Tuesday, October 28, 2008

It lasted for an hou-ou-our

Anyone who:

Is rushing to finishing cleaning the shower before his in-laws arrive for the week,






And gets a call to say they are going to arrive early,






And decides that the only way to get it done in time is to strip off, jump in the shower, turn the shower on and rinse the Shower Power off the screens all at once,






And then decides he may as well wipe down the taps while he is doing this,








And wonders why the shower is suddenly hellishly cold,












Is an idiot.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

What I did on my holidays (Part 2)

Well hey, I know it's not possible to go back to work after a really great holiday and then say "Oh I am so happy to be here, I do not miss sitting on the beach at all". What I don't understand is why I needed to have one of the worst weeks at work in living memory. Was someone concerned that after a week off I may accidentally forget that I don't enjoy working there?
I will spare you the whiny details and get straight to a few more holiday highlights.

The place we stayed at had a truly exceptional mini golf course. It wasn't so much the course itself, since some sadist had decided to put a few of the holes on slopes so that, if you miss a necessarily long putt, your ball will roll back past you, off the edge of the course, and into a paddock across the road where it will be eaten by a goat. The good part was what happens if you actually hit the ball into the ninth hole. Underneath the hole, there is a vacuum cleaner, which, when triggered by the arrival of the ball, sucks the ball down the hole and then shoots it up a pipe to a track which runs overhead for 10 metres and then drops the ball back at the start of the first hole.

Who would even think that up? The only unfortunate side effect is that, once the boys discovered it, then lost interest in actually playing minigolf and just wanted to drop a ball down that hole around 18 times per day.

While we're on the whole golf thing, I should mention again that computers play a role in my children's lives. It's partly my fault, since I had told Bundle and Cherub that the place we were going to had a mini golf course like the one in Bundle's favouring "Dora" game.

Why am I concerned? Because after completing the first hole for the first time, Bundle said "Oh, I'm going to go and try the next level".

Oops.

Another one of the more exciting things for small children to do in that region is the ferry from Queenscliff to Sorrento which, if you don't take the car, will do a return trip for the reasonably modest price of $44.00 for two adults and two children under 5.

If you take the ferry at 11.00am on a Wednesday, there is also little difficulty in finding a seat.

In between rides, we stopped for lunch at the Via Sorrento. The first thing we noticed was the music they were playing. After 20 minutes of "Khe Sahn", "That's what I like about you", "Land Down Under" and the Hooters' "And we danced" (a song which I thought had not been heard anywhere other than my ipod in the past ten years), I started to wonder if a cover band somewhere had decided to make an album, before realising it would be way easier to just download the originals from itunes at $1.70 a pop.

I was close. We made enquiries and discovered that were listening to disc one of "World's Best Beer Songs".

If lunch happens to be seafood pizza, chips and beer, followed by toffee apple icecream from the place over the road, then that soundtrack is entirely appropriate.

The place where we stayed also had a fair collection of donkeys, geese, chickens, rabbits and birds for the children to feed. In amongst this reasonable sensible collection of animals, there is one emu, which wandered onto the property a few years ago and is yet to leave.

It only freaked me out slightly when, the day after the song writing relate revelations in the previous post, I discovered that the emu's name was Edwina.

Every night after the children went to sleep, we ate cheese and drank wine and watched movies. For the record, these included all three "Matrix" films, "Ten Things I Hate About You", "A Good Year" (which is possibly the most underrated film ever) and "The American President". If I ever get time, reviews of each will appear over here, but that may take a while.

We also spent plenty of time playing at the beach. I know the waves at Anglesea are not huge, but it is still great to watch two little boys running at them without a trace of fear.

It is also great to see the whole "sunsmart" thing has really taken off, even if the local interpretation seems to be that it is fine for a child (who looked about three) to run around the beach completely naked so long as he was wearing a big floppy hat.

Finally, we rounded out the trip by stopping at the Werribee Zoo on the way home, which I mention mostly because I am thrilled that it is still there.

Now all I have to do is to remember to go on holidays far more often.

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Shocked like the lightning from up above

I am back from the most amazingly good holiday. There was playing in surf, there was the building of sandcastles, there was mini-golf, there was icecream, there was feeding of donkeys, there was a lighthouse, there was a ferry ride and pizza for lunch at Via Sorrento, and there were too many other good things to mention all in one sentence. There were also a few of the types of moments one might expect when a two year old and a four year old share a small unit for a week, but we shall not dwell on those. In other words, there were many things that were perfect, some that were flat out bad, but only one conversation that left me utterly flabbergasted and still unsure what to make of it all.



And it went a little something like this.



We drove from Torquay to a not too distant seaside town to visit a very close friend, let's call her Sunshine, and her two children, who are just a little older than ours. We chattered the afternoon away happily enough while the children gradually warmed up to each other and ended up jumping on the trampoline and playing some sort of Dora the Explora type game on the computer.



Just as we were getting ready to leave, I happened to mention to Sunshine that, as of last August, we had now known each other for 10 years. We briefly discussed a few of the things that were going on when we first met (it was around the same time that Sunshine met her husband) and then came the bombshell.



"You know," said Sunshine "I still have your tape in my car".



It took me just a moment to figure out what the hell she was talking about, during which time Sunshine helpfully added that it was her daughter's favourite song.



And the memories came flooding back. It was a particularly muggy Saturday night in Geelong. I hadbeen away somewhere, probably visiting friends back in Melbourne for the day, when it occurred to me that a few of us were having lunch for Sunshine's 24th birthday in a few days' time, and I had not thought about a present. I was out of ideas and possible a little bit broke, so in a moment of reckless creativity I decided to write a song for the occasion.



Together with an ever supportive and patient flatmate, I took my guitar over to the church we both went to and sat down to record. My flatmate helped to set things up and figure out levels and stuff and then wisely went home, and I spent the next few hours in a not at all airconditioned space writing, re-writing, recording, changing keys, re-writing some more and generally wondering if I had finally gone completely mad.



I should clarify at this point that, unlike some previous songwriting efforts of mine, this was not an unsuccessful attempt to get a date, or, for that matter, a successful attempt to do so. It was simply an act of friendship, and this was something that was heavily hinted at throughout the lyrics. As I was recording it, and for the next couple of days as I was wondering whether I should just rush off to the Geelong mall at lunchtime and try to find a nice scarf or something, I was convinced that this would either be great and Sunshine would feel endlessly flattered, or it would be the sort of hideously embarassing disaster from which a highly valued friendship would never recover.



The one thing that never occurred to me was that, ten years later, Sunshine would still be playing this tape in her car (which means her husband has surely heard it more times than he would care to) and that it would be her three year old daughter's favourite song.



I simply cannot believe this. I have spent the last week trying to figure out whether to be elated or completed embarassed by the whole thing, and I still don't even know where to start figuring it out.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

After this, you may need a holiday too

Hey folks, its break time again. Happily, this time it has nothing to do with exams and sleeplessness and all things stressful, and everything to do with a family holiday in Torquay.

I will be far away from all things work related, including computers, hence the posting of stuff shall have to wait until I get back.

Instead, I shall wander around the town with my boys, pausing occasionally to sit on a beach or stroll through a park, particularly the one with the impressive playground.

This activity is technically known as "walking the Torq".



I will write again in a week or two, by which time I'm pretty sure I still won't have been forgiven for that last joke.

And nor should I be.

Monday, October 06, 2008

Tracee Hutchison has gone COMPLETELY MAD

At least, that's the only explanation I can come up with for this.


It seems like it was only a few weeks ago that I left a comment over at Melba’s place suggesting that regular Age columnist Tracee Hutchison has her good and her bad days. That’s broadly true, but it seems the good days are few and far between lately.

I decided to let it go when, around the time that I was suggesting that there were a few issues surrounding the choice of Governor Palin as running mate to John McCain, Tracee Hutchison was writing hymns of praise to Ms Palin and complaining that attacks in relation to her qualifications to govern were sexist.

Just for the record, I was right. Also, saying that a person is entirely unqualified to hold high political office is not an act of sexism merely because that person is a woman and the person making such a suggestion is not. To take that a little further, crying ‘sexism’ whenever a woman is criticised, regardless of whether or not the criticism is valid, serves no good purpose and hands a whole bunch of ammunition to the critics.

In passing, Hutchison’s impassioned defence of Governor Palin was somewhat marred by her inability to resist taking a gratuitous swipe at the choices the Palins made when naming their children.

In any case, I was quite happy to let Governor Palin continue to say random words in interviews and thus demonstrate the flaws in Hutchison’s theory without anyone needing me to join the dots, but Hutchison’s latest contribution to the world of "insane stupidity really thinly described as journalism" cannot be allowed to pass without comment.

When it comes to climate change and journalistic slackness, its quite possible that boiling frogs, proverbs about being unable to eat money and references to the emperor’s lack of clothing are the three biggest cliches around and Hutchison manages to fit them all in to one relatively short article.

For the record, the story about the emperor’s new clothes was about the powerful not wanting to appear stupid, not, as Hutchison seems to think, about the powerful trying to con the rest of us. Also, the boiling frog thing is about failing to notice that anything is changing until one is already dead from it, and if Hutchison thinks nobody has noticed climate change she is possibly a little bit mistaken.

As for the saying about not being able to eat money, it has been suggested that this is not actually an old saying but something that a Canadian geography teacher made up in the 1970s. I can’t be sure on this, since when I googled the phrase I got around 55600 hits and I am yet to read them all, but there are a few indicators that suggest a certain amount of urban mythology. Firstly, there seems to be a couple of different versions of the quote. The one Hutchison uses appears to be more recent, in that it refers to air pollution in place of concerns about over-fishing. Secondly, the quote is variously attributed to Chief Seattle, Chief Sitting Bull of the Sioux tribe and, most commonly, to the Cree people, who actually live in Canada.

Since most people seem to think that someone from among the various groups identified as Cree said this some time in the 19th century, it’s a little curious that there is absolutely no mention of it on the Cree Cultural Site. From this we conclude that if, at some point in history, a member of the Cree people did say this or something like it, the Cree have long since gotten over it and everyone else should too.

Let’s accept for a minute that the quote just might be genuine. Even if it is, Hutchison should probably consider that repeating it is nothing more or less than flat out lazy journalism. She should also consider that, if one is going to invoke the wisdom of a long standing culture with a close connection to the earth in support of one’s argument, one could perhaps spare the time to look at a damn map and stop referring to these people as Indians. One could also look at Wikipedia and discover that Cree is a French slang term, and the people we know as Cree actually call themselves "Nahathaway".

This blog is now officially better researched than the opinion pages of The Age, which is absolutely terrifying.

And my concerns with this travesty of journalism are far from done. Hutchison takes a moment from whatever she was doing in this article to take a swipe at Russell Crowe for getting his maths wrong when talking about the Wall Street Bail Out plan. This would be fine (if somewhat irrelevant) except that Hutchison, mid-swipe, manages to get the population of the United States wrong by approximately 270 million people. She then wanders into an equally irrelevant swipe at Sarah Palin, which seems a touch on the hypocritical side, considering her recent writings on that topic.

As if all that is not enough, we then come to a more central problem with this article. Hutchison passionately argues that the environment and the economy are ‘inextricably linked’, which is true, but she does it in the context of the collapse of Wall Street without ever coming close to explaining how global warming and drought caused a number of under regulated banks to lend too much money in the sub-prime mortgage market.

Hutchison’s only attempt to actually demonstrate the link comes half way through where she points out that we watched the Wall Street collapse on televisions that use non-renewable energy sources. (Yes, this is the link that is so obvious that Hutchison cannot understand why no-one else can see it and she therefore suggests we all must be stupid.) Hutchison claims this is ironic, at which point I simply stop pretending that I have any idea what this woman is talking about and start to suspect that she doesn’t know either.

Incidentally, it’s not even true in my case, as, in order to do my part for the environment, my television is powered entirely by rechargeable batteries.

Since we’re on old proverbs, let me add that Hutchison’s increasingly unhinged search for a link between the economic collapse and global warming does remind me of Rowan Atkinson’s description of "A blind person. In a dark room. Looking for a black cat. That isn’t there."

Just to round out this utterly surreal collection of wacky non-sequiturs from someone who really shouldn’t be patronising about Sarah Palin, Hutchison goes completely mental and starts trying to talk like a cartoon pirate. Then, equally mystifyingly, she stops again.

In the end, none of this matters all that much, however tempting it may be to point out that if Hutchison loves the environment, she should stop wasting paper by writing this complete trash. What does matter is Hutchison’s utterly callous and staggeringly stupid response to the economic crisis, which is, in effect, "bring it on and isn’t it great that this is happening to those terrible Americans".

It is no doubt obvious to everyone in the world except Hutchison that the financial crisis is not going to cause the world’s largest polluters to lose their homes. It will, however, cause this to happen to any number of families who were already struggling. Relationships will break under the strain, children will suffer. Global warming will only be reduced to the extent that those who no longer have homes won’t have to worry about heating them, but the cost in real human pain will be high.

Anyone who can look at this crisis unfolding and say ‘bring it on’ forfeits all right to claim the moral high ground on an issue ever again.

Tracee Hutchison, I hope you google yourself often, just so I can tell you that you are an absolute disgrace. If your employers have a shred of common sense you will be fired immediately and replaced by a decent human being who can actually write sensibly about serious matters.

And, in conclusion, please go away.

Friday, October 03, 2008

Maturity

Is not something you're likely to find on this blog on a Friday night. Particularly after half a litre of Dutch beer.


So, instead, I present our first, and probably last, game of "Name that flower".


A few clues:


1. It's a particular species of lily, common to the Smoky Mountains region of North Carolina.


2. The sepals and petals are up to 4 inches long.


3. It looks like this:



4. It has the absolutely greatest name of any flower anywhere in thw whole world ever.


The answer is, quite seriously.....

.

.

.

.

.

.

Wait for it

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

LILIUM SUPERBUM

And for those who think that I surely must be making it up, details can be found here. Also here, here and right over there.

After reading it a couple of times, I think I understand how that name happened.

This does not make it any less funny.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

That particular Saturday was Father's Day

Our story begins on the first Saturday after Father's Day. We had deferred our celebrations for six days because the awesome present that my beautiful wife organised three weeks in advance was still in the post.* Based on an entirely fictitious assurance that it would only be a few days late, we decided we could celebrate father's day a few days late too. Of course, the gift still didn't arrive, but we figured that if we went ahead we would get to eat pancakes, and so go ahead we did.



My slightly late father's day started slightly early. Next year I shall explain to Cherub that father's day is, among other things, a day for letting daddy sleep in instead of waking me up at 5.30am. I explained it this year too but apparently he wasn't convinced. Still, we had a pleasant if offensively early breakfast together and waited for the rest of the family to wake up so we could start with the cooking of the pancakes.



After consuming slightly more maple syrup than was strictly necessary, we decided that it was a good day for a trip to the local swimming pool and off we went.

Our local pool appears to be subject to some sort of council regulation to the effect that every couple entering the pool must consist of an awesomely hot woman and an average looking and surprisingly hairy man. This meant that Honey Bear and I got in with no questions asked and we were offerred some modelling work for the pool's next advertising campaign.**



Bundle did an excellent job of showing me all the stuff he has been learning at his swimming lessons and Cherub did a pretty decent job of keeping up even though he won't even start lessons until next term. It was all very pleasant, apart from the mild case of tantrums when we said it was time to get out and have some lunch. Soon enough, it was back in the pool for more paddling, giggling, and attempting to catch boys between the end of the waterslide and the bottom of the pool.

We did this reasonably well, most of the time.


After four hours or so, it was time to head home. We parked our tired but happy children in front of "The Heffalump Movie" on DVD (with soundtrack by Carly Simon, just in case you were wondering what she's been doing since "You're so Vain"), cleaned up a few things around the house, cooked dinner for the boys, and, not a moment too soon, it was time to head for Lygon Street and dinner with fabulous blogging friends.

It was an evening that can be summed up in just six words.


Awesome. Awesome awesome awesome. Freakin' awesome.


For those who want a little more detail, I grabbed a drinkable Cab Merlot and drove over to Lygon Street, where parking is an entertaining challenge*** and walked a reasonably considerable distance to Papaginos. I was a little stunned to find I was early and even more surprised to find there was no need to wait for a table.


I have to admit to a fairly severe case of the nerves at this point. I has met Actonb once before, which meant I had gotten those nerves out of the way a while ago, but the thought of meeting Gigglewick was a little intimidating. Still, after a few minutes, two awesome people arrived and I could stop worrying.


I should also confess that I am completely hopeless at working out the 'do we do the kiss hello' issue, particularly on a first meeting . I get anxious, I look for the subtle cues that other people seem to instinctively be aware of, I find nothing, and I fight the temptation to fake a sudden coma in order to avoid the whole issue. Fortunately, Giggles cut through the whole tangle by walking in and saying "Hi, we should kiss".


The night passed very pleasantly from there. We ate garlic bread and a reasonably curious pizza topped with potato and something that may have been prosciutto, I didn't check. Someone, not being me, had the sense to order a salad. We chatted about whatever. It was good.


There is nothing surprising in the revelation that MsB and Giggles are excellent company. The only surprises I can think of from that night were discovering just how much Actonb knows about the finer points of burial at sea, and the remarkable statistic of Giggles only saying "dude" once even though we were there for over four hours.


Having knocked off the pizza and the merlot, the original plan was that we would then head over to Brunswick Street and have a few drinks at Polly's. As it turned out, we were all too chilled out to do this so we went with Gigglewick's excellent suggestion that we should wander up to Readings and browse for a while. We hung out and looked at books, we went to one of the million good places for coffee on Lygon Street, we wandered a little further and found some pretty decent gelati, we chatted some more, we took photos that will never appear on this blog, and, to my great regret, it got late and it was time to head home.

So, after a very fun night, all that was left was the long drive home, which gave me time to think about just how much it sucks that neither MsB nor Giggles actually lives in Melbourne, but also how wondrously good is blogging, without which I never would have met either one of these fine people in the first place.

If you haven't met these people yet, and you get the chance, take it.


















* Okay, yet to be posted. Possibly still being manufactured. It turned up about two weeks later and it is every bit as good as expected


** Exagerrating? On this blog? How dare you, etc


***next week, Brunswick Street, where parking takes longer than actually getting there