Wyrmlog

There’s an odd kind of surrealism to long distance train travel. I’m looking out the window at the brown, foaming waters of the upper Swan river (although this far upstream it could well be the Avon) swollen by the rain from the massive frontal system that’s rolled over the state for the last few days. The waters are pouring violently over rocks and boulders, just a few meters from where I sit, yet all I can hear is the endless thrum of the diesel engines pulling us eastwards.

I’m one hour into the eight hour train journey from Perth to Kalgoorlie, and am passing through the deeply eroded and disected edge of the western continental plateau. People are starting to settle in now, taking off jackets and coats, and either producing food from their bags, or ordering it from the attendants. Even the baby a few seats back has got used to the rythym and settled down to sleep. The train is winding in and out of the steep valleys, occasionaly bursting out into patches of sunlight, but mostly travelling through shadow and occasionaly patches of low cloud, hiding in the deepest valleys.

I’m not typing this, I’m writing it longhand in a notebook with a ballpoint pen for later transcription. This is somewhat appropriate – for all our development railway travel is still an eighteenth century technolgy, so it’s fitting that I’ve reverted back to a more primative form of recording to match. This is of course lost on the man sitting in the window seat next to me. He keeps trying to read over my shoulder, but as I usually do in public I’m writing in the oksos, so he hasn’t a hope of understanding it.

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It’s eight fifteen and the landscape has changed. We’ve emerged from the state forest of the escarpment and into sheep country. The land is flattening out and the man in the window seat is trying to sleep. These cripsy bacon biscuits are making me thirsty.

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Eight twenty five and it’s raining in Toodyay. Much to my relief a number of small irritating children have just alighted. We continue on our way, passing through cuttings of rich red earth. The sun is out, but the sky ahead is black.

We’re in dairy cattle country now. The trees are changing from dark barked to pale white, like ghosts gums. We lost the river at Toodyay, but a fragment of rainbow is flaring up against the dark skies ahead. Grey green rocks are poking up out of the hillsides.

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The track suddenly divides. A gigantic grain elevator looms. It’s the W.A.R Avon Yards, a great comglomeration of warehouses and workshops, laced with railway track. We pass under a bridge, and enter Northam where we briefly meet with the river once again. More people alight, but some get on as well.

Golden fields to the right under a mist of rain. Canola? Perhaps. I don’t know.

We are surrounded by sheep once again as the Kalgoorlie pipeline appears. Running hundreds of miles from the hills of Mundaring, carrying water from the coast inland to the desert city. The greatest achievement of the cursed C.Y.O’Connor. The ravages of salt start making their first appearances on the land, marring the green fields.

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A forest of dead and dying trees. Salty mud lies in swathes between the the bare trunks. In twenty years the entire wheatbelt will look like this.

Another grain elevator, a twin for the last one looms up. I miss the name of the town, and the driver offers no clue. A sign flashes past. Merriden? Earthquake ravaged Mekering? It’s gone too fast to tell.

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Salt ravaged land stalks the northern horizon. It sudenly swings southwards, and the train travels through a desert landscape of barren sand, low saltbushes and brackish ponds. It pulls back, but remains like a dark shadow to the north, returning to haunt us with another patch just outside of Cunderdin. It’s hard to appreciate the magnitude of the salinity problem until you see it for yourself.

A frieght train rushes past. It’s carriages are compressed by our relative speeds until they seem only a metre long each. The land becomes flatter, and the trees shorter.

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We’re well into the wheatbelt now. Green stalks sprout from the fields and the driver has to blow the horn to scare pink and grey galahs off of the tracks. Then, as if to confirm my thoughts, the driver announces that we’re pulling into Tammin.

Tammin! Scene of the year 12 Geography camp. Looking just the same as it did nine years ago, from the gigantic grain elevator (built to the same standard plan as every single one along the line) to the co-operative store full of metal tubs, to the old westrail depot (still in use to torture students, to judge by the tents outside). Even the big fat bastard tree is unchanged. It hasn’t changed a bit since 1993.

More’s the pity.

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If you squint, Kelleberin looks like Guildford. It has the same period buildings interspersed with eighties brick, the same types of trees, even the people look the same. The only difference is the empty fields stretching to the flat horizon visible down every side street.

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You get a feeling for when we’re nearing a town. The road, the pipeline and the tracks all come closer together. The train slows down. Some buildings and a grain elevator flash past, then it’s all gone.

The driver announces we’re pulling in to Southern Cross, but the train doesn’t stop. Did I fall asleep? Was I so wrapped up in my book that I didn’t notice? The mystery remains.

Time has started to melt and run out at the ends. The constant thrum of the engines and the rise and fall off the power lines between their poles has a hypnotic effect. The man in the window seat pulls the curtain halfway across to keep the sun out of his eyes. We stop somewhere (Merriden?) and most passengers dash outside to stretch their legs and have a smoke. I stay inside. The land becomes completely flat, the fields dissapear and desert scrub takes their place. How long has it been since I wrote last? How many towns have we gone through? I can’t remember. I read my novel and the landscape flashes by unnoticed. The attendants offer empty seats to the remaining passengers, and I swap sides, leaving the man in the window seat to snooze on on his own.

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A hill rears up suddenly in the distance, visible over one of the salt lakes that have been appearing out of the scrub for the last hour. The contrast to the flat desert is startling. It looks for all the world as if someone has excised Greenmount Hill from the Darling Escarpment and relocated it a thousand kilometres inland. As we draw near, a mob of emu scatter across the lake, startled by the train. Sunlight flashes off the iridescent patches on their necks. I think of grabbing my camera, but they’re gone before I have time.

The hill draws closer, and we pass it by. Hidden in the scrub at the summit are two buildings, disturbingly white against the drab olive vegetation. Who would build this far from anywhere? Vehicle tracks lace the steep sides of the massif, but the train pulls by, and this strange outpost remains a mystery.

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The train pulls to a halt by a small brick shed and a man alights. He walks off into the scrub carrying his backpck. The train continues on. I presume he knows where he’s going.

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The refreshment service is discontinued, and we pull into the outskirts of Kalgoorlie. The mountainous refuse piles of the Superpit looming up behind the city provide a contrast to the flat desert surrounds, and a beacon on the highest point flashes continuously. It is 3:00 in the afternoon. I gather my luggage, and alight.

I have arrived.

Sometimes I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

There was an article on NineMSN today talking about the DVD release of The Fellowship of the Ring and how it’s expected to break the record set by Harry Potter. This in itself wasn’t very provocative, what got me was towards the end of the article where it talked about the two upcoming sequels. The Twin Towers at the end of this year, and The Return of the Ring in 2003. Oh come on! Where did this so called reporter do their research? The back of sugar packets?

Mind you, I do kind of like the idea of Return of the Ring. Frodo and Sam risk their lives, pushing themselves to the limits of their endurance and sanity crossing Mordor and casting the Ruling Ring into the fires of Orodruin, Frodo gets his finger bitten off, and then – after all their efforts – THE RING COMES BACK!!! (Cue ominous music).

Still, some journalists should be shot.

Changing the subject, Mark has kindly enlightened me regarding the Aardvark thing. It was (of course) a promotion for the upcoming stop-motion-animation film Hamilton Mattress. You can read about it here. And here. It’s by the people who did The Wrong Trousers, so is no doubt fairly good. Not as good as it would have been if Hamilton actually was a Set beast of course, but hey, you can’t have everything.

Changing the subject again, come this Saturday I’m off to Kalgoorlie for a week or so for Rebecca’s birthday. Also to do some confluence hunting, and just to soak up the general goldfields ambiance. So I won’t be answering any emails for a while. I will be taking plenty of photos on my brand new digital camera though! (It’s not all that speccy, but hey, I could afford it! *g*) And I’ll also be trying to get another Tale written. Nothing like staying in a town you don’t know with a person who works insane shifts to give you time to write 🙂 I’ll probably be making some entries here though, so log in daily for updates on my outback odyssey.

If I don’t get lost out in the desert while looking for 31

There are certain songs that really grab me from the get go. Ones that I hear once, then absolutely have to hear again. And again, and again. Songs like Sonia Dada’s You ain’t thinkin’ ’bout Me, Shivaree’s Goodnight Moon, Mozart’s Voi che sepete, REM’s What’s the Frequency Kenneth? and Anita Kelsey’s Sway*. I have no idea what makes me like these songs so much, I just really really like them. Perhaps if someone who actually knew something about music was to analyse these selections they’d be able to find some kind of pattern, maybe to do with minor keys. Hmmmmm.

In any case I’m rambling on about this because as I type I’m holding in my hot little hands* two brand new CDs containing the two most recent songs to grab me in this fashion. Ben Folds’ Rockin’ the Suburbs (for Annie Waits) and Cake’s Comfort Eagle* (for Commissioning a Symphony in C). I ordered these a few days ago from a well know Australia online music store, who I just don’t feel like mentioning the name of now. Dunno why, I’m just in a recalcitrant mood 🙂

Also in my now rather overcrowded hot little hands are brand new DVDs of Clerks and The Fifth Element. I decided to buy the latter after watching it on TV last week, and deciding that it’s one of my favourite films of all time*. It’s extremely well written, is very funny*, has great special effects, fantastic music, an agglutinating conlang* and features Milla Jovovich who is probably second only to Alisen Down in my actress-I’ll-never-get-anywhere-near-but-wouldn’t-it-be-nice affections. Clerks, another one of my favourite films of all times just happened to be sitting on the shelf next to it, and going out cheap, so how could I resist? So, all up I’m about $120 down, but quite happy 🙂

And now for something completely different. Each Thursday the ABC has taken to filling in the two minute or so gap before Daria with a video clip. As for some reason they continue to classify Daria as a children’s show (it’s animated! It must be for little kiddies!) these clips are aimed firmly at the pre-teen market, and generally include colourful Sesame Street type characters singing about how wonderful trees are or something of that ilk. However the other week they played one of the oddest and most intriguing video clips I’ve ever seen.

It was stop motion animation, and about an aardvark* who plays the drums. He plays the drums in a swing band with a whole load of other aardvarks (all in very cool 40’s attire) in a 40’s style nightclub, and everything’s going well. Then a bunch of Gangster Parrots* take over the club and kick them out, although not before dragging him before the big boss and roughing him up (apparently they don’t like his drum solos). He wanders the streets, poor and destitute, until he ends up living in the dump, where he has lots of fun playing drums for the rats, who are highly appreciative. What happened after that I really can’t say as I was cooking dinner and a pot threatened to boil over, but it was pretty damn surreal. I think he got a new band together at the end, and named them after a mattress billboard, but I’m not sure. Anyway, I was most impressed, and would very much like to know what the heck it was all about.

Anyone care to enlighten me?

In other news, it turns out that the proprietors of Lovebox.com, who I so heavily vilified a while back for their evil spamming practices, are in fact a bunch of innocent cardboard box manufacturers from Kansas who’s domain name has been hijacked by the evil spammers. I was informed of this in a very apologetic email from a Lovebox employee – the company seems to be scouring the net for people inconvenienced by these parasitic bottom-dwellers in order to apologise to them, which is a refreshingly polite attitude in these, the waning days of our civilisation. So, anyone else who’s received the Lovebox email should visit this page for the full lowdown, and follow the advice provided to crush the squamous vipers besmirching the name of a respectable packaging company.

OK, I’m gonna go sleep now. Or watch The Glass House. Whatever.

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* The real version. Off the Dark City soundtrack. Not that dance travesty from a few years back. Die dance travesty makers! Die!

* Not literally. I’m not that dexterous.

* Comfort Eagle. Not Lone Eagle. Yes, I’m talking to you 😉

* For the record Clerks, Ghostbusters, The Blues Brothers, Men in Black, Run Lola Run and The Fifth Element. MiB is now the only one I don’t have on DVD. Cool!

* Multipass!

* Listen to that and tell me it’s not agglutinating buddy!

* I presume it was an aardvark. I thought at first it was a pig, but it had a long tail, and the ears were probably a bit big. It could have been a Set beast I suppose, but the prospects of stop-motion animators knowing what a Set beast is, let alone using one in a children’s video clip seem rather remote.

* I am not making this up!

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How to create a convincing impression of the Apocalypse in your own home…

Set up your clock radio to halfway between the local alternative and local religious fundamentalist radio stations. Get the alternative one to play Tom Waites and the religious one to play a fire and brimstone rant about hell and damnation just when you set the alarm to go off. Wake up in confusion and horror at 5:30 in the morning at the bizzarely ominious cacophany coming out of said clock radio…

Tom Waites: Grrrrrr rumble-rumble Alice! Grrrrrr growl!
Preacher: ConDEMED To the FIRES of HELL and DAMNation!!
Tom Waites: Arrrgh!!! Grrrrrr! Grumble mad-hatter HOWL!!
Preacher: Where the FIRE burns on the LAKE of SULFUR!!
Tom Waites: Grrrr! Rumble-grunt growl!!

Now that wakes you up quickly!

Hmmmm, they got the coal miners out. Good.

Well, not a lot has been going on here in Wyrmworld. I’ve been recovering from the labyrinthitis and going to work, that’s about it. And this weekend I’ve been doing all the cleaning I should have been doing while I was sick. Fun.

So I’ve decided to fall back onto something I’ve been holding in reserve for just such an occasion, and will now ramble on about amusing email addresses.

A few months ago one of our clients (who for no particular reason I shall refer to as “Bisby”) asked us to go through and “de-duplicate” their email database. This is a fancy way of saying “remove the hundreds of duplicate entries we put in by downloading the database, then re-uploading it without deleting all the original entries”. As we (foolishly) assumed that no one would ever be this stupid, we hadn’t actually programmed in a way to do this automatically, so Bevan and I had to sit there for a good three hours clicking a list of duplicate email addresses to remove them. To make matters worse Dale hadn’t bothered to actually check how many duplicate entries there were before phoning up and telling us to do it, and blithely told Bisby it would only take about twenty minutes. So we ended up charging 20 minutes for six man hours of work, which left no one very happy.

However as I waded through my section of the list I started noting down some of the more amusing email addresses to keep myself from going mad from boredom. And it is upon these that I now plan to ramble.

(To preserve privacy all the addresses here have been altered to point to the fictional “example.com”. If you really want to contact any of these freaks though, you could try pointing them at some of the more popular free web-based email systems and probably have a good shot at getting through. But you didn’t hear that from me 🙂

Some people use their email addresses to announce a strongly held personal belief, a creed or mantra they live their life by. I can sort of see the point of this, although you have to wonder if cabbageisevil@example.com and committment_sux@example.com do. It could be worse though. Not content with a simple descriptive email address, some people seem determined to inflate their egos. You can’t for instance tell me that bigger_than_ben_hur@example.com, huey_the_legend@example.com and jem_the_superhero@example.com are particularly modest folk. manwiththemojo@example.com may be excused for his excess, only however if he can prove that the mojo is in fact in his possession. A much more realistic self assessment I’m sure is that of ben_the_smeg@example.com.

Rhyme and alliteration are perennial favourites. blerkenderken@example.com may or may not mean something in German, but it sure sounds amusing. As does jiminijumanji@example.com, which may belong to an obsessive Disney/Robin Williams fan. persephonespride@example.com shows us that race horses have now joined the information revolution, as have some of their by-products, as evinced by crispy_dung@example.com.

Talking of the animal kingdom, it always offers some creative opportunities. parrothead@example.com for example. Or crazyflyinggoat@example.com who may or may not be a friend of holyflyingcows@example.com. Similarly hairy_chested_brute@example.com may be associated in some fashion with hot_beastie@example.com. big_ugly_bug@example.com however is probably on their own.

Still on the subject of animals we come to m_horsepower@example.com. While it is possible that there is a Mr or Ms M. Horsepower out there, I think it’s more likely that the owner of this address is having us on. As is onetonrat@example.com, the largest examples of rats known to modern science coming in at two or three kilograms maximum.

frog_brigade@example.com. I like this one. I have a vision of Wehrmacht soldiers pinned down in a foxhole in France. One of them peers tentatively over the edge and recoils in horror yelling “Achtung Sergeant!! Es ist die Froschbrigade!!!“. Sure enough, the British Special Forces Frog Brigade jumps into view, mounted on their giant armoured frogs! The Nazis flee in terror, their lines in disarray! C’mon Spielberg! Saving Private Ryan II!

Ahem, continuing down the list we come to a possible member of the Frog Brigade in pearl_frog@example.com. Although it is possible that this address belongs to a woman called Pearl and unfortunate to be born with the family name Frog.

Continuing study of the Bisby database reveals that the gothic contingent is well and truly alive on the web. This is evinced by such addresses as buried_alive33@example.com, dark_silence69@example.com, sacrificemysoul@example.com and leprosy_head@example.com (it’s slightly frightening that at least 33 people out there want to be known by the epithet “buried alive”). On the slightly more sophisticated side of Gothicdom we encounter lord_penteguire@example.com (to be fair the good lord may not actually be a goth, but with a name like that what are the odds? He might as well have called himself Hecubus).

And of course where you have goths, you have sci-fi fans. Although Bisby seems to have attracted some rather peculiar examples. droid_hurter@example.com for example is probably not the kind of person you’d want to meet down a dark alley, be you a droid or not. Given that Pluto is a frozen iceball, drummerfrompluto@example.com can be safely assumed to have possess non-human biology. As does (we presume) nitronium_blood@example.com. To the best of my knowledge nitronium is not yet an accepted entry on the periodic table, although research continues.

I leave the final comment on all of these addresses to one remarkably sensible Bisby subscriber. getalife@example.com.

I’m back. After the better part of a week writhing in a personal hell (where I roast in my shell*) I’m finally well enough to write again. And email people. And generally resume my life.

So, what was the cause of this break in transmission? A little disorder called labyrinthitis. My in-depth study of this medical phenomenon has lead me to a highly scientific conclusion. It sucks. Like really sucks. Given the choice of having labyrinthitis again, or being locked in a prison cell with Britany Spears for a week* I’d be heading down to the old jail house without a moment’s hesitation. It’s that absolutely horrible.

So, what exactly is it? Glad you asked…

OK, the ear works like this. Sound waves go moving through the air, then get gathered by the excitingly moulded contours of your outer ear, and channeled into the ear canal (that place you’re not meant to stick cotton-buds/q-tips despite the fact everyone does). Here they impact on a thin piece of skin stretched across the canal, called the tympanic membrane, or (for the scientifically uninitiated) ear drum. The vibrations of the ear drum cause a tiny bone, known (for obvious reasons) as the hammer, to bang against another tiny bone called (again obviously) the anvil, which is connected to a third tiny bone known as the stirrup (not quite so obvious, but it actually looks like one you see). The stirrup is connected to a thin membrane at the end of the cochlea, which is a fluid filled organ that looks like a snail shell, and is coloured bright blue in all the cheerful anatomical charts you get to look at while sitting in the Ear/Nose/Throat Specialist’s waiting room (it’s actual colour remains a matter for conjecture).

This rather complicated arrangement acts to transfer the vibrations from the air to the fluid inside the cochlea. These vibrations travel through the fluid, and (here’s the clever bit) depending on their frequency and amplitude (pitch and loudness to all you unscientific folk) penetrate to different depths within the spiral. Lining the inside of the cochlea are millions (OK, it could be merely thousands, it’s been a while since I’ve checked Grays Anatomy) of little hairs, each one connected to a nerve. As the vibration passes these hairs, they vibrate, stimulating the nerves and sending signals to the brain, which interprets the different patterns of signals as different kinds of sounds.

Now, all of this doesn’t have a heck of a lot to do with labyrinthitis, I just can’t pass over the opportunity to blather on about science. Anyway the bit we’re interested in are a few extra loops (called the vestibular system, ooh fancy) that poke out of the top of the cochlea. Nature in her infinite economy elected not to let a good fluid filled snail shaped thing go to waste (after all, how many of those are there available the body?) and added these extraneous loops to act as a sort of spirit level for the body. The movement of the fluid within them tells your brain which way is up and which way is down. In addition they also take care of telling you which way you’re moving, how fast you’re moving, and exactly what forces are working on your body mass (or at least head) at any given moment.

Now this is a very elegant and efficient system, except when some kind of infection causes these loops to become inflamed. In this case your entire sense of balance, movement and momentum go totally doolally, and you start stumbling around uncontrollably and throwing up, the conflict between what your vestibular system and your eyes are telling you causing severe seasickness.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last week. Stumbling around and throwing up. Fun.

It’s one of those strange medical coincidences, up there on a par with the humerus* giving you a “funny*” feeling when you bump it, that labyrinthitis (hence called as the cochlea plus the vestibular system are called the labyrinth) leaves you completely disoriented and confused, as if actually lost in the famous maze of Daedalus. It’s only a small compensation that don’t have to worry about stumbling over a minotaur*, although your mood does become similarly monstrous over a few days of putting up with the disorder. About the only Ariadne’s thread available is antibiotics.

Not that the first doctor I saw actually gave me any. He just proscribed some sea sickness tablets and told me it’d get better eventually, which wasn’t much of a comfort. Happily* though the infection then spread to my middle ear, and the second doctor (after pronouncing that my left ear looked “crap”) gave me a whole bunch of big white tablets, which seem to be clearing everything up quite nicely. I’m still dizzy, but nowhere near as much, and I was actually able to not only cook a proper meal last night, but eat it as well, which given that I’ve been living on irregular gulps of packet soups, chocolate cookies and vanilla ice-cream* in between bouts of nausea for the last week, was a major relief.

All this illness has of course exempted me from Jury Duty. I did go in on Monday, and got to the stage where they sit you down in a court room and draw names out of a ballot box to see who’s going to be on the jury, however my name wasn’t drawn out. Just as well really, all things considered. The case didn’t seem all that interesting really anyway, just someone accused of insurance fraud. I was meant to go back in on Thursday, but was too busy throwing up. I’ve got to get my medical certificate off to the Justice Department today, otherwise they’ll probably fine me.

Anyway I’m getting dizzy again, so I’m going to go and sit quietly. Yes, that seems like a good idea.

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* Aw, man, I can’t think straight till I get those peanuts.

* Being locked up with Britany Spears for a week may not seem like too dire a punishment at first glance (nudge nudge wink wink say no more), but keep in mind that whole virginity thing, and the fact that with nothing much to do in a prison cell she’d probably be tempted to pass the time by singing. Now you see the true horror of the situation.

* Funny bone. Get it?

* ie: Extremely painful. Medical students are all sadists.

* Or for that matter David Bowie.

* Relatively speaking 🙂

* All I could actually stomach would you believe? Things are much better now, but I still can’t eat cheese.

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deathly ill… labyrinthitus…. whole world spinning 24 hours a day….. nausea….. can’t keep anything down…… drugs not working…. going back to bed now…..

So the Silmarillion is boring eh? The youth of today, I don’t know. No appreciation of high mimesis. Shocking 🙂

OK the Ainulindal