Chopper Squad

Talking to a tired mother, KK, this morning, I learnt one of those parental tricks that quite amuse me.

She’d had a “Tooth-fairy Incident”. Her kid had woken up in the middle of the night and found that the fairy had not yet delivered. He’d gone into KK’s room to complain and was guided back to bed. Seeing that she was in for a long night of waiting for him to get back to sleep before she could pull the tooth-money-switcheroo, KK said,

“Your room’s quite messy, I’m going to take the tooth out to the kitchen so the tooth fairy doesn’t fall and twist an ankle. You can go and look for your money in the morning.”

“Nice work, KK,” I said, admiring the elegance of the deception. It also threw in an implicit criticism of the child’s housekeeping.

“So, I was able to get it done instantly, get back to bed, and he got his three dollars, ‘cause the tooth was in good shape.”

“Well, all’s well that… wait. There’s a price differential based on the condition of the chopper?”

“Yeah!  Ones that can be ‘re-used’ get a better price. Makes ‘em clean their teeth.”

The logic is irrefutable, but the bit that confirms for me that kids are idiots, is the re-use clause.  

The iQuit

Scene: Obscenely lavish private hospital room. Steve Jobs lies, almost in state, among life support  machinery. A private aide enters.

Steve: Is it done?

Aide: Well sort of…

Steve: Whaddya mean “sort of”?

Aide: Well, we released something.

Steve: Something doesn’t sound like what I was expecting. I’ve been hanging on for the iPhone 5. Where’s the iPhone 5?

Aide: It’s still on the backburner. We want to release something that actually makes and takes phone calls. We’ve released the iPhone 4S.

Steve: Ah, that fuckin’ does it!

Steve tears the drips and support gear out of his nose and arm. The beeping turns to a unbroken tone.

End scene.

Couch Potato Field

Emergency Contact relaxes on the new couch.

After lounge camping for far too long, Emergency Contact and I took delivery of our new couch… and it’s freakin’ huge. Warehouse tastes on apartment acreage. There’s the couch and the telly and that’s all, now. No cooking, no washing and certainly no dancing. I have to come in through the second story balcony window because I can’t get the front door open. EC has given up trying to get out and works from home now. The Eastern plateau of cushion area 18, just near the fuzzy summit of the North Face is casting shade over the bathroom. The cushion nearest the front door started broadcasting on Sunday night a message that read: ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

Comfortable, but.

Hope I Don't Get "Chosen"

Ricky Gervais’ stand-up, Politics was on telly the other night. It features a bit on Hitler misinterpreting Neitzsche. I wouldn’t recommend it to sensitive Jews but by the standards of people who think like me, it’s funny. Don’t get me wrong, genocide is bad. Let me just be plain about that: Genocide - Bad. Also, I don’t have time for racial supremacists. I’ve never wanted to join one of those clubs. But, it did get me thinking.

For a religious Jew, the Holocaust would have to be considered a miracle. If their god is the all seeing, omnipotent being that they claim He is, then something as big as the Holocaust would have to have come to His attention.

In fact, He would have had a hand in it if He is an omniscient hyper-being in charge of daily affairs. Further, He would have to have been quite convinced of His plan. If we consider that this is a super-being that can have his mind changed by chanting and praying, I think it would be safe to say that a lot of Jews at the time would have been appealing to Him to stop the slaughter, but He persisted. Surely this is a miracle. Not a good one, which is usually nuance we see put on miracles, but it’s an event that rivals a natural cataclysm so strays into that category.

This, I think, leaves the Jews in a nasty position as far as being the chosen people. Chosen for what?

It points to another thing that annoys me about religious thinking. You always see people thanking gods for saving their children, landing the plane safely, sparing their houses from the flood and on and on. Not only is it insulting to hardworking surf lifesavers, pilots and emergency service workers, it’s not apportioning blame properly.

I’ll give five bucks to the next person on a news report who says, “Thank God all the rooves in this neighbourhood were ripped off during the storm and that bit of tin flew across the road and decapitated Mrs Wilson. I hated her.”

Sit Up Straight. Elbows Off The Remote. Chew Your Telly Properly

The signs of old age are legion. It’s not just the obvious ones like needing to take your pants off as soon as you get home or preferring a night in, to a night out. There are the really unlikely ones.

Emergency Contact and I recently bought a new couch. This couch has quite a “lead time” before delivery. This is salesperson speak for, “It’ll take fucking ages to be made and delivered.”

We were getting antsy about where it was, so EC rang the shop and asked. We were told, “This week.”

That was last week.

That wouldn’t have mattered so much in the grand scheme of things if I hadn’t immediately given the old couch, armchair and Ottoman to a mate. We’ve been indoor camping for a week now and it’s not nearly as fun as it sounds.

I’ve discovered I would rather spend an entire evening watching TV sitting on an unpadded dining chair, than get down and slum it on a single mattress. There’s something hopelessly old-age and conservative about preferring to watch Breaking Bad in a straight backed chair. I feel like someone presiding over proceedings rather than lying back, being reassured.

I'll Fix Your Vampire Problem - I'd Stake My Reputation On It

I’ve been watching a new current affairs program from the deep south of America. It's called True Blood and it's been keeping me abreast of some horrifying social developments in that neck of the woods.

Being a solutions kind of guy, I have made some observations and I think I can help Louisiana, and therefore America, with its problems.

First, to some facts as I have understood them:

The vampire virus has some very specific behavioural outcomes. One of them is that the afflicted have to be invited over the threshold to enter the dwelling of another. At first I thought that was silly, but I have noticed with some of my human colleagues that the merest hint of the common-cold virus makes it impossible for them to enter the workplace.

If you un-invite a vampire already in your house, they are dragged out the door like there’s an invisible bouncer holding their collar. Always the door. It’s very specific that way.

As far as the vampire virus is concerned, the ownership of the house is entirely a legal matter. In one article I saw a vampire, called Mr Northman, buy a house that he had previously been un-invited from and after he had taken possession, he no longer needed permission to enter. With a stroke of the pen down at the conveyer’s office, the virus relaxed and was not concerned that the previous occupant’s family had lived there for generations.

The virus also makes vampires susceptible to extreme physical damage from silver.

Now, America, let’s use these facts to your advantage.

Every fly-wire door should have a few strands of silver woven through the mesh. You have a vamp in your house who looks a bit hungry or keeps changing the channel on the TV to something you don’t like, un-invite them. There’ll be a scraping noise as they’re dragged towards the door, a splorchy noise as they are forced through a silver wire mesh and then all you have to do is hose the vampire gazpachio off the veranda in the morning.

But let’s, as they say, kick this up a notch. If the notion of un-invitation from legally owned territory is enough to push a vampire out the door, I would suggest that we only need to speak to five people and the whole shootin’ match is over.

A majority decision from the US Supreme Court (5 from 9) that the borders of the US are the legal homeland of the US citizenry, followed by an un-invitation from America to the undead, and I would say you’ve only got two more things to consider; whether to do it in the day time or night time.  

(Maybe some spinning, silver blades at all immigration points for entertainment’s sake and an apology letter to Canada and Mexico for the mess, but that’s it.)

Now, I’m obviously going to have to make a speech at my inauguration and the conferral of the Public Health Distinguished Service Medal and that’s where I will outline my ideas for housetraining werewolves with electrified flea-collars.

Creative Impulse

I have decided what my new art project should be. I can’t afford it though, so I’m just going to have to describe it to you. That’s so post-modern…

I want to do art installations that look like unlikely or impossible accidents with hybrid machines.

My first work – the news will report that a crash site has been found in a farmer’s field, where apparently a jet powered, flying washing machine has come down, killing all socks on board. Chillingly, only left socks were found, it appears that the right socks may have bailed out.

Second work – freight train wrapped around, as if stopped dead from high speed, a spherical bubblegum dispenser of the type seen outside shops in the 1960s.

Third work – Four wheel drive printing press, bogged in the La Brea Tar Pits. The final few pages seen coming off the printing press have the headline, “Four Wheel Drive Printing Press Bogged in Tar Pit.”

Fourth work – Churches reported to be outraged as paparazzi snap pictures of a PC, giving sacrament to a Mac

I'm Not Buying Your Thing. I Don't Understand You

Making up words and describing things in exciting ways is how the impotent make themselves feel better. You don’t just "start" a computer application. What you are doing is so important it rivals moonshots and maiden voyages, you "launch" it. You don’t "fix" a laptop. What you are doing is so butch and hardcore, you "flatten" and rebuild it. One of the most useless additions to the English language from this brigade of macho-mercenary-gangstas, is "functionality". Function does fine. Stop pretending you’re clever by using the stupid word. You just reveal yourself as a tool.

I expect this kind of crap from men trying to impress themselves but today, the self-important, word-mangling, chump-of-the-day-award goes to a woman.

In describing a medical breakthrough that took a couple of teams working together, she said, “This kind of cooperativity is blah blah blah…” I write, blah blah blah there because I was unable to remember what the rest of the message was, I was so busy wrestling with what cooperativity has over plain old cooperation.

She totally undervalued her opportunity to maximise and leverage her information delivery with the consumer/participants using a benchmarked methodology that guarantees enhanced synergy in the multi-media ecosystem.