Your time starts now

I can’t stand a slow talker. I’m not crazy about fast talkers either but I prefer them to slow talkers. Slow talkers are people who begin to speak long before they have actually formed the thought they wish to express. There are pauses while they wait for the rest of the sentence to come in on the wireless. They often realize half way through they have forgotten some relevant preamble and the conversation goes into flash-back while they explain it. Then they forget where they were up to and have to re-tell the whole thing from the start…except now it conflicts with the first version and if you point that out you know you’re never going to get out of there so you let it go and try to piece it together later if it was important. I know slow talkers who are so slow you think they’ve finished until you start to walk away and they start up again “so anyway….” and you have to come back. I have a five step rule – if I get five steps away and you start talking again I pretend I can’t hear you and I keep on going.

“There was ….. across …. no wait. Ok, why did the chicken cross …. oh this is a joke I heard from Larry yesterday …. he was picking up his …. uh … kids …. from the daycare next to .… where my doctor is ……… and ……… so anyway…”

There are also slow listeners. Getting information into a slow listener is like trying to pour syrup through a drinking straw. You have to let the information dribble down their ear canals to pool at the bottom and gradually seep into their brain, sometimes overnight. They have to manually disassemble each phrase hold it up to the light, put on their little eye thingy and have a good look at it before they are prepared to accept any more. And if you try to go on while this is taking place they throw up their hands and say

“whoa whoa, go back, a chicken? On the road? Where … out front?”

I suppose it works out if you have a slow talker talking to a slow listener but not for people like me. I already had the conversation in my head on the way over, twice, and I’d like to move things along. I’ll start talking when you’re in sight and if I time it right I shouldn’t have to stop walking.

“Your chicken is dead. It’s on the road by the doctor’s office. That’s all I know. See you at lunch.”

cops and cars

Ahh, poor Cops. They pulled over a stolen Suburban full of non-caucasian recreational drug users, had them all out face down on the ground, found a rock of crack on the back seat and it looked like high-fives all round except for one thing. They failed to notice which of the four was driving.

Everybody can claim they didn’t know the car was stolen except the driver, who they can’t identify if nobody talks, and since the car WAS stolen it is completely plausible to claim the rock of crack was already in it. Poor Cops, the irony aggravates the buzzing in their heads.

You used to be able to tell un-marked police cars in Canada. They looked exactly like regular police cars without lights on the roof. Tricky. They don’t give you such a sporting chance over here. Cops go around here in all sorts of un-marked cars – Jeep Cherokees, turbo Subaru’s, and family wagons with big V8’s. The regular cop cars are either sporty little numbers with turbo V-8’s, spoilers and low profile mags or twin cab 4x4’s with a lock-up box on the back and snazzy metallic silver and blue two-tone paint. They have that rather fetching blue and white checkerboard stripe down the side, reminiscent of their Bobby ancestry.

You remember the car Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason) drove in Smokey And The Bandit? That was a shit-brown 1976 Chevy Caprice or some such thing. It was one ugly cop car. As I recall he was a member of the Georgia State Patrol. Georgia is a magical place where they manage to blend the bland, brown bleakness of Alabama with just a dash of antebellum snobbery to create a refined red-neck who can tell you what your problem is and make it sound like advice. They have very white teeth and determinedly blonde hair. They don’t drive a particular type of car.

Bless My Biscuits

Been down to Newcastle for a wedding. Our ex-neighbour moved down there to get hitched to a fella she met in her church. He’s the spitting image of Chris Farley except he’s still alive and he’s not even a little bit funny. I had never been to an Anglican service, which I discovered has nothing to do with fishing, but is in fact a little like Catholicism without the fascist bits. Just like the Catholics they like to have a biscuit and a sip of wine at their gatherings and pretend it’s the body and blood of Christ. Their god is that good you can eat him. There was a fair stampede as all the oldies jumped up and hobbled and caned their way down front, desperate for one more holy biscuit before they kark. They're that good.

I didn’t partake since I’m not Anglican and I don’t drink, especially not somebody’s last holy saviour, so I was checking out the architecture and watching the priest/pastor fella up the back. All together, after he had filled and poured, poured and filled, transferring wine back and forth between silver goblets like a holy three card monty game, he had had nine (9) big drinks of wine. Luckily he didn’t have a speaking part, he just worked up at the back mixing the drinks and handing out the biscuits.

Got me wondering though. Those biscuits, where do they come from? A holy cracker factory? How do they get to be holy? Do they get blessed right there at the factory, or do you have to bless them yourself? And can you bless a whole box at once or do you have to bless them individually? I don’t think they do it at the factory otherwise you’d see trucks on the road with special signs CAUTION – LEVEL 3 HOLY CARGO and a phone number to report spills. Also they would be a target for criminals dealing in black-market salvation. They must be expensive already because he was sweeping every last crumb into the cup and drinking them down too, then he wiped the rim of the cup with his napkin, put it to his lips and sucked out the last little bit. I’m not sure, he may have rubbed a little on his gums.

No, I think it must be part of the priest/pastor person’s job to bless the cookies. And then probably only in small batches as left-over Christ goes stale surprisingly quickly.

There were even some people there from Louisiana. I overheard a very tanned woman say to her daughter “Go on now. Y’all goan git the camera ‘cause here she comes”. My head snapped around and for a moment I couldn’t remember what friggin country I was living in.

There was a four hour break between the ceremony and dinner and I was starving. I imagined Jesus laughing at me saying “Should have had some of me when you had the chance, smart guy”. We had a look around for 10 minutes then said the hell with it and went and found a McDonalds.

Instead of the body of Christ I ended up with some clown’s nuggets.

Hole Truth

In comparing the damage from the early M14 rifle and it’s successor, the iconic M16, a weapons expert said “You can see the lighter M16 rounds have also penetrated the helmet from 450m, although the holes are smaller.”

I suppose when it comes to a hole in the head size really doesn’t matter.

You know those Star Trek holo-deck gizmos? The ones that let you create a whole artificial world to play in complete with food and drink and electronic ninja prostitutes, all contained in one room. You know why the Scientists don’t invent those? I think you can guess. Scientists are lazy.

That’s why they have beards and a faint mildewy odour.

It’s all the mercury fumes they breath in their work. At the end of the day all the robots get rubbed down with mercury to help maintain a shiny coat. The robots get fussy without it and refuse to go down in the afternoon. Some people are like that. Refuse to go down at any time.

I guess it all has to do with the size of the hole in your head.

Crack Views and Terrorist Blues

I came down the hall earlier tonight to find the surviving cat hunched down, neck craned, peeking through our bedroom door, which was open just a crack. When it heard my footsteps it leapt into the air, turned one-eighty and landed already running. Shot between my legs, down the hall and hid under P4’s sleeping plank. So I stuck my eyeball up to the crack to see what all the fuss was about in time to spot Mrs Joe in her all in all, back to the door, bent right over, picking something up from the floor. Crikey, that sort of thing gets me a bit jumpy too.

US States I have visited:

Washington
Oregon
Idaho
Montana
Michigan
Florida
Tennessee

Australia
Kentucky
Ohio
Pennsylvania
New York

They probably wouldn’t let me in these days, now that Canadians need a visa. Used to be you just gave a quick description of your business and the border guard would wave you on your way whether it was to buy cheap beer or see a pro ball-game or deliver marijuana to some bikers in Tacoma. It was all very civilized, your Canadian accent and license plate was good enough. In 1998 I got on a plane and flew to Florida with only my expired student card for ID. But then a couple of terrorists snuck into the US from Canada (and that’s what gave them away incidentally, the sneaking) and the walls went up. 300 years of free passage for snowbirds heading south and draft dodgers heading north shot to hell. Where will washed up NFL players and lovesick Californians go to play now? Terrorists are so thoughtless.

#421

“…the feces that is produced when shame eats stupidity.”
-Dale from King of The Hill

That’s funny.

What’s not funny though is blood poisoning. You never hear knock-knock jokes or riddles where the answer is blood poisoning. You never see a Happy Meal puzzle where the goal is to follow the maze and save Ronald from septicaemia.

Which is why he’ll probably die from it.

Did you know in Australia Ronald's voice is over-dubbed by Heath Ledger? Russel Crowe is Mayor McCheese.

When Ronald does commercials in Germany does he speak German or does he speak English with a Col. Klink accent? I bet there’s no just-pull-over-and-I’ll-bring-it-right-out-to-you at the drive-thru’s in Germany. If you have to wait there because they were out of nuggets, the entire kitchen staff is shot. By that of course I mean they are given warnings. Warnings and a short video presentation on anticipating demand, then a tea break, then they are shot. Not like the old days, when the tea came last.

When he does commercials in Iceland does he make a screeching, mewling, sobbing sound like someone sawing a sack of kittens in half? I guess that’s some sort of poke at Björk, I can’t be bothered to link it all up. Björk sounds like someone being electrocuted with a slightly varying current while sucking a salted lemon.

Still, she’s pretty good at it. I doubt I could do that. I can never get the kittens to stay in the bag. The little scamps. Last time one of them scratched me, gave me blood poisoning.

You think maybe Dale was talking about me?

not funny ha ha

We had a power surge and the TV made a funny ping noise and now we can tell who’s a space invading body snatcher walking among us and who’s not. It’s everybody. Everybody on TV now has blue lips which is the sign, page four in the big book of aliens. Either that or it’s really cold on TV. Perhaps TV is taking place at 38,000 feet these days. Could be I somehow devised and implemented a plan to slowly drain the oxygen out of TV and all the actors are suffering hypoxia. I don’t remember doing anything like that but I don’t remember a lot of shit I do. It’s not that I don’t care it’s just that most of what I do is so boring I fail to comprehend it.

Could be the TV was damaged by the power surge and no longer processes magenta. These are strange times.

America's Hardest Ponies

I was watching America’s Hardest Prisons (this week Oak Park Heights) and now I’m watching America’s Toughest Gangs which features such edgy young gangs as MS13 and GKB. But this week it’s the aryan nation, who are just dumb-fuck heroin dealers who use white supremacy as some sort of validation, and I’m wondering where it will all end?

When will America have enough gangs? When will America have enough prisons? When will America run out of things to put on TV? When will America buy me a pony?

Godammit, when will America buy us ALL ponies?

You know they’re just holding back “Battle of The Prison Gangs” until the time is right. Arnie’s in control of the Hollywood State and he was in Running Man, remember? That was a piece of shit. I felt sorry for Richard Dawson.

When will there be no difference between reality TV and surveillance?

When will there be a movie about vampires and South African joo-joo spirits set in a haunted voodoo mental hospital?

I’m telling you, you want to change America’s global image, give everybody a pony. Sure some people will simply eat the pony, Eskimos and mermaids for example, but they would still be grateful. All this time they should have been dropping ponies on Iraq. Imagine rising up from your sand hole to see 2500 white ponies parachuting down upon you, little red ribbons in their fluttering manes, love in their hearts. Why you’d just want to drop that rocket launcher and give them a big giant hug. That’s when they explode.

And they could put it on TV.

North Carolina denies molesting South Carolina, trial continues.

(a Venn Diagram)

Sarcastic Dan, having a poke at old SJ over there at The Center. Says I hate America. As I recall he said something like “Why oh why does [such a beacon of hope for the world like] Skookum Joe hate America?” The answer to this question is long and drawn out and complex and involves a series of Venn diagrams so I’ll make something up instead.

America and Canada were hanging out one afternoon at the post office. America was putting up wanted posters and Canada was waiting for its unemployment cheque when the conversation turned to women. America was bragging about all the countries it was doing – “Panama? Did her way back. Dug a motha fuckin trench through Panama. Did her again in 1989 too. Lately though, I dig those Middle Eastern chicks, so mysterious and oil-rich.” Canada mumbled something about its French girlfriend Quebec, but America said everybody knew Quebec was a dyke and only hung out with Canada because nobody else would let her have her own laws or bullshit made-up language. “I swear, she’s out doing Belgium as we speak, my frozen friend”. Canada thought it was odd that America suddenly had a Brooklyn accent but had to agree. That would explain that person who calls, says nothing in Flemish and hangs up, thought Canada.

“I’m pretty good friends with Australia you know,” said Canada, “she’s a little dry in places, but she’s got a nice beach.”

“Ha. Ain’t she like your cousin or something? You igloo-living freak. Go back to Alaska.”

“She is not,” said a rather stroppy Canada, “well only by marriage. We have the same great grandmother or something. It’s not weird. Tasmania is her vagina you know.”

America stopped putting up it’s poster “What? Her what? You freaky little canuck! You’ve been viewing her map abstractly! Wait till I tell Mexico…”

“Oh yeah?” said Canada “well we’re gong to excel at a sport not particularly popular in your country but one we can still play, not like cricket or rugby or football or basketball or soccer or darts, but one like hockey. One exactly like hockey. Not grass hockey either, ice hockey and we won’t wear helmets and we’ll kick your asses every Olympics and all the girls, like Sweden and Denmark will want to chill with the beaver. So there, eh.”

Canada’s cheque was finally in and so it went off to buy beer before the liquor store closed at 4pm and left America to ponder.

“Hmmm, hockey you say. We could put teams in Florida and Texas and the Carolinas and oh! I know! We’ll get Disney to make up a new team for California, they already have two but what the hell. Sweden eh? Never had a Swiss chick before."

One Evening In Early Winter

I was out in the backyard just now, checking on a little fire I have going. It’s been a bit stormy and wet, good weather for a fire and I figured I better burn that acacia tree that blew over 2 years ago. It was re-growth from the tree that blew over two years before that and if the trend continues we’re due for it to blow over again this winter. When it does I think we’ll put a jacaranda there instead.

I looked up into the patchy night sky, rafts of white and black clouds racing each other around, voids dotted with brilliant stars being exposed and erased and re-drawn There was a light behind the clouds, fading bright and dim as thicker and thinner cloud cover passed by but never becoming fully exposed. It was bright, bright as a low-flying aircraft, half as bright as the moon, and stationary. The clouds formed a halo around it and it seemed to grow and shrink, pulsing there to the north-west, about 40 degrees from the horizon.

Eventually the clouds shredded themselves apart to reveal the source to be Venus, good old Venus shinning brilliantly and I sighed in small relief. I got no problem with Venus. They pre-heat the probes on Venus.

invest in vengence

There’s an ad here for an investment firm. It’s a little skit where a seated man says to his man-servant - a handsome, fit looking, 40-ish man who is dusting a vase - “Michael, would you get me a cup of coffee please.”

“Certainly sir.”, Michael says with a twinkle in his eye, “Right away.”

Then KAZAM! Guess what these marketing geniuses did? That’s right, they switched the roles. Now our pal Mike is in the chair and the pasty older man is the butler – “Jeremy “, says Mike, “would you get me a cup of coffee please?”

“Certainly sir”, says Jerry, “right away.” And he looks into the middle ground as though he can’t quite figure out how he got there. And there, just there, the briefest hint of his inner rage, like a shadow passing behind his eyes.

And you think ‘that guy’s probably an alcoholic paedophile, he deserves to be the butler, serves him right. That Michael is a saint for even keeping him around. I think I’ll invest all my money with that company for they promise me not only a fair return on investment but also cold hard revenge on those who have wronged me or hired me as their butler’.

But then you realize you have no money to invest. So it’s back to plan A, with the gun-powder and the ferrets.

don't get your little hopes all up and everything

We had a new guy start today. Things are busy and we need the help. He didn’t actually show up though, didn’t call, no sign of him. So far he’s not been much help at all. But it was only his first day, maybe by tomorrow he’ll have worked out where we are. Then I suppose he’ll need a chair.

Do you think train drivers make sex jokes every time they enter a tunnel?

Do you think porn stars make train jokes every time they stick things in each other?

How about a train-shaped sex toy? That would make everybody happy.

The steam might be a problem.

We’ll put the new guy on it after we get him a chair.

anti-matter, lip monkeys, self amputation and a pun

Got a thing on my driver’s license. Says they can take out my guts and give em away if there’s anything left of me when I die (you never know, I might trip and fall into a vat of anti-matter, if they find a way to produce and store anti-matter, and I somehow find myself connected with it). Most of my organs are in pretty good shape for their age. They say we only use 10% of our brains and I have at least 40% left of mine, so a few long-divisions left in it yet. My spleen is immaculate.

A girl once told me I had nice ears. I can only take her word for it, they just look like ears to me, but I suppose somebody might like them after I’m gone. You could make a nice gift pack, two ears, two eyes and a nose. No lips though, Angelina Jolie would have bought all those up and had them sewn together into a super, or Gondwana Lip. After she died the Gondwana Lip would divide into smaller lipettes which would drift and cool. Eventually green plants would take hold and monkeys would form. Odd little lip monkeys the likes of which we can hardly imagine. I can barley imagine them now. All I see is fangs and bowler hats and the word monkey. Wait… no, that’s all.

I did see a documentary once about hand transplants. That was really creepy. One guy got hands that were three times too big for him. He was a little short guy with these long hands hanging at the ends of his wrists. The skin was off by four or five shades and they looked like melted soggy yellow rubber dishwashing gloves tapering down to gnarled brown, pointed, fingernail-like growths. The man said the hands were making him depressed. This is understandable. He said he sometimes felt suicidal. Not inconceivable. He said the left hand was trying to kill him. Yikes. Said it kept picking up knives and scissors and stabbing him, grabbing the steering wheel when he drove and veering the car into traffic. He was afraid the right hand would join the left and then what would he do? He wanted the hands removed but the doctors would not remove them for they had tried very hard to make the big rubber hands fit his pudgy wrists and they wanted to see what would happen next.

That guy should build a foot-operated hand chopping machine. But he better wear gloves while he builds it so the hands don’t know what’s afoot.

Catching up on some correspondence

One radio station where I worked had a teletype machine. It had a bell that would ding when important news items came over. I found if you jammed a paperclip in it you could make it stop.

Dear Teletype Manufacturing Company,

Please make one with a switch for the bell in case you don’t care to know anything new
or important.

There, that one’s done. One more to finish off the eighties.

Dear Duran Duran,

I find your work pretentious.

I suppose I should get around to writing Mom, tell her I moved to Australia. No, I better do these in order or I’ll never finish.

Dear Kurt Cobain,

Sorry I missd the wedding. Sure you and C will be very happy. Did I leave my shotgun over at your place?

bloody bloody bloody

You may have heard of this ad campaign by Tourism Australia which was banned in the UK for it’s tag-line “Where the bloody hell are you?” I don’t know if it was marketed in the US but I don’t see it doing well there either for the same reason.

That ad's not offensive, it’s not even accurate. It’s some back-of-the-never-never depiction of the idealized society Australians assume they live in. It’s a shame really. Because they spent a lot of money on that ad. So now they just air it locally. I have seen it 6 times this morning. I hate that ad. I want to punch most of the people in that ad right in the solar plexus. Except the “bloody hell” girl. It’s not her fault.

Not her fault that my tax dollars were spent on a multi-million dollar ad campaign currently being used to entice ME to where I already LIVE by use of the most annoying cast of movie-extras ever assembled. All because the British are too uptight to take a joke. I tired, worn, clichéd “How ya goin, fair dinkum, she’ll be right mate”, yes-we-all-know-Aussies-are-a-cheeky-lot, bloody joke.

Tonight's Post: Death Goes Antiquing.

I topped up the fish pond. It was really low. Dan the fish was confined to the deep end and could not venture up to the waterfall anymore. But it’s all full now and I wonder what it’s like for Dan to suddenly have twice as much space available. He was swimming around eating now-submerged mosquito larvae along the rocks. That’s his way of being amazed.

When I was 14 I tried to boil urine on the stove. I was trying to make phosphorus. It made a very, really very bad smell. You should do that outside.

One thing I did do outside was accidentally light a pot of melted wax on fire. I had a vague notion to make candles. I found out why they say never to put water on a grease fire when I turned the garden hose on it. Big fireball shot up, just like in the movies. It was pretty cool but it burned all one side of the cherry tree and that was hard to explain.

One summer I got sent to camp. Bible camp. Nobody asked me, they just sent me. It was run by Perky Teenage Christians and even at the age of nine I was wary of the optimistic. I couldn’t swim very well and was not able to tread water for the required two minutes to receive some sew-on patch and a John The Baptist bookmark with some of his catchier sayings on it. But Perky Christian Girl felt bad ‘cause everybody’s a winner, damn it, and gave me the damn thing anyway. I may be a lot of things but I’m certainly not someone who claims to be a better swimmer than they are, that’s just wrong, so I threw it away.