unification

Aotearoa New Zealand Herald, Sydney, January 2nd 2109

Today celebrations were held throughout Aotearoa New Zealand to mark the centennial Union Day.

Geopolitical events preceding the annexation of West Island created a favourable climate that engendered a high level of national confidence among New Zealanders at the time. The Rugby League World Cup final of November 22nd 2008 had resulted in a 34-20 win for the New Zealand side, beating the clear favourites (known at the time as the “Kangaroos”) who had won every one of the two teams’ last 13 World Cup meetings. Protests from the Kangaroos’ supporters, that largely took the form of “hardly call a bunch of Queenslanders the national team, mate; weren’t even trying,” fell upon deaf ears.

Historians remain divided on whether the World Cup defeat was evidence of Australia’s general weakened state, as admitted by the country’s Defence Minister on November 18th 2008. In fact, his decision to give the entire Australian Navy two months off over the Christmas period went largely unnoticed worldwide at the time due to other more important international events: a general election in the Maldives, the coronation of a new King of Bhutan, and the recent creation of a new children’s book prize in the UK. However, when Wellington intelligence officials were later asked how they uncovered this vital military information about their nearest neighbour and enemy, they were reported as saying “Yeah, we totally just read it in the paper one morning.”

The slip-up of simply telling everyone Australia would be undefended from November to January because Santa was coming, history suggests, could have been the fatal mistake that sealed the then-country’s fate.

The invasion was swift and bloodless. The most effective and efficient weapon proved to be a combination of red and blue Textas, used to convert the Australian flag instantly into that of the victorious nation simply by colouring it in.

flag of the former Australia

The most important institutions and mouthpieces were targeted and taken over immediately, including the parliament in Canberra, the Cadbury chocolate factory in Victoria, and John Nutting’s Saturday Night Country show on the former ABC (now a part of the ANZBC).

The unification of Aotearoa New Zealand to include West Island was formally ratified and announced on January 2nd 2009.

it's beginning to look a lot like...

I truly suck at taking photos. I was going for the pretty copse of trees here, because they're all fetchingly snowed up one side like in a picture book. But then I got all taken with the valley and the farmland and the watery early morning sunshine.

Anyway, rural Ontario this last week has put me in mind of when Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet go searching for a Woozle, following their own footprints in the snow. It all looks so astonishingly nonexistent-British-countryside-of-your-fictional-youth.

This is set to change over the next two nights though, as according to the Weather Network we are expecting a Significant Snow Event. They used the word 'colossal'. I live in the Snow Belt, it now transpires. (in the same way as I learnt the last move was into the Rain Belt, and the one before that was in the Minus Forty-Two Is Apparently A Real Temperature Belt. I'm all about the learning-by-doing).

I bet by the end of winter I'll have learnt to take a decent photo of snow. Looks as if I am about to get a lot of practice.

Movember

Boys, you're growing one, right?

Girls, you're paying 'em, right?

Right?

If you live under a rock or not in Australia or New Zealand, Movember is all about

prostate cancer research and men's mental health programmes.

Well, we like our men happy and healthy, both in the brains and the pants arenas.

And Canada is joining in, so if you are not as keen on Men Down Under as I am,

you can keep your love (and your cash) in the Great White North if you prefer.

If you don't mind keeping Aussie blokes in the pink, get thee hither and

send your bucks to Team Moh Errols.

Good on ya.

48 shades of love

So over at Pants at Large we’ve been talking about Nick Earls’s smashing book 48 Shades of Brown. Pants and I are in disagreement over the character Naomi. Naomi’s the girl that both main characters in the book are in love with. Pants maintains she is unconvinced by Naomi being the curly-headed blonde who is kooky and spacey and adorable in every way but doesn’t know that everyone’s in love with her kooky spacey loveableness because, as Pants says, those girls always know. And cultivate the kookiness etc on purpose because they just like to make boys lose it.

I, on the other hand, am a bit in love with Naomi. She is, after all, blonde and spacey and kooky and oblivious, and that is very adorable. (Pants does not like that girl). Nick Earls has created a very intelligent main character who is quite wordy and clever with language, but when it comes to Naomi, he’s somehow a little simpler with language, as if he can’t quite articulate what it is about her. It is a disarmingly straightforward way to talk. He loves “the ways she finds of understanding things, the things she finds to like.”

So. So. My point. Is. I think I am mostly in love with Naomi because of how the narrator talks about her.

And then, the song I was going on about the other day, Richard Thompson’s Beeswing (as sung only by Roy Bailey. Remember?) Here’s another wild and wilful lass, with whom the narrator (singer, I guess) is utterly smitten, a factory girl who belongs free on the moors and by the sea. She was a lost child, she was running wild, she said, ‘as long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay, and you wouldn’t want me any other way.’ Well, so the poor lad gets a bit keen to tie her down, and off she runs, and he hears of her every now and again, getting worn down and worse for wear as the price of refusing his ‘chains’, until finally he just wishes he could have any of her at all; better whatever little she can give than nothing.

Now, in this case, here’s a story that tells you more about the one singing it than the lass to whom he sings. You know? I’m not loving the girl he’s talking about, but falling in love with him for the way he’s talking about her.

The narrator that makes you fall in love with the object of his love, or the narrator you fall in love with because what he says about her reveals more about him? Which do you like best?

a rare thing, fine as a beeswing

I said that we should settle down
And get a few acres dug
A fire burning in the hearth and babies on the rug.
She said, young man, you’re a foolish man
That surely sounds like hell,
You might be lord of half the world but you’ll not own me as well…

Beeswing, Richard Thompson

Seems a group of designers in Denmark, and some engineering whizz at MIT, might’ve come up with the solution for all those who are ‘so fine a breath of wind might blow ’em away’. The Walking House is essentially a 21st-century Romany caravan – grass-powered horse replaced by solar-powered cells, and lo – your house gets up and walks wheresoever the whim might take you.

It’s a hexagonal tube thing of 3.5 metres diameter, on six individually moving, electrically-powered legs. Doesn't it look like a giant version of those walking robots on Robot Wars that always got the crap beaten out of them by the whizzy engine-powered things with spinning blades? For the die-hard romantics - and in a bit of a weird contradiction of the environmental aspect - the walking house even has a wood stove, though, in an even nicer bit of bizarre, it also has a ‘mainframe computer’ to control the legs.

This whole idea is really interesting to me, as someone who can’t be said to have really ‘settled’ anywhere or anyhow. I guess we’re all about ownership in modern society – getting our few acres dug, more or less – which is the whole reason why the 21st century is so hostile to travellers in general. There’s no place for ‘em. What’re you going to do, make your way between Caravan Club Certified Locations?

But really, as the world becomes an ever-smaller place and we all move about a lot more than our parents and grandparents ever did, I reckon the walking house’s time could’ve come. We’re not tied to our people by location any more. Conversely, it’s 21st-century technology that enables that, of course – free internet phoning, webcams and all that keeping us close to our people without physically being near them.

Incidentally, the only place you should listen to the song Beeswing is on this record (if you click on the track, you can hear the teeniest of snippets). Roy Bailey, for my money, is one of only two men on the planet whose voice could do justice to a song this beautiful. (And the other one isn’t Richard Thompson. It is truth absolute that he is one of the most brilliant and inspired and inspiring songwriters there is, but it cannot be only me that wants to reach up into his throat and pull his voice down from up his nose.)

I digress.

And I heard she even married one time,
A man named Romany Brown
But even a gypsy caravan was too much settling down…

Well. There’ll always be some of us who you’ll never get to commit even to the walking house – and we wouldn’t want them any other way. Me? I might start saving…

lessons learnt

Upon rocking Halloween-at-work dressed as a zombie (undead-icated to serving your library community. Ha ha), the following truths:

1. Coworkers’ children aged 3 and under – not fazed in the slightest by the undead. Even ones that are bleeding from the eyes (hey, go big or go home, I say). More confused by the foreign accent. Will accept candy without batting an eyelid.

2. Coworkers’ children aged 4 and up – totally freaked the frack out by the undead. Will be brought to tears. Not even candy will undo the damage. Nor will parents’ insistence that the zombie is in fact ‘not real’ (never mind the existential questions this causes in the mind of the zombie herself).

3. If you are committed to the blackened fingernails of the undead, but are someone who has never used nail polish ever in your life, there is a time to realise that the purchase of such a substance should also be accompanied by nail polish remover. There is a point at which this realisation is too late. But then, have you ever heard me say “let’s think this through to its logical conclusion”?

4. Black face paint does an excellent job, but you might as well just tattoo your eye sockets, because once it’s on? That stuff ain’t going nowhere.