Time Is On My Side - After It Stops Fighting Amongst Itself

I am perfectly in control and arriving places when I should be. The Sydney Morning Herald incorrectly told me to put my clocks forward, which cancelled out my phone company "3" putting my clock back by an hour, a week early.

Thus nature balances itself.

Backing Out Of The Church Slowly And Avoiding Eye Contact

For a while now, I’ve had a hunch that the Church of England is trying to back out of the deal.

I’ve mentioned before that there’s an almost resigned air of defeat to their communications. (Specifically in Organising Atheists...) It’s like they know the jig is up, and just want to leave quietly so that not too many people are embarrassed.

I have divined their plan to achieve this quiet withdrawal.

Smurfy sent me an email with the title, “Is the Archbishop of Canterbury secretly one of us?” At first I was confused. I was expecting to see a picture of the Bishop painted blue. It would make sense, he’s already got a pointy hat. But when I read this article God Will Not Give Happy Ending I realised Smurf meant atheist.

If you don't read the article, here’s the summation. The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that God can’t help us with our environmental troubles. What is He willing to help with?

So far they’ve said that; He doesn’t intercede on a trivial personal level of folly or sin. He doesn’t intercede on man-made acts of evil and now He won’t do anything about the planet. According to the Church of England, all we can count on, even in the worst disaster, is His love. Great. Stick that in your survival kit and send a flare up with it.

See what they’re doing? See? They’re incrementally removing the advertised features from the product until there’s nothing left to sell. It’s a recall by attrition.

The greatest trick that God ever pulled, was convincing the world he didn’t exist – gradually.

Curios Chiaroscuro

I’m lying out in the desert, the midday sun beating me in the face. I’m testing how tight the ropes are tied when I’m plunged into sudden and complete darkness.

I’m on my back in a city street. Labouring bystanders give me mouth-to-mouth and heart massage but I’m suddenly in the light. I have reached the heavenly brightness. As I am about to bask in God’s love, I am cast out. Total, aching darkness.

The spaceship engine has failed and we are plunging back into the arc-welding brightness of the exploding space-station. As we hit the flaming penumbra, darkness engulfs the ship. The light of further explosions hit us again and again. And then darkness.

At 7am, my alarm goes off and I roll over to flick the switch. I am almost blinded by a sudden, intense light. I rear up and the culprit of the dreams falls off my cheek. 

I had fallen asleep on my Smiggle Book Light and the tiny bastard had glued itself to my face. Every time I rolled over I had switched the thing either on or off and as it had been resting on my left eye, it had really given the lobes of my brain a workout. 

(I don’t care if it happens again and again, though. I have a Smiggle Book Light. The only thing that doesn’t make me the envy of 9-year-old girls everywhere, is mine is black, not pink.)

Good Times

It's good to mark the important milestones in your life. You all remember your twentyfirsts and graduations. I would like to mark some of the smaller moments as well.

So, as an insomniac, I would like to present a selection of great times in my life and what they brought to mind when I was there.

I wonder why I'm so hungry, I musn't have had enough dinner. I keep thinking of Pi.

I wonder if those crazy Jacksons will get back together. I mean, Michael's going back out onto the road. They must be jealous.

Fibonacci time. I wonder if they'll make Tom Hanks wear that wig in The Da Vinci Code Part II?

Collect the whole set, and you have witnessed what I like to call "Goldilocks and the Three Mazdas."

We Were A-Mazing

Above is a 3D maze with a small ball-bearing inside it. There are various twists and turns you must navigate to get to the finish which are all numbered, and they go up to 100. There are 90 degree and 180 degree turns, swinging arms, flip floppy buckets to drop the ball into and all sorts of other devilish little tricks to confuse those who prefer a 2D world. It is utterly brilliant. Because I'm not at all a nerd, when the bloke who owns it brought it in to work, I wasn't at all forced to finish it before anyone else and did not feel inordinately proud of myself, at all, for doing it. Not one little bit. 

I will admit to one thing, though. And I'm sorry to say you are either going to get this, or not. There's no explaining it. Through the entire exercise, I was singing, "One two three four five... six seven eight nine ten... eleven, twelve, Do do do dooo do du du.

Joss Doin' Some Whedon

Emergency Contact was given a box set of DVDs recently. I think the show’s got a good chance of being a big success when the networks air it on the telly. 

The actors are very nice and the script is snappy. It doesn’t require so much attention that you can’t relax and enjoy it, but it still provides some take-away lines for the next day at work. The look is fresh and new in a quaintly under-funded 90s way, and I don’t think I’m endangering my credibility when I say that Buffy The Vampire Slayer could be a hit. Watch this space.

However, no positive review can exist without some avuncular advice. Vampires are supposed to be sexy and smart and sleek. So, if there must be special-effects dentures for the fangs, they should be supplied for both the upper and lower jaw. Giving vampires only the top set of choppers just gives bad-guys a crook look. Evil lairs end up looking like badly lit roadside-diners when there are a bunch of chinless guys with chronic overbites, groaning and leering around a spunky, blonde stranger.

If The Hat Fits, Pull A Rabbit Out Of It

It’s the season for 40th birthday parties at the moment. I’ve gone to a few lately, then again, once you hit a certain age, lately stretches for a couple of years so, you know, don’t bank on the accuracy of my assessment… anyhooooooo, at the last one I attended a guy with a video camera came up and asked me to give a video message to the host.

“Happy Birthday, Miles. Damn tasteful of you to have your 50th birthday on the 50th anniversary of the recording of ‘Kind of Blue’ by Miles Davis…” I smile, then pretend to hear someone off camera say something so I can do an embarrassed backtrack, “What? Not 50!? It’s his 40th? Jesus!” (Somebody stop me, oh my sides.)

Birthday boy was within earshot and came over and said, “Actually, I was named after Miles Davis.”

“So that observation of mine is not terribly original because it is a genuine connection and you’re probably going to get that same sort of message 30 more times tonight, I would imagine,” I answered.

He politely opined that he probably wouldn’t, and then followed up with, “I got it really confused when I was a kid, but it worked out okay. When I asked my parents why I had been called Miles, they told me that I was named after a musician. I misheard them, though. When people would ask me about my name, I would proudly say that I was named after a magician. That was actually kind of cool in primary school. It wasn’t until I went to secondary school that a teacher, when told the story, sat back and said that he couldn’t think of any famous magicians called Miles. I checked with my parents and sure enough, musician. But by then I was in high school, where it’s definitely much cooler to be named after a musician rather than a magician.”

If you’ve got cloth ears and you’re called Harry, you’ve got a whole world of options open to you.

Pugnacious Times

Live feed on? Yep? We're Up? Ok.

Ahem... OK. In Three... Two... One... Not since the 'New Deal', have financial reporters had to go without pants, or be so 'restrained' in their coverage...

Hey, is that a butcher going out of business over there? No? Oh well... back to you, Stan.

Yes, We Have New Bananas

Shopping isn’t one of those things that I stick at the top of my “Best Ever, Unreal Things To Do” list. Grocery shopping actually depresses me. Not just because of the boredom and the queues, but also because I am an unrepentant snob and the place where we do our grocery shopping is filled with the most heinous slobs, losers, idiots and just plain smelly people. They like to go down the aisles two abreast and act all surprised when you want to get past them as they stare gormlessly at a jar of pickled herrings as though it is the single most interesting artefact to have dropped out of the sky.

As a consequence, I don’t go shopping every day. But this has led to a complication: and so, a request to geneticists and farmers.

At a recent visit to the doctor, it transpired that I have been critically short on potassium. You need to have a certain amount in your blood to stop you from falling over, and I had almost none. So the doctor said to me, “Bananas.” Because I am tired of nearly falling over, I have heeded his advice and got on a narny binge. But it’s not easy. As you  know by now, I like everything to be no harder than it has to be and bananas are not helping.

The window of edibility due to ripeness on your commercially produced banana is 20 minutes long, arriving at approximately 3.30 in the morning. I am compelled to buy bunches of bananas because I don’t want to go to the shops every day to buy one, lonely, curved, yellow piece of fruit. But that leaves you with most of the bunch being not ripe enough, or too ripe during its stay in the house.

What I want Monsanto to develop, if they really want to buy my loyalty to their GM crops, is bunches of bananas that ripen sequentially, not simultaneously.

How hard can it be?

In-Stinked

As I have stated before, I’m not asking for a return to some imagined ‘good old days’. I am not convinced there were any. If the good old days were really that good, people would have lived longer during them.

But something has been happening at work over the last couple of days that made me wonder if we haven’t strayed a little far from our natural domains.

We had an absolutely horrible smell blowing up and down our end of the building. Foul. Eye-wateringly bad. Leave-the-room-run-outside-heave-gasp-try-and-man-up-because-you’ve-got-a-lot-of-work-to-do-go-back-in-roll-your-eyes-give-up-and-move-somewhere-else bad. Potentially life-threateningly noxious. Worse than the guy who used to run the corner store who was known as Stinky Joe.

And none of us, not one, could positively identify what it was.

“That’s sewage.”

“Dead rat in the air-con.”

“Nah, that’s the smell of something electrical and expensive giving up the ghost.”

“Well I think it’s dust burning off the motors.”

“You’re all idiots. Get back to work.”

Turns out it was broken sewage pipes dragging the aroma into the building… and none of us were sure what the smell was.

That seems alarming to me.

If I think of all the diseases you can get by wading around knee deep in human excrement, I would have thought it would be an evolutionary advantage to be able to identify the muck - at a distance. It seems not.

If any of us were transported back to a 17th Century village, we would die instantly from being unable to identify what was deadly, off, second hand or diseased.

I would also spend an inordinate amount of time on the ducking stool for being a mouthy old guy who kept carrying on about how good the new days are going to be.

Hey, Fella! It’s Over. Move On

I don’t know how to feel about this guy.

Sorry? Envious? Admiring?

For those that can’t make out what’s written on the back of this car, it says “Hey, Hey it’s Saturday - proudly donated by Nissan”  (Or click to enlarge.)

Hey, Hey it’s Saturday was a show that ran for so long on Australian TV that it is possible to talk about it in terms of epochs. 

Between 1971 and 1999, Daryl Somers and Ossie Ostrich were there on the Australian landscape like a Greek Easter Island Head and his Fuzzy Pink Easter Island Ostrich. No matter what people say about Daryl, I have a soft spot for him; he reminds me a little of my Dad.

I liked the earliest incarnation, when the show was on Saturday morning. They played me The Thunderbirds and various cartoons and I am reliably informed that if you were an adult watching at the time, you would be splitting your sides at the non-stop innuendo, and if you were a kid, it sailed over your head and you just enjoyed the colour and movement.

I never really went for it in its later incarnation as a Saturday night, light entertainment show – but I don’t condemn it, unlike some Australians. The level of vehemency sometimes generated when talking about the show is surprising. Daryl really divided the pack towards the end there. So that’s why I kind of admire a guy who’s willing to drive around in a 21 year old Nissan Pulsar that proclaims the fact he won it on a segment of Hey, Hey It’s Saturday (probably Pluck-a-Duck). 

Mardi Gras aint got nothing on him. He’s out and he’s proud.

Urban Fairytales

Emergency Contact has a clever mate (actually, being who she is, she has a lot of clever mates). One of them, Victoria, a producer, I'm proud to call a friend of mine these days as well.

She did this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy0HNWto0UY

It's lovely and I felt better after watching it.

Name That Toon

Something that costs nothing is worth exactly what you pay for it. And so on.

Activities that, for example, our forebears would have risked life and limb to achieve have been made utterly mundane. Australia, for instance, took a year to get to in a rickety little boat, and unless you had a Dickensian grudge to settle, you weren’t seen or heard from again in Old Blighty.

The romance of the sea was not just about discovery, it was also about testing yourself, about winning battles against Poseidon. You came back from crossing the equator a man, or a very good female impersonator. A year at sea with only men for company, accordion for entertainment and boiled shoe for food.

These days, your main challenge in sailing the ocean blue is making sure you don’t end up dead on the floor of your stateroom with a stomach full of drugs. So really, in comparison, the olden days were much more crap.

To be balanced in this argument (can’t say why I start being balanced now), I do feel that most modern improvements are genuinely for the better. I pay homage when I say - If I have seen further, it is because I have sat in the seats of giant planes (apologies to Isaac Newton). However, I saw something on telly recently that made me yearn for a time past. A time where not everything was instantly supplied on a whim. 

For starters, no-one is going to die if they don’t have this application and I can’t see how lives are improved with it. It’s a feature that allows you to hold your iPhone up to a sound source and it will name the tune and artist for you. This is total bullshit, man. I’m a bit of a music fan and I can think of many occasions where I have struggled over the course of years to identify and find a piece of music. I have caught a hint of and liked countless numbers of songs and Sherlocked my way around the traps and tracked these little gems down. I get a real sense of pleasure and achievement when I capture one of these illusive treats. The hunt makes the having more worthwhile.

It took me ten years, in one case, to identify and find a Frontside album. I was sitting in a weatherboard house in Dungog celebrating a christening when I saw the thing sitting in a collection of strange albums owned by an acquaintance. It was like a ray of light on a cloudy day. 

Once, walking past the old Kinselas, I heard a track that I had been after since I'd been a young teenager. I queued, paid my entrance fee, and bought the 12 inch single from the surprised DJ.

These trials, serendipity, happenstance and triumphs by acute observation and memory are now made worthless by a silly little device.

Even though it gets fair up my nose, sideways, with an arm full of deckchairs (I really can’t put my finger on why it has annoyed me so much) I console myself with the thought that if it works as well as a whole lot of other things to do with digital music, it will be total rubbish.

Reliable Baby-Sitter Wanted. Homo-Sapien Preferred

We all have to be a little less xenophobic. Fear of 'the other' leads to terrible situations. But, during these tough economic times, it's important to retain some standards.

If when you come home from the opera, you have to strap yourself into a military-grade exo-sceleton and scream "Get away from her, you bitch!" while blowing the baby-sitter out of air-lock... you have probably gone with the wrong agency.