Move Along. Nothing To See Here.

I F--king WIN at "Dad".

2012-01-19T20:09:00.000-08:00

I've been busy. There have been visitors. There has been Sole Parent Duty. There have been disruptions to phone, Internet, etc. I will catch up soon. But right now, I just want to say this: I absolutely fucking win at "dad", right at this moment.

Observe these photographs:

It's a hot day by our standards. Perhaps 26, maybe 27 degrees, and sunny. My kids have now been out on that grassy slope for over two hours. It's their second session for the day.

They're covered in scratches from blackberries, full of burrs and thistlethorns. Despite the sunscreen, I expect they'll have a few burns. Yet from where I can sit, I can hear screams of delight from the Mau-mau, and wild cries from both Jake and Genghis.

They're sliding down a grassy hillside on a hot summer day.

But that's not the extent of the win. Oh no. It's much better than that. Y'see, the thing they're sliding on is the remnants of a large cardboard box. Yep.

Best of all, that cardboard box is the one which, less than 24 hours ago, was wrapped around the big, shiny, new LCD flatscreen TV which I bought to replace the beat-up, phosphor-failing Dick Smith cathode-ray-tube TV (for only fifty bucks more than the CRT thing cost us six years ago, or so.)

That's right. The brand-new television is sitting there in the lounge room, on its own. I've plugged a USB stick full of favourite tunes into the side of it, and it's playing the Imperial March from Star Wars as I write. Meanwhile, my kids are sliding down the hillside on pieces of cardboard.

I...fucking...win.

I'm behind on everything at the moment - but the hell with it. You don't get to slide down a hill with your kids very often, do you?

I'll catch up with you all soon.

Telstra Ad Nauseam

2012-01-10T23:26:00.001-08:00

Ah, the fun of it all.

Must have touched a nerve, though. Thank you for the notes and kind words, one and all.

In the short term. Things Have Happened. The local techie dropped by, checked the line, and threw his hands in the air. "Hit by lightning," he said. Apparently, hit by lightning so often he couldn't even begin to figure out how to repair it. So they called in a full crew.

The full crew were prompt. They came. They checked the line. They threw their hands in the air. "Hit by lightning," they said. "Hit so often that we absolutely cannot repair this cable. And so, we will place a Temporary Cable into the system so that the phone is Restored."

This they did. It took 'em a day and a half or so, and it must have been genuinely hard work. There were two vans, a small flatbed and a digger down the bottom of our property this afternoon, and when I drove to Scottsdale, I saw... well, I'm not sure how much, but it was a hell of a lot of cable strung along the cutaway clay banks by the highway, and through the trees parallelling the road. Does the "temporary cable" go all the way to the exchange? I don't know. I didn't see any signs of it down by the exchange itself, but there was a suspicious loop of black, snaky stuff on the fence down close to the Brid River... again.

The techs were cool. They always are. I've had more Telstra techs through my house in the last ten years than I can actually count, and they're always friendly, likable, competent people. I stopped by the bottom of the property after the shopping today to check whether they were right for tea, coffee, toilets, etc - because yeah, I do appreciate the work, and there's no public amenities down there.

Anyway, once it was up, one of the techs dropped by to see if the phone was working. It was, so we had a bit of a laugh. He told me that the lines are so old that they're actually a lead/copper pair, wrapped in PAPER insulation, of all things. I didn't know lead was ever used in telecom lines, to tell the truth. And... paper? Really? This place gets more lightning strikes than anywhere I've ever lived, including tropical North Queensland, and we get rain. Oh, my, we do get rain. And paper doesn't work well with water. Nor does it like intense heat. I suppose the lead/copper/paper stuff was state-of-the-art when it went in, but you have to wonder when that actually was.

Once the phone was up again, I decided to brave it, and call BigPond. Turns out that our 12gb monthly plan has been superseded. You can't even sign on for that any more. Now it's a 15gb plan for the same fee. I figured maybe if I asked nicely, they could upgrade us.

Guess what? The first bloke I talked to (spoke clear Australian English! But that's BigPond Internet, I suppose. Not strictly Telstra/phone) said he couldn't find us in the new system. Not even with names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers and bill numbers. So he put me through to what he called "the old system". And there, I got a nice lady with a strong Indian accent. And in short order, she took my details... and then told me, yet again, that there's nothing on their system authorising me to handle this account.

Again.

Well, I was expecting it, so I handed the phone to Natalie. She was pretty pissed off, but when I explained it was Telstra, she sighed, and accepted the handset. After a few minutes, she took it upstairs.

Half an hour later, she came down and said: "Well, they can't find our records at all. But now their system has gone down. She'll call us back."

Three or four hours later, I called again. System was still down.

Makes you wonder how they manage to send bills to our address, doesn't it?

Well, at that point I took the advice I'd been given by a good many people. I opened my (now shaped to 64k) Internet connection, and lodged a complaint with the TIO.

I'm starting small. All I'm asking is that Telstra gets its fucking records straight. Nat and I have a landline, in her name, which I am supposed to be authorised to handle. We have a NextG BigPond account which I created, bundled to her iPhone mobile account, which I am supposed to be authorised to handle. Then, obviously, there's her iPhone moblie account, to which apparently I have to have access in order to be able to access the bundled BigPond account. And then there's my piddly little prepaid mobile account.

And that's it. For now, I just want the right to contact Telstra and ask about those accounts, and NOT be told that I have no authority to deal with them. Nat and I have been together since 1992, married since... er... '95, I think. We've kept all the bills and accounts in joint names since the outset, because it makes sense, and it's easier. Telstra is the only goddam organisation for whom this has ever presented any kind of difficulty. Everybody else gets the instructions and the authorisations, puts 'em in their records, and after that it's all clear sailing.

So that's step one. Nat felt that was a small problem with which to bug the TIO, but I think otherwise. I think that if Telstra straightens out their records, it will do two things. First, it will stop the phantom bills arriving. (Did I mention we got a bill a couple weeks back? About $20. Our names, our address. No phone number cited. No account cited. When Nat rang Telstra, the lass on the other end insisted she couldn't find any record whatsoever of the bill in question. Natalie is now waiting to see if we get an overdue notice on that one.)

The second thing that straightening the records and the authorisations will do is to make future communications simpler. I do NOT want to have to hand Natalie the phone every time some change needs to be made. More: she really, really doesn't like sitting around, waiting for operators to become free. She WANTS me to be the one doing that, and much as I dislike it, better my time than hers. Therefore: if the TIO can prompt Telstra to get its bullshit recordkeeping in order, that alone will be a useful step forward.

I hope.

We'll see how it goes. Meanwhile, I'll call BigPond again tomorrow. Hopefully their system will be up again, and I can once more try to start the wearisome process of upgrading for those sweet, sweet 3gb extra per month. Of course, Natalie will be at the office tomorrow, not here - so when they tell me I'm not authorised to discuss the account, I'm probably going to lose my temper and say something sensible...

Dear, Sweet, Darling Telstra

2012-01-08T21:11:00.000-08:00

Note to friends: if you've been trying to ring me hereabouts and getting a busy tone... well, our line is dead. It's been dead since sometime Saturday, I think. The local Telstra chap called me (on the mobile, of course) and told me it looks to him as though it's been struck by lightning. Everybody up here on the hillside is without a phone at the moment, and given the patchy, crappy mobile coverage here, it's an interestingly silent sort of situation.

To top it off, it appears our Net connection has been shaped back to 64kbps. Still eight or nine days before the contract renews, and we get a massive 12Gb of 1.5mbps to play with again.

What went wrong? Well, Natalie updated her iPod. And of course, things like the iPad will happily update themselves. I take care of my own security, but Nat's new desktop machine doubtless constantly be checking into Jobsland. And the old machine the boys use runs Windows, so it gets regular security updates. And then there's the Wii... the last time I saw Jake switch it on, it had a vast array of new Internet channels, so I suppose it's been updating itself too.

Twelve gig a month. Gosh. The generosity of it. But that's the biggest allowance we can get under the 3G wireless plan via Telstra. It costs more than most of you are paying for four, five, ten times as much data at four or five times the speed, and it tends to drop out at unexpected moments... but it's what we've got, and it's all we're going to get, apparently.

Still, the dead phone line is a bit of a shit. I have some useful information for Telstra on that topic. Some of you may wish to stop reading at this point, because I may use language which isn't exactly suitable for the parlour at annual CWA meeting...

1) Dear Telstra: please put the following abbreviation on my record: NAFI. It stands for Not A Fucking Imbecile. What that means is that when I call your miserable, shitty call-centre to tell you there's something wrong with my phone line and I'm using my goddam mobile phone to do it, you can reasonably assume that I have ALREADY unplugged the handset and plugged it in again, tested the power, etc. I'm NAFI, Telstra. If I call you to say that my phone isn't working, can we just fucking well accept that it's actually not working?

2) Look, I have no problems with Indian folk. Dealing with people from the subcontinent face-to-face I don't even think about their race, or their culture, or mine. But you know what? The accent is a bit hard to follow, especially when I have to use a shitty Telstra - connection mobile phone to call your service. Oh, and the game where everybody tries to pretend they're actually in Sydney, and not in Chennai or Mumbai or Delhi? I have no idea who you think you're fooling. Yes, I know your Melbourne facility includes plenty of folk from the subcontinent, but honestly... I actually can't remember the last time I spoke to someone in your call centres who DIDN'T sound like they were fresh out of a Bollywood spectacular.

Telstra, I would very happily pay a reasonable premium for the opportunity to speak with someone who communicates in the same kind of English that I use, and who can share a friendly joke with me because we share the same basic cultural assumptions. I have no fucking idea why you imagine that outsourcing your call centre work was a good plan, but I promise you this: if any useful rival company ever, ever sets up out here in northern Tassie, I will abandon your fucking slipshod, pathetic, perpetually outsourced "service" so fast you won't know what hit you.

3) Speaking of service... lets go over our record of the last few years, shall we? First there's the horribly dodgy reception. Well, I live in a mountainous region. I guess I have to accept that. But... how come you can't upgrade my local exchange to be ADSL compatible? You've done it practically everywhere else. What's wrong with us? While I'm at it... the phone lines get blown to fuck by lightning every second year hereabouts. I remember one year you left a hundred-plus metres of phone cable draped over some farmer's fence because you couldn't figure out how else to keep it dry. (It was an electric fence, by the way. Every call we had for months (tick) included a regular (tick) noise that made the (tick) whole goddamned conversation sound like (tick) we had a fucking metronome going (tick.).

Anyway. Given that the aging copper lines on this hillside are prone to rain-death and lightning-death, and that we get a lot of rain and lightning, maintenance out here must cost you people a fortune, Telstra. But you know what ISN'T affected by water and electricity?

Glass. As in: fibre-optic cable.

I would dearly like to know what you fools pay to maintain the copper along this hillside. It would be fascinating to compare that ongoing cost with the cost of replacing the copper with glass fibre.

Ah well. I guess I'll never know, eh?

I remember the good old days when you convinced us to go with an ISDN modem for Internet purposes. We got a whopping 128kbps out of that. Yeee fucking haa, eh? Of course, storms blew out something like eight of your expensive modems in less than two years, until your people finally figured out you'd hooked our phone line to entirely the wrong lightning protection system... sure did make communications unreliable.

Anyway. When you pulled the plug on the ISDN system nationwide, you basically gave us the finger with regard to the Internet. No ADSL for us, no sir. Not out here. And back then, your shitty 3G service was still selling megabyte allowances for a couple-hundred bucks. Of course, we couldn't receive 3G Internet anyway... so for three or four years, we had a fucking satellite dish on the roof.

Actually, it's still there. But we're on 3G now, yeah. Not due to your work, though. Nope. To put it flatly, your consultants ranged from useless but friendly, to outright rude. The lass at the shop in Launceston was so unpleasant I've never gone back there, nor will. Luckily, one of my neighbours knew a bit about specialty 3G aerials, and after six months of phone calls and requests -- all of which came to nothing, except perhaps twenty to thirty wasted hours of conversation on the phone, plus a great deal of time listening to your fucking robot service -- I discovered that you have a business office in Invermay which actually sells the aerials my neighbour reccommended. So I drove there. And I bought one. And I installed it on the roof. And I connected it to your fucking base station router myself, and integrated the whole fucking lot with our LAN myself, and then argued my way through your tech support people until the account was up and running.

Yay me. Frankly, you should consider employing me, Telstra. Except you couldn't afford me, because I charge a vast premium when forced to work for utter arseholes.

Speaking of arseholes... what's with the business of maintaining parallel databases for all your different forms of customer? I can't actually count the number of times Natalie and I have had to tell some heavily-accented flunky to "check the records, yes, Mr Flinthart is not the account-holder but you'll see he has authority to access and make changes". Only, of course, practically every fucking time your people denied all knowledge because first we were private account holders. Then we held a business account (for the ISDN) and that didn't show the records from the private account. Then we were private again, but the authorisation didn't carry over. And then, even though you let me set up an entire fucking 3G BigPond account attached to Natalie's mobile, the first time I tried to fix and debug the account, your people insisted I didn't have the fucking authority.

How the fuck does that work? How can I create and authorise an online account -- but not have access to the simple issues of repair, because apparently I'm not authorised to work with the same mobile phone account that I built the goddam Internet account around? How is it you were willing to let me set up the whole 3G thing, including rolling all Nat's mobile bills in with the landline... but then you told me I didn't even have the authority to inquire about the usage afterwards?

Telstra... I really don't know where to begin with what I'd like to say. I'm writing this largely out of frustration, thinking back over ten seriously fucked up years of dealing with your wildly second-rate service, but the more I think about it, the more I realise just how piss-poor it's been, and how we've just come to accept it as a necessary part of life.

And I'm pretty goddam unhappy.

There's not much I can do about it, Telstra. Except, of course, to tell everybody: anytime you get the choice, anywhere, the answer is "Anyone But Telstra". And that includes hiring kids with plastic cups and long bits of string, to be honest.

I don't suppose we will ever see a competing service out here in the sticks. But if we do... I promise you, Telstra, the things you will have to do if you want to retain my custom will be so demeaning, so utterly obscene, and yet completely fulfilling from my viewpoint that you are probably going to have to hire an entirely new set of call-centre staff afterwards.

Until then: get stuffed.

Goodbye, Inigo. Goodbye, Darth Vader - And A Thousand Others.

2012-01-01T18:31:00.000-08:00

Only one source I've found for this so far, but AICN is usually pretty reliable.

It looks like Bob Anderson has finally met his match.

If you don't know who Bob Anderson is... I'm very sorry for you. Or rather: you know his work. You just don't realise it. And when you do figure it out, you'll be as sad as I am, I expect.

I hope that wherever he's gone, they've got swords. (And I hope they're not dumb enough to try and keep him out!)

An Interesting Alternative To Murdoch's Bullshit

2012-01-01T01:00:00.000-08:00

Here in Australia, Jolly Uncle Rupert controls something like 70% of the print media, and our political folks haven't the guts to take him on. He and army of shock-jocks, Bolty-boys and glove-puppet editors exert a truly alarming degree of control over the news to which we have access - and Uncle Rupe knows how to use that control.

Why do you think a rightwing nutjob like Tony Abbott continues in the job of Opposition leader? There are alternatives. Saner alternatives, even within Abbott's party. But Abbott is good for Murdoch business, and so he gets the press he wants, when he wants it, how he wants it.

Climate change. Carbon tax. Mining tax. Education spending. Health spending. Defense -- Uncle Rupe has a position on all these things, and he uses his media people to sell, sell, sell. The old saying goes: tell a lie often enough, and people will take it for the truth. Uncle Rupe has so many different ways of lying to us that it's next to impossible to find a way through to any sort of truth at all.

There are alternatives. Things like Al-jazeera and Green Left Weekly have significant media presences. The problem is that these outlets come with agendas of their own, potentially as screwy as even Uncle Rupert.

Then there's Crikey. Interesting, uniquely Australian... but now behind a paywall online. Do they have a print presence at all? I don't know.

There's a new, and very interesting, player in the game, however. Operating under the less-than-spellbinding name "The Conversation", the site appears to have great promise for a number of reasons.

The first reason is their up-front and avowed determination to involve academics, experts, and scientists. They're tightly linked with a broad university community, and the articles I've read so far have been thoughtful, reasoned -- and quite willing to call on people who appear to have genuine expertise in the areas under discussion.

That's a novel approach. I think I like it.

The second reason is their charter . Okay, yeah, anybody can write a charter and put it up on their site. But I have to admit, I like the look of this one. It's clearly written, simple, and focused in the right areas. Better still, their "ten rules" for involvement in the site are also clearly written, simple - and very plainly focused on producing a strong, inclusive, thoughtful, rational discourse.

A third reason: the team behind the site is shown in detail. Of course it could be a fiction - but if so, there are a lot of fictional people to be created and maintained here. Personally, I suspect the list is genuine. And it's an interesting list, heavy on expertise and knowledge... very, very light on magnates, Bolty-boys, celebrity fluffers, etc.

A fourth reason: I see no paywall here. I have no idea how these folks expect to generate revenue, or even if they expect it at all. But the information is there, and it's open, and there's space to comment, and converse.

At the moment, the site is still apparently in beta. I think it looks like something we desperately need in this country, so I'm going to dive in and take a look around. If there's anybody else reading this blog who thinks Uncle Rupert's deathgrip on our collective media gonads is an unhealthy thing... spread the word!

New Year's Eve And Sambal Ikan Bilis

2011-12-30T22:03:00.000-08:00

We're not doing much for New Year's eve. It's been a very busy couple months. We're all overstressed, overtired, and some of us are overcommitted. We're staying in, and watching movies in The Cinezone.

I picked up See No Evil, Hear No Evil - the classic Wilder/Pryor comedy in which Richard Pryor is blind, Gene Wilder is deaf, and both of them are suspects in a murder case. Also got Ghost Town, with Ricky Gervais. And Cowboys Versus Aliens, with Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig. That should be enough to keep Natalie happy.

Extending the theme, though. I got Aliens Versus Ninjas for me and the boys, and Repo Men (the Jude Law/Forrest Whittaker version) as well. We are well set up, I think. There's beer, ginger beer, cider, champagne, and tonnes of popcorn. Yay!

Excitingly, when I asked Nat what she'd like for dinner, she plumped for Nasi Lemak. This is an old Malay favourite of mine, usually served at breakfast. The best bit is the dreaded Sambal Ikan Bilis, served in spoon-sized portions along with lashings of coconut rice, peanuts, red onions, boiled eggs, and veggies.

I won't try to describe Sambal Ikan Bilis. Instead, I'll give you the blow-by-blow cooking process.

1: Obtain ingredients - two packets of dried anchovies; one large handful of dried chillies; tablespoon minced garlic, tablespoon minced ginger, three tablespoons tamarind paste, two tablespoons sweet soy sauce, oil for cooking, star anise bud, two medium brown onions, dollop of shrimp paste (belacan).

Consider the flavour mix: salty, pungent dried fish. Spine-tinglingly sour tamarind paste. Caramel-sweet/salty kecap manis (sweet soy.) Ginger, garlic, onion.... and brutally powerful dried chillies.

Drink some beer while considering this.

Put oil in the wok along with ginger, garlic, and star anise. Fry the spices until the smell rises. Now throw in your anchovies, and stir them until they turn light-brown and crispy. Remove, and drain.

Coarsely chop the chillies. Put them in the oil, and fry until the scent rises. Choke. Turn on the range hood. Add the shrimp paste. Gag. Have another beer. Open several windows.

Add the onion, the tamarind paste and the sweet soy. Ask the children to open the doors. Cough. Drink more beer. Stir the spice paste. Weep. Blow nose.

Natalie comes down the stairs, asks what's going on. Gets a deep breath. Bursts into a fit of coughing and weeping, flees outside. Orders children -- all of whom are now coughing, sneezing and gagging -- outdoors with her.

Stir paste. Drink beer. Weep. Sneeze. Cough. Stir and cook until the spice paste is thick and dark and viscous. Throw the crispy anchovies back into the mixture and stir until they're coated.

Turn off the burner. Grab another beer, run outside and collapse on the deck sucking in lungfuls of clean air. Listen to Natalie complain about being unable to go back inside for several minutes...

... return indoors. Eat a spoonful of wonderful, sour-sweet-salty-SUPERCHILLISPICY crunchy dried fish and onions and spice paste. Grab beer. Drink beer. Eat coconut rice. Weep. Blow nose. Eat more Sambal Ikan Bilis, despite the pain. Howl like a demented hippopotamus.

Mmmmmm.

Happy new year to you all.

Summer Lassitude

2011-12-27T02:30:00.000-08:00

Oh, the hot and heady days of summer. 21 degrees today, 22 yesterday... even Natalie cracked this evening, and complained that the day had been 'hot and muggy'. I made her say it again, just so I could laugh at her. She's always complaining about the cold down here, so to hear a whinge about a 'hot' day of 22 degrees is pretty damned funny.

I remember growing up in Cairns, in far North Queensland. There was one radio station that we could pick up: commercial channel 4CA. Frequency 1010... I remember because the awful fucking jingle went "Ten ten four --- see ayyyyy!" It was a horrible fucking radio station, broadcasting on AM as they all did at the time. Played mostly shit from the sixties while I lived up there in the seventies... that, and top forty crap. Yechh.

One thing I recall very clearly, though: the incessant advertising for the first shopping-mall built in Cairns: Raintrees Shopping Town. The radio announcers always brought it up the same way, reading off some terrible goddam script doubtless nailed to the wall: "...Raintrees Shopping Town, where it's always a cool and comfortable twenty-two degrees..."

Yeah. Aircon - the wonders thereof. That was a big selling point for the place up in Cairns. Funny enough in retrospect. Even funnier now that I live somewhere that the locals start to sweat and move slowly when the temperature gets to twenty-two.

Ahhh, nostalgia. Or the opposite, actually. What's the opposite of nostalgia? What word describes that emotion you feel when you think back to your childhood and shudder, and swear you'll never go back there again? Not so much Cairns, of course. It's not a terrible place. But for some reason, nostalgia gives me the creeps - to the point where my mind actively rebels against trying to go back and relive 'old glories', or whatever the proper term is. Been there, done that: it was fun, but now I'm doing something else.

What else? Well, what with the cricket on the choob (a good Test, so far. Better if the Aussies had held some of those tricky catches, or if Peter Siddle hadn't overstepped at a vital moment - or if the umpires hadn't screwed the pooch on Mike Hussey's dismissal) and the post-Xmas lassitude, it was a good day for laziness. Therefore, in honour of the good Prof Boylan, I devised a new, summer-time drink.

One of the advantages of being large, hairy, blokey, and well trained is that one can generally drink whatever the fuck one wants without having to worry about being harassed. These days, if I walked into a country pub and demanded a campari and soda with a splash bitters and a little pink paper parasol, please - well, there might be a silence in the place. But I know that silence. And I know how to stare it down, give it a shit-eating grin, and express without words just exactly what will happen to the unnecessarily silent individuals if they so much as look cross-eyed at me. Absolutely no words necessary.

That being the case, I'm quite happy to drink some very girly concoctions from time to time. Generally without the paper parasol, but that's just because I dislike any stupid bits and pieces that get between me and my drink. Like chunks of fruit, for example. Chunks of fruit do not belong in an alcoholic drink.

On the other hand, properly treated, fruit can be a real advantage. Which brings me back to the bit with Prof Boylan, who recently advised me to make raspberry Vodka. (Which I have. Thank you.)

I have also made raspberry sorbet, much to the delight of my wife and kids. A very simple recipe, what with all the raspberries we've got at the moment -- a litre or so of strained raspberry juice and pulp, some sugar, a couple egg-whites, and a half-hour or so in the ice-cream maker. Oooooh, yeah. Good.

Trouble is, sorbet doesn't really store well in the freezer. It loses its nice, smooth-slushy quality, and goes all icy and dry. Not nearly so nice to eat. On the other hand...

Make a gin and tonic. Make it nice and strong. Now, instead of ice, drop in three spoonfuls of raspberry sorbet, made as above. Drink. Listen to the happy song of your tastebuds as the alcohol goes into action. Make another. Drink that too. And then a third, what the hell. Mmmmmmmm.

And in other news: I do believe the inimitable Mister Jay may be back in the country. At least, judging from the return address on the rather wonderfully horrible "Mandrake the Magician" movie-serial DVD that turned up in my postbox just before Xmas, somebody claiming to be the man himself is launching crap-bombs out of Canberra. Mmmm! Tasty! The boys and I have now watched two episodes. The excitement is... umm... yeah. We're gonna have to give it the Suave Guy treatment, I think.

Not that all of Mister Jay's efforts have been so craptacular. As a matter of fact, the boys and I are thoroughly in his debt. Not only did we get some marvellous postcards from Sweden, but not too long ago, some books turned up in the post:

Very, very cool choices. We're not quite up to this standard yet... but we will be. Yayyy! Welcome back, Mister Jay!

Happy Boxing Day!

2011-12-24T14:45:00.000-08:00

Oh, great. Blogger has imposed it's "new look" on me. Now I have to figure out the whole setup again. I love it when these people decide to 'help' me.

Still. I suppose it's a free service. I get to suck it, basically.

Hey. Happy Boxing Day!

What - you didn't know it was Boxing Day? You thought it was Christmas? Ha! Poot to you! It's Boxing Day in the Flinthart household, and that's what counts.

No. This isn't a timezone thing. This is a "Nat's on call today" thing. We figured we could have Xmas yesterday, or tomorrow, to make up for Nat being called out. The Mau-Mau had the deciding vote. At first, she was horrified by the prospect of having Xmas on Genghis' birthday. The idea that he might get more presents than her was so awful that she was practically in tears... but when she was told the alternative was to wait another two days, she cracked almost at once.

It was a pretty good sort of Xmas. Low-key, as desired. Jake got a model rocket kit. Genghis got not one but two beautiful wooden, brass-bound chests, one with an inbuilt lock, one with a padlock. The inbuilt one contained a much-coveted set of polyhedral dice, for gaming. He immediately locked both chests and announced that his sister would never be allowed to look inside. Because that's what it's all about, right?

That's okay. The Mau-mau got a lockable diary, complete with Invisible Ink pen and UV light so she can read her own invisible notes.

We found Natalie a gun/toy into which she can load her iPhone. With the 'Alien Blaster' app downloaded, she can now wander around the place hunting invisible aliens and zapping hell out of them. It's fun to watch.

And me? Um... oh! I got a nifty Girl Genius badge and a Jackie Chan flick courtesy of my sister and her mob, and courtesy of the Mau-Mau I got the most marvellous set of action figures.

Okay. I lied about "marvellous". Here they are...

Natalie laughed like a drain. I did my best to keep a straight face.

Genghis found me a spice caddy. Jake got me a nice, clear pyrex teapot. I'm not sure what was going through the Mau-mau's mind... but she seemed to think the wrestling action figure playset was absolutely the best possible thing for me.

Never mind. I have a plan. It involves stop-motion animation... the Mau-mau will have cause to be proud of her gift.

The good thing about having Xmas on the eve is that the stores are open. I picked up a carton of Boag's St George, which will see me right for a while. Even down here in Tas, it's more or less hot. Yesterday maxed out at a fairly steamy 24C at 1500hrs - pretty much exactly when I was down in the raspberry patch, gathering goodies. Yeah... I know. That's not a patch on the Bad Old Days in Briz, but fuck that shit anyhow. 24C is plenty warm enough to make an icy beer very welcome after an hour or so of intensive berrypicking.

The bad thing about having Xmas on the eve is that the next day isn't Boxing Day. Nat's on call. I've got three restless kids, and another steamy, warm day to fill in without the aid of the Indians and the Australians doing battle at the MCG. Happily, various chunks of Lego sent by relatives (plus other intriguing presents) are still keeping 'em entertained. Long enough for me to type this, in any case.

So - have a good christmas, one and all. I hope it's not too hot for those of you in the south of the world, nor too cold for the north, and I hope that families and friends are around you, so you can end the year with peace and good will.

Oh, Humanity.

2011-12-17T15:57:00.001-08:00

Every now and again, amidst all the universal assholery and madness, between the destruction and the despair and the unbelievable, aggressive stupidity, something else happens.

Sometimes it's something special: so meaningless, and yet so beautiful that the meaninglessness of it becomes glorious in its own way.

This is one of those things:

http://thefoxisblack.com/2011/04/07/bach%E2%80%99s-cantata-147-jesu-joy-of-man%E2%80%99s-desiring-played-on-a-giant-wooden-xylophone-in-a-forest/

I'd have made a direct link of it... but for some reason, Blogger no longer permits that. I guess they want me to use their "updated Blogger interface".

Oh well. Enjoy the site, people. There's hope for humankind as long as this sort of madness remains.Ah. Here. Direct link.

I must say: this new interface isn't very attractive.

Early Birthday Present - A Personal Insanity

2011-12-16T15:42:00.000-08:00

Today is young Genghis' birthday party. It's about a week early, but what do you do when your kid is born on Xmas eve?

He's getting a really cool party this year. He and nine of his friends (including his brother) are off to the new Laser Tag facility in Launceston, for a few hours of running, screaming, jumping, and laser-zapping. I expect massive carnage. I also expect a bunch of very, very tired boys.

Once we're done, we'll head back here for the triple-layer chocolate cake with peppermint marshmallow, and a bit of a backyard barbecue with the firepit and all. In the meantime - well, Genghis got permission to open one birthday present. You can see it in the pictures above.

Obviously, I've been working at it for a while. To my variously Medieval friends: yeah, I know the links are too large, and it's a bit funky around the shoulders. But you know what? That is one deliriously happy not-quite-nine-year-old boy there. And remember that the armourer who put that particular chain shirt together has no prior experience whatsoever.

Hooray for the Internet, eh? I poked around a bunch of websites, and found out how to make basic chainmail. After that, it was all just cutting and bending.

It's a bit scratchy, but the boy loves it. He hasn't taken it off. (Of course, that's going to be challenging. It's a close fit. He'll have to tip himself up and shimmy out of it. I may even remove another couple of links.)

Happy birthday, kid!

The Evils Of Leap Years

2011-12-15T03:12:00.000-08:00

The Mau-Mau, like most six-year-old girls, is not hugely endowed with patience. Especially when it comes to things like, oh, Christmas. Or birthdays, for that matter.

The little pile of presents under the tree is tormenting her. It's as though it has its own gravity well, that works purely on the Mau-mau. She can't pass it by without being magically drawn to it, then frozen in the spot, staring longingly at the colourful paper and the enticing shapes.

Of course, the fact that it's Genghis' birthday just before Xmas pisses her off mightily. She and Genghis are frequently mortal enemies, and she strongly resents anything that happens to him or for him which she feels should properly be directed to her. By way of example: as we drove into Launceston today, to do an afternoon of gymnastics classes at the PCYC, a conversation developed vis-a-vis birthday cakes. And since I'm the chief caker-baker in this house, naturally I asked Genghis what kind of cake he might like....

Genghis:"Oh. Well. A multi-layered cake would be nice. With different flavoured icing between the layers."

Me: "Aha. Okay. Well - what kind of cake should it be?"

Mau-mau: "I had a cake with layers on my sixth birthday. It was so nice!"

Me: "Did you? I don't recall."

Genghis: "She did. You made it. It was really awesome. There was a big cake on the bottom, and a little one on that, and a littler one at the top, and it was all covered with white icing and sliced strawberries."

Mau-mau: "Yes! Oooh, I loved that. My sixth birthday was really good."

Me: "Okay. Multi-layer. But... you want chocolate cake?"

Genghis: "That would be good. With chocolate icing outside. Can I have fizzy lemon icing in between?" (This is a reference to a culinary invention of mine: yes, I created fizzy cake frosting.)

Me: "I don't think so. I don't think it would be good with the chocolate."

Genghis: "Oh. What about mint? And raspberries?"

Me (my face is curdling at this point.) "Umm. Look. A few mint leaves with a raspberry dessert is one thing. But peppermint icing and fresh raspberries... I'm not ready to do that."

Genghis: "Oh."

Me: "I tell you what, though. I could do layers of peppermint marshmallow in between the layers of cake, and chocolate icing over the whole cake. How does that sound?"

Genghis: "Peppermint marshmallow? Oooh! That sounds good!"

Mau-mau (infuriated): "Are you trying to make your birthday better than mine?"

I'm not kidding. Those were her exact words. So there was a brief Dad interlude in which I explained quite pointedly that I was going to try just as hard for Genghis as I did for her, and that he deserved the best birthday we could manage... and if she didn't like it, she could spend the day in question in the Time-Out area under the stairs.

She didn't think much of that option.

Anyway. Later in the evening, after dinner, the Xmas tree once more worked its evil magic upon her. She stood and stared, sighing. And finally, she announced that she just couldn't wait for Christmas. And how many days was it now?

Natalie growled, and said we weren't having Xmas on Xmas anyhow, since she's working that day. The Mau-mau was pretty upset by that, especially when she found we couldn't have it the day before because of... wait for it... Genghis' birthday!

Anyway. When the fuss died down from that, she decided she had to know how many days it was until her own birthday. At this point, Natalie rolled her eyes and pointed out that the Mau-mau had first asked that question the very day after her last birthday. So Genghis piped up, and said that obviously, when she first asked, the answer was 365 days.

Unthinkingly, I pointed out that 2012 is a leap year, and therefore the correct answer was 366.

Uh-oh. A truly remarkable frown appeared on the Mau-mau's face. What was this about an extra day? Had someone put another day between her and her birthday?

Natalie tried to dismiss the topic, but the Mau-mau wasn't having any of that. Footstomping ensued. Genghis tried his almost-nine-year-old best to explain leap years, but that was no good either. The Mau-mau shouted at the top of her voice: "I hate Sleep Years!"

The resulting wave of hilarity didn't help the situation. In fact, it cranked her up no end; she was infuriated that we'd caught the mistake, and insisted she'd really said 'leap year' but her mouth was full of pencil, or something. And then she really let loose...

Apparently, Leap Years exist solely as a conspiracy to offend her by keeping her farther away from her birthday. That one extra day in the calendar is a deliberate, calculated attempt to destroy her life and her sanity. That's right, folks: you heard it here first. The sole reason there are Leap Years is so that my daughter has to wait an extra day between birthdays every four years or so...

You can probably guess the amount of sympathy that her outrage generated. The whole episode ended with her stomping off to bed, and having a good old weep into her pillow.

I'll fix it tomorrow. I'll tell her she's slept through the extra day, now, and everything's back on track. I'm sure that will work perfectly.

...now, if only I could figure out how to restore my own failing sanity so easily.

End Of Year School Shenanigans

2011-12-14T00:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the Mau-Mau had her 'Early Childhood End Of Year Assembly'. There was much dancing at the prep-to-year 2 level. Happily, I managed to avoid that.

There was a price, of course. In order to dodge the Early Childhood school assembly (and please, folks... I've had two kids already go through all that three times each. And this is the Mau-Mau's second such assembly. So I do believe I've earned the right to duck one.) I had to take Genghis into Launceston for his double bass lesson.

Not so bad, right? Oh... but it's Christmas season. So... can you just take this PDF calendar to a printery and get them to run up four or five copies? Oh! And don't forget, we need something for little cousin S. And big cousin Z. Ooh - and here's a prescription that needs to be filled. Oh, wait: we need anti-fungal stuff for the fishtank. Can't get that in Scottsdale, no. And the Mau-Mau still hasn't got the Barbie doll she was promised when she won "Best Decorated Bicycle" in the Scottsdale Xmas parade last week. Can you just swing past K-mart and get the one with rainbow wings? Oh, and we need some gold and silver pens for the kids to make Xmas cards.

Meanwhile... I also got some T-shirts that I'm screen-printing for various folks. And I got Genghis another present. This whole birthday-on-Xmas-eve thing sucks.

I also found a remarkably clever present for Natalie. And one for the Mau-Mau. And one for Jake. We're staying low-key this year, though... have requested various relatives keep it minimal, and we're trying to focus more on family, and doing stuff together, and baking and decorating and stuff. Because, you know: I Have Had Enough Of This Christmas Crap, and so has Natalie.

So, that was most of my day yesterday. Five hours, including driving time of roughly an hour and a half. Mmm. Christmassy. I was so tired by the end of it all that I even skipped the weekly movie session with Bruce and the others... couldn't bear the thought of driving back into Launceston yet again. Besides, I needed the work time. Still do.

Today was Assembly Day for the rest of the school. Jake was set to play a cello piece. He was pretty comfortable with that. But far more nervous-making was the fact that my young flute student the Dill (of the Double-Banger family) was up to perform too. He'd not done that before, and he was pretty keyed up.

It went well, though. Or mostly. I'm afraid I made an ass of myself during the National Anthem. I've never seen the second verse before, you understand. I thought it was part of the Constitution that we only ever sing the first verse, and then we sit down and crack tubes. But no: the school, in a fit of misplaced patriotism, used its mighty digital projector powers to display the second verse on the wall so we could all sing.

Well. Almost all. I don't much like national anthems. But I was trying. And then I got to these lines:

For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;

By now, you know my opinion on our pitiful government (past and present) and the way it treats refugees... most especially, those refugees who dare to arrive by (gasp!) boat. I'm afraid that when I got to those lines, I couldn't actually keep singing. Instead, I burst into laughter, defeated by the lovely irony of it all. Natalie frowned and shushed me... but it was too late. The damage had been done. I think I wanna print those lines on a couple of T-shirts, and send one each to Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard...

Still, what with all the enthusiastic singing going on, only a few people noticed my breach of protocol. And the boys played well. Jake is starting to make the 'cello sound like a real instrument, and The Dill did a very fair rendition of 'The Skye Boat Song', so everything ended neatly.

I ducked out before the awards. Natalie was staying, so I didn't figure I'd miss out. And lo - Jake got another 'academic achievement' award, and Genghis got an 'aim high' award. This latter is interesting: it's offered to the student who gets enthusiastically involved in activity and particularly, in discourse and discussion. Knowing Genghis as I do, I think I can imagine his version of 'enthusiasm', and 'discourse and discussion', and I strongly suspect that in his case, the 'aim high' award was actually a declaration of surrender by his poor, long-suffering teacher. She's done well this year, I must say. I hope she gets an easier lot next year!

We're getting down to the skinny end of things now. Just a few more school days. Genghis is having his birthday party on Saturday... no real choice about that, since we're running out of time. I've found a really brilliant way to handle the party this year, though, so I'm actually looking forward to that one.

Meanwhile, I've been gardening, printing shirts, doing up Xmas cards, wrapping presents, cooking, baking, reading for the MA, writing for the MA, writing on the MS... and even attempting to bring some order to my study.

I think my big project for the summer will be a clean-out and refurbishing of the top shed. I need a place to store the martial arts gear that doesn't involve crowding out my study - but until I manage to put bird-wire all around the eaves of the dojo-shed, anything stored up there is likely to get swallow-shit all over it, which pisses me off immensely. I also need to replace some of the old fibre-glass light panels in the roof with modern "laser-lite" plastic corrugated panels, but that's a bastard of a job: I have to cling onto a steeply pitched corrugated iron roof, over a drop of something like six metres down to a very unforgiving, flat, rocky clay surface. I don't like that at all.

But it's going to have to happen. I can't keep jamming things in this little study. I need more room. If I could shift all the martial gear up there without fear of birdshit, that would be a great start. And I could also move the shirt-printing stuff, and the glass-art stuff. And the sword training stuff too, which would make sense, because it could be with the rest of the martial gear.

That would leave me with only the computer, printer, router, video/camera/recording gear, the reference books, the martial arts library, the shelves of SF and fantasy, the language texts and exercise books, the musical instruments and musical theory/texts, the laminating and binding equipment, the games, the software, plus my personal collection of movies and music, and the sewing machine with all the cloth and the bits and pieces that go with it. Boy! I'd have so much room in my 3m x 4m study that I'd hardly know what to do with myself!

Bolt Writes For Crikey: Wants Marriage Equality

2011-12-12T19:47:00.000-08:00

True story!

Read it here.

Okay, sure. It's Andrew Bolt's sister, Stephanie - not the Grand Fuckwit himself. But can you think of a better way to annoy the shit out of him than by recognising, publicising and respecting the excellent and intelligent writing of his married lesbian sister?

I can't. So... what are you waiting for?

Summer Tastes Like...

2011-12-10T14:06:00.000-08:00

Actually, right now summer tastes like raspberries. The work I did a few years back in putting in the canes is literally coming to fruition. I've given up on neat rows and carefully tied canes: there's a tall, spiny, shadowy bramble of raspberry canes, just right for kids to sidle into and get lost, and scratched, and sweaty - and absolutely loaded with beautiful, fresh, ripe, delicious raspberries.

It's not completely uncontrolled. There's a quarry in Launceston that will sell random slabs of flat rock from their operations. You can get a trailerload for about $30. I've taken a bunch of those rocks and just thrown them into the bramble, making winding, narrow pathways amongst the berry canes.

That'll do. We're sitting on fifty acres. Why the hell should I bother trying to constrain my raspberry bushes? I've got a fence around 'em for the wallabies, and a daggy old net that I'm going to have to replace in the next year or so which deters enough of the birds. We're currently getting about a kilo a day from the patch, and probably will do so for the next week or two. Shortly after that, I expect the first blackberries to kick in.

The kids are ecstatic. Natalie's happy. I'm happy. Raspberries are good. The canes keep coming up, expanding into new territory. Eventually, they'll break out of the fence - and I'll let them. If they can fend for themselves amongst the ravening wallabies and rabbits, then why shouldn't they?

In the meantime, I have raspberries. At supermarket prices, I have something like $40 or $50 per day of raspberries, and they're not mouldy, or over-ripe, or squished, or flavourless from cold storage. Faced with such a bounty, I have a Policy.

Naturally, we're eating a lot of simple, plain, ripe raspberries. Of course. But as a cook, since I have access to such a luxurious ingredient, I feel a real obligation to do the job right. So I'm playing around, and everybody's enjoying the outcome.

The photo at the top is my 'Raspberry Sandwich'. It's a very simple single-layer lemon cake baked in a broad, shallow dish. The cake gets cut into neat squares, and 'sandwiched' around whipped cream and oodles of lovely raspberries. The mint leaves on top are purely and simply because I can. I have an enormous mint bush in a half wine-barrel next to the main path to the door, and the green, fragrant leaves look groovy on top of all that luscious cake, cream and fruit.

That was Thursday. Friday I went to the cricket, and got back late. Yesterday I made an elegant, creamy raspberry mousse, which I served by heaping it with fresh raspberries, then drizzling melted dark chocolate over the lot. (And mint leaves. That really is a goddam big mint bush. Must figure out more things I can do with mint.) We had Malay Chicken Rice first - the whole show, with the bowl of soup full of vegetables, then the fragrant twice-cooked chicken served with rice cooked in the chicken stock.

Then we followed it up with the raspberry mousse, and at that point, five children were convinced I am a God... and my wife is convinced I'm an incarnation of Satan, promoting furious gluttony upon hapless middle-aged women.

Anyhow: I'm looking for more interesting raspberry recipes. Anybody got a favourite of their own?

Six Hours Driving, Five And A Half Hours Of Cricket

2011-12-09T01:47:00.000-08:00

...and was it worth it? Well - yeah.

We're being pretty low-key about Xmas this year. Frankly, Natalie and I are just tired of it, and the boys are old enough to be taking a more relaxed view of the whole show. The Mau-Mau is still young enough to be excited by the entire prospect, of course... but that kind of excitement can be adequately addressed with decorating Xmas trees and making seasonal treats, and pulling crackers, and so forth.

However, more or less as a result, we're kind of loosening the weave, and incorporating a few treats around Xmas. Not related, but timely, and fun. So when I discovered that the second cricket test between EnnZed and Oz was going to kick off in Hobart today - well, how could I resist? The boys love them some cricket, and I rather like the game too. Especially the test form. And Bellerive Oval is a pretty place that still has a proper Hill for the drunkards and the yobbos to sprawl upon indecorously.

So I dove online, and booked a few tickets. And then one more, because a friend of the boys' at school is also a big cricket fan, and has (like my two) never before been to a live match of any quality.

Hell of a drive, though. We took off at about 0730 this morning, and drove. And drove. And drove. And then we parked the car a few blocks from the Oval, and we walked. And finally, they let us in - although they told us we couldn't take our umbrellas with us. Weapons of terror, apparently. Or something.

Anyway, it was a very good day. The boys were thoroughly delighted. The weather was hot and bright for most of the day, and early in the piece there was a lot of action from the pitch - plenty of bounce and seam, and even a good amount of swing for a couple of the Aussie bowlers. As a result, the Kiwi wickets fell at a gratifyingly steady rate, and the boys got to cheer and jeer, and solicit autographs on the sidelines.

They made noises with freely distributed and sanctioned noisemakers. They gathered horrible little Milo Cricket balloons. They drank Powerade and ate sandwiches and fruit that we'd packed, and listened to the commentary on wee little free ear-radios provided by series sponsors Vodaphone. Whenever they got bored or hot, they'd wander off to another section of the ground, and then wander back when they were ready.

And I enjoyed myself, yes. I do like a bit of cricket, and I got to watch the match, as well as watching three young lads enjoy watching their very first test match, and I felt like a Decent Sort Of Dad, which is always rewarding.

A late rain shower delayed the start of the Australian innings, but they batted just long enough for Warner to hit a decent boundary, for Hughes to lose it to Martin in the slips yet again, and for Usman Khawaja to dodge, duck, weave, and pray his way through to 'not out' by the time the rain set in for real. By that time, we were ready to go anyway, so we packed up, reclaimed our umbrellas from the kindly buffoons in security, and launched ourselves into the traffic.

And may I just say: of all the events I have ever driven away from in cities all over Australia, getting away from Bellerive Oval is by far the most irritating piece of work. Hobart's traffic system was NOT designed for the kind of traffic dump you get at the end of a decent cricket match... and Bellerive is a cramped sort of suburb on a peninsula of sorts. The drive from Bellerive to the edge of the Hobart traffic region took nearly a full hour. I was less than happy.

So, that was the day. Six hours of driving. Lots of music on the radio. A decent day of cricket with a good performance from the Australians, and three very tired, very happy kids.

That's definitely a dose of true Christmas spirit, if you ask me.

I Did Promise Video

2011-12-03T15:33:00.000-08:00

Well, yesterday was The Christmas Parade here in sunny Dorset Parish, and Scottsdale. And of course, that means the yearly ju-jitsu demonstration.

The kids enjoy it. They get to show off in front of a crowd. The parents enjoy it: they get to watch the kids hurling each other about, chasing each other, wrestling, playing martial games, and going through set-piece defenses.

Most of all, the kids love the opportunity to break some pine boards.

Personally, I think board breaking is silly. But having seen how much the kids love it, and having seen how it changes their attitude when they get the chance to do it, I'm for board-breaking as a teaching element.

I don't think it teaches much in the way of technique. You do have to be able to generate a bit of power, sure. And you have to be balanced, and you have to hold your hand (or foot) correctly to prevent being damaged by the blow. But none of it is particularly difficult.

Despite that, it does teach one really important thing. It teaches people -- kids especially, but adults as well -- that they can step past limits that they currently take for granted. Not only that, but it's exciting and rewarding to go past those limits. It helps transform their thinking from 'oh, I don't know if I can do this' into 'ooh! I bet I could do this if I just try hard enough!'

Those of you who've been around this space will be aware that I regard that mental transformation as very possibly the single most important element of martial practice. Not everyone who comes to martial arts wants competition, or fitness, or self-defence. But everyone who learns to shift the mental bars, free themselves from their own doubts, and push their boundaries benefits tremendously. When you stop taking boundaries and limits for granted and start learning to exceed them, you enlarge yourself, you enhance your life, and you greatly improve your opportunities in every area. So: if breaking pine boards helps my young students acquire that mental attitude, then I will buy a whole goddam lumber mill, if the club finances hold.

Happily, we generally only need six or seven metres of good, wide, pine board.

Now. I believe I mentioned that this year I was going to try an interesting trick. I saw some footage of Jackie Chan doing a break, and he did it while holding an egg in his hand. That, I thought, was actually very cool. Breaking stuff is one thing. Breaking things while exerting sufficient control that a raw egg in the breaking-hand remains unharmed shows control, and skill.

I also promised footage. Well -- Natalie used a ratty little camera to shoot the event yesterday. I did, in fact, succeed (and finished up by holding up the egg, then breaking it to show the crowd it wasn't boiled, and swallowing the contents... which freaked them out even more than the actual board-break). So it wasn't very clear on the video.

Therefore, I set up again on the picnic table outside, and got Jake to man a slightly better camera for me. Here's the result.

Boards broken, egg unharmed.

Can't figure out how to make it show up as an embedded YouTube video. Sorry. If you're curious, you can click the link.

TEOTWAWKI. For Real.

2011-11-28T22:29:00.000-08:00

I suppose it was inevitable. And yet - reading the article, I'm struck by an awesome sense of frustration at the unbelievable, indescribable stupidity of what's been done here.

Those of you with memories longer than your average mayfly will recall the Great Avian Flu scare. A strain of influenza associated with birds started killing people in places like Hong Kong, and Vietnam, and there was a looong, nasty, tense wait to see whether it would take off and turn pandemic.

Turned out the virus was a serious killer. Of the folks infected, about 70% just plain died. Systems collapse. To give you some idea, the Great Spanish Flu pandemic which occurred in 1918 and killed more people around the world than all of World War One had a lethality of about 2.5%.

Lucky for us, the H5N1 Avian Flu virus turned out to be fairly difficult to catch. The structure of the virus itself made it pretty non-contagious in humans. It had to be inhaled deep, deep into the system before it could catch hold - which was why almost all the victims were either chicken-herders, or were directly caring for affected victims who were chicken-herders.

Whew. Sigh of relief, eh?

Except now, some unbelievably stupid Dutchman has not only genetically modified the virus to be highly contagious, while leaving it at roughly 5o% lethality... but he's also presented a paper on the topic.

Dutch Lunatic Sets End Of Human Civilisation In Motion

I appreciate the thought that knowing this shit can potentially help us prepare... but to present this kind of stuff in a public forum is the absolute height of lunacy. People are, of course, talking about 'banning the paper'. But it's the 21st century, folks. You can bet that information is well and truly into "the wrong hands" already. Banning it at this point is a waste of time.

Folks... here's how it is. When this one gets out, we're fucked on a scale not even imagined since the 14th century.

Nice knowin' y'all.

Martial Musings and a Tangle With Telstra

2011-11-24T01:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Natalie came down the stairs with an expression of doom on her face. I was busy listening to our neighbour, Mad Mick the Historian, so I didn't notice at first. It wasn't until she slapped a Telstra bill in my hand that I wondered what was going on. So I looked at it. $1,007.90.

Errr... what?

A cursory reading of the bill showed the problem. Apparently, Telstra believed that on exactly one day during that period (November 4th), Natalie turned on the 'International Roving' function on her Iphone, and sucked up $825 worth of data from some random overseas location.

My wife is a lovely person, but she's not good at confrontation. She was pretty upset. Remembering our various skirmishes with Telstra in the past (six months, unknown numbers of phone calls and consultations - and finally, it was advice from my neighbour which enabled me to set up a functional wireless internet aerial here at home... thanks Telstra.) she was pretty firmly convinced we were going to wind up forking out the eight-hundred plus smackers, and quite reasonably, that made her unhappy.

I, on the other hand, am perfectly willing to plant myself in the road in front of the proverbial bulldozer, and dare it to try coming my way. And most of that six months worth of back-and-forth on the phone was done by yours truly. As well as the three separate visits to Launceston offices of Telstra, etc. So I just asked her if I could handle it. After all - we've made sure on at least a half-dozen occasions now that I have access to the phone accounts.

Well. First, I had to call Nat back down to the phone so she could tell some Indian-accented chap (who was in Sydney, honest, because he could tell me all about the weather. Not Bangalore. Sydney!) that yes, I was her husband, and yes, I had authority to discuss the phone accounts. So, okay: make that seven times we've told Telstra, and been assured every time that they've adjusted the records accordingly.

After that, though, things went quite well. I explained to Mister Accent that Telstra had made an obvious and stupid error. I pointed out that not only did the spike in billing occur on one single day of the period, but that at no other point in our long history of Telstra bills had anything similar occurred. And while he was busy trying to tell me that sometimes people changed their habits, I pointed out very loudly that neither of us had been overseas during that time. At all.

No. Nor had the phone. Nor any of our computers. Not even a little bit.

He got kind of glum after that, and told me they'd initiate an inquiry. At that point, I politely requested his name and his employee number. Through pleasantly gritted teeth he supplied them, and then decided that the investigation should take place immediately, and if I would just hold, he'd put me straight through.

Half an hour of banal music later, Mister Accent came back. Oops. Yes. The investigation suggested that the bill should be adjusted downwards by $825. And just to be sure, he would cancel that pesky International Roving service (which Natalie had never actually authorised.)

Job done.

I suspect the 'cancellation' of the IR service was done because they decided not to bother investigating over a mere $800 or so. They probably figured that if we were scamming, we'd be pissed by the cancellation of the service, and they wouldn't be out any more money. Doesn't really matter: Natalie isn't stupid. When she goes overseas, she buys a cheap-ass local phone and sim card, because the fucking ridiculously extortionate IR rates are obscene. (And she raises a good point: don't these halfwitted phone people realise how much money they DON'T make by charging so much for IR? If they kept the rates reasonable, people wouldn't do the obvious thing, and buy that cheap phone. But with rates the way they are, instead of making a bomb, Telstra makes nothing at all from sensible travellers. Corporate brains at work?)

All up, it only took one phone call lasting three quarters of an hour. I'm still debating whether or not I should bill Telstra for the wasted time...

Anyway. In the evening, I had the usual class in ju-jitsu. It's near the end of the year, so mostly I'm working the kids through stuff they can show off for the Christmas parade. They love it: lots of exciting diving and rolling, plenty of sparring and game play, and best of all, they get to break boards. Kids luuurrrve breaking boards. And why not?

That wasn't the interesting bit, though. That came with the older class. I decided that since we were having a relatively quiet evening, we'd do something different, and so I set up a session of very, very hardcore groundfighting.

Not hardcore in the sense of MMA. Hardcore in the sense that biting, gouging, hair grips, ear grips, fish-hooking, head-butting, and finger-locking were all permitted: nay, encouraged.

It went like this. We broke up into pairs. One person became the attacker. Their job was to pin the defender in such a way as to be able to demolish some kind of weak spot: ribs, groin, face, throat. The job of the defender was to prevent that by the most efficient means possible.

Most efficient means possible.

Of course, restraint was required. Nobody actually got busted up, and I'm glad of that. But the goal of the exercise was real, and realised, and it was very valuable.

Y'see, the great paradox of teaching a genuine martial art is that you hope never to use it. And you start off, by necessity, teaching a very rigid, very safety-conscious set of techniques. Beginners are dangerous, but it's not because they're particularly good. It's because they've got no accuracy, and no control. You can't train hard with a beginner because what you want to do is pattern into yourself really sharp, accurate, fast responses, and you can't do that if you have to try to keep them safe while simultaneously trying to watch out for their tendency to stumble and swing wildly. So at the start, you teach people efficiency, and you teach them safety, and you teach them restraint and caution and observation.

And in a real situation of violence, you're unlikely to see many of these things from your opponent. Further: if you apply these principles, you are quite likely to be badly injured by somebody who just doesn't give a shit about rules of safety, etc.

So what do you do?

Many martial arts never actually bother. They emphasise discipline, fitness, perhaps spiritual development, or possibly sporting competition. But the hard core of no-rules, survival-first combat don't get much of a look in.

There are other arts and practitioners who insist that hard, frequent, high-contact sparring will do the job, yep. To those folks, I'd offer this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhxDQgbuZ3o

It depicts a handful of some of the UFC's top fighters going up against pairs of US Marines in an open woodland. And to a man, the hard-sparring, super-tough, highly skilled UFC men get completely pwned. Not just beaten: absolutely annihilated. They don't even score points against the Marines. They show no awareness of how to deal with paired opponents, and they're woefully unprepared for the simple hand-to-hand weapons that they are given, and which are deployed against them. The UFC guys spar as hard as anybody in the world, but they have rules, and they live by those rules. Put 'em in an environment where the rules don't apply, and they flounder.

There are some who more or less abandon the term 'martial art', and teach - well, "Surviving violence" might be a good name for it, I think. Try this blog: http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/ This guy gets my respect. I believe he knows what he's talking about.

But then, if you orient everything you do towards surviving violence - how do you work with kids? And what about the people who are interested in other aspects of a martial art?

Murky territory.

My background is ju-jitsu, more or less. The traditional kind, involving everything - strikes, locks, throws, kicks, evasion, weapons, groundfighting and anything else you want. Plus a lot of stuff which is less trad: defense from weakened positions, surprise attacks, etc. The instructor I studied under longest was Shihan Mark Haseman, and he quite openly declared he favoured a kind of goshin-jitsu, or self-defense oriented art.

One thing I got from everybody in ju-jitsu - the three different schools I've been with, the three major instructors and visiting masters and the seminars and the rest - was a sense of openness. Ju-jitsu as I know it isn't a closed tradition. It's an open, evolving art. But the heart of it is: efficiency, and survival.

So I compromise. With the young ones, I teach a lot of basic physical skills. They fall and roll, strike and kick and block and throw and dodge. They play games, and they break boards sometimes, and they wrestle, and they get exposed to a range of simple, basic kid-strategies for self defense. They seem to enjoy it all, and they gain a lot of confidence, and learn to move better, and maintain their balance. It's all good.

But with the older students, I try to bring things more to a sharp point. We still go through all the basics of movement and balance, striking and evading and blocking and throwing, etc. But in between the work on the basics -- the effort to make them more than just dangerous, unco-ordinated beginners -- I try to work on the things that are relevant to real self-defense.

The session last night was fascinating, from my viewpoint. I wound up wrestling with almost everyone individually, as we broke up the pairs and shifted them around, and in every case, I had to physically demonstrate what I was talking about. I had to show them how to bite, how they could grab an ear and use it as a handle to drag a face into range of a fist. I had to show them how you could try to pry a finger loose from a stranglehold on your neck, and point out that if that wasn't working - well, you had the attacker's attention on that grip and now you could get a really good handful of delicate groin tissue and tear hell out of it...

Difficult. Very challenging for the women, because they have to overcome not just the manners of the dojo, but the non-aggressive, relatively mild role expected of them by society at large. But even for the males, there was a lot of mental conditioning to overcome. They simply didn't think of biting, for example - not even at times when I deliberately stuck a forearm across someone's mouth.

I'm ... well, I'm not sure pleased is the word, but at least I'm satisfied I don't have any such inhibitions. Twenty-odd years under some very fierce instructors, plus a lot of time on the mat, plus long and careful consideration of the purpose of the training have left me with a very simple, matter-of-fact outlook on this stuff. Put me in a position where I truly have to fight for my life, and I will do - actually, I can't think of what I wouldn't be prepared to do to an attacker, if it was necessary. And I don't have to think about it. Try putting your arm across my face: I'll bite bloody chunks out of you. Get your face too close to mine and I'll use my forehead to spread your nose like Vegemite. Lose track of my hand: you'll find my thumb in your eye-socket. Because those are the rules when you're on the bottom, trying not to get killed, you know?

But it's not an easy thing to teach: morally, spiritually, or even technically. It's hard to balance.

We'll definitely be doing that exercise again.

Why I Don't Own A Kindle, or The Value Of Actually Owning The Works

2011-11-23T13:00:00.001-08:00

Everybody loves their Kindle. But not me.

Ever since I first heard about Amazon/Kindle remotely removing copies of Orwell's 1984 from several hundred accounts for some reason, I've been unwilling to get a Kindle. I don't care how wonderfully convenient they are. If the people at Amazon can control my access to works which I have legitimately purchased, then I don't really own those works at all.

Of course, it's not always a deliberate action. Sometimes things just... go wrong.

http://consumerist.com/2011/11/amazon-puts-your-1000-kindle-library-on-hold-apologizes-shrugs.html

You'll note from the references at the bottom of the article that this isn't the first time the problem has been brought up. This is, in fact, a recurring issue.

Bottom line? I'm sure owning a Kindle is just marvy. And I'm sure it's wonderful to have cloud access to all those texts. At least... I'm sure it's wonderful right up until the point when Amazon decides you shouldn't have that access. Or until the government convinces them that the books you're reading are dangerous and naughty. Or until...

Yeah.

You know what? There are e-readers on the market that let you store your own e-books. I'm not yet interested enough to get such a reader, but when I do, that's where I'll be going. And a Kindle account?

Nah. Not until Amazon accepts that when I buy a book, it belongs to me, not them.

Vale, Anne McCaffrey.

2011-11-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

http://www.airlockalpha.com/node/8787/dragonriders-of-pern-author-anne-mccaffrey-dies.html

I don't have a lot of time right now. I'm due to go and grab some kids and then teach an evening of martial arts very shortly. But I just spotted this article on the 'Net, and honestly, I couldn't simply stay silent.

I believe I first encountered Anne McCaffrey's works at the Cairns Library when I was perhaps ten years old. At that age, her Dragonrider books were a revelation, and I loved them.

It's hard for me to revisit them as an adult, I admit. But say what you will about her books, there's no gainsaying the wonderful influence she's had. Her work has made a very large number of people very happy... including one boy, some thirty-odd years ago, and I can never be anything other than grateful.

So long, Anne.

The Fundamental Flaw In Libertarian Thinking

2011-11-20T21:25:00.000-08:00

Of course, the first question is why am I bothering to address this? Isn't the whole 'Libertarian' thing a flaky outcrop of the loony Right of the US?

Possibly. But I found out yesterday that it's also taking root in Australia, which is disturbing. And while I'm at it - when I was a kid, reading Robert Heinlein (who might as well be one of Science Fiction's patron saints of Libertarianism) the philosophy seemed to have some good points to it. And is it not axiomatic that "...that government is best which governs least"?

Except that the so-called Libertarian philosophy is built around a fundamentally unsound basis.

The basic ideal of Libertarianism is: you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone, and we'll all be better off. Libertarians oppose government assistance schemes, government interventions of just about any sort, and "impositions" on personal rights, such as seatbelt laws. It's a basic ideal of the movement that one should be permitted to choose actions which may lead to self harm if one is aware that the harm is possible, and one desires to do so. Whose life is it anyway?

Unfortunately, that only really works if the whole world is composed of Libertarians, each fully self-sufficient and in no way beholden to any other. To show exactly how it falls down, consider the question of immunisation.

There are plenty of people who oppose immunisation of children. Despite the claims of harm being long since debunked; despite the removal of mercury-based preservatives (thiomersal) from childhood vaccines - despite all evidence to the contrary, there are people who insist that vaccines are potentially dangerous, and they shouldn't be required to subject their children to them.

There are enough such idiots (and I use the term deliberately, because anyone whose behaviour flies in the face of a century or so of scientific research and successful, effective medical practice, and endangers their own children in so doing is manifestly an irresponsible idiot) that recently we've seen a minor epidemic of whooping cough in Victoria, and if I recall correctly, there's now a measles epidemic going on in New Zealand... despite the fact that both these diseases are eminently preventable.

Lets take the Libertarian line, shall we?

* * *

"The government has no right to impose this on me, or my family. I can protect my own family."

Oh? How will you do that?

"If there's an outbreak, I'll isolate myself and my family. We'll wait until it passes. We'll be fine. We've made preparations."

Aha. So somehow, you're going to get your entire family into complete isolation before the first symptoms of the outbreak occur in your local community. Because, of course, many -- if not most -- diseases are communicable before they're symptomatic.

"I'll read about it in the newspaper. On the Internet."

Interesting. Given that an outbreak can last several months or longer, you're prepared to wait that long in complete medical isolation?

"... That's a worst-case scenario, right?"

No. It's pretty common. So - what will you do if your children catch this disease? Will you refuse medical treatment and let them die?

"Of course not. Libertarianism embraces the exchange of valuable skills. I can pay for medical treatment. We're not unreasonable. Nobody can have all the necessary skills and resources on their own."

Really? Doesn't that make Libertarianism kind of... untenable?

"No. No. We accept and understand a society in which all participants are involved on a voluntary basis, where everyone knows and take responsibility for the consequences of their actions."

All right. What will you do if your child requires hospitalisation? Let's say - for something like Whooping Cough? You know - because the outbreak arrived before you got word, or because you didn't stay in isolation long enough. Will you permit your child to enter a public hospital, if necessary?

"We're not monsters or idiots. We've got nothing against hospitals as such. They're necessary. If a child needs to be hospitalised and we have the money or the means to make that possible, then of course we will do what is needed to save the child. Who wouldn't?"

I see. So... how are you going to explain that to the other people whose children may have to visit that hospital? Babies, for example - too young as yet to be immunised against Whooping Cough. When you send your righteously non-immunised (but now desperately sick) child to the hospital, you're exposing an entire community to the disease. And yes: you're exposing children too young to make the choice about vaccination - even too young for the option. In fact, by insisting on your right not to immunise, you are now endangering the youngest, most vulnerable members of your community.

"...uhhh..."

Tell me: what's the Libertarian philosophy on people who deliberately endanger, harm, or kill small children? I'm just curious, you understand...

* * *

Our fable ends there, but the principle which it illustrates remains. I know perfectly well that not all (in fact, probably not most) people who call themselves 'Libertarian' are stupid enough to refuse vaccination. But under the Libertarian "philosophy", it's their right to refuse vaccination for themselves and their children. Because the Government has no right to intervene, and impose these things on people.

The truth? "Libertarianism" is little other than a nice six (or is it seven? How many syllables in "-ism"?) syllable word that is pretty much absolutely equivalent to another six-syllable construction: "Fuck you, Jack. I'm all right."

I'm happy to concede that there's a need for greater personal responsibility in the society we've built. I'm appalled by a lot of the crap we've imposed on people who are really not endangering anyone else, nor even themselves. But 'Fuck you Jack, I'm all right' is no basis for a civilisation.

It's a shared world. The resources of the earth are finite. We are interdependent, both upon the people around us, and the world and environment which supports them. The 'philosophy' of Libertarianism is a stupid, shallow, meaningless mouth-noise used to provide a shiny disguise for the worst kind of venal, greedy, self-centred, mean-spirited xenophobia...

...and I say let the Americans keep it, if they really want it.

The Great Stupid Smartphone Debacle

2011-11-12T20:27:00.000-08:00

So, not too long ago my trusty Nokia flip-phone became untrustworthy. Its little LED screen expired in a blaze of blue, and I could no longer access any information except by guess. And that really wasn't much good.

I knew the SIM was okay. I could still receive calls, and make calls. So that was all right. I figured I'd just replace the thing, you know? No drama.

Bit of backstory: I grew up in Far North Queensland, mostly. Did not have a landline in the family name until I was eighteen, and living in a flat of my own in Brisneyland. Horrible bloody place it was, too... and as it happened, the phone number was literally one digit different from one of Queensland's non-existent illegal brothels, so we occasionally received some very peculiar calls.

The point I'm making is that I'm pretty ambivalent about phones. I don't like conversing over the phone. I don't like the lack of feedback. If I can't see you, read your posture and your gestures and your expressions, it's not a conversation at all. It's just a limited exchange of information. I expect I have all the phone manner of Jack the Ripper, to be honest. But I absolutely do not give a shit.

The mobile phone revolution has left me quite unimpressed. I'm a big user of computers, and I love the Internet, but mobile phones? Meh. Who really cares? Who actually needs to be on-call to the world 24/7, eh? Not this little black duck.

Nevertheless, I have three school-age kids. I live on a rural property. My wife is a GP, often on-call, who delivers the occasional baby. It follows that sometimes I need to stay in contact. The choice is: get a mobile phone, or don't go out.

I got a mobile. And you know - it's been really cool to have it for the SF conventions, and the occasional visit to friends and different cities and stuff. Very convenient. Yep. But not so's I couldn't live without it. Completely pre-paid; that's me. And I generally spend maybe twenty bucks a month that way.

So I trundled on down to the post office, and went through their shiny toys looking for another cheap-arse mobile. Turned out they were carrying a funny little thing, branded by Telstra. It was called a 'Touch', and it was Android-based Smartphone, and it cost under a hundred bucks.

Well, I didn't expect much at that price, but what with everybody in the world positively fuckin' swooning over their you-beaut World Interface Devices, I figured I'd put a toe in the water. See what it was like.

And in fact, if I were to extend the toe-in-the-water metaphor, I'd have to say it was a lot like discovering the water was full of toxic waste and mutated piranha-squid with a vengeful hunger for toes.

First of all, the Telstra Touch is as fugly a piece of coprophagic illegitimacy as ever I'd hope to avoid seeing again. Even with the provided stylus, its touch-keyboards are buggy and untrustworthy.

On top of that, it comes preloaded with a mile-high pile of shite. Instalinks to Facebook, Fox News, SportShite, and a hundred other pieces of dung. Good luck figuring out how to remove 'em: half of 'em appear to be permanent. Unless you wanna crack open Android, of course.

If I'd been more interested, I might have bothered. But I wasn't. Instead, I went and turned all sorts of shit off. I did enable the 'contacts' application. Which was stupid of me. I should have twigged when it demanded my gmail address - but how was I to know it was going to download all my gmail contacts? That was especially pointless, actually, since I don't keep phone numbers on gmail. Just email addresses. I have another database for addresses and numbers. I don't trust "the cloud" with vital information, and I don't trust it with the personal details of my friends.

So, having pared the new phone down to a minimum, I figured I'd try using it.

...what an utter waste of time and money.

What do people use these bits of crap for? Oh, Bluetooth? I never use it. Music? Hey, I have an MP3 player, and it doesn't chew through batteries like the Telstra Touch. GPS? Oh for fuck's sake: I'm an ex-cabbie. I use maps. I don't get lost. And if I did, I'd use my goddam phone and I'd ask for directions. It's not difficult. Appointments and calendar shit? Hey -- that's what a memory is for, right? I've still got one. How about you? Games? I don't have the time, or the interest. I play a bit of Dwarf Fortress because it's crazy-making complicated, and I'm considering this new "Skyrim" because it's supposed to be an open world, and I like that. Otherwise? Sheeit.

I can't write and type on a Smartphone. And data access is brutally expensive. Besides, as most people who know me will confirm, I'm used to keeping a small Wikipedia in my head. If I really need a piece of information I don't have, generally I can wait. Oh - and I don't mind actually carrying a Netbook computer if I think I'm going to be doing that sort of thing.

So. The Telstra Touch. Battery life: maybe 24 hours, even with everything I could find switched down. And as a prepaid customer, the fuckin' thing cost me around $100 a month because it kept quietly accessing the 'Net at ruinous prepaid rates. On top of that, it barely worked as a phone.

I have now purchased a little, minimalist Samsung flip-phone. Of course, I can't transfer my number, because I had to get a Telstra specialist to transfer my number to the Touch - and the Touch used a mini-SIM which (upon investigation) appears to be irretrievably lodged in the phone, now.

Therefore: if you think you have my mobile number, you're wrong. And if you think I have your mobile number, you're probably wrong, because I didn't manage to transfer most of 'em from the old Nokia to the Telstra Touch.

If you really want contact details, you can email me, or even leave a note here. And of course, there are a number of you from whom I would very much like contact details. You know who you are... and even if you just suspect, well, hell: take a punt, and send me a note.

In the meantime, it'll be a cold, cold, farkin' day in hell before I waste time and money on a so-called Smartphone again. For me, the 'Smart' side of the phone is near-enough useless. And y'know... I have a sneaking suspicion that all you people who are using them to augment your own memory are busily making yourself more stupid and forgetful. Your brain is like most other organs and systems in your body: stop using it, and it atrophies. Smart phone -- not so smart brain.

Use it or lose it, they say.

A Little Bit Of Fun

2011-11-11T21:05:00.000-08:00

There's those of you floating around here who aren't always in the loop on my stories, and so forth. That being so, I thought it would be useful to put a link right here:

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/fiction/4944/genocide-blonde

That would be a straight-up SF story (yes, Mr Birmingham, I do 'em with or without elves and dragons) of about four thousand words or so.

Um. It's not a very nice story, you understand. There's some naughty words in it, and some very bleak thinking. But I like the central premise, and the choice that the protagonist has to make by the end, and the implications/questions it leaves. So... check it out, find out for yourself, see what you think.

Tip Of The Top Hat To Young Jake

2011-11-09T16:34:00.000-08:00

Jake and I are still playing with the Suave Guy webcomic. And currently, the storyline that we are reconstructing is pretty fracking stoopid. The original, I mean. Ours is actually a little less so. Which is scary.

Anyway, yesterday I threw him a loop by giving That Suave Guy a dance routine. So today, his new post has That Suave Guy following the dance routine with a song. Really.

Bearing in mind that he mostly had to use commas instead of line breaks 'cos of the software we're using to make new speech bubbles, I think he did a surprisingly good job in rather short time, so I'm giving him a shout out. Check the latest Suave Guy adventure here!

R.I.P David Bowie

2011-11-08T17:17:00.001-08:00

Which stands for "Rest In Pieces", by the way.

Not David Bowie the glam-rock icon, of course. What kind of eejit expects breaking news about one of the biggest names in modern music history to crop up in the obscure online diary of a Tasmanian writer? No: David Bowie the chicken. The Silky Bantam, to be precise.

Longtime readers will recall that some time ago, my wife decided that our three kids should have the divine joy of raising a baby chick each, to go with our regular, amiable Australorp eggmachines. She acquired some Silky Bantam eggs from a so-called 'friend' (friends don't let friends raise bantam chickens) and after a few unpleasantries, three chicks were duly hatched.

And they got names. I think. The Mau-Mau named hers 'Cutie Chick'. 'Cutie Chick' expired pretty early, a victim of Too Much Love, I suspect.

Jake... I can't remember the name of Jake's bird. But unfortunately, it was a cockerel. And if you know anything about bantam roosters, you know that you don't even try to keep them around kids. Not if you want your kids to keep their eyesight. Jake's bird eventually fell victim to high-velocity lead poisoning, and it is very telling to note that Jake was not in the least upset.

The final bird was 'David Bowie', so named by the ever-enigmatic Genghis. Apparently it had to do with the chicken's hairstyle - reminiscent of the wig worn by the real Bowie in his turn as the Goblin King, in the film Labyrinth. And to be honest, there really was a resemblance.

David Bowie did well. She never really managed to get along with the Three Fat Sisters, but she found a comfortable niche of her own in the chookyard, and took to turning out very credible bantam eggs on a daily basis. Genghis was delighted, and didn't seem at all concerned that "David Bowie" turned out to be female.

Tragically, David Bowie is no more. Sometime last week, Natalie went down to the pen and found a puff of silky bantam feathers, and no more. We didn't know the cause, but since then, the Three Fat Sisters have also been killed, one at a time.

We have a quoll in the area, it would seem.

Quolls are right bastards around chickens. The Dept of Primary Industries website says: " The best protection against these persistent predators is a 1.5 m high, well-footed, paling, corrugated iron or mesh pen; the latter with a roof, "floppy-top" or electric wire."

There's no way I'm going electric, so it looks like it's time to go nuts and rebuild the chookyard. One and a half metres all the way around, floppy-top fencing... great.

It's not like I didn't have enough to do already. But chooks are important. They do such a fantastic job of clearing up table scraps and cooking fallout... and those free-range eggs are fantastic.

I suppose I'll have to start tomorrow. Today it's grey and wet and rainy, and besides, I have to teach classes this afternoon/evening. But tomorrow's a new day.

Ave, David Bowie. The New Chookyard will rise upon the site of the old, and it shall Be Fiendishly Secure. The new inhabitants shall know your name, and speak of you with honour for your sacrifice!

Spring Rush

2011-11-06T14:52:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I was in Melbourne. Briefly, but I was there.

It was a good thing to do. I met with the truly remarkable Prof Boylan, and with Bangar, and Melbo and Catty and Trish, and we had an excellent lunch at The Mitre, which is a fine Melbourne oddity. It's a colonial-era pub that's been left standing in the heart of the hightower district, which is as strange as strange can be. To find it, you have to venture down alleyways between gleaming glass monoliths that hold the sky far from your head... and then, suddenly, there it is. Little. Almost ramshackle. But solid, and old.

The food was good. The booze was better. Bangar and the Prof and I hit the Fat Yak, and then I noticed that their wine list included the Kreglinger, and the Prof decided we needed a bottle. He was right, of course. (He usually is, I have discovered.) But this time he was righter than he knew... the Kreglinger bubbly that comes off the old Pipers Brook estates here in Tas is an exceptional drop. They had the 2004 there at the Mitre, and I felt like an utter wanker when I explained that actually, the '04 wasn't a really good year because the weather that year was kind of shitty for the grapes... but what else could I say? I live here. The weather that year really was kind of shitty for grapes.

Despite that, the '04 Kreglinger was still a very fine drop. Even a poor year hereabouts yields a remarkable wine.

It was a long afternoon, but very enjoyable. Bangar and I retired with the Prof to the Adelphi, where we talked his ear off until it was time for dinner. By then, poor Prof Boylan was feeling the effects of travel and constant yammer, so Bangar and I took off with Mr Barnes, and left the Prof to catch up with his snoozing.

Dinner took us to the House of Sichuan. This is a glorious little establishment to which Mr Barnes introduced me on my last Melbourne foray. It's located at the end of a tight little alley in Chinatown, and if you don't know where it is, you won't find it. But it's worth it. It is soooo worth it.

Barnes ordered the Chili Cumin Pork Ribs. He always does. It's a good stratagem, because the platters are huge, and so he winds up sharing the stuff that other people order. But he orders the Chili Cumin Pork Ribs because they are so farkin' good.

I ordered the Baked Chili Chicken. That's a bit of a misnomer. They take wee bits of chicken, coat it was spices and (probably) rice flour, and fry it crispy. But then they take all those tasty bits of chicken and they put 'em in a flogging great oven dish, and they pour dried chilis all around and through and over and they mix it all up, and they bake it until the oil starts to come out of those dried chilis and coat the chicken pieces.

Yes. It's a touch spicy. But again: once you get started, it's very hard to stop.

Bangar ordered the salt-and-pepper quail. Unlike most places, you actually get a stack of the little things. And they're tasty as hell.

Young Mr B ordered... food. I distinctly remember it was food. And then we ate. And ate. And ate. And sweated, and growled, and ate.

Tragically, Bangar had a small cultural lesson to learn. Tsingtao beer is sold in 750ml bottles. He had two. And the last half of the second bottle went down rather quickly, as we were leaving. Taken as it was atop a vast pile of lavishly spiced food, there were... side effects. But he bore up well, and he is stronger for the learning experience, because it did not kill him. Mr Barnes and I definitely observed that he was not dead.

And unfortunately, that was pretty much the end of my Melbourne sojourn. Because I had booked with Shitstar, you see, and that was the weekend when that cocktastic turdgurgler Joyce pulled the plug on Qantas.

I was supposed to be on a comfortable midday flight home on Sunday. But Saturday afternoon, Shitstar rang me to say my flight was cancelled, and I had the choice of flying home at Oh Fuck Too Early in the morning, or Oh Shit Way Too Fucking Late at night.

Now you need to understand that the Shitstar people were lying to me. My flight wasn't cancelled, as I confirmed the next day. Shitstar went into and out of Launceston exactly as normal all day. No - what they were doing was simple. I hadn't yet nailed down my seat on the flight, you see. I had a ticket, yes, but no seat allocation. So essentially, they fucked me. They threw me off my booked flight in favour of some poor Qantas bastard who got even more screwed than I did.

So. Knowing that my family were expecting me, and had made plans, I took the What The Fuck Am I Doing Awake At This Stupid Hour option. And Mr Barnes kindly saw me off to the airport, for which I am very grateful...

...pardon me. I just got called away to put sunscreen on five kids. It's a public holiday today in Tas -- something to do with Obscure Historical Figure Day, I think -- and we have two extras in residence. Fortunately, it's a beautiful green, glorious, sunny day. The boys are renovating the cubby house, industriously laying down old carpet and tacking it into place, and working with two-part epoxy to put an improvised door handle on the cut-down cupboard door that guards the interior. Meanwhile, the girls are zinging around on the trampoline, gathering flowers, playing. The morning has already seen a full-on expedition into the hillside forests, complete with pith helmets, compasses, walking sticks, mapping tools, and screaming younger sisters.

I doubt I'm going to get a lot of work done today.

Er. Where was I? Oh yes. I flew home and left Melbourne. And I'm kind of shitty with Jetstar, who have now fucked up my last four flights with them. And I'm really shitty with the CEO of Qantas, who accepted a $2 million payrise in the middle of a shitfight with his pilots and engineers, in which he claimed the airline is running on empty and he couldn't possibly afford a single cent more for the workers...

Prof Boylan thinks I'm temperamental with regard to my position on Qantas. But right now, I think the government should be stepping in. Mr Joyce should be brought to the table and asked to negotiate in good faith. He should be given exactly one chance to do this. And when he fails, the 2IC of Qantas should be brought in, shown Joyce's bloody head on a pike, and then asked to negotiate. In good faith. With the new next-in-command waiting in the next room.

For those of you who think I'm excessive on this, I suggest you check Senator Xenophon's information on this matter. Particularly with regard to the way Jetstar is being used to strip Qantas' profitability, leaving the national carrier vulnerable, and weakened. There is bastardry at work here, folks - and as usual, you and I are the ultimate victims.

I did manage to get Tuesday night to watch films with the Shite Boys (and ladies; best to you both, Tiarne and Heather!) but that really was it for personal time. In between, I've been writing like hell, assessing manuscripts, teaching martial arts (Thursday was Community Sports Day for the primary school. I organised the setup for the Mau-mau's music lessons when I delivered her to school. Then I opened the dojo, and ran a session sport-style ju-jitsu until about 12. Half an hour later, I ran a second session with a new group of kids until nearly 2. Then I packed up, raced home and grabbed the necessary crap for the gymnastics run. Picked up the kids from the bus stop. Left Jake with Viking Neighbour. Took the others to gymnastics. Did the grocery run while they did their thing. Came home, picked up Jake, produced dinner for all including on-call Natalie... sat down and read and wrote and reviewed manuscripts until one in the morning...) and then finally, the weekend.

Which was about Iaido. The Australian head of school came out from Adelaide and ran seminars on Saturday and Sunday morning. No way I was going to miss those, so I got up early and drove into town, waved swords around a lot, then did the grocery run and came home, cooked for everybody, etc etc etc.

Good weekend, yes. Hard work. But today is Monday, and the extended weekend with the extra kids is not a joy, but a bit of a burden. I should be having a quiet day to myself, in which to work like a bastard. Instead, I'm keeping my ears and eyes open, making sure that five kids are sunscreened, fed, watered, and more or less aimed in a safe direction.

Ah well. Eventually they'll go to bed. And there's always the late night hours, right?

Revenge Of The Platypus and A Menu

2011-10-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

We had another visitor. This time it was a friend of Natalie's, named Sharon. Apparently they met each other on the folk festival scene in Canberra, and got along. Well, okay.

I agreed to cook something a little nifty to help make Natalie's friend feel welcome. Unfortunately, when I went shopping, I had young Genghis with me and in short order, the menu got out of hand.

When Sharon arrived, I'd just finished hacking my way through a chapter on the novel, and I was doing some research on Regency England that was boring me shitless. I decided it was a good time to run the pump, so I took Sharon down to the pond, in the hopes of introducing her to the platypus.

I should point out here that Natalie has never actually seen the platypus. I think it hides from her. Why that would be is open to debate, but the fact is that within two minutes of Sharon and I quietly sauntering up to the pond's edge... there was the platypus. He/she/it swam around on the surface, dived to the bottom, came up again, blew bubbles, floated gently and regarded us, and in general, behaved like a perfect little tourist icon. Meanwhile, hundreds of bees hummed away, gathering water from the edge of the pond, and the spring sun shone down, and really, I must hang out down there more often. Pretty!

But the menu. Ahhh, yes.

I thought I'd try something interesting with prawns. We've been getting some big Carpentaria King prawns lately, and even though they're frozen for delivery, it's worth using them once in a while. I thought that if I grabbed some of that soft rice papery stuff used in Vietnamese type spring rolls, and then made a decent mix of herbs and spices, I could roll up the prawns with the spice mix and deep-fry them into a delicious, crispy treat. It seemed like an interesting idea, anyhow.

But while I was picking up the prawns, young Genghis noticed that there were fresh oysters in. And Genghis absolutely loves him some Oysters Kilpatrick. Oh, yes. So... I got a dozen oysters as well as the prawns.

Once you're on that kind of a roll, it's hard to stop. Next I spotted fresh Bass Strait scallops, and I remembered that I had some dumpling wrappers, and that we've been getting decent avocadoes at the supermarket for a while. Hmmm. Yep. Better get some scallops, too. And what about some smoked salmon, to round it all up?

The menu eventually went like this:

Smoked salmon roulades: thin slices of smoked salmon, spread with a mixture of cream cheese, pickled capers, fresh dill, black pepper and lemon juice. Roll the slices up, then slice them into little rounds. Serve with freshest, crusty bread - and a nice Brook Eden Pinot gris

Chilled Avocado Soup With Scallops: Blend four or five good, ripe avocadoes with two cups of fine, home-made Chinese-style chicken or fish stock. Add a half-cup of dry white wine. Once the mixture is smooth and thick, chill. Meanwhile, sautee a handful of fresh scallops with minced ginger and chili. Serve the soup in ramekin-sized dishes, with a couple of scallops atop each. Garnish with fresh coriander, spring onion slices, and a dollop of sour cream. We matched this with a Clover Hill bubbly. (Yeah, the same one they stuck in front of the Queen last week. I've been saying for years it's one of the best wines in Australia.)

Oysters Kilpatrick: A dozen fresh Tasmanian oysters, liberally sprinkled with diced bacon. Add a teaspoon of Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce and just a touch of Tabasco pepper sauce. Grill them quickly under reasonable heat, then serve. The remnants of the Clover Hill went over nicely here, and we also opened a Devil's Corner Sauvignon Blanc.

Steamed Scallop Dumplings: Mince fresh ginger, coriander, and spring onion, and a little salt. Toss your scallops through the mixture. Spoon scallops into simple won-ton wrappers, close, and steam. Serve with a sweet Japanese mayonnaise suitable for sushi, and a touch of Tabasco pepper sauce.

Crispy Prawn Dumplings: Mince chili, spring onion and fresh coriander. Toss your shelled prawns through the mixture. Now soften rice-paper Vietnamese spring-roll wrappers in hot water. Carefully wrap each prawn, ensuring a generous portion of the spices as well. Fry quickly in small batches in very hot vegetable oil, removing when the prawn (visible through the translucent wrapper) turns appropriately pink. Serve with a classic Vietnamese dipping sauce.

Of course, you can't do something like this without dessert. So I made:

Double-cream French Vanilla ice cream: with King Island cream, eggs from our own chickens and vanilla pod and brown sugar. The ice cream got served with home-made blueberry conserve... and finished everybody off nicely, along with a little of the fine Pinot port that Smileyfish left here the other day.

The meal took a long time, and all the portions were small. That was the only rational way to do it. I'm happy to say that nobody had to lie around clutching their bellies and moaning afterwards, and the conversation moved along nicely throughout.

All right, yes. I know. I'm bragging.

Wouldn't you?

A Minor Miscalculation

2011-10-23T03:34:00.000-07:00

Weekend again.

I took a punt, a while back. I ordered Mel Brooks Silent Movie online, drawing on the impressions and memories of my much younger self. I hadn't seen the film since it came out, so very long ago, but I recall that when I was about ten or so, I thought it was hilarious. I figured at the very least, my young sons would probably respond likewise, so I put it on for the family on Friday night.

That was a pleasant surprise. Mostly, I'm not too impressed by Brooks' stuff. His work often strikes me as a kind of American "Carry On" series -- full of cheap sight gags, oo-er double entendres, and randomly exposed women. Sometimes he gets it right, though. Blazing Saddles has all those things in it... but it also tackled a bunch of American taboos in a very front-on, no-prisoners fashion, and there was a lot of cleverness to the film as well.

Silent Movie doesn't have the same political or racial charge that Blazing Saddles did, but it's still a very funny movie. It works on two levels: in one, it's simply a slapstick silent film, with all the ridiculous qualities that implies. (Yes. It's actually silent. Oh, except for just one word, spoken by the least likely person in the film. See it for yourself if you want to know.) On that level, it's pretty good. Marty Feldman, for example, is at his absolute best here: all goggle-eyed, sweet-natured innocence wrapped up in a Bruce Lee jumpsuit and a Flying Ace leather helmet. Graves' Disease is a bastard of a thing, and Feldman suffered for it - but he really knew how to work his unusual appearance, and in Silent Movie, he's so funny at times it's actually painful.

At this basic slapstick comedy level, Silent Movie is great. The plotline is simple: alcohol-damaged director Mel Funn (Brooks) approaches his old studios with a plan for a silent movie. The head of the studios (American comedy veteran Sid Caesar) is desperate for a hit to keep vicious corporate bastards Engulf & Devour from taking over his beloved studio, so he greenlights the movie. Funn and his comrades (Eggs and Bell, played by Feldman and Dom DeLuise) decide they have to get an all-star line-up for the cast in order to guarantee a big hit... and so they set out across Hollywood, trying to recruit the big names of the day.

The sequences in which the various stars are wooed are lovely. It's wonderful to watch people like Paul Newman, James Caan, Marcel Marceau (yep. Even he.) and Lisa Minelli take the piss out of themselves - but the standout scenes are the recruitment of Burt Reynolds in a hilarious shower sequence, and a great dance number with Anne Bancroft. Reynolds and Bancroft in particular show no fear at all of parodying their own public images, and the results are lovely.

On another level, though, the movie is an affectionate tribute to the great era of silent comedies. You can feel Brooks' childhood coming through -- Saturday afternoons in darkened cinemas, flickering black-and-white images, and an abiding love for the marvellous clowns of a bygone time. Brooks and his companions don't deliberately recreate classic routines from the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and others - but if you know your cinema history, you can certainly see where various scenes in Silent Movie clearly represent an homage to these, and to others.

It's not highbrow, no. But the boys laughed until they cried, and the Mau-Mau fell about the place laughing, and Natale laughed even though she kept knitting, and yes, I laughed too - more than I have at pretty much any comedy I've seen in the last decade. If you've never seen Silent Movie, I think you've missed what may be Brooks' funniest work. And if, like me, you haven't seen it since you sat in the cinema and watched it on the big screen, you should consider revisiting it. The effort will pay off.

Obviously, that wasn't my minor miscalculation. No - the miscalculation turned up yesterday afternoon, in the form of my friend Smileyfish. I got my dates mixed up... thought she was visiting next weekend, not this one.

Happily, it didn't really matter. The weather had turned to the best of Tasmanian spring - all warm and sunny and green and alive with bumblebees and apple blossoms - and I'd already planned an evening cookout. We had skewers of beef, seasoned with pepper and salt and paprika and cumin, and there was twice-cooked pork, and green salad, and even a few bags of plain marshmallows. All I needed to do was spruce up the guest room briefly, lay in some Royal Swan rum, and pick up a few corn tortillas for the gluten-intolerant Smileyfish, and we were good to go.

That firepit really is working a treat. The boys built the fire, and we fed it for a while, then let it die back so we could cook on it. Meanwhile, Smileyfish discovered that rum and lime is a Very Good Thing on a warm spring afternoon, and the children ran about and climbed and played and shouted.

The marshmallows were a bit disappointing, though. We thought we'd scored, when we found them in 'Chickenfeed' - a Tasmanian overflow store. I mean - they were plain! White! No nasty pink or yellow or swirly shit. What could go wrong?

Ah. Artificial vanillin. That's what could go wrong.

Tastes almost but not quite entirely unlike vanilla, to paraphrase the great Douglas Adams. Marshmallows shouldn't leave a bitter aftertaste, should they? Nor should they burn in quite the fashion these did. They were unnervingly like unto marshmallow, without actually being marshmallow, and even the kids gave up on them in short order.

Happily, we had some decent lengths of PVC tubing about. I took the opportunity to deliver a lesson in the use of the blowgun, using my children as moving targets, and rather nasty half-marshmallows as projectiles. The kids took to the idea with alacrity. They climbed the big swing-fort, and blatted marshmallows back at me. Meanwhile, Smileyfish grabbed a blowgun for herself, and ran around shooting at either side as the opportunity arose.

The whole situation was made more ludicrous by the marshmallows. They didn't quite fit. We had to tear them in half, and sometimes they still didn't fit, and sometimes they got sticky as hell. You never knew if you were going to successfully blast a marshmallow at your opponent, or perhaps blow up your own sinuses with back-pressure, or simply just make a sort of flubby, farting noise while a half-marshmallow vibrated its sticky way down your blowpipe and fell out the end with a pathetic sort of flup.

A good time was, therefore, had by all.

We finished up the evening by watching Hayao Miyazaki's Laputa up in the Cinema Shed. Smileyfish brought that one along for the kids - but I have to say I enjoyed it too. Good clean storytelling, fine animation, engaging characters.... yep. That was fun.

And in the morning, Ms Fish arose, had breakfast, and bid us farewell. The Mau-Mau went to the beach with her best friend. I got into the garden (and the cooking, and the laundry). Natalie was on call. The boys practised their instruments, and their Swedish... and we had a fine, quiet Sunday which ended in a charcoal-grill pork roast.

That was a pretty good weekend.

Dire Movie Review And Other Stuff

2011-10-18T15:46:00.000-07:00

I got to hang out with the Cool Shite lads last night. It's been a while since I've been able to do that regularly... just too damned busy, or screwed on the schedule, to take that one evening in a week to do something for my own enjoyment.

It's always good watching films with them. Even if the films are awful, it's fun to take the piss out of them - and frequently, I get to see really nifty films I'd otherwise have missed. The Fall, Sauna, and The Brothers Bloom are three in the latter category, just off the top of my head. There are plenty more.

Still, last night was a cinematic failure. While I enjoyed the conversation and the mickey-taking, the movie was so disappointing I'm actually going to review it... like this:

Bruce dug out a pile of DVD's still in their wrappers. There must have been two dozen of 'em. He started going through, eliminating all the rom-coms and chick-flicks and documentaries about Eastern European armpit-hair growing customs. Quinny and I, meanwhile, made helpful comments about the films we thought might actually be interesting.

Of course, Quinny rejected Bloody Malory, a French monster-hunter film in which the Pope gets kidnapped and has to be rescued from demons before the world is annihilated... apparently it was too schlocky for Mr "I Teach Film, You Know" Q-Dog David Quinn. Pay close attention here. That's an important point.

A few more films went past. Several of them sounded interesting. Bruce put them aside for future weeks. But then we got to a thing called Chanbara Beauty. The cover depicted a Japanese lass in a red bikini and cowboy hat, holding a couple of katana. The blurb declared that she was Aya, and the movie was about her exploits slaughtering zombies in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Apparently, this isn't too schlocky for Mr Quinn, because he got all enthusiastic at this point. Yep. The mix of bikinis, samurai swords, cowboy hats, zombies and post-apocalyptic settings is obviously a weak point in his film-critic armour. Mind you, I'm not claiming to be innocent here. I liked the idea just as much. But of course, I'd also quite happily have watched Bloody Malory. I have no illusions about my cinematic tastes.

Tiarne got kind of excitable too. She decided she'd seen the character before, perhaps in a computer game. Tiarne's Google-fu is strong: within minutes, she had summoned up an Internet image of a computer-game character dressed very similarly to the lass on the front of the Chanbara Beauty DVD case. So... was this a game derived from a movie? Or was the movie derived from a game?

Neither. Apparently both were developed from one of those inevitable Manga series. Okay. Fine.

So, Bruce stuck the DVD in the player. The credits came up... and that was the last good thing that happened for the next eighty-six minutes, as far as cinema was concerned anyhow. (There were some pretty good lime-chili potato crisps. And some funny conversation. But neither of those reflects on the film itself.)

Chanbara Beauty... This movie is the cinematic equivalent of a cold coffee enema. If you're stupid enough to plan on watching it after you read this, please: remove ALL sharp objects from your person and your immediate vicinity, because the urge to gouge out your own eyes to protect your brain may be overwhelming.

How can a movie with a samurai-sword wielding, bikini and cowboy-hat wearing, zombie-slaughtering heroine have such an utter lack of fun? Was it the shitty SFX? Was it the fact that the lead actress had clearly been instructed to appear stone-bored and insomniac tired through the whole film? Was it the bleach-blonde Japanese fat bastard with a head like an animated bowling ball who supposedly supplied comedy relief? Was it the mechanistic, perfunctory, largely incomprehensible fight-scenes that rolled on endlessly, despite their shitty lack of anything like coherent choreography?

The film had all the ingredients to be entertaining. It sure as hell took itself seriously. Usually when a film aims to be serious and fails on this spectacular a level, it gains a life of its own, and becomes one of those movies you remember for years because of the lingering cramps in your belly caused by near-fatal attacks of hilarity.

But not Chanbara Beauty. Nope. Not even the random breasts of a female character introduced about twenty minutes into the piece solely to endure a single sex scene and then be slaughtered by unconvincing zombies were sufficiently interesting to make this film anything other than a brain-grinding, arse-numbing chore. By the end of the flick, Bruce was working on his i-Pad, Quinny was reading some sort of shit on his MacBook, and I was watching Tiarne play a peculiar computer game. Every now and again we'd look up, and beg the characters onscreen to die. Horribly. And quickly.

Mostly they did. But not quickly enough.

All copies of Chanbara Beauty should be rounded up in the name of humanity, and buried in that same landfill somewhere in New Mexico which contains all those copies of that infamously bad ET video game... Then the director, the producers, and the writers should be hunted down and publically executed. Only then can we truly feel safe about going back to the cinema.

And in other news:

Genghis has hit the zoom function with his reading. He didn't take off as early as his brother, but at eight years old, he's just discovered the Skullduggery Pleasant books by Derek Landy. These are young-adult fantasy, and they run to about three hundred pages each. Genghis is literally burning through these things at the rate of a book a day or so. At least, on weekends. On school days, he only gets through half a book.

It's great to see him discover something like this. He's not as narrative/fiction oriented as Jake. More typically blokey, he likes reading histories and factual stuff. He adores his books on the Darwin Awards, for example. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not, but I figure it's good cautionary reading, at least. Anyway, he's well into the most current book in the SP series, so he's about to run out. We're going to point him to Artemis Fowl next, and probably Pratchett and the Discworld. Thirty books of fantasy/comedy should keep him occupied for a couple months.

Meanwhile, Jake has learned to make popcorn. He takes it seriously, and does it properly. No microwave bullshit for him: he's been raised right, and his few encounters with the awful shit that comes out of those prepackaged bags have taught him that popcorn has to be cooked in oil, and if butter is to be involved it must be real butter, not crappy yellow powdered toxin.

He's good. He gets down the beat-up old aluminium saucepan (because the thin layer of near-enough sapphire on the inner surface is smooth and strong, and you can scrub it clean. But if you burn popcorn into steel, for example, the carbon will enter the fine pores of the metal, and that pan will always burn things forever after, no matter how carefully you clean it.) and adds the oil and the popcorn. Then he fires up the stove, cooks the stuff, and pours it into the big serving bowls. He melts butter in the hot pan, and meanwhile, he adds salt and seasonings of choice -- citric acid, powdered beef stock, cayenne pepper, powdered chicken stock, parmesan cheese... there are flavours for every occasion -- and then tosses the lot together.

I have mixed feelings about this. I'm glad to see him learn, and I like the idea that he's taking this task onto himself. But it's kind of odd watching him do what has been the "dad thing" with our movie nights. I always figured there was a kind of gemutlichkeit comfort in watching movies or TV with your family, munching down on a big bowl of dad's special popcorn...

Still, he's very proud of himself, which is good. And it saves me the job. And I still step in from time to time, so I guess he'll keep associating all those memories of dad and family and stuff. I hope so, anyway. I want my kids to look back on their collective childhood, and be able to pick out things that made them feel like a family: close, and together. Movies and popcorn and rare late nights have those associations for me - so why not?

All right. It's a green and gorgeous spring day outside. I have stuff to write, more stuff to read, and stuff to cook. I also have a bunch of potatoes to plant, and an evening of martial arts to plan and then carry out.

I'm outta here.

What Day Is It?

2011-10-11T01:01:00.000-07:00

Whoa.

Okay. The weekend was large-ish. Three extra kids, because the Double-Bangers weekended at Chez Flinthart. Their situation is complicated: mum and dad aren't really doing so well as a couple. Mum D-B works too damned hard, and her weekends are something of a nightmare, so the three kids were running short on a parent, what with Dad D-B being somewhere in NSW studying up on permaculture, or something. Anyway: Amazing Viking Neighbour Anna stepped in to make sure the D-B kids were okay on weekends... and Clan Flinthart provide the backup when Viking Neighbour Anna needs a break.

They're good kids, all three. Two boys, one girl: much like Clan Flinthart. However, when you get six kids under one roof on a rainy weekend, you have to expect things to run large.

Genghis and I started with the Saturday routine. He came to my sword class and watched, and then I took him to his double bass lesson. We picked up some stuff, had lunch, came home. And after that, it was a free-for-all. I'd planned to have a cook-out around the new(ish) fire pit, but the rain put the zap on that one big-time.

It didn't help that the DB middle child had a birthday on Monday. Remarkable Viking Neighbour Anna is fiercely protective of children of all varieties - so on Sunday, we had a proper birthday party. With cake, and presents, and vast chaos. Meanwhile, Natalie was packing: she's spending this week in Queensland, on the Medical Educator gig.

Which means, of course, that following the Weekend of Many Children, I am now doing Sole Parent Duty until Saturday. Or so.

Yesterday was Monday. That was the Day of the Wardrobes. It rained again, very heavily, and the temperatures plummeted. Somebody cancelled Spring, I think. I want my money back. Anyway, the guy put in a big built-in wardrobe in the Mau-Mau's room, and an even bigger one in the boy's room.

Oddly, it turns out that gigantic fucking mirrors for doors are actually cheaper than standard particle-board, or whatever they use. We spent the money for non-mirrored doors in the Mau-Mau's room... but the boys got mirrors. Big fuckin' mirrors. We're talking about 2.5m high, by nearly 2m wide.

Shit, that's a lot of mirror. I guess we wanted the wrestling matches in the boys' room to stop anyhow...

Today? Today was Cello Lesson day. Drive Jake into Launceston. Normally, we'd be doing Swedish, but apparently Natalie is trying to shift all musical lessons to Tuesday morning. Maybe we can do Swedish in the afternoon? I don't know. Pissed off, though. I'm enjoying learning Swedish, and I think a second language is easily as important as music.

Meanwhile, I've been catching up with bills, building a gate for one of the fenced vege garden beds, handling laundry, cooking, cleaning, shopping, writing. I'm apparently supposed to put together some kind of paper/presentation related to my MA for sometime in November. That would be somewhere between a martial class for the school, preparation for the Xmas parade, the Ringarooma show, the work on the online programme for creative writing, the editing on two stories, visitors on a couple of weekends, a concert (for the boys) late in October, a trip to Melbourne to catch up with Prof Boylan, the work on the novel, and every other fucking thing.

Tomorrow... tomorrow I throw the kids on the bus. But I have to be down in Scottsdale by 1200, because somehow Jake managed to flake a chunk off one of his juvenile pre-molars on Sunday. How? Eating a fucking Cheezel. How the fuck do you flake a piece of tooth enamel on a Cheezel? He and the other two have only recently been past the dentist for a very clean bill of health. They have a good diet, and we drill dental hygiene into them. So... how the FUCK does he manage to flake a piece probably 5mm by 5mm off the outside vertical surface of a premolar?

This is what we will be trying to discover, of course. Is he lacking calcium? If so - how? He gets cheese, milk, and dark, leafy vegetables. Maybe not as much as I'd like of any of the three - but probably more than the vast majority of kids with non-flaking teeth out there. So... what the fuck?

You get the picture, though. If I have to be there by 1200 for his 1210 appointment at the hospital (where they have a nice dental clinic) then... let me see... probably not done until 1230. Which means that if I turned around and went home immediately, I might get back by, say, 1245. Unfortunately, I'll have to turn around and go back down the hill at 1430 so I can collect a gang of kids from the school, get some food into 'em, and then run the ju-jitsu classes from 1600 to 1830 or thereabouts.

At that point, I'll drive home. I'll have my two boys in the car, and probably two, maybe three of Viking Neighbour Anna's lads. I think I'll pick up some pizza, because I'm damned if I feel like trying to cook a meal after teaching two and a half hours of ju-jitsu.

Thursday... what's going on Thursday? Not sure. Must be something. Friday is orchestra. I know that. Oh... I have to get to the mechanic, apologise for the fact that Natalie completely forgot her appointment last week, and pay the bill for the tyres on the Mighty Earth King. Gotta fit that in somewhere. Ooh - better finish bracing the steps I built for the Movie Shed. They're not ready for use until they're braced. And shit - when was the last time I checked my university email? I haven't finished reading Spenser yet, let alone Ariosto and Milton. Fuck!

I totally fucking hate this time of year.

Head Down. Arse Up. Trying To Keep Up.

2011-10-03T03:44:00.000-07:00

The pointy end of the year approaches. So much shit, so little time.

I took a morning off today. Necessary after the weekend. I took Genghis in on Saturday morning. His bass lesson was at 1015, and I went to sword training at 0900. I hope they keep the Saturday morning class. Genghis didn't mind hanging around the dojo... he even got the chance to learn a little, with a bokken, well out of the way from everything else. He thought that was pretty damned cool, and according to the sensei who was giving him tips, he learned fast, and well.

Sunday was more or less about music. The Mau-Mau and Jake both took part in a music competition under the aegis of the St Cecelia school, of which their teacher is a part. They did well - each got a second place and a 'highly commended' in their instrument class. The Mau-mau was tickled, and took her second place medal to school today. Jake tried not to let it show, but he was surprised and pleased as well. Good thing, really. He needed a bit of a boost with the music. His commitment has been flagging a bit.

Gardening: I put in tomatoes. The wallabies ate them, down to the soil. I looked around, and realised the gate wasn't fully closed. I closed the gate. I put in more tomatoes. The wallabies ate them down to the soil. Okay. So, the big enclosure is no longer wallaby-safe. So I banged in a bunch of star-pickets, and today I picked up 25m of heavy chickenwire. Now I'll enclose the raised garden beds, and put in a gate. Soon I can put in more tomatoes. In the meantime, the potted radishes are coming on, the rhubarb is picking up, the cabbage seedlings are going to need to be planted out soon, and the herb garden needs to be completely weeded. But I've given all the fruit trees a nice dose of blood and bone... and bugger, there's a lot of fruit trees these days.

Writing: behind on everything. Not stuck, just overrun. Gotta edit two short stories, finish the MS for ROR, put together a proposal to start an online extension class in English for the local high school, and work up the outline of my MA. Among other things. And of course, Jake and I are continuing to enjoy creating The Amazing Adventures of That Suave Guy. We just finished his first outing, and we're at work on the second.

Study: had a useful meeting a week or two back with my prof. We've reshaped the MA once again. Now I'm reading Spenser and Ariosto, and looking into some of the more interesting critical writing on modern fantasy.

Martial Arts: graded the junior blue belts last week. They did pretty well, all told. I need to see more focus from all of them, but little Genghis' commitment surprised hell out of me (and his grading partner!). Most interesting was the fact that where he didn't flat-out know certain techniques, he improvised... and his improv was generally on the money, utilising the principles of the art. He's only eight. He'll be nine in late December. If his interest continues, he's going to be a very effective, very dangerous person by the time he's fifteen. Meanwhile, I got halfway through grading all the wee ones and the newcomers: a bunch of youngsters at the yellow and orange level. Again, I'm pretty pleased with them so far, but it's a real handful putting them through this. On Wednesday, we have to do all the self-defense material, which will really try them (and me!) out. Also graded a couple of senior orange belts, both female. Very good work from both of them. No... correction. I didn't grade them. I made my senior student - a young brown belt - handle the grading, because he needs to be more confident with his communication and teaching. He did it well, and I'm happy with all three of them.

Music: teaching young Mister D the flute and Irish whistle. He's discovered Irish folk, and he's delighted. He even puts in enough practice that I can spot the improvements in his technique. I'm not qualified to put him through musical exams, but I play flute well enough to get him to a decent standard, such that if this town ever gets a flute instructor, he'll do well. In the meantime, it's nice to brush off my own technique. We're working on a duet (Danny Boy) for wooden flute and Irish whistle (I'll play the flute!) and I'm trying to arrange a duet score for the Barcarolle by Offenbach, to be played on cello (Jake) and flute (Mister D). I haven't done a lot of musical arranging, but there are enough clues available online that I think I can manage it.

Language: Swedish continues to be much easier, and more fun, than Spanish. Sure, the extra vowels can do your head in, and the umlauts are just all kinds of wrong... but the grammar and vocab and the syntax are so much easier that it's a doddle. We've found a satisfactory book full of readings and lessons, and we get down to Viking Neighbour Anna's place of a Tuesday morning to read all about the life and times of Erik Lindkvist, en ung Svensk student. At the moment, we suspect Erik may be gay. He lives in a flat in a fashionable part of the Old City, and he likes to throw parties and dance. Unfortunately, he only has about five friends, and they tend to bring just one gramophone record (!) between them... but Erik dances keenly anyway. The text says the neighbours are very forgiving. One would bloody hope so. Dancing to one single gramophone record would be extremely irritating after the ninth or tenth play-through.

House: spring cleaning. Among other things. We're getting some wardrobes put in, which should make keeping the kids' rooms tidy a little easier. Meanwhile, I've built some removable steps for the cinema shed, landscaped around the new firepit, made gates for various garden enclosures, and tomorrow I go up on the roof with (of all things!) a chimney brush. I didn't even know we had one until last week - found it under the top shed. It's warming up nicely, but there will probably be a few more nights where it would be nice to have a fire... and the chimney really isn't drawing all that well. Of course, it hasn't been swept since we got here, so this will probably be an epically filthy job. Oh goody.

Enough procrastination. I've got work to do.

Martial Arts As A Transformative Process

2011-09-28T03:20:00.000-07:00

So I've been involved with martial arts since I was seventeen. Not constantly, mind you. What with moving around from here to there, and studying and working and everything there were gaps. From time to time.

Mostly I've practised ju-jitsu. I started with judo, in my first year at university, and I loved it. But it happened on a Monday night, and the next year my timetable changed, so I couldn't go on with judo. However, I'd heard that ju-jitsu was similar, so I found the class taught by sensei (now shihan) Mark Haseman at Milton.

In short order, I was a convert. Ju-jitsu didn't involve as much sheer, bloody-minded physical hard work as judo - but it was infinitely sneakier, nastier, and more efficient. As taught by sensei Haseman, it was a flexible, adaptable and astonishingly deadly practice of self-defense.

In the years that followed, I did most of my training under sensei Haseman, and he remains one of the most remarkable individuals I've met through the martial arts. Yet it wasn't just the teacher. What I enjoyed about ju-jitsu then, as now, is the constant challenge it presents. Sensei Haseman's approach was holistic, aimed at incorporating functional techniques and placing them in a framework of practical principles designed to maximise your chances of being able to avoid, deflect, or simply survive the possibility of physical violence.

The list of techniques is way too long to even start. But to give you some idea, back then just to do a full brown belt you had to have solid command over all the forty basic judo throws, plus the strangles, the hold-downs and the groundfighting technique. You also had to have essentially the same range of striking, blocking and kicking techniques that a black belt in something like Shotokan Karate might have. You also had to have the footwork and evasive body movements (tai-sabaki) of an Aikido practitioner, plus a range of armlocks, wristlocks, shoulderlocks and other joint-locking techniques, both standing and on the ground. You had to be able to name and locate all the major bones, muscles, organs and joints of the body. You had to be able to show attacks designed to work against something like twenty different nerve and pressure points, and explain the effect of each attack. Oh - and you needed a St John's Ambulance Certificate in First Aid, too.

That's brown belt, in case you didn't notice. I didn't mention all the free-sparring. And the judo-style randori. And the ground-fighting. And I didn't list all the self-defense stuff: the defenses against knives, sticks, chains, chairs, axes, pistols, broken bottles, multiple attackers, surprise attacks, attacks on the ground... seriously. You did a full brown belt in three separate stages. Good damned thing.

Black belt? Well. All of that, but more, and with more intensity. And all in one grading, not three. You want to be nice and polite to anybody who's done a black belt under Mark Haseman.

Anyway, you see the point. Big curriculum, very challenging. The idea is to keep throwing technique at you until it blurs, and eventually, you start understanding the principles. Moving your body at the right time, in the right way. Practice long enough, and technique grows out of the basic principles, to meet the situation as required. It's endless, and it's challenging, and to this day I find it deeply interesting and rewarding.

I've tackled a few other arts along the way, of course. At various times I've held lower to middle-level gradings in aikido, a version of kung fu, a version of silat, and a version of karate. Currently I'm also practising Iaido. And why not? Ju-jitsu is adaptable. I've stolen the quick, flowing hand techiques that I met in kung fu, and I've kept some of the aikido body movement. And even though breaking boards isn't part of ju-jitsu as such, I saw how the students responded to it in karate, and brought it along for the kids that I teach... and they love it. And I use padded boffer-style swords to encourage the younger kids to duel with sword technique lifted straight out of aikido, and I stole some of the silat approach to changing the height of your attacks rapidly, and so forth. Always something good to learn.

When I got into martial arts, it was because I was a skinny, smart, mouthy kid from the sticks, used to being hassled by mouthbreathers and inbreds for no better reason than the fact that I could use words of more than two syllables. I was tired of being a target, and I wanted a way to discourage potential trouble.

I got a lot more.

You hear a lot about the 'confidence' that comes from martial training. And it is important, in terms of defense. When you're comfortable with the possibility of violence, and you're not intimidated by the prospect of aggression, you gain a relaxed quality that somehow tells the mouthbreathers that you're not really a target any more. (This isn't surmise. A study was done many years ago, on muggers. They showed a bunch of 'professional muggers' a series of photos, and asked them to choose victims. The level of agreement in their choices was extremely high. The muggers couldn't explain what it was about the 'victims' that made them likely targets - but they all saw something. So... simply learning not to be a victim turns away a lot of trouble immediately.)

But there's more to it than simple physical confidence. I think ju-jitsu was the first thing in my life that I really stuck with. And when you do it long enough, eventually all those crazy things you see the martial artists doing stop being crazy, and start being... well, just something you can do, if you want.

I can break a brick with my fist. I've done it. Yeah, it hurt. But it didn't break my hand, or even really leave a bruise.

I can throw a full-strength punch at a target - like a brick wall - and stop the punch absolutely dead cold within 5 mm of the surface. I can do the same thing with a kick. I can wrestleand throw while blindfolded far better than most people can with all their senses at once. I can fall, dive, or roll on concrete or tarmac and get up unscathed. I've had my jaw cracked by a wild punch, and all it did was piss me off; within limits, pain is just something you deal with, not something that controls or disables you.

There's a lot more, but you get the idea. But the real heart of it is learning that a lot of your own limits are illusory. If you can break one brick... maybe you can break two? Or three? Who knows? If you can kick as high as your head... maybe if you just add a jump and get the timing right, you can kick even higher. If you can break boards with your hand... maybe you can do it while holding an egg? (I've gotta try that. I saw footage of Jackie Chan doing it, and I have totally got to give it a try.)

What I'm saying is: like no other practice I know, a good martial art is transformative. You learn with every part of your body. You work on strength, speed, accuracy, balance, and confidence. You learn to practice alertness and observation. You learn to 'read' other people - their balance, their expressions, their clothes and language and actions and affect. You take on board an ocean of technique which can never be perfected... you just keep refining it and refining it until the errors are smaller and smaller.

And with all this learning and refining and all this 'taking control', your attitude to the world changes. It has to.

I've seen fat, unhappy kids learn to fall, roll, and wrestle like demons, and make friends in the process. I've seen small, skinny kids put their fist through a pine plank, and turn into wide-eyed little warriors, astonished and proud of their own accomplishments. I've watched a kid with physical disabilities learn to do a good, clean forward roll -- and then terrify his mother by happily showing off his new achievement at every opportunity.

There's a woman at the class right now. She's got kids, and she's moving towards middle age. She was tentative and nervous about starting, but tonight she did her second grading, and did it well. She's had to battle herself, almost, every step of the way - mostly her own reluctance to believe that she can do this crazy shit. But she's discovered that she can fall, and roll, and move, and get up again. She's discovered that she can dodge a kick, deflect a fist, and throw a man nigh twice her size over her hip. She's discovered that snapping a pine plank isn't difficult - and that she can do it without breaking her hand. She's had to adapt to the fact that she's training with kids less than half her age, some of whom can learn this stuff much more quickly than she does...

But since coming along, she's also taken up the guitar, and gone back to studying, and a host of other minor things. And that's what I'm getting at. I claim absolutely no credit for any of these other things. She's done them entirely for herself. But... once you've discovered that what looks impossible is just something you do by practice, training, concentration and determination, why - suddenly, all those hundreds of other things you thought you could never do start to look a lot closer than before. A good martial art teaches you the habit of overcoming your own doubts, and marshalling your resources so that you can reach farther than you ever thought.

And maybe the best thing about it is that when you get to be good enough at it, you can teach it to other people and watch them change and grow, too. Because - well, while breaking a pine plank is no big deal, and doesn't make you a martial arts genius... seeing the amazement on the face of a student who does that for the very first time is a really humbling, wonderful experience. You can see it, right there in their eyes: I did it! That was me! And -- if I can do that, what else can I do?

And that, there: that's what a human being should be.

Insert Title Here

2011-09-26T03:48:00.000-07:00

Heh.

Genghis is gonna be really pissed at me.

Today, Natalie was in Albury for some medical thingy or another. She left me with a raft of shit that needed doing; a lot of it specifically for this music competition thing into which she has entered our eldest and our youngest. The Mau-mau needed her pink satin birthday dress dry-cleaned, for example... because our washing machine didn't quite get all the poster paint out. The Mau-mau also needed some nice white stockings to go with her new black shoes.

Scottsdale couldn't take care of either of those things before the weekend, and we have to have this stuff by Saturday, apparently. Also, Jake needed some decent trousers, and some clothes of the sort that one might wear while performing on stage solo with a cello. And once again, Scottsdale wasn't up to the task.

You can just about guess my chances of getting lightweight workout gloves for the heavy bag around here, can't you? Or a couple of new blue belts for the boys, since they have a grading coming up very soon.

So, yes. Trip into Launceston. Obviously, I needed to take Jake for sizing purposes. Stockings or tights for the Mau-mau were a no-brainer, so I figured I'd send her off to school, 'cos she loves it. But Genghis... he really didn't want to go. He thought today was the Athletics carnival, you see, and he hates the athletics carnival. He's a very competitive kid. He's very fit, strong, and physical... but he's stocky, and small. He's rapidly becoming a good gymnast, and he learns the martial stuff very quickly and effectively - but he is NOT a runner, and (surprise, surprise!) the school's "athletics carnival" consists mostly of running. (There is some jumping. But you don't get to do that until grade five. Why? I have no farking idea. Apparently, grades 1-4 are incapable of jumping. Or something.)

Therefore, young Genghis pleaded at length with me to miss school and go to Launceston. In the end, I shrugged and agreed. Personally, I can understand his loathing of the athletics carnival. If he really needed to get off his ass and exercise, I'd maybe have another opinion... but I don't see the point in making him run a series of races he utterly hates.

Except, of course, that today wasn't the athletics carnival. As I found out when I signed him and his brother off from school, the athletics carnival is next week. He's gonna really hate that when he finds out.

Anyway. We got the white stockings. We got charcoal pinstripe trousers. We got a black waistcoat and a black bow tie. We got a copy of the cello book with the piano-accompaniment CD. We got wrasslin' gloves. We got blue belts. We got a bunch of heavy pine timber to build a small stairway for the shed. We got the makings of dinner. We got lunch. We found a couple of DVDs. (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Black Swan.) We put a tank of diesel in the car. We dropped the little pink satin dress at a dry-cleaner. We...

... uhh... yeah. I think that was about it for Launceston.

But when I got home, I planted the laburnum tree that Amazing Neighbour Anna gave me. And I did some laundry, and I cut the pine planks to length for the stair. I collected the Mau-mau from the bus stop. I grilled hamburgers and made all the trimmings and fixings, and I carved up a watermelon. I washed things and I stacked things and vacuumed things and cleaned things. I oversaw some music practice.

And now, I can go to work.

Another Busy One

2011-09-25T02:36:00.000-07:00

Ruminations on Art and writing here... Battersblog Guest Appearance

Meanwhile: I managed to snaffle a quiet sort of day today. Natalie got herself involved in a social bike-ride down to Tomahawk, a little caravan-park of a town on one of the really sweet beaches down the coast. She'd been looking forward to it all week. There was a barbecue afterwards, too.

Unfortunately, it only became clear yesterday that my job was to be largely unsolicited Support Vehicle Driver.

Normally, I'd have sighed and taken it on the chin. A bit of barbecue with the kids down the beach would be a decent exchange for all the aroundgerfucken that goes with kids and bikes and long rides. But this time... well, Natalie's away tonight and tomorrow night, doing some kind of medical educator thing in Albury. Meanwhile, I've got a list of errands about nine metres long that I have to carry out in Launceston tomorrow... but of course, I can't leave until the kids are off to school, and I have to be back in time to collect them. Yep.

So I begged off, and took a bit of a mental health day. I wrote maybe a thousand words, did some reading, had a nice lunch, took a walk... of course, I also did the shopping, prepped for dinner, handled a bunch of laundry, etc. And after they got back from their ride I unloaded the trailer and fed a bunch of hungry kids (mine plus two extra) and Chrissie the Medical Student (happily, I had three litres of leftover Chicken Sweet Corn soup which was easy to heat up on demand).

Really, I have to get down to this blog thing more than once or so a week. I hate recapping. On the other hand, I've been busy enough that the only way to contemplate the bloody week has been in recap. Back to martial classes; teaching another basic class at the primary school; working up the proposal for an online high school extension class; reading for the MA; catch-up at Iaido classes...

We went to a wedding yesterday, did Natalie and I. Damon the Mad Piper has married Tanya, and it was a fine ceremony at the Holy Trinity Church in Launceston. Luckily, Chrissie the Medical Student makes a very fine babysitter... I left her with the ready makings of chicken won-ton soup, and a chocolate shortcrust flan thing, and Jake can now make popcorn, so they were well set.

"Mawwiage. That bwessed event. That dweam... within a dweam..." I can't help it. Every time I see a priest dressed up in those nifty robes, I flash on Peter Cook in The Princess Bride, and I start sniggering. It's not a good look.

The other problem for me is the bit where the priest does the blessing. He has to raise his hand in front of him, you see... and invariably, I find myself thinking: These aren't the droids you're looking for. You don't need to see his papers. Move along.

Pop culture. It can really fuck up your ability to take a church wedding seriously.

It didn't help that they were piped into the church by Highland pipers, and that an Irish piper played while the register was signed. Don't get me wrong. The pipes were lovely, even with the pipe organ in the background. But the thing is that Nat and I were sitting among other musicians from the regular session she attends, and... well... they have a sense of humour.

As the piper was playing an phis fliuch (a well known Irish piece) we were giggling about the possibilities. You see, a lot of Irish trad pieces have... odd titles. After a bit of discussion, we decided that there ought to be a "Wedding Set" of tunes to be played at these occasions. We figured it would consist of the following three pieces, in order:

Dick Gossip; then Cock Up Your Beaver; and then Oh, Hag You Have Killed Me.

I should point out that the second tune was named in the era when a 'Beaver' referred to a fashionable hat, which could be 'cocked up' at a jaunty angle. (What else could they possibly be referring to?)

So, there we were, giggling like naughty schoolkids. Then Andrew the Piper came over to us after the ceremony, and we let him in on the joke. Or so we thought.

Turns out that Andrew and Damon had a better joke for us.

An phis fliuch is a lovely piece of music. But I've only ever seen the name in Irish Gaelic. And that's odd, since virtually every trad piece I've seen (and I've seen well over a thousand) has an English name, or an English translation.

Well, it turns out there's a reason it's not usually translated. Apparently it translates directly as "The Wet Vagina". (It's not crude in Irish.) It's more often referred to as "The Wet Kitten", or even "The Wet Pussy". Sometimes it's coyly called "The Choice Wife". But the actual translation is very much as shown...

... well played, sir. Well played.

Where'd That Week Go?

2011-09-19T06:04:00.000-07:00

Okay. The LOTR marathon went off beautifully. We finished at about 0200, and didn't wind up with any overnighters, so by and large we got to sleep in a little the next day. Except Natalie... she had a long and busy weekend putting people with bronchitis into the hospital.

Seriously. This f__king plague of bronchitis has been a vicious bastard. It's a week later, and Natalie is still waking up at 0200, thrashing about and coughing several lungs worth of crap. It's horrible. She's feeling much better, but the bloody cough lingers in a truly hideous fashion.

The week was flat-out, though. I caught up with my prof at the university, and we got the whole masters degree thing pushed into a more sensible shape then before. I also did the student ID thing, and checked out the library, etc.

The boys and I hung with Bruce and the Cool Shiters on Tuesday night. Watched... umm... some movie or another. Heather was back from Queensland, though, which was nice. She finished her film degree, and is now apparently ready for unemployment - although I'm given to understand she's quite gainfully employed in the industry, which is odd. But not surprising: Heather is smart, and determined, and I suspect anybody employing her will get more than their money's worth.

And in other news, Chrissie the Medical Student is back down this end of the country. This time she's doing a month at Launceston, on surgery. She came out for the weekend, and so of course, yet another weekend dissolved into a mess of cooking and entertainment, 'cos Linda turned up, and brought with her Em the Mad Scientist, and I cooked much more food than I really needed to: grilled cardamom chicken, slow-grilled spice-rubbed pork belly, salads, baked potatoes... finally, I poached some beurre bosc pear halves in port and spices. Then I wrapped the pear halves in puff pastry and baked them, while reducing the spiced port down to a piquant sauce, and served the lot with lashings of sweetened whipped cream.

The school holidays have ended at last, and we're down to the sharp, pointy end of the year. They're already making noises about the ju-jitsu club appearing for the Christmas Parade festivities again, and I have to get on with the gradings over the next week or two, then devise some kind of a Christmas show, I guess. I saw a lovely clip of Jackie Chan breaking some concrete slabs while holding an egg, unbroken in his hand. Concrete slabs are hard to come by... but surely I can take out a stack of boards while keeping an egg whole, right? Better practice first, I reckon. This could be tricky.

Desperately putting finishing touches to a story for one small press anthology, and carving a second story into proper shape for someone else. Meanwhile, I'm supposed to put together a proposal to start an online teaching group for the local high school - drawing on the work I did for years with Dr Virginia Little, in the USA. The online forum would allow advanced English students a place to practise skills in writing, criticism and critical thinking for extra credit. There's a fair bit of enthusiasm from the students with whom I did the 'Write A Book In A Day' project, so hopefully the school will be prepared to listen.

Meantime, the primary school wants me to do another series of martial arts 'taster' classes for their October Options. I mentioned that it's still September, but apparently the 'October' part is just for the alliteration this year. Who knew? I've also got to catch up with the principal, to discuss the restrictions placed on Jake's computer. I can understand the need for security for most of the students - but the computer Jake uses is issued to him alone, and it was issued because he's in the "gifted and talented" category. The very existence of that computer is proof that the system has been altered for him... so why is he restricted to the idiotic fucking "Bing" search engine like all the other students?

That's not the only restriction, of course, but the point is clear. 'Bing' is noticeably inferior to Google as a search engine. I don't know what obscure goddam deal the school or the education department has with Microsoft such that the students are actively locked out of Google on the school computers... but I'm not impressed. I'm guessing it's related to some kind of net-nannyware designed to keep potentially naughty students from seeing naughty stuff, but it doesn't matter. The point is that Jake's already an exception to the rule, and they need to think about that when they do this kind of thing. So - meeting on Thursday. Lucky, lucky, lucky me.

What day is it? Still Monday for another forty minutes or so. Right.

I read an odd thing the other day. It was a newspaper article which said that despite the proliferation of TV chefs and cooking shows, most Australian families still eat around a basic menu of about five recurring dishes.

Five? How the fuck does anyone survive the boredom?

Since the longterm purpose of this blog is to keep a sort of diary for my kids, I'll put down the list of dinner menus that my kids rattled off when I read the article at them this evening. In no particular order, these are the most frequent, regular dishes:

San choy bau (either pork, or prawn and chicken)

Chinese dumplings (pork, chicken, beef, prawn, scallop: all steamed, or pan-fried, or both) with steamed vegetables

Thai beef salad

Nasi goreng

Mee goreng

Char kway teow

Chilli chicken and tamarind

Tacos

Spaghetti bolognese

Grilled khofta (lamb or beef or even chickpea) with flatbread and salad

won-ton soup

chicken and sweet corn soup

rich tomato soup with spiced meatballs

Thai fish stew

Laksa

curried pumpkin and coconut soup

creamy mushroom soup

Winter pea-and-ham soup

summertime Gazpacho soup

sushi

baked stuffed mushrooms

polenta-crusted baked salmon over sushi-dressed noodles and salad

grilled cardamom chicken

smoked vegetables with balsamic vinegar

poached salmon with cheese sauce and pasta

shashliks/kebabs (lamb, beef)

satay (chicken, lamb, beef) with spicy peanut sauce

stir-fry (just about anything, really)

poached scallops on croutons

grilled haloumi salad

curried lamb, fish, chicken, beef, or vegetables

Vietnamese-style spring rolls (with the soft rice wrappers and the spicy pork balls)

Charcoal roasted lamb or chicken,

Char-grilled fish or steak

pizza

There's probably more. I forget stuff from time to time, and dishes fall off the menu to be rediscovered after a few months.

There's also a bunch of stuff I do less often, for occasions. Things like the poached pears, or chilled prawn and avocado soup, for example. Mix it all up with a range of pasta or Asian noodles, steamed vegetables, roast vegetables, and salads; allow for variations on dishes (how many different ways can you curry lamb? I don't know 'em all. I tend to vary it as the whim takes me); incorporate seasonal produce (scallops are winter and spring; berries and cherries and plums are summer; apples are autumn... garden vegetables vary with the weather and the temperature and how much energy I've put into planting and weeding); throw in snacks and dips and side-dishes; allow the occasional wallaby to appear on the table... desserts, random bits of baking (pretzels, sourdough, doughnuts, biscuits, cakes) - you get the picture.

People don't really still work around five dishes, do they? I can remember the staple diet my sister and I grew up on: stew, green salad, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti bolognese, breaded chicken or veal, pork chops, the occasional steak... umm... yeah. Actually, that was it. My mother didn't like cooking.

Ah, shit. The cat's brought a rabbit in. I'd better go deal with it or there'll be half a bunny and a lot of blood and guts on the floor in the morning.

Saturday Sanity Check

2011-09-09T18:30:00.000-07:00

It's school holidays. It's a Saturday. Therefore I must be doing something tremendously stupid, right?

Oh, well done. Now, read on.

Today is the day of the long-awaited Lord Of The Rings Marathon. The older half the ju-jitsu class (plus or minus a few), my kids, the Viking Neighbour kids, me, various parents... and all three LOTR movies.

The first one is the extra-length extended Director's "Fuck You" cut. The next two are open to discussion, depending on how we're going.

We kick off in about an hour. There's popcorn. Drinks. Beer. Snacks. Blankets. Mattresses. Inflatable mattresses. Cloaks. Swords. Staffs. Beards. A fire for the fire-pit. A full bottle for the gas barbecue. Plenty of charcoal for the Weber. Sausages. Chicken. Bread rolls. Pork khofta. Bacon. Salads. Ice. Potatoes. Sweet potatoes. Mushrooms. Pumpkin. Also, there are plenty of eggs, and milk, and cream, and self-raising flour and sugar and syrup for a big Fluffy Pancake Sunday Breakfast.

Personally, I'm stoked. I used to do this kind of shit with my housemates and boon companions back in the college years, and I'm delighted to have an excuse to revisit the exercise. I'm sure Mr Barnes will recall the jollity of it all... Of course, since a large percentage of the participants are below legal boozing age, it will be a relatively sober event, but really, who gives a toss? This is going to be fun.

We rather expect it to finish at about 0100 or later, so there will be some overnighters. Therefore, as an added bonus, I propose to show the 1977 Ralph Bakshi animated version of "The Hobbit" as a waker-upper in the morning, for any survivors. Because more than too much is never quite enough.

Poor Natalie. Not only is she on-call this weekend, but she's caught the killer lung-death lurgi bronchitis from hell which has been scouring Scottsdale. I'm going to do my best to keep the action outside, and up in the moviezone, but oooh. I really wouldn't want to be in her shoes right about now...

Let's Go Fly A Kite

2011-09-08T15:07:00.000-07:00

...and we did. Yesterday. It was a beautiful, sunny, clear spring day, and the kids have spent enough time inside already due to rain, illness, more rain, mother's illness, and rain.

I packed the three of 'em up, and we drove to the beach. The following photos are posted especially for Cat Sparks, who knows how to say the right thing when it's needed.

We spent a couple of hours watching the kite, and beachcombing. Then we took in a toasty-sandwich lunch at a local cafe and headed back.

Unfortunately, on the way back I began to develop my version of a migraine headache. I get a sharp pain about five centimetres back in the skull, behind one of my eyes. (It was the right, yesterday.)

It's a strange thing. The pain doesn't really seem that bad to me, but for some reason, I can't ignore it, and if I don't do something about it, it kind of takes over my entire perception of the world, and I get knocked flat.

I took a couple paracetamol and a couple ibuprofen. That's usually enough, if I get to it in time. Unfortunately, after an hour or so, things were worse. I had to put the kids on autopilot ("Godzilla movie, anybody?") and lay down in a darkened room.

Things didn't improve. The kids were great, but I was drifting in and out of a horrid, fitful sleep, and the pain behind my eye was like a clenched fist. Luckily, Natalie came home a bit early. I ran a bath and climbed in (I don't know why it helps, but it does) and she gave me some aspirin as well. I lay there in the bath for about an hour, and the tide of pain receded until I could more or less function again, but I was washed out - empty, exhausted.

Migraines are weird. I know that most people who get them are far worse off than me, though. Both my parents used to get them, and could be bedridden for forty-eight hours or more.

Anyway: Natalie made dinner. Luckily, I had made soup stock the previous day, and laid in a supply of vegetables, and we still had leftover chicken pieces. Took a lot of pressure off when I needed it.

The aftereffects of the migraine passed by about seven o'clock, which was handy. I went on to bake a chocolate cake (somebody's birthday today; not kids, but a friend) and to make a big batch of peppermint pillow candy (the birthday friend really, really likes peppermint.)

Today is also fine and sunny. It's still spring, still school holidays. I think the little barstewards need to go outside for a while...

The Rites Of Spring

2011-09-07T00:08:00.000-07:00

Well.

That was a large sort of weekend.

Spring has arrived, right? First of September, all that shit. Also, an anniversary for Natalie and I. Not wedding, but just getting together: nineteen years. Fuck, eh? Who knew?

By chance, the weekend was clear. And we had a three-year-old pile of deadfall timber, tree branches, old furniture, leftover timber from renovations, etc. Huuuuge forkin' pile of flammable stuff.

Not at all by chance, I had completed the basic work on the new fire-pit, near the playground. It's nice. Low, curved brick wall backed with earth, for sitting on. Gravelled surround. Nice, deep, gravel-lined pit, walled with fieldstone, lined with concrete pavers to protect the stone.

As you can see, the Ducks Were Lined Up.

Therefore, I brought out the Shotgun of Merriment, and shot the bastards down.

It wasn't really an organised thing. Just one of those neighbourly events, with added kids. (Total kid-count: eleven.) We started a nice little fire in the new pit, and toasted marshmallows and wieners. When the fire burned down appropriately, I slid a makeshift grill over the top, and cooked a mass of mushrooms and chicken and fish and chops and pork and sausages. Meanwhile, I took advantage of those concrete bricks (now thoroughly hot) and wrapped a very large number of vegetables in foil. Potatoes, pumpkin, sweet potato, and sweet corn. The vegetables roasted nicely between the coals and the hot bricks, while up above, the grill-specific comestibles toasted nicely, with plenty of smoky flavour. Yum!

In the background, there were kids. Kids with waterguns. Kids with nerfguns. Kids climbing shit. Kids with balloons. Kids chasing each other. Kids wrestling. There was also plenty of beer (a carton of Boag's St George) and cider, and wine brought by various neighbourly sorts.

Sometime around dark, I went down to the Gigantic Burnable Heap, and applied twenty litres of accelerant. For those who need to know: a fifty-fifty mix of diesel and petrol is recommended by those professionals I know who have to light backburn fires safely. I'm happy to say it worked very well. Your Mileage May Vary. I am Not Responsible for Any Stupidity You May Enact. Bear in mind that I live in Tasmania, and we've had a long, wet winter. There was zero chance of starting any unwanted fires... and despite that, we still had a nice quorum of sober, adult observers.

Natalie wasn't altogether impressed with my twenty-litre effort, mind you. She thought it was overkill. Heh. I did mention a long, wet, winter, didn't I? The fire burned down, and smouldered through the night, though we had a brief thunderstorm at 0500. It burned out sometime the next night, when yet another lot of rain arrived... and it turns out that maybe half the heap has burned. But all around the edges, where I put the accelerant to start it... nope. Still a hell of a lot of fuel there. I'm either going to have to repeat the process, or even hop on the tractor and see if I can scrape it together.

Either way: that was a very fine Spring Bonfire night. Here's hoping the rest of the season is as pleasant.

Silly New Project

2011-09-02T17:58:00.000-07:00

Well, more than one, really. I'm sitting down, having a bit of a rest after landscaping around the new fire pit. I should probably take photos, shouldn't I? Nothing much to see, really. There's a hole in the ground with a stone wall lining it. And lining the circular stone wall is a wall of cement bricks, to keep the worst of the heat away from the fieldstone (which might, potentially, crack violently if overheated.)

The hole has about half a metre of gravel in the bottom of it, to keep rain from forming puddles. After the last couple weeks of weather, I'm pleased to say that it works very bloody well indeed for that job.

Near the hole is a nice, sitting-sized log. And today, I found some long-forgotten landscaping blocks and built a nice, curved, wall for sitting on. Then I took all the loose stone and earth, and piled it up behind my curved wall, and finally, I brought half a dozen barrows of mulch down to cover it all, and even it up.

It looks okay, actually. We'll probably have a fire in it tonight. It's a big fire night, actually -- we're going to try and burn off our three-year-old pile of old trees, timber, garden cuttings, etc. It's probably too wet to really go off, though. I'm going to have to go after it with the classic petrol/diesel mix the rangers use when they're setting up a controlled burn. I've got a twenty-litre container I can use for it, but it's a hell of a big pile, and I'll be surprised if it really burns. We'll probably have to do it two or three times.

Nevertheless, it will make for a nice evening, and there will be neighbours and many children, so no doubt it will all be fun. And yes, I'll try out the firepit, and if it works, we'll roast marshmallows and cook sausages and bacon and chops, and maybe throw in some potatoes. Hooray for springtime!

Now, as for the other silly project...

It's continuing to be difficult to find writing competitions or similar which will permit young Jake to enter. At eleven, he seems too young for most of them, which is just rude. I am, therefore, constantly looking out for stuff to entertain and challenge his love of writing.

Thus, when we were at our favourite second-hand bookstore last week and I found two old "Mandrake The Magician" comic collections, the germ of an idea settled. For those of you who don't know the redoubtable Mandrake, he was another creation from Lee Falk, who brought you the Phantom. And while it's purely a personal opinion, I feel that Mandrake (who is constantly 'gesturing hypnotically' and causing bad guys to hallucinate ridiculous crap) and his buddy Lothar (big, black, shaven-headed guy with a propensity for leopard-spot shirts) are possible the crappest ever comic-book action heroes.

They are, in a word, tragic.

Therefore, Jake and I have set upon them. I'm scanning the stories, page by page, and removing all text. Then he and I are reconstructing the stories, page for page. I get one page, he gets the next. The game is simple: whatever the storyline the previous player leaves behind, it is that which you must continue. And the story has to make some kind of sense.

It's not as easy as you might think. But it is fun. Thus, I direct interested parties to

The Amazing Adventures of That Suave Guy.

You never know. It might bring a giggle or two.

Well, So Much For "Protecting The Kids"

2011-08-30T16:35:00.000-07:00

Not sure how many of you know, but various Australian ISPs have been 'voluntarily' imposing censorship for a while now. At the behest of the government. To 'protect the kiddies', naturally.

And of course, it was never, ever about politics, nor suppressing dissent. Nope.

I'm on a Telstra account. When I saw this link:

http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/07/08CANBERRA685.html

on a news site, I was curious. There was a note that said the US government had sought to trial a nerve agent on Australian soldiers, and requested the Aus government's co-operation and silence. I'm skeptical, so I thought I'd read it.

I clicked the link. (Have you done so yet?) And I got a Google broken-link message. (I use Chrome as my browser. On Firefox, it 'times out'.)

Did I mention I'm skeptical? I'm also cynical. I promptly went to a very quick-and-simple proxy site called Workdodger, in the UK, and input that self-same link. And got this:

O 070749Z JUL 08 FM AMEMBASSY CANBERRA TO SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 9814 INFO AMCONSUL MELBOURNE IMMEDIATE  AMCONSUL PERTH IMMEDIATE  AMCONSUL SYDNEY IMMEDIATE  CDR USPACOM HONOLULU HI IMMEDIATE SECDEF WASHINGTON DC IMMEDIATE DEPT OF ARMY WASHINGTON DC IMMEDIATE NSC WASHINGTON DC IMMEDIATE

C O N F I D E N T I A L CANBERRA 000685      SIPDIS    STATE FOR EAP AND PM  SECDEF FOR OSD J.POWERS  PACOM ALSO FOR POLAD    E.O. 12958: DECL: 07/07/2018  TAGS: MOPS PINS PREL AS SUBJECT: GUIDANCE REQUEST: ALLEGATION USG SOUGHT TO TEST  NERVE GAS ON AUSTRALIANS    Classified By: Charge D'Affaires Daniel A. Clune.  Reasons: 1.4(b),(d)    ¶1. (U)  This is an action request - please see paragraph 4  below.    ¶2. (SBU) Australian newspapers, quoting recently declassified  Australian government documents, carried stories over the  July 4 weekend alleging the U.S. Government had asked the  Australian government in 1963 to permit aerial testing of VX  and GB sarin nerve agent on Australian troops in Queensland.  According to the stories, the U.S. proposal included a  request that the GOA conceal the nature of the testing,  including from the troops on whom they would be conducted.  The Australian government at the time did not respond to the  U.S. request, according to the press stories.    ¶3. (C) At the Embassy's request, staff of Defence Minister  Joel Fitzgibbon, currently in Hawaii and en route to  Washington, provided a background paper used to brief the  Defence Minister that includes further details (see full text  at para 5 below.)    ¶4. (C) ACTION REQUESTED:  Embassy requests guidance for  possible use in responding to media inquiries.  Defence  Minister Joel Fitzgibbon has indicated he will raise this  issue during his forthcoming visit to the United States,  possibly including during his July 8 call on PACOM Commander  Keating and during his call next week on Secretary Gates.  In  addition, although no press had contacted the U.S. Embassy as  of COB July 7, we anticipate the need for guidance to respond  to press inquiries over the coming days, particularly for a  previously-arranged radio interview of the Charge in Adelaide  July 9 on a range of topics.    ¶5. (C) Following is the text of the background paper provided  by Defence Minister Fitzgibbon's staff:    Begin text:    Nerve Gas test plans    Regarding widespread reporting - The Australian, SMH, Sunday  Program, Advertiser 07/07/08 - that recently declassified  National Archive documents reveal an American plan to test  Nerve Gas on Australian Defence Force members during the Cold  War.    Background    Recently declassified documents held by the National Archives  contain information that the US wanted to test Nerve Gas on  Australian soldiers at the height of the cold war.    The Australian reports that under the plan, 200 Australian  combat troops, presumably wearing 1960s-era chemical  protection suits, were to be subjected to aerial bombardment  in the Iron Range rainforest near Lockhart River in far north  Queensland.  The Australian also reports that the plan is not  believed to have been acted upon.    The nerve agents were to include VX and GB, better known as  sarin nerve gas.  The aim of the tests was to gauge the  effectiveness of nerve agents in jungle warfare at a time  when US military involvement in Vietnam was intensifying.    The US proposal is alleged to have made by US defence  secretary Robert McNamara in July 1963, according to Defence  Department and Prime Minister's Office documents.    The documents stated that of the 200 troops to be used in the  tests, "only four to six would need to know the full details  of the operation".    The US proposal is reported to have recommended that the  Australian government keep the nerve agent tests secret,  describing them as either "equipment testing" trials or "land  Qdescribing them as either "equipment testing" trials or "land  reclamation" experiments.    The Australian reports that the Australian government is  believed to have not responded to the initial US proposal in  1963, but in 1966 Washington approached the new prime  minister, Harold Holt, with a request to drop tear gas on  Australian troops.  Reports say that again, Canberra quietly  ignored the request.    A former Holt staffer told the Sunday Program that the then  Government was concerned that its Cold War alliance with the  US would be damaged if it refused to allow the tests.    Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who was Minister for  Army from 196668, denied knowledge of the US requests.    COMMENTS BY MINISTER FITZGIBBON - 06/07/08    "(It is) difficult to believe any such request came forward,  but if it did, surely it would have been rejected by the  conservative government of the day out of hand".    "I have asked Defence for an urgent and full briefing on this  matter. I can certainly rule out any such testing in the  future."    New lines for the Minister:    --I am aware of reports that the United States sought to test  nerve gas in Australia during the 1960s.    --I am advised that the United States did seek Australian  agreement to conduct experiments using chemical agents in Far  North Queensland, as they had no suitable sites available in  areas under their control.    --I am advised that in 1964, the Cabinet agreed it was not  appropriate to allow such trials to be carried out in  Australia and agreed to advise the United States of this  decision.    --I am advised this information is available on the public  record. Relevant cabinet papers were released in the  mid-1990s under the provisions of Archives Act, 1983.    --I am advised the United States was made aware of the  pending release of this information in 1994.    --I have asked the Department of Defence for an urgent and  full briefing on this matter.    End text.

Don't take my word for it. Try it for yourself.

So. Is there anybody out there who still thinks the government's censorship of the 'Net is about 'protecting the kiddies'? Because if so, I've got a lot of money in Nigeria you can have if you just send me a few thousand dollars to cover administrative costs...

EDITED TO ADD:

1) Different results have been reported to me from different ISPs - well, yes. I'd expect that. Conroy's Great Big Firewall hasn't been implemented, but a number of ISP's have agreed to censor voluntarily. They're supposedly listening to Interpol, but there's nothing that says they're all censoring the same stuff the same way... and there's nothing to say that Telstra, for example, isn't taking quiet instructions from our government.

2) A later check allowed me to reach the Wikileaks site. But the cable was simply not there. On the other hand, it was still accessible via the English proxy. This was about five hours after the first couple of checks, which occurred across a period of about an hour to an hour and a half.

3) According to Twitter sources, Wikileaks.org has been under cyberattack today. Well, maybe. On the other hand, I can't quite see why a cyberattack would block an inquiry from a Telstra ISP, but let an inquiry from an English proxy go straight through.

Something's not straight, folks.

FINAL EDIT: And now, as of 2220, I can get straight through from my Telstra ISP to the cable itself.

So what happened? Did a cyberattack somehow block access from Telstra while leaving open access via an English proxy? And did that cyberattack somehow later refine itself, allowing access to Wikileaks, but blocking the one cable in question? Or is it merely my computer (and two others in this house that can access the 'net, of course... naturally I tried them.) which has somehow slipped a gear?

This isn't the first time I've noticed problems with accessing portions of the Web using Telstra. This is, however, the first time it's really pissed me off. I'm going to keep watching this, with interest.

Unattractive Leisure Pursuits: The Bronchoscopy

2011-08-30T15:15:00.000-07:00

I had a distinctly unpleasant day yesterday.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a good dose of bronchitis. The same cough went through every kid in this neighbourhood, but I'm the only one that got raging bronchitis. Personally, I think it's because of my pathetic cough-ability. Somewhere in the last few years, I lost the ability to cough deeply, and bring out all that wet, nasty shite that goes with minor respiratory tract disorders. As a result, my goddam lungs are probably better at incubating vile bacteria then they should be.

The doc who saw me for the bronchitis said he'd set me up with a referral to a respiratory physician. Well and good. And about a week ago, I got a note from the Launceston General Hospital telling me I was on their waiting list. They also said they'd notify me when my name came up.

Well, fine. The waiting list is apparently several months long. I could try going privately - but it's not really urgent. No big deal. I'll wait.

Except that on Monday, while I was at the supermarket, I got a call from a hospital clerk who wanted to discuss my 0800 appointment for Tuesday. For a bronchoscopy.

Fuckin' what?

Apparently a gap opened in their list, and they forgot to tell me. I got slotted in because other than the cough problem, I'm in good order. The lung doc figured I'd probably need a bronchoscopy, and he knew he could safely slide me into the gap because I'm not in my seventies, and on five different kinds of medications.

The clerk was surprised I hadn't been informed. Not as surprised as me, I told her. Fortunately, I'm not stupid: I actually asked about pre-procedural prep ("Don't eat after midnight." "Why? Will I turn into a gremlin?")

I also asked about driving. And there began the problems.

With the total lack of warning, there was no way Natalie could go in with me. And what with the sedation, I wasn't supposed to drive for twelve hours afterwards. Hmmm.

Well, okay. I figured I could just stay in Launceston, shoot on out to Bruce's place in the evening, catch a movie with him as usual, and then drive home roundabout midnight, as I often do of a Tuesday. There. Plan made.

I got out of bed obnoxiously early and drove into Launceston like a chiropteran making a rapid exit from Sheol. That ensured I found a parking place near the hospital - one that would actually let my car sit for near-enough twelve hours. Yay!

They signed me in pretty quickly. And then they gave me the dreaded backless gown. These days, you also get nifty paper underpants and booties. Add to that a nice little lap blankie to keep the breeze away from your 'nads (those paper underpants are about as useful as... paper underpants, really) and you're all set for a forty-minute wait in the TV room of lung-victim hell.

Happily, it was a slow day at the hospital. There were only two people before me, and neither of them seemed particularly tuberculoid. We nodded and smiled and carefully avoided looking at each other's paper underpants, and eventually, I got called into The Room. With The Chair.

The nurse was nice, but she made a hash of sticking a drip in my hand. Natalie told me later that it's probably because of my more-than-usually tough skin. The nurse did ask about that - wanted to know if I did a lot of outdoors work. I do work outdoors, but no more so than any gardening type... it's just my skin. Anyway, she missed the vein in the left hand, switched to the right, and caused a truly remarkable amount of pain by missing the vein there too, whereupon she just gave up.

Fuck it hurts when they miss the vein.

I lay there on the chair, waiting. I had the blood pressure cuff round my left arm, the pulse monitor on the index finger of my right hand. Lacking anything more interesting to do (I did smuggle in a book, but it was kind of hard to read with all that crap hanging off me) I played around with biofeedback. I discovered that simply by concentrating hard, I could move my heartrate down to sixty-five (it generally hung at about seventy-five, which is higher than I like, but I haven't been able to exercise well lately) and up as high as ninety or so. I also discovered that my blood pressure is about 123/77, which is pretty reasonable for a forty-five-year-old man coming out of a bout of bronchitis. It's even better when you recognise that hospital stress tends to raise everybody's blood pressure. (Natalie's jumped twenty points when she had it done in a hospital. Which is weird, since she works in the things.)

So all up, aside from this stupid cough, I'm doing okay.

The nurse finally noticed my fluctuating heart-rate. She stared. Asked me what I was doing. I said "Biofeedback. It's fun."

She stared some more. Then switched the machine off. Well, okay.

The doc arrived. He was good value. They stuck a needle into the crook of my arm, and then put a mask on my face. I had to inhale nebulised lignocaine for a while, to numb the airways. Apparently, jamming a camera up one's nose, then all the way down to the lungs can be traumatic. Who knew?

Finally, they got around to loading me up with a mix of Fentanyl and Midazolam.... yippee. Happily, whoever mixed the dose had a light hand. According to the doc, most people come out of it without realising anything has happened. I, on the other hand, recall... well, a little more than I want, really. The bit where the tube wouldn't go up my left nostril, so they tried my right, then went back to the left -- there's a thing I could do without. But on the other hand, the bit where the doc tilted the vidscreen and said: "There's your vocal chords. Say 'hello'..." was very cool. Especially because I did indeed say 'hello', and my vocal chords moved in the most amazing way. Keen!

Anyway, they had a good old probe around down there. I don't recall that they found anything too exotic, and they wound up splashing in a bit of saline so they could get some sputum samples, which provoked a certain amount of coughing. And at this point, I'd like to report that it's fucking difficult and painful to cough with a camera in your goddam lung...

... then they wheeled me to the recovery ward. I got a little oxygen while we waited for the various drugs to clear, and then they shifted me and my bed to a second ward. Shortly thereafter, they brought me my clothes and my bag, and shifted me to yet another ward - this one all about chair. (I abandoned my paper underpants with alacrity, and returned to the comforting cotton of my regular Rios.)

And the waiting began.

Apparently, I shouldn't have told them I planned to (eventually) drive home. I had been quite clear with them that I wasn't driving for twelve hours. But they didn't like the sound of that, and so instead of letting me go by 1330, as they'd intimated, they 'asked' me to stay 'a while longer'.

By 1500, I was over the whole funking experience. Sitting around in a hospital is dull. I'd read a lot. I'd even composed about a thousand words of fresh fiction on the Netbook 'puter I brought. But I was bored, and I was feeling rocky from the afterFX, and I wanted to GTFO.

So I called up a nurse, and very politely explained that she needed to remove the needle still hanging out of my arm, or I was going to do it for myself. We had a short, friendly conversation, and then they brought me some self-discharge forms. And I left.

I can understand that the hospital needs to cover itself, sure. But enough is enough.

I did have a bit of aftermath. For some reason, I started running a low fever at about five o'clock. But by eight o'clock, I was in Bruce's kitchen, cooking asparagus and mushroom crepes with cheese sauce for him and Tiarne, and by eight-thirty, the fever was broken, and gone. We watched a French crime/thriller thing which was, by and large, not too bad, and I hopped in the car and went home almost exactly twelve hours after the bronchoscopy was complete. The drive home was very normal indeed.

Kudos to the doc: he had a good sense of humour, and he really did handle the machinery - the hospital's and mine - well. I have no soreness at all today, and though the cough did flare up, he warned me of that, and it really hasn't been a big deal. The nurses were nice, the hospital was organised... but no matter how you paint it, the whole thing was still a tube up the nose and down the chest, followed by several hours of post-drug hangover and waiting.

Ah well. We shall see what the results show, eh ?

Write A Book In A Day

2011-08-26T04:18:00.000-07:00

That's what they call it.

It's a school thing. It's a competition associated with Katherine Susannah Pritchard, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Once your school is registered, on a given day at 0800 the competition people send you a bunch of details that have to go into your story. And by 2000 that night, you have to email them your book.

The local high school has a few avid writers, and they've been asking me to do something with them for a while. They leaned on their teachers, and eventually the gears turned, the wheels ground, and we all agreed to do this WABIAD thing. The high school folks were 'specially nice in that they even agreed to let young Jake join in for the day.

I did two prep sessions. The Friday before last, we did a couple hours on character: how to build character, using and understanding motivation, and how characters act as the main point of entrance to the narrative for the reader. Last Friday, we did a kind of dry run, putting together story outlines based on sets of data of the sort the WABIAD organisers supply.

And today was the Big Day.

Naturally, things had to be difficult. Firstly, Natalie went to Hobart last night. She's away for the weekend. Obviously, that made things a bit challenging since Jake and I had to be at the school by 0800 - but Genghis and the Mau-mau also had to get to their school at the usual time. Likewise, Jake and I were prepared to be busy until 2000... but of course, Genghis and the Mau-mau were on a school bus home by 1500.

Difficult.

Happily, Viking Neighbour Anna was prepared to accept Genghis and the Mau-mau in the evening. It probably helped that one of her progeny was also involved in the WABIAD competition, and I gave him a lift home when we were done... but nevertheless, I'm grateful. There's no conceivable way I could have handled this otherwise.

The WABIAD day was - well, actually, it was extremely bloody cool. They had enough kids signed up to make two teams of ten or so. The first lot had to write with a lifeguard, an artist, and one non-human character - an elf. The had to use a wrecker's yard as a setting, and they had to address the issue "one good turn deserves another".

Not too difficult, really. They jumped right in and got going.

Unfortunately, the second group kinda got screwed. They had to write about a gangster, a sandalwood cutter, and their nonhuman character was a doll. Their setting was a peace rally, and worst of all, their 'issue' was 'drought'.

That's a bit of a bastard combination, really. Not impossible, of course, but not at all pleasant. You really have to twist things to make 'drought' your central issue when your setting is 'a peace rally'. I have to give them credit. They handled it well.

Both groups also got a list of words that had to be used: 'ginormous', 'beef stroganoff', 'plopped', 'amongst', and a couple of others.

It was one blue-arsed hell of a hectic day. Really.

It started with mad brainstorming and character design. Then the writing and illustrating took off. (Yes. The books have to be illustrated, and they have to have a front cover and a back cover too. And for high-school level, they have to be a minimum of 4000 words long.) By lunch, the bulk of the drafting was done, and we were well into the editing and proofing.

But things got out of synch. Chapters got mislaid or missed out. Computers spat the dummy at inopportune times. Collating and proofing was slow, troublesome work. It got quite tense towards the end, doing final proofs, and hunting for typos, etc, while juggling image files and text files...

... and I have to say, I fucking HATE Microsoft Word. What a fucking awful piece of shitbag software! Overcomplicated, slow, resource-hogging crap that desperately tries to impose all kinds of idiotic formats and standards on you. What fucking good is a goddam grammar checker when you're writing large slabs of dialogue? FUCK!

But - yes. We managed to get both files emailed away to the WABIAD folks in the last half hour before the deadline. And there was pizza all around.

The students had themselves a fantastic time. I actually cannot recall another time I've seen twenty school students work twelve solid hours so cheerfully and enthusiastically. By the time we were printing out copies, they were swarming the photocopier, competing to see who could get the first complete version to take home for the oldies.

Not a single cross or cranky word did I hear all day. Lots of hilarity. Ridiculous characters, silly dialogue, crazy ideas -- and a tremendous spirit of co-operation. Everybody jumped in, and tried to help everyone else.

Jake in particular had a great time. He got his writing done well before 1100, and went around helping out others, and writing the blurb for the back cover, and so forth. He even had time to refine his mad pie-seller character: in the end, he was a French expat who cursed the police in French that Jake dug up via Google, and who suffered from myokymia of the eyelid. His Beef Stroganoff pies were apparently notorious for causing constipation - which was handy, since evil gangster Barry Broxburn had slipped laxatives into the ice-cream trucks which attended the peace rally...

So now I'm home. It's 2130, and the kids are in bed. I've managed to neck a couple of decent beers, and... holy shit, I'm exhausted. I've read, edited, and proofed every single word of both books (though I'm not the only one to do that!) I've helped twenty different authors through plot hitches, over character motivation humps, and down the long, winding road to a proper denouement. I've helped invent names for characters. I've cut much-loved passages, and insisted on added detail in sections otherwise too dull or pedestrian, and I've been question-answerer and dogsbody and grammarian and I've done the bakery run for lunch, and yeah, shit, I am really, seriously worn out.

"Elves And Trees -- And Everything In Between" went to 7500 words.

"Paradise Mislaid" made it to 6500.

Both books went out on time.

Two teachers put in the hardest yards I've seen at a school in years... and twenty-odd people had a really, really entertaining day.

Oh, Wow! This Is Brilliant!

2011-08-25T04:02:00.000-07:00

For all my comrades-in-arms out there in the world of parenting, I present this frigging brilliant website:

Child's Own

They're Canadian, but they ship overseas. They're not too expensive, and what they do is bloody fantastic. Essentially, they'll take a drawing made by a child, and turn it into a custom-made soft toy.

So. Your kid ever make a really special picture? Now you know exactly what to do about it.

For the non-parents out there: this site might not seem so interesting to you. But trust me... it's pure genius.

Zombies? Ha. I Survived Mermaid Fairy Princesses.

2011-08-21T20:05:00.000-07:00

That... was a big day.

No parent with even a skerrick of experience leaves the timing of a birthday party open. The invites clearly said: 2.00 to 4.00pm. Naturally, there's always a bit of looseness in these things, but a note like that tells parents of invitees more or less what's going to go down. It's after lunch, see, so it's not likely to be a big nosh-up, but of course the usual range of party food will be available. And you'd better have a damned good excuse if you try to leave your kid much later than, say, 4.30.

I had a lot of work in the morning. I scratch-built a chocolate cake with a layer of marshmallow in the middle, and I filled a bunch of ice-cream cones with the remaining home-made marshmallow, then covered the lot with colourful sprinkles. Mermaid Fairy Princesses fuckin' LOVE colourful sprinkles.

Had to do a shopping run in the morning, of course. Drinks, snacks, party favours, balloons, and the inevitable sausages and bread rolls. Oh, and jelly.

An odd moment in the car: the Mau-Mau was in the back seat, already decked out in her frilliest, pinkest, princessiest finery (did I mention her mother brought her a goddam tiara from Ireland?) while Jake was up front with me. Jake dug out the AC/DC soundtrack album from Iron Man II and stuck it in the cd player, which was all right by me. Is there a better hard rock band ever than AC/DC? I think not. They define their own genre, and whatever their music may now lack in novelty, it remains solidly what it is: hard driving guitar rock.

So 'Thunderstruck' came on. And I turned up the volume. As you do.

Jake cringed into a foetal ball with his hands over his ears. Ahh, but in the rear view mirror what do I see? It's the Mau-mau, and she is goddam ROCKING OUT. Her arms are in the air over her head, flailing away. She's bouncing up and down in her kiddy-support seat, and banging her head like a complete freak.

I could not, in all conscience, turn the music back down until 'Thunderstruck' was done. Jake just had to stay curled up. Pfeh.

The Mermaid Fairy Princesses - and one pirate - turned up on time. I believe we had an extra five little girls in the house, plus the young pirate. Of course, by that time Jake had turned out eight batches of jelly while I'd been prepping marshmallow and cake, and setting things in motion.

Three hundred balloons, in the end. I partioned off the sunroom, and just goddam well inflated balloons until the place was knee-deep (for a six-year-old, anyhow.) I think the boys managed to blow up maybe thirty balloons between them, so I probably did something like two-hundred and seventy. Yes: by this point, I am largely over the bronchitis.

Happily, we had a bit of a break in the weather. It was especially good because on top of all our mermaid fairy princesses, the Viking Lads turned up with loaded waterguns. Meanwhile, Jake and Genghis had prepared their Nerfgun arsenal, intent on keeping Mermaid Fairy Princesses out of "their stuff". Thus, when the Viking Watergun Raiders arrived, the battle was on... and fortunately, it was warm enough and dry enough outside that it was an outdoors event.

There were shrieking mermaid fairy princesses running hither and yon. Nerf darts flew. Waterguns creaked and spat their streams of moist vengeance. Parents dodged, and talked, and drank the beer I'd laid on (with considerable experience and foresight.) Whenever things started to slow down, I threw snacks into the fray. When they finally started to look tired, I grilled an abominable mass of sausages, slashed a horrorshow worth of chewy bread-rolls, fried a half-dozen onions into tasty rings, chopped up a block of cheese and a jar of pickles, and limbered up the tomato sauce jar: and many, many children were fed.

The timing was very good. By about half-three, a very light rainshower drove them inside, where they gleefully began swimming about in the balloons. (I have photos of a mass of balloons. You cannot see the children beneath. They wanted it that way.)

I played my ace in the hole, and threw Natalie to the lions with a pass-the-parcel game. The big prize at the end was a bubble-gun, and after all the balloons and notes and lollies and teary outbursts, the Mau-mau wound up with the coveted weapon and promptly added vast quantities of soap-bubbles to the chaos...

The party did run overtime, yes. Various parents were having a good time too, so the kids stayed until the oldies were done. Last to go was our pirate, whose parents had the very good manners to turn up with a really interesting bottle of bubbly, which we promptly demolished. By that stage, I was already prepping dinner - a great big pot of spaghetti with a strong tomato/anchovy/basil sauce, and plenty of fine-sliced bacon. Thus, when we were down to just the usual three kids (plus two Mermaid Fairy Princess sleepover types) I fed the hell out of everyone yet again, and Natalie and I gradually defragged the place while the kids went through their shower routine, and watched 'Chicken Run'.

Whew.

I admit, once all the offspring and their ilk were in bed, that I cracked open another beer or two. But not until I'd managed to quell even the three Mermaid Fairy Princesses, who were lying all three together on one vast inflatable mattress on the floor of the Mau-mau's room. By pointing out that if I heard little voices any longer, I'd put one of 'em up on the Mau-mau's bunk to sleep on her lonesome, I managed to send even those three off to the land of nod.

And so, I think that last beer or two was very well earned.

In the morning, we despatched children with pointy bamboo skewers to kill all the remaining balloons in a frenzy of colourful rubbery violent death. The sun came out, and I managed at last to pour the concrete footer for the stone wall around my firepit. Laundry was done. Tasks were carried out... and lo: in the end, I even managed to convince the Three Mermaid Fairy Princesses to clean up the Mau-mau's room.

Eventually, Anna the Viking Neighbour came and claimed her daughter, leaving only one excess Mermaid Fairy Princess. I fired up the barbecue, and prepared a mass of tandoori chicken and lamb, plus a bunch of roasted sweet potato. I also set up a green salad, and a bowl of turmeric rice, and a dessert salad of melon, ginger and coconut... because when Madame Double-Trouble arrived to collect her daughter, it was dinnertime, and she had two boys with her as well. Thus, my weekend finished with a barbecue dinner for eight. (Woulda been nine, but Natalie went into town to play music.)

Am I tired?

Fuck, yes. Where's that fucking beer?

Anxiety...

2011-08-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

Today is the day of the Mau-mau's official sixth birthday party. She actually turned six some days ago, and received a plethora of presents from all over the place, as I mentioned. But for a six-year-old girl, the birthday thing isn't complete unless there's been a party. A particularly girly party.

And therefore, we are having a Mermaid Fairy Princess party this afternoon.

Oddly, a number of boys have been invited to this party, and at least one has accepted. His mum sounded relieved when I pointed out that according to Natalie, it would be all right if the lad dressed as a pirate. Personally, I think he should be a Mermaid Fairy Princess too, but I'm not sure six-year-old boys have enough of a sense of irony to appreciate the humour.

I'm sitting down right now in the post-breakfast zone, clearing my mind, thinking things through. It's been rainy as hell down here - some flooding across the north and east. (Not affecting us, mind you.) Today it's dim and grey and foggy. My hopes of throwing all the small ones outside for a sunny afternoon play on the stupidly oversized playground structure are looking slender. Ergo, I have to come up with a way to keep about eight very small, sugar-driven, birthday-frenzied kids from annihilating the interior of my house for about two hours this afternoon.

I'm thinking balloons. Fuckloads of balloons. Kids like balloons, and if I inflate a couple hundred, they'll be happy to run around shrieking and kicking clouds of balloons into the air, right? The cats will never forgive me, but who cares?

Meanwhile, I've also got to prepare a chocolate cake with chocolate icing and a cherry on top. Maybe a layer of whipped cream in the middle. Apparently, jelly is also desirable. And marshmallow cones.

There's also party favours and lollies and decor to think of. Yes. All that stuff.

Then there's my sanity. Have you seen it? I'm not sure where I put it down. I think I had it just a few days ago, briefly, but then the phone rang. And then the University told me my enrolment was up in the air 'cos they didn't have proof of my citizenship. Citizenship? Fuck! I've been a permanent resident of Oz since 1973, and a full citizen since 1991. I don't even know exactly where my stupid Citizenship Certificate is anymore. Luckily, I keep my passport in a handy location. Wish I could do the same with my sanity.

Fortunately, there's a carton of Boag's St George in the kitchen. I will undertake the Quest for Sanity through Booze after the Mermaid Fairy Princesses are all in bed. (Did I mention that at least two of them are sleeping over? I didn't, did I?)

Okay. Gotta go. Genghis is now coughing up a lung, and quite seriously, he's amplifying his already horrifying cough by putting a very long cardboard tube up to his mouth. So I can hear this weird, echoing, rattling, tearing, gurgling bark of a cough richocheting around the house. Natalie doesn't seem to like it either, by the way she's snarling at Genghis. I can understand that, though... the cardboard-tube Death Cough is probably the ugliest thing I've heard since I last mashed up Justin Bieber and Yakity Sax.

Sanity? Hellloooo?

Alarums And Excursions

2011-08-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

Natalie and Jake returned from Ireland on Sunday morning, as planned. I was well enough to drive in a collect them from the airport, which was damned handy. (The antibiotics appear to be doing some good. Not fixing everything, but at least I can breathe again.)

Of course, they fell asleep in the afternoon, and lay like logs. Still, they brought presents, which was good. I have a fine bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey which my antibiotics and I are observing wistfully, from time to time.

Everybody took Monday off school, sensibly enough. And by a useful coincidence, it was also the Mau-mau's birthday. Her sixth. I've had a daughter for six years, apparently. Fuck, eh? Who knew?

Six year old girls and birthdays are... challenging. They expect rainbows, unicorns, and random falls of sugary pink candy from the sky. The Mau-mau did okay. Her mum brought her a pink satin dress complete with puffy skirt and bows and ribbons and underskirt layers. There was also a LEGO dollhouse that took half the day to build. (Kept mother and daughter nicely occupied.) There was a fine tiara of some kind of robust but graceful metal, replete with diamantes and pearl-ish things: high grade costume jewelry which she immediately adopted and adored. There was a necklace of silver. There was an embroidered purse and some bead necklaces from an aunty.

From yours truly, she got the first fifteen issues of the Marvel Godzilla comic, bound in a single edition. (She loves her some Godzilla.) She got a simple digital camera meant for kids, with which she is now photographing the crap out of the entire world. And she got (with help from Ginny in the USA) a very clever paintbrush. You use it with watercolours. It has batteries, and a metal strip down the side. You paint with it, and then with a finger of your off-hand, you touch the wet paint and become part of an electrical circuit that makes the brush 'sing'. Essentially, you form a variable resistor, and by moving your finger to different places on the painted line (with the brush touching, of course) you can change the tone the brush makes. It's very cool.

Nevertheless, the Mau-mau wanted more. More! What's Aunty Becca going to send me? Ooh!

It's not so much the having. It's the opening, and the getting. I'm quite sure that if we were to wrap a bunch of rocks and get her to open them with sufficient fanfare, she'd be almost as delighted.

She wanted tacos for dinner; I complied, as one does. And I made a fine chocolate cake with whipped cream and strawberries. (Yes. That explains the photos.) And she got to sleep on the floor of her bedroom, in her little fold-out kiddy indoor playtent. What more could you ask for?

But Dark Forces were aswirl. For starters, Natalie appears to have brought back an exciting gastro-enteritis from her Irish sojourn. Jake, as usual, is completely unmoved. The kid gets unwell so rarely that when he does, he's a fucking pain, because he has no experience with things like sore throats, or vomiting, and he gets really cranky about it.

Genghis, on the other hand, Catches Stuff. And last night at a quarter to midnight, I heard an awful, stertorous bark from downstairs. Now, as it happens, I'd only just gone to bed because I'd been watching the Mau-mau (still sleeping on the floor in her tent. Why? You'd have to ask her). She's caught the chest infection that settled on me. By day she's fine, but by night, she coughs like a ninety-year-old three-pack-a-day smoker, and her nose blocks up too. So I was kind of expecting trouble, yeah?

Except that when I got downstairs, I had to put the brakes on fast. It wasn't the Mau-mau. It was Genghis, and he'd just dumped at least a kilo of polenta-crusted salmon, green salad, hash browns and leftover birthday cake all over his pillow.

Not good at all. The bedding got changed, and everything got cleaned up, and Genghis got a bowl - but that mess was horrible, and showed absolutely no sign of being digested, five and a half hours after the meal had been eaten. This is not a good sign.

And sure enough, at 0630 this morning, another thunderous bark yanked us out of bed. The boy is not well. He's currently on the couch watching "Life of Brian", his faithful barf-bowl close at hand... unlike his brother, he's used to this sort of thing so he just takes it in his stride.

The Mau-mau? Oh, she was fine. I checked on her at the first Vomit Volcano event, and she was sleeping peacefully in her little tent.

So, here we are. My family is all home again. Lucky me!

God, I Love Science!!!

2011-08-12T14:23:00.000-07:00

Sheep Drugged and Shocked to Prove Taser Safety

Seriously. Go read it for yourself.

Now, while I admit that I have no particular desire to teach sheep to freebase and then go all Tasermatic on their sheepy asses, there's a certain wild-eyed enthusiasm to this whole project that I find fundamentally admirable. Who came up with this idea? More importantly, who did they find to implement it? It goes to show: we may live in a modern world, but there's still a job for Igor whenver he needs it. Because who else could you possibly call upon to make sheep snort meth, then apply the lightning rod to their woolly butts if not that most tried and tested of all B-movie stereotypes: the Mad Scientist's Equally Mad Assistant.

Look, I know this whole thing is awfully hard on the sheep, but as a longtime fan of B-movies, I can't help but approve. In my youth, I often envisioned myself as a Victor Frankenstein for a new age. I liked Science. I liked weird stuff. I liked mixing chemicals until they changed colour and smelled funny (and made the cat fall over). I liked explosions and lightning. At no point have I ever been concerned with the idea that there are Some Things Man Wasn't Meant To Know. I have wild hair. I can cackle maniacally.

There really ought to be a useful place for me in the world of science. And now, thanks to this... clearly VERY scientific project, it is apparent that somewhere, somehow, Mad Science is still happening. Could it be that at last, at long last, my project to crossbreed magpies and tiger sharks has a future?

Could Have Been Worse, Apparently

2011-08-11T20:16:00.001-07:00

Not pneumonia. That's good.

Bronchitis. That's... not so good.

The good is that I'll probably not have to be hospitalised. The not so good is two weeks worth of doxycycline... and the lingering question of why the f__k I can't cough up all this crap the way normal people do.

Referral to a respiratory physician coming up.

There May Be A Hiatus

2011-08-11T14:29:00.000-07:00

Yeah.

So - this cough isn't going anywhere. Except downhill. Bad night last night. Not a good morning so far. I'll be taking this one to the doctors today, and I gotta say I won't be surprised if they want to keep me for a while.

I'll be back when I can.

Diseases

2011-08-09T05:14:00.001-07:00

First, mine: this whole lung thing is starting to worry me. There's a strain of pneumonia doing the rounds hereabouts. I'm feeling like utter shit. I'm still afebrile, but I'm given to understand there's been a case or two similar to that recently. There's only two things keeping me from heading down to the surgery. First, I'm still goddam sole parent until Sunday. And second: I can still walk up and down the hills here without falling over.

That suggests the pain and coughing are all about inflamed bronchial pathways, not fluid in the lungs and other pneumonia-type problems. So I'll drop another handful of paracetamol and ibuprofen tonight, have a hot shower, and grab a few hours of broken sleep with my head propped up on two or three pillows in the hopes of breathing just a little better.

Fuck this shit.

Second disease? Oh, that would be Fred Nile -- the NSW parliamentary equivalent of a big, fat herpes sore. Here's his latest:

Wong Baby Not Right

The man is an absolute dick. Penny Wong and her partner are having a kid - and he goes on and on about the wrongness of children in a gay relationship. What a set of standards, eh? Can't have a kid in a gay relationship, even if one of the parents is a Federal minister. But it's okay for a world-spanning organisation of paedophiles and their enablers to go on running schools, right?

I think I've come up with a good plan for dealing with Fred. What we need to do is put our pennies together, and raise a large sum of money. This money is to be paid in the form of a bounty. It goes to the first brave, heroic Sydney drag queen who manages to get footage of himself giving our Reverend Fred the blowjob (or other sexual thrill) of his life.

That ought to just about shut him down, no? So - how do we go about starting up a charity, then?

Urgh

2011-08-06T17:43:00.000-07:00

Genghis' pet chest infection is leaving him. I didn't have to drug him at all last night. He coughed for a while after he lay down, but then he went off to sleep nicely and stayed that way.

Wish I could say the same. It would appear I'm still on the downslope of this particular bit of nastiness. I'm not enjoying the situation at all.

We took a trip to Launceston yesterday to see 'Captain America'. I'd rate it one of the best superhero flicks so far. The look was perfect, the acting was fine, and Hugo Weaving made a most excellent Red Skull. And who can argue with a story about Nazi super-science and lost Asgardian technology threatening to destroy the world?

There really was a lot to like in the film. If you're an old Marvel fan, watching Captain America hook up with the likes of Dum-Dum Dugan and a young Nick Fury (from a very old comic called 'Nick Fury and his Howling Commandoes') was pretty cool. I admit to a warm, fuzzy moment when Dugan took over the zap-ray tank during the escape-from-Hydra sequence, purely because of the cry of "Waaahoooo!!!". I don't think I've seen one of those old comics since I was about seven or eight years old...

They did well with 'Bucky' Barnes, too. A sneaky, fun moment when Captain America features in the scope of a sniper rifle... then the scope climbs, finds another sniper about to shoot our hero; the trigger of our POV scope is pulled and the sniper onscreen dies, then the camera pulls back to reveal 'Bucky' behind the scope of 'our' rifle, and a quick thank-you wave from Captain America. Shades of the Winter Soldier and the 'Death of Captain America' plotline from a few years back.

And a bit of respect for film history: Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull, unearthing his Asgardian toy. He says something like "...while the Fuehrer plays in Northern Africa, digging for trinkets, I have found this..." Heh. Anybody remember a movie where Nazis in Northern Africa were trying to dig up an item of Great Magic Power? Nice touch.

Genghis and I did not travel alone to the cinemas, however. We took with us the redoubtable Baggins sisters (Not their actual name. It's an in-joke that they'll understand if they read this. Hi April! Hi Amy!) and the eldest of the Viking Neighbour clan to round out the expedition. A trip to my favourite secondhand book store made things even better. I found a compendium of the first fifteen Marvel 'Godzilla' comics in a single cover, still in its shrinkwrap. That may not seem like much a find to you - but then you don't have a daughter who thinks Godzilla is the greatest thing ever to reach cinema. Said daughter has a birthday coming in about a week - so a mint, unopened Godzilla compendium is a Huge Goddam Score. I'm really rockin' the dad thing here.

We had another Skype attack from Natalie and Jake last night. It went... marginally better than the last one. (The Mau-mau did not stand up, lift up her dress, and scream "Booooooobies" at the camera this time. I count that as progress.) Our farflung family members are apparently in a backpacking hostel in Galway. They affirm that the place is nice, and everybody's friendly, and they're having a good time. The bastards.

Anyway, today the rain is closing in cold and grey, and I have three extra kids in the house. Genghis and one of the Viking Neighbour kids are taking apart the clothesdryer that died. The Mau-mau and the Double-trouble daughter have got out "The Craft Box" (a big cardboard box full of pipecleaners, tassles, string, paddlepop sticks, glue, crayons, paper, cardboard and all kinds of similar epic shit) and are making a fucknormous -- but very creative -- mess on the dining table. The eldest Double-Trouble child is slouching about aimlessly.

Soon I shall have to feed them all. Best I conclude this now.

Not The Best Of Days

2011-08-03T04:29:00.000-07:00

Genghis has got some kind of vile chest infection thing; a cough which is ramping up his asthma. It isn't really slowing him down or anything. (I'm not sure what would do that.) But it does tend to make him cough horribly at night.

Horribly. As in: parent lies awake upstairs, cringing and anticipating the next bark. To top it off, he's given a version of it to me, so I'm kind of wheezy and unwell too. Not good. So, last night -- no sleep until about 0300. Awake again by 0630 in anticipation of getting kids on track for the day. And I recall waking up and seeing the clock at 0430, so it was pretty shitty sleep. All three and a half hours of it.

The clothesdryer has died, too. Not a simple, repairable death. What we have here is not a mere worn belt, or a broken heating element. Nope: the drum is literally off its rails. Normally, that central drum kind of 'floats', on some sort of shock absorbers, and spins fairly freely. Lately, I've noticed a tendency to get stuck, but I could get it going if I just reached in and gave it a spin.

Today? Nope. Dead. The drum is sitting low, and I can barely get it to turn. I think the mounts or the bearings or whatever have given up. You can hear the motor hum in frustration, and you can feel the heat from the element, but the drum steadfastly does not turn. Most irritating, since we've drifted into that phase of winter in which it's pretty much cloudy and showery every goddam day.

So tomorrow, I shall pull out the old dryer, and put it in the top shed. Genghis can take it apart over the weekend. He'll enjoy that. I shall then hitch up the trailer, head down to Scottsdale, and pay off the new dryer I've already picked out. The last one did its work for something like seven or eight years. Hopefully the new one will manage at least as much, once I bring it back up the hill and wrangle it into place. Yay.

Hitching up the trailer will serve a double purpose. I'm currently building a nice fire-pit with a stone retaining wall. To do that, you dig a Flogging Great Hole, and then level the bottom with a good, thick layer of gravel. You lay an inner cylinder of heat-resistant brick to the requisite height, and then for cosmetic purposes, you build a nice outer cylinder of fieldstone and mortar, and finally you level the top with some slates, or the like. (Not a good idea just to build the structure out of fieldstone. Repeated heating and cooling can lead not just to cracking, but with some kinds of stone, random exploding. We don't want that. No. Hence the inner cylinder.)

I dug the hole. I got myself some gravel. I placed it in the hole and levelled it. Then I lay my first ring of heat-resistant brick... and realised there wasn't quite enough room between the brick and the walls of the hole to build my fieldstone cylinder.

No sense fighting it. I pulled out my first layer of brick, and then I widened the entire goddam hole, and dug out all the gravel. So tomorrow I have to take the trailer to some gravel-supply folks, get a decent load aboard, then come back so I can re-gravel and re-level my pit. Then I can at least get through laying the heat-resistant stuff down, I hope.

Genghis. That kid kills me. We came back from ju-jitsu class, picked up the Mau-mau from the Viking Neighbour Clan, and went home. I threw some marinated diced lamb under the grill, made a quick salad, and served up flatbread with a nice yoghurt/mint sauce, plus the salad and the lamb. Healthy, tasty, and quick.

So I'm sitting there, enjoying a bit of well-deserved dinner. The Mau-mau is staring at hers fearfully, as though it's going to attack her. This is her standard approach to dinner. Food seems to frighten and dismay her, unless it's spaghetti, pizza or chocolate. Those she understands.

Anyway, I'm trying to encourage her to eat, when I hear an almighty racket from Genghis. He's stuffing salad into his mouth, but he's shrieking "Nooooo! Noooo!".

I'm not stupid. I didn't ask. I just watched him.

Apparently, he'd decided that he was a fiercenormous gigantic monster, and the salad was a crowd of innocent little creatures he was devouring. The shrieks of "No! NOOOOO! Look out! Don't eat us! Aaaarrghhmmmkmffmfgrmgrmgrrmmchomp!" were... kind of disturbing.

But I figured he was eating, at least. Shovelling it away by the handful, even as it screamed for mercy... if only I could convince the Mau-mau to do something similar.

Wow. I am sooooo tired.

Sole Parent Saga Continues

2011-08-01T03:53:00.000-07:00

It's kind of hard to get shit done when you're on Sole Parent Duty. The writing is not moving well. Every time I turn around, I'm either playing chauffeur, or cook, or just cleaning and motivating and suchlike. Bah.

Winter weather is doing its thing. Ironically, it got a lot warmer just about the time Natalie left. She's been whining for months about the cold, and to be fair, up until Wednesday last week, we were having an unusually bitter winter. However, the moment she left on holiday, things reverted to the typical mild, damp Tasmanian winter. I've kicked off half the covers, and young Genghis told me this morning that he tried sleeping on the floor last night because he got too hot with the cats in his bed.

Of course, one has to wonder why he didn't throw the cats off. But wondering would do no good at all. Genghis is the kid who created the Rhino of the Twilight, and often wonders what the world would be like if God was a great big chicken. For him, no doubt it's much more rational to climb out of bed and sleep on the floor to escape the excessive warmth of cats.

Certainly his sister would think differently. I had them strip their beds today so I could change the sheets. When I went into the Mau-mau's room with the fresh bedding, I found I was walking over... something. Little hard lumps of something on the carpet.

I knelt, and looked closely. Cat food. Dry cat food.

Hmm.

I called the Mau-mau. "Why is there cat food on the floor?"

"I don't know," she said. Not unexpectedly.

"Why did you put cat food in your bed?" I figured a quick change of tack might shake her.

"I didn't," she said.

At that point, I allowed myself to play Angry Dad. I snapped at her, cutting her off, and told her flatly that she was lying. I did so because I'd worked out what was going on.

"I'm not," she said. And if I didn't know better, it might have been convincing.

"You wanted the cat to climb on your bed," I told her. "So you put cat food up there. But when you took the sheets off, the cat food fell on the floor."

And that was it. She crumbled, and admitted she'd been trying to get the cat to sleep on her bed. I told her off sharply for lying, and made her clean up the cat food. Frankly, I'm just glad we only give the cats kitty-crunchies... I have no doubt at all the Mau-mau would quite happily have put a big, wet bowl of sloppy cat food on the end of her bed if she thought it would attract the cats.

Anyway. I've worked my way through the laundry. I've run the pump, and organised firewood. I spent half the weekend taking Genghis to lessons and running errands in Launceston, and the other half helping look after spare Double-Trouble kids.

Oh -- that ended well, actually. I had a new computer monitor for the Double-Troubles, plus drivers for a USB wifi aerial, so I thought I'd load both the Double-Troubles and my two kids in the car and head out to Bridport to return the non-Flintharts to their lair. When I got there, I was able to help figure out the reason for patches of mould on the ceilings. I theorised that perhaps the insulation in the ceiling was incomplete, leading to cold patches on the interior where breath/vapour could condense, allowing mould to grow. Once the theory was devised, I despatched the eldest Double-Trouble kid into their ceiling crawlspaces - and voila! Problem identified! All they really need to do is organise to fill in the missing patches of insulation, and the Mystery of the Ceiling Blotches should resolve.

Even better: the Double-Trouble matriarch told me that a new restaurant in Scottsdale actually had a woodfire pizza oven... so Genghis and the Mau-mau and I put it to the test on our way home. Hooray! It was quite a decent bit of pizza, and thus I didn't have to cook for the evening. Better stil, there was enough left over for lunches the next day...

And finally: tonight, a quick phone call from Natalie, in Ireland. She's managed to get sunburned, which is kind of impressive. More impressive, though, was the fact that she was calling from the Jameson distillery, and wanted me to tell her what I wanted.

"Something interesting and reasonably expensive," I said.

I wonder what she's going to buy?

Thank You, Norway.

2011-07-31T02:35:00.000-07:00

Commiserations, sympathy, best wishes and all the rest to Norway and the Norwegian people. They've been through -- are still going through -- a powerful, testing series of events. The bombing and the murders carried out by a right-wing anti-Islam freak (won't bother with his name; let history lose his identity utterly, says I. The Romans did that: erased people utterly from their records for certain crimes. I think we should consider bringing that back.) have rocked a historically peaceful and tolerant society, and brought the glaring light of world scrutiny to the most heart-rending and personal of tragedies.

And in response, what have the Norwegians done? Have they started piling on the extra security measures? Have they begun cracking down on personal expression? Have they put aside their tolerance and their freedom in the name of 'safety'?

Hardly.

Statements from the Prime Minister and from the Mayor of Oslo - not to mention many others - have reaffirmed a powerful commitment to tolerance and openness. The people themselves have spoken, again and again. A huge rally in Oslo, in support of the Norwegian way of life and society, drew more than 150,000 people. The funeral of an Islamic girl killed in the attack has been carried out with the greatest of honour and respect.

They're not backing off. Not one iota. The absolute worst they've done, so far, is to remove some video games from sale - because the idiot murderer apparently spent a lot of time playing shoot-em-up games. Okay, so the connection is tenuous... but I'll give 'em that one. Because they could have done so much worse.

And you know what I mean by 'worse', don't you? No-fly lists. Massive wiretapping programmes. Invasive searches in airports and in other public transport hubs. Laws, laws, and more laws designed to curb rights and freedoms, and empower the government with ever greater control. "Free Speech zones."

That's only the tip of the iceberg. I don't even want to think about the nauseating shift to fear-driven conservatism and jingoistic bigotry that's infected even my own country. The crap I read every day from contemptible imbeciles who lap up every word that Andrew Bolt defecates onto the pages of Uncle Rupert's press; the violent, flag-wrapped pinheads who use Australia Day as an excuse to terrorise anyone who doesn't drawl their words with a decently Strayan accent...

Sometimes you find yourself thinking there's no damned hope. Sometimes it's just impossible to believe the human race is worth the effort.

And then, Norway.

Thank you. What happened was an unforgiveable, unforgettable horror - but the response of the Norwegian people, their government and their society, is the first truly hopeful thing I've seen in a long time. I'll do my best to try and live up to the example.

On Being An Instructor

2011-07-28T04:02:00.000-07:00

They sent a bloke along today to assess my performance as an Active After Schools Community Coach. Which was fun.

The school gets me in a couple times a year to run mickey-mouse introductory courses on martial arts one afternoon a week. It's a hangover from a programme the Howard government put in place, aimed at getting lardyassed kids out from behind Nintendo screens, and back onto the sportsfields. I don't much care about the politics one way or the other, mind you. I like working with kids, and giving them a chance to try something different.

The thing is, these courses are maybe five to eight weeks long. They're not what you'd call deep immersion efforts. I plan them out so the kids get exposure to a nice range of martial skills: throwing, grappling, wrestling, joint-locks, strikes, kicks, blocks, break-falls, body-movement and evasion... then I tie it together with some self-defence work, and throw in a few fun bits (boffer-type swordfighting; flying kicks and funky martial stunts) and we all have a good time.

Some of the kids go on to the regular class, which is great. Some just keep coming back to the intro class, which is puzzling, but perfectly okay. And of course, there's always new faces, which is good as well.

The assessment... I understand why they need to do it. The Active After School Communities programme was designed to unearth skills possessed by people not usually involved with the schools - hobby players of sports, things like that. They probably don't see a whole lot of black-belt instructors who routinely teach classes for primary-age schoolkids. I don't mind the assessor turning up and checking out the show, in any case, and he's a cluey sort of bloke. He took maybe five minutes to look over what I was doing this afternoon, and then trotted off to check the football guys. He came back two or three times, but -- not unexpectedly -- he was quite happy, and signed off on the class after asking if there was any more equipment we could use.

All of which is nice. Good to know that somebody's prepared to look in, check it out, and give me credit for being able to wrangle a few kids.

But the whole instructor thing is a weird gig. I'm forty-five now, and among my older students, I've got a handful of young blokes who are my size, and have been at this martial arts stuff for a few years now. The good news is that I can still chase them 'round the floor in open sparring, or randori, or even on the ground in full-on groundfighting mode. That's kind of gratifying, I admit.

What annoys me is that I know perfectly well, the next morning those bastards are going to be more or less fine. They'll have some bruises, sure. And because they have to work harder than me (the loser always works harder in martial arts. That's the point, after all. You want the other guy to have a worse time than you do.) I expect they'll even have a few aches and strains.

But I'm forty-five. I still have those goddam twinges two days later... and I bloody hate that!

However it be, there's something extremely satisfying about seeing people gain skill and confidence under your guidance. I should stress that I don't imagine it's down to me: these are people who have made the decision to learn, and to train, and they could pick up these skills from anybody who cared to show them. There's no such thing as teaching; there's only learning.

Mind you, I'm not denying the existence of good versus bad teachers. Good teachers understand they need to find ways to engage the interest of their students, and to present the material in a fashion which the student will find easy to assimilate. Bad teachers believe they have an important body of knowledge which they have to drill into the students, whether they want it or not.

I try to stick to being a good teacher. And yeah, it's rewarding when a ten year old kid runs up to me at school, proud as hell, and explains that he '...fell off his skateboard but he did a forward roll the way he learned at the martial class, and he didn't even get a scrape!' But the credit goes to the kid, for listening and practicing and overcoming his fears to the point where he can relax during a high-speed fall. That's a shitload more difficult than demonstrating a forward roll on a crash mat for a bunch of students!

Truly, I have no idea how long I'll go on as an instructor. One of these days, I'll get around to doing my second dan. That calls for some weapons training, among other possibilities and by no very great coincidence, I've been working in Iai-do these last few years. Between that and the ongoing commitment to the dojo, I suspect I'm probably in line to do the grading sooner rather than later.

But I don't really care. I have two or three major reasons for doing this. The first is the students: my own kids, and other people in this community. As long as I see people getting something out of what I do with them, I think it's worth the effort. And helping country kids get a start - that's a good thing.

The second reason is more selfish. Ju-jitsu is interesting. It makes me think... around corners. I meet interesting people through the martial practice. It provides an ongoing challenge which I enjoy.

The third reason is probably even more selfish. Some of the people I've admired most have been elderly martial arts instructors. Gentle, friendly, good-humoured men with white hair and stooped frames - men who could very possibly kill you by raising an eyebrow. I may never wear a red-and-white striped belt, or carry a list of dan gradings as long as my arm... but I would very much like to have the alertness and the physical skill and confidence that those dangerous, wicked, kindly, hilarious old men possess when I too reach that kind of age.

And the only way I know to ensure that is to practice, the same as they did. So: I'm going to keep dragging my bones down to the dojo, keep wearing the bruises and nursing the strains and the sprains... and let's be honest, I expect to keep enjoying it.

As an aside, there was a discussion the other night on the mat about the difference between a black belt and a good student. One of the most important and underrated things, I think, is persistence. The really good student who picks up technique easily and learns everything beautifully is in a great situation. But the one who's likely to wind up with a black belt is the one who keeps coming back, week after week, session after session, time after time. No matter how cold it gets in winter, or how hot in summer; no matter how many repetitions it takes to get things right, he or she just keeps on coming.

That's half a black belt right there. And though you may think you possess this quality, you who read this... I assure you it's a damned sight more rare than you believe it to be.

Okay. That's enough of that.

In other news: I had a phone call from Natalie about an hour and a half ago. She and Jake are now on the ground in Dublin, desperately trying to stay awake long enough to bring their jetlagged brains into synch with the local timeframe...

Sole Parent Duty

2011-07-27T03:47:00.000-07:00

Well.

Natalie and Jake got away okay this morning. More accurately, we all got up a half hour or so earlier than usual, and shivered our way through an early breakfast. Then Genghis and the Mau-mau got dropped down with the Vikings, to catch the school bus with the Viking kids. Meanwhile, yours truly chauffeured the cheerful travellers to the airport, along with their baggage... then turned around, and drove home again.

Lots of cleaning up ensued. Natalie has spent the last three days packing and panicking, and the place looks like five bombs went off. It's horrible. I've been gathering up her bathrobes, slippers, undergarments, random clothes, papers, lists, etc. I've been rounding up dirty dishes from all over the house. And I'm not enjoying it, thanks.

Of course, the sole parent stuff doesn't mean I get a break from the regular crap. So tonight, I taught the usual two and a half hours of ju-jitsu. Except that Genghis had to stay with me through the later session. The Mau-mau took the bus home, and hung out with her Viking friend until I got back and collected her. Then I dashed home, fed the kids, did some more cleaning, got the kids showered, etc.

Since then, I've contacted my prof to arrange a talkfest about the Master's degree on Friday morning. And I've contacted Genghis' music teacher to ensure we're supposed to have a lesson on Saturday morning. So: tomorrow, I drop the kids at school and arrange the keyboard and the music, etc, for the Mau-mau's piano lesson. Then later, I go back to the school and teach a flute lesson. Later still, I go back and teach an introductory martial arts class. Then I get to do the shopping, go home, clean and cook until Genghis and the Mau-mau come back from their gymnastics class, as chauffeured by Anna the Viking.

Of course, the after-school martial class isn't as simple as that. Normally it's just an hour-and-a-half of light exercise aimed at giving the kids a glimpse of martial practice, and helping them pick up a few physical skills. But tomorrow, they're sending someone around to "assess" me. I guess they have to do that from time to time, but it means that I have to have a nice, shiny lesson plan for them to see, etc. So, yes. Paperwork tomorrow morning, between ferrying kids and teaching flute.

Meanwhile on Friday morning I'll have that talkfest with my prof. But come Friday afternoon, I'll be picking up the kids from school and zooming into Launceston so Genghis can attend his orchestra practice. While he's doing that, the Mau-mau and I will get the shopping done, and perhaps afterwards I'll save myself the grief of cooking, and drop in at a pizza pub I know. That could be nice.

Saving myself a bit of effort there is kind of desirable, because on Saturday morning, I'll be driving back into Launceston yet again, so Genghis can have his bass lesson. Yippee.

Sole parent stuff sucks. Nat and Jake don't get back for a couple weeks at least, so I've got plenty of this super-chauffeur bullshit to look forward to...

Joe Appears To Have Run Out Of Organs

2011-07-25T05:41:00.001-07:00

Oddly, Natalie gets "Readers Digest" in her mail on a regular basis.

This has nothing to do with any money changing hands. They just send her the magazine. Our best guess is that Readers Digest probably do this to a lot of doctors (it's pretty easy to get a mailing list of registered doctors courtesy of the AMA, among others. After all, somebody's got to tell all those fraggin' drug companies where to send their advertising.) in the hopes that said doctors will then use RD to fill out their quota of ancient, decaying magazines in the surgery waiting room... and perhaps some desperate souls will stumble upon RD and decide that a subscription to said publication is precisely the prescription they require.

Or something.

Normally, Natalie does just that: throws the RD into the waiting room, and forgets it. Good thing too. But she brought the latest home by accident, and it's been a source of fascination to young Jake. He's read us all kinds of (excruciatingly dull) snippets of (utterly pointless) information. He's done the vocabulary quiz. He's checked out "Laughter, The Best Medicine", or whatever they're calling their humour column these days. And altogether, he seems to have enjoyed himself.

At first, I was appalled. But then I remembered that at age eleven, I didn't mind Readers Digest either. Some friends of my mothers had a colossal frockin' collection of the things - a vast double-shelf probably four metres long, spanning most of their lounge room, which had pretty much every issue from the late sixties up to the late seventies (which was the time I was reading 'em there.) I certainly wasn't riveted by the things, but there was stuff in them that I found interesting. Sometimes.

Anyway, in light of Jake's recent infatuation, I thought I'd glance over this modern-day RD, and see what kind of crap they were purveying. I do recall that by the time I was fifteen or sixteen, I was reading RD in an almost Deconstructionist mode... sort of deriving a mental image of their target demographic from the nature of the stories and writing, and from the advertising. Even back then, it was painfully obvious that RD was attempting to address an astoundingly bourgeois, fundamentally conservative and naive population - and so I was quite curious to see who they thought they were reaching these days.

The first conclusion was that the Readers are now a fuckload older. So many adverts for adult diapers, mobility aids, wills, funerals... it's spooky. Makes me think that a lot of the people who were reading the RD seriously back in the seventies are still doing so. Only now, they're not reading about Joe's spleen any more. (That's the tie-in with the title of this post, by the way. There was a whole series of articles back in the seventies entitled "I Am Joe's {Insert Body Organ Here} ". These articles explained, in nice, simple terms and with discreet but colourful diagrams, the mysterious workings of Joe's kidneys, lungs, thyroid glands, pancreas, etc. Poor Joe. Must have been a hell of a series of interviews.)

The second thing I noticed: attention spans have shortened. The old RD used to carry a few long articles among the short stuff and the fillers, and often, the latter third or quarter of the thing would be a single piece of writing - sometimes an adapted piece of fiction, sometimes a biography, sometimes a lengthy exposition on some kind of real-life incident. ("Drama In Real Life", I believe they were called. And the fact I can remember that makes me want to go and drink slivovitz until those particular neurones are dead.) The modern RD has nothing similar. The "articles" and essays are all quite short, and there are many more little columns and quizzes and games.

The last thing I noticed: despite the reduction in size, and particularly in the depth of the writing, there's as much advertising as ever there was. Maybe even more. And it's all still wrapped around that fumblesome, bourgeois core of conservative naivete.

Ah well. It's probably harmless enough. And in another year or two, Jake will be ready to start deconstructing the magazine, and thinking about the reasons it is published, and why it is laid out as it is, and so forth. In the meantime, I suppose the damned things might as well languish here as in the surgery. In any case, I think they've got two or three other copies turning up down there every month...

What? Oh. Right. Bandwidth Cap. Thanks, Telstra.

2011-07-18T03:25:00.001-07:00

Things are not slowing at all.

Weekends consist of a mass of kids: the Double-Troubles, the Vikings, and of course, the Flintharts. Anywhere up to eleven kids ranging in age from two to thirteen or so may be running about the place. Or about the Viking house. Or split randomly between them and us.

Happily, they're all pretty good kids, and likeable. Damned good thing, really, because cold, dark, damp wintry weather tends to keep 'em inside a lot more than in summer. Sure, they still swarm the trampoline and the playground-thing, but they don't last as long, and then they come in damp and shivery, and in need of hot chocolate or lunch or something.

It's nice for the kids, but all a bit chaotic. Mind you, it's going to stay like this for a while, maybe even get a bit more challenging. Shortly, Natalie and Jake are going to go to Ireland for a couple weeks. Y'see, as most of you know, Natalie is big on the diddly-dee fiddle music. Loves her some Irish Trad. And she plays pretty regularly with a bunch of people at a pub in Launceston.

Turns out one of those folks is a chap by the name of Brian Mooney. These days, Brian is a little on the far side of eighty years of age, and makes a crust as a rather good artist - but back in the day, in the sixties and early seventies when Irish folk music was making its comeback, Brian was a real player. Or singer, rather. Dig around in the history, you find him standing on stage next to folk like the Dubliners and the Fureys and a whole bunch of others.

Brian and his wife Phyllis are also two of the kindest, most generous, friendly, hospitable and interesting people you're ever likely to meet. And it turns out they're going back to Ireland for a look-around. Probably the last time they'll be able to go. And Brian in particular is looking forward to catching up with an army of famous and near-famous music friends... lots of singing and music and drinking, etc.

And they've invited Natalie to go along as well.

Oddly, she was a bit dubious at first. Couldn't quite figure out how to make it fit into the year. But I kind of put my foot firmly down, and told her that she was going to go one way or another. Seriously: Natalie longs to be a muso. But she started a bit late in life, and she's got doctoring and the family, so she plays for her own delight instead. Nevertheless, she's steeped in the stuff, and I know that she daydreams about playing with the big kids. So the chance to wander around Ireland in the company of a couple of folks who really did play with the big names, and who remain in contact with many of the legendary figures from that era (and later) in Irish music... yeah. She'd be insane to miss that. Moreso because it's not a chance that will come again, is it?

Anyway. That means in another week and a half or so, I'll be on sole parent duty for a couple weeks. Admittedly, the Kid Quota will be one down, because Jake gets to make the trip too (we couldn't afford the whole family, and Jake is old enough to travel with a degree of independence, so he got the brass ring.) but that still leaves two kids and all the usual excitement. Plus these multi-kid weekends, of course.

They come about because the Double-Trouble Dad is off in NSW for a few weeks on some sort of a permaculture training course. And more power to him: this corner of Tasmania could really use somebody to kick off intensive, boutique agriculture. But for the weeks he's gone... well, it's hard on Mum Double-Trouble 'cos she works weekends. Hence the addition of three kids to the Viking/Flinthart menagerie.

Mind you, it's nice to help out, and as I said: it's great for the kids. They run around like lunatics all weekend, stopping only to hoover up vast quantities of food. I remember a few weekends like that when I was a kid: mass family gatherings, gangs of us kids racing around, playing energetic games, reappearing for meals and then disappearing again. Very good times, and I'm glad my kids are getting the chance to experience something similar.

And the reason I've been offline so long? Simple. This month, I rehabilitated a computer to give away to some friends with kids - they could use a computer, and we had an old one that I knew worked fine; just needed to be formatted, reloaded, etc.

Lotta bandwidth there.

Meanwhile, Jake has been making animations and putting them on YouTube. More bandwidth, yep. Doesn't take long before 12gigabytes is gone. We've been throttled back to 64k connection for the last eight or nine days.

Don't blame me. That's the biggest 3G wireless account Telstra provides, and there's no provision whatsoever to top up the bandwidth if you go over. That's it. Flat: you go over 12gig in a month, they kick you down to 64k.

Yep. Gotta love rural Australia. Anyone out there who really opposes the NBN should just buy a fucking hardbound set of encyclopaedias and give up on being part of the 21st century in any form.

Okay. That's it for the moment. I should go into detail, for the sake of the kids reading this in the future, but I've got too much to do. I've got two or three stories to finish, further work on the novel... Swedish language lesson to prepare for tomorrow, etc.

No stopping. Forward!

Long, Long Week.

2011-07-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

I kinda lost track of time to write this stuff over last weekend. It was Jake's eleventh birthday on the Thursday before the weekend, but Natalie couldn't get the time away from work. Therefore, he had a day off school on Tuesday. On Thursday he had a small family celebration, with presents and cake. And on Saturday?

Well, on Saturday we had a screaming dozen kids in the place, most of whom stayed quite late for a movie night. And those who didn't stay late for the movie night stayed overnight, sleepover fashion.

The three Double-Trouble kids were here. (So called in these missives because they have a hyphenated surname which I can never quite bring to the front of my tongue in time.) By the end of the movies, young Marley (the middle Double-Trouble) had fallen asleep on the foldaway up in the garage, where we do the moviehouse thing. It's a nice little couch, and when it's folded down, it's quite a credible bed, but I hadn't intended to leave Marley and his brother up there to sleep. Still, the night was only moderately cool, and they had plenty of bedding. Marley didn't really wake up when I unfolded the couch underneath him, so I just covered him up carefully, and made sure he and his brother were fine.

Meanwhile, down in the house, the Mau-Mau had two of her friends in her bedroom: Minor Viking Blonde, and Eden Double-Trouble. Natalie was having trouble getting them to sleep, so I had to go in and explain carefully that Minor Viking Blonde would be bundled into the car and driven home like her brothers (yes, they were some of the ones who didn't stay after the movies.) That worked quite nicely, much to Natalie's annoyance... apparently she'd tried the same tactic and the girls had ignored her.

It was a long day. Kids on the trampoline. Kids running around the house. We built a small backyard fire in our little firepit, and Many Marshmallows Were Carbonised. Also many wieners. And of course, Genghis got enthusiastic about the fire, and we also lost a pair of tongs and a plastic cutting board. Genghis loves him some fire. I can see where that's going to be a problem some day.

Naturally there was also birthday cake (again), and singing, and presents from people other than the family. All up, I think Jake did quite well. I have to say, I like the Internet when it comes to kids' birthdays. I know he likes Silly Putty, so when I saw an article on magnetic Silly Putty - well, I also know he likes magnets. So I ordered some of the magnetic putty via the 'Net, and I also ordered a few small, inexpensive neodymium magnets... and he thought I was the coolest Dad in history.

It would be damned hard to find anything interesting for the kids without the Internet, living out here. The Mau-Mau's birthday is coming up. I've found a plush, penguin-shaped hot water bottle for her (she likes a hot-water bottle in the winter weather), and also a nifty paintbrush which 'reads' coloured paint as an electrical signal and makes a musical tone. That came via the USA, courtesy of my boon friend and mentor Ginny... and of course, the Internet. The Mau-Mau adores both music and painting, and when she gets hold of this, she's going to flip. And it cost less than $20.

That's the cool thing. With all this access to a world of innovation, kid presents can be cheap without sacrificing 'interesting', 'fun', and 'appropriate'. Earns you lots of Parent Cred.

Meanwhile, the rest of the week unfolded like a train crash in slow motion. Every day, a stack of stuff to do. I gave myself a morning off on Monday because I needed a little down time, but then it was back into it, without stopping. I've been writing, and emailing, and assessing manuscripts. I've been studying Swedish and preparing Swedish lessons and reading. I've taught three classes of martial arts -- two regular, one on Thursday afternoon for the school. I've had the car serviced, collected passports, paid bills, fed visiting medical persons, dealt with unexpected guests, repaired the chainsaw, planted herbs (catnip in the garden, with specially erected anti-cat mesh. Once the little plants are big enough to grow through the mesh, THEN the cats can get high. They're NOT gonna roll all over the plants and dig them up like they did last time). I've done dump runs, refurbished computers, pulled apart electronic bits and pieces, practiced sword, practiced ju-jitsu, practiced flute and taught a flute lesson. I've downloaded 'The Lion Sleeps' as a MIDI file, dropped it into a notation programme so I could see the actual score, and then re-arranged that score for Bass, Cello and Flute so that my flute student (Dylan Double-Trouble) will be able to play it along with Genghis and Jake. I've been to Launceston twice, and Scottsdale every day, often multiple times because it's been impossible to co-ordinate all the errands into one trip.

I've gone through a vast mountain of laundry. Made foam swords for the ju-jitsu class. Researched a couple interesting pencak silat techniques, and taught them to my two most senior students because they needed a bit of a challenge -- and of course, in the process I had to learn the techniques myself. Silly stuff, but athletic and fun, and operating out of a slightly different martial mindset than usual.

And so here I am, at the other end of the week. It's the weekend again. This weekend, the Double-Trouble kids are staying with Viking Neighbour Anna. Their dad is on a training seminar, and their mum has some heavy working hours this weekend, so they're out visiting. Which is cool, 'cause they're good kids. But Viking Neighbour Anna has her own tribe of five, and since my lot really enjoy the company of both the Viking Clan and the Double-Trouble kids... well, I'll be heading down there this afternoon to take some of the load off. I'll run a gaming session for them, so there will be action and adventure and shouting and dice and popcorn and soda. And eventually, I'll have to come home and cook dinner too, because someone has to. (Although possibly I can set up a pot roast before I go down. That might work out well.)

So. I'm not really writing here, am I? I'm procrastinating, most likely. I still have to finish writing up the manuscript assessment I'm working on, too. I'll post it out on Monday. It's a nice change, actually - this MS is a raft of short stories, and the writer has a real touch. Not only can he write cleanly and effectively, but he's actually got something interesting and potentially valuable to say. The assessment is going to be fairly lean on criticism; it'll wind up looking a lot more like a scholarly introduction to the collection, I suspect. Anyway, it's very nice to be reading something of a genuinely professional level, and I hope this writer gets the kudos and the publication in the end.

Gotta go. Time is wasting, and I can hear the Mau-Mau doing something dubious in the kitchen...

For Want Of A Nail...

2011-06-20T18:52:00.000-07:00

So, this morning the cat woke me up. I was pretty pissed off about that for a number of reasons. The first was that it was still wintry pitch-black. There's the thing about a winter solstice in the temperate zones: it counts for something. 0630 (and cold, and rainy as hell) is darker than a birthday card from Cormac McCarthy.

Another reason I was pissed off: the cat awoke me with that awful noise they make. You know the one - where they're chewing five kinds of hell out of their arse, making little grunty, snorky-slobbery noises all at the same time. The sound of a cat frenziedly masticating its own nether regions is a long way from my list of top-five wake-up calls.

Still another reason: the cat in question was sitting on top of my snuggly, fleecy bathrobe, which I had left on the floor. I'm not allergic, but the robe is black, y'know? And the cat... he's cat-coloured. Which means my fleecy black bathrobe is now covered in the cat equivalent of shed pubes. Plus, of course, whatever utterly disgusting substances he managed to dislodge while vehemently introducing his dentistry to his proctological parts. Yuck.

Of course, once I realised all that, I was even more irritated, because normally I don't leave my robe on the floor. Generally, I hang it on the bedpost so I can grab it if I need it. But last night, at something like 0300, it turns out I needed the fuckin' thing. And the reason I needed it was even more frickin' irritating.

Y'see, we're having a winter here in Tas. A serious one. And last night took itself very seriously indeed. For example: at 1800, I tried to drive over the range to get to sword training. I laughed at the narrow, winding road and the pounding rain. Ha ha! See me laugh!

Of course, when I got a bit higher, the screaming winds cut in. And I was driving Natalie's little blue car, which is a bit light on the road. But never mind: see me chuckle grimly, and drive on through the horizontal rain (and sleet), and the violently gusting winds over the narrow, winding roads.

When I hit the impenetrably dense fog, I stopped chuckling and began to snarl. Tasmania is the only place I've ever been where you can get thick fog, rain, sleet, and wild winds all at once... and that's what I was trying to drive through. But never mind! I am Flinthart! I am made of sterner stuff!

I dodged the first spot where the water was almost all the way over the road, but at that point I started thinking about the fact that in three hours, I'd have to make the drive back again... except I'd be kind of tired after a couple hours of swordslinging. That didn't encourage me, but I kept driving.

The second patch of water stretching across the road was a real eye-opener, but despite the fog, I dodged it too. That was probably because by that time, I was doing about 30kph. Any faster would have been seriously stupid.

The final straw wasn't a straw at all. It was, in fact, a decent-sized tree that had fallen across the road. Unlike a lot of chaps hereabouts, I don't travel with a chainsaw in the boot of the car. All I had was my katana, and frankly, I didn't think my tameshigiri skills were up to clearing away a tree with a 50-80cm trunk.

So, that was that. I turned around and came home. But you understand now the kind of night we were having.

Therefore, when I heard a stentorian electronic monotone blaring out from somewhere downstairs at 0300, I groaned and pulled the pillow over my head. But Natalie got up and investigated, and didn't come back, and that kind of meant I had to do something manly and tough, so I got up and grabbed my robe.

Downstairs, I found Natalie standing underneath the smoke alarm, looking up with a resigned expression on her face. Oh. Shit. She can't reach the smoke alarm, even with a chair. But I can.

So I went and fetched a chair.

Oddly, the sound of the smoke alarm was considerably lower in pitch than I was used to. It was loud as all hell, but it didn't have that brain-skewering quality I associate with a good, healthy smoke alarm. Never mind. I reached up, and disconnected it.

And the noise continued. Fuck.

I looked around. Natalie looked around. At much the same instant, we spotted the intercom by the door. It's an old model, and it's linked by a light electric line to the shed, so we can communicate with kids who might be up there. Evidently the wind had torn down the line and the rain had shorted out the contacts, because the speaker was producing the most ungodly howl... which stopped when I switched it off. Yay.

I went back up the stairs, conscious of Natalie's glare, because I left the chair in position under the (now reconnected) smoke alarm. Bugger it. I could move the chair in the morning.

Ahhh, but I recked without that weird instinct women have -- the one that can ignore any number of dishes, or violins, or clothing scattered around the house, but goes Spider-sense berserk the moment a chair is moved to the wrong spot at 0300. So Natalie picked up the chair and put it back in the sunroom.

Okay. Time for sleep.

The bed was warm. The bed was cosy. The rain was loud on the roof, and the wind wailed like a Canadian hockey fan outside... and then the 'chirp' happened.

You know that sound? Of course you do. The sound of a smoke alarm whose battery has just raised the middle finger. CHIRP! CHIRP! CHIRP!

"It's chirping," said Natalie. As if I hadn't noticed.

"Fuck," I said. And I got my robe. And I went downstairs. And I fetched the chair. And I found a spare nine-volt battery. And I pulled down the fucking smoke alarm, and I put the new battery into it, and I put it back in place. Then I put the old battery in the bin, and I put the battery packaging in the bin, and I put the goddam fucking chair back in the sunroom, and I tidied half the fucking kitchen while I was down there and then I fucking well went back to fucking bed and left my goddam robe lying on the fucking floor...

...which is why the cat woke me up when it started snarfling its own butt at 0630 this morning.

Happy Solstice, everybody!

Stuff You Learn As A Parent That You Wish You Hadn't

2011-06-17T02:22:00.000-07:00

And what a lot of stuff like that there is.

Today, I learned that eucalyptus oil dissolves refrigerator-grade plastic. And how did I learn that, you ask? Oh, it's quite simple, really.

The refrigerator was beginning to stink. It was developing a nasty, sick-sweet rotting odour that subtly perfused the entire kitchen every time I opened the fridge door. I didn't know what it was, but I knew that a stink like that couldn't be left to ripen. Not even in a chilly Tasmanian winter.

Therefore, once I finished making dinner (chicken and sweet corn soup... and since I served it early on the grounds that Natalie missed her lunch at work, I also set up a steamed chocolate pudding with orange/rum sauce and whipped cream. It's winter, after all.) I opened the fridge and started at the bottom.

Bingo.

The crisper. Who came up with that name, anyway? It's not a fucking 'vegetable crisper'. It's a death sentence. It's a fucking oubliette in which innocent fruits and vegetables are condemned to languish in lightless horror until they deliquesce into the most disgusting possible components of the ancestral primeval ooze. A 'crisper' would be a place where things remained snappy, crisp, sharp and delicious. That thing in the bottom of your fridge is nothing like that. It is a place for turning food into terror.

This time around, some genius -- and I have no real names to offer, because we've had a horde of kids traipsing through the house over the last few days -- appeared to have spilled maybe a half-litre of milk into the vegefucker, where it promptly formed a vile pool on the bottom, joined forces with an undead wombok, overpowered a few innocent carrots, and converted a lush pair of tomatoes into the sort of purulent, oozing scarlet nastiness you'd expect in the middle of the face of a zombie clown.

In short, the bottom of my crisper was full of rotted vegetable milk soup-cheese. That hated me. Personally.

This, I felt, was not a desirable state of affairs. And with Natalie being ill (she's got the cold I had last week), and Elder Son being likewise incapacitated, it fell to me to devise a plan of attack. That plan involved two heavy-duty plastic garbage bags, one inside the other, and a gardening trowel. Armed with these tools, I shovelled the worst of the milk-shoggoth out of the so-called 'crisper', sealed it away from light and life and air, and promptly bundled it out of my house into the depths of the skip-bin up by the shed. (And if the damned stuff wants to eat its way out of all that bagging and join forces with the rest of hideous, Lovecraftian remnants therein... good luck to it. There's a five-tonne truck coming on Thursday to sort it out for good.)

Now, while I was wrestling that bag of evil through the stygian darkness and abysmal cold of a Tasmanian winter night, my beloved wife decided she would offer me some help. And I am truly grateful, I admit. Unfortunately, she decided to put the 'crisper' (now largely empty of all but... residuum) into the laundry sink to decontaminate it.

She then poured eucalyptus oil directly into the 'crisper', and topped it up with hot water.

Aha.

Ten minutes later, I went in and tipped out the water. The air in the laundry was thick and steamy, and reeked of eucalyptus - which was a huge improvement over the stink of feculent milk. I grabbed an old rag, and began scrubbing away at the last, lingering hints of the horror... and lo! I discovered that a large portion of the hitherto-clear plastic of the 'crisper' had now turned milky-white, and become... gummy.

So, there it is, folks. If your kids (or anyone else's, for that matter) spill milk into your vegetable crisper, by all means disinfect it with eucalyptus oil. But remember: hot water goes in FIRST, eucalyptus oil goes into the water.

Otherwise, like me, you'll be ringing up various electrical goods outlets, trying to locate a replacement crisper.

The Problem With America...

2011-06-16T05:22:00.001-07:00

...is really simple, when you think about it. They just elected the wrong black guy to the office of President.

See? Much better idea.

Well. What Do You Know? Explains A Lot, Really.

2011-06-13T20:42:00.000-07:00

From a 1996 article in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology:

The authors investigated the role of homosexual arousal in exclusively heterosexual men who admitted negative affect toward homosexual individuals. Participants consisted of a group of homophobic men (n = 35) and a group of nonhomophobic men (n = 29); they were assigned to groups on the basis of their scores on the Index of Homophobia (W. W. Hudson & W. A. Ricketts, 1980). The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes, and changes in penile circumference were monitored. They also completed an Aggression Questionnaire (A. H. Buss & M. Perry, 1992). Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. The groups did not differ in aggression. Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.

That really would seem to account for a lot of the bullshit from various Conservative government members around the world. You know the ones: by day they spend their time thundering away in Parliament or Congress or Diet or whatever, excoriating the Evils of Homo Secks You Allity... but by night they put on fishnets, rubber underpants and a gas mask and hang around public toilets with prominent holes in the walls.

It's been more or less accepted folklore for quite some time that "homophobe" is just another word for "closet case". In fact, apparently the idea goes back as far as Freud, who theorized that people get most uptight and condemnatory towards stuff they secretly want, but think they shouldn't have.

In any case, it's nice to know somebody actually investigated this, and the results stood up to peer review. I'm going to make a little note of the title of the article, the date of publication, and the authors, and the next time I'm involved in a discussion with a loud-mouthed closet case, I'll let him know that a) he's not fooling anybody, and b) there are people who can help him come to terms with his own feelings.

Mind you, I wouldn't recommend this course of action to everybody. I personally can probably survive most of the fistfights which may result from this, but then I've been practising.

School Hols

2011-06-11T18:33:00.001-07:00

That is my new shirt. Yes. I got out the inks and paints again. Personally, I think it sums up the situation pretty well. Fair warning, I reckon.

We're at the halfway mark on the current batch of school hols. There's a big push on to change the school year to match the mainlanders next year - four terms of ten weeks each. Not sure I like that. I remember being a kid. School is dire, boring horror and you live for the holidays and weekends. Personally, I think there's too much time allocated to classroom hell already.

The snow stuck around for a surprising length of time. As we drove into Launceston yesterday for Genghis' regular bass lesson, there were still little patches of snow by the roadside along the Sideling Range. I've never seen that before. Mount Barrow was appropriately snowy, and when we came over the hills into Launceston proper, I could see that the Western Tiers were white from one end to the other. Great start to winter.

In other news... anybody got a cure for kids fighting? Genghis gets bored, the first thing he starts doing his irritating and baiting his sister. And then it's on. This has been going long enough that even my patience is worn out. Genghis has been fetching an awful lot of firewood lately, and we've literally reached the zero-tolerance point. He doesn't get the benefit of doubt any more. A single wrong word - even a sideways look, sometimes - and he's off the field. It's really fucking irritating.

We're doing our best to explain it to him, and make him understand that if he dislikes the situation, it's in his power to change it. But there's only so much of that kind of thing that sinks in when you're eight years old. And to be fair, the Mau-Mau is an annoying little gobshite too.

Well. I've had a quiet Sunday morning, but that's about to end. I've set up pizza dough for the evening feast, and I'll have to go down to the supermarket for the Sunday papers, plus a few other bits and pieces. Then I'll get back, and run the pump. Then I'll fire up the chainsaw, cut up a few of the older deadfalls and extend our firewood supply. That'll occupy the afternoon nicely, and then it's into the dinner routine.

Thanks to the redoubtable Tehani, I've been pushing Jake into various writing competitions. The school can't really help him with his narrative and creative writing skills to any great degree... he's kind of past that. Happily, his teacher is very helpful, and she understands the situation, so we're throwing different entry forms at him, and seeing what falls out. I've got his entry for the Bauhinia Literary Awards all enveloped, ready to go, and he wrote a cracker of a piece of poetry last night for the Dorothea Mackellar competition.

By way of encouraging him and keeping him company, I've written a piece for the Bauhinia awards too. Haven't done something at the 2000 word length for a while. It was kind of refreshing. I figure if he knows his old man is entering the same competition (they have different age categories, of course) he'll be more interested in the various outcomes. The only negative I can see is if I manage to score a gong and he doesn't... but I don't even think that will peeve him. He's enjoying the writing, and he's excited about being involved in a 'real competition'. If I score something and he doesn't, I'm quite sure he'll put it down to the professional experience, and roll with the punches.

Personally, I'm hoping he scores something more significant than me. That would really give him a boost. We'll see.

Damned if I'm entering the bloody Dorothea Mackellar disasterzone, though. I'm not even certain there is an adult entry... but I don't care. The 'sunburnt country' is my pink butt, and Dorothea Mackellar can kiss it.

On a final note: I saw a rather enjoyable movie the other night - a loaner, from Q-Dog of the Shite Team. It's called "The Warrior's Way", and it's a hybrid Korean/Hollywood piece with CGI courtesy of Weta. It's a heady mixture of samurai/ninja and Western B-movie, and it's very cool. It never takes itself too seriously, but still manages to hit all the right notes. Homages to the greats of both Eastern and Western cinema, decent performances all round (and what is Geoffrey Rush doing here? My! I guess he wanted to add 'ageing drunken Western outlaw with a heart of gold' to his 'Ruthless Pirate Captain' B-movie chops) and strong story arcs for all the more important players.

Very definitely worth an evening in. Find it on DVD and enjoy hell out of it.

It Got Cold Today

2011-06-08T01:58:00.000-07:00

Seriously cold. As in maybe record-breaking.

At about 1000 this morning, there were big, fat flakes of snow swirling around the yard. Admittedly, they were mixed with rain and sleet, but the only other time I've seen snow here was a brief flurry of very little flakes at 0800 one morning, about eight years back.

The kids and I layered up like Matroshka dolls. We were planning to set out for Mt Barrow, where the snow usually falls. However, we only made it a hundred metres or so from our driveway before the snow was noticeably piling up on the road. A few hundred metres later, we saw it all over the big tree ferns. And then there were small trees, bent under the unaccustomed weight, leaning onto the road and disrupting the traffic. Fortunately, since the snow was maybe five cm deep on the road by then, there really wasn't much traffic to disrupt.

We made it as far as the lookout, which has perhaps two hundred, maybe three hundred metres of elevation on this house. This is what things looked like up there.

A few minutes later, the police turned up from the direction of Launceston. They were driving very slowly. They weren't impressed by the plan to drive to Mt Barrow.

Later, by the time I went shopping to Scottsdale, they had closed the highway. I didn't find out about it until I came down, round the sweeping corner, and discovered 'road closed' signs facing the other direction across the road. Being the scofflaw I am, I drove around them. Then I went to the bank, the post office, the butcher, and the supermarket. On the way home, I drove back around the road closed signs. Mmmm. I am a rebel. And illegally obtained roast pork and vegetables taste much nicer, anyway.

At first, the Mau-Mau was having a good time. But then she took off her pink gloves so they "wouldn't get wet." Then she complained about her cold, wet, hands. Then she fell on her face, and howled quite a lot. No snow expedition is complete without a good Mau-Mau faceplant.

Young Genghis, on the other hand, just couldn't be stopped. I suspect he has veins full of superheated antifreeze, not blood at all.

Check it out! That is very nearly a real snowman. It's a bit leafy, and there's some wallaby shit embedded in it, but it's much bigger than any of our previous efforts, and it actually held together.

By the time Mr Snowman was a reality, the Mau-Mau had hunkered down in the car, never to emerge again. Everybody else was cold and soaked, because at this altitude there was still some rain among all that snow. We decided not to go for Mount Barrow. Pity.

An interesting thing: across the road from the lookout is a commercial plantation of Douglas Firs. They're pretty sizeable, and they've been there as long as I've lived here, so I guess they're probably fifteen years old or more. Anyway, despite being evergreens from a snowy ecosystem, they've been growing here without yearly snow. Because of that, the unexpected weight of the falling snow was too much for them. As we mucked around in the snow on the lookout, we kept hearing big branches snap and fall. It sounded like a giant, stomping about in the forest.

And finally: this is Jake's Youtube footage of the winter adventure.

May not mean much to those of you from real snow country... but for us, it was pretty mindblowing.

So Stupid It Gives Stupid A Bad Name

2011-06-03T17:48:00.001-07:00

By now, you'll be aware that I think Australia's policies towards asylum-seekers and refugees are disgraceful in the extreme. Now, however, Gillard's government has shown me that no matter how obnoxious and stupid a government is, there's always a way to fall even lower.

We're letting Australian soldiers die in Afghanistan on the pretext of 'nationbuilding'. We're supposedly helping the Afghan people create necessary infrastructure and civil order, and in so doing, theoretically building a relationship between our two peoples. You know: so as to undermine the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric of the Wahabi idiots behind Al-Qaeda and other largely Islamic agitators.

We talk about engaging with moderate Muslims. We talk about tolerance. We talk about finding ways to cross the cultural divide, to promote understanding.

And then we send unaccompanied children off to Malaysia.

Check the article.

There's stupid. Then there's Pauline Hanson moronic. And then there's subhuman, brain-dead cretinism the like of which I don't think I've seen from a government in this nation before.

We've got couples all over the country who are absolutely desperate to adopt children. (Go ahead. Check out the waiting times.) We've got a precarious relationship with Islam and with various countries in this part of the world. And we've got a pool of innocent children without families -- children who ask for and need nothing more than any other child -- who come from some of these troubled countries. Some of them are certainly of the Islamic faith. All of them, without exception, are frightened and wretchedly alone.

It would take an absolute imbecile not to see the opportunity this presents. All we have to do is treat these children kindly. All we have to do is place them with decent people who want to have families of their own, in the Australian way. All we have to do is act like the fair-go nation we so loudly proclaim ourselves to be.

Children. They're just children. Are you really trying to tell me that they're some kind of security threat? Do you really expect me to believe these are heinous Al-Qaeda sleeper agents, just waiting to grow up so they can be fiendish domestic terrorists?

Why in the name of all that's sane and rational are we doing this? Why are we sending these vulnerable, innocent kids to camps in Malaysia, of all places? Malaysia, where caning is part of the official regime of legal punishment? Malaysia, whose record on human rights is spotty, to say the very least?

D'you think those kids are going to grow up as comfortable, decent people who remember Australia with kindness? Or do you suppose they might just possibly develop some kind of life-long loathing of the place and the culture which treated them so foully, and then rejected them so completely?

Are we goddam TRYING to raise a new generation of Al-Qaeda recruits?

How can anyone be this howlingly stupid? You know -- if the Opposition were to throw Abbott into the oubliette where he belongs and perhaps even put Turnbull in his place, I could even vote Liberal over this simple issue. Yep. That's right: green, anarchist me. I'd vote with the Liberals on this (if Abbott wasn't such a rabid dog) because -- and follow me carefully here -- ANY GOVERNMENT WHICH IS STUPID ENOUGH TO DO THIS IS TOO FUCKING STUPID TO LIVE.

Words fail me. I really thought I'd seen the depths of imbecility in governance. Gillard has just proved me wrong in the worst possible way.

Winter Busyness

2011-05-30T20:25:00.000-07:00

Winter indeed. I don't know what the rest of you out there are going through, but we're having an early winter here in Tas, and a cold one. Lots of frosts; clear, cold nights where the temperature drops to freezing. We even had a good dose of Aurora Australis a few nights back, apparently. Unfortunately, with the mountains immediately to our south, I didn't get to see the display. Mind you, I've caught the Southern Lights before, so I can lay claim to having seen the earth's aurora at both ends of the planet.

I've been writing, which is good. A couple of stories, three submissions, one rejection. The other two are on longer deadlines - one is for Ticonderoga's paranormal noir anthology upcoming, and the other for Cosmos. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

And more writing: two novels at once. There's the novelisation of the libretto for Outkast Opera, and another project, which I don't care to discuss. Enough to keep me quite busy, obviously.

Meanwhile, in keeping with Sudden Winter, I have a cold. And apparently, also 'Geographic Tongue'. Which is as weird as it sounds, yes. I thought about trying to take a photo, but between the need for a mirror and a flash (which is always a bad combination) or alternatively, the need to point the camera at my tongue while vaguely hoping for the best, I decided I'd pull a photo off the Net. And here it is. Not my tongue, but more or less what my tongue currently looks like. Ick.

Meanwhile... this year isn't slowing down even a little bit. It just screams past while I'm still trying to catch my breath. Every day, every week, chockfull. Last Friday night, Nat and the boys did their first concert with the Launceston Youth and Community Orchestra. It went rather well, all things considered - all things being a tired and impatient Mau-Mau, sub-zero weather by the time the concert was finished, lengthy pause between practice and play (which we filled with a trip to Dumpling Legend for dinner) and the fact that yes, it was a Friday night concert in Launceston after a long and trying week at school, etc.

I notice they're trying to set up a four-term school year again here in Tas. I guess those summer holidays are just too long for good, industry-standard breaks. Can't have the kids getting used to the idea of freedom, can you? And those awful parents, demanding time off to be with their spawn... how dare they?

I don't think they're planning to add a lot more in the way of school days, mind you. Just redistribute the holidays. Of course, that means an extra start-period every year, in which nothing much gets done. And an extra last-week-of-term each year, in which (yes, again) nothing much gets done. But that's okay, because it will Modernise Tasmania, and Bring Us Into Line With The Mainland.

... you know, I'm kind of tired of prioritising corporate interests over everybody else in society.

Take the current fuss with Cate Blanchett supporting a carbon tax. Madame B has been a card-carrying Green for many a year, and has put her money where her mouth is in terms of lifestyle. She's speaking up in favour of a price on carbon, designed to help raise awareness of CO2 production, and to reduce it by allowing less CO2 intensive alternatives compete with the artificially lowered price of carbon-heavy energy.

And for this Rupert sets the media dogs on her.

Meanwhile, Australia's richest individual -- Gina Rinehart -- jumps on the bandwagon against the infamous Mining Tax, howling that it'll bring roooination to us all. Oddly, Gina's massive fortune comes from... mining. Yes. But does anyone call her out on the patently obvious conflict here?

Well, not in uncle Rupert's newspapers they don't. Nor in TV-land, where the Word of Murdoch is Law.

We can afford a mining tax. In fact, it's arguable we can't afford NOT to have one, because while we're making money from resources now, the day will come when either we run out, or the demand falters -- and if we haven't done the right thing by ourselves as a nation, we're gonna wind up looking a lot like Nauru: an ugly, abandoned chunk of Pacific undesirable. But apparently the possibility that Gina might have to make do with just ONE set of platinum-forged dinnerware is too much.

We can also afford a carbon tax. And again: it's arguable we can't afford NOT to have one. But Cate has no oars in the water here. She's not making money out of anti-CO2 schemes. She states loudly and clearly that what she wants is to be able to look her kids in the eye when they're older, and say that yes, she did her best to preserve a decent world for them.

I guess it's up to you whether or not you accept that. But given that the nastiest of Uncle Rupert's diggers have yet to uncover a money-making link between Cate Blanchett and any "no-CO2" alternatives -- well, if you don't accept Cate's motives, you're going to have to scratch around and devise one of your own. Which ought to be interesting.

Well, hell with it. I'm going to go out and get some exercise. I'm heading down into the berry patch to cut back the old canes. And yes: I'm going to compost them, which will keep the carbon in the soil and do at least a little bit for the atmosphere...

More Pirates

2011-05-22T17:58:00.000-07:00

Well, I took the inevitable trip with the boys to see the new Depp/Pirates film this weekend. And either my sensibilities have been blunted, or it really wasn't as bad as I expected.

Let's be clear: I love the first of the three films. It's a gem, a marvellous mix of homage, irony, spectacle, character-acting and sheer damned fun. The second film was a much less vivid work, aimed mainly at bringing the third onto the screen. And the third was a muddy, plodding, noisy wreck that disappointed in almost every way.

Obviously, I wasn't expecting much from the fourth. Admittedly, the fact that they felt a need to credit Tim Powers' book for the title and elements of the plot was a positive factor. I do like Mr Powers work. Nevertheless, I went in expecting little more than eyestrain (3D again, yes) so the fact that I was entertained more often than I was bored counts as a success.

The problem, for me, with the movies since #1, is that they've lost the momentum and the character interplay that carried the first from one set-piece to the next. The set-pieces are fun, sure. The complicated Jack-Sparrow-Escapes-From-The-Royal-Palace effort was positively balletic, and filled up the screen nicely, while remaining very much in character for Sparrow. But in between the shiny set pieces in the first film, we got a certain amount of character development. Minor plot arcs that kept the film from getting dull.

There's little of that here. In between the set pieces, what we get is essentially exposition aimed at moving the plot to the next set-piece.

Credits: Ian MacShane has an absolute lock on 'menace', and does a fine job as the villain of the piece -- Edward Teach, or Blackbeard. Penelope Cruz looks the part (as always), and is sufficiently fiery of mien to allow us to believe she's actually able to buckle those swashes up there in the action scenes. Depp has Jack Sparrow under his skin now, and Geoffrey Rush is reliable as ever in Barbossa's boot. (Not boots. He's had a very piratical accident.)

Brickbats: the subplot involving the preacher and the mermaid is tacked on to add something resembling complexity to an otherwise painfully straightforward go-there-and-grab-the-maguffin plotline. I didn't give a flying fart about the preacher, and my only real response to the mermaid was to wonder whether or not the Internet had any slightly less clothingy photos of her. (It does.) Keira and Orlando may not have been the most riveting actors on screen in the first flick, but they were given more room to play, more depth, and most of all, more goddam significance to the storyline. I actually feel rather sorry for the people playing Mr Preacher and Ms Mermaid.

Overall? Don't bother seeing it on your own, but if you've got kids who like the franchise, it's entertaining enough to justify an afternoon out.

I F--king KNEW It!

2011-05-19T21:57:00.000-07:00

It alllll makes sense now.

Apple causes ‘religious’ reaction in brains of fans, say neuroscientists

And no. They're not talking fruit.

OMFG! I WANT ONE!

2011-05-17T19:26:00.000-07:00

Superhero fliers. Radio. Fucking. Controlled.

Check 'em out.

God DAMN I could have some fun with one of those things...

The End Is Nigh

2011-05-17T02:41:00.000-07:00

Yep. This is the last night in which I sleep quietly, in an otherwise empty house. (Ignoring two pet cats, three pet rats and two fish, of course.) Tomorrow evening, Nat and the spawnage return to the fold, and levels of noise and chaos rise appropriately.

It's been a good break. Sunday night, for example: I invited a number of the older ju-jitsu students to turn up and watch some classic films with me. (Okay - they're classic to me, all right?) See, while the boys would watch anything if they had the chance, Natalie has seen The Princess Bride and Blade Runner often enough that she'd just roll her eyes and groan at me for watching them again. On the other hand, it turned out that the posse of teenagers in the martial class hadn't seen either. (Barring the redoubtable Amy, who had actually seen The Princess Bride, but was completely happy to see it again.)

It was a good evening. I made pizza and popcorn, and we watched The Lost Thing first, in the grand old tradition of cartoons before the main feature. Everybody enjoyed The Princess Bride appropriately (although April used the word 'ridiculous' so often that eventually, I replied to her with the Montoya Response to an overused and potentially incorrect word. And if you don't know the Montoya Response... no. That's just inconceivable!) and the encounter between Inigo and Count Rugen, with all the repeats of the famous "Hello! My name is..." speech went over exactly as it should.

Blade Runner also provoked the right responses. I have to admit: I really like the current crop of young students. There's some wit and insight there. It speaks well of their families, and of a community that can bring up young people like this, even when the economy and the long-established customs are faltering.

And what else? Well, I've also shopped for a replacement computer for the boys. They've got my old one, but it runs on XP, and it's about five years old. It's slow to start, and it's reaching its capacity in terms of functionality. Natalie is particularly cranky with it, because she likes to use it to consult the Internet, rather than disappearing off to her study.

On the other hand, it really does look as though replacing it with a useful faster model will cost at least $600, which is more than we want to pay for mere convenience. (And six hundred will only get a machine with Vista. There is no conceivable way I will permit another Vista-driven machine into this house, so I'd have to load one of my copies of XP onto the thing... and really, that's not much of an upgrade, given that their current machine operates under XP.)

Hmm. I've also bought and planted four apple trees. The species is Malus gorgeous, believe it or not, and it's theoretically a crab-apple. However, there are a few mature trees in Launceston, and Genghis and I raided a couple. They fruit very heavily indeed, and though the apples are small and tart, they're quite tasty. The trees are genuinely gorgeous, and the jam I made from the apples -- flavoured with clove, cinnamon and honey -- was wonderful. Oh, and Genghis ate an entire bagful of the things. So, yes: I think that putting four of them in the ground around the Giant Killer Playground Fortress is a good plan.

What else? Oh, I've slothed. And it's been good. I watched a couple movies I'd picked up ages ago, and never managed to find time for: Zombieland and Taken. The former was quite entertaining: Woody Harrelson's turn as the redneck master zombie-killer 'Tallahassee' was lovely, and the little knife the writers stuck in with the backstory of the death of his son was unexpected and affecting. Bill Murray's appearance as himself was comedic platinum.

Taken, on the other hand, didn't do nearly so much for me. Liam Neeson did what he could with the material, but it was... not pleasant. Annoyingly patriarchal. Irritatingly xenophobic. Depressingly prone to racial and cultural stereotyping, and underpinned with that godawful American righteousness that Hollywood loves to jam down our throats. Corrupt French police, vicious Albanian drug- and slave- traffickers, decadent, cowardly, salacious Arab sheikhs... and over it all, Neeson's Righteous Fatherly Rage.

Fuck it. That is really not a movie I needed, and I'll be glad to get it out of the house.

The break from cooking has been nice too. Other than Sunday night's pizzaganza, I've subsisted on leftovers and toasted sandwiches. The fridge is now down to a state where I can meaningfully clean it out tomorrow, and restock it. I'm not looking forward to that, I admit. Eyyeuch.

Of course, there's been the inevitable irritation from those mindless pricks at Telstra Bigpond. Those of you who read this regularly know it took me nearly five months to get NextG broadband here, owing to reception problems. You may also be aware that in order to minimise the cost, the account is linked to Natalie's mobile phone number.

Note well: I'm the one who set up the account. Me. Personally. At the Telstra shop in Launceston. I created the account, and with the help of a Telstra functionary, I linked to Natalie's mobile.

So - the first time I tried to contact Bigpond to ask about account details, I was told I had no access. Because, of course, it's Natalie's mobile. And even though I'm listed on the home phone, I'm not on her mobile account. No matter that the existence of the Bigpond account was down to me: because it's linked to Natalie's mobile, I can't ask about details, or do basic maintenance.

Here's a note for you Telstra: no way NATALIE is going to check the basics. She doesn't know how, doesn't have time, and depends on me to handle that shit -- as I told you when I set up the account. You cretins.

Anyway, Natalie finally got around to ringing Bigpond, and adding me to the account. She did it on Tuesday last week. And yesterday, I rang Bigpond to adjust the password to the account, because for some reason it doesn't respond online - so I can't check our data usage.

Guess what? The Indian-accented woman at the Telstra Bigpond call centre informed me that I'm not listed on the Bigpond account. Apparently Natalie needs to ring Billing and tell them to add me...

... gosh. I wonder what she actually did on Tuesday? And more to the point, I wonder what f__king drugs the Telstra employee she talked to was on when they told her that they were adding my name to the account?

I am so f__king tired of Telstra and Bigpond that I would pay twice as much money to any other carrier for an equivalent service.

Shame there aren't any other carriers out here, eh?

Looking Out For The Kids.

2011-05-15T00:06:00.000-07:00

In 2009, a man in Bakersfield, California bit out his four-year-old son’s eyes. He may have eaten one of them. He was under the influence of PCP at the time.

In 2005, China Arnold put her 28-day-old baby Paris into a microwave oven, and cooked her to death. She’d had an argument with her boyfriend.

New Jersey, February 2010. A 21-year-old man kidnapped his three-month-old daughter from his estranged wife. He wrapped the baby in a sleeping bag, and threw her off a bridge into the freezing waters of the Raritan river.

January 2009: in Melbourne, Arthur Freeman threw his four-year-old daughter Darcy off the Westgate bridge to fall something like sixty metres into the Yarra river. She lived long enough for the ambulancefolk to try to revive her. Freeman had been arguing with his ex-wife, apparently.

I’m not going to go farther into the details of these incidents. You can if you want. I’ve included the necessary links. I’ve had all the horror I can handle for the moment.

This meditation is triggered by page eight of my local newspaper, which featured an article on China Arnold and her dead baby, right next to another article about a man who shot his wife, then his three small children, and then himself. Currently, my kids are in Perth with Natalie, visiting their grandmum. I’m enjoying the solitude, and the ability to sleep as I see fit... but the gap the kids leave is enormous, even if it’s a relief to be on my own for a while.

It’s an increasingly overpopulated world. Nearly seven billion people. I’m old enough to recall when it was four billion. Since I’m not a geriatric yet, it’s pretty obvious we’re breeding at a terrifying rate. And every new human has needs, and — in theory at least — rights. At the very least, every new human being is exactly that: a human being, and if we treat them in any lesser fashion, we demean ourselves. More importantly: the creature that can voluntarily hurt or kill a dependent, defenseless, innocent child is a thing that has at least temporarily given up any possible right to be viewed as a human being.

And yet the horrorshow rolls on. I listed only four incidents, and I deliberately limited myself to the US and Australia. I hate to think what the list might look like if I really did some research, and considered the whole world.

What I’m saying is this: we have to be licensed to drive a car. You need a license to fly a plane. You can’t practice law or medicine without going through all kinds of training and oaths and examinations and licensing. You need a license to wire up a house for electricity. You need qualifications to teach at school. You need certification to handle food in a shop or restaurant. You’re even supposed to have a license to get married.

So how the fuck is it that we collectively don’t have the stones to step up and ask for some kind of goddam evidence that people can be fit parents before we put them in charge of children?

Right about now, there’s a whole bunch of people reading this, collective sucking in wind, getting ready to bleat about human rights and freedoms. Right about now, if I could, I’d slug each and every one of those people in the solar plexus to make them cough, whoop, and shut the fuck up while I ask the obvious counter-question: what about the rights of the kid whose eyes got chewed out? Where were Darcy Freeman’s rights in the last, terrifying, flailing three-and-a-half seconds (‘cos yes, folks, that’s how long it takes to fall sixty metres. It’s high school physics. Check your watch. Count it off. Three and a half seconds. That’s how long Darcy had to think about what was happening to her, before she hit.) of her life?

The state already acts like an extended nanny-system to kids. The state demands the kids participate in an education system which is, quite frankly, fucked up. The state demands all kinds of censorship to ‘protect kids’. Including that idiot Conroy’s Great Internet Clusterfuck — and, of course, the lack of an R-18 classification for computer games. The state insists kids can’t drink or smoke. The state tries to mandate minimum levels of exercise for kids. The state prescribes where and how childbirth is to take place, and under whose observation. Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of all this shit, the state instead tried to insist that people becoming parents demonstrate reasonably sound judgement in the first place?

When you decide to become a parent, you agree to put your whole world to one side in favour of someone else. You have to, or you’re worse than a fool. A child doesn’t have any choice about being born. The choice - limited as it may be by religious idiocy on birth control — belongs to the parents. Sperm and egg have nothing to say about the whole process. Neither does the foetus.

If you’re not ready to reshape your whole existence so you can nurture a new human being — do not fucking well become a parent. If you find this has happened to you accidentally: either get yourself straight, or admit you fucked up, and allow the kid to be adopted. There are a large number of eager, well-qualified couples desperate to have kids who can offer the child a real life.

And finally: the political group that steps up and says “Yes. We need to impose some kind of education, licensing, and restriction on parenting, and we’re going to do that. We’ll match it with improved support for new parents and their kids, of course,” is going to get my vote. And I don’t give a flying fart in a windstorm for 'the devil in the details’, or ‘the rights of the parents’, or anything similar. Because no kid should ever, ever have to answer a police inquiry with the words "My daddy ate my eyes."

419 Scammers Alive And Well... But Behind The Times

2011-05-14T04:32:00.000-07:00

So, I just got this in the spambox of one of my email addresses:

Dearest in Christ

With Due Respect And Humanity, Let me first of all inform you, I got your email address from a mail Directory and decided to mail you for a permission to go ahead.I am Mrs. Rachael James from United Kingdom. I am married to Mr. Tom James who worked with a construction company in Asia for
twenty Years before he died in the tsunami disasters, we were married but without Any children.

I am now suffering from long time breast Cancer and Cancer of the lungs, from all indication my condition is really deterioration and it is quite obvious that i won't live more than 2 months according to my doctor, this is because the cancer stage has gotten to a very bad stage;Since his death I decided not to re-marry. I deposited the sum of (Two MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) in a bank and now i am willing to donate this sum to the less privileged and to contribute to development of church in Africa, America, Asia, and Europe.

My late husband was a very wealthy and after his death, I inherited all his business and wealth, Presently this money is still with the bank and the management just Wrote me as the beneficiary to come forward to receive the money or rather Issue a letter of authorization to somebody to receive it on my behalf If I cannot come over. I am presently in a hospital where I have been undergoing treatment Cancer of the lungs in a hospital , I have since lost my ability to talk and my doctors have told me that I have only a few months to Live. Please i want you to note that this money is lying in the Bank.

I want a person that is trustworthy that will utilize 90% of this money to fund churches, orphanages and widows around the world but in my name Mrs.Rachel James"As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the bank.I will also issue you a letter of authority that will prove you as The new beneficiary of this fund. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I stated herein and Keep this contact confidential till such a time this funds get to your Custody,this is to ensure that nothing jeopardizes my last wish on Earth.

I await your urgent reply.

Yous In Christ,

Mrs.Rachel James

I'd just like to point out a couple things. First, it looks as though the 419-ers have finally got the hang of punctuation. Except for random Capitals, of course. Words like Keep and Custody are definitely important enough to need capital letters, right?

Next there's this Cancer stuff. I think Mrs Rachel James would have been more convincing if she'd had only one cancer, not two at once. But hell, who am I to argue? Maybe she collects cancers. Everyone's gotta have a hobby.

Finally: why are these eejits are still working in USAnian pesos? Haven't they heard of the recent rude health of the Aussie Dollar? When are we going to see whining Nigerians trying to convince us to send a lot of money and personal details to free up a massive hoard of good old Australian cash, eh?

It's not good enough, I tell you. Something should be done!

Edited to add: You know, I find it fascinating how so many of these 419 letters I see cloak themselves in Christian greetings. You don't suppose they have some reason for thinking that loudly religious folks might be... I dunno... more gullible than the rest of us?

Nahhh. Who'd think a thing like that?

Mother's Day Weekend.

2011-05-09T04:58:00.000-07:00

I didn't do much useful writing this morning. One would think I could, what with the kids catching an 0800 bus, and me not having to go shopping or anything until 1400 or so.

Truth is, I was mentally wasted. The weekend was Not Easy.

It probably started Friday sometime. I had to make sure all the kids were packed properly for a weekend on the road. And I had to ensure that the double bass and the cello and the violin were waiting in my car for the changeover after school. And of course, I had to be packed myself, yep.

So a little after three, Natalie zooms up the drive in her little blue machine. She's got the boys. They jump into the Earth King (now chucky-jam with musical instruments, as per instructions) and zoom off.

Roughly twenty minutes later, I collect the Mau-Mau from the bus stop, get her changed into civvies, and we zoom off after Natalie. Once we hit Launceston, I have time to grab some sandwiches for the kids, and some sushi for Nat. Then I refuel the car, and zip round to the orchestra zone to meet Nat and the boys after their practice. We convoy from there to the house of a friend who is supposed to look after the Earth King and the cello and the bass for the weekend.

It's now roughly six pm. The kids are eating in the little blue car, and I'm driving. Two hours later down the midland highway and left, and we're at Hatchers' Manor, near Richmond. I won't go on at length about the place, but I will say this. I stayed there once, about five years ago, with a friend, and I've never forgotten it. Neither has he. We spent most of the weekend laughing at the mad architectural quirks of the place (a toilet placed under a sloping roof meant I actually had to lean sideways when I went for a piss!) but at the same time, it was wonderfully comfortable, great value for money, and the people running it couldn't possibly be nicer. I've been awaiting the right moment to drag the family down there... and this was it.

Yes. It is modelled after somebody's idea of a Swiss alpen chalet thing. And yes. The tower/turret has an apartment in it. And that pink trim? All over the interior too. Yep. But trust me: comfortable, friendly, spacious - brilliant place.

Mind you, after a two-hour drive all any of us wanted was bed. I ducked out to Richmond, found beer, cider and pizza, then returned to feed everybody and then more or less crash.

Next day we took in breakfast. Then we zipped down to Hobart, and dropped Natalie at her music thing - a chamber music workshop, as it happened. Guess it's a change from the Irish stuff she usually does. In any case, that left me and the kids for the next six to seven hours. I made a call to an old friend, and then we took off for the Salamanca Markets.

That's the main lobby of Hatchers Manor, by the way. Just in case you thought I was exaggerating when I said the place is peculiar. But fun.

Hobart's Salamanca Markets are good value. We met up with my friend Pete, shopped for Mother's day presents (we found some flowers and a really nice scarf in Lao silk) and bought a whole bunch of different apples. One stall had twenty-eight varieties! We're still tasting them, and arguing over which we like best.

The Mau-Mau got involved with this gentleman's sales pitch. She enjoyed naming the pewter animals.

Jake in a pensive moment

Genghis racing leaves down the Abel Tasman Fountain.

Lunch was fish and chips and woodfire pizza at a very acceptable little place near my friend Pete's residence. And then, since we still had hours to kill, we went to a big park in Sandy Bay with a very fine playground, and followed that up with a long beach walk. Finally, roundabout four in the afternoon, we made it back to Natalie's music zone so we could listen to her concert.

Only to discover we were locked out.

Ah well. Par for the course, really. We found a nearby paddock, and the kids ran around and wrestled even more, and we ate more apples, and listened to the car radio, and finally, finally, Natalie came out and joined us. Whereupon we promptly went BACK to Pete's place so Nat could have coffee. And then we went to dinner at a place called "Written On Tea", which gets a big Flinthart Food Tick for anybody looking for a decent Chinese/Japanese fusion feed in Sandy Bay at a very reasonable price. (The spicy pork with rice vermecelli was great.)

And then it was back to Hatchers Manor.

Next morning, the kids practised their ninja concealment skills. Happily, the multitude of cupboards in our spacious rooms gave them plenty of help...

That would be Jake.

And of course, the Mau-Mau and Genghis.

Naturally, being Mothers Day, the whole presents-and-flowers thing was done. And breakfast. Did I mention that among all the kid-wrangling on Saturday, I also stopped at a supermarket and collected fine cheeses, deli products, bread and fruits? No?

Well, I did. And a mighty breakfast was made. And then?

Why then, I drove us all back to Launceston. We went back to the House of Instrument-Minding, and Genghis and I hopped into the Earth King. We went to the supermarket, and then headed home. Seeing as how it was still Mothers Day, I promptly created a duet of charcoal-barbecued chicken and duck, along with a fine salad, and a bottle of excellent bubbly (courtesy of Chaz.)

And in keeping with the nature of things, I was the last one to bed... stayed up to make lunches, catch up on email, etc.

So: that's why I didn't have the necessary mental focus to churn out 3000 words this morning.

I Think I'm In Love

2011-05-08T17:45:00.001-07:00

Please take care. The video to which this is linked is not at all work-safe, due to the language. And it's even less work-safe if you happen to work for Steve Jobs...

Endangered

2011-05-04T17:21:00.001-07:00

I saw one of these last night. It crossed the road in front of my car on my way home from the ju-jitsu class. I stopped the car and waited for it to cross. It posed in the headlights very nicely, and the boys in the car with me were duly impressed.

The beastie in question is an Eastern Barred Bandicoot, one of Australia's threatened/endangered mammal species. I was really pleased to see it, and it was cute as all hell.

Unfortunately, it's probably in real trouble even here in Tasmania. With the Facial Tumour Disease wiping out the Tasmanian Devils in our area, I see more and more feral cats haunting the forests and roadsides around here. Feral cats are savage, deadly hunters, and though an adult bandicoot is a hefty little bugger -- the size of a very large, well-fed rabbit -- the young are quite vulnerable.

I like cats. But they don't belong here. Bandicoots do. I hope they can hang around.

Heh. I just noticed: the autospellcheck on this blogging system doesn't know what a bandicoot is. Ignorant shit of a thing!

What A Writer Will Do For A Free Drink

2011-05-04T03:53:00.000-07:00

Five hundred kilometre round trip? Sure. No problems.

Actually, I was just taking a cheap shot at myself there. And why not? Somebody should. Y'see, I drove to Hobart yesterday afternoon to launch a book. Not mine -- you don't launch your own books. (No, I don't understand this system any better than you.)

Here in Australia, books in SF and Fantasy are traditionally launched by Jack Dann. I'm not sure why. Last I heard, Jack's not sure either - but he does it with great energy and enthusiasm, and when Jack launches a book, you sure as hell know it's been launched.

Anyway, Tansy Rayner-Roberts (a friend now of ten years standing, and a colleague on a number of projects and groups that actually surprised me when I went back over the list) has the second book in her Harper/Collins/Voyager trilogy on the shelves now. The first, 'Power and Majesty' was a damned good read, and it was really cool to see it in print since I'm part of the writers group who helped criticise it into shape, so to speak. But I haven't seen even the MS of the second book, so I'm looking forward to reading it.

And launching it? That was unexpected. I haven't done that before.

It was down at the Hobart Book Store, in Salamanca Square, so I took off around 1330. Made it there by 1645 for a 1730 deadline: plenty of time. The Hobart Book Store is a fantastic place, with a wonderful and eclectic range of books, and perfectly lovely proprietors. They even bought me a beer.

Not only that, but the launch itself came with the requisite bottles of vino, and a bunch of people I hadn't seen in a while (except for Emma Kate, whom I had seen quite recently. Hello, EK!). So I made some kind of a speech, and Tansy made another kind of speech, and lo! 'The Shattered City' was launched. Then Tansy signed some books, and we all went off for pizza. Yay!

And then?

Why then, I turned around and drove home again. As one does. Because, of course, today was a busy day with writing and yardwork and then all the ju-jitsu stuff in the evening... but Natalie made sushi so I didn't have to cook, and now I'm back to work.

G'night!