Adventures Of The German Amateur Scrabble Society, 1939-45

The German Amateur Scrabble Society (GASS) were having a rough time. They hadn’t won a tournament since the Kaiser wore a pointy hat and morale was low. At the last big tournament both sides had been bogged down with consonants until America showed up late with the vowels and it was all triple word scores after that. GASS had been beaten bad, told it was out of the European league altogether and limited to forming three letter words - and then only for defence.

So when a brash new coach, with promises of a glorious and poly-syllabic future rose up from the ranks of disenchanted former crossword players, GASS was ready to listen and he was promptly elected head coach. This new coach, Andy they called him, then annexed Austria for its good spellers and Czechoslovakia for their abundance of 14 syllable words full of ‘Z’s and ‘K’s.

Finally though they went too far. One morning they went over to Poland’s clubhouse and beat the shit out of them while Poland was still making coffee. That having worked pretty well they went up the road and captured the Belgian Vowel Works, in Antwerp. Then they beat up the Dutch and Norwegians for looking at them funny. By now Britain had heard about it and had put together a few of the lads in a mini bus with some ‘E’s and ‘O’s and an experimental ‘Y’, and sent them over on the channel ferry. They were all good spellers but unseasoned, lacking the flem required to pronounce many Germanic words. Meanwhile France dropped all its tiles on the floor and began to cry.

Things looked bad for a while, England was beaten back, Australia went home and the Canadians insisted on ending every word with “eh” which was some fucked up arctic-rules thing only they understood. The Germans sank shiploads of new replacement letters and England soon had to begin recycling old words like “hark” and “forsooth”. Vowels were rationed and it was sometimes difficult to find a whole sentence for Sunday tea.

After a while Andy, on advice from a porcelain teapot, decided to turn all his players around and have a go at Russia. The Russians however had done this before with Napoleon and knew just what to do. They burned all their tiles, hitched up and headed east with GASS armoured letter carriers chasing right behind them until they were all the way to Moscow in the centre of the board, with its glittering Red Star. By now Germany was having to truck new letters a thousand miles to fuel front line spelling and the weather was turning. When winter hit the Germans were still being supplied with tropical words like “orchid” and “bananas” which quickly froze up until they couldn’t be removed from their little wooden holder-things. It was then Russia turned, and a million vodka fuelled Heroes of the People’s Scrabble Forces attacked. Words like “подстрекните” and “рыбы” rained down on the hapless GASS forces who were totally unprepared and quickly surrounded - with only four ‘E’s and a ‘K’ left between them. “Eeek”, although appropriate, is not a proper word and soon the Russians were on to the finals in Berlin.

Meanwhile Japan had coaxed the Americans into a game in the Pacific league* and they enjoyed it so much they came over to Europe to join in the big Invasion ’44 game in Normandy which they won and soon they too were off to Berlin to play with Andy. Andy, in anticipation of the match, shot himself in the head. Most of the remaining GASS team ran off to South America and everything was back to normal except some of the poor countries got switched around and Russia kept eastern Europe and wouldn’t give it back.

*America won the Pacific tournament after developing a word as bright as the sun and playing it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan was then forced to withdraw, as it was on fire.

Creation Story

And the Lord did jack the world into being, for there was no Mrs. Lord, and all creation lay drying on his divine belly. Except one little spatter that landed on the heavenly headboard and which did not get wiped up with the holy sock. This spatter became known as Australia and it thrived in the dark humid environment of what the Lord liked to call the Creation Station when he had the other gods over to watch hockey. The other gods would just roll their eyes for the Lord was always going on about some Mary chick he knew in Canada, but nobody had ever seen her. Then the story changed and this Mary was from Jerusalem and was in fact pregnant. It doesn’t count if its immaculate, they told him.

Eventually the Buddha got a plasma screen and the other gods stopped going over to the Lord’s all together and he was left to brood in his cloud-filled bachelor’s paradise for eternity. Eating frozen pizza and listening to harp music in his underwear all day, he had no desire to be clean. And so Australia thrived, a dried crusted speck with nice beaches on God’s headboard and if you look closely you can still see it there to this day.

How John Cusack got the malaria

I heard about this guy once. He was called John Cusack and his friends called him that except one guy. That guy didn’t like John Cusack and called him John Cue-sack and one day he gave John Cusack a cup of malaria and that’s a disease and he told John Cusack it was lemon-barley cold medicine but John Cusack didn’t have a cold but the guy told John Cusack it would make him high and STOP HIM FROM GETTING FUTURE COLDS so he drank it and now he’s got the malaria.

That’s why John Cusack wears all black and he sweats a lot.

Here It Is - Day 1 of SJ's All Day Christmas Spectacular Extravaganza and Special Christmas Video

Well here we are again at the 1st Annual SJ Super Christmas Spectacular. A tradition as old as this blog which is about 10 months. So far this is the first Christmas we’ve come across, and there may be more, so lets just try and get through it.

An unusual event this morning, our decorative light-up miniature pine tree seems to have attracted a clutch of wrapped packages, coincidentally labelled in the same names as many of the people who live here. I figure possession is nine tenths of the law (and possession of 9/10ths will get you a trafficking charge), so we’re keeping them.

Not one but two iPods in the pile. A big 30GB video player and a cute little Nano which is currently working through a Steely Dan discography so I don’t have to listen to “Must Love Dogs” which is on the satellite and serves as more proof that John Cusack just isn’t going to come good and shouldn’t be allowed to play with the other actors anymore.

Had a round of Jr. Monopoly this afternoon and I was all prepared to dominate but was stunned to find the new Monopoly-land to be an over-regulated bureaucratic nightmare. Here is a market beaten flat like plate steel. Cripe sake, you can’t even buy railroads…you just get another turn. There are no utilities! No Tax! What sort of pabulum-spewing false utopia is this? No example at all for kids…when we were young you weren’t playing right unless someone quit in tears. The only thing we took more seriously was Risk which usually ended with the board and all 5000 tiny pieces going up in a pre-emptive strike. What’s it like these days? “Take that Kamchatka! I rolled a six, that’s a harshly worded diplomatic letter for you! Two more and I’ll embargo your ass.”

SJ trudges on toward the new year, seven past the end of the world and we’re still clinging to the surface of this wet rock like slug-slime. But I guess even slug-slime has a use and I wish the slugs well as they march by.

Thanks everyone for your support over the past 300-odd posts. Meanwhile here’s a little video to keep you going with music by the above mentioned Steely Dan and starring (in order of appearance)

Dan The Fish (as The M.C.)
Jack and Jessie
P4
Tank Commander Hanzi
Stumpy
Polly

This is the rare missing reel that explains how Hanzi lost his arms….Enjoy!

Hanzi's Back - Day 1 of SJ's Two Days of Christmas Spectacular Extravaganza And Free Termite Inspection

In another media-coup SJ is proud to present secret shots of Tank Commander Hanzi starring in the traditional Christmas production of Othello Kitty – Shakespeare’s most beloved tale of a German tank commander’s betrayal by a Japanese marketing gimmick.

Luckily opening night was here in the village, over at the Lutheran church hall, and I managed to get tickets up in the balcony. I couldn’t get any video because the whole thing was live to tape for some big re-broadcast in Russia where Hanzi is a mega star so security was tight. I did get a couple of still shots but I couldn’t use the flash so they’re not the best…

You may notice Hanzi has lost another arm, this only added to the performance. There were none of the usual gesticulations and walking around so often bogging down Shakespeare’s plays and we were free to bask in Herr Hanzi’s shrill, staccato, Bavarian delivery.

In the stirring death scene Hanzi is brilliant as the fallen Othello, pushed over simply for being limbless and not well stuck down. Here we see Desdemona, played with great subtlety and craft by Plastic Cat, mourning Othello’s demise as the Russians close on Berlin, thereby indirectly saving Christmas.

Truly inspiring.

Flaming Inuit Zombies - Day 1 of SJ's Three Days Of Christmas Spectacular Extravaganza and Bare Knuckle Boxing Match

Moving along it was stinking hot today, humid as a sumo’s loincloth although not as baby smooth. Don’t question it.

P4 and I spent the afternoon at Castle Wolfenstien killing Nazis and zombies. She especially likes me to use the flamethrower, makes a disturbing guttural laugh to see S.S. soldiers rolling around on fire going “AAAAHHHHH!” (funny, it sounds the same in German). I might get her one for Christmas (a flamethrower, not a flaming nazi) and don’t worry, I wouldn’t let her use it in the house. Not after the grenade incident.

And spending a summer afternoon incinerating nazis with your daughter really makes you appreciate what you’ve got. Really makes you glad you’re not an Inuit seal hunter stalking your prey across the frozen arctic wastes. That would suck. I don’t know anything about seal hunting or arctic survival beyond aim for the head and wear a scarf, and there's probably more to it than that.

The Trials of Bonnie

Bonnie had been happy waiting tables at the diner. Sure it got rough sometimes on the night shift but you learned to take it, close yourself off to it somehow. Then he’d come along, smooth talking Clark, hanging around the diner every night, told her he’d take her away, make her a queen. And she’d gone with him, lord help her, even though Momma cried.

And where were they now? No money, no place to live – flat out busted – and all Clark wanted to do was sit on her lap and suck her tit. At least back at the diner she got paid for it.

Rage Against Linda - Day 1 of SJ's Four Days Of Christmas Spectacular Extravaganza and Cockfight

Alright it’s on. These are my summer holidays. Last day of work today before two weeks off for Christmas. I am home and just had some left-over Mongolian beef and rice. Then I had a dirty great smoke and I’m currently running a cultural experiment.

I recently acquired four Rage Against The Machine albums – about 75 songs – and I was so pleased with it I went out and got the Linda Ronstadt 4 CD Box Set. I’m now listening to all eight albums on random.

The Eagles-like 70’s high-desert rock, Spanish ballads and pure soulful voice of Linda Ronstadt juxtaposed with Rage’s bass-driven Metal/Hip-hop/Skater fusion goodness. Linda does an a cappella cover of Queen’s We Will Rock You which is breathless and eerie. Meanwhile Rage does Bob Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm in a way I suspect Dylan would have if he could of back then without people passing out from fright.

I suppose the difference is with Linda if you take away the music the voice carries on just fine, with Rage if you got rid of the jams it would sound like someone yelling at a dog.

This is my conclusion. Experiment over. More beef…

They're all the same

A friend of mine was telling me about a fella his ex-wife had been seeing briefly a couple of years ago. The reason my friend met him is because he and his ex-wife remain close and live near enough each other the kids move back and forth freely. He did not like this man his ex-wife was involved with, considered him shiftless and shifty at the same time. “I’m pretty sure he was a pot head” he told me.

“How do you tell?” I asked

“Because he lies a lot. Pot heads are all habitual liars.”

I was quite surprised to hear this for several reasons. My friend is not much older than me (and therefore should have been exposed to plenty of pot in his life), he himself drinks at least a bottle of wine a day and more if they have a party, which is often. They? My friend is gay. I mention this because I find it ironic that someone who was once married, presumably from purely societal pressures, who then plucked up the courage to come out, and was blessed with a family and even a wife who supported him and continue to do so…I find it ironic someone like that would be so quick to label people.

Back in logic school they talked about cause and correlation. Let’s assume it’s true most paedophiles like pizza occasionally. Should we then assume Italians are paedophiles since they invented pizza? And since most Italians are Catholic would it be right to say most Catholic Priests are…ok bad example, but you get the point.

You shouldn’t judge people based on their socio-economic-gayness. Yeah yeah, it’s rude and mean and not politically correct and who fucking cares. The reason you don’t do it is because you are very likely to be at least partially wrong and so will any decisions you made based on those views. Who loses in that situation? You, stupid.

My friend was wrong to make the assumption and I was wrong to assume he wouldn’t.

Then again, I smoke pot so I could be making the whole thing up. You just can’t tell with some people.

The Poo Wire

Mrs. Joe was in the laundry room tonight when she called out

“What do I do with this wire I found in the sink?”

“That’s the poo-wire from last time the kids plugged up the toilet. It had poo on it.”

“Well do you want it back out in the shed?

“Hell no, woman. Poo…on…it”

“Well throw it out then.”

“I don’t know… they plugged it three times in one week, maybe we should hang on to it, not literally, just in case.”

“Well, what do I do with it then?”

“Ahhha!”, I said edging out the side door, “this is the crux of it.”

“The what? Why do you talk like that?”

But by then I was outside and safe.

Christmas Story

I suppose we better do a Christmas edition SJ.

They say Jesus was a carpenter like his dad while his brother Brian was an electrician. He also had a sister called Cheryl, who did hair for a while and then ran off with a smooth-talking Philistine who later turned out to be a Cretan. Anyway very little is known of Jesus’ carpenter days, the days between when he was plopped down in a manger until he started going around to parties turning everything into wine.

After his apprenticeship, young Jesus went to work with Joseph building cheap modular dwellings on land Joe had scooped up in the big recession of 12BC. But fathers and sons don’t always see eye to eye and after an argument one day Jesus cried “You’re not my REAL dad!” and ran off start his own business, building high quality crucifixes for the Roman market. “Immaculate conception, my ass” mumbled Joseph.

Jesus’ business thrived and he soon had a staff of 12 and a legion of hanger’s-on. He started living the high life, rarely showing up at the office but hanging out by the sea of Galilee instead where he threw a daily big fish fry and booze-up for everyone. “Jesus you’re cool” said Peter then pissed himself laughing until fish came out his nose. But Jesus didn’t notice for he had dropped a holy lot of Phoenician stone tablet acid and was looking over the crowd tripping “Wow…it’s like…it’s like I’m the…the…I’m the Shepard…YEAH! I’m the Shepard and they are my…sheep…no lambs, little lambs…hahaha. Fuzzy little lambs!” And Jesus did grab a stick and stumble about whacking people in the knees until he had them more or less in a circle. “Awesome”, said Jesus, and it was awesome.

At one particular gathering, a big supper, they had Lenny da Vinci come by to do a bit of a sketch and they ended up smoking some good Venetian hash he brought with him. Old Lenny went on all night about flying machines and secret codes he’d put in paintings just to fuck with people’s heads. The last thing Jesus remembered was Judas betting him a bag of coins he couldn’t carry one of his big crucifixes all the way up to the top of the hill at Calvary…

+

Several days later Joseph took a walk up the hill and stopped on the spot where his son had suffered so. He looked up at the rugged cross, how the iron spikes that had pierced his boy’s wrists had split even the great timbers, such was the force of their application. “Stupid kid “Joseph said “I told him to use softwood …but what do I know. I was just his dad.”

Owl Fishing Continues In UK

Whatsamadda? Don’t like poems? Fuck ya then.

G’day and welcome to Friday. Today we have some disturbing news from the UK involving owl fishing. I know, it’s hard to believe this sort of thing still goes on but I guess since fox hunting became such an issue, your average country squire needs another distraction.

The photo is by Nick Oliver and was published in that sanctimonious little rag called Reader’s Digest (the pages are perfect size for out-house use).

“A vole’s eye view of a barn owl in Suffolk, UK, taken with a camera trigger and a lure attached to a fishing line. One twitch of the lure and…”

Really this is too much. I can remember being a lad of 5 when we lived in Longtown, Cumbria, waiting for the school bus in the winter morning twilight. From the frost furred trees a silent winged ghost passed over me close enough to feel the presure wave of it's wings. I watched for that solem beast every morning after, but never saw it again.

Apparently because some fucker was flying it around on a fishing lure. Poor innocent nocturnal predator dropping in for a tasty snack only to find he’s instead got hold of a hand-tied fishing vole with a dirty great hook. The feisty little owl would try to free itself and the mean country squire would let it spin out a while, liberty seemingly at hand, until he YANKED up hard on the line to set the hook and began hauling it back in. Poor little wings flapping like mad but to no avail. Oh what sport! “Quick Georgina, get the net, he’s lovely. We’ll take him home for the cats eh?”

Vicious bastards.

'77 Grand Taurine-o

Taurine-o, taurine-o
Like acid amino
Tastes like bile
But after a while
Everything’s peachy keen-o

Prevents brain rot
Like it or not
I Tried to stop
And then I forgot

Now I’m of improved mood
Though I’m off my food
Still it’s the best I’ve ever felt.
Excellent healing though I
Can’t shake this feeling
I may be Theodore Roosevelt.

SJ Live II

The Taurine controversy rages on. Will the vile make me big or small, will I get to the tea party on time? Clearly more debate is needed, although I don't believe we should tie up the UN with this sort of thing.

JR and I are working from home again today so any comments to the blog will be dealt with more or less straight away (please allow for a delay if I happen to be doing mathematical operations like counting on my toes when the comment comes in).

Well better get to it. Enjoy your day.

SJ

Hippy Beer

click for make big

Well well, look what the Missus found in town the other day. Does it not seem ironic to be promoting a "hemp" based product as an energy drink? Of course the brown-shirted neo-zipheads who run this joint wouldn't stand for anything actually made with marijuana. No, on closer inspection this concoction has slightly less THC than whole milk, but it has buckets of this stuff…

Pantothenic Acid? Guarana Extract? Glucuronolactone!? 108mg of caffeine – whoa baby but don’t let that fret you. What about the one-thousand-three-hundred-sixty milligrams of Taurine. What medieval sorcerer’s herb is this? Does it make one see devils and winged horned beasties? Sounds like a fucking wood preservative to me.

Should I drink it?

Quitline Angel

Just in case you ever want to quit smoking in Australia, here is a handy little ad from the government. It’s one of a series they made the tobacco companies apply to all their packaging. The others show grisly photos of gangrene (from reduced circulation) and the ravages of mouth cancer which is heady stuff to be sure, but this one is my favourite on so many levels. So much so that I scanned it right off the pack for you people who insist on reading this crap, thereby forcing me to eject more.

Here we have an excellent example of marketing techniques straight out of the book. The text is in no-nonsense, left justified Arial. Black, red and white – the serious colours. But it’s the condescending little photo-play that I love best. The man on the left is a Dirty Smoker. This is indicated for us by the way the shot is cropped so he has no headroom behind which creates a visual tension. The tones are cool and bluish and he’s lit obliquely from behind creating fairly harsh shadows. He needs a shave and holds the phone like he’s listening to Asian Schoolgirl Confessions in the bathroom. He is a Dirty Bad Smoker, that’s for sure.

The photographs are separated by a diagonal slash of telephone line to let us know the two people are indeed communicating by telephone in case we missed the fact the man is holding a telephone and the woman has her professional Telephone Angel head rig on. And isn’t she an angel? Shining golden hair, warm soft lighting. She is framed so her eye level is slightly above his and she’s given plenty of headroom which relaxes the shot visually. She is smiling because she can help the Dirty Smoker even though she is above such things. It really is an act of mercy and kindness. She may ask him to bark like a dog to prove his worthiness of her telephone advice, but that’s seems fair considering the enormous gift she is about to bestow on this wretch of a man, this degenerate tobacco fiend.

At some point the Dirty Smoker will break into fits of sobbing as he admits how he used to smoke with his morning coffee almost every day, how he once smoked in plain sight of a school…how he once gave a cigarette to a work colleague who was out. Several months later that colleague died of complications from a burst appendix. He told himself it was a coincidence. And through the sobs our Telephone Angel will make soothing sounds from a list she has been given by a person who writes government lists and the Dirty Smoker will repent his evil ways, blubber at her feet and ask her out on a date. The angel will smile knowingly and tell the man he is cured and, no, she cannot date him as he is unclean and will always be so. But she will still wish him a nice day before disconnecting to move on to the next haunted being requiring her divine attention.

The Reformed Dirty Smoker will feel as though he has been released from the bonds of nicotine. He will feel as though he has his whole life to begin afresh and he will also feel embarrassed about asking such a perfect creature to even consider dating him. He will realize the only thing he can do now is stalk her every move, living vicariously through her perfect-ness. He will throw a roll of duct tape and an Asian Schoolgirl uniform into the back of the car and head off in search of his one, true, Angel.

You see? He really was a degenerate. You could tell from the photo.

White Christmas Unlikely

Goldangit I forgot my power supply for JR at work for the second day in a row. I’m already at 50% batteries and it’s the weekend. First thing tomorrow I am going to have to rise early, hitch up the team and journey across the river into Town to hunt down a second power supply, and a spare battery if they are in season. I bet I’ll go to every computer shop in town and they will either not stock it, have just sold out, or plain never heard of it. I’m picturing myself saying “Nooooo, Hewlet-Packard has been around a while, I’m pretty sure. I actually bought it here…in this store…two months ago…from you.”

Meanwhile P’s 3 and 4 and myself are off to Carols By Candlelight in the park up the village. Says here it starts at 6:30pm….Christ sake (hmm, I suppose it is too) it’s 36c outside with a sun that’ll take the paint off your car in an afternoon and they expect us to go stand under it holding an open flame and singing songs – Christmas songs at that. I think we’ll mosey up there a little later when the frogs get going, the mosquitoes rise up and its safe outside for white people. Hey, Australia’s got the world’s highest skin cancer rate you know. Somebody broke the ozone layer over Antarctica and there’s bloody ultra-violet light getting in everywhere.

World Of Tomorrow (and early next week)

Years ago I was renovating an old building and came across a box of Popular Mechanics from the 1940’s-60’s. They were full of articles about the great future in store for everyone. Computers would run everything in the futuristic 70’s and by the unimaginable year 2000 people would be living in cities under the sea. Curiously a “top scientist” predicted the first moon landing wouldn’t be until around 2013. Probes would need to be sent first etc. He didn’t count on Kennedy and the cold war. They didn’t count on environmental snags either. Everything was a nuclear powered disposable wonderland, plastic and asbestos were our friends . There was no internet but you could send a letter by ballistic rocket post which launched the mail in an arc through space and had it half way around the world in 90 minutes. The mail sack was jettisoned over the destination and the rocket …sort of went…away and the mail parachuted down to be collected by the local postal service and distributed to the recipients. Yes what a rosy old time we were going to have…twenty channels on the TV, some of them in colour with smell-o-vision and all this was going to be ours by the year 2000. Yeah, well here are my own few predictions for the future...

In The Future:

-Women will gain the ability to make themselves understood
-Men will say “Ohhh! I see now.”
-The sun will explode.

I’m just not sure in what order.

Sunrise On The Second Floor

I have found, in the office environment, its not correct to yell out “HAHAHA EAT THIS FUCKERS” as you deposit 10 (ten, dix, V) big, fat, completed jobs in the tray. So I just set them there and tip-toed away. A shriek was heard from the downstairs office as I neared the top of the stairs.

I can see the sun rising on my stack of plans and files and the makings for 15 assorted offices, lunchrooms, meeting rooms, and blah blah rooms are about to hit the factory, delivered as promised, today. People who, all along, have been about as helpful as a hangnail (I got that one down at Boy Howdy’s Colloquialism Hut, out by the airport), people who offer to order you lunch and then forget, people who shrug when asked the most basic of questions like “Do we own any more copy paper, anywhere…at all?” These people now find themselves very very busy. Like the silly grasshopper who played all summer while the industrious ant was building an aphid ranching empire, they find they have 7 (seven, sept, VII) days to complete 10 jobs with 5 more to follow PLUS (and, +, as well as) everything the other two planners spew out. HA I say again.

But I won’t get too cocky in public until it’s all built and installed, with no fuck-ups. It’s by no means the biggest job we have going, but it’s the biggest I’ve ever worked on and there are about a thousand (1000, mille, many, see: shit-load) ways it can go wrong yet.

You can lead a deer to a hole in the ground, but you can't make it be your friend.

When I was four I dug a hole in the woods. It was about 6” deep and at the bottom was a loop of tree root I had exposed. I had dug away with a stick until I could get my little hand through the loop which somehow then assured me it was deep enough. I packed up my stick and headed back to the house absolutely secure in my belief I would return the next day to find a deer caught in my ‘snare’. I returned the next morning a little worried about how to handle my newly caught deer only to find the hole much as I’d left it. Some of the dirt had sloughed back in, the root had dried out and it didn’t seem near as impressive as it had the day before. I was not disappointed as much as perplexed. I had assumed that merely creating the necessary conditions would cause an irrevocable chain of events – the deer would see the hole and think “Hey, that wasn’t there before, I better stick my foot in there and…ooh I’m stuck. Curse the humans and their big brains.” – and I could then come along and set it free so we could be friends and I’d be the star of the bus-stop with my own pet deer that came to play-school with me. My coat hook at play-school had a sticker of a playful Holstein calf above it and I was considering how to approach Mrs. Johnson about having it changed to a deer. Surely she’d at least have a Bambi somewhere.

Thirty odd years later I wrote a blog on a popular thing called the Internet, you may remember it. It was a service for your computer where you could buy crap, get instant weather information and view images of people having various objects stuffed up them. And on this blog I posted this image from Swedish National Geographic where I had added my own text which I translated into Swedish with some on-line translator. I have no idea if what the translator came up with actually makes any sense in Swedish but it didn’t matter. The idea was to make out like I’d been sent the image, which clearly mentions my name, but couldn’t read the rest because it was in Swedish. I figured at least one net-geek with nothing else to do would try to prove his or her on-line prowess by running the text through a translator and then telling me it said “Skookum Joe is a bad, bad man”, which is what it was supposed to say, or maybe something even better after it had been de-translated. Discussion would then ensue on what it meant, there would be material for more posts and the “fact” it had been published in the first place would slip quietly into acceptance. And that was the goal, to convince people something was real by distracting them with the details, in this case the translation problem.

As it turned out I don’t think anyone even read the text, as all the comments were then about polar bears. Once again my deer had escaped. It’s human nature to believe, or want to believe, that of all possible outcomes the one we want most is what will indeed transpire. And we are constantly thwarted by it. Many stories of disappointment begin with “I just thought…” and follow a chain of assumptions which lead ever deeper into the murky swamp of human wiring. The answer is simple, lower your expectations.

That doesn’t mean going around expecting the worst, for that would be just as foolish as always expecting the ideal outcome. No, what I mean is set up the conditions as best you can and if the deer does not come, well then maybe it’s a rabbit trap. I did not expect the Swedish thing to work, I hoped it would, I thought it might, but I did not expect it to and so I wasn’t disappointed. Besides, I got nothing against polar bears.

Those Aren't Two Pillows

What’s all this photo sharing guff? All these camera and printer bundles which specifically highlight the share-ability factor. Now you can press a button and inflict blurry images of whatever shiny thing caught your eye last on people around the world. “Hey look, Dad sent another picture of the new gutters. Sure does like them gutters.” It’s eye-spam. It’s worse than someone telling you about a dream. But this isn’t about that, this is a story about Kenny.

Before they were married, Kenny and his Missus would often travel to visit her parents, a small German man with an almost too cheerful wife. Gloria was great, I helped them move once and had to return the rental truck back to Vancouver 4 hours away and she made me sandwiches and cookies and cake for the trip. Whenever Kenny and his wife visited they were housed in the spare bedroom, across from the parents room at the end of the hall in a nice suburban home with tidy lawns, a green garden shed and nary a pink flamingo.

Now, after they were married they lived with the parents for a little while and by then there was a baby so the parents moved into the spare room and gave Kenny and Co. the larger room. Early on in the caper Kenny’s brother came to visit and they drank many beers together and sang songs and talked in the strange pseudo-accent his brothers had developed among themselves. I have spent many such nights with them where we laughed and attained levels of intoxication exceeding government warnings, and I can attest to the quality of the experience.

About 5am the next morning Gloria rolled out of bed, chipper as a German’s housewife, to make fresh muffins for breakfast. Shortly after that Kenny rolled himself down the hall to the bathroom where he said farewell to the last two beers from the night before, which had ended only 3 hours earlier, and fumbled his way back to the room. He crawled back under the covers, pulled them over his head, curled up to the Missus and went back to sleep.

At half past six Gloria brought her husband a tray of fresh muffins, orange juice and coffee as well as toast just in case he didn’t feel like a muffin. She put the tray down, walked over and opened the drapes and window. Morning sunlight filled the room, bringing with it the soft scent of dewy grass and roses and it was only then that she noticed her husband and son-in-law together in the bed sleeping peacfully in the 'spoon' position. Kenny's autopilot had not yet re-calibrated to the new room. It should also be noted at this point that Kenny prefers to sleep nude and as it turns out, so do Germans. Gloria thought it prudent then to simply leave the tray and make her exit. How the two gentlemen came to separate in an honourable way and without loss of face is unclear, but the incident was never mentioned again.

Kenny has a flair for getting away with stuff like that. All I know is if it had been me there would have been nine types of trouble. But then again I didn’t know the German that well.

Call Now!

Working from home today. Why? Cause I can. This so fucking rocks it's not only not funny, it's downright solem. I don't know what that means either. Anyway for today only SJ is live! Any comments left today will receive immediate response (quality of response cannot be guaranteed, refer to your waranty)

Have a nice day.

The Machines Have Turned

The power’s out, sort of. The clocks are going mental. The microwave clock was flashing some high speed intricate pulsing sort of thing while the bedroom clock has no numbers at all, just the “ : “ between the numbers, glowing weakly as though time got tired. The scanner was constantly re-calibrating itself and the air conditioner was making a faint and intermittent beeping that I have never heard before. It was switched off at the time.

And it all happened right after this ...




I’m not always good about switching off the computers during a storm but this one was different somehow and I shut down Big Media and old Skook, and disconnected little Jr from power and network connections. Laptops are great in that regard.

(2hrs later) Just came out of a two hour brown-out. Dim lights, scwewy-wabbit clocks, modems blinking…finally had to go around and unplug everything including the fridges which were starting and stoping with ever-so-quiet clunks which were insidious in their subtlety, like a bully gently smacking its hand with its fist. No good could come of it. But just now the hall light which I had left on sprung to full brightness again and a small cheer was raised by P4 (so brave). The lights on the modem and router are behaving normally again – I don’t know what they mean, but its comforting to see them flickering softly again instead of signalling the mother craft or whatever that shit was before.

1/2 hour later.

Good evening ladles and jelly spoons,

Jeez, gotta type in your life story to sign in these day...grumble...stupid....

Hey how about this? Borat, and Mel Gibson vs. John Kerry and Michael Richards in a tag-team cage match. Losers get shot in the face by….no, not him…wait for it…the FBI.

Doot-doot doottle-oot-doot doo doo – that’s circus music.

Stand Back, I'm An Architect

Good news, the opening has been plugged (yesterday’s post). After some manual coaxing and careful manipulation I managed to do it all by myself. At worst we’ll be 20mm too long and that’s better than 5mm too short.

Architects should be lined up and shot. It’s been done in the past you know. It’s tradition during revolutions, coups and juntas to round up the intellectuals like doctors, teachers, hard core librarians and architects. Not engineers mind you, you need them, but architects – soft handed megalomaniacs who need to put their fucking mark on everything. Everything has to curve, or use some exotic material…I once had an architect who wanted to flout the laws of physics and good sense by trying to push shit up-hill. The plan called for us to dig a trench from the building and hook into a main sewer line. Except the building was on the side of a hill and where we were supposed to join was 6 feet higher than where we were. We had to call the architect who was astounded because the plan on his desk had been flat, you see.

One fit-out I did back in Canada for a large restaurant required the Greeter’s little phone-desk-thingy (technical term) to be made from laminate which had to be ordered from across the country, took 6 weeks to come and cost $1500 per sheet. There are other similar laminates for about $150/sheet but the architect wanted this stuff with real copper in it (because he just did). On top of that the plan required one and one quarter sheets, so the clients were up for $3000 right there. We could have made the thing six inches shorter and saved them $1500, but no.

Rooms made 12’2” long when carpet comes in 12 foot rolls.
Entire kitchens built using stainless steel screws at 50 cents each.
Plans where stairways go UP in both directions.

I once worked on a house that had so many rooms nobody was sure what they were all for. Apparently the plans were revised at some point but earlier ones were also issued. There were bedrooms coming off each other, a second kitchen off the hallway with no windows, a huge 7 sided windowless room downstairs and another hallway that went nowhere and was 8 inches wider at one end than the other. I was doing carpet back then and we laid 3200 square feet of blood-red plush Berber. We used to work at night and it was spooky.

A waste of space and parasites on society. Like faith healers posing as doctors, some architects try to tread in the realm of engineering with no other qualification than a degree in design and, god help us, some fresh ideas. Sure you get your Frank Lloyd Wright’s and your Art Deco’s, but the average slogger out there designing the world’s post offices and strip malls should be rooted out with dogs or perhaps wild pigs and chased away.

Missus left me without an opening

The Missus has taken P’s 3 and 4 up the coast to Port Macquarie, jewel of its immediate surroundings, to meet up with her old nursing-school pal for an oestrogen-fest weekend. I am home, working until moments ago on a Friday night with more tomorrow. I can’t find the opening.

It’s a simple fucking linen cupboard. Should take about 5 minutes. Except it’s being retro-fitted into….something. There are all sorts of instructions about shadowlines, door heights, architraves, gaps and reveals. There will be a 15mm thick tile floor put in later in case you care. This cabinet must fit the opening the builder is making for it, actually it must have exactly 5mm (3/16”) clearance. That’s great, I got all that, should still take about 5 minutes…just one thing, how big is the opening? You know, the hole – how big is it? Five millimetres clear OF WHAT?

I have spent 2 hours reverse-engineering a basic cabinet to try and figure out how big it should be. Somebody thought they’d save me a step by measuring the opening, doing the math and giving me the resulting door height instead of the actual opening. It’s like trying to work out the size of the doghouse from the dog’s collar:

Let’s see, dog needs 2 ft all around…ok how big is the dog? The tip of the nose would be 147mm from the buckle and the tail would be 488mm back from the nose, the neck diameter would be the twice the square root of the inside circumference of the collar, -5mm clearance, over pi. You think. Ok so now let’s work it 50 other ways until we get the same answers everywhere and then we can be reasonably sure were right. Of course you never know until somebody tries to stuff it into the doghouse. But doghouses are one thing, $15,000 polished rosewood and stained-glass display cabinets that end 12” short of where they are supposed to are something quite different. Especially when the customer was planning her grand-opening the following day.

When I was younger I spent most Friday nights trying to fill an opening. It was just as complicated and confusing, but much more fun.

By the way

I had nothing to do with this

Top O' The Chain, Ma

What if you could break the human body down into say 30,000 units or so? Each unit would be autonomous but could also form up with other units for more complex tasks. Imagine separate fingers coming together to form a hand when needed and breaking up again when you needed to pick your nose, ear and ass at the same time. Now imagine this creature’s brain is not separated into units, but spread over ALL the units. So units do not need to communicate, as they share a collective brain; they just know. Far more efficient and no glaring weak point, no head to cut off or spine to sever. Net-based designs are extremely robust. Damage to any one location is easily absorbed across the rest of the net. Our brains are not currently wired that way. Drill a hole in the right spot and you lose the ability to do long division. If your natural habitat is counting cards in a casino, you’d be fucked. But with a net brain and a unit-based body, you could play at 50 tables, count cards at each, compare results over all 50 tables, and enjoy a complimentary beverage all at the same time.

Of course you know I’ve been describing a hive system. Bees and ants mainly. Some might argue it is a more evolved system. But zoom out a little, what’s the ultimate ‘unit’? DNA makes up every living thing and every living thing’s sole purpose is to make more DNA. Fish do it one way and oak trees another, millions of strategies…as many as there are species of plants, animals and bacteria (not sure about viruses, lab people?).

It is argued that humans are special (and therefore the above argument false) because of our self-awareness. Oddly the bible describes this as the punishment God doled out to those mixed up kids Adam and Eve. Went and made them self-aware, unique among creatures – as a punishment. This has a strange resonance with the evolutionary model which would have us as temporarily superior freaks, spikes in the graph – bumps really when spread over any fraction of time.

Then again, mom always did say I was special and would prove it by spitting on a napkin and wiping it in my face. Yeah, top of the food chain, that’s me.

.

All the long-baking
Bad-ass days
All the long faking
Whirling ways
Gary’s got a headache
And they shot Beau Brady down

Curled up fingers raking
Damp dust down that day
Curled down long toenails
Razor-clipped and grey
Sally broke a toothache
But the other’s still around

And me I’m all for taking
My share of cathode rays
All my time goes breaking
In crisp and crafted ways
And I haven’t got a namesake
To blow that mother down.

-Sir Winston Churchill

At The Tone...

We have an unlisted number. My friends ask who I’m hiding from and I reply if you were someone I wanted to talk to, you would have my number. Even so I don’t answer the phone unless absolutely necessary, it’s rarely for me. So it was with reluctance I answered it the other night after letting it ring 6 times before I remembered everyone else had gone out.

It was a representative from the electricity supplier, an apologetic young man who was named something or other. Seems he had called earlier in the week and spoken to Mrs. Joe who informed him she was very ill, so he had decided to wait and call again now. She is crafty, Mrs. Joe, and had not been sick at all but had brushed the boy off so that now I had to deal with it. What he wanted to tell me was, in short, the government had given them permission to raise the rates and they were doing it. I now had to, in effect, sign a new contract with them by answering some formal questions which would be recorded. Did I understand the new terms? Did I agree to the new terms? etc.

Well what choice did I have? Was I going to say “No, I do not agree. You have gone too far and I wish to end our relationship. Come remove your unsightly wires from my home!”? No I said whatever was required to keep the electrons flowing. He rambled on in legalize and I soon discovered the correct answer was “yes” to all the questions and after a while both of us stopped listening. Then he said soothingly “That’s it mate, all done” like he knew what I’d been through. Five minutes of my life sucked down a telephone line and stored away just in case anybody wanted to know what my answer sounded like to question 12, was it strained? Did he put enough feeling into it? Can he be trusted with electricity?

When the global warming finishes and bands of rabid Greenies rule the earth they will drag me before the tribunal and play the tapes. “There!”, they will cry, “You see? He asks to purchase electricity, he caused all this. Burn him and do not point out the irony in doing so!”

That’s why I don’t answer the phone.

On Robots and Fairies

As we watched on television, a scanner took 200,000 individual measurements of the human body. The results were sent to robots which cut and sewed cloth into a perfectly fitted suit. I turned to P4 and said “We are living in the robot future, you know” but she looked unimpressed, she is used to a world of robots.

“When I was a kid, there was no electricity”, I said, “at night we’d sit on the front porch and watch mushrooms grow. We each had our favourite and we’d watch it grow”.

“Did it grow fast?” she asked

“No. You couldn’t really see it doing anything. It was pretty boring”. I sensed I was losing her so I added “and ALSO back then we didn’t have feet. We had to drag ourselves around and there were special tracks by the road and we dragged ourselves around in the dirt.”

“How did you grow feet then?” her voice was tinged with the cynicism she got for her birthday and I could just glimpse a fully formed young lady waiting under the freckled surface.

“I was given feet by a passing gypsy. She was heading to Los Vegas to be a show-gypsy”

“Hmm” P4 was unimpressed, “Did you know Los Vegas has the world’s biggest Fairy Village?” I admitted I did not and she said “Well it does, I know everything about fairies.”

This is probably true so I promised to consult with her on any fairy-related projects in future and we turned back to the TV to find out what else the Scientists are making these days.

Meeting of The Big Heads

According to at least one anthropologist the peoples of Easter Island came undone because they used up all the trees, the soil blew away and they couldn’t grow sweet potatoes anymore. And, because there were no trees left, their boats fell into disrepair and they could no longer fish.

I imagine a meeting where they discussed what to do with the last tree. A great number wanted to use it to make weapons to go beat up those Small Head statue makers, some wanted to make timbers to help erect more Big Head statues, some thought it should be saved for cooking fuel and one lady thought a nice armoire and matching hutch would go nice in the dining room. There was one guy though, way up the back, who suggested they fix the boats. Their ancestors had been sea-farers to come here and surely they could build some boats and go somewhere else. He had heard Hawaii was nice, there were pineapples. But the others cried “No, Hawaii is too touristy. Let us cut down the tree and burn it so the smoke will rise high and show the Hawaiians we consider them stupid and impotent during intercourse.” – or something to that effect, the result being no boats were built and they starved to death.

What’s the moral? Try not to get stuck on an island with stupid people? Smoke makes Hawaiians impotent? You don’t put a hutch on an armoire? Hell if I know. I spent ten minutes on it and moved on.

Horrible Cat Mutilation!

Here we see what’s become of poor Poly, the kitten who liked to poop in the laundry basket despite free access to the rest of the planet. Yes, we’ve had to have her stuffed and made into a handy thermometer. She also has LED flashing eyes and at 9pm each night her skull pops open and a tiny MC in a ruffled tuxedo does a ½ hour of blue jokes and a fair rendition of Mack The Knife. I was going to get a built-in radio but I thought that might be seen as tacky.

It’s not like we didn’t try to educate the poor thing. I pushed it through the cat door a dozen times each way. She got the idea straight off, but still the pooping…and the smell. God, that cat piss smell that you often find in the homes of those who have made poor choices so far in life. I’ve made plenty of bad choices, but until now I was still that last indicator away from the cover of Trailer and Park.

Then yon moggy started getting up on the benches at night and knocking the loaf of bread to the floor where she’d rip it open, chew up a few pieces and leave it. I don’t know if she thought she was killing bread and leaving it for our breakfast, or just pissed off I wouldn’t feed her a fourth time that day. I’m thinking the latter. Finally I got a mouse trap and wound a strip of towelling around the trap, not the whole trap just the springy thing which is also called the trap, so that it does not hurt. Ask P4, it got her this morning when she went to make toast. I set the trap on top of the bread and each night Polly would set it off and go running, but the first night I forgot she savaged half a loaf of wholegrain.

I must say the rest of the time she was very lovable and kind to others and had even been thinking of running for Pet Council. She was popular with the dogs who had a bet going on whether she was hollow inside or had a soft chewy centre. But we could smell this way no longer and there was nothing for it but to have the poor dear stuffed for our own amusement. Unfortunately the taxidermist was a little inexperienced. Well, I’d seen something about it on TV once. Anyway now there’s this other smell…


*the thermometer reads 32.4 Celsius, that’s 119F. I can’t keep doing this for you Americans. You really should catch up.

Ok, now say it in Irish

The weekend Herald, print edition, features columnist Mark Dapin explaining how he came to be columnist Mark Dapin. Looks like all you need to do is hold a series of boring, menial jobs throughout your twenties and early thirties, drift around a bit and finally move to Australia where being from ‘overseas’ (which is technically anywhere) makes one exotic and therefore inherently interesting. That’s me, exactly! Stories that bored the mukluks off people in Canada go over great here just because of the accent and charming colloquialisms (see: mukluk). Hell, if I was Irish I could make a living reading out the bus schedule as long as I sounded like Jimeoin.

I am assuming Mr. Dapin is paid for his work, I’d be happy with something like that. So now all I need is one or more of you readers to forward this post to all the Australian daily’s and magazines who will realize they too could have their own pet foreign columnist to put a fresh take on issues such as the price of petrol, the price of beer, what happens to odd socks and the differences between men and women.

.............

The Missus tells me she had a dream last night where we were all on holiday. She was about to begin an affair with a woman she’d met, which later turned out to be a transvestite, when the kids and I came along and spoiled it. In the dream, she says, she thought it remarkable I wasn’t upset to find her thusly.

Well she’s right to be surprised, because upset isn't the word for what I would have been. I’m already being drowned in wet towels, hanging bras and various other accoutrements regarded necessary by la femme domestique. I can’t keep a sharp razor without it being appropriated for underarm work, Mrs. Joe and P3 have synchronized hormonally and soon P4 will fall into their painted clutches. The last fucking thing I need is to come home, trip over a pair of size twelve stilettos and find some hairy-backed freak taping down its genitals in my kitchen prior to a big girl’s night out.

If anyone actually does forward this post to a newspaper or magazine (Transvestite Monthly?) let me know at mamalfarmer@yahoo.com and I'll send you a postcard for your trouble.

anything

Big Daz: Hey, what the fuck was that?

SJ: It was…

BD:…That noise sort of like “boing!" I heard it.

SJ: It was…

BD: Did you hear that SJ? Sort of like “Boing!” ?

SJ: It was my phone, for fuck sake. Calm down. Message from Mrs Joe, she’s in town. What do I want for dinner?

BD: How do I know. How about prawn cocktail and rice?

SJ: Nah. I had rice and chilli for lunch. Fuck I don’t know, it’s a loaded question.

BD: Just say “anything”

SJ: No, that’s no good. I gotta pick something. Anything but chicken. Sick of chicken. That’s too long to message. Jeez time’s running out Daz, she’s probably waiting for an answer before she comes home from town.

BD: Fish?

SJ: Hmm, maybe fish and chips. Nah too greasy. Don’t feel like a burger either. Shit I have to write something, I’ll just have to go with “anything” and hope it works.

*SJ begins to laboriously peck out a message- ANY..T..HIN..G...MY....P..ET -when the landline rings…

SJ: Jesus! I’m typing it woman! *picks up the phone* Hello?

Mrs SJ: Hi

SJ: Jesus! I’m typing it woman!

MSJ: What? Hello?

SJ: ANYTHING!

MSJ: *crackle, static - beeeep*

SJ: She’s gone. *presses SEND* I tell you Daz people like you and me that can’t text very fast are going to be ostracized, that means cast out.

BD: What, you can send messages on that thing?

SJ: It's a telephone, Daren.

*boing* BURGERS OR FISH?

SJ: Christ on a pony. B..U..R..GE..R.

BD: What, you push once for A and twice for B?

SJ: Fuck sake Daz, it’s not new.

*boing* OK

That was three hours ago and they’re just pulling in now. Man, how long would it have taken in the old days, without instant communication? Weeks, I bet. She would have had to scrawl a note and hire a fast runner. There’s a pretty big hill on the way here, I’d have starved to death.

I ain't axing youz

A couple of posts ago we were talking about axe battles. Here is a medieval weapons expert demonstrating the axe....



Ok, now imagine there's a civil war, you don't have a shield, and Crazy Larry from down the street is coming at you with old Betsy while his wife screams "Git em Larry! Chop his (or her) ass! Then come back here, and git some lovin'."

That would scare the shit out of most people, not to mention the axe. No, only one thing for an axe weilding chartered accountant on stress-leave or his diabolical mate...run fucking away.

Enter My Stupid Contest

Sandra's giving out book reading tickets and Exoterica's giving...of herself and I just felt like I needed to have a contest too. Being cool and accepted is important to me.

First Tuesday in November today. Phones went off the hook at 1pm, BBQ was fired up, beer, wine, champagne, stinky cheese and biscuits. Our company was only one of thousands across the country doing the same and at 3:05pm we all gathered around the TV with it’s fuzzy reception for the event. In five minutes it was over, there were whoops of joy and mumbled curses and then some people went home and others stayed behind to drink. Grimey took his beer upstairs and went back to work.

Tell me, you strange people who read this crap, what was this event that stopped the nation today and does so every year?

The prize is an old washing machine I’ve got breeding mosquitos out back. You gotta pick it up. And bring a bucket to put the mossies in. I won't be home, mind the dogs.

How's it go again?

I’m watching a documentary all about how some of world’s despots used drugs. Hitler was injected daily with vitamin C and methamphetamines. I guess he couldn’t sleep so he invaded Poland.

Of course he was on drugs. How could you not be and run that travelling freak show called the Third Reich. That whole fucking monstrosity he started was like a bad Tim Burton acid trip gone way wrong. Apparently he also had need of flatulence pills. mein kampf! zat stinks.

Hey, you can’t go wrong bad-mouthing Hitler. Or Sadam Hussein. Sadam. How come all the classic bad-guy leaders, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Erkyl – go by their last names but The Sad Man is the only one we’re on first name terms with? He is never referred to as Hussein, just Sadam.

Laura, gone for milk.
Might stop in and bomb Sadam if he’s home.

G-man

Anyway looks like they’re going to hang him. So let’s see: a rich Saudi megalomaniac, operating out of Afghanistan attacks the United States soooo we took over Iraq and hung it’s leader. Is that right? And we’re winning right? I thought he was good ‘cause we called him Sadam, no? What about Kim Il? He’s bad right? But Iran might be good again? Boy, this is hard.

Frozen Turkey Pie

Our pal Sandra over there at Over Here says someone was looking for me at some mucky-muck book reading in Toronto. I was last in Toronto in 1998 to visit my brother for Christmas. We played video games and had frozen turkey pies and peas for dinner. On a lark we promised to meet again in 8 years time, at the first book-reading given in the south-south-east sector of the city in November of 2006 - as you do - but I didn't think he was fucking serious. Oh well, he'll get over it.

Brave New Joe

Finally got the beta. I had originally switched to Blogger VHS, but just my luck it never really took off. A bit easier on the old eyes and I fixed the clock while I was at it. I tried simply copying over my old template but beta is a disciplined work and it scolded me roundly for sloppily formatted code. This is not surprising as all previous changes to my old template involved snipping wires to see what went on and off and saving every time something went right. Like carving a roast pig in the dark, you’ll get fed but it won’t be pretty.

A few posts back I listed some long standing questions I’ve had. Ever since then Big Daz has been nagging me to post a question he has for everyone. I resisted but he has a way of constantly suggesting things all innocent like, as though it’s the first he’s mentioned it, until you finally scream OK fine ok ok fine yes ok I’ll do it just shut up now ok. To which he invariably replies “what?” in a hurt tone.

Big Daz’s Question For Humanity: Why does he, Big Daz, no longer receive the fellatial attention Mrs Daz used to provide prior to their shackling.

Leading Hypothesis (by Mrs Daz): He wasn’t that pretty to start with and has slowly degraded ever since. (it’s true – bowed knobby chicken legs stuck under a beer gut, long ginger beard, shaved head except for a pony tail and the rheumy red eyes of a disgraced British lord emerging from depths of a Shanghai opium den).

I shall pass on your certain-to-be wise advice to Dazza as it pours in.

Another Aussie Halloween has passed and we tied last year’s record with two (2) visits by treaters (haven’t seen a trick since…never mind). It ain’t real big over here and is viewed with suspicion by many Aussies. Why would you give kids candy just for coming up to the door and asking for it…for free. The cheek. Another damn Yankee invention (not the band, the running dog imperialists south of Canada) designed to steal our women, somehow. Oi Oi Oi.

And that’s this week’s Sunday wrap-up. Be sure to look for Saturday’s hilarious post next day before tomorrow.

Fun with geometry, no really

One of the jobs at work requires we bend some 2 inch wide strips of acrylic plastic around a 150mm (6") radius. This acrylic is 12mm (1/2") thick and very brittle. None of that is important except to say it is difficult to bend. It must be heated evenly and slowly bent at the same time. Too fast and it will shatter, too slow and it begins to melt and deform. Also it must be kept flat so it doesn't twist. The whole operation takes two people and is fraught with peril as this shit costs big money and takes forever to order in.

What was needed was a jig. A jig is a template which allows you to perform difficult or time consuming operations easily and consistently. If you need to repeatedly bore a row of 6 equally spaced holes it makes sense to take the time to measure and drill a template and then use that to reproduce those holes over and over. We needed a jig to bend these acrylic strips and I got to program my first shaped cut on the overhead router. From a slab of 2" thick board I had the machine cut this shape

"What is this!" they cried in New Factoryland, "What has the tall man made here?"

I took the part to the saw and made one simple cut resulting in these two shapes...

.

.

and we rotate the little one...

.

.
and take it around here like so...

.

.
and fit it right...in...there...


The resulting gap is exactly 12mm wide. Now I know you were all asking yourselves at the start "what the hell has that V-shaped notch at the bottom got do with anything?" (I say you were). And now you see this notch has become two opposing flats for which to clamp across - that's right kids, the convenience is built right in. The acrylic is heated and the clamp slowly tightened to pull the plug into the negative forcing the acrylic to take the same shape. Let it cool, remove it from the jig and there you go - an exact 150mm radius turning through 90 degrees. Beauty.

"Hoorah!" they shouted in New Factoryland, "the tall man made a funny shape into something which helps us in our toil. What a grand trick! That bastard Grimey wouldn't have helped us, he's a right cunt."

And the tall man was most pleased as well.

knock-knock

Fucking hell, on second look that last post reads like a high school essay trying to be quirky. Or a John Kerry speech without a joke.

Some asshole is claiming to be my brother, and so is this guy. He’s Canadian, so it could be true. Most Canadians are related. But on reading his work he seems far too happy…unless he’s delusional, that would make more sense. Could be he was adopted. Maybe it’s part of a complicated John Kerry joke.

A botched joke. And what is to become of the poor joke, deformed and retarded and abandoned by it’s creator, now a writer for John’s Farming News in Oxnor, Illinois? Can’t have bad jokes running free, spawning puns, caricatures and hastily thrown together SNL bits. Bits that go on and on for like 12 minutes circling around the same joke until it’s rubbed raw and begins to chafe. The botched joke will be euthanized and dissected, a new course will be offered in community colleges

JOUR 330 – Advanced Speech Writing: Avoid classic traps in speechwriting such as giving a politician a joke or other phrases requiring a personality.

?

Did my title bar always have a frame around it? I do not remember having one. Blogger sometimes does suspicious things like send comments which are time stamped 4:12pm…except I receive them at 4:04pm same date. I have some other long standing questions that I have asked many people only to meet a wall of vagueness, a moat of generalization, ideas made of steam, lacking substance. They seem like questions that should have simple straightforward answers yet experts cannot be found.

If submarines “blow” their tanks to submerge, where does the air come from to fill them up again when you want to surface?

Leading hypothesis (by me): They do not discharge the air but rather compress it and store it in tanks.

Holes: What about when you need to dive in a hurry…compressing the air would take time.

In Australia fence posts have holes through them for the wire to pass through, instead of being stapled to the side. How do they drag barbed wire through all the posts without it getting hung up?

Leading Hypothesis (by Big Daz): The barbs point slightly backwards, so they don’t get caught.

Holes: Stapling, which is common in NA, is still far easier and does the job. There must be more to it.

How do they put up tall construction cranes and take them down without another crane, and if they use another crane how do you put up that crane without still another crane?

Leading hypothesis (by Jutra): The crane raises itself on hydraulic legs and slips in a tower section. Then it lifts up again and puts in another section. Comes back down in reverse.

There are cranes nesting along the river which meets the sea at Vancouver. Would they be the Fraser Cranes?

What would you save it in?

Please note, Australia has switched to daylight savings time in some places including here. The clock in the sidebar cannot be re-set without downloading a new one and sticking it in the template which is something I’m really not prepared to do for the sake of an hour. That being said, the clock is now set to Queensland time as Queenslanders believe daylight savings is evil and will confuse the cows and make the drapes fade faster (extra sunlight) and so do not switch over. For New South Wales, where this drivel is distilled and bottled, please add one hour.

Those Queenslanders will be sorry at the end of the world and not just for naming their state after a 70’s British supergroup. When the end comes and the world is plunged into darkness those places that thought ahead will have all that saved daylight to tide them over until something can be done about getting the lights on in limbo. Those with extra light and nothing to read could end up selling it. Soon there’d be an illegal trade in photons, a black light market, and those who can’t pay the ever increasing price of light will be left to scrabble for candle stubs in the gutter. After that they’ll be plunged into blackness and the Blind will rise up and rule them in underground labyrinths – much as ants herd aphids within the colony. Those white canes leave a nasty welt.

And those of us who saved our daylight will trade it to the Blind in return for goods produced in the human-aphid colonies. The Blind will use the light to shine on the humphids when they are good and to burn them when they are not, as they slave for eternity.

Of course, if the world ever stops ending and the lights come back on, those Blind dudes are in a lot of trouble.

Greasy Writer Tricks

South Park is doing a Steve Irwin thing already, which is of course upsetting people, which is of course the point. No word on whether it will be shown in Australia, no word on whether I care…oh wait, this just in…no, I don’t.

You see that? That was that bitchy sort of sarcasm that passes for clever on sit-coms these days. It started with Will and Grace but now everybody’s doing it, even the vacuous pre-teen fare on Nickelodeon and Disney. P4 is going around talking ghetto after watching That’s So Raven, except it’s smart-ass ghetto that’s really Hollywood-writer ghetto and it makes her sound like a 35 year-old Jewish boy trying to sound like a 15 year old black girl with an Australian accent. The other day she called the cat girlfriend. Then the cat called the dog a skanky ho which is true, but the language is clichéd and not relevant here. The cat should have called the dog a dirty slag or a greasy slapper, that would have made more sense for Australia. American TV ghetto slang sounds stupid coming from a cat. Cat’s do better playing androgynous evil puppet-masters or sea captains. You know a cat sea captain is going to have an all-mouse crew too, which can only lead to grief. No, it’s a bad thing all round, trying to be something we’re not.

You see how I tied that up with a little morality at the end? That’s another one of those greasy writer tricks. Just like South Park using Irwin 8 weeks after his death. The shock-factor is no longer using the celebrity, but doing it while the barb still hangs from his chest. There, I did it again. Bad writing is easy.

The History of Technology ptVII

The proportion of comments to visits has fallen to something easily expressed as x/0, where x represents visits and 0 represents comments. As we all know it is wrong and impossible to divide by zero and frankly it’s causing concern with some of the technicians and statisticians here at the Beta Compound.

By the way did you know all that Y2K stuff at the turn of the century was about division by zero, not dates at all. Everyone said “The computers will think it’s 1900 again”. Again? Computers have no idea of dates or time, they just count really fast. The problem was when you tried to do math with a four digit number where the first two digits were implied…you had to decide if it was 19-something or 20-something based on context. Computers not good for that, just counting fast.

Bank: You bought your house in ‘85 so you’ve owned it for, let’s see, (06-85= -79) negative seventy-nine years…ok lets just run that through the computer and , oh it seems to be on fire.

The same thing happened two hundred years ago (Y1.8K)…

“Gads, Silus, the windmill turns counter to God’s plan!”
“No, brother, yon windmill is thinking it be 1700 again.”
“It is a windmill, it thinks nothing Silus, you twat.”
“Tis true. I am touched with stupidityness.”
“Aye, beaten with it, more like.”

and again last century (Y1.9K)

“Edward, pray check out my new incandescent light globe”
“Very grand Bartholomew, 40 watts is it?”
“Nay nay Edward, good chum, this is the latest from that Edison chap – tungsten carbide filament, 60 watts!”
“But will it continue to illuminate once we step bravely into the twentieth century?”
“It’s just a light bulb, Eddie. It doesn’t perform mathematical functions based on two-digit dates”
“Mark my words, Bartholomew, one day man will build a light globe so bright it blinds us all.”

But as we know, that never happened. The world was issued protective goggles and not many people were blinded at all.

Is This The Real life?

Interesting article about Sudanese immigrants in rural Australia. The government gets nervous when immigrants do things like form communities so they have a policy now of spreading them out into the country so they can pick crops and “integrate”. So we have about 1000 Sudanese refugees living Toowoomba, Qld – a small city west of Brisbane known for bible-bashing and nationalist politics – who are understandably having trouble fitting in. The usual racial shit you expect in a cowboy town, letters in the paper, kids yelling stuff from cars. One guy said back in Sudan he had seen people hacked to death with axes… so he wasn’t too worried about the “shouting boys”.

The funny thing though is that the Sudanese aren’t helping things. Apparently they insist on driving without licenses and are very very bad at it. It’s claimed the young people are having trouble separating reality from fantasy, the culture shock is so great. For example in the film Independence Day the moon landings (true) and an alien invasion (fiction) are both depicted. To people who have never heard of either, or ever even seen a film, it all seems unreal. The people they see walking around in Australia look like the people on TV too so they are not sure what to take seriously. Basically they think it’s all an amusement park of sorts.

I suppose once you’ve been in an axe battle, everything else is Disneyland.

More stuff people said

I heard/read all these within an hour this morning.

"You have to stay up with the times to get ahead of the game." - Farmer discussing contemporary farm machinery.

"...and mulches it back into the ground, waste that would otherwise end up in landfills." – Ad for tree mulching machine.

"...their heads circling with the slow complacency of water down a blocked drain." - Columnist on public kissing in Paris.

Finishing up with this conversation with P4:

SJ: Hey P4 come back here for a minute.
P4: What?
SJ: How far would you have got if I hadn't called you back?
P4: (puzzled) To over there.
SJ: Never mind.
P4: Ok, bye.

Drat, foiled again.

Hey, over here.

I never said 'nothing after that, just stared at her a while. If she was sweating it, she didn't let it show and I was beginning to think she was taking me for a chump. Maybe she was wise, maybe Big Eddie had already filled her in and all this was an act...like our love had been. But then she started screaming and ran into the kitchen - fuck it was funny.

slick marketing

These are flyers I had made up in order to try and raise some capital to continue the baboon trials. As you can see, I've teamed up with a big developer to market my estate to the crusty top market buyers. It was expensive hiring a helicopter for the aerial shot of the house (it’s a bit off-centre) and they were printed using ink made exclusively from endangered species, but that’s what it takes to attract the best offers. Luckily the development company picked up all the expenses as they know it’s a guaranteed investment.


click picture for larger view

As you can see, the estate features a red roof and is on a street for easy access. There are other buildings nearby containing neighbours and a river which flows different directions depending which side you stand on.

Asking $1.7 million, will consider part trade for snowmobile.

frogs

Built my fishpond two years ago and finally some frogs have moved in, I can hear them out there, and at the very same time Animal Planet is showing a documentary about hippos which also enjoy water – man, that’s spooky.

Do polar bears eat penguins? Of course not, they are exclusive to their respective hemispheres. Do hippos eat frogs? If by ‘frog’ you mean the colloquial diminutive for Stinky Frenchman then no, probably not. Too stinky.

Do I mean I have Stinky Frenchmen living in my pond? No, most of them drowned, the goldfish got one of the little ones, and two escaped. They were later run down with dogs before they could breed or start complaining.

Am I racist for picking on the very Stinky French? No, the Stinky French are not a race, but rather a loose collective spread from Quebec to Polynesia and controlled via a large radio antenna in Paris (although they are not magnetic and may be harassed with iron implements).

Do many Stinky French read this blog? No, not really. It’s in English. What do you think the whole world speaks English? You arrogant bastards.

It's ok, I'm a surfer.

Some quotes from the week

“I’m a surfer, so I knew the wave had the potential to knock down the hotel.” – American tourist recounting his vacation in Thailand when the tsunami hit.

“It’s almost literally true that it keeps me up at night.” - weather scientist on changing rain patterns in Australia.

“We’re very happy the gentleman hasn’t been put in jail.” – family of little girl struck and killed by an elderly driver at a crosswalk. The same girl was badly burned in 2003 when a car crashed into her day-care centre and caught fire.

Almost literally? I'm going to use that..."if you give me a pay raise I promise I'll almost literally double my output."