Author: Purple Wyrm

Congratulations to the People’s Republic of China! Yey! 🙂

Well, the server was down all of last night. How about that then?

Anyway yesterday I made a momentous discovery. The Red Orchid does home delivery!!!

WOO-HOO!!!

Naturally I decided to take advantage of this fact (mainly because I couldn’t be bothered cooking anything) and ordered myself up a serve of chicken and crab spring rolls, and squid with cashew nuts. Oh, and a serve of deep fried squid to bring the order up to the $20 delivery threshold.

The squid – both serves – was of course great. The spring rolls on the other hand – well, pretty dissapointing. Dry and unpalatable would be the best description. Naturally I ate them (I paid for them damnit!) but I don’t know if I’ll be ordering them again. I’ll just get the deep fried squid instead 🙂

In other news I’ve decided to follow Helen’s lead and establish my own Nation State (several months late – I don’t even know if her one is still running :). Mine is the Federation of Zurvar Areana. Our motto is “Kebronal tagas mon dolfin holbeshikla” which is of course Zurvar for “On condition it doesn’t frighten the Dolphins”. So far I’ve decided that voting shouldn’t be compulsory, and to start a space program. Could be kind of fun. For a while 😀

Hmmm, nothing else to report. I’ll shut up now 🙂

Friday Night: The first really warm night of the year, combined with removalists working late into the evening. Result? Not enough sleep.

Saturday Night: Not quite as warm, but pretty humid. Also a full moon riding high and shining through the blinds. Result? Not enough sleep.

Sunday Night: A cold rainy day, with thick cloud cover. Low temperatures, no moon, no removalists. So what happens? A car thief being pursued by the cops decides to try to ram them – right outside the building. So the cops open fire – also right outside the building. So then there’s some kind of collision – again right outside the building. Result? Nowhere near enough sleep.

GAH!!

There’s been a faint but unmistakably nasty smell hovering around here for the last few days. Normally I’d attribute this to the bin needing emptying, but this particular miasma seemed to be strongest in the second bedroom (which is a good distance away from said bin). It only occured to me today to have a look out on the balcony.

The smell was indeed coming from the balcony. Specifically from a very deceased pigeon which had decided to ring down the curtain and join the choir invisible just outside the second bedroom window. By the looks of things several days ago.

Ack.

Luckily by some fluke of fate I happened to have all the equipment necessary to deal with this situation right at hand. Namely a pair of heavy duty, lined rubber gloves, a painter’s facemask, plenty of plastic bags and a spray can of Glen 20 hospital grade disinfectant. So I suited up (so to speak) and dealt with my ex-pigeon visitor in a highly efficient manner. He now rests in peace, bereft of life in several plastic bags at the bottom of the bin in the rubbish room, and the balcony (and most of the rest of the flat to be honest) smells nicely of disinfectant.

Germ phobic – Me? 🙂

In other second bedroom news, the Bed of Doom is no more! Or at least it’s no more at this address. Dom came around on Saturday and we disassembled it for transport to South Fremantle where he and Rebecca have found an apparently fantastic place to rent (which doesn’t mind the cats). The whole disassembly process went fairly smoothly, and we managed to get it down to the trailer without the caretakers wailaying us for the heinous crime of moving furniture on a weekend. We also managed to get it past the bogans downstairs without incidnent, although they did apparently comment on the quality of the wood. Dom’s theory is that they were interested in burning it.

And speaking of the bogans, they had a major falling out the other night. Not their usual late night screaming match, but a late night sobbing/swearing fest in the carpark. Sobbing by her, swearing by him. It was hard to figure out exactly what was going on, but apparently he was pretty upset with something she’d done. Sufficiently upset in fact to weave the f-word (and variations thereof) multiple times into every single sentance. “Don’t you f****** tell f****** me you’re f****** sorry for f****** f***’s sake because it’s f****** your f****** own f****** fault, f***!!!” for instance, all backed up by her sobbed apologies and professions of love. I did feel kind of sorry for her – whatever she’s done – but I must admit the thought that might be a relationship breaker for them was a somewhat pleasant one. If they have split up then there’ll be no more screaming competitions at 3:00 in the morning. Ah bliss!

Finally, Helen has suggested that the third of the frightening real estate men bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain Armin Shimerman. The truly frightening thing is that he does!! 🙂

Intransigent DNA Influenced Cute Woman of the Week: That Kelly girl who got kicked off Australian Idol. I have never watched an epsiode of that show in my life and I never intend to, but wow, she’s cute. Actually she kind of resembles Alison Mack now I think about it. *sigh* I’m so predictable 🙂

PS: I remember this show! I remember this show! 🙂

You know it occurs to me that I’ve been mentioning a lot of “cute” women in my posts lately. The waitress at La Porcetta, the accountant over at West Tax, and probably others that I thought about mentioning, and then stopped myself from. While it’s possible that there has suddenly been a massive increase in the number of attractive young women wandering around Perth a much more likely explanation occured to me while watching a particularly fetching comedienne on Rove Live the other week. I reckon it’s down to genetics.

Human beings are (biologically speaking) only meant to live to about the age of 30. In the paleolithic for instance, the average life expectancy was around 28-34. In the Roman Empire the commoners only lived to about 22-25 (the upper classes were another matter entirely). Now, I’m twenty seven and a half (well, twenty seven point six six six continued to be exact) and have never even had the faintest hint of a relationship. So, I reckon my genes are getting itchy.

The problem with evolution is that it takes a long time to happen. It’s only in the last few centuries that better health care and nutrition have allowed us humans to have long lifespans. Our genes are yet to adapt to the fact that we (in the western world at any rate) now tend to live into our seventies. As far as they’re concerned if we don’t pass them on to the next generation before the age of 30, they’ve had it. So, my genes have taken a good look at my pathetically single life and are doing the DNA equivilant of screaming “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!?!?!???!??!!” – the practical upshot of which is that I’m suddenly perceiving any even halfway attractive woman that comes my way as the girl of my dreams.

Well – if my genome thinks it can push me around like that, it’s got another think coming! I’m not going to start making life decisions based on the opinions of a bunch of uppity little nucleic acids! They can shut up and crawl back into their chromosones as far as I’m concerned. I’m the one in charge of this organism damnit!

Right, with that insanity out of the way, onto other business 🙂

Email. I got a great email today. Or at least an email with a great subject line. Imagine my delight when I opened my inbox at work to find – hidden amongst all the spam – an email promising ‘Wight Loss’.

I just about fell out of my chair.

Predictably it turned out to be nothing but a misspelled spam promoting yet another miracle weight loss system, but I was momentarily distracted by the concept that someone (possibly tom@bombadil.com 🙂 was promoting their services to help rid subscribers of those unsightly undead spirits of Angmar just in time for summer. Oh well, I can dream 😉

In closing I should mention that there was a documentary about the murder of Julius Caesar on the ABC last night which concluded (among other things) that he suffered from temporal lobe epilesy. Now, what I want to know is did Caesar ever reported being abducted by aliens? ;-D

(Believe me, if you read Fortean Times you’d be laughing yourself stupid at that!)

(OK, maybe not stupid *g*)

Good Lord I hate Batfink.

What is Batfink you ask? It’s some dark-ages five-minute-an-epsiode cartoon series the ABC have dug up out of their vaults and put on just before Dr Who. It seems to be a parody of the Adam West Batman series – a really bad parody. A bad, unfunny, offensively racist parody.

The hero is some kind of humanoid bat. Where this freak of biological science came from is never actually explained. His sidekick is a buck-toothed funny-voiced Asian man named “Karate”, who’s attempts at both heroism and humour consistantly fall flat. Naturally they live in a cave … (I have to go off on a tangent here and quote one of my favourite lines from The Drew Carey Show – “Batman’s car has a morals clause? He kept a young boy in a cave!” *grin* OK back to complaining about BatFink).

Every single episode features pretty much the same plot. Some unlikely criminal mastermind commits some insanely unlikely crime. We cut to Batfink’s “split-level” cave where he and Karate engage in some spectacularly dull and unfunny dialogue. Then the Police Chief (who looks so like Elmer Fudd I’m surprised the animators weren’t sued by Warner Brothers) calls them up on “the hotline” and lisps the details to them. Batfink orders Karate to get the “Batilac” a volkwagon beatle with really lame wings on the back, and they go driving around for no obvious reason.

Eventually they reach the crime scene where Batfink uses his “Supersonic Sonar Radar” to find the bad guys (this is apparently a sentient animated ‘beep’ that does all his work for him). Once the beep returns and the bad guys are located Batfink and Karate head off to catch them, only to be trapped in some patently stupid fashion. Karate then steps up to free them using his karate. Naturaly as a simple oriental he fails, and it’s up to Batfink to release them, usually by use of his “wings of steel”. Once free they locate the evil doers again who shoot at them. Batfink then delivers the line that any sane viewer soon comes to dread…

The epsiode soon wraps up in some tired fashion (usually involving Karate smashing down a door which lands on top of Batfink temporarily crushing him), and closes with a really lame visual gag, which the entire cast laughs at as if it was Kreskin*No, ‘Kreskin’ doesn’t make any kind of sense in this context, but c’mon, it sounds good 🙂.

Arghh!! Is the ABC that strapped for content?? Bah!

You know, I’m amazed at how much Kullervo resembles the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings.

For those unfamilar with Kullervo (and that’s just about everyone outside of Finland) it’s the first major work by the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). It’s based on a section of the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, and tells the story of Kullervo son of Kalervo, who’s travelling home after paying his taxes (any other nation in Europe would have had him coming back from a war or something, but hey, this is Finland we’re talking about*Sorry, that was unecessesarily mean-spirited 🙂). On the way he notices a fairly attractive maiden, and suggests she might like to join him in the back of his cart for a while. She quite effectively tells him to bugger off, so he goes on his way. Further on he meets her again, and makes the same offer. She is even more emphatic and he carries onwards. Then he runs into her a third time, and makes one last try. When she refuses he apparently decides that enough is enough, and hauls her into the cart (did I mention by the way that this Kullervo guy is a complete bastard?).

Naturally enough she’s not very happy about this, but changes her tune when Kullervo shows her all the silver and fine fabrics he has (even after paying his taxes) and lets him have his way with her (because you know, it’s perfectly OK to assault women if you’re rich*Need I actually point out that this is sarcasm?). She then decides that introductions are in order and asks him who the heck he is. So he explains that he’s Kullervo son of Kalervo. This turns out to be rather unfortunate as the maiden is in fact his long lost sister*This kind of thing goes on all the time in ancient epics.. So they both lament a bit and go on their respective ways*Actually I think she kills herself out of horror, but you wouldn’t really know it from reading the lyrics..

So, some years later Kullervo is travelling home from war (probably something to do with taxes) and happens over the spot where the awful deed was perpetrated. He gets a long overdue attack of remorse, has a conversation with his sword, then kills himself. End of story.

Anyway the music for all of this is intensely dark and brooding (as you’d expect given the subject matter) and what with the massed choir singing and chanting in Finnish and all the drums and horns and things, it really sounds like Howard Shore’s score for The Fellowship of the Ring*Particularly The Prophecy, parts of The Bridge of Khazad D