Goodbye, Ray.

Ray Bradbury has died.

Absolutely nothing I can say or write can touch that one, single fact.

So long, Ray - and... thank you.

Stuck In Transit

Transit of Venus, Transit of Venus
How shall I rhyme thee
Without using "penis"?
         --- From "Lord Byron: Notes Scrawled On The Privy Wall"






So. It's bright and sunny outside. Yep. Beautiful. Clear, with the kind of crystalline quality you only get on a crispy, wintry day in a place that actually has a winter. And of course, Venus is in transit.

That's right. Across the sun, yep. Little black dot. Very important from a scientific viewpoint, oh, yes. And it won't be happening again for a hundred and four or five years, apparently.

That being the case, I set about attempting to view said transit with the kids.

Attempt #1 - Simple Pinhole Camera. Obtained large cardboard box. Punched small, neat hole in one side. Put clean white paper on opposite side, interior. Aimed pinhole at the sun.

Result: Round dot of light on piece of paper. No visible Transit of Venus.

Attempt #2 - Focus Through Binocular Lenses. Brought out bird-viewing binoculars. Recycled nice, clean white paper from Attempt #1 above. Pointed big end of binoculars at the sun, shone the output onto the clean white paper.

Result: Somewhat larger fuzzy round blob of light on the paper. No visible Transit of Venus.

Attempt # 3: DSLR and Useful Lens. Attached 75-300mm lens to Canon DSLR. Manually set focus to infinity. Carefully lined up with the sun using tripod, etc.

Result: lack of filter means no real resolution - just a fuzzy white ball. No visible Transit of Venus

Attempt #4: Video Camera and TV.  Connected handheld JVC digital video camera to television. Stood outside the window with camera in hand, using camera LCD screen to find the sun, and shouts from children inside to guide attempts at zoom/focus

Result: Lack of filter makes camera very unhappy. No real focus. Large, fuzzy white blob. No visible Transit of Venus

Attempt # 5: Welding Goggles. Sent boys off in pursuit of my welding goggles, with the aim of using them as a filter for one of the various cameras. Boys argue bitterly over which of them last used the welding goggles to pretend to be a Steampunk mad scientist villain. Both boys are sent to fetch firewood in punishment. No welding goggles found.

Result: Still no motherfucking Transit of Venus.

(Pause to think...)

Attempt # 6 Camera Motherfucking Obscura.  Dirk remembers accounts of Renaissance painters converting entire motherfucking rooms into giant fucking pinhole cameras, oh yes. Dirk grabs a BIG-ASS sheet of cardboard, and goes up to the CinemaZone shed. He jabs a target arrow through the cardboard sheet, and uses it to block the northern window into the very large, very dark loft. He then traces the solitary beam of light, and places a nice, clean, white sheet of paper in its path, some four metres from the source.

Result: a nifty, clear, round image of the sun some four cm across. And... what's that? What's that? Yes! It's a little black blot near the upper left quadrant... exactly where it ought to be. It's a little unfocused, yes, but it's definitely there, and it's quite clear. YES! MOTHERFUCKING YES! WE HAVE TRANSIT OF VENUS!!!!

Dirk and children stand around in the dark shed looking at the blob of light for about five minutes. Fuck-all happens. Venus is In Transit.

Epilogue: return to house. Sign into the Internet. Check in with NASA, find a live feed of the Transit of Venus. Big, red-filtered sun, very clear round black spot. Hmm. Looks just like a computer graphic, doesn't it?

Never mind. Time for some hot chocolate, maybe.

School Holidays: The Other Web

Today is cold, windy, blustery as hell. Trees are bending over like politicians in front of mining magnates. Tasmania's got the winter thing going on.

Yesterday, I took the kids into Launceston to go bowling. Yay me. Natalie got to stay home and work, which was good, because she'd already started fighting with Genghis... and on only Day Three of the holidays. Gotta love that.

Since the bowling alley is just spitting distance from Chez Tehani et al, we dropped in there, and made plans. However, the best-laid plans of mice, men, and mothers gang aft agley when confronted by a stroppy toddler, and young Max decided he Needed His Nap, so in the end it was yours truly who took five children bowling.

Five.  Bowling.

It starts with shoes. Everybody's gotta have shoes. Nobody knows what size they are. Even me: turns out I needed an eleven, not a ten. Who knew? So I'm standing there, pulling shoes off kids, putting kids up on the counter, exchanging shoes, replacing shoes... happily, one of my older ju-jitsu students rocked up out of the blue. He was in town with his family, doing exactly what we were doing. But he's a particularly useful kind of kid (okay, he's nearly sixteen and he's as tall as I am, and he's a state representative in rugby, so maybe 'kid' is a little inaccurate) and immediately set to with the shoe-tying and the exchanging and lifting and all the rest, and I Am Grateful. Thank You, Big K!

Our deal with the bowling alley gave us two games each, and a Hot Dog Meal thrown in. Num num num. Yeah. Hot dog, french fries, soft drink: the lunch of fucking champions! Fortunately, it's the sort of thing kids like. Me? Err... yeah. Hmm.

Interesting fact: two games of bowling with five kids takes the better part of two and a half hours. When we were done, I threw them all out at Tehani's place, and dashed into Launceston for a bunch of errands: LED lighting strips, power supplies, a soldering-iron stand, kitchen scales, 820 ohm resistor, in-line electrical switches, extension wire... all good. I've discovered the sheer joy of LED lighting strips, you see. Thirty bucks gets you half a metre or so of bright, bright LED lights which operate very easily off a 12v power supply. I can now see the stovetop at night, which is a real novelty.

It's so effective that Natalie decided the boys needed new reading lights. I put one up over Jake's bed... but it's so damned bright we're going to have to build some kind of you-beaut light-shade, and make sure we direct it just to his reading area, or he'll keep Genghis awake. And maybe fry the cat, too: those lights are fucking strong!

Anyway. We got home just in time for Genghis to pack, and be collected by his friend Liam and his mum. So Genghis is off overnight. But not long. I'll pick him up later this afternoon, so he and Jake and I can go in to watch movies with the Cool Shite boys in Launceston. Oh, and we'll be taking one or more of the Baggins lasses with us, it seems.

Meanwhile, this morning Natalie shot through to Launceston for a while. And then, one of the Mau-Mau's friends showed up, with her mum and brother in tow. So now the Mau-Mau is off with friends for the day. And that's okay.

Of course, Jake and I are off to the NatCon over the weekend. That starts Friday, and Natalie isn't much good for childminding on Friday, so on Thursday, I'll duck into Launceston, grab a couple of kids off Tehani, and bring 'em out here for a sleepover. Then when Jake and I head into Launceston Airport on Friday morning, we'll drop off Tehani's two, plus Genghis and the Mau-Mau, and Tehani will have them until the afternoon, when Natalie will collect them.

All of which means that next week - the second week of the school holidays - we will be seeing Liam visit, and probably the Mau-Mau's friends too. There's also a promised day of gaming (Paranoia!) with the Viking Neighbours. And Jake is going to visit his friend James at some point next week too.

You see what I mean by 'web'? With three kids, school holidays become unfeasibly complex. Who dreams up this crap, anyway?

But at least it looks like tomorrow will be sunny. Transit of Venus, anybody?

Pants

Well, crap. I can't seem to widen this stupid text box. Nor can I put the picture up as a thumbnail. No doubt there's a cleverboots way of handling this, but I really don't have time. Fuck. This. Shit.

Trying To Remember...

...what it might have been like to be lonely. As in: greatly desirous of human company.

Thursdays are the closest thing I have to a day to myself. The kids go to school, and while every second Thursday I have to grab them from the bus at 1530 to drive them (and some others) into Launceston for trampoline and gymnastics at the PCYC, on the alternate Thursdays it can happen that all the way to 1825 or so, I might not have other people in my face.

Right now, I've just had a very fine Boags Pure Lager. I've got ABC Dig Music coming in via the TV, which I have just wired to a small amplifier/speaker system because the native sound off the TV was shite. It's dark outside, and pleasantly cool in here, despite the fact that the fire is pootling along cheerfully. I've got a pot of leek and sweet potato soup simmering on the stove, and I've just pulled the bacon out of the grill. When the family gets here, they will have delicious soup with bacon bits and sour cream and chopped coriander.

But you see, there I go: planning already for the return of wife and kids.

What was it like, being alone? I did it, now and again, when I was younger. I took multi-day walks deep into isolated bushland, carrying my food and my gear in my pack. Once I hitch-hiked around Ireland on my own... at least until two very cute German lasses with a car of their own made me a better offer.

Lately, though, I find myself wondering.

Let's be honest: I've never really liked most of the human race. Oh, by and large they're decent enough, but I wouldn't actually seek them out for company. My friends know who they are... but it's an indication of the nature of what I call 'friendship' that Papa Stanley can show up at my house a good seven years after I last saw him, and we simply carry on in much the same fashion as always. We're friends, yes, absolutely. Good friends, I believe - but I know he can live without me, and vice versa.

These days, communicating with the people you want to reach is easier than at any time in history. I have a number of distinct, but overlapping, circles of friends. Some I see regularly and routinely. (Hi, Bruce!) Others I might only hear from once a year or so. (Simone? Julie? You out there?) Nevertheless, I could get in touch quickly, as needed.

What I do not have is that ability to walk away, and experience silence and isolation. I have three kids, and a wife. I have commitments to study, to writing, to family, to teaching, and to the community in which I live. I move from obligation to obligation, moment to moment, breathing in the spaces between, mustering my resources, planning the next engagement on the fly. I may spend an afternoon in relative peace on a Thursday... but nevertheless, I'm tied down, locked in. I picked up snacks and drinks for the kids. I shopped for, and installed, the speaker/amp system so that the others can enjoy TV and games and music. I met the kids at the bus stop, delivered snacks and drinks and paperworks, collected school-bags and books, and organised a few details with my neighbour. Then I went home again, handled laundry, laid my plans for dinner, etc.

And amidst this, if I did feel lonely I have email, and Facebook, and I have a mobile phone too. If I really wanted there's Skype and various chat systems, and the landline. There's the radio. The TV. A backlog of movies and TV series I've been meaning to watch.

I think... I think I might like to walk away for a while. I can't really remember, any more, what it's like to go through a day without confronting other people. I think I might truly enjoy a week, a month perhaps, of genuine isolation. The chance to reflect, to contemplate, to reduce my daily obligations to the absolute minimum necessary for self-maintenance, or self-improvement.

Of course, I can't see it happening any time in the next five years or so. But the fact is that here I am, and it's dark, and cold outside, but I'm warm and the music is good, and frankly, I don't think I'd mind if I could just stay like this for a while...

Maybe I'm Jaded...

Checked out a film with the Shite Team last night. We had high hopes for it: a thing called Kill List, which is touted as this amazing British horror flick full of suspense and scary stuff and violence and... stuff. Rotten Tomatoes has it at about 75% as I write this, so you understand when I said we were kind of excited.

We'd considered The Grey, but I couldn't face a movie about Liam Neeson punching wolves, at least not without cheering loudly for the wolves. Bruce popped it onscreen for a brief instant, and we got a lovely temperate pine-forest with snowy mountains as a backdrop... but I felt compelled to shout "Look out, wolves! Liam Neeson is coming to punch you!" and after that, the others decided that maybe we should watch something else.

Hence Kill List. And it's been a long time since I was that disappointed in a movie.

Maybe I'm jaded, okay? But the film starts slowly. Very bloody slowly. We're presented with the rather unlikable Jay, a man in early middle age living somewhat beyond his means in a suburban house in England; a house loaded down with expensive furnishings, exercise gear that Jay clearly doesn't use, jacuzzis, and toys for Jay's beloved son.

The opening scenes drag on through domestic strife between Jay and his wife over money, through a tedious dinner party with Jay's Irish buddy Gal and his deeply strange partner Fiona. Jay throws a tanty and ends the meal on a sour note. More shouting occurs offscreen. Gal attempts to placate Jay's young son. And then gradually the adults get their shit together. But then they get drunk, and stupidity follows.

None too bloody quickly, we discover that Jay and Gal are ex-soldiers, having done time in Iraq. They now work as contract hit-men, and the implication is that they get hired to kill nasty, unpleasant, frequently criminal people. Well, okay. Nothing new in that. Oh - and about a year ago, they had a job in Kiev that went very wrong. But we don't know how or why.

Anyway. Jay accepts Gal's suggestion, and they go off to get a new contract. By now, Weird Fiona has inscribed a stupid little geometric symbol on the back of a mirror in Jay's bathroom, and has apparently gaff-taped a 'dear john' letter to Gal's dick in the night. Eh. You get that on the big jobs, right?

The contract goes askew immediately. The old man doing the hiring says "Necessary", and slashes Jay's hand with a knife, then cuts his own, and splats blood on the contract. Jay doesn't really seem perturbed by this. Okay.

From here on in, things just get uglier. Jay and Gal go out to fulfill the eponymous Kill List, and Jay goes farther and farther off the tracks in the process. Meanwhile, the world in which Jay moves inexplicably gets more and more weird, with victims thanking him profusely as he beats the ever-loving shit out of them with various kitchen and garage impedimenta.

By the final murder, the movie has -- as Robert Downey Jr puts it so aptly in Tropic Thunder -- gone 'the full retard'. Jay and Gal are hanging around the vast estate of the palatial (I'm sure I recognised it from some historical doco or another) house of an MP who's made it onto the shit-list. It's night, and a troop of loonies in mixed garb (some wear calico smocks and straw masks; others are just naked, but not an enjoyable, 'wish that was Scarlett Johansson' sort of naked; they're all too pale, pasty and lumpy for that) parades through the forest, carrying torches. They carry out some sort of generic death ritual in which a random woman gets hanged - though she seems quite happy to participate - and Jay loses it yet again. Blazing away with guns, Jay and Gal retreat from the howling loonies, fleeing (for some inexplicable reason) into a stone-lined tunnel system.

Yes.

Loonies stab Gal. Gal dies. Jay shoots many loonies. Jay escapes. Loonies follow Jay to his hideaway. Trouble ensues. Jay is captured. Jay is forced into an embarrassing knife-fight with a hunchback wearing a calico smock and a straw mask. Jay wins. The identity of the hunchback is revealed... oh my, how shocking. And then the straw mask loonies unmask, and there's the client who hired Jay among others, and there endeth the film.

It's an effort to do The Wicker Man all over again, with Jay at the centre. Unfortunately, because Jay is an unlikable twat and we're never actually given any reason to be interested in him or his doings, Team Cool Shite and I just flat out didn't give a bubbly brown fart what was happening to him. And as for that "final, shocking revelation" - well, I guessed half of it. But immediately after I voiced my idea, Q-dog spoke up in a very weary voice and predicted the "twist" down to the last, hackneyed, cliche-raddled image.

The film is violent, yes. But then, there's so much violence on screen now. It isn't particularly affecting unless I have something invested in the victims. And Jay's victims are a bunch of lowlives, while Jay himself is completely uninteresting, so it's hard to care. All that's left is the 'ick' factor you always get with excessively violent hammer murders.

The film is not spooky, unless you're susceptible to schoolyard tales of ghosties and serial murderers. I'm not.

 It's not atmospheric: it's slow, frequently boring, and in between times, flat out incomprehensible.

And that "industrial soundtrack" they mention in the reviews? The one that builds atmosphere? I don't know what atmosphere it was building, to tell the truth. Frankly, it reminded me of a flaccid fart.

Essentially, this film tries desperately to be atmospheric, intense, portentous and spooky. Instead it becomes tedious, repugnant, and irritatingly silly. If the film-makers actually wrapped it up, and tried to tell a functional, coherent story that tied up a few of their loose threads, it might have been interesting. I get the impression, however, that they realised they'd written themselves into a corner, and being unable to construct any kind of rationale for what they'd done, they decided simply to say fuck it, and pile on the wannabe-creepy imagery in the hopes that the audience would be overcome by the woooo-spooky! stuff.

Didn't work.

Mr Flinthart gives it: Four G&T - meaning that if you drink four stiff gin and tonics quite quickly, the second half of the movie should at least provoke a few giggles as the looniness sets in.

Visitations

Well, that was nice! My old boon companion Papa Steve rocked up. Not quite out of the blue, mind you. He dropped me a line a couple weeks back declaring he'd be in the area, and we worked out an overnighter between us.

It was very fine to see the man again. I don't think I've actually been face-to-face with him since an epic wedding about eight years ago. Steve is one of the best; one of those who has the right to call when and where and however, and expect an answer and as much aid and assistance as I can come up with.

He got along with the kids famously. Genghis was particularly impressed, since Papa Steve is himself a bass player of many years standing. He picked up the 1/8th size bass that Genghis plays, and proceeded to jazz it up very nicely indeed.

Unfortunately, Steve was also the victim of Sudden Transplant Syndrome. These days, he's a hothouse flower, living up in Cairns. From the layers of clothing he was wearing, I don't think that our 2C evenings and cool, rainy afternoons really agreed with him. He was surprised to see I was only wearing sandals on my feet when I collected him. I pointed out that the only reason the sandals were there was because my heels were cracking up again... otherwise I would have been barefoot, as ever.

We fed him up okay. He got a good dose of Nasi Ayam - chicken rice, Malaysian style, and I made a decent effort at producing a Key Lime Pie. I'd not tried that before, but seeing as how it's one of the all-time classic USAnian desserts that turns up in every random chunk of fiction you care to name, I figured it was about time I had a go at it.

Rather disappointingly, Key Lime Pie turns out to be very similar to a simple Lemon Tart... except with a biscuit-crumb base, and (Florida) Key Lime zest and juice in place of the usual lemony bits. Oh, and of course, it uses sweetened condensed milk (plus a bit of cream) in place of rather a lot of cream and sugar. But that's about it, really. No big deal. If you can do a decent Lemon Tart, then Key Lime Pie is no big thing. Oh, and apparently the substitution of the standard limes you can get at the supermarket for the Key Lime is perfectly acceptable. I was lucky, though: turns out someone is growing limes locally around here, and I bought a bunch of them, ripe, fresh and cheap at one of the petrol stations in Scottsdale.

Limes growing in Tasmania? Who knew? I've got two little lime trees, so I guess there's hope for them. Unfortunately, the one I've got in the ground got... Natalified. She decided it needed to be weed-free, so she lifted the wire cage around it, stripped the weeds - and didn't put the wire back. In one night, the wallabies ate every leaf off the tree, and the ends of most of the branches. I've put the wire back and given it lots of care and attention, and I'm hoping it will recover. Meanwhile, the one in the pot on the deck (I'm hardening it against winter, so I can put it in the ground too) is doing fine. I'll plant it out in spring.

Hmm. Heh: I picked up The Rolling Stones: Rolled Gold the other day. Had it on the player in the car when I was driving the kids to school this morning. They were absolutely delighted by some of the tunes. Paint It Black got their attention, as did Jumping Jack Flash. Sympathy For The Devil went over quite well, but the stand-out was Satisfaction.

Listening to it again, for the first time in quite a while, I have to admit it's a genuine classic. That unmistakeable guitar riff, so arrogant, with just enough distortion on it to sound like a snarl... and then Jagger comes in, but he knows enough to rein in his often sharp, slashing vocals so those famous first couple of lines come out almost like a purr, in marvellous contrast to that vicious guitar. Fantastic stuff.

Of course, the kids have been dancing around all evening, singing off-key versions of the thing. But that's okay. It feels good to bring them another nifty piece of the world to enjoy.