Dear Harry Manx

Dear Harry Manx,

My sock and I are quite overwhelmed by your beautiful, musical hands. The sock hasn't got over its encounter yet, honestly.

We appreciate your indulgence.

Love, A.xx

how not to do it masterclass, by me

Something wrong with me.

Must be kept away from those I admire.

Exhibit A:
AMBER (thinks she said, to wickedawesome author): Love your book! So funny! Like sunshine! So clever! And funny! Loved it!
(actually said something like): Um. Your husband just kinda insulted my friend, I think.
WAA: Wow. Thanks. Also, get a sense of humour. Shall I sign this for you?

Exhibit B:
AMBER (thinks she said, to talentedsmiley musician): Love your music! Want to come hear it! Too lacking in common sense and overexcited to figure out your website! Please help me out!
(actually said something like): Dude, your website sucks.
TSM: Um, I feel so lucky you will be coming to my gig. How I wish you were in our neck of the woods more often.

Exhibit C:
AMBER (thinks she said, to world’sloveliest musician): Love your…everything! Your song in my head all day…until I died of happiness! Must hear more!
(actually said something like): God, all day, over and over. Write some more damn songs, will ya? Jeez. What’s the holdup?
WLM: (fortunately, maintains radio silence)

Somebody. Stop. Me.

seen this weekend:

1. Friday, a bloke in shorts. It was only minus three, so he had a fair point.

2. Yesterday, a shirtless bloke. I live near a uni campus, so warmer-weather induced shirtlessness happens round here approximately two weeks before the real world. A bit like the bellwether ridings in the federal election – you know everyone’s going to go the same way eventually, it just takes them a bit longer.

3. Today, people outdoors smiling at each other. The temperature was definitely, truly, plus.

4. Also, this, printed on a paper napkin:

I am mistrustful of the jaunty orange ‘a’ in ‘laugh’. I don’t get it. I think there must be some significance to the ‘a’ being orange and everything else not, but I don’t know what that significance is.

And I get that napkins come from places where you eat, so spoonfuls and forkfuls, okay. But is it only me - yeah, I know the answer to this already, it is only me - who finds the third imperative a bit aggressive? “Enjoy a mouthful (darlin’. Heh, heh)”.

Squick.

go back to sleep, love, it's just a lunatic ninja

A friend pointed me at this report today:

Man Wrestles Kangaroo in Canberra Home

If you can't be bothered with the link, here's the pertinent information:

Moments later, a kangaroo burst through a three metre high window of the house's master bedroom and onto the bed where [bloke and his family] lay.
"My initial thought when I was half awake was: it's a lunatic ninja coming through the window," [bloke] told The Associated Press.

There was some kind of a scuffle; the kangaroo tore about bleeding everywhere and scaring the living crap out of everyone, including itself, and the man somehow managed to shepherd it outside without getting himself irreparably damaged in the process. Everyone safe, including the kangaroo; dad is most assuredly a bit of a hero.

Yet all I could think was: for whom, in this situation, is their first thought: “Jeez, must be a lunatic ninja breaking in my house”?

Really? That’s what you first thought?

Because I understand the likelihood of a kangaroo careening in through a plate glass window and pitching a fit all over your house is fairly slim. But surely the chances of it being that, over, say, a lunatic ninja, are at least slightly higher?

On further reflection, in fact, I can imagine precisely no situation in life where I might jump to the conclusion that it was caused by a lunatic ninja. Not a one.

You?

required reading

Go here:

UN International Women's Day page

Now go here:

Grandmothers to Grandmothers - Stephen Lewis Foundation

Now here:

Amnesty International: Safe Schools (Girls' right to education)

and here:

Oxfam Canada

Thanks.
A.
xx

Canadee-i-o

This week’s ‘I haven’t heard that for a long time’ was Nic Jones singing Canadee-i-o. (Yeah, I think Dylan did it too. You’ll be wanting the Nic Jones version, k?).

So lovely and clean a guitar tune, and the beginning of it makes me think of Joan’s research and the masses of interesting things she knows about seafaring women. Joan knows everything there is to know about that curious breed of girl who found herself wedded to a whaling ship captain heading off into the great nowhere of the south seas, surviving months in close quarters among stinking men and salt and flesh and blood. Joan also knows about those women who commandeered convict ships in Australian waters and (maybe) made it to New Zealand shores, or in any case made themselves able to fare quite admirably, thank you very much, on the high seas (until caught and hanged, obviously). And Joan knows about these women who disguised themselves as boys to get ship’s passage.

Theirs isn’t generally a happy story, to hear Joan tell it; it seems mostly one of captains who discovered the women’s treachery and let them continue working for the voyage, only to kick them off at port with threats in their ears and no pay for months of hard labour.

So in this song, a ‘fair and handsome girl’ wants to follow her young sailor-boy overseas, we assume to Newfoundland, and bargains her way onto a ship to get herself there. The crew discovers her in short order, binds her hands and feet, and makes ready to throw her overboard.

Enter the captain in a great rage, who says the girl can keep her collar of sailor-blue and be taken safely to that seaport town. Then there’s a handy guitar-solo gap of ‘half a year’ – at the end of which she ends up married to the captain who saved her, dressed in the regulation ‘silks and satins’ of such songs, one of the ‘finest ladies’ of Canadee-i-o.

Well, the song has the requisite plenary verse of ‘what have we learned today, kids?’ in which what we’ve learned is the ‘honour’ she’s gained by dressing as a sailor.

And much as I like this song, this bit always annoys the frack out of me. First of all, if we’re counting the ‘finest (immigrant) ladies’ of Canada of the time, we’d be looking to Susannah Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill, and if you’ve ever come across them you will know there’s a lot more black mud, hacking out tree stumps, starving and delivering freezing slippery babies than tripping about in silks and satins going on. It pisses me right off that this girl goes through the ship’s passage – enduring the unmentioned six months of, presumably, extreme hardship at the hands of crewmen who only didn’t kill her because of orders – only to spring into a pair of silk stockings and get all her ladyshippish. She’s all about the ‘honour’ the sailor’s uniform brought her, as long as she could ditch it at the first waft of a lavender handkerchief.

Also, what of the sailor-boy she was following in the first place? All right, I can somewhat see having your head turned by the captain, in a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-prevent-you-from-being-murdered kind of way. But according to the song, she ‘loved him well’, that sailor-boy. Seems he didn’t live up to the potential standards of living of a captain’s wife, though.

Anyone – find me something in between the Joan and the Jones version? Any girl who didn’t get her arse kicked for trying, nor trade it for glamour? They existed in history. Why not to a mandolin accompaniment?

Dear Large Grocery Store Chain

Ahoy! Hoist the topsail:




















It’s not because you can’t spell, which doesn’t matter a bit.

It’s because you didn’t check.

(Saw it on the way home. Went back with my camera later. What?)

doing it by halves

1. Southern Ontario. Now with 50% more winter! We had spring on Friday morning. Then in the course of five hours the temperature dropped back twenty degrees and we’re sitting at minus fifteen again.

2. The great thing about knitting is, you can get 50% through a thing and still have no idea if it is going to look great or like utter arse. Either way, knitting something this straightforward makes a pair of socks look like the enigma code. You need no more brain function than a bewildered chicken to get this right. (Still doesn’t mean it’s not going to look like crap, but at least it’s non-taxing).




3. The local uni has opened a new massive sports facility, with a great big pool, and dudes, nobody but me seems aware it exists. I show up and have a 50 m pool and three bored lifeguards to myself. The first time I arrived and there was nobody else there, I thought it must not be open, but the lifeguards all nodded encouragingly and reassuringly. I can feel them wishing I’d get into difficulties halfway up a lap just so they get to do something. However, now somebody else has caught on. Yesterday I had to turn over 50% of my Olympic-sized pool to the use of another swimmer. I may have to have words about our schedules, so we can stop crowding one another.