For sale signs for houses are usually full of hyperbole of how wonderful the house is, even if the house doesn’t live up to the way it is described, which is normally the case.

However, what do you write for a house that is so bad that you can’t even think of one good selling point?

Perhaps this For Sale sign for a house near the end of my street might answer your question.

It reads:

Land Value With A Bonus House

• MASSES of Work to Do
• Cheapest House in the District
• Only For The Very Brave Or Very Bored

I am wondering if this house is actually going to sell at auction this week and if so, how much for.  If I find out, I will let you all know.

There are those movies that you will proudly admit to loving to anyone who asks and then there are those movies that you watch almost in secret (and no, I don’t mean porn) and you would never admit to actually liking.  These are movies that you feel are kinda dorky, but you love them anyway.

What movie/s do you love but are almost too embarrassed to admit to it?

For me, it is Three To Tango.  I just love this film yet it fall squarely in a genre that I really don’t like, the romantic comedy.  I find most romantic comedies predicable and extremely cheesy.  Yet for some unknown reason, I love Three To Tango even though it is just as cheesy as the rest of the genre. Maybe I love it because it deals with gay issues and stars the gorgeous Neve Campbell and the fantastic Oliver Platt.  Maybe I love it cause it makes me laugh, I really don’t know. I do know  I love it so much that I tracked down a copy of it on DVD to replace my video cassette copy.  It is currently hidden amongst all my ‘cooler’ movies hoping that no one notices it.

Now I have revealed my embarrassing movie love, it’s your turn.

I started getting into skeptic and science podcasts about a month ago and have tracked down an amazing collection to listen to on the way to and from work.

What I am listening to at the moment are:

• Monster Talk
• Skepticality
• Skeptics With A K
• Skeptoid
• The Skeptic Zone
• The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
• This Week In Science

If you are interested in the skeptical movement, I thoroughly recommend downloading one or more of the podcasts above and having a listen to them.

For those of you already heavily involved in the skeptical movement and much more knowledgeable than I, which fantastic podcasts am I missing that I should be listening to.

I also have this list in my sidebar and will update it with any new podcasts I discover.

For today’s installment of Curious Minds:

Can you describe your life with a six word sentence?

‘Constantly wanting to learn new things’ is mine and I think it sums my life up pretty well, especially considering all the varied jobs I have had and the fields of study I have done.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion and to share their opinion to everyone that they want to.  However, when you are a celebrity, for better or worse, your opinion carries more weight than the average person on the street.  Therefore, celebrities should think before they speak and should research their opinions before they relate them to the media.

Enter, Jenny McCarthy, a once minor celebrity on MTV and now a major anti-vaccination proponent.  She has a son with autism, which she attributes to childhood vaccinations.  She has appeared on Oprah numerous times since 2007 preaching the fact that vaccinations are dangerous and encouraging parents not to vaccinate their children.  Thanks to Jenny McCarthy and people like her, the rate of vaccination in the US and other developed countries has fallen to levels where previously rare diseases are making a comeback.  Jenny McCarthy has a body count to her name.

Oprah, you don’t get away scott free either.  You have given this quack a platform to preach her dangerous ideas to millions of parents worldwide. You  don’t offer any other viewpoint nor do you challenge her views.  Shame on you.

It both amuses and appals me when some Christians make shit up in an attempt to try to prove how their god is so much better than anyone else’s.  This article by Kimberly Davies called The Danger of Celebrating Halloween fell into the amusing category cause it is so out there that the fact that anyone could believe this nonsense is mind boggling.
She writes

The word “holiday” means “holy day.” But there is nothing holy about Halloween. The root word of Halloween is “hallow,” which means “holy, consecrated and set apart for service.” If this holiday is hallowed, whose service is it set apart for? The answer to that question is very easy—Lucifer’s!

And it just gets better from there on in.

She comes up with gems like

Most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

and

During this season witches are celebrating the changing of the seasons from summer to fall. They give praise to the gods for the demonic harvest.

The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) originally published this article on their site, but now appear to feel differently about promoting this idiotic nonsense as this article has since been removed.  However, thanks to the caching powers of Google, we can still enjoy it in all its entirety.  Thanks Google!

My life has gotten extremely hectic lately.  My weekends are packed with things to do and people to see and my weeknights seemed to be filled with playing catch up of all the household duties that didn’t get done over the weekend.  I am feeling stressed out and exhausted.  I am dreaming of having a whole week off from life to rest and relax, even just one day with nothing planned and nothing around the house to do would be heaven. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have even a spare day until about December.

Therefore, to aid me in dreaming about the perfect day off, I have the following question for all of you.

If you could spend a whole day doing exactly as you wished with no demands and no responsibilities, what would you do?

For those of you who are new to reading this blog and don’t really know anything about me,  I have been doing Kung Fu for the past 7 months.  I have my brown belt which  is equivalent to your yellow belt in Karate i.e it is the belt you get after your first grading.  I am very much a raw beginner.  Today was my third tournament (my second one being just last weekend) and I was signed up to compete in Beginners/Intermediate Soft Traditional Forms.  However, due to not many people signing up for this event (I was the only one), they combined it with Advanced/Black Belt.  This meant that in this competition I would be competing against people who had been doing martial arts for years, which was really not fair.  My instructor lodged a bit of complaint and got me moved to the Beginners/Intermediate Hard Form division instead.  However, this division had already started their competition by the time this all got organised, so with no warm up or run through of my form, I went and competed.  Out of a field of 10 competitors, I came third, which completely shocked and totally amused me as my kata felt nowhere near as solid as I could perform it.

What was even more amusing, was that I was competing at the AMAC Australian Titles, which featured the best martial artists competing on the AMAC circuit in Australia.  Not really sure how I pulled that one off.  I must admit I am left wondering how I might have done if I had warmed up first, still I am more than happy with third place and my rather big trophy.

On the left hand side is my 3rd place AMAC Australian Titles trophy and on the right hand side is my 1st place AMAC Round 4 Beginners Traditional Hard Form trophy

November 1st is the beginning of the National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) where the aim is to post at least one blog post every single day for the entire month of November – that is 30 posts in 30 days.  For the third year in a row I have signed up for NaBloPoMo after swearing every year never to do it ever again.  I fool myself into thinking that this will instill in me good blog posting habits for the rest of the year.  This year is no exception.

Therefore from the 1st November, there will be a brand new blog post for you every single day.  If you don’t want to miss them, then subscribe to my RSS feed.  :)  I hope I can come up with really interesting topics to post about every day, but if there is anything you want me to cover, then let me know either in the comments section or through the Contact Me page.

Cover Songs – they can either be done really well or sound absolutely dreadful, yet many artists take the risk that their interpretation of a famous song won’t fall into the latter category.

This morning, I found this amazing cover version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, performed by one of my favourite musicians Imogen Heap and I think it is just gorgeous.  What is your opinion?

Note the video just plays the music, no images so don’t be disturbed by seeing just a black screen.

I also love Alanis Morisette’s cover of King of Pain

What are you favourite cover songs??  Post links if they are on You Tube or LastFM as I would love to hear them.