Rising Chaos

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve. There's an unknown number of guests arriving at unknown intervals. It's predicted to hit 30c. The shed is still not fully insulated.

The house is in a certain amount of chaos, which isn't anything new. But we have a houseguest: the inimitable Girlie Jones from Western Australia. That's a fine thing, and the Mau-Mau is, as always, entranced to have a female visitor. (She likes male visitors too, but she tends to flirt at them, and that's just unnerving for everyone.)

I've still got all kinds of preparations to do. Too much to list. But the crowning glory occurred not twenty minutes ago: Natalie decided that the Younger Son was itching too much for her liking, so she went through his hair.

And voila! What should she discover but an infestation of goddam head-lice. Not nearly as bad as the infestation she herself brought home much earlier this year -- but irritating, nevertheless. She stuck around long enough to confirm her findings, and then she laughed at me, and went to work.

Great.

The boys are now wandering around with complicated, loopy, Manga-esque hairstyles provided by latherings of insecticidal hair-foam. Their bedding is in the laundry, awaiting The Treatment. I'll have to go past the chemist today (in between wineries and salmon farms, for Girlie Jones' sake) to pick up the rest of the arsenal, and put in a big effort tonight to clear everything for tomorrow, when there will be at least eight to ten other children on the patch.

Farkin' great. I love this shit.

Best of all, poor Girlie Jones is still blissfully asleep upstairs, doubtless operating on Westralian time still. In another hour or two, I shall have to break it to her that she's come to visit a plague house... she'll never forgive me!

Elementary? Hardly!

Made a pilgrimage to Launceston today to take in the new Guy Ritchie directed Sherlock Holmes flick, with Robert Downey Jr in the title role, and Jude Law playing Watson.

The journey was not without mishap. I phoned the Friendly Neighbour People to see if they wanted to send a couple of their kids with me and the boys - and instead, we wound up travelling in their car, with five of them. My two lads performed brilliantly. We all climbed out into the car park in Launceston, and Elder Son promptly turned green and puked all over the tarmac. Younger Son poked his nose around the rear of the car, caught sight of Elder Son's stage-show, and immediately hurled his own breakfast in sympathy.

I'm afraid I wasn't very supportive. I was too busy giggling, pointing, and trying to get Friendly Neighbour Dad Tony to stop making comments designed to set off two little chunderbuckets all over again.

They paused for a breather. I took 'em to a sammidge shop, put some food and drink into 'em, and it was okay after that.

The verdict on the movie?

Really good, yeah. But one of those films where they never really had any chance of living up to how awesome you hoped it would be.

What do I mean? Well -- it was a Guy Ritchie flick about the London underworld and crime and stuff. Which is what Guy Ritchie does best of all. And it had Robert Downey Jr (who is one of the best performers of his generation, in my opinion) playing one of my all-time favourite characters. Sherlock Holmes has been part of my life since I was maybe four years old.

There was really no way they could have created a film awesome enough to fulfill my hopes.

But they tried pretty damned hard.

Guy Ritchie's visuals were a treat. The colour palette was used with beautiful, understated, gritty blue-grey elegance that gave the whole film real atmosphere. The music was by Hans Zimmer, who did the rich, lush score for the three Pirates of the Caribbean flicks - except this time he kept it sparse, and thematic, and it was excellent. The villains were suitably villainous. The action was top-notch, with really solid, well-crafted fight scenes. The pacing was really good.

And the acting?

Well, Jude Law has now become THE Dr Watson. No more Nigel Bruce bumbling here: Law's Watson is tough, competent, smart, and very nicely torn between his off-beat relationship with his best friend, and his wife-to-be. In a wonderful piece of screenwriting and directing, the film enters the Holmes/Watson partnership at just the time when Watson is moving on with his life - getting out of 221B, setting up in his own private practise, and preparing to get married. The whole thing between Holmes and Watson reverberates around this separation. We get to see the pair of them as long-term buddies, complete with the jokes and the habits and the backstory, and the feeling of trust and affection between them comes through very strongly.

To be honest, for me the least effective part of the film was RDJr as Holmes.

I'm not referring to the director and scriptwriters' re-invention of the screen Holmes as an action hero, master of fisticuffs, eccentric and abrasive and socially impossible. All those things are on the page in Arthur Conan Doyle's books, and frankly, they've been missing from the screen versions of Holmes for far too long. Even as the new Jude Law Watson is much closer to ACD's original character than the perpetually bumbling sidekick of so many films and TV shows, the Holmes given to RDJr is a lot more like the Holmes I knew and loved from the books.

No - for me, the trouble lay in RDJr. For my money, he laid on the arch humour just a little too thick, played it for laughs just a little too obviously, couldn't quite understate the role effectively enough. This isn't the Holmes it could have been: this is Tony Stark (hard-drinking genius with a dark side) shoe-horned into Sherlock Holmes' Victorian-era wardrobe.

Having said that -- well, I'm being nit-picky. And if I hadn't seen RDJr doing Tony Stark, I probably would have been a lot more forgiving. But I did, and once the connection was made, I couldn't shake it.

Overall? Definitely worth seeing, and very enjoyable. The plot's complicated and appropriately over-the-top, and there are a few scenes that don't quite make sense -- but it moves along nicely, and the visuals are brilliant, and the action and fight scenes are really well done. A very strong thread of humour surfaces often enough that I giggled a lot more often than I do at most comedies, and the strength of the Holmes/Watson dyad laid out by these two very fine actors has me already anticipating the sequel.

So: gtfo and SEE the thing. Several times, so they make enough money to hire everybody back for the next movie.

The Day Of Days

Well, I've had worse Christmas Days. The kids did NOT awaken at cracka and come storming up the stairs. Instead, as trained, they stayed quiet until 0700, at which point they came upstairs in a calm fashion, carrying breakfast.

Breakfast? Holy shit! They did it!

Natalie got coffee and her favourite muesli - which is heavy enough to ballast a zeppelin, and guaranteed to make your gastrointestinal tract fearsomely healthy. According to Elder Son, they had to make four prototype cups of coffee before they finally got one right...

And I got a big mug of green tea, and two slices of multi-grain toast with fresh avocado sprinkled with salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon juice. Yay me!

There was a brief flurry of phone calls and texts in the morning, and another round of breakfasts because we had an overnight guest who needed pancakes and fresh blackberries, apparently. And then the serious business of opening presents started.

I made out like a bandit: a couple of books, a bag of bizarro fluffy dyed cotton pompoms with glitter from my daughter, two sticky-tape dispensers from Younger Son, and a book of redeemable Dad Coupons from the Elder Son. Sigh. Ah well. Such is life.

Natalie got some books too. And Sea Monkeys. She always wanted Sea Monkeys as a kid. Now she's got them.

And the kids? Well, it's all about them, innit?

Here's the Mau-Mau with two of her favourites for the day...

The pink princess dress is the replacement for the much-loved fairy pink dress she's worn pretty much every day of her life for the last two years. This new one came from a ballet shop in Launceston, and I hope it serves half as well as the old one. Oh -- and the really farnarkling big pink balloon I found in a party shop. Couldn't resist it. The Mau-Mau loves it, naturally.

Younger Son did very well, thanks. Seeing as it was his birthday yesterday, he scored this bugle and the solar topee ( found 'em both in an Army Disposal in Launceston), plus his first-ever fishing-rod, and a regulation-weight cricket ball, among other odds and sods. Very pleased with his haul, he's been working hard on playing "taps" -- which is interesting, because he has no idea how it goes.

The dog got one of his favourite treats too: people blowing bubbles at him. He loves nothing more than leaping frantically into the air, scarfing down soap bubbles until he gets sick, froths at the mouth, and wanders away making a noise like "Hork! Hork! Hork!"

There's Doctor C. I'm afraid I got a little creative this year. The T-Shirt is my fault. Turns out there's nowhere in Launceston that will print personalised stuff, so I had to paint it and print it from scratch. Turned out okay, I reckon. The good doc is blowing bubbles here - chocolate-scented bubbles at that. The dog was very pleased indeed.

Elder Son is here wearing another of my creations. It's based off a costume he wore to a party some months ago. He's very pleased. He scored a few good things as well, including a vest full of pockets to keep all his junk, plus books and comics and aeroplanes and stuff.

A quick trip back in time, but it's appropos. Younger Son's birthday was yesterday, but this is the infamous Bomb-Shaped Cake of two weeks ago.

And there's the watergun birthday party in full flight...

What else? Well, I picked up a copy of "Last Night On Earth" and "Settlers of Catan" and even "Wii Cricket", so we've been playing games. And I char-roasted a HUGE ham, after dressing it with sweet soy and chilli and sesame and clove... ate it for lunch with twice-cooked taters and a garden salad. It will furnish fine sandwiches later, in between drinkies.

Oh - and the boys were also given electric pickups for their instruments (cheap) and access to their mother's little amplifier and FX pedal. They were absolutely and totally delighted. Spent over an hour just sawing away at cello and violin, trying out echo and fuzz and wah-wah and all sorts of good stuff. Noisy as hell, yes, but anything which helps them get excited about their music is good.

I'm gonna sign off here. The Mau-Mau has been permitted to start one of her new presents -- a spanky new Godzilla flick. It's time for me to make popcorn, mix up some rum and lime, and kick back. It's been a good day.

I wish you all as fine a time, or better.

Adios!

There Is No Sanity Clause

I think I’ve done... pretty much everything I’m supposed to. I know I missed sending out cards to half the world. And I’m sure I forgot presents for another half. But I’m finished, and there’s nothing to be done about it.

I shan’t waste breath ranting about commercialisation, or in querying the nature of this bizarre, hybrid sort of holiday. If you’re not already aware of the peculiar origins of modern Christmas — that is, if you’re genuinely of the opinion it’s a Christian celebration recognising the birth-date of Jesus of Nazareth — I’m afraid that your ignorance is just too massive for me at this time. I’m not averse to tilting at the odd windmill, but I’m simply too tired right now to consider engaging with people who are deliberately ignorant of the history of their own culture.

Instead, I’m just gonna ask one simple question. Why ‘Santa Claus’?

Oh, sure. I know the historical roots of the character: Nicholas of Myra, sometimes called Nicholas the Wonderworker, a Greek bishop around the fourth century who became known for acts of anonymous charity and gift-giving. And it’s a nice story, and a nice concept.

What I want to know is why we perpetuate the fat bugger in the red suit?

I don’t get it. I’m sitting here typing away, thinking about phrases like ‘the magic of Christmas’ and considering how we’re supposed to fool kids with this fairy tale about the fat guy and the reindeer and the wildly improbable circumnavigation of the globe in a single night. And honestly, whose kids really believe that? I know the Mau-Mau is still too young to really understand the size of the world, but I’m quite sure that at nine, Elder Son is well aware of Santa as a myth. And I’m sure that Younger Son, who turned seven today, is equally aware.

Because it doesn’t make any sense. The smallest amount of logic applied to the story makes it fall apart. So, Santa gives gifts to ‘good boys and girls’, does he? How the fuck does he know? And what kind of gifts to the kids on the edge of starvation in the Sudan get? Or are they automatically ‘bad’ for being born in a Santa-free zone?

As adults, we talk patronisingly about not telling the children. Apparently we’re meant to think it’s somehow sweet that they are prepared to believe in a mysterious magical break-and-enter artist who flies around the world distributing gifts in a pattern which heavily favours wealthy households of putatively Christian cultures.

Uhhh... why?

That’s the bit I don’t get. Not at all. I can deal with exchanging presents in recognition of the Gifts of the Magi, no matter how far off-date Christmas may be. (For the record: best historic evidence suggests Jesus of Nazareth was likely born around September.) That’s cool. But... why are we trying to tell our kids that some magic muppet is responsible for putting ‘em out there?

Why is that sweet? Or special? Or magical? Why aren’t we acknowledging that mum and dad worked bastardly hard to manage all this? What’s wrong with saying: it’s Christmas, kid, and the custom is that gifts are given. Why do we try to hide it all behind a fictional devolution of a minor religious figure from sixteen centuries ago?

Would kids look forward to Christmas any less if the gifts didn’t come from a random, anonymous source?

I dunno. I have some suspicions. I think maybe Santa can cop the blame when kids set their sights too high, you know?

“Aww, gee... I didn’t get a Playstation 2 with Thundertronic Sound and a 52-inch plasma screen!”

“Yes. I guess Santa couldn’t fit it in the sleigh this year.”

And I can see where, in the season of giving and with all the Christmas propaganda about charity and generosity, your pragmatic kid from the lower socio-economic bracket is gonna need some kind of explanation as to why his year of good behaviour was only worth a pair of shoes and a Frisbee, while that fat bastard of a kid who lives over in the rich section of town made out like a complete goddam bandit, even though he’s the biggest shitheel in the entire school. But honestly? Santa doesn’t actually level the playing field there. In fact, quite the reverse.

So... what gives?

I know. I’m tired. I’ve been doing the Christmas Consumer Shuffle for too damned long. With three kids, one of whom has his birthday on Christmas Eve, I think I’ve finally suffered the Yuletide equivalent of shell-shock. Not only do I not like the hideous commercial side of this whole goddam time of year, but I no longer understand Santa Claus at all, if I ever did.

Help me out here, folks. I haven’t done anything either to perpetuate the Santa myth, or debunk it in the eyes of my kids. But today I’m tired and weary, and I’m pretty much at the point of laying it on the line: there’s no Santa. Your mum and dad love you, and we think that it’s nice to have a day for giving presents, and that’s all there is to it.

Is that so evil?

Revenge Of The Roosters!

Yeah. I kinda thought this might happen.

One of the problems with free-range chicken is that sometimes it can be a mite too free range. It's like the difference between a fit, healthy jogger and an Olympic marathon specialist, y'know? All that butchery yesterday... I took a good, long look at the carcasses in question, and thought: I'm going to slow-cook these bastards. Very carefully.

This I did. And might I say the flavour was astonishing. I jointed the critters, dredged 'em in flour, salt and pepper, and browned 'em in butter. Then I put 'em into a big casserole dish along with onions, mushrooms, garlic, heaps of tarragon, about a litre of chopped roma tomatoes, a cup of white wine and enough stock to bring it up to the level I wanted. The whole schmeer went into the oven at 140C for about three hours.

Meanwhile, I put together a green salad. Sliced up some potatoes, fried 'em with chopped green onions and more tarragon and pepper. And every now and again, I turned the bits of chicken to ensure they cooked nicely.

At the time of serving, I poked the chicken with a knife and fork, and I admit I was slightly dismayed. But I soldiered on, loaded up the kids' plates, and we settled in for a meal.

Elder Son was the first one to crack. He chawed at his drumstick/thigh combination, then paused and looked at it closely. Then he looked at me. Then he grabbed his knife and kind of stabbed it, but nothing much happened.

"I can't eat this," he opined. "This chicken is too tough!"

What I refrained from saying was the truth: that if this chicken had met James Cameron at the right time, Arnold Schwarzenegger's film career would have died in the ass, and the Terminator series would have been made about mutant farm-fowls from the future, not some pansy-ass goddam robot. No... what I actually said was this:

"Come on, boy! We're human beings. Homo sapiens! Your hunter-gather ancestors would have killed for a meal like this! They would have wept over the exquisite flavours, and raised the mighty hunter upon their shoulders in celebration!"

He looked at me again, and had another go.

Meanwhile, Younger Son had put his drumstick/thigh chunk down, and was giving it a very piercing look. I, on the other hand, had the upper half of the bird -- sans wings, which were on the Mau-Mau's plate -- and was busy separating the flight muscles from the breastbone with much growling and gnashing of teeth.

Younger Son looked at me. I growled some more. Then I said: "Dammit, boy! We're at the top of the food chain! We are the uberpredators! Are we going to let ourselves be beaten by a mere chicken? Will we flee the table, admitting that a simple barnyard bird is tougher than we are?"

His eyes narrowed. He raised his chunk of chicken in both hands, lunged forward, and snapped. I saw the tendons in his neck stand out, the muscles at his jaw knot. He growled, and whipped his head back and forth like a savage wolf, and tore a chunk of dark, dark flesh away from the bone.

The Mau-Mau didn't even try. She just licked all the tarragon and tomato off the outside of her chicken wings, ate her salad and potatoes, and demanded custard.

When Natalie came home, the kids were in the bath. I had defeated the upper half the bird by dint of age, experience, bloody-mindedness and the fact that it actually tasted fucking brilliant. Younger Son had dealt with most of a thigh and a significant portion of drumstick, but the sheer bloodlust in his eyes and the vicious growling noises were making me a little nervous, so I let him call it quits. Elder son bent a knife and a fork, and managed a bite of the drumstick.

I stuck some sausages in the lovely casseroly stuff, and whacked it back in the oven. Natalie duly tried the chicken and discovered for herself that it could have gone twelve rounds with Mike Tyson, and still been able to bite the bastard's ear off later. But the casseroled sausages went down really well...

... so.

I'm guessing that future roosters from that particular source will be used for the making of stock. And given the flavour of the birds, I think they'll do an excellent job. But there's no way I'm trying anything else with the bastards. There's Sylvester-Stallone-Rambo tough. There's Clint-Eastwood-Dirty-Harry-Tough. There's Jason-Statham-Chev-Chelios-tough.

And then there's free-range, Killer Commando Chicken tough.

Why Is Science So Lame?

Seriously. I mean, scientists are forever dicking around trying to cure malaria or unravel the genome to cancer, or maybe build shinier solar stuff, when what the world really needs is completely something else.

Non-fartogenic beer. That's a good example, right there. Who's out there, researching day and night to save us all from stinking great eye-watering, ass-burning beer farts? Nobody, that's who. But if you turned up tomorrow with fart-proof beer that tasted great and got you drunk just as fast -- dude, they wouldn't be able to get your name on the Nobel scrolls fast enough.

But that's not what I'm really talking about right now. Fart-proof beer isn't a bad idea, but what the world really, really needs is a self-disassembling chicken. Absolutely.

See, today we had some visitors. Actually, we had a couple today, and one leftover from the night before . That was Miss M the Student Dietician who turned up last night for Thai fish stew, and crepes with home-made vanilla ice-cream and garden-fresh raspberries. She stuck around to watch Igor up in the Cinema Zone with Clan Flinthart, plus a whole lot of popcorn and a large pitcher of that gin and curacao stuff... made for a good evening all around.

So Miss M and Nat and the kids were all hitting the blueberry pancakes this morning when our other visitors arrived -- a couple of local folk, who brought with them a pair of goddam roosters. Why? Because the local folk in question, who are perfectly lovely people in their own right, are animal softies. They rescue 'em. And keep 'em. And look after 'em.

And they aren't much chop when it comes to going the chop-chop with the excess of roosterage.

Enter Mr Flinthart and his Cleaver of Chicken Slaughteration.

Once the visitors toddled off, I felt I could go about Silencing the Roosters without alarming anyone unduly. So I seized the cleaver in question, opened the travel cage, and pulled out one of the big, white chooky bastards.

Cranky bloody thing it was, too. Lots of blurrrking and borrking, and attempts to gouge yours truly with the impressively large and sharp spurs on the back of the feet. Nasty. No wonder the lovely visitor-folks wanted rid of the damned things...

So I took Rooster One out to the wood-chop zone, and laid its head on the block. And who should come bolting around the corner but Younger Son, eh? Mightily excited, he is. Apparently some banana-brain has told him that chooks run around after you cut their heads off, and he is truly desperate to see...

...great.

No, I'm not gonna consult with Natalie, I figure. The Younger Son needs to understand how this stuff works if he's going to eat meat. I'm no vegetarian, as you all know -- but I don't have much time for people who will eat meat, but can't face the ugly facts behind that delicious, tasty meal. If you can't bring yourself to kill and clean the meat for your table, sez I, stick to the greenery. And no: I've never slaughtered a cow. But the odd lamb, occasional goat kid, and wallaby? Yep. Without blinking.

So I shrugged, and brought down the cleaver - which is fiendish sharp, oh yes - and Rooster One loses its Command and Control module. The head sits there on the chopping block, blinking and opening its beak remarkably like unto a chicken too stupid to know that it's dead, while the body leaps about, flapping and spraying blood, and Younger Son stares in fascinated horror...

I don't think he's going to have nightmares. But just to help him along, I made him put the head into the compost heap. And then, after I plunged Rooster One into a pot of boiling water to loosen the feathers, I left Younger Son hard-a-pluck, and introduced Rooster Two to a chunk of century-old hand-crafted German steel.

And there was much plucking, and stench of wet feathers, and then there was gutting and there was blood and me with my hand deep in a dead chicken's body cavity, grouting around for the little fraggy bits that you can never quite get loose. And at some point or another, Elder Son came out just as Younger Son discovered that you can squeeze a dead chicken and activate its voicebox, so there was macabre Zombie Chicken noise happening. And Elder Son wanted to know what was going on, so I called him over to help hold the remaining unviolated chicken corpse, and just as he was about to reach for it I gave it a squeeze and it went "blu-urrk!" in a convincingly chickenlike fashion and he jumped about a metre and a half and Younger Son fell about the place laughing, getting blood and feathers all over himself, and earning me the Wrath of Natalie who was Not At All Amused by Zombie Chicken antics.

Now both plucked, cleaned corpses are reposing quietly in the bottom of my refrigerator. Tomorrow I will joint them, season them, and slow bake them until they're crispy golden brown, to be served with new potatoes and garden salad and maybe a nice dry white wine... but nevertheless, it was still a horrid, ugly, stinky, feathery sort of job. And what I really want for Christmas, dear Science, is a chicken that will kill itself. And then shed all its feathers in a single fluffy cloud. And then fall apart into nice, neatly sectioned joints, with the giblets in a pile of ugly in the centre, ready to be properly disposed of.

Is that too much to ask, O Mighty Geneticists? Or are you too busy diddling around with second-rate shit like AIDS, Swine Flu, and a cure for Stephen Conroy?

... actually, I have to admit that I'd be prepared to accept a cure for Stephen Conroy. That would be cool too.

What's A Science Fiction Writer To Do?

Jeez.

I love a good piece of fiction as much as anyone. But it's rough when supposed newspapers get into the SF act. Check this article here. Really. It's pretty funny, in a po-faced "you're supposed to take this shit seriously" way.

I particularly like this section:

In addition, popular NASA and space researcher, Richard Hoagland, has publicly come forward to reveal that the October 9, LCROSS ‘bombing’ mission of the moon, discovered an ancient base at the moon’s South Pole. Reviewing the scientific data achieved by NASA’s LCROSS mission, Hoagland concluded, also on the popular late night Coast to Coast AM radio show, that “LCROSS is part of a carefully constructed campaign to prepare the populace for imminent disclosure. The President of the United States will soon announce that scientists have discovered ruins on the moon, he added. Nobody saw the LCROSS debris plume because the probes struck a building which swallowed the effects of the explosion.”

I mean -- that shit's gold, right there. But seriously, how's an SF writer supposed to get a look-in if the journalists are printing this kinda stuff? Should I be trying to convince the editor of the Examiner.com that I should have a column of my own? I'm definitely capable of spinning much more convincing crap than that. But is that a good thing? Do they want SF that sounds plausible? Or is their target market wedded to tinfoil hats and mad-arsed conspiracy theories?

Never mind. Since all the revelations are due to happen before the end of 2009, we shouldn't have to put up with this much longer. And I suppose it's more entertaining than sightings of Elvis, eh?