She's Baaaaaaaack

You may have noticed I’ve been a bit quiet lately. It’s ‘cause of the munchkins. Since the little monkeys arrived, the last 18 months just blew by like an election promise. I was also a little short on material. But, a little Christmas treat has come down my chimney and I feel the need to share.

Susans Trippin is maintaining the rage – not just with a comment on the previous blog post, but with an email to me, as well. So, for those that haven’t caught up, read the previous post Don’t Trip Yourself Up, Susan, and her comment on it that arrived last night. 

Then, let’s bask in the warm glow of her crazy.

Note: I’m not going to comment on grammar, punctuation, spelling or any of those other things (much) that help communication make sense. That’s just shooting comatose fish in a tiny, dry barrel. I’ll let the breathtaking stupidity speak for itself. 

But, she did start this crap and then writes, “Not my problem” - but is quite happy to make it my problem. At that point, Susan forfeited any rights to a sympathetic hearing from me.

The email she sent first, this morning:

Fbi and fcc already are on u sorry I guess they email ****@** is
still tracing back to u.
Not my problem if ur not this hacker he's using your identity via email.
I'm not some dumb bitch. I been tracking this person for 3 months.
Goodluck

I would love to overhear the imaginary phone conversation when the FBI call the AFP and ask to start a joint, international taskforce on behalf of someone who thinks that because a word appears in two different addresses, they must be the same address. 

Again, Susan, just because 'greyarea' appears as part of the address line, it does not mean it is the same address. Stop huffing paint thinner for a second, get your brother/husband out of bed and get him to help you read the below three lines, out loud if it helps.

[Scene opens with an ambulance officer leaning over a recently recovered Susan.]

[Susan] – You gave me the AIDS. I be getting the police on you!

[Ambulance Officer] – No, you took yet another drug overdose and I gave you 
first aid. That’s not the same thing as AIDS.

[Susan] – Doesn’t matter. Them words sound almost the same so it is the same. Gimme my syringe back.

End Scene.

I promise I have not tampered with the last line of her email. She actually wrote, “I’m not some dumb bitch. I been tracking..”

Ahuh. 

If you can’t see what’s wrong with that, Susan, I can’t explain - and it’s taken you three months to arrive at the wrong address and now that you’re at that address, you consider the best approach is to kick the door in and shout a lot.

That's not enough for our Susan, though. About an hour later, the comment on yesterday's post arrives. I have not edited or played with it in any way:


Seriously I'm 36. Yep have a past doesn't everyone. The fcc and fbi can clear you I just googled the base address and your blog pops up. Thanks for all your pleasant comments. That was uncalled for. I stated I hope this wasn't you but you reply in this manner? OK well its SUSANS TRIPP IN as in trips, concerns, and a V log name suppose to be funny not as you took it. 
Thanks for publicly replying. I am not perfect. Who is. 
I shouldn't have stated my comment so crudely but what's happening to my family is no joke and it lead to your blog. So I'm sorry nick. What would u have done? 
I'd appreciate u deleting my 1st comment and your reply. And this one. I'll let the authority's address you more professionally and leave it there. Btw my junk mail email IS ROMAN NUMERALS. MERRY CHRISTMAS


Seriously, you’re 36? You shouldn’t publicise that. It's not helping. You sound, at best, like a petulant teenager.

As for having some history – no, that’s a particular sort of past. It's the sort of past that usually comes with a theme song that goes, "Bad boys, bad boys, watcha gonna do?" You can actually measure how much everyone else doesn’t have that kind of past.

If three months of tracking consists of you Googling the words 'grey area' and deciding I was the guy, then I guess I should applaud you. Too often we don’t recognise the true heroes among us. It’s the little, ordinary people who manage to go about their lives, despite crippling brain injuries, who really deserve our appreciation and praise. Well done.

As for my previous “pleasant comments” – If you cast your mind all the way back to Wednesday, it was you who started things, by publicly calling me a sick fucker and a paedophile. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t turn tricks on the carpet, Susan. What would I have done? Probably looked at who it was a bit better.

I did take your name as funny. Susan Strippin’ was one of the other variations that occurred to me.

Your apologies come a little late in the scheme of things – and it becomes obvious that you really haven’t understood or even properly read my first reply. A “base address” doesn’t lead to my blog. Go and learn about domain names if you’re going to be your own detective. They're important. All you’ve done is associate similar words.

And Susan, after going for a little sympathy, you don’t disappoint. You finish up your delightful message by capitalising (shouting) yet another bone-headed stupidity. I get that your disposable email address is roman numerals. That’s why I wondered, in the previous post, if it meant the 29-October-2002 and then wondered if you were an 11-year-old (see, ‘cause if that was your birthday you would… oh, never mind). Americans tend to write dates with month first, then the day of the month and then the year. The only combination in the American format that can be a date with your numerals, is the 29th of October.

So, seeing how much you have not understood, I have little hope for the following making any sense to you, but here’s my guess at what’s happened.

1) My blog comes up in a Google search for the words “grey area” because that’s the NAME of the blog - "A Grey Area". With the unusual (in the USA) English spelling.

2) The ADDRESS for the blog is “largegreyarea”. Not “greyarea”. Please try and hold on to that fact.

You got my email address, from the blog. nickgreyarea@gmail.com. And again, that is not the same as "greyarea@gmail.com" please try and understand that, too.

You found it with a search because I am enormously popular, very sweet, tall, handsome, engagingly modest and have readers in the US who are able to cope with the subtle difference between address and name. (Have a look into that. I bet that's why a lot of your welfare and alimony cheques aren't arriving.) I bet my readers, like me, are not used to having trailer-trash poking their heads out from under piles of empty beer cans, to point with their chewed fingernails and start shouting “paedophile”.

If I am the 'super hacker' that you accuse me of being, don't you think it would be unlikely that someone like you would be able to find someone like me? Do you really think that you're bringing down an international identity thief by writing straight to a gmail address that can be found on the front page of a five-year-old blog?

I was going to write, "Now disappear back into your squalor, you fucking moron," about here, but I thought it was a bit harsh.

Merry Christmas.

Don't Trip Yourself Up, Susan

This is good.

A comment was left on my previous blog, it reads:

“You need to stop coding me and my family u sick fucker”

… and it’s from someone who trades under the completely trustworthy name of Susans Trippin.

Spam, I think to myself, and don’t do anything more than wonder what's with the email address she supplies: xxxixmmii@gmail.com.

If you look at it the way an American would write a date, it might be the 29th of October, 2002. Judging by the overall grammar and language, it’s just possible that Susan is 11-years-old. I don't think so, though. Her presence all over the net makes her look like a schizophrenic, out of work, ex-semi-glamour model with a few names and a few more arrest warrants to her sheet.

Forget about it, Nick, I say to myself. I've got better things to do, like curl my nasal hairs.

Then, a little later, an email arrives from the eloquent Susan, it reads:

Is this just a assumed email?
I have tracker a supercoder, Hacker, & Pedo using it. 
I'd hate to see u in trouble but seems I've Google that email and its leading to your blog
I'd stay clear using greyarea@gmail.com if your not involved but the fbi and fcc will have ur blog in the morning
You realize this is no joke. 
Xo

Then, a little later again, a second copy of the above email arrives, this time with secrurity@apache.org cc’d on the correspondence. I am now officially intrigued and will do a little investigation.

But, in case you do come back to A Grey Area, Susan, let's nip this in the bud. I'm a busy bloke and don't really have time for your brand of misguided, righteous anger.

Let’s start with your gambit. (You might need to look that word up. I’ll wait here.)

“You need to stop coding me and my family you sick fucker.” I’m not certain what coding your family means. Can you elaborate? Does it involve me inserting them into a game of The Sims or something?

Your email:

First, I need to congratulate you on making an error on every line. I didn’t even know that was possible but you seem to have invented new ways to hurt the language.

I’d love to know, or meet a “supercoder”. Do supercoders and hackers divide into different sub-groups at parties and fight over who would be a better Sith Lord? Why does “Pedo” get a capital letter? (I’ll assume that’s not a pedometer. I don’t want people using my blog to track their exercise. Ewwwwwww!)

I do realise it’s no joke and here's the bit you need to understand. 

I don’t use greyarea@gmail.com as an address. It's not my address. Address - not mine. As far as addresses and me are concerned, this address and I are not together. We've never met.

I use nick.greyarea@gmail.com – see there? See that whole other word there in the address? It’s sort of like adding another word to a sentence that changes how the sentence works. Here’s an example: 

You're so smart. 

Then, you add a whole other word, like “not” and it changes the sentence. 

It’s like magic except completely not.

Susan, don’t even start me on “your” versus “you’re” – and then in the same sentence you lapse into “ur”. Total madness.

But, while we’re on that sentence, you see how you are threatening me with the FBI and FCC? (I’d capitalise them, what with being initials and all) Let’s look back at my email address. There’s a huge clue in it that you should pick up, considering the amount of time you’ve allegedly spent “trackering” it. 

That’s the English spelling of Grey. Not the American spelling. That spelling alone would indicate that I neither care about, nor am I under the jurisdiction of, the FBI or FCC. You’ve now got a couple of choices on where I am most likely from, but I haven’t made it too hard for you, Susan – it’s in my blog profile. A profile that also indicates a couple of other things.

1) I’ve been blogging since mid-2008, so it’s the most elaborate front for a Pedo-super-hacker known to man, considering there are hundreds of hours of golden, hand-tooled turns-of-phrase in there (ahem).

2) My pet themes are whimsy, ethics, humour, culture, anti-religion and scepticism. That’s almost a Wikipedia entry for someone not interested in ‘coding’ inbred, illiterate hicks from Bumfuck, North Carolina.

Now, a question of manners or sanity – you sign off with kiss/hug after threatening me. I think you need to see someone and talk things out a little. That's not normal. 

Calm down and look at who you’re yelling at. I don’t even really know what “coding” is, let alone do it. My address has greyarea in it, yes, but that’s not my address. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be “tracking” and as for your Google+ account that you've led me to... I think I might add you to my circles. 

You’re hilarious.

P.S. My mate Smurfy says you've got some really bad Ebay feedback for not sending stuff, too.

Just Wait For My Sauna Design

My bathroom is poorly named. There’s no bath.

There was once, judging by what is left in the room. There’s a bathy sort of space, all tiled over. The surfeit of safety handles and grab-bars in the room hints at the previous owner having the bath removed due to some brand of human frailty. I could rent out the room for Ninja Warrior training with all those points of purchase mounted on the walls.

“The challenge today at Mount Midoriyama, using only the wall furniture, is to go to the toilet, wash your hands and moisterise your toenails, all without touching the floor, falling down the waste drain, or losing too much blood to the mosquitos living on the ceiling.”

For our kids, though, it’s a bit of a bummer. Having become embarrassed at the tiny size and huge grottiness of the baby bath I’ve been jamming them into, I started considering alternatives… and I think I hit on a beauty. A giant Esky.

Think about it. Watertight, energy efficient, drainage tap at the bottom, multifunction and fun! Imagine being grown up and saying to your rich and successful mates, over dinner,

“You think that’s awesome?! Dad used to bath us in an Esky. He’d close the lid and play a game he called Trapped in a Capsized Boat. Sometimes he’d turn the shower on as well for a Das Boot variation on a theme. If we were particularly dirty, he’d hold the lid, and just shake the Esky.”

Carry a Big Stick and Operate at Whatever Volume You Like

This week I presented what I ‘manage’ in my professional capacity, to some heavyweights from the Japanese Head Office.

They were unfailingly polite and showed interest in what we were doing. They raised eyebrows, made noises, asked questions and said things like, “We will be back to talk more about this.” They were senior and polished and experienced.

I was polite and reserved. Maybe a little more than usual. Afterward, a colleague asked why I hadn’t taken the opportunity to really show them how it was done. Why I hadn’t gone all out and impressed them with the numbers and the doovers and the thingamebobs.

I answered with the below story. Partly, because I wondered why I’d been bashful myself (and the answer had only just popped into my head at that moment) and partly because I would like the word “gnomic” in my obituary.

In or around 1983, when I was a teenager, I bought my first 3-in-1 stereo. It was bought with the savings from my job at the bookshop (see how long ago that was? Bookshop!) and topped up with Birthday gift cash. It cost hundreds of dollars. That’s hundreds of 1983 dollars, I’ll have you know. Not your crazy Bitcoin imaginary spondoolies you young kids are smoking.

It was a Panasonic with a turntable in the bottom that came out on a tray (so it could go in a bookshelf without needing room to lift the lid). It had twin tape decks. 'Tape-to-tape' meant you’d joined an elite club that no longer needed to put two tape players face-to-face and then quietly leave the room, to get their mixed tape pirating done. It had 25 or maybe even 50 watts per channel and I was enormously proud of it.

A friend of mine was over to get changed for a party and I had the stereo on. I’m painful these days with a new gadget, so I cringe to think of what I would have been like with 30 less years of disappointments in my electronics cupboard. She showed genuine interest. She listened closely. She asked to hear it up loud, hear her favourite song on it as well as mine and generally made me feel like I had indeed made a good purchase and it could well be one of the finest stereos ever to have been manufactured.

A few weeks later I was at her place to change for a party. It was my first time there and we went to her room to put some music on. She powered up her hand-made, fluid damped turntable, swung the imported tone-arm suspended on the latticework of counterbalanced wires onto the platter, warmed up her NAD pre-amp, switched on the Yamaha amp and kicked the pile of clothes out from in front of one of her four JBL, totem speakers, grabbed the remote and turned up the volume. Then my head caved in and the wallpaper started to bleed.

She didn’t say a thing, just went to hunt for her mascara. When I had picked my jaw back up and had moved to spluttering and pointing, she just gave a graceful little shrug.

And that lesson has really stuck with me.

I Was Watching a Documentary on Food Manufacturing Recently…

Boy, some confectioners have a lot of problems with hygiene practices don’t they? I’ll leave that issue to people with more food preparation or sailing experience than me – but for the record – I reckon a Viking longboat, rowed by genetically fiddled identical midgets, is not as appetising in your hot chocolate, as a marshmallow.

I’m also not an expert on ‘little people’ hiring ethics, but Gurdeep Roy had better’ve been paid more than the Munchkins ‘cause those little fuckers were ripped off. 

In fact, by my in-depth calculations, Roy had better have been paid more than Johnny Depp. I say this having applied RCA to the film.

RCA - Relative Celluloid Acreage.

• Actor’s film acreage = amount of celluloid in one film, covered by an actor.
• Proportionally adjusted by the actual real-life size differences between the actors.
• (King Kong should always earn less than Fay Wray. Gurdeep Roy plays every Umpalumpa and he’s a midget.)
• Therefore, Deep should get more than Depp.

Something else occurred to me later in the evening - Wonka stops at a three-course-flavoured-chewing-gum. Think big, Wonka. Why stop there? Degustation chewing gum. Why not have a gum that finishes off with a cocktail at Trader Vick’s or getting pepper sprayed in the carpark? 

More Power to Me

Emergency Contact and I recently moved into a new house. New to us, one-hundred-and-ten-years-old to Sydney. The change from living in a flat is quite stark. I wasn’t happy with what the guttering was doing in the rain last night and made a mental note to make it the strata management's problem… 

There are upsides to living in a free-standing house and I’ll let you know when I come across them. But, in the meantime, my house is determined not to let me finish reading my book.

After the chores are done and Darth Baby placed in his chamber, I like to climb into bed and read a book, or latterly, kill the zombies with the plants – but the house has other ideas. I read my books electronically and the house does not charge iPads or iPhones. Weird, huh? Let me explain.

The building inspection did warn us in fairly definite language that the wiring in the place was a little substandard. I think I remember seeing the words “dire”, “cataclysmic”, “abysmal”, “rudimentary”, “Neolithic”, “foolhardy” and “laughable”. Suffice to say, we knew the house needed a little money spent on the wiring.

I insured home and contents and moved in with Emergency Contact and a toddler, anyway. (To those that know EC, it’s hard to gauge who of the two is more dangerous in certain situations.) The plan was to gently ramp up the demands on the electrical wiring until we saw the upper load point and then I’d know what we were working with. It went the other way and we've found our low point.

As many people know but few are ready to admit, electricity is borderline dark magic and no-one really knows how it works. Sure, there are sparkies and electrical engineers who will make bold and baseless proclamations about harnessing it and charge you like any other high-priest of a forbidden sect for their “expertise” but deep down, I’m pretty sure they know it’s all just luck and insulation. Even the fact that they named positive and negative the wrong way round tells me how circumstantial the whole thing is. I’ve owned cars at which auto-electricians have thrown their hands in the air and said, “Don’t understand how this car is running, mate.”

So, our house can simultaneously run a washing machine, dishwasher, lights, hot water, fridge, stove, oven, central air, lamps, large flat-screen TV, DVD/Blu Ray player, home theatre, PlayStation, PC, curling iron, clothing iron, and sundry other bare necessities but it cannot charge an iPad. In fact, it sucks the electricity out of an iDevice. I left a pad plugged in overnight and it was so depleted the next morning it weighed less and it took three hours of charging at work before I could even turn it on.

The answer? I’ve put our iThings on the floor because everybody knows it’s easier for things to run downhill. That’s why lighthouses are constructed at sea-level.

Now, if I could only get Darth Baby to stop sucking them.

(Perfectly reasonable explanation to tell the coroner, too.)

It's A Medical Issue

I awoke to the news that there had been a streaker at the State of the Union football sports last night. That feller has got one of two things going on that need to be addressed.

One – he’s suicidal. Who runs, nude, onto a field populated by 30 fit thugs who professionally run after people and throw them onto their heads?

Two – he just needs a little love. Who else would run, nude, onto a field full of blokes who like to roll around in the mud, on top of each other?

Far from banning and fining and jailing and slapping and book throwing, this person should be helped.

With Friends Like These…

Giggle and Hoot (and Friends) Live is a bit like Sarah K. Silverman - short and loud. Also like SKS, it’s oddly watchable, but only for brief periods. The producers must know this, so they’ve kept the show to a merciful one-hour-length. More on that point later.

I should state my interests. I’m not unbiased. I have been a fan of the owl’s work for a while and was looking forward to the show for two reasons. It would be Darth Baby’s first live show and I was interested to see how that would go down, plus I suspected that Jimmy Giggle might be a genuine “triple-threat” and wanted to see if he could deliver outside the safety of the pre-recorded television studio.

He can. Jimmy Giggle delivers a subtle and nuanced performance, at 400 decibels. He sings well, dances confidently and plays the guitar with flair. His trumpet cadenza in the fourth act is a triumph and one has to keep reminding oneself that it is achieved on a cardboard, cut-out trumpet. His puppetry with Gigglasaurus, in a witty tip-of-the-hat to Fred and Ginger, was a master class in physical comedy and he also carries the show with a modest grace and aplomb when it is only he and Hootabelle on stage.

And this leads me to one of a few problems with the show. As usual, Hootabelle is not the strongest cast member and the slightly egotistical way she delivers her material is designed to pull focus to her but achieves the opposite by being slightly repellent. It’s as if you are watching someone act, but can’t get past the fact that you are certain you wouldn’t like them in real-life. She is a charmless pink owl that has plumbed the depth of her character and really reached the limits of her potential.

The eponymous “Friends” weren’t charming either and I couldn’t wait for them to get off the stage. Lazytown was exactly that. In fact, so lazy, the real actors in the show didn’t bother to make an appearance and second-stringers were sent on. The female lead playing Stephanie resembled her in the way that a truck resembles a car. Same principal, but you wouldn’t confuse them.

Bananas in Pyjamas were confusing. They need to clarify the plot points and I could see that my theatre companion, Darth Baby, was equally mystified. He punched his Hoot pillow in frustration. I hear the TV show is being axed in any event, so good riddance. Stupid, clumsy bananas.

The same wouldn’t be said of the magnificent Hoot. I think he may have put on weight recently (hard to judge between stage and screen) but that doesn’t stop the original, blue night owl from bringing the funny. At his age he can’t be expected to do quite the physical work that J. Giggle can, and let’s face it, having the limitation of not actually being alive and needing to be operated from behind objects, does limit the stage mobility. But, one doesn’t notice those limitations at the time of the performance. And his eyelids are particularly good.

Now to the length – as mentioned, it was short. Good, because it was exactly the right length for Darth Baby. He sat transfixed for 56 minutes and the show was an hour. But, I want to know who I have to "take to dinner" to get in on the racket. For the adults in the audience (which make up at least half) the show works out to a dollar a minute. The concert hall at the Opera House was packed, and they were doing three shows a day. To quote J. Giggle. “Aww ha ha ha. That’s awesome.” 

It's Good to Get Out

We've got tickets to Giggle and Hoot and Friends, LIVE!

Now I just need to find a babysitter for Darth Baby and we can really make a night of it.

Any Shorter of Ideas I'd be the Dinklage of Ideas

There are times when a bloke just needs to set off in the car for an unspecified amount of time. He knows he just has to be at the helm for as long as it takes.

This is not the romantic wanderlust that will lead to a blog about me getting arrested on the border between Outer Mongolia and Tahiti under suspicion of transporting herring for nefarious means. No, the job is simply to keep the vehicle moving while Darth Baby spends some time in his hyperbaric chamber communicating with the Sith Lords or choking the missing green sheep with his mind… or having a God. Damn. Nap.

Recently, I had to start driving but didn’t have any destination or purpose other than the nap. The Imperial Star Destroyer just had to keep moving, without making the jump to hyperspace. (i.e. Puddle around the suburbs without getting too far from home.)

I can’t imagine the following idea is startlingly original - but I came up with a little game to achieve the above “puddling about” and now I need to iron out the kinks and make it competitive.

I call the game Left Right Out:

Objects of the game (Score weight to be agreed upon with consultation):

1.   Turn alternate left and right turns in your car until you leave the state (I did write earlier that puddling about in your corner of the world was the primary objective, but once you get into it…)

2.   Turn alternating left and rights until you create a repeating circle (to a New Yorker or anyone else living in a planned city, that would make no sense. To a Sydneysider – I accidentally did it in my first two hours.)

3.   Left and rights until you are in the ocean. Playing in Europe? You should be able to go for the open-lay-down-misere. Leave your state, do a circle and end up in the drink all at once. Extra points for committing and actually getting the water above the door sill

4.   Lefts and Rights until you drive by the place that you were born or other significant life event. Again, weights to be determined. If you enjoy and are good at taking your clothes off and cuddling other people with your naughty bits, “I had sex there” is not going to score too well. On the obverse side if you are shy, “I passed out from blushing there” is not that awesome either. Consider swapping. This is where we need to chew over the pooling of goals and then the betting on who can achieve what

5.   Group Goals - Witness Eddy McGuire going through a dumpster, Mark Latham paying a cab fare or Geraldine Doug beating up a nun

To play, you will need:

1 x Car (careful, they’re sharp, so get mummy or daddy to help)

1 x Baby - optional

Rules:

1.   Random generate a number between one and ten by your favourite method

2.   Random generate a direction. All you have to do is not set off in the same direction as last time

3.   Drive in that direction as best you can for the number of minutes or kilometres you generated in step one. Make sure that the next time you play, you stick to time or distance

4.   Once you arrive at point X, mins or km from home, the  Left Right Out begins

5.   Take the first legal and available left turn

6.   Then take the next legal and available right turn

7.   And so on

8.   Do not take “No through Roads” or obvious cul-de-sacs

9.   If you do find yourself in a dead end that was short but not clearly marked, drive back out and continue the journey as though that turn had not been taken

10. If it is a long dead-end and not reasonable labelled, treat it as part of the L/R sequence

11. Remember, only legal or possible –so if you drove back out of your dead-end and the sign at the end of the street says “Left Turn Only”, that is not a choice in the sequence of Left and Rights. Treat it as a straight road

12. Islands, large median strips, diversions such as private roads and any other mid-lane construction are not counted as a left or a right. The question you ask yourself is, “Does this constitute a change from going straight? If it doesn’t involve taking drugs and staying up late, then no.

13.   National Parks, Royal showgrounds and lunatic asylums are quite ok to include in the trip. I spent an hour or so in Callan Park and it was totally worth it.

14. Other semi-public roadways are ok but if the limited and confined nature of the interior-circuit means that you keep being redirected back into the institutions grounds, politely describe your predicament to the guard who has now seen you three times for no good reason and skip a turn in your sequence. Ignore the look on his face. (In fact, print these rules out and hand them to him. Mention my name.)

15. Track your progress. I wanna map this somehow. Go-pro cams on  high speed, geo-stat tracking through your sat-nav and any other fab means to be able illustrate each trip, overlaying each other trip on a map

Sell it as art.

This is a particularly rewarding game to play in a V8 Grand Tourer, where you can also watch your fuel tank level drop at the same rate as the child’s eyelids.

You Have to Starve For Your Art

Having battled Darth Baby to a standstill over lunch I felt that he had, while not actually claiming outright victory in the food fight, definitely made me look silly. I can't undo the preportion of food that ended up on the floor rather than in his tummy but I can still win a moral victory.

I am not cleaning it up.

I am redifining the house as a modern-art museum. Maybe I'll call it the Googooheim or the Poopeedo Centre, I don't know. What I can let you in on is some of the content for our first season's exhibition.

Fame: Abstract in baked beans that shows a witty tip-of-the-hat and flip-of-the-finger to Warhol

Apple and Yoghurt avec Keyboard: A disturbing and possibly expensive commentary on the alienation caused by the increased PC mediation of our lives

Still Life with Mixed Fruit and Stuffed Bear: A timeless piece for a disposable age

The museum will also host Happenings and Installations. Some to watch out for:

Eyebrow, what Eyebrow? A whimsical yet dark journey into the human psyche that challenges the moral bounds between premeditated and unpremeditated violence. The second piece in the trilogy, Gentle Bubba, Just Be Gentle is currently receiving rave reviews off Broadway and off potty.

An Evening of Interpretive Whinging (Monday - Friday. Matinees and late night performances 7/11)

The Best Boy in the World*

*Conditions may apply, check website for details

Our Culture Just Lost 'The Culture'

Iain Banks died today. For many of us it will feel like we’ve lost a complex, visionary and hilarious friend. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be his new widow, as he was notoriously good company in real-life as well as on the page. Banks has been my favourite author for nearly 30 years. He’s the only author I have bothered to collect and re-collect in entirety, several times. 

(When you really love an author, you always end up “re-collecting” because at dinner parties you recommend and loan to guests. The guests might return, but the books rarely do. I don’t mind. Books are fair that way. You’ll do the same at someone else’s dinner party.)

Banks is such a favourite for so many of the right type (i.e. people who think like me) that he is a touchstone for a couple of my best friendships;

“Hey man, good to see you. Have you read your latest Banks Statement?”

“Yeah. Better than the last one, not as good as the one before that. How about that bit where…”

And we’re off.

He wrote under two tags, Iain M. Banks for his Sci-Fi and plain Iain Banks when he was doing literature. When he announced he was “poorly” a few months ago, I started reading more things about him. Here’s something I found amazing:

It was assumed in a lot of places, including my own, that his Sci-Fi books were his dirty, great cash-cow that supported the more highfalutin literature.

Wrong - and by orders of magnitude. Mr B. himself reported that his literature outsold his Sci-Fi, four-to-one. I find that astonishing. I think good Sci-Fi is as important as any other writing, so I’m not going to say that it’s heartening to hear that, but I do find it mighty interesting. He also said that he enjoyed writing his literature - but always looked forward to getting back to the main character in his Sci-Fi universe, The Culture.

I read him in order simply because I read as his publishers released. I suggest, if you haven’t read any and are interested, that you start out of order:

Iain Banks - Espedair Street

Iain Banks – Complicity

Iain M. Banks – Consider Phlebas

Iain M. Banks – Use of Weapons

If you’re a Sci-Fi bod, do Phlebas and Weapons first. (Maybe Player of Games. That’s also a cracking place to start.)

After that, you’re on your own and I’m jealous that I don’t get to go there with you, for the first time, again.

I will doubtlessly need to rebuild my collection of Banks books in the future, and they will move inexorably into the digital realm, rather than being in the physical. It’s deeply unfair that he won’t get the chance to be uploaded and go digital like some of his characters and give us more, but he lived in and wrote about a deeply unfair and uncaring universe.

Bloggers Note: This blog is called “A Grey Area” first and foremost for one of Banks' characters, the GCU A Grey Area.

Just Because it's in There, Doesn't Make it a Cake

Darth Baby doesn't mind a mirror. He gets a kick out of watching what the kid in the reflecion is up to and I'm not going to be a literal or mythological Nemisis and discourage the fun.

Any shiny surface can be the limpid pool of obsession, but the only real-world danger I've come across is sounding odd to the neighbours.

"Oh, whatcha doin'? Are you pointing at the little baby in the oven?"

I Saved You a Little Something. No Need to Thank Me

During the evacuation it became evident that Darth Baby had chipmunked* most of his yakatori-chicken nori-roll. When the acrid smell of whatever was on fire hit him, the resulting sneezing attack covered the people behind us on the travelators with sticky rice.

(Now I can cross writing that paragraph off the bucket list… finally.)

Darth Baby thought it was utterly brilliant and followed up with an extended laughing attack; the woman and her two teenage daughters immediately behind, not so much. I gather that this was a relatively rare fashion shopping trip for them and not only had the shopping centre thoughtlessly burst into flames, but some rotten toddler had made them look like lamingtons as they fled the scene.

*Chipmunked; past participle. The act of having secreted most of one’s meal in one’s cheeks for later dispersal or use.

Banking, Spanking, Thanking and Walking On

Yesterday, I misread the television guide and thought Extreme Fisting With Robson Green was a show. In my defence, it was on after 8.30pm so Robson had at least bothered to come down on the right side of the watershed, if not limbs. I double-took and realised it was fishing. Gill by association I thought, and moved on.

Unfornately, I'm now worried that the problem isn't so much with my eyes as much as what goes on behind them.

I'm dealing with commercial banks at the moment. Emergency Contact and I are trying to get into a larger house, in the Sydney real estate market of 2013. I couldn't be more pissed off with the way in which every single step in process lifts your shirt and sticks you in a boat with a fully lubricated Robson. Maybe that's why I had the mondegreen moment with Mr Green. It's just on my mind.

It may also be why I think I saw the following.

A billboard for a bank that has very orange colouring in its campaigns, advertising an "ATM Amnesty". 

I was driving and didn't get a chance to get out and firebomb the sign, but if that is what I think it is - a period where you don't get charged fees for using another bank's ATM, then I'm driving back there to right a wrong. 

An amnesty is for the guilty, not the exploited. If I really have seen this billboard, you have my full permision to riot. If not, I'm keeping a sharp eye out for Robby Green and his marine of mean.

War Reporting From the Pillow-Fort of Full-Time Parenting

Children and crows will conspire to take over the world. Don’t look at me like that. You can’t handle the truth.

For children, the whole process of growing up is about getting smarter and better at things. The Corvidae are already notoriously smart and have done a bunch of growing up. Let’s face it, you can draw a pretty unbroken line from dinosaur to nevermore and we’ve all seen what happens when the raptors get loose in the kitchen (you had one job, Phil Tippet. One job). 

They’re highly adaptive and have good memories. They are tool users and have basic senses of humour. I mean, that “uck orrrf” call always brings a smirk to the face of an Australian of a certain age and how about that collective noun?

(It’s probably time for a change with the collective noun, though. If I was a crow, I would be on to Pointy Face Black Feather Media & Publicity and be asking some hard questions about their commitment. Maybe, even making a few suggestions. How about a ‘Crows Line’ or a ‘Russel’?)

Anyway, playgrounds in the inner-city are going to be the hotbeds of the Crow-Baby conspiracy because of the food. Crows and babies are spending more and more time together as more and more of us live in ever denser, high-rise accommodation. We take our kids to the park to let them run around and the kids throw their food on the ground. The crows know this and are moving from agrarian communities to dense urban and CBD areas in a metropolitan-drift that rivals any of the so called Tiger Economies in the 90s. (It’s worth noting that the tigers couldn’t make a go of it and moved back out to the country where they’ve been applying for jobs in Queensland zoos ever since.)

So, there I am in the park, watching birds and babies of equal weight and intellectual capacity, breaking bread. I’m the one on the outer. M. Nightshade-Salami-Wanga-Ding-Dong has already approached me for a treatment on how it’s going to go down. I’m going to surprise him and not put in a twist. It's just goint to follow logical, straightforward lines.

DIY Haircuts: After you’ve given your adored child a haircut, try to cut down on the normal number of photos you tend to take of you precious pumpkin. In other words, keep the evidence limited. 

I was certain that I was going to be an absolute natural at hairdressing. I’d arrived at this conclusion because I have met many hairdressers and I would never accuse them of putting a lump in the IQ bell-curve on the right-hand side - know wha' I’m sayin'?

Considering the challenges, I’ve actually done a pretty good job. There were no serious head wounds and Darth Baby still looks like a little boy. It’s just that it could be a lot better. The issue? The kid never stops moving. Never. If we are going to be serious about finding sustainable energy resources, we should consider tapping toddlers. Fit them with a dynamo or attach them to leads that have the dynamo inside a return reel or just make them run around under balloons.

The haircut was more complicated than a 16-year-old girl and to an observer would have resembled more a joisting match than an appointment at the beauticians. I sort of took snips off him as we passed each other. I refrained from yelling “Ole!” but it did require memory and tactics to get it done.

The reason I don’t particularly want the cut recorded for posterity is it could be used as leverage at some future point. It’s the opposite of those photos that a parent saves for the ritual humiliation at the kid’s twenty first birthday party.

You Men Will Never Understand

Darth Baby and I were at the Magic Yellow Bus yesterday. I managed to put my foot in it with some sub-urbanites.

Inner-city types like to think that they're open-minded and anything goes, but really, apart from that one embarrassing threesome at uni, they're less daring than the septuagenarian tranny at the Rooty Hill RSL who vows that Danny La Rou will make a triumphant return. (That lovely lady will be back, I’m sure of it. She didn’t appear that ill.)

Darth Baby was making his way through the miniature earth-moving equipment on the play mat to mug a pigeon, when one of the women supervising said to me, “Why don’t you sit down and join in?”

I am 20 years older than most people schlepping around with their kids on the play mats. Getting up and down isn’t something that I ‘just do’. I need notice and pants that are going to retain my dignity and not need to have every pocket unloaded to get down there. 

More to the point, Darth Baby moves fast. There is no point in getting settled when he can outflank and out-manoeuvre in seconds. Better to retain a war-room overview… utilizing air-superiority.

Ignorant of the above, another woman said, “Here’s a spot… just here”, and it was then that politeness dictated I respond. I thought I'd deflect by making light.

“Thanks, but I’ve over estimated how these jeans were going to work with my post-baby-body and I think I’d rather stand this one out.”

They didn't think I was joking. They got angry. So angry.

The Expensive Apple Device Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree

This year, generational obesity is Channel 10's weight-loss lynch-pin. A heavily reinforced, industrial lynch-pin being asked to deliver too much. Self-Obsessed Cohabitating Delusional Malcontents (7.30 pm, Sunday till lard-knows-when) is yet to be shown as a ratings failure, so here’s to making the most of it and thinking about something else.

It did highlight one of my own intergenerational issues, though, but without all the cliff jumping and cannibalism... sorry, "backbighting".

Generational Technobastardry

Generation Battleground Alpha:

My father was a music-obsessive by birth and an opera singer by trade. The way a High-Fidelity Stereo was placed and adjusted in the home was an operation of such technical finesse and importance, NASA's approach to the moon shots were considered a bit slapdash by comparison.

As a toddler, apparently I sensed that any dial or button needed to be put through its paces regularly and to destruction. My family has never let me forget that I was “The Menace”. Daddy's Hi-Fi ain't never been the same.

Generation Battleground Beta:

Toddler Darth Baby escalates inter-generational techno-war on Ex-Toddler The Menace.

Pre toddler wrangling, our telly had a hard-drive tuner and I waxed lyrical on its arrival. 

That telly tuner meant a lot to us. To mangle a metaphor for the fun of it; if you wanted to turn our telly off against our will, you would have needed to send Sir Alec Guinness wearing a hessian sack and waving a fluorescent tube to get it done.

That HDD tuner had a gorgeous and unfortunately enticing electric-blue button on the front. Darth Baby pressed the button so often (somehow through the baby barrier by means best explained by Sir Alec) that the HDD Tuner punched its own clock and checked out.

Not content with that, while I had the HDD Tuner out of the shelf to rewire, Darth Baby threw it on the ground with such force and accuracy, the USB memory stick in the back that held the back-up operating system was mashed and then somehow separated from the box. If I was The Menace, Darth Baby is Menace + Cost.

Generation Battleground Omega:

It is a law of nature that each generation has to somehow improve upon or at least apall, that of its parents. As sure as Beiber enervates Underworld, Darth Baby’s wife will have her cyber-intertube-implants thrown through her bionic pelvic floor in-utero, by Darth Baby’s feckless thug of a son.

... and I wouldn’t have it any other way, Daddy-o. Groovy.

3 Barden St Tempe, NSW

Open Letter to Any Prospective Buyer of 3 Barden St, Tempe.

Hello Prospective Real Estate Purchaser,

I recently had a building and pest inspection done at the above address. If you are interested in my thoughts, do feel free to contact me on the links at the right of the blog. In a just world, the contents of the report would be made freely available to anyone interested in the property before holding deposits or contract exchanges, particularly without interference from "interested parties".

Yours Sincerely,

Nick at AGA 

The Poop That's Probably on The Scoop... Among Other Places

Week two and a bit

The very fact that I have to give this blog the title, “Week Two and a Bit” is proof I’m losing touch with the normal measurements of time. I don’t go for your mundane lunar cycles or solar transits anymore. I now measure time by naps. In fact, the whole “now” thing is a bit shaky for me as well, “Sit down now, please… ok… when you’re ready.”

The authorities also seem to be in cahoots with children to keep reality at a distant grasp. Darth Baby is quite fond of a public get-together for children known as the Yellow Magic Bus. This council run purveyor-of-playtime gets around to local parks and unloads a bunch of toys and paints that are manned by well-meaning women. 

Three things I want to point out, though:

1. It’s not magic. You find out exactly where it’s going to be through the internet
2. It’s not a bus – it’s a two-tonner, badly in need of a tune
3. It’s not even particularly yellow. It’s got some yellow on it, but with the other two bits of misdirection on how to identify it, the yellow is not what you would call the defining factor about the truck

Anyway, Darth Baby reckons it’s ok and goes to whichever place it magically appears by the magic of the internal combustion engine and ignores the toys and books and chases the pigeons.

New Topic. Actors are desperate not to have a real job. Let me explain. Playschool.

If I was an actor and the choice was doing Playschool or being a chimney-sweep between real acting jobs, you’d hear me saying “Roight-ho Guvner, how far you want them bristles pushed up your flume?”

Here’s another thing about Playschool, not only is it paralysingly dull, it uncovers the little bits of missing talent on some of our better known TV faces. If someone’s not the best singer (Georgie P, I’m thinking your Mum had a touch of the Missus Worthington, here) or gets lost in some pretty simple script (looking at you, Kate) it gets exposed in front of the merciless cardboard background of the Playschool set. You’ve gotta have the goods ‘cause there’s nowhere to hide if your special effects consist of a moth-eaten teddy and a toilet roll with pipe-cleaners glued to it.

Babies are not good navigators. They call the turns late, if at all.

Ball Kicking Area. Give Children Priority

A few blogs and ten months ago, Darth Baby entered the lives of Emergency Contact and me. That’s my excuse for the break in posting blogs, but as far as reasons go I think that one’s a cracker.

When a Small One waddles into your life, venting your spleen to an anonymous audience in the shape of a blog sort of takes a back seat - one with an Australian accredited five-point harness.

EC is now back at work and I’m Mr Mum for three months. I have the following advice and observations to offer other parents.

Things Learnt in Week 1 (Only 11 to go):

It takes a village. Unfortunately.

I have made every effort for the last few decades to remove myself from the odours and opinions of other people. I drive to work alone. I park in my parking space. I work only with people I know and respect, and then I drive home to the safety of the compound. Now I am assaulted with the asinine opinions and strange olfactory offerings of every pin-head and… and… commoner who cares to poke their face into that of my child’s. You know the saying - It takes a village to raise a child. It’s true and I would like to add that the village sux. Once you leave the confines of the house, everything about the kid is so freakin’ communal! The swimming leasons. The libraries. The shops. The toilets. Fine for him, he loves a crowd. Not so good for Dad who has met the crowd in its various manifestations and knows exactly how dumb the crowd can be.

You can stop your child from chewing things you don’t want them to chew by terrifying them.

EC and I have a pretty old-fashioned and therefore pretty modern view of disinfecting (what goes around comes around. Particularly with bacteria). Once the kid can crawl, most bets are off. We don’t let him chew the thongs that have been on my feet while I’ve been at the urinal at the local club, but we can’t and don’t stop him eating the “floor toast”.

Darth Baby (DB – 15 months old) likes to chew the plastic covering on the safety chain while he’s having a swing in the park. There are life forms I can’t identify living in that particular plastic sleeve covering the seatbelt chain. I couldn’t convince him to stop, whether through a failure in rhetoric or credibility, but I have found that if you push the swing high enough, he gets so scared he will just hang on and not chew anything. I don’t think he can even see anything with his eyes that tightly shut. Win.

Children have a strange grasp of history.

DB and I built “Baby’s First Kursk Submarine” with Duplo. As much as I am sure the Soviets had some pretty interesting ways of ensuring their crews were fed, I’m not sure they actually had live chickens on board. Maybe DB knows better than me. He certainly seemed pretty insistent about the Duplo chicken. It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing I’ve heard about how the Russkies kept competitive during the Cold War. For posterity though, I’m pretty certain they didn’t allow cows on the bridge.

Re-enactment-wise, Darth Baby was bang on. When the Duplo hull split, there was screaming and saliva and lots of lying down and kicking.

Tips for the novice “In the Night Garden” Hunter.

I would like it recorded that if the camera stays low, you are catching the Ninkynonk. If the camera starts to pan up, you are trying to catch the Pinkyponk. Isn’t that a pip?

For those who don’t understand, don’t worry. For those that do… am I right? Huh? 

Kids. Aliens. Wha'ever