series to go on forever, it has some fairly large downfalls…

So what is the simple answer for The Simpsons to get back it’s original sparkle?

Two words. Character development.

Hmmm… apparently WordPress doesn’t support images that aren’t smooshed up to the text in their editor like Blogger does. Because I can’t edit the HTML code for it to do this everytime for me, I’ll keep this style tag handy whenever I need to use it. For anyone who’s reading, you post this style tag into your image tag, sort of how you set the width and border of the image and in the same section.

style=”margin: 10pt 10pt 10px 10px”

I don’t think I would ever do this – but I have. Today and early this morning I imported all of my previous blog entries from Blogger, straight to WordPress. Immediately I was astounded at how easy it is to set up, navigate and edit your profile and blog compared to Blogger. Don’t get me wrong though; Blogger was great, especially with the ease of me already having a Gmail account, but WordPress seems so much more personal and like a community. Thanks to the Blogger’s Choice Awards, it was easy to see how WordPress ranked compared to Blogger, beating WordPress for first place by a mere 32 points – even though Blogger is a lot more popular than WordPress (as WordPress is not easily search-able on Google with generic terms).

So I’m here. And what do I think? I love it. The templates are absolutely amazing, with such a great range with easy-to-use features that include things such as customisable header images. The thing that made me deside to import all my files though, does not have to do with the presentation or anything fancy like that. WordPress seems to have so many ways of finding people who have similar interests – and you don’t have to be super popular to get a fair few page views. Not to mention they have no bugs compared to Blogger…

Only two pet peeves though. WordPress doesn’t have enough support for images and image editing and aligning, etc, and I miss the use of a HTML/CSS editor, as you have to pay for the upgrade for that and I really can’t bothered spending money on something that should be free.

Anyway, enough about the WordPress and hosting services, it’s time to actually put some content into this page, lol. Please excuse my lack of writing the past couple of days. My blog is still in its early stages of development and needs a couple more weeks until it can stand on it’s own feet, so to speak. I dunno what I should specialise blogging in, so for a little while, all my blog entries will be just some random stuff I thought was interesting, and what happened during my day.

Here are a few photographs I took today while outside and looking at my pet budgerigar, Buddy. I hope you enjoy them!

I’m really annoyed at blogger today. I tried to make my posts have labels now, but of course, it won’t work at all and just glitches all the time. I’m really considering changing to another blog site as blogger isn’t as good as I thought it would be…

Hopefully I’ll calm down soon, lol.

Edit: The pine trees we are painting on the sets look a lot better now.

I’m so angry right now. My brother has potentially ruined the ending and deaths involved with the final book of Harry Potter, The Deathly Hallows…

I was so excited this morning as I realised it was exactly one month until the release of the final Harry Potter book by J.K Rowling. I’ve been waiting for this book for years, and it’s gotten harder to wait by each month that goes past with no new Harry Potter material to read. I do feel very upset that the series is coming to a close so soon though; I don’t think there are any books comparable to Harry Potter that I have enjoyed and re-read so many times. They are truly, in my opinion, the best works of literature during my entire lifetime (and many others, presumably).

Anyway, my anxiety of the release date has grown considerably with each day, especially when I solved the title of the book on the official J.K Rowling website. This anxiety was also pressured greatly by the new movie of the Order of the Phoenix, and especially the new theme park in Orlando, United States of America, that is set to be opened in 2009. All those things just drove my desire to have my hands on the book and know the fate of Harry Potter and his friends…

But all my excitement is somewhat shattered now, with my brother almost completely spoiling the ending.

The ending was posted by a hacker on a website, where he clearly states all the ending plot details in his post. The hacker apparently managed to get into a computer with the plot details in the hard drive, and retrieve the data electronically (and illegally, if that is so). I hope the website, which he showed me, is a deliberate and elaborate hoax, but really feel that this is the truth. I hope I am wrong.

If you would like to read any articles about this, please search google with “Harry Potter Spoiler”. As it is a current news item, there will probably be a lot of news articles reguarding this. I please advise you though, if you are a fan of Harry Potter, not to read through these articles if you can help it.

Just to show you how low some people go, here is a direct quote from the hacker, who goes by the name “Gabriel”.

“We make this spoiler to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring,”