March 2009 – Page 2

I am the Wombat

Goo Goo G’joob!

If you fell foul of a witch, what animal would you be turned into?

I rather think I’d turn into a wombat. Wombats are antipodean and rotund, like myself. They like to sleep, but can be tenacious when the mood takes them. They waddle along in an amusing fashion but with a look of determination that seems to say, “Yes, I may be round and antipodean and have an amusing waddle, but I have things to be doing, so please move aside”.

Yeah, I reckon I’d be a wombat.

PS: Big congrats to Ali and Matt! 😀

The Hideous Horrors of Home Hygiene

Why can’t we just eat out of a trough?

Oh! How I hate to wash up in the morning,
Oh how I hate to wash up at all!
But the unkindest cut to date’s,
When I run out of cups and plates,
You’ve gotta wash up!
You’ve gotta wash up!
You’ve gotta wash up this morning!
You’ve gotta wash up!
You’ve gotta wash up!
You’ve gotta wash up today!

I composed this charming ditty some years ago when once again faced with a gigantic heap of cutlery and crockery piled up on my kitchen sink. It is based (of course) on Irving Berlin’s Oh how I hate to wake up in the Morning which itself is based on the traditional reveille of the US Army.

(Irving Berlin, there’s an interesting fellow. Coming from a poor and Jewish background (in a time when being Jewish was a major social disadvantage) he managed to create a career as America’s best loved songsmith. He fell in love with a non-Jewish girl whose wealthy father was scandalised at the thought of her marrying not just a Jew, but a working class Jew, and sent her off on a round the world cruise in the hopes she’d forget about him. Irving kept in touch with her via letter for the whole journey and wrote Always one of his biggest hits for her. They got married almost immediately on her return. Irving was pretty much persona-non-gratia with his in-laws until the stock market crash of 1929 when his wife’s father lost huge sums of money and found himself heavily in debt. Irving was still pulling in cash hand over fist despite the economic collapse (or perhaps because of it – it can be argued that the worse things get the more people need songs) and paid off all his debts, refusing to hear a thing about being payed back. From that point on he was a welcome member of the family. Or at least that’s the story I heard. But I digress.)

The reason I detail this rather awful parody of an American classic is that, once again, I find myself confronted with a sink piled high with used plates. This is because (as the song suggests) I hate doing the washing up. I hate spending time on a menial and slightly disgusting chore when I could be doing other far more interesting things. Which means that I tend to use every bit of crockery and cutlery I have (eating my dinner off saucers is by no means unheard of) until I completely run out and have no choice but to buckle down and do it.

Now yes, I could get a dishwasher, but frankly I’ve never liked them. They’re big, noisy, use criminal amounts of water and (in my admittedly limited experience) don’t do a terribly good job anyway. You have to wash down the plates and cups and things before putting them in, and then have to finish the job by manually scrubbing off tough stains and dried food bits that the machine missed. This is frankly not very efficient, and I won’t have a bar of it.

So I am once again doomed to spending the next forty minutes or so with my hands submerged in soapy and increasingly filthy water, trying to find drying space for the huge piles of cups, knives, forks and plates that have accumulated in my kitchen for the last week. And once again I will promise to myself to do the washing up on a nightly basis. And once again I shall immediately break that promise and start the whole process over again.

I’m gonna need a bigger sink.

Jack Sprat and the Doom of Dogs

Better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull!

Many years ago, when my brother and I were young kids our parents would occasionally leave us in the care of our aunts overnight. They lived in a small, yet somehow rambling house in North Perth with our two cousins – both boys about eight years older than us. It can’t have been much fun for them as teenagers babysitting two little kids, but they did a good job and I can’t remember a single incident of teasing or cruelty towards us on their part.

One thing they did do however was teach us two very important and little known facts, which I shall now reveal to the world at large.

The first concerns the gap down the back of an armchair, between the cushions on your couch, or even between a bed and the wall. You may think this is nothing but a depository for loose change, but in fact it is a dimensional portal that opens solely for members of the canine clan. It is The Doom of Dogs!

I have to admit I was a bit shaky on exactly what happens to any pooch that falls into the Doom of Dogs – the cousins seemed a bit shaky on that themselves – but whatever it is it must be fairly terrible because their aged terrier Suzie (her full name was actually Suzie Wong, but that’s a story for another day) would run for the hills whenever we placed her on the couch and started pulling the cushions apart.

(Of course we would never have let her actually fall into the Doom, we were merely using her to demonstrate the concept. Repeatedly. Every time we went over there in fact.)

The second important thing they taught us was the real words to the nursery rhyme Jack Sprat. You are no doubt familiar with the traditional version, learnt from books and at nursery school…

Jack Sprat could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean,
And so betwixt them both, you see,
They licked the platter clean,

Well the real version, passed down through our cousins’ family line for generations (or at least since they made it up the previous week) is…

Jack Sprat forgot his back,
His dog was green with envy,
So together they sat, on Old Shag’s back,
And told stupid stories,

Now the meaning of this rhyme (not that it rhymes very much, if at all) is naturally an ancient and terrible secret. I could of course tell you, but then I’d have to condemn you to the Doom of Dogs, and no one wants that…

Lost in Austen

TV makes everything better!

One of the things about myself that I’m kind of embarrassed about is that while I apparently come across as highly erudite and well educated, I’m not actually particularly literary. Confront me with a list of the greatest novels of the last 200 years and I’ll have to admit that I’ve read very few of them. Dostoyevsky? Nope. Balzac? Nup. Orwell? No. Tolstoy? ‘Fraid not. The Brontës? Uh-uh. Steinbeck? Never. Dickens? Well I read Great Expectations in high school. Kipling? No. The list goes on.

A few years ago I decided to do something about this. I – on the basis that everyone always goes on and on about it – obtained a copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and set to work on it with vigour and enthusiasm.

I got about two thirds of the way through before collapsing in apathy and giving up.

I just couldn’t get into it. The pace was glacial, there were dozens of characters you had to keep track of, Elizabeth and Darcy were irritating as all get out and I really just could not motivate myself to push through to the end. Once again literature one, me nil.

(I dare say the book’s many millions of fans – or at least the few that stumble over this blog – are foaming at the mouth at the above. Let me state here that I’m in no way saying it’s a bad book, just one that I couldn’t understand. The fault is entirely mine!)

The reason I bring all this up was that the ABC played the first two (as is their wont) episodes of Lost in Austen last night, and I loved it. It was freaking hilarious!

For those unfamiliar with the premise, a young 21st century woman (and fan of the book) finds herself somehow swapped with Elizabeth Bennet and by her very presence horribly disrupting the plot. Her attempts to get things back on track make matters even worse and – well I don’t want to include any spoilers and I’ve only seen half of it anyway, but it’s entertaining in the extreme.

(Mr Collins! Oh my lord Mr Collins!! The sniffing!!)

I think one of the main reasons I like this version is that the actors do all the heavy lifting on remembering who’s who. It’s much easier to remember what’s going on when you’ve got a clear image of each character in your head. It’s also got the right mix of sly, post-modern humour and Austenic (if I might be permitted to coin an adjective) witticisms. I’m very much looking forwards to the conclusion next week and, who knows, once it’s all over I may even go back and give the book another try.

Maybe.

The Ghost Who Lurks

Wheelchair bound freaks!

I am by nature a lurker. Rather than being involved with things I prefer to stand on the fringes looking in. If I won the lottery (not likely since I never buy a ticket) and decided to hire a nightclub to throw a big party for all my friends (well what would you do if you won the lottery then?), I’d spend most of it sitting in the office keeping half an eye on things through the security cameras. Like I said, a lurker.

The reason I mention this is because it explains my attitude to forums. I keep an eye on quite a few forums, but I am not a member of any of them. I just drop in and check the threads, often on a daily basis. And 90% of the time that’s fine. I feel no social impulse to jump in and take part and feel in no way deprived, isolated or left out.

Occasionally however I come across a thread where I’d actually have something to contribute. An idea, or a comment, or some experience relevant to the subject being discussed. It’s times like this that I wish I was a member of the board – not enough to actually sign up – but enough to be mildly irritated at my inability to contribute.

So, what better to do than ‘contribute’ through my blog? Sure, the people on the boards may never see it, and probably wouldn’t care if they did (apart from wondering who this anti-social weirdo is) but at least it gets the ideas out of my head.

So that’s what I’m going to do here.

The board in question is Whitechapel, one of the domains of Warren Ellis (King of the Internet), and the thread is the latest “Remake/Remodel” challenge. Rather than go to the trouble of explaining what this is, I’ll be lazy and let Warren explain it…

So, every week or two, I set all the artists at my message board a challenge called REMAKE/REMODEL. I pick a character — usually some ancient pulp character from the claggy depths of the public domain — and tell the artists to reinterpret said character from a modern perspective.

This week he selected a certain Ivan Brodsky (Note: At least one of the remodels is seriously not safe for work, or anyone of a sensitive disposition. You have been warned).

Now, I’m no artist. I can – if I try very hard – draw something that probably wouldn’t be laughed out of town, but it certainly wouldn’t be applauded either. But I have a very good idea of what I’d try to draw if I could draw, and if I was a member of Whitechapel, and will describe it here in a ‘pen portrait’.

(Yes, I realise Warren specifically outlaws pen portraits and hence would be likely to set his eels on me if I tried this kind of crap in his thread. But this isn’t his thread, it’s a blog post aimed in the general direction of his thread, so I think I can claim a certain amount of immunity. I hope. Get the iron trousers Marion! 🙂

So imagine if you will, a wizened figure in an electric wheelchair. His withered body is strapped in and his oversize head is held up with braces. The left side of his body and face are scarred and burnt, and his left arm hangs limply. His right arm grasps the joystick that drives his mechanical conveyance. Hung around his neck are the sacred insignia of a multiple faiths. A crucifix, a hand of Fatima, a seal of David, a Khanda and a dozen others.

Various metal rods and wires stick out of the left side of his bald head which is heavily scarred. His left eye is clearly artificial, a bulging, oversize globe painted with a spiraling, hypnotic pattern. His remaining eye has a piercing, penetrating quality with more than a suggestion of madness…

Dr Ivan Brodsky was a brilliant, if amoral brain surgeon who was the only survivor of an operating theatre explosion. Flying surgical instruments severed his spine and were driven deep into his brain, altering his neural pathways to let him perceive things men were not meant to see! His patented hypno-eye(tm) was a later innovation to enhance his hypnotic abilities.

Eat your heart out Stan Lee! 😀

So yeah. The pine nut curse has dissipated (for now), I’m busy cataloging and sorting the photos of my UK trip back in 2004 and uploading them to Flickr and I saw Watchmen yesterday which I quite enjoyed despite leaving my glasses at home and hence having to watch the entire film through my sunglasses. Apart from that it’s business as usual at the Wyrmcave. Boring, awful normal ;D

That is all.