Zombies

Emergency Contact and I recently watched a film that was pretending to be a zombie movie and while 28 Weeks Later is a total stinker, it did lead to a revelation. I suddenly understood why we love zombie movies. They’re actually revenge stories.

Vampire movies are aspirational. You’re lying to yourself if you don’t want to be a vampire. Immortality, great wardrobe, no Monday mornings on public transport, finally being able to take advantage of bank interest rates by waiting, waiting, waiting. Bitey bitey slurpy slurpy. What’s not to like? But, it’s fantasy. You know you’re never going to get bit by the right gang-fanga who just wants to look after you in the lap of decrepit luxury.

Superheros are a bust. Their stories are too easily dismissed. Superman in particular is as boring as Batman’s poop. Quite frankly, I’ve never understood the attraction to fighting crime the minute you can levitate. Sure, the meek might inherit the earth, but in the meantime the strong are going to have pretty nice time of it. Again, it’s not going to happen. You are not suddenly going to wake up being able to leap small ponies in a single bound and being invincible to anything but Samsonite.

Zombies though – that can happen, brain owner. We’re all just one useless penicillin shot away from world-wide, dawdling apocalypse and we always imagine ourselves as one of the few remaining survivors. Here’s what dawned-of-the-dead on me the other night.

It’s a chance to kill your neighbours.

Guilt free.

Admit it.

The instant the first syllable of Braaai… is halfway of the mouth of the selfish son-of-a-bitch who always parks across two car spaces, he’s getting his moronic head caved in.

The second that fucker across the landing, the one who always screams at the football late at night, lifts two arms up in front of herself, she’s getting two of Remington’s best in the face.

The tiniest hint of a shambling walk from that idiot in the post office and we’re finally going to see how sharp that axe really… what… he only had a hip injury? He wasn’t really a zombie?

Let’s just chalk that one up to a mercy killing. But you know what I mean. Come the zombie apocalypse, all bets are off and some of those painful bastards who make the world a worse place are finally going to get what’s coming to them without all the hand-wringing that goes with assisted suicide.

Ducks

After sitting quietly behind the wheel for some hours recently and pondering the nature of things, I have arrived at the following conclusion. Ducks are the funniest birds.

They are funnier than other birds for a number of reasons. They are a very birdy sort of bird. They are an archetype. They play it straight, which makes them excellent for jokes of all sorts.

 “But AGA,” I hear you say, “there are so many other stand-out funny birds. Why ducks?” Well, let’s look at this scientifically. 

Penguins are bunging it on. They are comical but overcook the act - you look at a penguin and you start thinking of little men in tuxedos. There’s also that thing they do with the useless wings, the walk, and all the physical comedy of bouncing off rocks and falling over on the ice. They yell, “look at me”. Overkill.

Pelicans are arguably very funny, with their little, punk back-of-the-heads and serious expression. However they are a caricature, and that’s a distraction in a joke. You are forever expecting something to happen with the beak. The penguin is also a large animal which, unless you are presenting a gag in the vein of elephant jokes, is no good. It’s not typical.

Vultures are not good because there’s no cuteness. A certain amount of likeability is important in your comic bird. Vultures are only liked by Texas Rangers looking for a lost body in the desert.

Chickens are a close contender because there’s something so hopeless about them. Pathos plus bird-feed equals comedy. But chickens don’t fly, don’t have nice round heads and their eyes are a bit psycho. There’s also that creepy weirdness with the combs and fleshy bits above and below the beaks. I also feel that lice are part of the bargain with a chicken. Ducks are clean. Look at the amount of time they spend on the water.

I could invoke a Daffy and Donald versus Foghorn Leghorn logic here, but that’s not really where I’m coming from. I want there to be a purity to this; none of that fictional stuff.

Ducks aren’t all straight-men. They are able to bring an element of the surreal to the party. They quack. That can be funny, and it can have a mysterious quality. One of the great modern myths is that a duck’s quack doesn’t echo. Ducks can also survive being shot with arrows - there are numerous cases on record. They have lived that classic comedy: arrow-through-the-head.

Duck. The word is good to say, which helps. Duck. It’s sharp, it rhymes with things that make it good for punning, and where would you be without the bit on the front of their heads? Whenever a duck walks into a chemist and asks for chap-stick, you know it’s going on his bill.

They must occupy a special place in the hearts of us all. Think about when they are used in language. Water off their backs, taking to things like one of them to water, being lame when your presidency is timing out, and of course, not getting down off an elephant. You get down off a duck.

So there you have it. Ducks win. The mighty duck. I like a good duck.

On The Road Again

A Grey Area hit the road again recently and racked up over 3,500 clicks in a week. That’s not bad going for someone with attention deficit look over there! As usual though, such trips raise issues and questions that need addressing.

First, the planking craze has reached our wildlife. We saw hundreds of different animals planking on the side, sometimes even in the middle, of the road. When will the madness end?

Second, when are lambs supposed to appear? We saw thousands of little lambs and it doesn’t feel like spring to me. Has someone been telling me porkies about when lambs spontaneously generate? Is it like that horse’s birthday thing where someone just nominated a date but it’s not actually the day that all horses were born?

And talking of horses, third, how do you know when to put a jacket on a horse? I saw some horses that were fairly formally dressed with coats on, and others that were just standing around in their all-together.  What was the difference? Are these the horse latitudes I‘ve heard so much about? And what are ponies for? We saw quite a few ponies and I can’t work out what you would do with them other than maybe put a few of them on a skewer and make pony-kebab.

We saw quite a few llamas. One of them looked like he was wearing shorts. He was all white except for black hind-quarters and a bit down his back legs. Brilliant. The llama led to a conversation where nature helpfully pitched in with props to illustrate my point.

I mentioned that I’d read somewhere that llamas make good watch-animals for sheep. Apparently they’re inquisitive, territorial and not particularly afraid of stuff. Emergency Contact said, “But wouldn’t a fox just jump on a llama’s back and bite its head off?”

“They’re not wolves, they’re only that big,” I answered, as a fox ran across the road in front of us. It was the first fox I’d seen that wasn’t flat out planking and his timing was immaculate. Thank you, Mr Fox. Buon appetito.

Defence Of Planks

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Smurfy said to me, “I heard that someone died from planking. I was really worried until I realised I’d misheard the radio report.” We both chortled like the witty raconteurs that we are and then went on to list words that rhyme with wee-wee.

After the death of that guy in Queensland, the standard position on planking (other than lying rigid on something unlikely) was that it was bad and stupid and only bad and stupid people did it. This was reinforced a couple of days later by a woman who, when talking about the Queensland death at a dinner party, ended up in hospital after an unsuccessful dining chair demonstration to her perplexed mates.

Emergency Contact came home one day to report that a mate of hers had asked, “So, let me get this right. It’s people pretending to be wood?” Which to me, is a perfectly incorrect although amusing explanation and exactly why I’m not anti-planking.

Planking is funny. It’s anti-art but occupies exactly the same space. It is something that exists for no other reason than itself.

It requires skill. Not everybody can do it, as evidenced by the deaths and injuries. I’m not being flip about that.

Planking, when done properly, is anonymous. A really good plank is done with the face away from the camera, which for some reason amuses me even more. Animate objects pretending to be inanimate - in odd places. It amuses for the same reasons we find faces in inanimate objects amusing. For the same reason that the ‘lampshade on the head’ is still referenced to describe certain absurd party moves, planking relies on the absurd, the surreal and quite often the most picturesque and high places. The implied back-story is always, "How the hell did they get there?" and even better, they're not mugging for the camera, they’re pretending to be a lost bit of wood. There’s nothing in that sentence that I don’t find amusing for a couple of seconds and let’s face it, it’s the net. It’s an ephemeral source of entertainment.

I don’t think we should get all disdainful about people trying some danger-art for grins, and certainly don’t think we should get all upset when it occasionally goes wrong. Think of how much more famous Stelarc would be if he plummetted to his death with a bunch of tear marks in his back. That’d be good for no-one.

That's Going On The Bill, Too

"A good pre-soak, Darlin', and that should come right out."

I once said that I was all vampired out. I might have been a bit hasty ‘cause on the whole, I’m enjoying the third season of True Blood. The show does worry me on two counts, though.

The first one is a minor quibble. Vambars (say it like Bill Compton. It’s more fun that way.) are very tough on clothes and Manchester. Mein Gott they get that blood everywhere! And they don’t clean up nearly quickly enough. They munch down on some innocent and leave the goo all over their faces and clothes for hours. Don’t get me started on what they do to the bed linen. While all that biting and humping and strangling and gargling and chewing and burping might be fun, there’s absolutely no thought for the poor maid who’s going to have to clean that up. How many sheets do they have, anyway? I can’t see a lot of those stains coming out and it’s not just the bodily juices. There are lumps!

But that’s a problem for the props department and can be relegated to the realms of disbelief suspension. My second concern is far more pressing.

I saw my first ugly person in the cast.

Yep. Well. Not actually ugly, but not as over the top gorgeous as everybody else. I mean, there is the odd realistic looking human in the cast list; there’s that dumb cop, and somebody’s mother isn’t absolutely smoking, but by and large they’re a pretty drop-dead bunch of undead and this girl stands out like a severed thumb.

My only consolation is that I can’t see her lasting long. She’s fallen for the wrong guy so we’ll probably see her body in a ditch soon enough so I shouldn’t get all sooky about it. (Yep. Say it like Bill. Much more fun that way.)

Shower Scene From Monsters Inc

Yesterday in the shower, an animal fell out of my navel, danced around for a bit, and then made its escape down the plughole.

Well, that’s what it looked like anyway. What it actually was, was a really good sized bit of navel lint that fell out, then got hit by individual droplets of water that made it move around like a small animal dodging a predator, and then inevitably got washed away.

I’m glad I’m not going to be surprised by this again, because it’s fuzzy sheet weather here in Sydney and the navel lint production ramps up to a whole new level at this time.

How Tweet It Is

A Grey Area has joined/started/been assimilated by Twitter (whatever it is you kids-of-today do with it). This happened for business reasons and I won’t go into it other than to say that I’m there now and it rankles with me a little.

For old people like me, Twitter represents everything that is wrong with the world, so I’ve been trying to think of ways to subvert it a little, without actually tweeting about it.

Idea number One

• Convert a black and white picture into 140 ‘pixels’ per line.
• Each pixel is given an “O” for black, or a space for white
• Tweet it line by line over two years
• Only someone with the patience to collect all the lines in the right order, print them out in poster format and stand back and squint, gets to see the “art”
• The picture will be of something really good, like a Chihuahua in a toupee
• First reader to identify the contents of the image, wins a really good prize, like a slightly used toupee

Idea number Two

• Tweet jokes backwards
• Someone reading in order gets a series of intriguing non sequiturs
• Someone reading down a timeline gets a joke
• I get to clean out some unused material

Idea number Three

• Start an epic poem that begins with “We all remember when Ashton Kutcher died”
• Add a line daily until
• It actually happens

Idea number Four

• Take the last three tweets from someone famous
• Start an imaginary dialogue... wait, I gotta go, I have to know what Elizabeth Hurley's having for breakfast

The Answer

Ok, look, it has to stop. Adding the word “solution” to the end of things does not make them better or more important. Once, I saw an ad for a three million dollar yacht that described it as “your cruising solution”. I laughed. When was that ever going to be a problem? But I’m seeing the use of solution everywhere, now.

A storage solution is still just a box. An entertainment solution, while sounding like an answer to an insoluble puzzle, is a telly. And an industrial cleaning solution is not a bucket of chemicals, as much as that would make sense. It’s a guy with a broom.