Category: Old and Uncategorised

Well, there we go. Everyone’s favourite rodent serenader has won the Papal election. Cardinal Ratzinger (sorry, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI) is now Pope with all the mystical theological powers that position entails – which may or may not include the ability to crack walnuts with his teeth.

Judging by the photos in all the papers he does quite look the role – like someone’s jolly and good natured grandfather, or maybe a beardless Santa Claus. Obviously the Cardinals decided to hark back to all those medieval Popes who enjoyed a good meal, as opposed to the rather skinny and ascetic John Paul. Appearances aside however he’s apparently a staunch conservative, so we’ll just have to see if he’ll end up moving the Catholic Church forwards, backwards, or just keeps it running on the spot.

While I don’t know if he’ll be a good Pope, I do know one thing he’s good for – search engine hits. My ramblings about St Malachy and comments on what a great name Ratzinger is saw my visitor numbers jump from 13 on Tuesday to 314 yesterday. I’m quite pleased at the idea of 314 people looking for solid information about De Gloria Olivae and ending up reading my ill-informed rants, it’s probably done them all a world of good 🙂

Hmmm, I’ll have to check out what the Malachy pundits are saying about Ratzinger (sorry! His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI). They’ve had a couple of days, they should have found a weak and subjective link to olives by now. I would have been much more impressed if St Malachy had said something like De Muris Carmen, but that’s probably just me 🙂

Better go, I have work to do.

On the whole – in my experience – Real Estate agents are not the smartest people in the world. There were all those dramas with Josie (my property manager back at the Gables) for instance*She is apparently now a very big wheel in the state Real Estate Institute. As someone who lived under her “management” I find this terifying.. Or the ones with the people who took over when Rebecca got totally fed up with Josie’s incompetance (such as their reluctance to join the 20th century by accepting rent payment in any form except cash or cheque). Or the various issues with the people I bought this place from (like quoting the price $5,000 too low). Basically it seems as if people who can’t suceed in any other career gravitate towards property sales like a moth to a flame*You’ve hijacked my brain, Like a moth to a flame, If you don’t release me, I’ll leave just the same, Moth gonna fly, Moth gonna fly, Moth gonna fly….

My workday today did nothing to damage this opinion.

Case One: One of our real estate clients called us up with instructions to switch their email hosting over to their new, on-site mail server. On being asked why a small real estate office would need their own mail server, they informed us that sharing just one email address around the office was getting inconvenient. When asked why they didn’t talk to us (ie: the company that hosts their website and email) about this, they said that they talked to the people who service their office computers instead, because they’ve been dealing with them for years.

Cost we’d charge for setting up any number of new email addresses for them on their current hosting? Maybe $22 GST inclusive.

Cost of their new mail server? $20,000.

Ahem.

Case Two: A new client, setting up a real estate site with us wants to put pictures of food on it. Why? Because people won’t expect to see pictures of food on a real estate site, so it’ll make the site “memorable”.

He’s quite right, people don’t expect to see pictures of food on a real estate site. They expect to see pictures of real estate.

Honestly. These people are living in Bizzaro World.

Question 1: What do you think would be an appropriate time to play the Offspring with your stereo pumped up as loud as it will go?

1. 12:15 on a Saturday afternoon.
2. 12:15 on a Friday night/Saturday morning.
3. 12:15 on a Tuesday Night/Wednesday morning.

Question 2: When one of your neighbours knocks on your door to complain about the noise, what do you think would be an appropriate reaction?

1. Apologise and turn the music off.
2. Apologise and turn the music down.
3. Inform said neighbour (by yelling at the top of your lungs) that you have no respect for him because his girlfriend sold you “bush weed” and said it was hydro, threaten to beat him up, then change CDs to Marilyn Manson just to make a point.

If you answered 3 for both questions you may well be the guy living opposite my bedroom window!

It’s times like this I really wish I had an electromagnetic pulse cannon.

Well, it turns out John A. hasn’t killed off the forum, he’s just removed the link on the site. It’s still there when you know where to look. Which is good, for obvious reasons.

You know, when The Cure are being used to sell pet food*Love Cats being used in a cat food add, so it’s not quite as nuts as it seems. I mean, it’s not like Killing an Arab is selling horse feed or something., the end of the world can’t be far away.

I had a particularly surreal day yesterday.

I went over to Morley to do some shopping, nothing surreal about that, I’m just setting the scene. I needed to get some expanding gap sealant to fill various holes around the apartment that were letting things like cockroaches and pot smoke in. I also needed some new shoes – my old ones have some major holes in the soles which isn’t a problem in fine weather but causes some problems when it starts to rain, and since Autumn finally seems to have arrived I figured I’d better do something about it.

(Actually I did try and do something about it with a bit of amateur shoe repair. I cut new soles from some plastic sheet I had around and stuck them into the shoes with my hot glue gun. This didn’t really work, the plastic was too stiff and started cracking as soon as I put them on and the hot glue didn’t seem to stick properly anyway. The repairs on my slippers went perfectly though.)

So I wandered around Morley buying hadware and shoes and such. Then it was back to the bus station where the surrealism started courtesy of an old woman who seemed to be entertaining herself by hitting people with her cane and ordering them to smile. THAWCK! “Smile!”. She wasn’t hitting people particularly hard, being a feeble old woman, but it still seemed somewhat counterproductive to my eye. Once the bus arrived she grabbed a seat right at the front and replaced the cane-thwacking with grabbing people’s arms in a vice-like grip as they went past. GRAB! “Smile!”. She was probably insane 🙂

So the bus started off. It was a different number to the one I used to catch (since I only have to get to Bayswater now I have a wider selection of buses to choose from) and took a much more direct route without all that annoying rat-running through tiny suburban streets around the aquatic centre. All was going well and quite normally when the driver’s two way radio suddenly crackled to life and filled the bus with a conversation between a guy and girl planning to meet up at “The Deen*The Aberdeen Hotel that is, a popular nightspot – or so I’m told“. Apparently their mobile phone signal had got tangled up in the ether with the frequency used by Transperth buses. So, we journeyed down Coode Street listening to them deciding what time to hook up (they eventually decided ‘around 6:00’) and an interminably pointless story about how the guy had convinced the DJ at the Deen that he was ‘Kevin’s brother’, despite not actually being so. Thankfully they eventually hung up 🙂

So I arrived back home and got to work doing handyman-like stuff. I was minding my own business drilling some holes in the bathroom wall when there came a loud THUMP THUMP THUMP at my door. Not just a ordinarily vigourous thumping, a distinctly angry thumping. So I got down off the chair I was balancing on and carefully opened the door, holding the hand drill ready in case I needed to defend myself.

Standing on the other side was a middle aged tattooed man in a singlet with a distinct smell of Jim Beam*Or something quite alcoholic. What am I, a brewer? around him. “Have you got my dog in there?!” he demanded, with both vigour and spittle.

I was struck dumb for a few seconds in sheer confusion. “No” I finally managed to blurt out.

“You sure?” the guy demanded, slightly less violently and apparently a bit confused himself.

“Yeah” I answered, stepping aside to let him see into the apartment. “No dogs in ‘ere mate*In situations like this it’s best to address people as ‘mate’ and drop your ‘H’s. It makes you sound like a true blue dinkum bloke rather than a potential dog thief.“. He peered inside uncertainly for a few seconds, muttered “OK then” and walked off, probably not entirely convinced.

It should be noted that I have absolutely no idea who this man is, or what’s happened to his dog. I’m vaguely worried that he’s going to come back with the police and a warrant to search my unit for pilfered canines and then when they find nothing I’m going to be sat down at a table and have a bright light shone in my face while a Seargent shouts “We know you took the dog, what did you do with it you sick freak?!”. But then vague worries like this are just part of my day to day existance anyway 🙂

So yes, very surreal.

Talking of surreality I have to mention a paper headline I saw earlier this week. Charles/Camilla Wedding Postponed for Pope’s Funeral. Show that to someone five years ago and they wouldn’t believe it. There’s been an inordinate amount of media fuss concerning the Royal wedding this week, at least one TV station broadcast the whole thing live, which seems particularly pointless to me as the show would have gone something like…

Shot of Windsor Castle. Car drives out of Windsor Castle and down 50 metres of road to Guild Hall. Charles and Camilla get out of car and walk into Guild Hall. Half an hour’s footage of outside of Guild Hall. Charles and Camilla walk out of Guild Hall and get into car. Car drives up 50 metres of road and into Windsor Castle. Shot of Windsor Castle. End broadcast.

OK, they may have broadcast the blessing ceremony in the castle after that (I neither know or really care) but still, do we really need to see all this in real time? It’s enough to turn you into a Republican.

And of course the whole thing has stirred up the Republic issue again. The Republican Movement celebrated the wedding by having a Yum Cha breakfast on the basis that this was a ‘very Australian’ thing to do. I would suggest that it’s actually a very chic and trendy thing for rich middle class yuppies to do, which only confirms my views on the hardcores of the Republican Movement.

I should probably clarify my views on the Republic issue here before I receive a whole load of hate mail or something. I’m not a Republican, but neither am I a Monarchist. I’m a Status-Quoist. I don’t really have any problem with the way things are run at the moment and as such don’t see the need for all the bother and expense of changing things. I mean, OK, technically we’re ruled by the Queen, but it’s not like she ever does any serious ruling. She just rubber stamps all our laws by proxy via the Governor General. If she was bossing us around all the time I could see a reason for getting rid of her, but she doesn’t, so why the problem?

That said, if the majority of the Australian population want a Republic (which polls suggest they do) I have no objections. I think the whole debate (on both sides) is akin to arguing over which end to crack eggs, but people will have their weird little obssesions about ‘freedom’ and such, so what can you do?

(Mind you, the day Camilla becomes Queen is the day I lead the march on Government House with a flaming torch – but a lot of Brits seem to think the same way, so what are the odds of her actually becoming Queen? Princess Consort is a much more reasonable compromise).

Anyway, enough on Charles and Camilla and onto the other major story of the week, the Pope, or rather the new Pope that the Cardinals are going to elect in a few weeks. There’s some pretty scary candidates being talked about, some real hardcore fire and brimstone types, particularly a few of the guys out of Africa. But they probably won’t get in. The College of Cardinals has shown itself pretty good at selecting moderate*Moderate for the Catholic Church that is compromise candidates over the years rather than anyone too controversial. I could go off and research the various candidates at this point, but that sounds like too much work, so I’m just going to take the easy route and turn to good old Saint Malachy 🙂

Saint Malachy (for those not in the know) was an English Bishop who in the middle ages was paid to make a pilgramage to Rome by someone else on their behalf – which was the kind of behaviour the Medieval church found perfectly acceptable (and Martin Luther so annoying). In any case he made it to Rome and on arrival (so we’re told) collapsed to the ground and started muttering away uncontrollably in Latin. These days we’d diagnose him as suffering severe travel fatigue and put him to bed with a cold drink, but the Romans of the day decided he was in a prophetic trance and one of them was quick enough to jot down everything he said. It turned out (we’re reliably informed) that he was running through the tally of future Popes, giving a short Latin motto or description for each one. Almost as soon as he finished theologians got to work trying to make it all match up, and the great game of predicting the next Pope based on the prophecies of Saint Malachy began (and has never really stopped since).

As with all vague predictions (Michael De Nostradame anyone?) you can basically make the prophecies of Saint Malachy say whatever you want them to. Probably the biggest problem lies with the fact that for a lengthy while in the middle ages there were two rival lines of Popes (one in Rome and one in France) so you can pick and choose as to which Saint Malachy was meant to be talking about (some even try to fit them all in, but this isn’t hugely popular as it means you tend to run out of predicted Popes in the 18th or 19th century and where’s the fun in that?). But eventually over the years a general concensus has been reached on who fits where, and we can confidently report that the next Pope will be De Gloria Olivae or “The Glory of the Olive” (whatever that may mean).

(For the record Pope John Paul II was De Labore Solis which may refer to him being born during a solar eclipse, his working in a limestone quarry during World War II for a company that used a sun as its logo, or perhaps nothing at all).

So, we’re going to end up with “The Glory of the Olive”. What can you say about that? Except idly speculate about the new Pope having some connection to Judaism, or ‘working for peace’, or coming from an olive growing region, or having a fondness for stuffed olives at Papal tea-time.

Much more interesting is the Pope after De Gloria Olivae, who will be Petrus Romanus – “Peter the Roman” and the last Pope!. Malachy (presumably having got all the preceeding stuff off his chest) gets positively chatty with this one informing us that…

Or in English…

That’s right people, the destruction of Rome and Judgement day! Something to look forwards to there and only two Popes away! Good old Malachy, knew to end it all with a bang rather than a whimper.

So, let’s all keep an eye on whoever the Cardinals elect, and see who can be the first to connect him to olives, glorious olives 🙂

I was going to write more, but I’m all worn out now from sarcasm, so you’ll all have to wait for the next installment in my amazing life. Yawn 🙂

Damn this is depressing. Paul Hester (drummer for Split Enz and Crowded House) committed suicide on Friday night. Apparently he’d been strugling with depression and it finally got the best of him. It’s a real shame, not only was he a member of two of the antipodes’ best bands, but he used to appear fairly regularly on the old Martin Molloy radio show, and seemed like a really smart, funny guy. Guess it just goes to show that it can hit anyone. There’s so much general disbelief and grief around the place that you can’t help but wonder if he’d have done it if he’d known how liked and respected he was.

Apart from that Easter wasn’t bad. I was sick (still am in fact) for most of it, but the sort of general malaise and coughing sick as opposed to lie in bed wanting to die sick. I got a nice amount of chocolate, but it’s almost all gone now, which is good because I have absolutely no control and if I had heaps would just eat and eat until I went into a diabetic coma or something. I re-read most of John Allison’s Scary Go Round which almost drove me mad, but means that the Tackleford Map is almost complete (how could I forget the Weasel Reserve?). Oh, and someone gave me a very generous Easter gift in the form of an unlicenced wreck dumped in my parking space.

Now it’s not like I use my space much – not having a car or a driver’s licence – but it’d still be nice to have it there and not filled up with a gigantic piece of garbage. So tomorrow I’m calling the strata company and having it hauled away. Consider this a warning people – you DON’T mess with my parking space!

Oh, and I ended up having to work on Easter monday. This should have been OK because I’d get some kind of penalty rate for working a public holiday. Sadly though (for complicated reasons) I didn’t get any penalty rate. I didn’t work very hard though, so it all evens out in the end 🙂

Hmmm, I’m sure there was something else I was going to write about, but I can’t remember what. Too much chocolate probably. Oh, I will say though that Laisse Tomber Les Filles by Fabienne Del Sol is one of the best songs around at the moment. Like a French version of the Munsters theme. I just wish I spoke French so I could understand what she was on about*Well OK I know what she’s on about in broad terms, but the actual specific words would be nice 🙂

Been a while ain’t it?

I’ve been busy getting settled into the new place, that’s my excuse. But now things are just about right, so I should start making updates with a bit more regularity. You never know.

I spent a few enjoyable (enjoyable to me that is, anyone else would have been bored paralytic) hours this weekend redrafting my map of the entirely fictional English city of Tackleford. Tackleford (for those not in the know) is the setting of John Allison’s most excellent webcomic Scary-Go-Round (and his most- excellent- for- the- time- but- now- looking- somewhat- dated- webcomic-Bobbins). My motivation for undertaking such a task is that someone on the Scary-Go-Round forum asked if anyone had a copy of it so he could add it to the Tackleford page on the new Dumbrella Wiki.

So I redrafted it, neatening it up generally and adding a few extra details like the Keane End golf links and the suburb of Copper Edge (it’s nice there – they rob you, but then shoot you so you won’t feel sad :). The next logical step would be to reply to the forum post, BUT in order to do that I’d have to sign up. And while I have considered it from time to time (it’s a fairly entertaining read – if you’re into the comic that is of course*Which I am. Not just to the extent of forking over good money for tea-towels and printed collections but to the extent of forking over extra money for such fripperies as getting my name published in the back of first editions and having John A. do personalised sketches inside the back covers. I probably badly need a life but I reckon it’s worth it for a hand drawn sketch of Amy and Friend Bat 🙂) but I don’t think I will. I don’t know exactly why, maybe it’s because everyone on there seems to know everyone else so well – that kind of thing tends to intimidate me. I guess I’m just a natural lurker 🙂

So I’ll just post my map here, and sooner or later someone may stumble across it and feel inclined to add it to said Wiki. Hmmmmmm I guess I can increase the odds of that with a few well chosen key words on the actual map page…

Apart from that I’ve mostly been just settling in to the new apartment. I did a major furniture reshuffle yesterday with the result that I can now use my computer without having to have the main curtains drawn (the perpetual gloom was depressing me) and the TV is now in range of the remotes while I sit at said computer (having to stand up and walk a metre forwards whenever I needed to adjust the volume was getting to be a serious pain). The new location has the added advantage that I can no longer hear the drug-addled thugs downstairs going around their business, which is fantastic. Unless they’re being really loud that is.

You know I don’t think I’ve mentioned the drug-addled thugs before. They inhabit the unit underneath mine and seem unable to hold a simple five minute conversation without some kind of shouting/screaming/swearing match breaking out. And that’s just their day to day routine – if something happens to annoy them they ramp the volume up to deathmatch levels.

Like the other day for instance. Apparently one of the other residents had the temerity to complain about one of them damaging her car. The resultant discussion about this went something like this…

This (and variations thereof) went on for about two hours while I was trying to sleep. I did consider leaning out my window and pointing out that if he was innocent of damaging her car, then putting a brick through her window would be highly illogical (making oneself guilty of one criminal act specifically because you weren’t guilty of another), however I decided that they might not appreciate my input 🙂

The only time they seem to calm down is when they sit in their garden (ground floor units have a small fenced garden in lieu of a balcony) and smoke massive quantities of the wacky-tabaccy, the smoke of which blows up into my unit, giving me a headache. Sadly the calming effect doesn’t seem to last very long as soon afterwards they start up again with the yelling, screaming and dog kicking.

(OK, they don’t kick their dog that much).

When I first moved in here their continual fighting terrified me, but now I’m getting used to it. The trick is to view them as an interesting anthropological case study of Very Angry People, or as a cautionary example on the dangers of too much pot and alcohol and too few brain cells. If they carry on the way they are, I figure they have to get kicked out of the complex eventually – or at least I hope so at any rate. With my luck they’re owner-occupiers.

Ah, there they go again! Something about someone paying someone else with $20 and a foil. Everyone in Geraldton’s talking about it apparently. Well I never!

Anyway what else has been happening? Oh yeah, I almost found a diamond on the street. It was at the bus-stop on Hampden Road, just lying there between the brick paving. I carried out some preliminary hardness and spectroscopic tests on it (ie: I tested to see if it would scratch glass – it would, and I held it up to the light to see how sparkly it was – very sparkly) then took it in to a jeweller. The good news is that if it was an actual diamond it would be worth about $15,000. The bad news is that it’s not an actual diamond, it’s a cubic zirconia and worth maybe $6.00. Oh well. It was worth checking out, $14,000 would have been very useful for the mortgage.

(Why only $14,000? If it had been a real diamond I would have gone into town and blown $1000 on books and CDs. I’ve always wanted to just walk into a store and start throwing things into a basket without bothering about how much they’re going to cost :D)

Naturally a lot of other stuff has been going on, but that’ll do for an update for now. After all, I’ve got to figure out where to put my printer and scanner before CSI starts 🙂

Am I the only person in the world to notice that the maps of Middle Earth used in Peter Jackson’s films incorrectly label the Adorn as the Swanfleet?

Am I the only person in the world who actually cares? 🙂

Reasons Moving Sucks

1. I’m horribly stressed.
2. I’m in a strange new place with strange new people (unlike back at the Gables where I knew and was comfortable with all the strange people).
3. All my stuff is in boxes and crates where I can’t find it.
4. I have no phone line.
5. My computer is still at the Gables waiting to be moved.
6. My rubbish bins are still at the Gables waiting to be moved so I have to put my garbage in a plastic bag on the side of the sink.
7. My stereo is still at the Gables waiting to be moved so I can’t listen to music or the radio.
8. My clock is still at the Gables waiting to be moved so the only way to tell the time in the mornings is to turn the TV onto Sunrise with David Cosh.
9. My toaster is still at the Gables waiting to be moved, so I have to have cold bread instead.
10. My condiments are still at the Gables waiting to be moved, so I have nothing to put on said cold bread except margarine.
11. I’m out of margarine.
12. My bed and mattress have been moved and shaken around and possibly put back together the wrong way – so they don’t feel like my nice comfortable bed and mattress anymore.
13. There’s no benchtop or surface of any kind to put things on in the bathroom.
14. My TV was dropped during the move and has a big ugly scratch across the screen.

By themselves they’re all fairly minor things (apart from maybe point 5) but put them together and I’m not happy at all 🙁

You know it’s times like this I can really see the advantages of having a relationship. It’d be nice to have a girlfriend in this kind of situation – I could whinge about it all to her (instead of to this blog) and then she could roll her eyes, give me a big hug and tell me to stop being such a wimp and pull myself together. Oh well, I’ll just have to buy some margarine, re-arrange my bed and hope things improve.

Moving sucks.

I started moving on Friday afternoon, it’s now Monday morning and I’m still going. Obviously I own way too much stuff -it took most of Saturday to get my books over alone. But while the end is not yet in sight, the point from where the end will be in sight is within sight. If I haven’t gone blind from prolonged heavy lifting in the meantime.

Ummmm, don’t know that there’s a lot else to say. Well not in my life anyway. There’s been a bit going on in the world. Like the Kyoto Protocol. Finally it’s come into effect. Of course the world’s largest polluter (the USA) and the world’s largest per-capital polluter (yes, that’s us, the Australians) won’t have anything to do with it. Hopefully carbon trading will turn out to be such a major economic force that the Government will see sense. Hopefully.

Talking politics there’s been a major diplomatic row with New Zealand. Helen Clarke (the NZ Prime Minister) has had the temerity to declare that she’s never heard of John Farnham! It’s unbelievable! The leader of a foreign nation has never heard of an outdated and mediocre Australian musician who’s never had any kind of musical career or success outside of Australia?!? It’s an outrage!! We should invade immediately!! Or at least that’s the attitude some segments of the media have been taking, I’m sorely tempted to suggest they all get a life.

Hmmm, JJJ is playing a song at the moment (the name and artist escape me) whose chorus features the line Are you hoping for a miracle?. The thing is though that is sounds like Are you happy for a moo-cow? which frankly is a much better lyric. There should be more songs that pose nonsensical questions about moo cows if you ask me.

Oh yeah, Tang. On impulse I bought some Tang the other day as a backup for when I run out of orange juice, and on Friday I actually ran out of said orange juice and mixed some up. What can I say except wow! It’s really good! It tastes like real, fresh orange juice, but without that bitter quality that I can’t stand. I can see why Homer was harrasing President Clinton for some, I’d be doing the same. It’s going down as a permanent item on the shopping list from now on.

OK, I’m going off to shift heavy furniture. sigh.