Purple Wyrm – Page 121

Blast from the Past

Like sands through the hourglass…

Dingalings do stupid things, they don’t think of others at all,
They’re dopes and bullies, see the trouble they bring? That’s what we call dingalings!

If you’re now wondering about my sanity then you obviously didn’t grow up in Perth in the 80’s…

Dingalings
Vitamins
Nutrition
Dirt and Germs

I stumbled across a Livejournal page linking to these while searching for info on the old Ascot Water Playground. This was a favourite summer destination when I was a kid and I only just discovered that it’s all shut down and derelict. I cycled over today and scouted it out for Abandoned in Perth. I’ll probably get a proper expedition together later on.

It was a great place Ascot Water Playground. You had a big pool at the bottom, a sort of concrete bunker halfway up with fountains and slippery metal ladders (which were a death trap waiting to happen frankly) and two smaller pools at the top linked with locks. Locks! Like on a canal! A paddling stream ran from the top pools all the way down the hill to the bottom pool and one year (oh the excitement!) they opened a new pool with water slides. And admission was whatever you decided to put into the tins at the gates!

One of the defining moments of my childhood was at Ascot, the day when I finally summoned the courage to climb the deathtrap ladders all the way to the top. All the other kids (including my younger brother) who’d been clambering up and down them with abandon for years kept mocking me mercilessly about my cowardice, and on this particular day I decided I was going to conquer them even if it meant I fell to my death on the concrete below. I waited until there was no one in the bunker (both so the other kids wouldn’t figure out how badly their mockery hurt me, and so that if I chickened out at the last minute there’d be no one to see) and hauled myself up the slippery bars and over the top onto the roof. Then I clambered back down and wandered off, quite happy with myself.

(I only ever climbed the ladders once again – the next time the other kids started mocking me. I climbed up and down once to shut them up, and then never risked it again. Honestly, I’m amazed no one was ever killed on those things.)

But – back to the modern day – run off from the park into the river was apparently getting out of control (the site is right on the riverfront) and there were all kinds of liability issues (those ladders I bet), so the playground had to shut down about five or six years back. Another irreplaceable childhood memory gone – although at least it’s gone in a way that provides me with something to clamber around and take eerie photos of.

The Livejournal page I stumbled across has a bunch of other musings about Perth in the 80s, including a reminder of the plastic tugboats and space shuttles you used to get Red Rooster in. How could I forget those!? They were made of extremely thin and brittle plastic (that crumbled after only a few hours exposure to Perth’s harsh summer sunshine) and you got a sheet of stickers to personalise them with. Great days!

I’ll have to write about my memories of Atlantis Marine Park and Dizzy Lamb sometime I suppose…

So, any plans for the weekend?

BAH!!!

I planned to take things nice and easy this weekend. Work has been extremely stressful for the last few weeks (for various reasons) and I was looking forwards to a couple of days of sitting in my cave watching DVDs and laughing at stupid cat pictures on the internet, before catching the train down to Mandurah on Monday and photographing what (if anything) is left of the old Castle Fun Park for Abandoned in Perth.

In fact I was so exhausted when I got home from the office last night that I had a light dinner and went to bed at the ridiculously early time of 7:45. I was just drifting off to sleep, snuggling up to a pillow and imagining it was Miranda from Mysterious Ways, when I was startled back to full wakefulness by a loud, BZZZZZZZTTTTTTTT!! sound that seemed to come out of nowhere.

I started up in shock, but when there was no repeat I wrote it off as some bogan stripping his gearbox in the carpark and got back to the business of sleep. However a few minutes later – BZZZZZZZTTTTTTTT!! again. And this time it definately seemed to come from within the apartment.

I got up and started looking around. I could think of nothing in my possession that could create such a sound. But as I stood in the loungeroom, puzzling over the phenomenon, it happened again – a loud BZZZZZZZTTTTTTTT!!, quite clearly emanating from the kitchen.

I investigated. Was there a a giant wasp from the carboniferous period trapped under the sink? No. I was trying to come up with an alternate explanation when the noise came again, and this time I was able to identify it as coming from the fridge.

A couple of minutes experimentation found the answer. Any time the fridge tried to power up its compressor it would shudder to a halt with a loud, electronic BZZZZZZZTTTTTTTT!!. Crap.

Given that there was no way I could sleep with random buzzing noises I switched it off at the plug and went back to bed.

Close investigations this morning have revealed that there’s really no point trying to get it repaired (I bought it second hand about eight years ago, so it’s had a good run). I’m about to head off to buy a new one, which probably won’t be able to be delivered until Monday. So my nice quiet weekend is now filled with stress and warm food (this would happen on the first really hot weekend of spring wouldn’t it?) and I can’t possibly head down to Mandurah on Monday because I need to be here to accept delivery.

Wonderful.

Later:

I’ve just got back from the city where I’ve bought a slightly dented yet perfectly functional fridge for only $700 (gotta love factory seconds). The downside? They can’t deliver until Thursday. Thursday! What is this!? The middle ages!?

Anyway my frozen stuff has been shipped off to the folks to look after (or eat) and some essentials are being kept cool in the freezer compartment along with 5kg of ice. I’ve tipped the entire fridge onto its back to help (hey, if you can’t figure out why then go learn some physics). So it looks like I’ve got my Monday back. If I’m in any mood to do anything that is.

I think I’ll listen to some music.

Things you don’t want to hear…

It’s things like this that make you ashamed of your entire gender…

So I go to bed last night at a reasonable hour and (I must admit for the first time in ages) am kept awake by the guy in the apartment downstairs. Rather than his usual schick of wandering around his yard yelling into his mobile phone about building cupboards, this time he and a friend sat around loudly discussing their venereal diseases.

Yes, that’s what I said. Venereal diseases.

Specifically genital warts (although herpes was also mentioned). The main gist seemed to be that the friend had recently developed a very large wart in a particularly prominent position, and his new girlfriend was asking him questions about it.

My neighbour’s advice about this situation was to slather the offending growth with over-the-counter wart medication to burn it off. In the meantime he should tell his girlfriend that it was a birthmark and that he’d had it for years. This way he would not only avoid any awkward situations, but when she dumped him (I presume on discovering that he’s a deceptive, self serving bastard…) he’d have the satisfaction of knowing that she’d pass the infection on to her new boyfriend, which would serve them both right.

(Presumably if she developed cervical cancer later down the line it would also serve her right…)

They carried on discussing the subject for about an hour before heading back inside and letting me get to sleep.

I am seriously considering cutting out a stencil and spraying “DANGER! GENITAL WARTS!” in large red letters on his door in the middle of the night. Or maybe doing a letter drop on the same subject across the whole complex…

Hey Hey it’s Bigotry!

We’re not all ignorant rednecks you know…

I thought I’d better weigh in on the whole Hey Hey it’s Saturday blackface incident since it seems to be getting a lot of international attention and I don’t particularly want to be tarred with the same brush (oh man, that sounds like a really bad pun, sorry) that so many of my fellow Australians seem to be being tarred with.

(If you don’t know what it’s all about, just Google it)

The important facts that a lot of commentators seem ignorant of are as follow…

1: Blackface doesn’t have the same notoriety here in Australia as it does overseas. We have a different culture here to the United States and don’t have the long and shameful history of blackface on the stage and cinema. Sadly a lot of Australians are completely ignorant of this history and are hence unaware of the pain and offence it can cause.

2: The performance on Hey Hey was a recreation of an act originally staged 20 years ago. Idiotic football celebrities aside it’s a rare and notable thing to see anyone done up in blackface in modern Australia for any reason (and if it does occur it’s met with disapproval and severe criticism).

3: The performers are of various racial backgrounds, including Indians and Asians. It’s not a simple case of a bunch of white Anglo Saxons blacking up.

4: Hey Hey is (God knows why) a treasured and well loved piece of Australian culture, attacks on which by ‘foreigners’ seems to trigger a strange and disproportionate form of ‘my country right or wrong’ defence from some sectors of the community.

Basically the act was not intended to cause offence, or reference the blackface stereotype. It was just a bit of really badly thought out idiocy that never should have gone to air if anyone at Channel Nine had actually stopped and used their brains for a few seconds. The fact that it did go to air, and that it did cause offence is something that should be unreservedly apologised for.

Now, onto the reactions. While the innocent (albeit thoroughly stupid) intent of the performers can be defended, the resulting act and the offence caused cannot. There seems to be a certain sector of the Australian population (many of them members of the anti ‘political correctness’ brigade) who are leaping up and down over some perceived right to slather boot polish on their faces and go around loudly eating watermelon on the basis that “it’s just a joke” and “people shouldn’t be so sensitive”. A lot of these people are hitting on two particular points in their arguments, which I shall now address.

1: Harry Connick Junior once took part in a sketch parodying a black preacher, and used makeup to darken his skin. Hence he’s a hypocrite.

2: Robert Downey Junior was made up as an African American man in Tropic Thunder and no one complained.

Neither of these points is particularly valid. Yes, Harry Connick Junior was made up with darkened skin for that sketch, but there’s a difference between the slight darkening employed there, and the wholesale boot polish job employed on Hey Hey. Similarly in Tropic Thunder the make up and prosthetics employed actually make Robert Downey Junior look African American – as opposed to a white man painted black – and much of the humour in the movie is based around the inappropriateness of using make up (and plastic surgery) to make a white actor look black. This subtlety seems to be lost of a lot of people defending the Hey Hey act.

So that’s my two cents. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s plenty of Australians – such as myself – who were outraged, disgusted and embarrassed by the fact that such a performance should be put to air in modern day Australia, and who are just as outraged, disgusted and embarrassed by the ignorant loudmouths trying to defend it. Insomuch as I can personally apologise for the actions of my fellow Australians I do so, completely and unreservedly. Sorry.

What a lucky man he was!

This is your whale. This is your whale on drugs.

Hmmm, well I haven’t done much posting recently have I? I’ll put it down to getting back into the swing of work and spending much of my time uploading and annotating photos from my UK trip. I’ve almost finished the first day’s worth!

I’ve also got caught up in a writing challenge on Whitechapel. It’s the first time I’ve tried writing anything but mindless blog drivel and role playing material in ages, so we’ll see how it goes. The deadline is November 1st – with luck it’ll actually be readable by then.

Kraft has come to it’s senses and realised that “iSnack 2.0” is one of the worst marketing decisions in history. They’ve posted a bunch of more popular names to their website for the public to vote on and will be announcing the replacement name this week. I didn’t bother to vote – I’m just happy that clueless tech-speech abomination is being banished. Anyway, the only name I would have voted for is ‘Voldemite’ and that wasn’t on the list.

Before I go I’ll direct everyone’s attention to this song, which I discovered over the weekend – “Lucky Man” by Emerson Lake and Palmer. The song itself is (in my opinion) nothing special, a fairly dreary rock-folk dirge about a guy who goes off to war and gets shot. What makes it remarkable is the play out, the only explanation for which I can come up with is that they got a humpbacked whale in to do guest vocals and dosed it up on LSD.

Listen to the first 20 seconds or so to get the scope of the piece (it’s all like that), then jump to 3.20 to be astounded by the assorted wails, shrieks, groans and howls you get when you pump twenty litres of hallucinogens into a giant sea-going mammal!

That’s all I’ve got to say.

I can’t stop listening to this…

I’m not very good at singing songs but here’s a try…

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
You must first invent the universe,
Space is filled with a network of wormholes,
You might emerge somewhere else in space,
Somewhen else in time,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The cosmos is full beyond measure,
With elegant truths,
Of exquisite interrelationships,
Of the awesome machinery of nature,

I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos,
In which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky,

The brain does much more than just recollect,
It intercompares, synthesises, analyses,
It generates abstractions,
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one,
Has an elaborate, logical underpinning,
The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

For thousands of years,
People have wondered about the universe,
Did it stretch out forever?
Or was there a limit?
From the big bang to black holes,
From dark matter to a possible big crunch,
Our image of the universe today is full of strange sounding ideas,

How lucky we are to live in this time,
The first moment in human history,
When we are, in fact, visiting other worlds,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The surface of the earth,
Is the shore of a cosmic ocean,
Recently we have waded a little way out,
And the water seems inviting…

Glorious Return

They couldn’t keep me silent forever!

Well, I’m back.

Actually I’ve been back for over a week, but madness involving unpacking, getting back to work and getting my landline fixed (no internet for days! days!!) have prevented me from doing much online. Even the Queen’s birthday weekend was a blow-out thanks to a nasty 24 hour cold that had me coughing like a Dickensian orphan and feeling like death for most of Sunday and Monday, but I’m more or less back on deck now.

I’ve started uploading my holiday snaps onto Flickr. This is quite a daunting prospect as it turns out I took hundreds, if not thousands of the things. I haven’t even managed to get all of the first day’s up yet – let alone annotated and geotagged. It’s clearly going to be a long term project, you can check my progress here.

Other things of note. The new Vegemite product has apparently been named “iSnack 2.0”. If this is the kind of thing that’s going to happen when I leave the country I can clearly never take a vacation again. Also, although I can’t speak as to the accuracy of the last panel, this XKCD pretty much describes every day of my life 🙂

OK, that’s it. Expect more updates soon. Probably.

Hotel

Venting my frustrations…

I have completely failed to make any blog entries while I’ve been here in the UK haven’t I? This is mainly because I’ve been having too much fun to spend time sitting in front of a computer typing away, but since this is my last day with regular internet access I suppose I’d better make some kind of effort, lest everyone thinks I’ve died. So I though I’d write a review of my hotel.

For reasons that will become obvious I’m not going to name the hotel. I’d also like to state that overall my experience there has been good. There are just a few things that got on my nerves…

So let’s begin.

The staff at the “Mystery Hotel” are well organised and friendly. Check in and out are quick and efficient – if on arrival however you are allocated to rooms 114 or 115 it’s best to ask for a map. These are placed far away from the rest of the first floor, requiring extensive navigation to locate. There are signs, but these peter out before you hit the first of several staircases. Be careful – one wrong turn and you could end up battling a snow-witch in a land where it’s always winter but never Christmas.

Your room will be clean with a wardrobe, a dresser, tea/coffee making facilties, a television, a phone and a safe. If you’re shelling out enough cash there may also be room to swing a cat – this is however London so a lack of space is only to be expected. You will have an onsuite bathroom, which is just the perfect size for you to brush your teeth without difficulty while sitting on the toilet. Hot water is both hot, wet and plentiful – in an unusual twist however cold water is in short supply, your tap producing just a half hearted trickle which refuses to alter in volume no matter how far you turn it.

Your toilet is a source of unending wonder – you will wonder for all eternity how it manages to produce noises akin to the base stop of a major pipe organ for several minutes after being flushed.

A continental breakfast buffet is provided in the basement restaurant. This is clean, well organised and packed to the gills with Spaniards by 8:00am, so get in early. The selection of food, drinks and condiments is perfectly adequate. The restaurant may be open for other meals – I’m honestly not sure. I did go down to check it out one evening but it was like the Mary Celeste down there, so I fled.

Eating options in the immediate area include the Pride of Paddington pub which does a very nice grilled chicken, three separate Italian restaurants in the space of about twenty metres of road, and a diner named Garfunkle’s just past Paddington station. I can recommend the gnocchi at Bizarro (perhaps that should be ‘me can recommends tasty potato dumpaling things’?) which comes with a free floor show from the serving staff who race around the place without break like their pants are on fire. Garfunkle’s is also very nice, but beware of the tendancy of the waitstaff to assume that any change they owe you is intended as a tip.

But back to the hotel. It offers a laundry service where you place your dirty clothes in the bag provided and leave them in your room. By the time you get back from your day’s activities the maid will have tidied your room, made your bed and neatly left the bag of still-dirty clothes on top of it. I found the best laundry option was to haul your clothes one block along the street towards Paddington Station to the Harlequin laundrette where a nice Muslim lady will have them washed, folded and ready to pick up by 5:00 that evening for about ten pounds.

Your hotel room includes a phone. This will not work. The procedure to get it working involves heading down to reception where they’ll explain that you need to pay a deposit of either 40 or 50 pounds (depending on who you’re talking to) before they’ll switch it on. It’s best to do this before you head out in the morning, as it gives them the full day to do absolutely nothing about it. On your return in the evening confirm that the phone is still not working. Head back down to reception and query this. They will express puzzlement and poke at a computer for a while before stating with confidence that they have no idea what’s going on. Ask them to look into it again, and with any luck your phone line will be sorted out by the time you return to the hotel the next day. Probably.

Transport connections are excellent with the hotel only two blocks from Paddington station. Busses charge up and down the street at all hours, and if you feel lucky you can try to catch one of the wildly bucking black cabs that hurtle around the Hilton in the nightly running of the taxis.

There is an internet terminal in the bar. You’re probably better off heading down the street to the Reload internet cafe. A weekly or monthly membership is fairly cheap and you not only get decent hardware and speeds, but you can enjoy the sound of the Underground trains as they whiz back and forth only a few metres through the wall from where you sit.

So, that pretty much sums up my hotel experience here in London. Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Southampton for a few days before flying home mid next week…

PS: The wedding was excellent! I’ve put some photos (note that “some” – I’ve got heaps more) up on my Flickr Stream

Chavs and Rude Boys

I think they’re kind of like bogans…

Well, this is it. I fly out tonight for the UK. As is usual for these kind of things I am in equal parts excited and terrified. And I haven’t even finished packing yet.

The terror in particular is compounded by my discovery yesterday that I totally screwed up my dates and am arriving in London a day earlier than I thought. On the upside this means I have an extra day to do stuff in. On the downside it means I have no accommodation booked for my first night. I imagine the hotel I’m staying at will be able to fit me in, but if not I may end up sleeping under a bridge, fighting off chavs and rude boys with a pocket knife.

So yeah. My plane leaves at 1:05am tonight. Wish me luck!

Foolish Musical Ideas

If I had the tools I’d do it myself.

Back in ancient historical era known as the 80s, British House giants Cauty and Drummond (perhaps you remember them as the KLF – also known as the Justified Ancients of Mumu, and furthermore known as the JAMs) sat down to create a House remix of the Doctor Who theme.

After messing around with it for some hours and getting nowhere they realised that it’s in triplet time, and you can’t do House in triplet time. So they threw the House idea out the window and just mashed the theme up with perhaps the most famous triplet rock song ever – Garry “I want to touch your children” Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2.

The result was one of the most successful and annoying novelty tracks of all time – Doctorin’ the Tardis – which transformed them into millionaires almost overnight.

The reason I mention this is that in the shower yesterday morning I realised that Marilyn “Oo! I’m so Evil!” Manson’s Beautiful People is also in triplet time. Which means you could easily do a Doctor Who – Beautiful People mashup!

Go on! What are you waiting for?! 😀