Boredom Attainment Index

I was initially going to call this post “Attention Span” but I decided that didn’t accurately represent the topic of this post. I wanted to write about how I tend to get bored with hobbies or projects relatively quickly (anyone who could’ve been bothered to keep track of my various blogs would testify to this). I decided that this wasn’t an issue with my attention span per se, as I will often stay focused on something (e.g. a conversation or a movie without distraction). It is more to do with hobbies (blog writing, model building, beer making etc.) in that after a random period of time I’ll want to find a new hobby, even if it’s as simple as a new blog with a different focus. Ironically blogs really are designed to be a flexible, often random collection of thoughts or ideas, varying from one post to the next. I think part of the boredom resolution is in setting up the blog.

Anyway, I decided that my issue needed to be quantified a little better, so I’ve come up with the “Boredom Attainment Index”. The idea is that if you quickly become bored you have a low boredom attainment index (I’ll call it BAI from now on) and if you can keep the same hobby for 42 years you have a high BAI. For example if you get bored with something whilst you are still in the process of deciding what to do you’d have a BAI of 1. If you’ve been making paper airplanes in your spare time for the past 25 years you’d have a BAI of 10. In the next few weeks/months if I don’t get bored of my BAI concept I’ll quantify the scale further.

Perhaps you have some ideas about how the BAI should work or stories about your pastimes and how they fit into the BAI, I’d love to hear them or put them in my blog (if I’m not bored of it by then).

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Dream Boat

Dream boat sounds more like a term used by 16 year old girls in 1962, but dream yacht just doesn’t sound as catchy.

From a young age I enjoyed sailing, mainly small boats like the beautiful wooden Gwen 12 we used to own (we are not sailing the one below).

The beautiful Gwen 12 (wish I could sail that well)

Of course time and money is the root of all problems related to sailing and the boats went. The dream was always kept alive by a couple of naval architecture books relating to yacht design. The two books were Further Offshore by Ed Mapes and Cruising Under Sail by Eric Hiscock. These books had an array of beautiful yachts both big and small from which I used to pick my ideal yacht. Of course the beauty of doing this when you were young was that cost and logistics were not an issue. I could just pick a yacht and sail off into the sunset. We can still dream when older, they are just complicated by factors such as, who will pay the bills, how much do I have to win in the lottery to afford all this and when will the kids move out so we can disappear into the sunset?

My dreams have again led me down the path of my perfect yacht. Today they have settled themselves on this 51 foot dinghy.

My dream yacht

It’s a beautiful example of a yawl. A yawl has a mizzen mast that is located aft of the rudder post. For those non-nautical types the smaller stick that holds one of the sails is located right at the back of the boat. The particular yawl shown was designed by Phillip Rhodes and built in 1947.

As luck would have it, this truly beautiful yacht is for sale. I can have it for the bargain price of $413,000 US. Of course I then just have to work out how to get it from Rhode Island to Melbourne, but at least I know how much I have to win in the lottery.

Perhaps I’ll just stick with the Gwen 12 (again, I am not sailing this particular one, yet).

The Three Graces

This has to be one of the most beautiful sculptures in the whole world. You can thank Antonio Canova for this piece of work (if you know how to talk to dead people). There are probably a couple of people that were expecting something different when they read the title, I hope you are pleasantly surprised.

The Three Graces by Antonio Canova at the Hermitage Museum.

Wikipedia says that this is a Neoclassical sculpture (whatever that means). All I know is that from the moment I saw it in the historical drama Russian Ark (I’ll talk about that another day) it has ranked in my top 10 sculptures. If you’re wondering what the other 9 sculptures in my top 10 are stop, even I don’t know. I don’t know about the symbolism of this work or how to describe it’s artistic beauty, all I know is I find it to be a warm piece full of love. Often I think sculptures in stone can be cold and laking in life, this looks like Euphosyne, Aglaea and Thalia have been captured in a secret embrace whilst spending time at the Hermitage. I’d hope you get a feeling they are really there with you (even if they are unaware) when you see the piece in real life (perhaps someone can comment).

One day I will travel to the Hermitage Museum to view this piece and every other amazing work of art kept there.

Scarred For Life And Getting Loaded

When I was younger I had some friends who thought they were the self appointed gurus of cool. This self indulgence only worsened in university. It got to the point that I stopped telling them what sort of music I liked or what books I was reading, for fear of being labeled mainstream or lacking in culture. I can still hear they’re mocking tones about how a song wasn’t real music if it made the top 40 and was played on commercial radio. Even more painful was they’re self appointed subject matter expert opinions on everything that was wrong with the world from politics to economics. I now know why I got totally loaded when I was around them, it really did dull the pain.

This is one of my all time favourite posters. I laughed my arse off and wanted to go have a drink when I first saw it.

I’m sure if they were to read my posts they’d suggest my misuse of the English language was tantamount to raping the soul of Shakespeare. What I’ve come to realize is, if I like it who gives a shit what others think. Real friends will say “man you listen to/read/watch/like some crazy shit, but that’s cool, you probably think the same about me”.

Bite my arse Shakespeare. Some of your work is very cool, but some of it makes no sense to me whatsoever.

This blog is a big up yours to those who have stunted my ability to say how I feel and talk about the things I like. The only problem might lie in my short attention span (I just spent 10 minutes looking for something about attention spans and ended up looking at social facepalm images), this blog business could take a while.