Jake Flinthart Has Been Writing Again.

I just received this e-mail from Jake, at his school. He was asked to write an expository piece about the cancellation of the local show. ('Show' = 'local fair' for the overseas readers hereabouts.)

Let me hasten to add that the Scottsdale Show is NOT cancelled. This is just a writing exercise. But frankly, I think he's done a great job, and his piece is funny, so I'm reproducing it here. Remember the kid is ten years old, so don't expect Shakespeare. On the other hand... I think Ben Elton might need to look out.

The Show Must Go On‭!

An exposition starring Thames O’reilly and Dennis‭ ‘‬deny everything‭’ ‬Fletcher

TV PRESENTER:‭ ‬Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of‭ ‬The Debaters and I’m everybody’s favourite presenter‭ ‬Thames O’reilly‭! ‬Today we just got word that the Scottsdale council is‭ ‬going to cancel the Scottsdale Show‭! ‬What we need here is a good debater and here he is:‭ ‬DENNIS‭ ‘‬deny everything‭’ ‬FLETCHER‭!

DENNIS FLETCHER:‭ ‬Yah,‭ ‬zat is me.

THAMES:‭ ‬How do you feel about the council cancelling the Scottsdale Show‭?

DENNIS:‭ ‬What‭?! ‬No‭ ‘‬otdogs on a steeck‭? ‬Ze Scottzdale show is...‭ ‬Well,‭ ‬kind of a‭ ‬cultural theeng in Scottzdale.‭ ‬Peeple save op for it,‭ ‬are exzcited about it,‭ ‬and it only comes once a yeer‭! ‬It's like going to a native tribe of some contry and cancelling an ancient reetual for zere peeple.‭ ‬Ze Scottzdale show is eemportant to a lot of people,‭ ‬and ze blimming council does not have ze right to demolish zis age old tradition‭! ‬It wouldn't be so bad if zey had cancelled it earlier in ze year so people wouldn't have to take down their preparations for it,‭ ‬but no,‭ ‬zey decide to cancel it right when everyone is preparing for it‭!

THAMES:‭ ‬Those are some pretty good arguments,‭ ‬but is there any other reason‭?

DENNIS:‭ ‬Yeh‭! ‬What about ze peeple who make money out of it‭? ‬You’d be steeling dere job‭! ‬All zose peeple who zell zose battered zausages on a steeck rely on ze Scottzdale show for a lot of their money‭! ‬Cancelling ze show would make all zat tedious preparation‭ (‬cooking ze food,‭ ‬zetting up a stall,‭ ‬buying a permeet,‭ ‬zat sort of stuff...‭) ‬go right down ze drain‭! ‬And who is to say zat they’ll get their money back‭? ‬Ze preparation requires lot of money,‭ ‬and eef they don’t get their money back and they don’t get a profit because ze show is cancelled,‭ ‬zey could go bankrupt‭!

THAMES:‭ ‬I hope the council’s watching this right now‭! ‬I don’t know you,‭ ‬folks,‭ ‬but Dennis here is sure convincing me‭! ‬Go on,‭ ‬Dennis...

DENNIS:‭ ‬Zank hyu.‭ ‬Now there’s also ze problem of the animal attractions in ze Scottzdale show.‭ ‬If it’s cancelled,‭ ‬what weel happen to all zat work zey put in to clean their animals and train them‭? ‬It’ll all be for nothing‭! ‬Hyu know,‭ ‬it’s bad eenuf zat we get a holiday for ze‭ ‬Launzeston show but not for ze‭ ‬Scottzdale show,‭ ‬but now they're stopping it altogther‭!

THAMES:‭ ‬You’ve explained all the communtiy and economic problems,‭ ‬but what about the simpler problems‭?

DENNIS:‭ ‬Ah yez,‭ ‬I forgot.‭ ‬Ze children.‭ ‬You can’t deny it:‭ ‬ze children LOVE ze Scottzdale show‭! ‬It’s cheap,‭ ‬fun,‭ ‬local and all ze money goes to people in ze community.‭ ‬Plus zere is lollies‭! ‬Imagine all ze children crying zemselves to sleep because ze council has cancelled it‭! ‬Why should zey suffer‭?

THAMES:‭ ‬Wow,‭ ‬that was great,‭ ‬Dennis.‭ ‬People are definetly getting their money’s worth today.

DENNIS:‭ ‬It’s my job.

THAMES:‭ ‬Too bad they’re still probably going to cancel the show.

DENNIS:‭ ‬I’m not going to theenk about zat.

THAMES:‭ ‬And there you have it,‭ ‬ladies and gentlemen‭! ‬They don’t call him Mr.‭ ‘‬deny everything‭’ ‬for nothing‭! ‬I’m afraid today’s episode is coming to a finish,‭ ‬but next week we’ll be finding out who exactly‭ ‘‬they‭’ ‬is‭! ‬Bye everyone‭!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

...must remember to teach him how to spell 'definitely'.

Christmas For The USA Will Be A Lonely Event This Year.

I have an acquaintance in the packaging and posting industry, and apparently yesterday he had a very, very interesting day.

Turns out that the USA has now banned the sending of any personal effects by air, except where accompanied by a traveller. Basically, that means if you were planning to send any Christmas gifts to friends or relations in the USA -- it's tough shit for everybody.

No doubt this is supposed to prevent exploding printer cartridges or other such fiendish al Qaeda ingenuity. But what it's really going to do is turn Christmas, USA into a living hell for the US Customs department.

At this point, I can't find any confirmation of this particular ban. But I trust my source absolutely, and seeing that he's got a serious vested commercial interest in this issue, I believe he's taken the time to get his information right.

My advice to readers: hold off on sending any packages to the USA until you can find out for sure what's the deal here. And to anybody participating in a cross-border Secret Santa or other such exchange, you may wish to notify USAnian participants that your contribution might be (very) slow in arriving.

I'll stay in touch with my buddy in the industry on this, and pass on any information I can. Hopefully, the US will realise that it's made a colossal blunder, and the order will be reversed in the near future, or even better, not even implemented. But I wouldn't count on it.

Meanwhile... so if we can't even send gifts to celebrate the Nativity and all that good stuff, you wanna tell me again how we're winning this 'war on terror'? Because right now, it's starting to look like a 'War on Christmas', with the US government in full Grinch costume.

Edited to add: confirmation is in, courtesy of redditor shortkid422 - check the following two links.

Apparently it's only a 30-day ban at the moment. We'll see how it develops, eh ?

http://www.cartusblog.com/?p=1550

http://www.moveoneinc.com/blog/moving/enban-household-goods-hhg-shipments/

The Face Of Evil Is A Mirror

I'm disabling comments on this post. Those of you who agree with what I may have to say are unlikely to have anything more to contribute, as I believe you'll understand by the end of the piece. Those of you who disagree?

You can find your own way out. Thanks.

Nietszche famously said: "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." The quote refers to the danger of being changed by the process of struggling against what you hate into the very thing that you hate.

Since late 2001, by virtue of decisions taken largely by the US government, and to a lesser extent the governments of a group of nations including England and Australia, our society has been involved in a so-called 'war on terror'. We are repeatedly assured that it's for our freedom's sake. That we are the Good Guys. That the Bad Guys are Just Plain Evil.

But what's the real difference between good guys and bad guys? It's not motivation, that's for certain. Some of history's most terrifyingly evil acts have been carried out with what seemed to be the best of motivation.

The difference lies in walking the walk. In the doing. In the actions you take. In the rules you follow. In the limits you place on yourself.

And in this soul-destroying war on a fiction, as a society and as a people, we've crossed the lines. Really. Pay attention to what I'm saying: we aren't the fucking good guys any more. If we ever were.

This isn't some piece of hack lefty moral equivalence. I'm not suggesting that identifiable terrorists and religious extremists have become the 'the good guys'. I'm saying, very loudly, that there are no longer any 'good guys' in this fight.

We set rules for ourselves. We broke them. We created standards of human decency and treatment. We defiled them. We proudly trumpeted ideals of equality, justice, representation and liberty. And we abandoned them.

I've spent nine years of my life, now, calling for a more thoughtful and measured response to the insults put forward by the Taliban and their ilk. I supported the war in Afghanistan because even the Afghan people were being abused by the Taliban, and they needed our help just as much as we needed to take away the safe haven the place offered Al Qaeda. I still support action in Afghanistan to help the Afghans rebuild, and to strengthen their society so it never again needs to slide into theistic totalitarianism.

I never supported the war in Iraq. I opposed it vocally, and at length, in the face of some very nasty personal criticism from people who should have known better. I lost friends over that one - though I'm proud of the friends who argued sanely, rationally, and logically... and eventually had the courage to admit to errors.

And I've screwed up from time to time as well. Who hasn't? This situation is a pile of shit.

But I've never, ever supported some of the measures we've been taking. And I have been distressed, dismayed and horrified to see the descent of the liberal-minded, freedom-loving society of my upbringing brought closer and closer to some sort of Orwellian parody of itself. Invasive searches of children at airports - the alternative being high-dosage X-rays. 'Free Speech Zones'. 'Total Information Awareness'. 'Great Internet Firewalls'. "Extraordinary Rendition". 'Children Overboard' - and concentration camps for desperate refugees in leaky boats.

The worst, I think, is the torture. And the fact that we've never even tried to hold anyone accountable for it.

Torture? Yes. I mean waterboarding. And if you don't know what that is, you're blissfully ignorant. Go and look it up. And if you disagree that it constitutes 'torture', consider that our side convicted several Japanese soldiers of precisely this crime after the second world war. Try this article as a beginning.

Of course, we've known for some time that waterboarding went on in Afghanistan and Iraq. But like any war, more information comes to light over time. It's now clear and public that President Bush authorised the use of waterboarding. And that a depressingly large number of people were complicit.

What is now coming to light is a range of details. Facts. Observations. Things which were done by our people, in the name of our freedom. Terrible, vile things. I direct your attention to this article from Salon.com:

"Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing."

The remainder of the carefully written and researched article is here, and I urge you to read it, because I want to make three important points which relate to this.

The first point is: I have been unable to find anywhere any evidence to suggest that the use of waterboarding or any of the other so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' (because we can't call it 'torture', can we? We're the Good Guys, right? When we do it, it's not 'torture'.) has ever, at any time, yielded information of significant value.

Furthermore, the whole of the literature with which I am familiar in this area suggests that torture does not provide useful information. Time and again, the evidence shows that alternative techniques work far, far more effectively. I'll say it again: torture doesn't work. And if it doesn't work, it is pointless.

The second point is: we claim to live in a democratic, representative society. If that is so, then we the people are ultimately responsible for what is done in our name. You. Me. Our friends and relatives. We may not have poured the water, tilted the boards, held the cloth over the heads of screaming victims -- but the people we put in charge arranged for this to happen. It is our fault. If you choose to disagree with this, the only real alternative that you have is to argue that we do not live in a democratic, representative society... and that would be my case made for me, wouldn't it? Because what I keep saying is: we are not the Good Guys any more.

The final point I want to make is personal: if you can read that article and find it in you to approve of what was done, or if you can make some kind of justification or rationalisation to exonerate the people who did it and the people who authorised it -- go away.

Truly. Really. I don't need you. I don't want to know you. I have nothing to say to you. Go elsewhere. Don't come back to this place until you've had some kind of a change of mind, or a change of heart. I don't care who you are, or how long I've known you. It's not a permanent condemnation, because I believe even the wrong-headed can grow up and change, and I'll be happy to welcome you back when you do. But very simply: I don't have time or space in my life for people who can support this. It is absolutely unacceptable in any society that dares call itself 'civilised'.

I do not support this. Nor ever have. We may not be the Good Guys any more, but I'm hoping like hell, and working as hard as I can, to change that -- for my children, if not for me.

Genius, Idiocy, Or Both?

I got an email the other day, and once I took it in, I loved it. Absolutely hilarious. I've reproduced it in full below. I've even left in the email address they cited for contact, in the hopes that ten zillion web-bots read this and spam them into despair. Probably won't happen, but it's nice to think so. The email:

SCAMMED VICTIM/US$1,000,000.00 BENEFICIARIES.REF/PAYMENTS CODE: 06654
$1,000,000.00.

ATTENTION SIR/MADAM,


CBN./UNITED NATIONS 2006 SCAM VICTIMS COMPENSATIONS PAYMENTS .

This is to bring to your notice that we are delegated from the United
Nations & Central Bank to pay 150 scam victims US$1,000,000.00 (ONE
MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) each. You are listed and approved for
this payment as one of the scammed victims to be paid this amount, get
back to us as soon as possible for the immediate payments of your
US$1,000,000.00 compensations funds.

On this faithful recommendations, we want you to know that during the
last U.N. meetings held at Abuja-Nigeria, it was alarmed so much by the
world in the meetings on the lost of funds by various individuals to the
Nigerian scam artists operating in syndicates all over the world today.
In other to compensate victims, the U.N Body in conjunction with the
Nigerian Government is now paying 150 victims of these operations
US$1,000,000.00 each in accordance with the U.N. recommendations.

Due to the corrupt and inefficient Banking Systems in Nigeria, the
Payments are to be supervised by the 'United Nations' Officials and the
Central Bank of Kenya, as the corresponding paying bank is STANDARD
CHARTERED BANK. Nairobi branch - Kenya. According to the number of
applicants at hand, 114 Beneficiaries has been paid, half of the victims
are from the United States, and we still have more 36 left to be paid
the compensations of US$1,000,000.00 each.

Your particulars was mentioned by one of the Syndicates who was arrested
as one of their victims of the operations, You are hereby warned not to
communicate or duplicate this message to him For any reason what so ever
as the U.S. secret service is already on trace of the other criminals.
So keep it secret till they are all apprehended. Other victims who have
not been contacted can submit their application as well for scrutiny and
possible consideration. If you have already been notified of this
payment programme previously, do proceed with your claim as required.

As directed by the Global Settlement Committee, You can receive your
compensations payments via any of this payment Options you may choose:
(A.)CERTIFIED CHEQUE (B.)ATM CARD PAYMENTS (C.) WIRE TRANSFERS. We
shall feed you with further modalities as soon as we hear from you.

NB: To proceed with your claim, write/email the secretary to forward
your payment file to required department for your immediate payment on
below email:

ATTN: Ms. Melissa A. Pascal
Mellisa00pascal@gmail.com
Mellisa33pascal@gmail.com


On behalf of the board,
Mrs. Rosemary Bandu.
SCAMMED VICTIM/ REF / PAYMENTS CODE: 06654 US$1,000,000.00

On behalf of the board,
Mrs. Rosemary Bandu.
SCAMMED VICTIM/ REF / PAYMENTS CODE: 06654 US$1,000,000.00

___________________________________________________________________

Now, there are a whole bunch of reasons to like this email. First, I absolutely love the fact that they're trying to get a second bite of the cherry. (This is, of course, yet another Nigerian Email scam. A 419, I believe they're called.) Clearly, they've reasoned that people who were stoopid enough to buy into the original scam will now be incredibly pissed off -- but no less stupid. In fact, the combination of stupid + angry in the world outside the 'Net generally adds up to 'much more stupid than before', so frankly, they're probably onto something with this. Which is just hilarious.

I also love the fact that they've managed to find someone who can actually (mostly) handle the English language, and put capital letters in the appropriate places. Sorta. Every now and again you get a sentence that kinda boggles you a little -- the line about 'feed you with further modalities' makes it sound like the writer already ate too many modalities and is about to regurgitate a dictionary, for example.

The final reason I like this email? Well, it strikes me that if they're now deliberately re-targeting previous idiots, then perhaps the 419 business has been slowing down lately. Maybe enough people have finally heard that mis-spelled emails from Africa promising you a fortune in exchange for a few banking details and maybe just a little money of your own aren't actually a private goldmine. Who knows? Cull the flock long enough, and maybe it does get smarter. We'll see, eh?

...and in other news: the Mau-Mau didn't want to get up this morning. She made her Saddest Face In The World, and told me that she hurt all over, and pointed to many different places on her body by way of illustration. Including her elbows. Then she lay back down.

When Natalie came downstairs, I suggested she should give the kid the medical once-over. Unfortunately, the arrival of Mum in the Mau-Mau's bedroom provoked much undesirable excitement, and Natalie shouted for a bowl. Being well versed in this routine, I seized a large salad bowl and made it into the bedroom in time to keep 'most everything except the top sheet from being covered in very stinky vomit.

So. The Mau-Mau is at home today, on the couch, extremely subdued. The vomit contained pretty much everything she ate last night, undigested -- and horribly reeking -- so there is something astray. And I am thus confined likewise to the house, as nurse.

Oh, goody.

Doughnuts

I indulged myself in a bit of a rant a while back; a rant which is likely to turn up in somebody else's blog sooner or later seeing as how I was asked to do it by the delightful and terrifyingly talented Mme Slatter. In said rant, I expounded upon the qualities of the true yeast doughnut, and I spoke disparagingly of the crapulous, battery junk pushed on us in the name of 'doughnut' by a horde of vile purveyors of toxic waste disguised as fast 'food'.

Indeed. And I note with a certain sense of satisfaction that one such purveyor of 'doughnuts' is in deep financial doo-doo here in Australia, which suggests to me that the humble Aussie doughnut-sucker knows a thing or two about dough.

Maybe. Or maybe they just can't eat the damned things fast enough to keep the company in question afloat, seeing as how it originated in the deep south of the US where the doughnut is regarded as one of the essential food groups.

Not that it matters. Because today is Friday, and on Fridays it's me and the Mau-mau, pretty much all day. She stuck out the morning shopping run like a champ. She dealt with the pump-operating part of the day very nicely, even though she knew there might be leeches. (I got leeched down by the spring just last week...) She did her piano practice, and raced the dog up and down the spring-green paddocks for a while. Then she enjoyed her lunch, and took in a Godzilla movie, and finally, I agreed we would cook something together.

She likes her some cooking, does the Mau-mau. 'Specially if it happens to be some sort of sweet.

The end results are visible in the photo above, and I assure you: those are genuine, finest-kind, home-made yeast doughnuts. Twice-risen, hand cut, then fried in peanut oil, and lightly glazed with a mix of milk and icing sugar flavoured with vanilla and cinnamon.

The sprinkles were the Mau-mau's idea. I couldn't convince her to leave 'em off.

Never mind: still the best goddam doughnuts I've had in a looo-ooong time.

Mr Flinthart makes doughnuts as follows:

Ingredients -

1 tb Dry yeast

1/2 c Lukewarm water

1 tsp Sugar

1 lge Egg

1/3 c Sugar

1/2 ts Salt

1/2 c Milk

3 tb butter

3 1/2 c plain flour

Vegetable oil

Preparation

Put your warmish water in a bowl with the yeast and that first teaspoon of sugar. I used brown sugar. I don't suppose it matters. Whisk the mixture and set it aside until it goes all foamy. That tells you the yeast is ready to rock and roll.

Put the milk and butter together in a small saucepan over a low heat, stirring until the butter melts into the milk. Don't boil it. Just melt the butter, and then put the saucepan aside. You want the milk to be no more than pleasant warm to your finger.

Break your egg into a big mixing bowl with your 1/3 cup of sugar, and that sprinkling of salt. Beat the crap out of it with an electric mixer until it's light and thick and fluffy. Now you can beat in the foamy yeasty stuff and the lukewarm milk-and-butter mix.

Put your electro-mixer away and get yourself a wooden spoon. Start gradually beating your flour into the liquid until it becomes a batter too thick for comfortable spoonage. Scrape the spoon into the batter. Put the cleaned spoon in the sink. Get some butter on your hands and prepare to get messy. You have to work the last of that flour in until you have a nice, soft, dough that you will knead for the next five minutes, until it becomes smooth and springy. Now stick the doughball into a buttered bowl. Cover it in plastic, stick it in a warm place, and leave it alone until it doubles in size. (About an hour. Maybe an hour-and-a-half.)

Now: spread out some baking paper. Punch down the dough, and roll it out to a bit less than 1cm in thickness. With an egg-ring (buttered!) cut rounds out of the dough. To cut the centres, you will have to improvise. Or just poke a hole with your finger and stretch your doughnut to shape.

Take all the scraps, reroll'em, and cut out more doughnuts. Keep going until you've got about twenty or so. Take the remaining scraps, and roll 'em into a long snaky tuby thing about 2cm thick. With greased scissors, cut the tube into 2cm lengths. Put all your doughnuts and your doughblobs aside on baking paper to rise for the next hour or so - or until they roughly double in size again.

Get a decent saucepan. Put about 8-10cm of clean vegetable oil in it. Make it hot. Very hot. Grab one of your little dough-blobs and put it in the oil. When it starts to bubble and float, the oil is hot enough. Start frying your doughnuts.

When you drop 'em in the oil, they'll bubble, and rapidly float. Fry them in batches of three (more of the bloblets, obviously!) Turn them once as needed, so both sides go that wonderful golden brown colour. Drain them on paper towels or butcher's paper or newspaper or whatever you like.

While they're cooling, mix a tablespoon of cinnamon powder with a cup and a half of castor sugar, in a sturdy plastic bag. Once the doughnuts are cool enough to handle (but still warm, dammit!) put three or four at a time in your bag, and shake like hell, thus giving your doughnuts the perfect sweet, crunchy-cinnamon coating.

(Or you can just glaze the damned things and cover 'em with sprinkles if you're cooking with your bolshy five-year-old daughter who loves sprinkles as though they are the very Fountain of Youth and Life...)

Gnerrrghhh!

So I promised a short story to an anthology a while back. Deadline end October. And I had a lovely idea.

Except it was a complex idea, with about three different themes resonating through it. And really, it coulda, shoulda probably been a novella. So getting it pared back to short story form was a real bastard of a job. A screaming bastard.

By the weekend, I had it mostly in shape, at least in my head. All I wanted to do was write, and get it done. But we had rain, didn't we? Fuckbuckets of rain.

That wouldn't have been so bad, except Natalie was on call for Saturday, and theoretically, not so much on call for Sunday. Which meant she was cranky on Saturday. And then on Sunday, when it really pissed down, she was even crankier because the kids were trapped indoors, and she is totally not adapted to the way the kids fight with each other.

It's a nightmare, really. When the kids start fighting, I just break 'em up and send 'em off with a few sharp words. But Natalie wants them to negotiate, and speak nicely, and so forth... and so she winds up deep in a four-way brawl, with the kids bitching at each other, and herself getting snakier by the moment.

It's not good.

Normally, when that sort of shit starts to rain down, I excuse myself from the study, go out, and quietly redirect some energies. Maybe take the crankiest kid off to the garden. Maybe haul out some forgotten toys. Maybe grab a couple kids and get the shopping done. I do it quietly, and it wasn't until the weekend that I realised: they don't know that I'm doing it.

I realised that because when I STOPPED doing it because I ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY HAD TO WRITE, I put up with most of a day of some of the stupidest, most petty infighting I've listened to in a long time.

It is very, very hard to write anything good with that kind of crap going on just outside your study door. I was up until three in the morning making that thing come together.

Erf.

Monday was a lot better. We didn't do much, but the sun was out, and I had the story away, and we went into Launceston for the evening and ate at the new Korean Barbecue place. It's just a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Elizabeth St, but the food (it turns out) is inexpensive, and delicious, and according to a Korean friend of mine, not too far off what it's supposed to be. (Though the Kim Chi wasn't as spicy-hot as I'd hoped. Not that I've ever had Kim Chi before.)

Tuesday's dinner was good, too. Friend of mine dropped off a big, fat, wild-caught trout, and I baked it over the charcoal gorilla, with lashings of ginger, salt, pepper, lemon and curry-leaf. Woo-hoooo! Mind you, my mashed potatoes were too gooey. I had a brainwave, and made 'em with chicken stock and a little cream in place of the usual milk/butter/whatever. They were totally frakking delicious... but too damned runny. I used too much stock by accident. Ick.

And today? Today I got the job of being Natalie's tech guy for telephony. Which meant I had to go into Launceston with her, and with Younger Son and the Mau-Mau, and while Natalie and the Younger Son went to his first double bass lesson (did I mention Younger Son has now aced his first two violin exams? He did. Really well. But he doesn't enjoy the violin, and we promised him that if he took his music seriously, we'd look into finding an instrument he really enjoyed. So now he has a 1/8th size double bass. Which he loves to death.) I had to negotiate through the minefield of phone plans and smartphonery and so forth.

Natalie now owns an i-phone. Well, phine, that's her problem not mine. I'm sure it's a lovely, shiny toy. And it only took me an hour to set up an appropriate plan, and carve a path through the bureaucratic Telstra bullshit. And now that we're pulling out the old ISDN system (which we don't use any more), what with Natalie's shiny new phone plan and shiny new phone, we're actually... umm... ten dollars a month better off. And she now gets four hundred dollars of calls plus 500mb of data on her new phone every month. Locked in for two years, yeah, but since she was running on the $20 per month plan for the last five years on her old phone, I doubt she'll be too upset.

Of course, now that she's home with it, the fun has started. She's been trying to synch it with i-tunes and her i-pod since... ummm about 1800. It's now 2100. She's just done over a year's worth of updates to the i-tunes software, and finally reinstalled all the drivers for the i-phone, and I think she may actually be coming to the light at the end of the tunnel.

Of course, what would I know? I just use a shoddy cheap-ass MP3 player, a little old Nokia flip-phone... and I organise my own digital music. I'm just a primitive, I guess. But then, my computer is still working, isn't it? Whereas Natalie's had all but locked up under the strain of all the updates. I had to give it the old three-finger salute, dive into task manager and strip out a couple dozen minor functions and stupidities that were eating into memory, etc.

She will keep using Vista, though.

Who Was That Masked Man?

“Ugh,” he groaned. “What happened?”

“Take it easy,” she replied, staring intently into his eyes.. “You’ve been dead. High-speed crash.”

“Dead!” His mouth worked, but no words came.

She stroked his forehead. “You’re okay now. A guerilla medic found you in time. One of the last holdouts from the Gene Wars. He rescued your neurochip and grew you a new body. He had all this military-grade medware in the back of his hover. It -- actually, it tool less than fifteen minutes. It was amazing!”

He sat up carefully, exploring his body with his soft, pink hands. “Unbelievable. And he didn’t even stay around so I could thank him?”

“That’s not his style,” she said, and opened her hand, showing him a silver hypodermic needle.

His eyes widened. “You mean that was —”

“Yes,” she said, rolling her eyes to the heavens. “Thank God for the Clone Arranger.”

__________________________________________________________

(Wrote it years ago as part of a little in-house competition at the VISION writer's group. I just found it, lurking in my notes. It made me laugh, so I thought I'd post it here.)