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.