Throwing Away the Breadcrumbs

troubled

2011-07-29T10:54:00.004-04:00

I am troubled.

I have not The Television at home, but it exists in multi-channel, widescreen, HD format at my mother-in-law's house, and I stay there twice a week for work. There, The Television trumps all things, so I end up hearing quite a lot of it.

Last night, on a US television show I know not which, two female presenters were discussing the STAGGERING fact that in the UK just recently, a magazine advert with Julia Roberts in it had been pulled because it was considered too airbrushed.

The presenters were falling about with laughter over this nonsensical behaviour from English people "Haven't they got better things to discuss?" they said, after a forty-minute programme entirely devoted to how much Hustler is offering Tot Mom to pose. "OF COURSE it's airbrushed. If it were me, you bet I would want it airbrushed!"

They showed pictures in magazines of themselves, that had been airbrushed, to prove how true that was. One of the two is a singer, and she showed her album cover. "You know why I chose this picture?" she said. "Because it doesn't look anything like me! I'm three years younger and three years skinnier there!"

"See how much better we look?!?!", they asked us.

"Apparently," they managed to squeak out around their laughter, "in England this issue was raised in parliament!!!!!" (actually, they didn't say parliament. They called it the English Legislature).

Then this morning, in my 'book biz round up' email at work, I got a notification of an interview with Maurice Sendak in Vanity Fair. This is the cover of Vanity Fair that popped up:

Oh, I beg your pardon, I said. I seem to have been accidentally linked to Maxim instead.

John Green, on his blog and on Nerdfighters and all those places where his vlogbrothers videos go, is talking about The Great Gatsby these days. In his first video - conveniently for this post - he reminds us about the bit when Daisy describes finding out, in the delivery room, that her new baby is a girl:

"I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool..."

And this has all been said before, in better ways and more erudite ways and I have nothing new or different to add, except another voice to it. At least officially, at least in public, some UK MPs (sorry, some Representatives in the House of the English Legislature) are too.

...

2011-06-10T11:32:00.003-04:00

While I'd love to be writing you a blog post along these lines:

"On Tuesday, I drove to a book launch on a backroad highway that is under construction at a rate of approximately three inches a year. I arrived at the 'escorted one-lane passage' at a comparatively good time, only having to wait about ten minutes before the cortege coming in the other direction passed and we were able to resume our journey. Those people in the queue ahead of me had not only been there long enough that it made sense to turn off their engines, but had also got out a picnic, and were in the second innings of a cricket match."

Here is what I've really got to give:

Monday, forgit what did.
Tuesday, forgit what did. Nothing pertikeler for tea.
Wednesday, forgit what did.
Thursday, forgit what did. Wish I was a beter girl.

etc.

nagez, rameurs!

2011-04-30T13:01:00.004-04:00

Radio silence; maintenance-level, low-functionality, etc. It’s where it’s been at the last couple of months. But you don’t want to hear about that.

You want to hear about this, and I want to tell you about it!! This is what has made me excited enough to come out of hiblognation:

(Image by David Bernier, www.beaujoualvert.com)

Nagez Rameurs, Genticorum’s new album, is coming out in almost no days' time.

Why is this so so-exciting? I’m glad you asked.

Because it’s going to be awesome. Obviously.

Because of the cover. If you have facebook, which I don’t but I piggybacked on someone to look at it, you should seek out their page because you can see the finished cover there. But you must also look here at the designer's page If the best album cover in the world is not this one, with three hairtastic French musos rendered as wooden puppets paddling a canoe with their instruments, then kindly fax me an answer as to what is.

Because of the canoe. This is a voyageurs-themed album, and you know very well that I never met a folkloric canoe I didn’t like. Some of you in fact know that it was a folkloric canoe that brought me to Canada in the first place (no, not literally; but you are hilarious; what a good joke).

Because there is reportedly a song on it called ‘turlutte hirsute’, ref: my post months ago about how every time a Quebecois musician cuts his hair, a fairy dies. I am so joyous that these boys clearly understand the important hair-to-musician nexus, (ref: also that Pascal Gemme is far and away the current reigning Samson of Quebec music).

Because of weird coincidence. The title track – the title itself – comes from a French translation of the English-language 'Canadian Boat Song', that until I read about this album a few days ago, I had not heard of. Cut to a few days fewer ago, when I went to a book launch in Regina for a novel that deals with Confederation (good for my citizenship education). It turns out said novel, by chance, contains the Canadian Boat Song, such that one of the presenters at the launch gave a wee talk about it AND we all ended up singing it. This reminded me of another very similar flying-canoe-related coincidence that happened to me the first time I ever went to Quebec (I won’t bore you with it now). There’s something about this particular bit of my adopted country’s heritage that’s done me only good, and I feel quite certain this top-of-their-game, hair-reverent, coincidence-embracing, creatively-packaged record is only going to add to my conviction that this is the case.

Am I back in the blog? Not sure. The exam marking is approaching, so I’m ratcheting up a notch for the three-jobs-at-once season, which is never my best side. But thanks for waiting.

foggy

2011-02-15T16:43:00.001-05:00

My brain is so…fogged today.

I was reading an email at work, and I flipped over to the internet to look something up so I could reply. I got on my opening page and immediately had no idea what I had wanted to look up. Not the first. I couldn’t even remember who the email was from. I had to go back and read it all again and work out what the thread of my thoughts had been.

I got an email from my sister, and it reminded me I had wanted to tell her about a blog post I read a while ago. I went to the blog in question and suddenly couldn’t think at all what it was in the blog I had wanted her to read or why. I went back through some of the posts but none of them rang that bell that said, that was it.

I went onto the library website to see if they had any of my books yet. Two out of four requests, they have in. I decided to look up another book I’ve been wanting to read, and I entered the author’s name: Liane Moriarty. The library website search said, did you mean ‘lane ordinary’?

Just for a moment, I thought, I don’t know. Maybe?

how many toasters does it take...

2011-01-26T23:31:00.004-05:00

Some many months ago, I was (unsuccessfully) attempting to combat a bout of insomnia with repetitions of On Ilkley Moor Bar t'at, and its theosophy.

Last night, it was economics, thanks to 24 Hours from Tulsa.

In the mid-1980s, a petrol, or possibly oil, company had a tv advert to promote its reward card. Everybody used Green Shield Stamps back in them days, so although the reward card scheme was identical to that, racking up points in return for paying for petrol, there was obviously some need to preach to the suspicious who were not sure about a plastic card versus tiny slips of gummed perforated paper that you were supposed to lick and stick onto a cardboard...card. (In reality Green Shield stamps just got lost in the glove compartment or were whipped out of your fingertips by the wind as you crossed the garage forecourt to your car. As a kid, it was hard to get a handle on the Green Shield stamp. It was so important, because it was like...money. But they were always crushed and coated with mud in the footwell, or dinged to shreds in the ashtray, and the card was never about, and then sometimes you would find one among the pile of parental pocket change on the sideboard, and...wonder).

So. The petrol company (I googled it; it's Mobil) did this advert about the things you could get with your points, and the song went: "I was only 24 toasters from Scunthorpe. Only 6 double beds from Torquay".

Now, we all know, until very recently at least, supermarket points things - aside from being calculated to confuse foreigners - buy practically nothing until you have been accumulating them for four hundred and ninety years, and then your options are an acrylic tumbler with the supermarket logo on, or a keyring. (The reason they are meant to confuse foreigners is the way you are asked for the card relating to a particular points scheme when you try to pay for things. It's not a quesion, as in, 'do you have a Nectar card?' The cashier just says, 'Nectar?' - or here, 'Optimum?' If you are confused, or are foolish enough to ask for elaboration, it is customary to simply repeat, 'OPTIMUM?').

So to reach even ONE toaster, even a hundredth of a double bed? You would surely have to drive a considerable distance. Yet the singer is in a car, 24 toasters away from Scunthorpe. And six, count them, six double beds from Torquay.

You're wide awake now too, aren't you?

The furthest point in the UK from Torquay has to be John O'Groats. Torquay is way in the south west. It's only about 100 miles from there to Land's End. The driving distance from John O'Groats to Torquay must be something just over 620 miles.

If I can earn 6 double beds from driving 620 miles, then...I can get a bed for going about 100. I could drive to London from Leicester, and I wouldn't even have to go back.

Conveniently, probably the furthest point from Scunthorpe is Land's End, since Scunthorpe is in North Lincolnshire. It can only be about 400 miles. That's 17 miles for a toaster.

Mobil, I didn't take A Level Economics. I didn't even take GCSE Economics. But even I can see that's financial suicide on your part.

This song was written before the Channel Tunnel existed. I guess you could allow for car-ferry transport to, say, Zeebrugge, or Ostend, thus opening up Europe and a much greater distance for the 24 toasters and six double beds to cover, but I don’t think that’s really in the spirit of the song.

However, since I still was not asleep at this point, I decided to allow for that Channel Tunnel they’ve got there, and assume Mobil must mean a much greater distance than the UK could offer.

Since I was in bed, I made some guesses about reward-points-to-litres-of-petrol ratios, and random looking-it-up after the fact bore it out – a litre gets you a point. 4.5 litres per gallon = 4.5 points (can you keep up with the maths?).

A nice economical little car like the Micra (I wish they had them here, but can you imagine driving on the Prairies in one? The people in their monster trucks wouldn’t even see you as they chewed you up into their front grille) gets about 50 mpg when driving long-distance. 4.5 points for every 50 miles.

Now, points-to-pounds. I don’t live in England any more but I’d say you could get a decent toaster for fifteen quid. (Not one that does eggs, probably, or has a muffin-or-croissant cradle on top for when you want to defrost pastries. But one that toasts.) The best-known supermarket points scheme gives you £2.50 for 500 points. 3000 points for the toaster.

Times 24.

72,000 points.

If 72,000 points gets me 24 toasters, and 50 miles gets me 4.5 points..then...16,000 miles. 16,000 miles for my 24 toasters.

As the crow flies, that’s beyond New Zealand. Driving distance, overland and through the Channel Tunnel (remember that far back? Still with me? Getting sleepy? Good) it’s got to be somewhere in Asia. Mongolia, maybe (I’m adding miles to detour through Iran around... that sea there, above Iran. My geography is about as good as my maths. The Black Sea? The Caspian?)

None of this, though, approaches the question of why, if you had 16,000 miles worth of points under your belt, you’d think of getting 24 toasters. I hear you can get some really good stuff from those points things now. There’s more to rewards than acrylic tumblers and multiple toasters.

Unless.

Unless you have a large extended family in Ulaanbaatar who all really enjoy breakfast, and you are looking for holiday gifts to take them, I suppose.

what did you expect...

2011-01-11T18:47:00.003-05:00

...if you're going to leave partially-drunk travel cups of tea out in your car for the day at this time of year?

vous connaissez l'histoire...

2010-12-31T13:23:00.004-05:00

Health and peace to you as the old year passes.

Try not to make any pacts with the devil tonight, ok?

taken for questioning

2010-12-30T17:09:00.002-05:00

I buy soap and shampoo from a particular shop for a particular reason. They sell solid shampoo, which means it doesn’t come in a plastic bottle.

I hover around fifty-fifty on whether it’s preferable to avoid plastic or palm-oil when it comes to soap and shampoo. I don’t know which is worse – buying things with palm oil in them, or buying things in plastic bottles. Each as bad as the other, probably. However, at the moment it is certainly easier to avoid the plastic bottle (soap and shampoo-wise) than to avoid palm oil. Even fair-trade places like Ten Thousand Villages still use palm oil in their soap.

I’m not sure if the particular shop has palm oil or not.

Okay, I just looked it up. Apparently not, so there’s another reason for me to keep going there.

Anyway I was lucky enough to receive a gift voucher for this shop, and was almost out of both soap and shampoo, so today I went.

I headed straight for the shampoo, and picked up the one I always get, because it’s meant to be good for if you swim in chlorinated water a lot. Immediately, a sales assistant appeared. ‘Which is your favourite shampoo?’ Um, this one. The one I’m buying. She fetched me a little paper bag to slide it into and I carried on. Another assistant asked if she could help me. I asked her to cut me a piece of the face soap I use. ‘Have you used this before?’ Yes. A third assistant then approached to ask if there was anything she could help me with and if I’d seen a particular product, the one she was holding. No, I said, because I hadn’t. Then she told me all about what it did. And then, shampoo assistant came back, and, wondered ‘Do you know that buying two shampoos would mean you get a free tin?’

I’d been in the store about a minute and been asked six questions already.

At that point the second assistant came back with my soap and asked if I knew about their promotion. I could get the same amount of soap again – of any soap – free! So I set off to look at all the soaps and choose one. Then, the first assistant came up again. ‘How long have you been a (our product) lover?’ I blinked. Caught off-guard, I actually started explaining how when I first moved here I’d fly home to England through Toronto airport and there was a shop there, and then when I came back I…

Then I stopped. You know, I finished vaguely. She nodded receptively, but I managed to hold my tongue and turned back to the soap.

‘Have you chosen your second soap yet??’ I jumped. Second assistant was back. No, I’m still looking. She slipped away again. Each time I reached for a soap, I could feel her inching back towards me. I backed off and took a turn around the shop to steady my nerves. And, in honesty, to see if I could do it without getting questioned.

With a deft two-step I made it back to the soaps and grabbed one of approximately equal size to the one I already had. I stepped smartly to the cash desk to pay, congratulating myself on avoiding having to parry a single enquiry.

‘Have you seen our (these products on the counter)?’ This time, I went for yes, because they were technically in front of my eyes and I had, in fact, seen them. ‘Would you like one?’ Not today. ‘Have you received our newsletter??’ No, I said, again truthfully, and watched as one was put in my bag while I paid. ‘Have you signed up for our email newsletter???’ Just for a moment I almost told the truth, but caught myself in the nick of time. I straightened my shoulders, got a grip and, Oh, yes, I said sunnily, signing the slip with a flourish and picking up my bag, escape now firmly in my sight.

One soap was left on the counter. The sales assistant picked it up to put in my bag. ‘Ah, you chose that one?’ she said encouragingly, and unable to stop myself, I said, I once got a lip salve thing in the same…flavour, and I liked it. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, ‘we don’t have the lip balms in that line in our stores any more. You must shop online. How long have you been visiting our online store?!’

I eyed her for a long moment.

I haven’t, I said. But I begin to think I might start.

some sort of joke?

2010-12-22T16:20:00.003-05:00

Winter solstice, don't get me wrong. I like you. I like your vibe. I like what you signify.

But...let's make it a year til I see you again, shall we? Because this is the third time in a row we've got together, without an intervening interruption from your carefree brother, summer solstice.

I'm glad we were able to meet again here in the northern hemisphere, where things are the right way up and go in the right order. But, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder. So how about this: I promise to stay on this end of the globe, and you promise not to come back for 364 days. Deal?

Also: today's lunch? fly in my soup.

off

2010-11-30T23:37:00.005-05:00

For holiday giftitude this year, I decided to only get people exactly what they wanted. Often I spend a lot of time thinking of something [that I think is] cool and unusual that totally goes with someone’s interests. But the thing is, everyone gets a lot of gifts. Not only is there Christmas and Hanukkah but there are a tremendous amount of end-of-year birthdays within my closest and mostest. And the thing I thought of was probably fine, but it wasn’t something they said they wanted, it was just something that kind of goes with them.

In the past I have also made socks for people. Because, well, even if socks don’t necessarily ‘go with your interests’ as such, I still think someone spending time to make you something nice by hand is a good gift. One reason I like to make people socks as gifts is because it means I was thinking of them, and spending my time producing something that is especially for them. To me, it’s meaningful.

I am still going this route in one direction; possibly two. But for everyone else, this year is the ‘just pick something off the list and buy it’ year.

This may sound a touch cynical and easy-way-outish. Well, it sort of is. I am making myself an easy holiday after all the travelling and moving and jobhunting and so on. But if there are Amazon wish lists out there, and there are HBC registries, and they have on them things that people said they wanted, well, why not point and click? You said you wanted it; here it is.

Then, quite recently, my dad threw a spanner in the works. When are you going to do me another pair of socks, then?

So my dad would really actually like - he said he wants - a pair of socks. A week and a half ago, I decided I would just about have time to squeeze in making a pair and mailing them.

This, friends, is lovely yarn. Look at it. I absolutely knew it was going to self-stripe in an interesting colourway and pattern. It’s Gawayn and the Green Knight foresty – pine foresty, the dark green and silver-grey-blue of evergreens and mythology.

And lo, the silver-blue behaves and interacts very nicely with some of the other blended colours, interleaving row by row. Pleasing.

Then suddenly, this arresting weird-ass pooling effect with the dark green. What the hell?

It doesn’t get better.

I did not sign up for making socks with a map of farking New Zealand on them. I hated it more and more as I went along. I wondered if it would work differently if I had knitted it pulling the yarn from the inside of the ball rather than from the outside, but deadline knitting is no time to be experimenting in that way. I had to get these in the post, pronto. I decided the Pooling New Zealand of No Apparent Reasondom could go at the back and down the heel, where it would be covered by trouser, and carried on.

When I got to the foot, it did this:

So now the well-behaved interleavery of the smoky silvergrey with the other evergreen forest colours was pooling to make a new zigzag stripe – a New Zealand in negative, if you will, and right on the top of the foot – in colours pulled straight from my sister’s bedroom decor circa 1987: pale grey with dusty rose, lavender and powder blue accents.

None of which features in my dad’s favourite colour schemes, for socks or anything else. None of which is part of any legendary evergreen forests of yore. And all of which combine with the original New Zealand effect for a yin yang of Ugly As Sin.

I have two balls of this yarn, so my final bid to unbugger up this sock was to add in the new ball, knitting one round in the first yarn and one in the second, to try to break up the pooling. Break up the pooling it did, but it also gave me a random pattern last seen on the screen of my Atari computer during the 20 minute burr-burrr-burrr session it underwent while loading the Sammy the Sea Serpent game from a cassette tape.

I unambiguously hate this sock. I thought it was going to be lovely, and it’s ugly. It’s taken a lot of hours, and everything about it is off. I don’t even slightly want to give this to my dad for Christmas. I definitely don’t want to carry on, and finish it, and then waste even more hours making a second that is equally hideous. There is nothing to like about either the process or the product.

Emergency socks are on the go. There’s still time.

books

2010-11-24T19:05:00.000-05:00

If you look at the thingy at the top left of this blog, you may have noticed that the ingredients of the magical fusion have been absent of late. Not a lot of books, music, socks or cake going on at the moment.

Remiss.

Luckily Joan is about to release her new book! and here is the spiffy trailer:

Click here to see it on Joan's blog.

my hero

2010-11-06T11:52:00.003-04:00

I am a treehugger. You know this to be true. I take my canvas bags to the supermarket and my travel mug to tea and coffee shops and recycle and compost and don’t buy stuff or eat meat and I get fair-trade tea and use solid shampoo because it's made without palm oil and doesn’t come in a plastic bottle and most of all, I ride a bike and take the bus. I’m not on the map as far as cars are concerned. The Top Gear men would hate me (even though I actually find them quite charming and watchable, for ridiculously posh wealthy petrol-headed hoons). I don’t, in general, much enjoy the burning of petrol to get places you could get with the burning of a bit of leg energy just as well.

A year ago, I had a car, to get to a stupidly distant job. The best I could do was find a small and fuel-efficient one and carpool daily. Since that time ended, it’s been bike and bus all the way.

But I have to admit to you, that in the last week, my hero, whom I love with a love that knows no bounds at all, at all, is:

I have a new job, and a new home. It’s a long long way from where I last lived in Canada. More than 3,000 kilometres. And everything I own – which to many people, doesn’t amount to much, but is still quite a lot to me – was located near to where the old job and home were. It had to be moved from one to the other, and so did I.

This, my small and fuel-efficient hero, is what got me and everything I own – that is, EVERY. SINGLE. THING. I. OWN. – more than three thousand kms in three days, without a complaint. Without a squeak, a moan, a groan, a hiss, a crunch; without even a polite request for a refreshing drink and a bit of a sit down.

It took me safely around scary Detroit in the early hours with news of a gas station carjacking shootout on the radio;

through the centre of Ann Arbor because of my creative map reading; across the rest of Michigan in such a flash I hardly noticed;

over the Chicago Skyway, pointing out the baseball stadium and a building with funny white ears on the way, and politely ignoring the oddly pull-y camber of the road and the continuous stops for bizarre mini-tolls of sixty cents every ten paces;

into and through Wisconsin without requesting fresh cranberry juice, or asking to stop at the restaurant with the name you’d never hear in the UK (The Bog) or even at the Wisconsin Indoor Kalahari Experience;

purred happily along the beautifully-paved highway between La Crosse and Madison;

joined me in a juvenile giggle at Minnesota’s billboards for Stearns Vet Outlet and Pharmacy (We Do Cows!);

stepped easily up to the challenge of the 75 mph speed limit in North Dakota that meant we zipped through the state like a dose of salts;

nobly protected EVERYTHING I OWN through one night parked in Eau Claire and one in Brandon, Manitoba...and proudly rolled me home more relaxed and content than I’ve felt in a while.

It’s been treated to a nice new set of winter tyres and a service, and as a true hero should be, was allowed to rest on its laurels for an entire day before we headed off flat-hunting together.

Last week I was on the bus to my new job, outside temperature minus four. The woman sitting next to me commented, ‘well, I guess we’re getting our Indian Summer at last!’

Hi, Saskatchewan! I’m back!

here

2010-10-15T23:41:00.003-04:00

I'm here.

I am here, I promise.

It's just that here, on any given day recently, has been an astonishing variety of places, most of which are extremely far apart, and it's a bit tiring and quite hard to think or even put my trousers on the right way round, never mind get the right vitamins and/ or any sleep at all.

So. I'm here. Soon, I'll be elsewhere.

Oh, also? The keys keep pinging off my keyboard. ('keep pinging off' = two keys. Have departed my computer keyboard, and I can't fix them back on). One of them, even the little rubber nobble beneath the key has come off. It's been suggested it's because I bang the living daylights out of my computer keys, having learnt to type on a typewriter as a wee girl. I say, they should stand up to that sort of treatment. Is nothing built to last any more?

doing it by the book, or Sybylla says hi

2010-09-16T09:48:00.007-04:00

So I set off from Jasper Jones...

...made a right at Breath...

...and oddly enough, ended up right in My Brilliant Career in time for tea.

got my Ls

2010-09-04T02:52:00.003-04:00

At the bus stop. Youngish guy rocks up carrying an open bottle of some fizzy thing (asti spumante, or something, with the foil peeled back at the top) in a paper bag, and a slab of stubbies.

GUY: (sings) Wha-aaa-t are YOU dooo-ing the re-EST of to-o-o-DAY?

ME: Going home and working. How about you?

GUY: (still singing) Con-TIN-yooooouuuu-ing to drink, then going to see my friends, and dri-i-i-ink....ING. (looks at me quite closely) I know!!! I don’t look the type, do I?!??!

ME: On the contrary, friend. The only empirical evidence I currently have is that you are, in fact, The Type.

GUY: I mean, ok, I haven’t achieved everything my friends have. One of them, he flies jumbo jets!! I don’t even have my driver’s licence.

ME: Not ambitious in that direction?

GUY: Nooooo, man! I hate cars. Hate ‘em. Never been interested. (nanosecond pause) I could buy a house in Brazil.

ME: Well, Brazil. Naturally.

GUY: This bloke I know has one there, right, and it has, like, everything. A kitchen, a whole school!! A four-car garage.

ME: What do you want with a four-car garage? You can’t drive.

GUY: *blinky blink*

ME: *eyebrows*

GUY: Yeah, got my L plates, though, ay.

In other news: climbing up high things in the vicinity of Sydney, and looking down.

all she'd do was just...

2010-08-21T05:19:00.006-04:00

Well, my little Doney gal, don’t you guess

Better be making your wedding dress, wedding dress, wedding dress

Better be making your wedding dress

Well, it’s already made, trimmed in green

Prettiest dress you’ve ever seen, ever seen, ever seen

Prettiest dress you’ve ever seen

Well, it’s already made, trimmed in red

Stitched all around with a golden thread, golden thread, golden thread

Stitched all around with a golden thread

Well, it’s already made, trimmed in brown

Stitched all around with a golden crown, golden crown, golden crown

Stitched all around with a golden crown

Well, it’s already made, trimmed in white

Gonna be married on Saturday night, Saturday night, Saturday night

Gonna be married on Saturday night

Well, she wouldn’t say yes and she wouldn’t say no,

All she’d do was just sit and sew, sit and sew, sit and sew

All she’d do was just sit and sew

There are those who say this Appalachian song is about a relentlessly hopeful and ultimately jilted bride. She’s stuck at the end of the song with nothing to do but sew away as all her chances pass her by.

They’re wrong though.

Well, I mean, nobody’s wrong in folk music. It’s all about interpretation.

But they are mistaken.

This is a bride who’s read up on her Greek myths, and taken a leaf from Penelope’s book.

ODYSSEUS: Pen, my dearest, I gots to go and do something manly. Be right back!

PENELOPE: Okay, honey. Telemachus, say ber-bye to your dad.

ODYSSEUS *doesn’t come back*

GENTS OF ITHACA: Penny, you are HAWT. You should totally marry one of us.

PENELOPE: No thanks!

GENTS (suddenly menacing): No, seriously.

PENELOPE: Oh dear. Well, as it goes, I’m inconveniently right in the middle of weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s dad. I’ll pick one of you absolutely as soon as I’m done.

PENELOPE:*weaves shroud all day*

PENELOPE: *unravels shroud all night*

PENELOPE:*weaves shroud all day*

PENELOPE: *unravels shroud all night*

GENTS: Ready?

PENELOPE:...Not quiiiite...

PENELOPE:*weaves shroud all day*

PENELOPE: *unravels shroud all night*

*twenty years later*

ODYSSEUS: Hey my lovely wife! Sorry I was ages. I missed you like whoa.

PENELOPE: Me too honey! Incidentally, there are about a hundred men around here I would really like you to say hi to, when you get a minute and have a sword handy.

This Appalachian girl doesn’t want to make a decision. “Nope, I’m still sewing...no, not quite ready...try Tuesday week...oh, no, sorry, still not done...” The freedom not to decide is small but significant in a folk tradition where girls often don’t have a lot of power.

It doesn’t have to be husbands; it’s more that not making a decision - on anything - means you get to keep all the decisions open. The minute you make a decision, you unmake a million others. Once you decide to do x, then you know you’ll never do y, and it reduces the likelihood you’ll do a, b or c, too.

That you may not really all that much want to do y or a or b or c is academic. It’s just the fact of those possibilities existing, and not existing once you have decided. Penelope and the Appalachian bride keep their freedom to not make a decision by never being quite finished their weaving and sewing.

The socks don’t lie. I’ve got some decisions to make.

Floating accent, part the first

2010-08-16T06:19:00.005-04:00

Vindication!

Scientists – yes, Scientists good and true – conclude Floating Accent Syndrome exists!

I first read about floating accent syndrome in one of Dave Gorman’s books (I have an imperfect memory on this, but I think it was the googlewhack one). Gorman claims to have the tendency of gravitating his accent to align with the person to whom he is speaking, completely accidentally and unconsciously. I think he also mentions it as an especial outcome of being from the Midlands, where we don’t really have much of a distinguishable accent ourselves. Well, Dave Gorman is a wise man, and now Scientists – Scientists! mark you – have confirmed it.

These Scientists say as humans we are likely to imitate those with whom we’re in conversation. It’s an empathetic reflex. I want you to feel I am familiar, so I will try to sound a bit like you and mirror your speech patterns and inflection and even the speed at which you talk.

I’ve said it before; if you live anywhere other than where you were born for any length of time, you probably should start to get a bit of a floating accent. (That is mostly because I have the world’s worst case of it*). Our surroundings should change us. We are supposed to respond and relate to what’s around us.

Unfortunately, in practice, this just makes us sound massively inauthentic. It appears we’re trying to be something we’re not.

It’s funny, because when you're learning a foreign language, mimicking is demonstrably the right way to do it. That’s how you learn it. My French sounds determinedly Québécois. I learnt French in school, but I learnt to use French in Canada. If you use your own accent when operating in a foreign language, you simply sound like someone who doesn’t care enough to try very hard.

My accent these days is an unlovely tattercoat stitched from the shreds of all the places in which I’ve lived. By someone who doesn’t entirely know how to sew. And who doesn’t have time to do much more than vaguely mackle things together relying quite heavily on iron-on hem tape and baling twine. Some things are quite ingrained: I haven’t ever got rid of my glottal stops (Ga’wick airpor’) or my non-rhotic intrusive R (Canada-r-and Australia-r-and New Zealand). Vowels are much less unequivocally nailed down.

The really irritating thing about my floating accent is that sometimes it will float in the opposite direction. Sometimes, with people posher than me – or with Australians/Kiwis – I will hear my vowels rounding out to match theirs (although I’ve never gone as far as grarss or barth). At other times, though, it will send me in the complete opposite direction and suddenly I’m channelling my colliery heritage and asking where ‘ast tha bin since I saw thee last? At what point wanting to belong becomes losing your authenticity, I don’t know.

My question for the Scientists, though, is this: who is mimicking whom? Because if I am trying to sound like you, aren’t you also trying to sound like me? Down what sort of wormhole is that going to end? And...how are we ever going to get out?

*except maybe for Dave Gorman.

winterswim

2010-08-03T04:16:00.002-04:00

The Winterswimmers are of a different breed.

Never mind that it is actually almost 23 degrees outside. It’s Winter, so almost nobody is at the beach, and absolutely nobody is swimming.

Except, of course, for the Winterswimmers.

We love our Winter Sea, the Winterswimmers, and we love each other a little because of it. After all, everyone’s a Summerswimmer, so there’s no common ground, no unity among the masses. Winterswimmers have Shared Experience, a special nod, abbreviated interactions of recognition and acknowledgement. “How’s the water?” we will ask. And “Bewdiful,” we reply. We all know ‘bewdiful’ is code for ‘it’ll take your appendages off if you stay in too long’, but we participate in the code nevertheless.

Winterswimming, to be fair, is different from Summerswimming. Although the sun is blazing over 20 degrees at us, the sea didn’t get the memo, so it’s pretty cold. When the waves close around you, your body gets that physiological reflex to gasp in, which means you have to concentrate very hard and override your natural response each time you go under. The Winter Sea is unforgiving and unlovely. Its waves are a little choppier, its currents tug at you a fraction more magnetically. It swells snarled black mats of seaweed unexpectedly beneath you. It’s even a little more difficult to extricate yourself from, because the suckback of the waves as you stumble up the shore after Winterswimming is strong and unbalancing; the sandshelves fall away uneven beneath your soles.

For some time after I leave here, I know my body will fight not to relinquish its memory of being a Winterswimmer.

five things

2010-07-23T11:12:00.003-04:00

Yahoo (exclamation mark) News has an incisive headline tonight: 'five things you should never put in a dishwasher'. I did not click the link to find out what they are, so I'm going to guess

1. Babies

2. Pets

3. Musical instruments

4. Electrical appliances

5. Geraniums

...and, now I think of it

6. radioactive waste

7. endangered species

8. firewood

9. soft furnishings

10. your passport

11. former wrestling star Giant Haystacks

12. the Stanley Cup

13. cheese

In fact, now I really think of it, Yahoo (exclamation mark) could’ve saved itself a lot of time by just listing the things you can put in a dishwasher, because I suspect that list is considerably shorter.

memo

2010-07-12T07:14:00.001-04:00

Dear Google Chrome,

I love you very much. You are much friendlier than Explorer. You are very helpful and speedy to deliver me webpages.

It’s nice that you notice things, too, and give me a popup saying ‘This page is in French! Would you like to translate it?’ I click ‘Nope!’ every time, but you do like to check. Even, I feel bound to point out, when the page is not in French at all. You just did it on my email homepage, actually. And your helpfulness seems to be influencing other websites too. Youtube has permanently affixed itself into French for me now. I think it’s mostly to enable you to put your jaunty popup line over the top and ask me if I want to translate it back again. Are you perhaps in cahoots? I suspect it.

Love,

Amber

p.s. the answer’s still no. But thanks for offering! Really.

p.p.s. actually, if you want to tell me what ‘in cahoots’ is in French, I would be cool with that. Perhaps when you pop up to tell me this page is in French, which when I last looked it still wasn’t, I will hit translate, and then I’ll find out.

a lesson in clarity

2010-07-07T07:39:00.004-04:00

Well. That was a very interesting exercise and you all stepped up to the plate in a completely different way from how I was expecting. I thought I was going to be reading about your love for a bunch of places in Canada and the reasons they would be a smashing spot to hang my hat. Perhaps I could’ve been marginally clearer on that one, because I wasn’t actually trawling for you all to just tell me you want me around where you are. You are all either astonishingly nice, generous and kind-hearted people, or hoping to be lined up for some good Australian gift loot when I come back. Maybe a bit of both.

In other news, I spent the afternoon stacking beautiful red, brittle jarrah logs for firewood. Jarrah! I am officially living in a Tim Winton novel.

(ps I am not sure why the most recent comments haven’t displayed. Maybe there is a comment limit, and blogger simply can't believe this many people want to talk to me. However, the comments are still appearing in my email, so I am seeing them, and responding, although mine are also being eaten by the hungry hungry comment gods).

The One

2010-07-01T07:03:00.005-04:00

I need your help with a Very Important Thing.

2010 is going to be the year I find The One. And you’re going to help me.

O good heavens no. I don’t mean that kind of The One. No calling up brothers and cousins to beg favours.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s been some...relocation, in my recent past. New Zealand. Australia. Saskatoon. I have learnt a lot, taught a little, and experienced and enjoyed many things I would not have done, had I stayed in one place.

But I am ready, now, to find my Place, and make it The One. I am ready to take all the things I have experienced and enjoyed and learnt, and put ‘em all together somewhere that I want to be long enough to make it worth buying Tupperware. Painting a wall. Making a home.

So this midwinter Canada Day, when I have officially less time left here in Australia than I have until I go home to Canada, I pass it over to you.

Where shall I go?

Within certain boundaries mostly dictated by my own caprice, I’m willing to give most places a shot.

I’d give you my list of capricious needs, but I’m at the romance stage at the moment. I just want to hear things about places and imagine finding my Place there. So long as there’s some music (yes, MY kind of music. You know) and some books, the remaining needs can wait until the plans get more concrete. When I pack my bags for home, where should home be (and why)?

Find me The One. I trust you. I know you can do it.

(p.s. 1. It doesn’t have to be where YOU live, though it can be. 2. You don’t have to be Canadian to suggest. Pick a place and send me there. 3. Look! Cake!!)

social song

2010-06-23T06:53:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow, this starts:

A Folk Song A Day

In summary: English folky John Boden does his bit for ‘social singing’ by recording and sharing an unaccompanied song each day for a year. He starts on Midsummer Day (because that’s the sort of thing that is relevant to Our Kind).

Well, the two of you who are still reading, this is undoubtedly A Good Thing, yes?

It is a particularly trad music thing, the preoccupation with ‘social song’. The reason response songs are so bloody long is because it gives everyone a chance; even what my primary school teachers would have called the Slow Learners’ Group can pick up the line after hearing it that many times. If there’s one thing trad music gigs everywhere have in common – England, Canada, Australia, wherever – it’s that consistent effort to make it seem social, as if, ‘well, sure, some of us are up on a stage amid a bunch of heavy-duty sound equipment, having spent thousands of hours honing this talent, these skills, to bring you these sounds, but really we’re all just hanging out together sharing our songs, right?’

Because that’s where it came from, all this, in the beginning.

Coope, Boyes and Simpson have always done unaccompanied singing. Oddly/ excitingly (yes, to me), one song on their new CD As If employs a Québécois style of foot-tapping in a way that pulls the swing of that sound into a really straight, almost Methodist, pure trad English style. It profoundly anglicises it, tames it, makes it something entirely different.

Five very fine Charbonniers do untamed-and-unaccompanied here:

(this is not a recent recording. Aside from anything, they have all apparently discovered scissors and/or barbers these days, which...well, you know how a fairy dies every time we say we don’t believe in fairies? A little bit of my soul dies every time a Québécois musician cuts his hair. Call me Tinkerbell. Anyway, these boys are still purveying The Beautiful like this; hear them more recently (though not unaccompanied) here).

As all of us who have had the misfortune to have ever been trapped around the bad kind will know, the tedium and whininess of unaccompanied English folk singing at its worst can lead you to want nothing so much as to hack your own ears off with rusty shears and feed them to zombie wolves. And never mind ‘social singing’; as far as ‘social skills’ are concerned in that extraordinary brand of fellow whose speciality is the rape-and-pillage ballad, he’s actually the last person on earth with whom you’d want to social-ise.

But at its best?

On my UK touchdown in December, I went to hear the BBC Young Folk Awards, and James Findlay, the kid who won, Had It; the whole thing that ‘It’ is about. He sang and played fiddle, and for the last couple of verses, dropped out the fiddle. In the whole audience, not a timber was left unshivered. He sang again after he’d won the award, and got everyone to join in – in a radio theatre – in the way trad singers all do, to make us feel we’re sharing it, not just being presented with it.

One reason this stuff is important, to me, is that for those of us who live in secular world, we don’t have a good excuse for sharing song. Go to church every Sunday, there’s a reason to lift your voice in the company of other people. In secular world, this is our really good alternative, I reckon, going back to the roots of it like this. One song at a time.

Next week: cake, and the Very Important Question.

ring out those bells (again)

2010-06-20T00:22:00.002-04:00

Ah! Hello, winter solstice, longest darkest night of the year! We meet again. Why, it seems as if just six months ago you and I were rubbing shoulders back in the northern hemisphere. Good times!

The local government of Perth has had this whole bell-tower built – not especially for solstice bells, to be sure, but...they could be for that.

And I am here to tell you, I have not run into a single West Australian with one good word to say about the bell tower. It is in fact the very genesis of the question that marks you out as One Of Us or One Of Them: “What do you think of the bell tower, then?”

If you are One Of Us, there is but one answer to this question, and it is the same answer you would give were you asked “What do you think of someone who skins live kittens and eats them raw, then?”

Whisper it softly, but I am not One Of Us.

signs

2010-06-09T07:51:00.001-04:00

I went to a place recently that had a contraption on the wall that floofed out soapy foam for cleaning your hands with. It had a sign above it: 'Waterless Hand Washing Facility'. Someone had taken a biro and crossed out the word ‘Water’ and written ‘Use’, so it read “Useless Hand Washing Facility”.

Then on the bus home this evening, I saw a sticker in the back window of a car, that read: BREAD + DUCKS = DEATH. And I briefly fancied that same person might come by in the night, and replace 'DEATH' with 'SANDWICH'.

it's a canadian thing

2010-05-30T09:44:00.003-04:00

Summertime. Canadians, you’re going to The Lake, aren’t you?

I knew it.

This may be the only thing on which I will always, always disagree with Canada. I have never understood your affinity with The Lake. (Everything else, I adopt and embrace in the way that only a foreigner who has humbly chosen and asked to be One Of You can. Oh, except also, not Ashley McIsaac. Two things).

Y’all know how I love a good seaside. Perhaps it’s originating from an island nation that makes the ocean something that locates me; I know where I am, there where the tide is. The ocean’s the absolute Unknown, but sand under soles, you know yourself.

A decent river absolutely turns my crank too. Rivers are purposeful; they GO somewhere. Like oceans, their history is one of taking things places. Rivers are busy and effective and efficient; they get stuff done. Connect things to other things.

The Lake has no such qualities. It’s so stand-offish, The Lake. It’s got no tides (‘think you can influence me, ‘the moon’, if that even is really your name? I shun you.’). There’s no Unknown; I get that the Canadian lakes are jolly big, but...say you set out on The Lake from Toronto, The Unknown is...Rochester. There’s nothing Kon-Tiki about that.

And it doesn’t DO anything. Off goes the St Lawrence, ‘busy busy, can’t stop to chat, putting in the hard yards, keeping the world running, doin’ my job, 365 days a year’, and The Lake’s just like, ‘oh, you know. I sit here. You can walk along my shore if you like. Or you could sit, too, I guess. I don’t really care, one way or the other.’

I like it not.

What’s yours: lake, river, ocean? None of the above?

I have an important question to ask you, in a few weeks. At the moment it’s exam season and I’m up to my eyes in marking and cannot quite put my mind to important questions (nor, in the interest of honesty, to combing my hair before leaving the house, which, in the interest of further honesty, does not make a great deal of difference to my appearance). But soon.

return of the socks, and how

2010-05-14T05:05:00.006-04:00

Until I find that bûcheron who’ll come home from a hard winter at the chantier (circa 1840) and lift me up in one hand while making me tea with the other, well, I’ll just be content to knit myself the girls’ version of the socks he’ll be wearing when he does.

I have the crazy sock gleam in my eye for these, the one that leads me to write sentences longer than a whole paragraph should be. I cannot begin to describe how beautiful and miraculous this yarn is. It is from Bilby Yarns, a local producer.

This is the quintessential voyageur yarn. It’s rough (in the best way) and honest; springy and even and clean; it feels good in your hands and smells good, and it makes the warmest socks I have ever produced. These are socks that could only be worn out by a thousand days on the hardworking feet of someone with a sincere and loving heart. I know for certain that socks made with Bilby Yarn are worn by every wholesome woodcutter, every good farmer, every truthful man in every folk tale or fairy tale ever written or sung, in any country, in any language, ever, primarily in northern hemisphere ones where there is real winter. (I don’t know how they got it from here to all those places back then, but dudes, it is le fact).

Photos never do colour justice, and I can only imagine the dyes used on these yarns are distilled from nothing less than the quiet and happy souls of those who did small kindnesses, who built bridges, who did not hurt, who laughed long, who sang loudly, who loved deeply. They are beautiful.

The pattern is from a hardcover book (deetz below) that I could not bring all the way to Australia with me. I did photocopy this one pattern, though, because I already had a skein of Bilby Yarn and knew this was the pattern it had been yearning for all its life.

As we all know, it’s better to be happy than to be right, but being right is cool too, especially when it coincides with also being happy. And I was so right. They were made for each other.

I have two more skeins of this yarn already. I am so not done. I may never knit anything except these socks with this yarn for the rest of my life.

(For the knit-interested who need to know, the facts: the book is Handknit Holidays by Melanie Falick; it recommends knitting these on four needles but I usually use three until I get to the foot, when it gets bulky on three; these are made with a double-strand of Bilby 4-ply on 4mm needles.)

in the soup

2010-05-07T21:01:00.003-04:00

Because if I didn’t mess everything up much of the time, there’d be nothing to write about, right?

Yesterday I bought a big ole handful of fresh prawns, and thought, I’ll do this properly, and use the shells and legs and brains and stuff to make stock for soup.

Quite why I decided to undertake this shortly before I was to leave to get the bus to get the train into the city for a friend’s Very Massively Important exhibition opening, I do not know. Anyway, I threw the shells and legs and brains into a pan and started boiling away.

After a while, I removed the shells and legs and brains, and put potatoes into the stock to boil. Then I took the shells and legs and brains outside to the bin.

It was when I came back inside that I realised the whole house boomed with the smell of prawn shells and legs and brains.

Didn’t think this through.

I had that moment of...can I get away with it? Because what with the fourth-quarter decision to start the prawn peeling and stock making, I was already in a might-need-to-put-your-foot-down-a-bit place vis à vis getting myself out of the house in time to make the bus.

Good sense, in the form of realising I’d be the person on the bus and the train and in the gallery about whom people whispered, ‘Crikey, that woman reeks of fish’, prevailed. I poured the stock and potatoes into the blender to soup them up, and hopped in the shower.

Tick tock, tick tock. Out of the shower, poured the soup out, filled the blender jug with dishwater to soak. Sat the blender jug on the counter.

Aha! I see you got there before me! If only you’d been here at that moment, instead of now, to remind me blender jugs don’t have a bottom. The blender blade bit just sits underneath with a seal. Setting the thing down on the blade bit makes it pop up inside the jug. A tidal wave of fishy water slapped into my front in the manner of a perfectly executed Soak the Bloke booth at the village fete.

Tick tick tick tick tick.

I wiped down, dressed up, threw towels over the fish-flooded floor, and got the heck out.

I’d checked my route on the public transport website. I’d typed in the street the gallery was on, and it told me which train station was closest. At no point in the process did it occur to me to think, “Gee, I wonder if Aberdeen Street is by any chance the longest street in the city, encompassing two different train stations?”

It took me ten minutes (with two false starts; I have no inner compass) to walk to Aberdeen Street from the station. I reached it at number 189. The gallery was at number 12.

TICK TOCK.

I missed the speeches, but on the plus side, nobody was heard to remark that there was a strong smell of prawn shells and legs and brains in the vicinity. And today, I’m having soup.

And washing the towels.

what lemonade is for

2010-05-06T20:56:00.001-04:00

I bought a cup of lemonade and a bag of popcorn for forty cents from a little girl and her mum who had a stall in their driveway.

They had gone to a LOT of trouble for the forty-cent lemonade and popcorn combination deal. They had a proper little stall, and had even cut fabric up into flags to make bunting.

I made my purchase and stood passing the time, drinking my lemonade and waiting for my change (what do you think is the etiquette on this? I had a buck, and dithered between just-give-her-a-buck-because-she’s-making-some-pocket-money-and-it’s-only-a-buck, and mum-is-trying-to-teach-her-maths-so-you-should-let-her-figure-out-change). Anyway, at this point their second customer of the day approached, and you can believe me that this dude wasn’t necessarily in absolute command of all his faculties. He had either been very drunk last night, or was drunk right now. Or both.

And mum, without missing a beat, said ‘Now. This lady needs her change, because she gave us a dollar, and this gentleman needs a cup of lemonade. Because he has a hangover.’

En roulant la navette, le beau temps viendra

2010-04-25T07:38:00.004-04:00

I’m losing my French.

Careless, careless, careless. But it’s definitely slipped down the back of the radiator in the last few years, and I haven’t put my hand down there, because it is a haven for dust bunnies and stale biscuit crumbs and fear.

I can still read French pretty well. And in my head, practised and re-practised, I can have a decent conversation (because I know exactly what the other person is going to say). But out in the world? My French is too fragile to survive.

Example: I spoke French to someone the other day, because he was struggling to find one or two of the English words to formulate the question he was asking me. When he’d heard me answer, he responded. And I panicked, because he wasn’t in my head, so I hadn’t made up what he was going to say.

All it was, was ‘Ah, whereabouts in Canada are you from?’ and I didn’t get it.

This proves two things: one, having once been fluent, I would barely pass my Basic Listening French GCSE these days; and two, I obviously still quack like une vraie Québécoise.

I just recently went to Fairbridge Festival, and I was half-inclined to avoid the Canadians (Genticorum, James Keelaghan, Hugh McMillan) because I figured hearing them would make me homesick and sad to be here, and I am not at all sad to be here, but music can be sneaky that way. In the end, I didn’t avoid them, and they did make me cry like a baby, but in a good way, and anyway some Yahoos, and others, reminded me of what I would miss were I back in Canada, so it was okay.

Pascal Gemme of Genticorum is, weirdly, a dead ringer for Michel Bordeleau circa 2001, whose leaving of La Bottine Souriante I never quite got over, and thus got a bit out of the habit of listening to them. But my festival experience (complete with camping in this jolly SWAG, natch):

made me wheel out some French-Canuck tunes when I got home. I had to write a bunch of articles right off the bat when I came back, and my brain was right in that place, concentrating really hard on fact-checking how many flights were cancelled in Europe and on whether a quoll is a marsupial, when I suddenly realised my lips were shaping themselves unhesitatingly around the words of every single song that came out of the speakers. Jeunes filles mariées aux (dreary) avocats; jeunes hommes qui sont des premiers marins; even one with a pun, where the joke is that ‘trop petit’ (too small) sounds like ‘rôti’ (roasted) - a joke that’s possibly a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiit too laboured to bother explaining here. It was as if the French was the motor part of what I was doing, while my brain was otherwise (dis)engaged.

Frankly, no, being fluent in 19^th century chansons à repondre is not spectacularly helpful to my communication skills. But it is a bit comforting to know it’s still in there, someplace.

C’était une fille en Australie

Qui a fait du camping dans un swag

(Répétez: C’était une jeune fille en Australie

Qui a fait du camping dans un swag)

Et elle l’a trouvé bien jolly

Même qu’elle n’a eu ni un jumbuck ni un tucker bag.

Whaddya reckon?

new clothes?

2010-03-13T02:03:00.004-05:00

You know how sometimes, your neck and shoulders really ache? Or just one shoulder. You did something, or twisted it, or slept funny, or they just ache. That muscle that goes up from your shoulder to your neck.

And you sort of vaguely go, 'oooh, my neck aches,' and you give your shoulders a little shake.

And someone invariably says 'Ah, yes, look at that, you can just see that right there, in your shoulders. Oh my goodness. What a huge knot/ bundle/ abnormal musculature. Wow, that's really tight. What have you been doing?'

I have never been able to see that. I can't see the difference between a hurty,second-rate shoulder, and the shoulder of a super-balanced yoga pretzel person.

Can you? I am interested to know if this is a gigantic failing on my part, or some measure of fibbery on the part of those who claim to 'see it'. Or, to put it in another sense: here before you, is a royal entity, such as a king, rajah, or even, if you will, an emperor. And I am asking you, what, if anything, is he wearing?

yesterday

2010-03-08T08:22:00.002-05:00

Coming up from the beach in the morning. I crossed paths with a couple going down to the sea. He said, Don’t you know how the world started?

She made a noncommittal noise that suggested I know in the sense I could explain it to myself, but not so I could explain it in the way you would challenge me to, if I were to say, Yes.

He said, There was a Big Bang and then there were all these atoms. And the atoms became stars.

I thought, that’s not really explaining it. There was, and there were. That’s not really knowing how the world started, at all.

Later, on the bus. A boy behind me said to his friend, I always wash ‘em, but I don’t always put ‘em away. And they got off the bus.

I dreamt of a man who came to visit me in the night and we ate chips together in the dark. When I woke up, I knew for a full minute that it had really happened.

gluten-free: a love (hate) love story

2010-03-03T07:57:00.008-05:00

United Nations statistics show that Fremantle has the world’s highest population concentration of Ageing Hippies. To a man they are quite the loveliest people you are likely to meet, but the dietary requirements of the Ageing Hippie have necessitated my altering my baking habits fairly radically. Because United Nations statistics also show that the least-favourite word of the Ageing Hippie – one that many won’t even allow in their vocabulary – is ‘wheat’.

And naturally, unless whatever you bake is organic, they won’t touch it.

Some even go as far as dairy-free too, but that is the point at which my fingers firmly go into my ears and I start singing The Real Thing real loud to distract them into reminiscing about their misspent youth.

My one previous gluten-free baking effort years ago resulted in a cake that was effectively a large ship’s biscuit that would have made a sound and stable bookshelf or coffee table. Unwilling to waste perfectly horrible food, I tried to salvage it by making it into a trifle, assuming the fruit juice would soak into the hard cake and make it delicious. Not so. The trifle ingredients simply sat aboard the dismal mahogany-solid slab it undeniably was.

Now, I have no choice but to sally forth and give it another whirl.

Effort 1: Coconut and lime cupcakes

I quickly decided anything large-cake-adjacent was not the way to go, due to the lack of rising that goes with anything missing the crucial ingredient that makes it rise. This recipe was one that used whipped egg whites to make the cakes light and fluffy – which is exactly what resulted in the ship’s biscuit effect last time, so I didn’t hold out much hope. To counter an almost-certain failure, on the same day I also opted for

Effort 2: Banana choc-chip cookies

...because cookies don’t really need to rise to be any good. The batter for the cookies, frankly, tasted as if the Delicious Batter Fairies had dropped by and waved their wands, and I ate at least a third of it before it reached the baking sheet. Thereafter, though, disappointment lay ahead:

because the other thing gluten does besides make things rise, is make them stick together. The cookies ended up as a pile of (still tasty) soft cookie crumbs, which were nice spooned up, or strewn carelessly over your breakfast cereal, but did not in any sense resemble cookies.

Astonishingly, the coconut-lime cakelets were TOP NOTCH. They were springy and squishy and moist in exactly the right measure, and I could not have been more charmed:

One win, one fail, for gluten-free.

Effort 3: Lemon meringue pie

There was only one thing to be done with that massive windfall of lemons, and that was to crank out a batch of lemon pies. The lemon custard filling was smashing. The pastry, this time, called for maize flour. And I am here to tell you: maize flour pastry is what they serve in the canteen in the sixth circle of Hell. It tastes of nothing so much as licking the yard of a busy riding school just after the mucking out but before the sweeping up. It was that bad. And, for the record, pastry is supposed to melt in your mouth, not fall apart when you so much as look at it sideways. I couldn’t say it completely ruined the lemon pie, but it sure didn’t do it any favours. And pastry that you simply want to spoon the filling out of is not, in my book, pastry you ever want to make again.

Fail, fail, FAIL.

Effort 4: Chocolate brownies

The batter was promising; it looked like brownie batter made using real flour. This one was supposed to have rice flour, but I ran out, so barley stood in. I went with cupcakes again instead of one big slab. This recipe resulted in a curious two-tier cake effect: the tops of the cakes were perfect brownies, both cakey and chewy, while the bottom halves simply followed their wayward banana choc chip cookie cousins in utterly falling to bits. Again: gluten makes things stick together. Tasted delicious though. These recipes all come from the same book, and – except for the maize pastry horror – I cannot fault it on taste.

I give this a fifty-fifty on success.

Effort 5: sweet potato scones

I make these all the time, so it was just a case of subbing rice flour for real flour. They look like real sweet potato scones, and although the texture is a bit grainy, really, they’re...not bad. Straight from the oven smothered in butter, they’re awesome, but that’s something that can be said of so many things, so isn’t really a reliable gauge.

More of a win than a fail.

GF cooking is playing with me. It gives me just enough to get my hopes up, and then it whaps out something like the maize pastry to put me back in my place. Which is why, for Valentine’s day, I eschewed GF with a firm hand and made these:

Real flour, cocoa, pure buttercream icing, refined white sugar, and pink hearts no doubt made of something synthetic and dyed with E numbers. And you know what?

Not a single hippie complained. And every cake was eaten. (one person was seen to quietly set aside the Pink Heart That Harbours Chemical Evil – and then write a folk song about it – but the others knocked those suckers back).

No doubt the following week was plagued with Wheat Headaches, but that is assuredly nothing a lentil-and-barley poultice can’t handle.

windfall

2010-02-16T06:55:00.002-05:00

What a lucky thing it is pancake day, for I needed something to put underneath the juice from these lemons that were blown down from the tree.

doing the Fireworks Event

2010-01-27T09:13:00.003-05:00

Australia Day sort of happened to me a bit too quickly. I haven’t been here very long. It was a bit sudden.

I have never much gone for doing the Fireworks Event on these sorts of occasions. I find them a bit Big and a bit Much. There is always a Fireworks Event. On Canada Day, I have done large-scale community pancake breakfasts, and I like them. To me they always have the feel of a giant campsite crossed with a country fair, as if we have all emerged from our tents and caravans after one of those chilly-yet-magical nights of sleep you only get from camping, to a beautiful broad July morning that is suddenly and arrestingly in a showground, where there is a tannoy broadcasting the national anthem, some vintage cars, and a beautiful dreadlocked girl in a sarong doing henna tattoos. But I’ve never done the Fireworks Event.

Well, in Australia, naturally there is no community Canadian pancake breakfast. (In fact, every Australian person so far to whom I have explained a Canadian breakfast has gone ‘yuck’ and made me feel bad about one of the very few meals I could offer to cook really well for them. Just by the by.)

So really, the only way for me to see What Australians Do On Australia Day was to go to the Fireworks Event.

I actually set off for the F.E with a flea in my ear, put there by a charming and friendly neighbour whom I had mistakenly asked along. I was treated to a spectacular rant about how sitting watching fireworks – an entirely non-participatory activity – is typical of this country, and how if people wanted to make something of Australia Day they should jolly well do something active, instead of sit on the beach drinking beer pretending that sitting watching thousands of dollars go up in smoke has any sort of national significance or resonance whatsoever.

So that was a cheering start.

After backing carefully down the driveway making calming noises, I went to the local museum. There was an exhibition about swimsuits! This is very Australian, I thought, ie beaches and competitive swimming and that sort of thing.

Next, I went to watch the citizenship ceremony. Something about when people choose to be a citizen of a place. It’s not yours just because. It’s yours because you really wanted it to be. It was a good atmosphere. Participatory, you might say. All of the new citizens were given a tiny Golden Wattle plant. When each person was called up to receive his or her certificate, then he or she read out the next person’s name. So your first duty as a new citizen was to welcome the next new citizen.

Then, sausages. From a barbecue. That is ten points right there in the Big Book of Australiana (listed, incidentally, just before stings, jellyfish, which is twenty).

And later, gathering on the beach ready for the fireworks. There were many picnics and tiny barbecues with more sausages, and a very large and convivial group of elegant old people, and many families, and people swimming, and even a guy with a big blue plastic canoe thing, and several games of cricket. There were a lot of people on mobile phones telling other people on which bit of the beach they could be found, and then there were people carrying food and towels and blankets exchanging warm greetings with the mobile phone people, having successfully found them.

It was windy. I got sand in my tea. People around me talked about all the other years they’ve been down to watch the fireworks from the beach like this. There was the year Reuben got lost. That first year with the babies. The big to-do with Aunty Peggy that time, which year was that? The time we sat and watched the fireworks from the water because it was just too hot to come out. And the year all those boys did that thing with the...remember?

And we all sat together and watched thousands of dollars go up in smoke.

Participating.

momentous event

2010-01-17T06:59:00.002-05:00

Today, I got stung.

By A JELLYFISH!!!

Being stung by a jellyfish was quite interesting.

Having survived a jellyfish sting is ever so very exciting indeed.

Well, I mean, they are really only tiny, not very harmful at all jellyfish here. I did not even see the jellyfish at all. I felt a shivery quiver across the top of my foot while I was swimming. Heavens, I thought. I wonder if that could have been a...

I was right on my way out of the water at the time in any case. By the time I had walked up the beach, there was a big red jellyfish sting on my foot!

When I went to get on my bike to go home, a lady who was getting her bike at the same time said, oh, I like those shoes (they were Birkenstocks). I wish I had worn mine that are the same as those. Instead, I wore these rubber ones.

I wanted to say, but look at my foot. You can see it, in these shoes. There is a big red jellyfish sting right there on my foot!

I said, oh, but those are very practical.

She said, I walked through a flood in them, in Bali. (It might not have been Bali, but I forgot where it was she said. And a lot of people who live here go to Bali on holidays, and there are probably floods there sometimes, so she might have said there).

There, I said. You couldn't do that in these. They would be ruined!

That's true, she said.

I cycled off, in my Birkenstocks, with my jellyfish sting.

So that is what it is like to have been stung by a tiny, not very harmful at all jellyfish. It felt quite like a big bee sting. Later, it felt a bit as if someone had stomped very hard on my foot. Later still, it feels like a very bad sunburn, and still quite like a big bee sting.

These are exciting times. Whatever will I get up to next?

2010-01-10T19:35:00.002-05:00

It’s a quiet fear, and some are better at not having it than others.

Here’s the thing. I reckon just about everyone can fall in love. And just about anyone can be in love. And many of us – most of us – to some degree, can love.

But there’s always that worry that leads us to fear – do we, can we, love enough?

That is, can we have, find, make, the kind of love that has you giving to another entity without thought of the consequence – because you know the consequence will be that you are made better – not just twice the person you are, but infinitely. Not the kind of love you have to keep feeding and find it draining you. The kind you keep feeding and only find it means you have more to feed and more to give; infinite, infinite.

Kids, I have found it:
O Fremantle of my heart. Never change.

extreme weather mayhem

2009-12-22T14:54:00.002-05:00

We are currently playing an exciting game of Weather Cliché Bingo in the UK, due to the Extreme! Weather! Conditions! of literally millimetres of snow and hovering-around-zero temperatures. The Eurostar has just limped its first train through in four days, Heathrow and Luton airports seem to be closed indefinitely (if you want to fly anywhere for Christmas, you may do so next March), and roads are closed everywhere. Cue the clichés.

My bingo card is getting full, as it has both ‘chaos’ and ‘mayhem’ on it (though also ‘bedlam’, which I haven’t heard yet). Other family members have crossed off ‘ongoing delays’, ‘heartache’ and ‘families running out of time’ just from one airport alone. Surprisingly, ‘the biggest/worst snowfall in x years’ has yet to make an appearance. But bonus points were scored from a canny spotting of an entreaty to ‘find the Dunkirk spirit’.

There is even an Added Irony round. This covers motorway signs warning about weather problems that are themselves compromised by the weather problems (witness: the ‘Sa preading’ rather than ‘salt spreading’ sign). It also includes a rather brilliant comment heard on tv just this evening that ‘around Christmas is the worst possible time for weather like this to happen’ – mid-July presumably being more convenient.

It seems likely that ‘absolute shambles’ won’t be wheeled out until the aftermath, which could be weeks away at this rate. A twist in the tale tonight might furnish other valuable opportunities, though, as theories begin to be floated on councils being forced to import grit from offshore. (Jury is out on whether importation of pluck and mettle will also be required. Snork).

Please feel free to offer your own suggestions that should be included on the bingo card. Even if you are in Canada, where you will have to stop laughing at the UK’s incompetence for long enough, or the southern hemisphere, where you will have to stop laughing and also come home from the beach.

after three o'clock

2009-12-16T09:16:00.002-05:00

The scene: The Seafront Restaurant*, The British Seaside, about 3.10 pm.

ME: (planning to run some errands and then come back later) Hello. What time are you open until?
RESTAURANT LADY: About quarter to five. But you can’t have food.
ME: No, that’s all right.
RESTAURANT LADY: You can have tea, after three o’clock, but no food.
ME: Great! Thank you!

There may be restaurants where the tone of this exchange is begrudging or abrupt, but in this instance (and in most instances of this very same conversation), both participants maintained a jaunty, friendly and pleasant manner.

It is The Way We Do It here.

I would not at all have expected to be served food after three pm in a seafront restaurant at The British Seaside, even though it has the word 'restaurant' in its name, which implies there is food to be had. There is a narrow possibility that at the height of summer and tourist season, allowances would be made for people to eat food in a seafront restaurant after that time, but not always. Thus I was not in any sense disappointed that this was the case.

To Canadians, Americans, and, let’s face it, most people in the world, this is absolutely unfathomable.

But it is one of the many things that makes this The British Seaside. I love it. I don’t love it ironically, or nostalgically, or in a way that implies I think it is quaint or old-fashioned or comical with a side of embarrassing. I just love it, without qualification.

I went back at 4.10 p.m. and had tea, and a scone with jam and cream, and looked out at a wild and wintry sea. And felt very pleased indeed with the whole affair.

*Not its real name. I’ve called it this because I can guarantee you this scene has played out in every single seafront restaurant in the whole of the UK, several hundred thousand times.

moods

2009-12-02T05:47:00.006-05:00

Friends, the time has come to speak seriously about something very important.

Macramé.

This excellent publication came from the library book sale at a cost of one of your finest earth dollars, and I can feel your envy all the way from here.

There is one among you who once told me tales of an office in which, on quiet Friday afternoons once the bosses had departed for their afternoon of golf and alcohol, the secretaries all indulged in a heady afternoon’s macramé-ing. (There are others of you for whom the afternoons of the mid seventies emphatically did not involve such pursuits, and who frankly may be in slightly better shape now if they had).

The observant will have noticed there is something amok with this publication. Because this is not your traditional 1970s government-office secretary macramé. This is cutting edge, the-80s-will-be-here-in-three-years macramé, and that means macramé with the most modern of materials.

As the book notes, polypropylene is ‘washable, colourfast, mildew proof, durable and practical for interior and exterior macramé.’ But perhaps most importantly, ‘the ends of polypropylene cord can be fused together over a candle flame for easy splicing’. It is not, then, a staggeringly massive surprise to find elsewhere on the same page a notice that ‘disclaims any liability for untoward results and/ or for physical injury incurred by using information in this book’. This is not macramé for the faint of heart.

This pillow cover design will ‘liven up an entire room’ – presumably because nobody will actually want to sit down on something as deeply uncomfortable as a pillow made from polypropylene cord. Other project descriptions include the following: “the lines of this elegant design are reminiscent of the slender loftly towers of the Near East, from which holy men cry the summons to prayer”. So you can see, this is some pretty amazing macramé.

The magnificent project on the cover page at the top is called ‘Bell of Yama’. There is no such flowery project explanation for Bell of Yama. Bell of Yama simply is. If you need Bell of Yama described, well, then, maybe you just don’t get Bell of Yama.

Its ingredients include 660 yards of gold polypropylene cord, and a ‘large cowbell’. In fact, the total amount of polypropylene cord needed for this project is SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY. And yes, that would be just shy of HALF A MILE.

Something tells me that Bell of Yama is not a project those office workers would be secreting in their desk drawers.

I, however, am going straight down to the yachting store to tell them I’d be willing to import the cowbells and we can work out some sort of kit cost. They probably don’t even know what a goldmine of creativity they’re sitting on there, with their endless polypropylene yardage. The macramé revival starts here.

the weight of worry

2009-11-23T17:22:00.005-05:00

Flipping out today; thanks for checking.

It’s the weight limits.

I don’t go over luggage weight limits for flights, because I don’t. 20 kg is a lot of stuff. I don’t want to be carrying around 20 kg of anything.

But - especially when it comes to big moves, like, oh, like the one just over yonder the other side of Yuletide - I always flip out about them.

20 kg is the limit. You can, if you wish, pay some cash to go over the limit. It doesn’t appear to be all that much cash. It wouldn’t matter much if I had to pay a bit extra.

And in fact, I know with almost deadly certainly when I show up at the airport, if my bag is over 20kg, it’ll be, like, 22 kg. And that will be fine.

But I am flipping out. Because I flip out about luggage weight limits. Always.

I think it is the uncertainty. If you get to the airport and are over the weight limit, and suddenly they’ve changed the rules and decided nobody is allowed any extra, or it is actually going to be a thousand dollars a kilo, there’d be nothing you could do except throw stuff out. And when you are carrying everything you need for a year, you’ve already made damn sure that all of it is pretty important. Including – perhaps especially – the large numbers of hardback picture books and chocolate for gifts. I do not want to have to choose between having shoes and having candy.

I have to get a handle on the flipping out, pronto, because it makes me do ridiculous things, such as convincing myself that being the bringer of maple syrup is more important than being the owner of any pants.

Wait. Maple syrup IS more important than pants. Right?

the flu post

2009-11-01T10:24:00.002-05:00

Hey, remember that time the NDP and the Liberals and the Bloc put on their big girl boots and went to see the headmistress and told her they didn’t like the class bully any more?

For non-Canadians: this happened around November last year. Prime Minister Stephen Harper had been running things here in such a way that meant every time he wanted to pass legislation, the other parties had to either vote for it, or force an election (this happens when you attach a confidence vote to everything). Naturally, nobody wanted to force more elections – which are costly and get people’s backs up – so a lot of legislation got passed.

This worked for quite a long time. Until it didn’t. Eventually the other three parties went to the Governor-General and said a) they didn’t like being pushed around and b) the government didn’t seem to have much of an economic plan, so c) the PM had lost the confidence of the House. They proposed a coalition. (the coalition would be the Liberals and the NDP – the Bloc wasn’t going to be part of it, but supported it).

It may not appear so from my rather pedestrian summary here, but dudes, it was a massively exciting few days. Leaping from largely symbolic head-of-state to political superhero in a single bound, the Gee Gee had the fate of the country in her hands.

She had the following choices:

1. Dismiss the PM and force an election.
2. Suspend parliament and give the PM time to get his act together.
3. Officially ask the opposition if it was ready and able to form an effective government, and hand it power.

Given the opposition had already been to see the Gee Gee and told her it was ready and able, it actually seemed Option 3 was a probable step.

Option 2 seemed unlikely, because at the time we were all in the clutches of the Global Economic Crisis (ah, remember that?) and not only did the government not have an effective plan in place, but having no parliament sitting at the time would surely just compound the problem. And if she wanted to dismiss the PM, the opposition was already raring to go, rendering the election in Option 1 unnecessary.

In the end, though, she went for Option 2.

But we all learnt a new verb that day: ‘to prorogue’. ‘To suspend,’ in parliamentary-speak: the Gee Gee decided to prorogue parliament. Suddenly we were all using it as if we always had done in regular everyday conversation. “Oh, we were going to paint the house, but we’re proroguing that till spring.” “I might prorogue my cup of tea till after this episode of McLeod’s Daughters has finished.”

And now, here we are a year later, and H1N1 is upon us, and everyone is coming unglued because there aren’t enough vaccinations for everyone right now and people’s access to them has been, as it were, prorogued. Why? Ah, well, you see, they stopped producing the adjuvanted vaccines, because (until last Friday) they thought the non-adjuvanted ones were better for pregnant women, so they stopped the line of adjuvanted ones to produce more of the other kind.

Why yes. Adjuvanted. Wasn’t that always part of our lexicon, just like prorogue was?

It is comforting that at times of political and social crisis, we can all take a moment to expand our vocabularies.

on the road again

2009-10-23T17:36:00.002-04:00

Insistin’ that the world be turnin’ my way, I have quite literally been on the road. Again.

Being On The Road, as Canadians will be aware, involves Eating At Tim Hortons.

The background to this tale is that I do not like sandwiches all that much. I don’t mind sandwiches, but they don’t exactly stop my clock. They are massively handy, though, and since this past two months there has been a lot of On The Road-ing, they have featured quite strongly in my daily menu. It means that by this point in the game, I could probably be quite happy never eating a sandwich again. Especially not one with a slice of (insert name of processed meat) and a slice of (insert name of sliceable hard cheese).

So, it used to be that if you just wanted some salad between two bits of bun at Tim Horton’s (because of the issues vis-a-vis Ham and Swiss) you had to ask for a ‘garden vegetable sandwich”. It also contains cream cheese. I learnt this through practice. I am able at learning by doing.

However in recent visits, asking for a garden vegetable sandwich has met with uncomprehending stares. I have had to describe the way in the old days they used to take that to mean lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes with cream cheese. Between two bits of bun. Once it was described, they caught on very easily, but it was a bizarre turnaround from not being able to use any other phrase than ‘garden vegetable’ to suddenly ONLY being able to use a phrase that WASN’T ‘garden vegetable’. (Either way, the servers look at me as if I have just got off the crazy train carrying a bag of mothballs and wearing half a Tunnock’s tea cake on my head, because NOBODY ever just wants a salad sandwich, but anyway).

So, armed with my description, and On The Road, I hit Tim’s.

ME: Could I have a sandwich with salad and cream cheese in it, please?
TIM:(for it is he): You want a bagel with cream cheese?
ME: No, a sandwich. With the cream cheese and salad.
TIM: An egg salad sandwich?
ME: No. It is the same salad you put in your egg salad sandwiches, the lettuce and cucumbers and tomatoes. But with cream cheese. In the sandwich.
TIM: So, do you want an egg salad sandwich or a chicken salad sandwich?
ME: Well, quite honestly, I don’t even like sandwiches.
TIM:(trying to be helpful) on a bagel?
ME: No. No. It is two bits of bun, and on one of them, you put cream cheese. And on top of that, the salad items heretofore described, and then the other bit of bun.
TIM: Madam, I can only assume what you mean is a GARDEN VEGETABLE SANDWICH.
ME: Oh good heavens. Thank you. Could I also have a receipt?
TIM: Indeed.
(The sandwich comes)
ME: Please could I have my receipt?
TIM: Sorry. I forgot. Now it’s not on the register any more.
ME: Well, but I know this seems a little much, but the thing is, I am On The Road Again, and that means I should really by this point be getting’ the world turnin’ my way like a band of insistent gypsies, and it also means my organisation buys my lunch, which is basically the biggest solid it has ever done me, (the tears begin to well) and if I don’t get a receipt for this sandwich I don’t even want or like, that is literally four dollars and ninety seven cents that I WILL NEVER SEE AGAIN.
TIM: Oh good heavens.

it's what you do with time

2009-10-19T20:15:00.003-04:00

Here is some Time. It's mine.

I am Biding it.

Things are afoot. There is much to do.

Alongside the biding, though, and the things underway (it's under weigh, isn't it, ship people? I know. I do know. But underway is less weird), I hit the big city lights with my book talk, Steampunk is the New Zombies, this week!

It's all on my own, so I don't even have to defend my (measured, literate, solid-as-a-fictional-steam-powered-juggernaut) theories against anyone. If you wish to challenge me, I will fight you with my ninja handouts. They have fonts. Zombie fonts.

And now, back to the Biding.

*bides*

the happy, from the weekend road trip

2009-10-11T21:34:00.005-04:00

1. Baking a Grandma Cake (thatched with chocolate buttons) and taking it to share with the fam in the USA.

2. Merging from Highway 6 onto the 403 at Burlington for the first time. Dudes, the merge is BACKWARDS. You merge into the OUTSIDE LANE. Also, the merge lane is approximately two feet in length. It is massively exhilarating, provided you come out alive.

3. Three words: Dance Dance Revolution. Against my sister. Bring it on.

4. Fall colours in New York state.

5. The Coodabeens singing along to Wired for Sound.

6. Podcasting, enabling my entertainment - on the 403 back through the world's darkest country night, and without even the excitement of the Merge of Flying Death - to be the Coodabeens singing along to Wired for Sound.

7. My heroically super-fuel-efficient little car getting me to a deserted petrol station somewhere near Woodstock on said dark country night to give it a drink. I apparently forgot you cannot drive from southwestern Ontario to upstate New York AND BACK on one tank, and only noticed when the fuel light sputtered on. My car manual reliably informs me I then have 15 ks to save the situation, and we made it to the oasis at 12.4.

cutting-edge political joke

2009-09-23T22:06:00.006-04:00

Okay, are you ready? Because here it comes!

Hey, everyone! Do you think the new Norwegian government is keeping its stick on the ice?

Ha! Oh, ha ha! See what I did there?

You don’t see, do you.

Because, okay, well, the new Norwegian government that just got elected – and that is, in fact, exactly the same as the old Norwegian government except one person no longer has a chair to sit on in the Big Important Room of Shouting At Each Other any more – is the Red Green Coalition.

And the ever-popular Canadian TV show that features duct tape and men doing comical things – on which Steve Smith always says, in his endlessly loveable way, “keep your stick on the ice” as quite literally nothing less than a hockey metaphor for life itself – is the Red Green Show.

My razor-sharp socio-political witticisms are just lost on you people.

some days

2009-09-21T20:10:00.003-04:00

Some days, grey things happen.

But one day months ago I saw a little yellow car peeking round an orange tree.

That, I said, is a picture for a grey things day.

And I was right.

handy

2009-09-12T16:55:00.002-04:00

If you are changing the headlamp bulb on your car, and someone comes to offer to help, what do you do?

Because there’s only one blown-out headlamp bulb, and there’s only one spanner. So the option isn’t really ‘help’, so much as ‘doing it for you’.

It’s nice when people offer help. They’re being nice. It’s what nice people do.

But you don’t need the help. You’ve got a spanner, and a bulb, and the know-how.

My new neighbour came over when he saw me under the bonnet of the car. To help. (I suspect, when he saw the very short-haired girl who looks like a boy, wielding a spanner and capably doing basic mechanical things on a car, he may have Surmised some Things. Surmisingly.) Anyway though, we talked for a bit. He has a daughter in Melbourne, so we talked about Australia. While we talked, I changed the headlamp.

There was a pause. Then he said, “Well, you’re a handy girl.”

I’m not. I’m not a ‘handy girl’.

But I’m someone who can read instructions and learn to do things. And if I can do them, I’m unlikely to hand them over and have you do them, is all.

the last box

2009-08-29T19:28:00.003-04:00

When you are moving, the gods of moving decree that the final box you pack up must contain the following:

electric extension cord
box of tea bags (two thirds empty)
roll of bin bags
bicycle pump
unidentified cable that may be to do with a computer
pair of knickers
hammer
one CD without case
a fork

Here's a picture I took. It's a bird. On a rock. I didn't take the picture recently. Not very recently, anyway. Not this week, or last week, or the one before that.

But really? It's all I've got, today.

Look! Everyone, look! A bird!

the weariness of the long-distance folky

2009-08-13T19:31:00.008-04:00

Y'all know, I am a folky. I love folkiness. I embrace it. I would not mercilessly ridicule it if deep down I did not bear for folkiness a love that knows no bounds.

But oh.

Oh.

After all this time, this is where we're at?

There were morris dancers, at our local folk festival, dancing Bonny Green Garters. This is often quite impressive (in morris dancing terms, which of course is all relative), in particular when a very large number of them dance it all together. Here, though, there were precisely four dancers. They did another one called Step and Fetch'er (o gods, ask me how I KNOW) but inexplicably, to the tune of Waltzing Matilda. Average audience: two people.

In a startling oversight, the festival organisers had not employed anyone to sell didjeridus. Luckily, some harpmakers stepped in to cater for all those with a pressing need to spend huge amounts of money on a large and unwieldy musical instrument they will never be able to play.

We must set aside that these women had clearly become as disoriented as a litter of panicked kittens as they tried to escape the Wacky Children's Entertainer wardrobe, for they were by far the most engaging and musical people there.

Food provision: as ever, a 'home made' lemonade stand. "Lemon tree, very pretty/ and the lemon flower is sweet/ but the fruit of the lemon/ is impossible to eat," says Judith Durham, so it must be true. But apparently if you sock it in a polystyrene cup with half a kilo of sugar and charge nine dollars for it, well. Suddenly possible.

Folk Miscellany Bingo; check 'em off: extraordinarily large dog gently terrorising smaller dog; socks and sandals; purposeful bearded man carrying deckchairs, camera bag and thermos; stall selling fairy costumes and staffed by women wearing fairy wings; tie-dyed t-shirt; person juggling craply and dropping beanbags into other people's picnics.

Suspicious absence of anyone playing Michael Row the Boat Ashore on an ocarina, though. Weird. I bet there was one there somewhere.

I just...people, the folk revival was fifty years ago now, and I used to find it reassuring that these things have been the same the world over since god was a boy, but this time? It made me so weary. We gotta do something.

where I am not

2009-08-03T15:48:00.005-04:00

Cuileann over at Eating A Tangerine put up some of her beautiful beachy photos, and they made me all sunny and happy. Usually I would try to find something relevant to say that linked to a picture I put up on here, but this time, I just saw her beachy photos, and remembered my beachy photos, and mine aren't as good as hers but here are two anyway, because this is where my heart is:

debut book covers

2009-08-01T18:20:00.007-04:00

Because I have plenty of time right now for things that are not work-related, I allowed myself to get completely distracted by this buzzy thing going around - building your own YA book cover.

The Alien Onions pointed at 100 Scope Notes, which has come up with a winning process, involving fake-name generating (to get your author name), random-word generating (to get your title), random-picture-related-to-random-word generating (to get your cover pic), and finally mucking about with the result to patch it all together and see if you can make it look like something you might see on the shelves.

(The process, if you wish to do it yourself - which you DO - is explained at both links above, where they have links to all the randomness sites and also to the rawther brilliant picture-mucking-about-with site, Picnik, where I whiled away ~~several hundred hours~~ a few minutes mucking about with pictures.)

And here are my two efforts:
I had to think hard with 'Air' because I had expected to get some sort of ethereal cloud-type picture, and instead I got a bizarre Miami golf course thing. And thank goodness for picture-weirding effects, because really the image of a cute baby stick insect on someone's fingertip that came up for the word 'afraid' wasn't absolutely the scariest thing I could've imagined.

This was fun. Go do it.

Dear Author

2009-07-23T13:24:00.004-04:00

Welcome to our Society! We are thrilled to have you as a member.

The Society for People Who Write Books About Things They Did For a Year is a thriving organisation. Since its inception in 1991, when our esteemed chairman, Peter Mayle, took off to Provence, we have been growing and growing!

You may wish to look through our catalogue. It includes titles such as Eat, Pray, Love (spiritual journey); Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (cookery; and now a major movie!); The Year of Living Biblically (following the Bible’s tenets to the letter), and Just Do It (an inclusion that divided the admissions committee, as the author had sex every day for only 100 days rather than the traditional 365). We will shortly be admitting the previously-rejected Sean Aiken, as his One-Week Job Project (doing 52 different jobs for one week each) is finally due to be transferred from an organic endeavour of youthful idealism into the proper print format recognized by the Society. We also have high hopes for the Around Oz On A Battered Fish bloggers, who drove around the coastline of Australia in an environmentally-friendly car powered by waste vegetable oil (except when they had to use diesel!).

Our selection process is a rigorous one, and we are proud to have rejected My Year Of Just Doing My Job, Raising The Kids, Getting Groceries, And Looking After My Mum Etc.

Forthcoming titles include Underequipped and Ridiculed: A Year Painting Rowboats In A Landlocked Finnish Village; Living Canadian: 365 Days, Eh?; and Twelve Months of Relentlessly Quoting the Goons.

You will be pleased to hear that both of your proposals have been accepted by the Committee! Your initial idea to take a year off to write a book, and then write a book about the year in which you wrote a book, is inspired. And your second, to spend a year reading 365 books people have written about things they did for a year, and then write a book about it, shows admirable commitment to the Society’s cause, alongside a healthy grasp of a very comical metatextual conceit! Dear Author, we are impressed. A position on the Society’s Steering Committee for the Promotion of Doing Things For A Year seems likely to be in your future.

Membership expires on an annual basis.

Sincerely,

The Society for People Who Write Books About Things They Did For A Year

meanwhile back in the AFL...

2009-07-11T16:06:00.008-04:00

I am sorry to report that the Adelaide Crows have 'devoured' my new bezzies, the 'undermanned' Fremantle Dockers.

I KNOW. Try to contain your sorrow.

The only real way I have to keep up with all this pain and heartache is through WA Today's online reporting. It seems pretty comprehensive. It uses the words 'obliterate' and 'humiliated', which can't be good. I suspect Shoutah, having run through his entire extensive vocabulary of insults for his beloved team, is at the very least going to be unable to go in to work this week, and at worst has lost his everloving mind, lifting a ceremonial two-by-four of shame and murmuring a soft, sad, '...like a pack of galaaaahhhhs...' before beating himself square about the chin with it.

But look at this:

"Fremantle's final score was the lowest in their (sic) history, comfortably less than the 3.7 (25) compiled against Geelong in round 20 of 2004, and the 117-point deficit equalled a round six drubbing by West Coast as their worst loss.

Their halftime return of 0.1 (1) was the most meagre in a league fixture since Fitzroy went scoreless against Essendon in round one 1995."

I could not love these sentences more, nor be more curious. What in the name of all that is good can it all mean? What other team sport has scoring represented by dual numbers employing both decimal points and brackets? What mystical equation brings us from the one number to its enbracketed relative? It's like a freaking MENSA question: "If 3.7 is to 25 as 0.1 is to 1, then 4.5 is to ... as 2.2 is to ...?"

Just about the only word I understand in the whole of the above is "Essendon", which is only because an acquaintance's dad played for the team in the forties.

I remain undaunted. Through WA Today's report, I've picked up a few more bits of correct terminology - it seems each quarter is actually called a 'term' - and I can begin to fill in position names, replacing the English rugby/ Canadian football tangle of wingers and quarterbacks in my head with correct AFL nomenclature:

"Fremantle entered the game minus a host of big names, none more significant than that of their gargantuan ruckman Aaron Sandilands."

Aha! I shall diligently scribble 'gargantuan ruckman' in my notebook. Right alongside 'youthful hobbledehoy' (to be found in the forward line) and 'inscrutable filibuster' (on the flank).

The Dockers website is also a mine of useful information, quoting the coach:

"...an inability to move the ball forward efficiently and combat Adelaide's structures were the most frustrating aspects."

Really? Not 'moving the ball forward efficiently' was frustrating? Well, I imagine it would be, since that is more or less the entire point of the game.

I LOVE this sport.

it's time to play the music

2009-07-04T13:25:00.003-04:00

Sometimes, there is quite simply nothing in the entire world that is better than the Muppets.

but how much is that in weight?

2009-06-26T19:04:00.004-04:00

I can't put my finger on which bothers me more; is it:

a) that the best quality of this is how much it weighs?

or

b) that the best description they can come up with is "food"? ("So, what's in it?" "Oh, y'know. Food.")

The P'zone. Presumably by introducing an apostrophe, they saved money on letters, and passed on the savings to us, the valued customer, to give us A POUND OF FOOD for ten bucks. And you can't say fairer than that.

Over to you. Fire at will in the comments; which is worse?

A POUND

or

Of FOOD?

too much to ask?

2009-06-21T18:31:00.012-04:00

Yesterday, this happened. All in one go. It was so quick and fun and easy. Start to finish, straight through.

(I can't foot model, because it's sized for an eight-year-old. Although it looks a bit bootie-ish, when it's on a foot, the foldover top does that very shallow ankle sock thing that is very cool. Also, I was accused of buying horrid plasticky yarn because of the candy colour. I am here to tell you not only is this lovely lovely wool, but it has aloe vera magically infused into it by the aloe vera pixies, so it is a Good Thing and Nice Yarn and you can throw it in the washing machine to boot).

So today I started the second sock.

Now some people, when they use these self-striping yarns, don't see a need to match stripes; stripes fall where they may. I am not one of these people. Socks gotta match. They're socks. Matching is what they do. They're called a pair of socks. And the truth is, a self-striping pattern on yarn repeats itself, so all you have to do is take the trouble to find where the repeat is, and start there. Which I did. Light pink bit, followed by red bit, dark pink, light pink. Cast on.

Yeah. You see it too, right?

I didn't see the red bit didn't match until I was way down. But, I thought, must be me, because look - further down the pink bits match up perfectly:

So, I thought. I can just unwind a bit of the top to shrink the red bit, because the rest clearly matches.

Then I got to the pale pink bit here:

So, I thought.

So.

So I picked the incredibly wrong bit of the pattern to start at. I unwound the ball to find where the repeat really started, so I could just start again there.

I could not find it. I decided to just continue knitting, because then I would see where the repeat was, and I would make that the start, and undo the inches I already did, and carry on from there.

Dudes, there is no repeat. I have knitted a thousand yards of sock, and the pattern hasn't repeated. This is completely inexplicable to me. I even turned it upside down, because I thought that might make it match. It doesn't.

Socks match.

What is going on?

What am I to do?

they keel you

2009-06-12T18:03:00.004-04:00

I was advised by actual real Australians that I should venture by ferry to Rottnest island, home of the quokka. The idea of this animal was sold to me as a more wee, more cute version of a wallaby, and by all accounts Rottnest is crawling with these adorable bundles of marsupial charm.

I am here to tell you that empirical evidence trumps anecdotal:

Quokkas are terrifyingly gigantic beasts (check out the trees behind for comparison). They would rip your head off as soon as look at you. I did not seek them out.

announcement

2009-05-31T11:39:00.003-04:00

You are hereby notified that my attitude towards team sports has changed somewhat in the last 24 hours.

Somewhat - because I still can’t abide all that abject worship of overpaid manboys - but that aside. You may consider me the newest-born Fan of the Freo Dockers.

I have less than no idea of the actual Rules of Aussie Rules. Luckily, the Dockers ticket people had obligingly selected a seat for me in close proximity to A SHOUTAHHH!!!! So I can provide for you full commentary and thorough, pinpoint-accurate analysis of yesterday evening’s match against ~~THE FILTHY TIGAAAAHS!!!~~ Richmond.

The facts ascertained:
There are four quarters of half an hour each
Everyone is very tall
It’s a bit like rugby, only not very, because the whole thing is a lot more streamlined and there is much less biffing and pointlessness
The refs all look ludicrous, no matter what they are doing, but especially on a throw-in, where they practically upend themselves in a spectacularly comical over-the-head backwards dive manoeuvre
There appear to be eighteen players per team on the field, which seems an awful lot
There are no sleeves
The kick-off involves the ref slamming the ball as hard as he can physically manage into the ground, as if chucking a major tantrum

(The Dockers mascot, who appears for approximately nine seconds at the start of the match and subsequently never again, is rubbish. He is simply a Dockers player made out of foam. He looks like a bad children’s book superhero character who has a name composed of lots of Z’z and exclamation marks.)

First quarter
The match begins. Four seconds later:
Shoutah: (NAME I COULDN’T MAKE OUT), YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A HAAAAACKK!!!!!
By the eleventh second:
Shoutah: (SOME OTHER NAME), YOU'RE PLAYING LIKE A GALAAAAAHHHH!!
At approximately twenty four seconds:
Shoutah: (THIRD NAME), PISS OFF BACK TO VICTORIA, YOU IDIOT!!!
Bloke sitting nearby: Mate, save some for later, ay?
Shoutah: Sorry, coach.

Seems to me offence is doing okay, defence sucks. Freo ends the quarter in the lead.

Second quarter
Much the same, but in the opposite direction. The FILTHY TIGAAAHS are a bit quicker with the ball.

Guy in the Number 31 jersey: Hello, anklebiters. I am approximately fortyseven feet tall. My whole job here is to reach over everyone’s heads and simply knock the ball towards someone in my team who can do something with it.

A bloke behind me yells at the Dockers to play it forwards, not backwards. Then yells that they’re going in the wrong direction. Then suggests they should stop playing backwards. He is so monstrously pleased with this excellent joke that it will continue throughout the entire rest of the match.

Once the Dockers get ahold of themselves, and it, they pop a few nice goals. Defence still appears to me to be fumbling like absolute crap, but they finish ahead.

Third quarter
The Dockers pack it in. Apparently there have been some substitutions that I didn’t notice so they have ‘no bench’. This is a bad thing, especially as everyone is apparently out of puff and has had it up to here with those swift-footed, glue-handed FILTHY TIGAAAHS who are zigzagging about like Harry Potter chasing a particularly madcap Snitch. It is quite impressive, but I am wearing a purple shirt (I actually was, by the way. On purpose), so I must despise it. The Dockers are playing like A BUNCH OF GALAAAAHHHSS!!! and Shoutah thinks they should USE THEIR EEYYYEESS!!! as well as KICK IT LOOOONGGGG!!! An eleven-year-old girl in the next section giggles, wide-eyed, at every increasingly apoplectic outburst. But the Dockers refuse to take Shoutah’s advice, and also keep dropping the ball. Right before the klaxon, they hoof in two field goals (terminology, anyone? Field goals? Just goals?) within about three seconds, but are still way behind.

Fourth quarter

We all start in a slough of despond and can barely muster the energy to care. But a la Tim Henman at Wimbledon in the 1990s, this appears to be the only position from which the Dockers can sit up straight, brush their hair and achieve something, because they start clawing it back and actually manage to hold onto the ball a few times. A kick that goes into the side bit rather than the centre bit of the goal brings them back within a point. This means that every time a FILTHY TIGAH so much as touches the ball, we must boo like crazy. We bite our nails. Shoutah loses his shit completely, and the previously-giggly eleven-year-old girl in the next section quietly switches seats with her dad to be further away. The Dockers somehow manage to pull ahead and even I get that all they need to do now is play for time.

And yet. They do not.

The TIGAAAAHS win it, and the match ends just as a Docker aims a kick on goal that wouldn’t have gone anywhere near. As one, we clutch our heads in despair. Shoutah digs for a heart pill.

Dudes, I am hooked.

not joking

2009-05-25T02:43:00.003-04:00

..."including - but not limited to - death"???

Manly Council does not kid around.

notes from the seaside

2009-05-23T05:49:00.005-04:00

Danger! Is! Everywhere!:

Even the beaches here are trying to keel you dead.

Sydney is currrvy

2009-05-22T18:59:00.004-04:00

Those of us who are women, but are not strictly woman-shaped; those of us who are a bit plankish up and down; those of us who don't undulate in and out where we ought to; we are those who notice a nice curve when we see one.

I suspect Sydney of blossoming from a straight-hipped past, because it sure likes to show off its curves:

je me souviens

2009-05-21T17:51:00.004-04:00

O, friends,

I have truly seen the best Sydney has to offer. The quality of awful souvenirage is high. The term 'Authentic' is employed both widely and inaccurately. The best of the best? You decide:

1. Kookaburras-in-a-can
2. 'Convict soap' (no, I don't know either)
3. Ned Kelly action figures
4. Authentic dot art oven mitts
5. Anything with the word "g'day" followed by the word "mate" embroidered on it

(Writers' Festival by the numbers, for those who are interested? Number of times I have moved my own weight in books in the last four days: fifty-nine million. Also, Morris Gleitzman? happily bears out the rule about the loveliness of bald men.)

Sydney by the numbers

2009-05-18T03:41:00.004-04:00

I know. I KNOW, all right? I quite understand how my chronic, economy-sized disorganisation in the face of this trip led some of you to question whether I would get here in one piece. I do see that, despite successfully getting myself across the globe lock, stock and barrel as many times as I have, this time, my making it here seems worthy of nothing less than a set of commemorative stamps.

Worry not. I can currently be found entirely in the place they call Australia, for that is its name.

So. Sunday morning walk in the suburb of Cream Horn: discoveries.

Large trees successfully identified as Moreton Bay figs: 4

Large trees incorrectly identified as Moreton Bay figs: 40

Scary blue-black dinosaurish birds that sound like a strangled lamb with a cold: 8

Astonishingly bright, fast-moving, noisy green and red birds: 8 zillion

Successful photos of astonishingly bright, fast-moving, noisy green and red birds: zero

Spider webs walked into: 1

Spider web-induced nervous breakdowns suffered: 1

Deadly Australian spiders encountered (imaginary): 50

Deadly Australian spiders encountered (actual): zero (yet)

Steep hills descended: 3

Steep hills climbed: 6

Unexpected sudden panoramas of Sydney: 5

Unexpected sudden views of Harbour Bridge:1

Nearby pedestrians surprised by shout of "holy mother of f***, that's the Harbour Bridge": 1

Apologies issued: 1

Spontaneous little jigs of joy danced: 3

Mysteries unsolved: 1

Wax-tipped bananas.

Anyone want to hazard a guess?

Mr Pastry

2009-05-09T15:34:00.003-04:00

I absolutely want to kiss the internet and offer to have its babies today, because I was able to find this. If you remember Mr Pastry, well, then you will Know. If you don't, well, then now you Know.

lucky Rachel

2009-05-08T09:15:00.003-04:00

Joan points us at this BBC report about a new book that says Van Gogh didn't cut off his own ear in a fit of crazy after all.

The Beeb says:

"[The writers] looked at witness accounts and letters sent by the two artists, concluding that the row ended with Gauguin - a keen fencer - cutting his friend's ear off.

Van Gogh then apparently wrapped it in cloth and handed it to a prostitute, called Rachel.

Mr Kaufmann said it was not clear whether it was an accident or a deliberate attempt to injure Van Gogh, but afterwards both men agreed to tell the police the self-harm story to protect Gauguin...Gauguin later moved to Tahiti, where he produced some of his most famous works."

VAN GOGH: Rachel, honey, you are both bewitching and awesome at your job. Please accept this gift as a token of my affection for your services.
RACHEL: Well, you didn't have to...I mean, the invoice is in the mail as usual. (opens it) WTF is this?
VAN GOGH: It’s my severed ear wrapped in a hanky. Buddy here just cut it off, but we’re keeping it a secret.
RACHEL: …
GAUGIN: Last one to Tahiti’s a lemon!
VAN GOGH: This world was never meant for one as beautiful as me.
RACHEL: Dude, y’all are a pair of freaks.

bonny green garters. etc.

2009-05-04T18:28:00.003-04:00

In England, you will rarely come across so joyous an occasion as Mayday morning, when morris dancers and their cheery musicians welcome the summertime at dawn.

You can see why I miss this riotous, fun-filled occasion.

(They're 'concentrating', I'm told. Presumably on how to escape the sixth circle of hell they apparently feel they are currently occupying.)

Edited to add: Thank you to anyone who dutifully went running for their copy of the Inferno (always on the bedside table, no doubt) and wondered if I purposely picked the sixth circle because that's where the heretics go. I would like to set you straight on this score, because my translation indicates that actually the sixth circle is reserved exclusively for those who play either the accordion or the banjo.

not my best side

2009-04-28T19:41:00.004-04:00

How desperate does someone have to be for sugar before she seriously considers – and by ‘seriously’ I mean ‘seriously enough to actually reach the point of standing in front of the open fridge door’ - the possibility of drinking from a bottle of maple syrup? Or if not drinking from it, at least pouring from it into a big spoon to take its sugary goodness like a dose of Panadol for a childhood earache?

This is not, as you may be charitably surmising, a rhetorical question.

parallel importing

2009-04-25T13:13:00.005-04:00

This article, while possibly spending slightly more time on chooks and utes than is strictly proportional in the overall issue, sums up quite well what's going on in the Aussie book industry right now.

I don't do well at explaining this whole thing, which is one reason I haven’t touched it here, but the Guardian nutshells it neatly. The other reason I haven’t written about it is that every time I get into it I lose any articulate expression all that education carefully engendered in me, and start going “No. Just no. Because no. Because. No.”

So instead, you can find many thousands of spectacularly well-chosen words on this issue right here. Start with this (ignore what he says about booksellers. He doesn't mean all of us, and you can find submissions from indies too - for example, and some figures). See this. And then, this, especially because it addresses the allegation of protectionism. This, too, because it also addresses figures, or the lack of them. It’s livelihoods, and industryhoods, and culturehoods.

If nothing else, if you’ve read the US version of Don’t Call Me Ishmael you will know how maddening a North Americanisation of a novel can get. Reading it over here is bad enough. Reading this version in Australia would make me want to weep. And break something.

(This is a different-but-related thing, but I loathe that Americanisation suggests North Americans can’t access a novel unless it’s written for them, with cultural and linguistic references of anywhere else removed or changed. It’s insulting. Canadian friends, if I were you I would be spectacularly pissed off with the implication I couldn't interpret what a ute is from the fact that someone’s driving it. In DCMIshmael, the big debate was over ‘dag’. There isn’t really an equivalent over here. But I'm guessing you could probably have got it from the context.

Finally, and what I think is more worrying, is that a generation of American kids could grow up thinking the world is really like that – a) completely tailored to them and b) all the same. An American kid reading DCMIshmael would have to surmise that Australian high schools have a thriving American football culture. American kids aren’t stupid. But if they’re not given the chance to be informed, well, could you blame them if they were to grow up being bemused every time everyone isn't just like them?)

zombie ap-sock-alypse

2009-04-13T10:57:00.004-04:00

This is how you read The Forest of Hands and Teeth when you also have a birthday sock knitting deadline. Because there is no option on not doing the socks, but there is also clearly no option to not read The Forest of Hands and Teeth. As your hands are occupied with sock, The Forest of Hands and Teeth has to be held open with elastic bands.

I do not like zombie movies. I wondered about a zombie book, to be truthful, but I heard it was awesome and must be read!! So I read it.

I had to go to bed one time in between starting this book and finishing it. Going to bed in the middle of this book is not recommended.

It is scarier than zombie movies, but in a much better way.

The characters’ world is post-zombie apocalypse, and people are hemmed in their village(s) by metal fences that keep them safe, but the zombies – (‘the Unconsecrated’) are always there. You can hear them all the time. You get used to seeing them ‘tearing [themselves] against the fences’. They can’t die; they just batter themselves into an ever-weaker state. They are the people you loved, the people you grew up with, and you want them near you even though you don’t, and you have to live knowing the only reason they want near you is hunger.

The change that precipitates the action is a breach of the fences, a village attacked; survivors head out onto unknown narrow enclosed paths through the Forest. The tension is heightened all the time, because the Unconsecrated are there against the fences as the survivors walk. Blunted, torn fingers tangle in hair if they stray too close (scratchy zombie Hands, survivable; bitey zombie Teeth, prognosis not so hot).

So unlike zombie movies when OMGsuddenlyzombiesarehappening!!! Howcanwestopthemandsavethewoooorld?? , you start out in a place where life just includes them and always has. Which is quite the paradigm shift. There are procedures in place for when a living person gets bitten and starts to Turn; Guardians and gates and ropes. The bitten have options, while they’re still with-it enough. People get used to it.

*MILD SPOILER*

I cannot stress enough that the zombies are always there. Did I say that? Always. There. When the survivors make it to a better-prepared village, with treetop refuges, it’s clear people are equipped to just live on while below, scores and scores of the Unconsecrated shamble and crave and moan without cease.

*END OF SPOILER*

To be a bit serious for a sec, most of us will never have to live in a world where any real level of danger becomes just part of our daily lives, and where we have to scoop bits of hope when there’s no evidence there’s any good reason for it. But plenty of people do, and that’s what’s terrifying about this book’s world – that every decision in life has to be crafted around that horrible relentless truth.

Also, rope bridges. I recommend working on them. Preferably before the zombies are actually breaking the doors down.

And also, look; the birthday socks match what Mary is wearing on the cover of this book! I made awesome zombie-fighting birthday socks!! So the birthday recipient will, if nothing else, be dressed for the zombie apocalypse.

Which may be all some of us can hope for.

dear singers 2

2009-04-11T17:02:00.006-04:00

Singers, you misunderstand me, possibly on purpose and for comic effect.

When I say that when you adopt a mid-Atlantic accent to sing, it beats through my skull with the thunder of a thousand fire-hoofed stallions and makes me die inside each time I hear you, what I mean is you are perfectly welcome to sing with a mid-Atlantic accent if that’s where you come from. (Though if that’s actually where you come from, you most likely have fins and scales and your singing career is limited to being attached to a wood-effect backboard and animatronically booming Take me to the River to the delight of precisely no-one).

I am not against Floating Accent Syndrome of itself, because I suffer from it. Everyone who has lived for any length of time anywhere other than the place in which they were born should suffer from it. If you’ve lived in places other than where you were born, and don’t start to sound a bit Lucky Oceans, then you probably need to get out a bit more.

In short: If you sound like that, then sound like that. But if you don’t, don’t (cf. fire-hoofed stallions, dying inside, &c).

Love, Amberxx

unsuccessful tourism activities

2009-04-05T22:40:00.003-04:00

I’ve been Seeing the Local Sights, because you do that when people From Away are visiting. You have to Show Them the Local Sights, and as there are many Local Sights I Haven’t Seen this was an Excellent Opportunity.

AMBER: Let’s go to the museum!
AMBER’S MUM: I am very on board with museums. I love museums. In fact, I require regular applications of local history to maintain good health. I am the Queen of Museums!!
AMBER: I know. I actually do totally know that. I used to live with you, remember?

AMBER’S MUM (confused): Is it me, or is this museum actually an art gallery with one very large piece of art in it?
AMBER: That's an excellent point. But it says here it is the one piece of art that sums up this whole artist’s life so far, including his battle with not one but two debilitating diseases.
AMBER’S MUM: I definitely got that from looking at it.

(not very much later)
AMBER’S MUM: On further reflection, this museum appears to be mostly a shop with an art gallery with one very large piece of art in it attached. But look! Here in the shop is a box of cards with paintings of the local area on them. These are painted by some Canadian artists From History.
AMBER’S MUM (to the museum shop lady): In this box of cards are historical paintings of the local area. Where can we see these paintings?
MUSEUM SHOP LADY: Well, we sometimes sell posters.
AMBER’S MUM: No, I mean, the actual paintings. Where can we see them?
MUSEUM SHOP LADY (laughing quietly to herself at the indescribable lunacy of the foreign loons before her): Oh, no! These artists are dead.
AMBER’S MUM (backing away slowly): Ah. Well, thanks for clearing that up. Ber-bye.

AMBER’S MUM: I think I’m ready to go home now.

very

2009-04-03T08:44:00.002-04:00

How excited?

That would be very.

See ya there, kids!

Dear Harry Manx

2009-03-28T09:04:00.006-04:00

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

2009-03-19T20:15:00.003-04:00

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:

2009-03-15T15:02:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-09T17:14:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-08T09:34:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-07T13:38:00.002-05:00

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

2009-03-03T19:05:00.003-05:00

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

2009-03-01T09:53:00.005-05:00

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.

is it on...The List?

2009-02-24T18:16:00.005-05:00

My brain is working so fast and so hard at the moment, that when I stop working, it can’t handle changing gear. I daren’t read a book, because I start racing through it for The Point and forget to actually read it (“yeah, all right, Winton, surfing surfing blah blah blah. Step it up already.”) I daren’t knit, because my brain in hard-and-fast gear isn’t up to method, or patience, or allowing a thing to unfold.

My brain needs absolutely off, now.

It’s a great pity, then, that what my brain needs isn’t available here in Canada.

What it needs is The Rich List.

You will not have seen the ~~popular~~ New Zealand tv show The Rich List. It hasn’t travelled.

Let me attempt to recreate for you a tiny piece of its magic, so you will understand.

On The Rich List, two sets of randomly-paired people who have never met sit in big oval transparent space-pods on either side of a Plexiglass Podium of Neon, upon which stands one Jason Gunn. The whole procedure kicks off when Jason Gunn announces to the pod people a Subject.

Jason’s Subjects are wide-ranging and bizarre. He knows when he has a good’un. You can tell by his face. He cannot wait to make known to us the level of sheer wackitude his researchers have risen to this week. The pod people busily discuss the Subject. For they will have to Name as many examples of it as they can possibly imagine.

After sustaining the tension for a couple of glacial ages, Jason Gunn asks them to decide how many Test Cricketers Of The Seventies Whose Mothers Were Named Mary they think they can name.

Next, with his Soundproofing Plunger of Doom, Jason Gunn masterfully soundproofs one or other of the Space Pods. The first team confides in Jason its number. Jason unPlunges the one pair, and Plunges the other, and then immediately blurts out the secret to the previously-soundproofed pod: the first pod thinks it can name three. The second pod, alight with its new auditory function, counters that it thinks, Jason, it could name four test cricketers.

There is then Plunging and unPlunging a-plenty, as the slowest bidding auction in the history of the earth goes on between the two sets of pod people and their interpreter. Finally, the will of one pod is broken, and the people fall to their knees, sobbing, “Jason, we ask the other pod to Name…The List.”

The camera swoops up close to Jason’s Illuminated Dais of Interlocution in a way that resembles the spaceship out of Flight of the Navigator, when its big spherical eye-on-a-hydraulic-arm whizzes up to the kid’s face and goes “COMPLIANCE!!”. Jason Gunn, having almost been toppled from his Mighty Throne of Plexiglass, straightens his giganta-knotted tie, and unPlunges the soundproofed pod for the final time. He announces to the pod people their fate: “They say…Name….The List!” and everyone applauds wildly.

So the pod people proceed to name ninety-four test cricketers of the seventies whose mothers were named Mary. Every time they suggest one, Jason has a handy factoid ready: ("Played for the West Indies in (any year) when they battered England; played for Australia in (any year) when they battered England...") and finishes up with "but is he on...The List???" And then he either is or he isn't, so the pod people either win or they don't.

It’s a dramatic best-of-three scenario. So once the pod people have got through the test cricketers, the whole business starts again with naming Yarn Colours in the Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Range, or Australian Lakes That Contain More Than Five Million Litres Of Water, or Famous Percussionists Born in Whangarei.

This part of the competition determines who gets to go on and try to win Some Money. The prize for knocking out the other pod, is to (waaaait for iiiiit) do the exact same thing again. This time, though, it’s not just any old list, but…The Rich List. The procedure is identical, only for this one they can win literally pence for naming Julie Andrews’s Favourite Things.

The final thrilling climax of the whole event comes when the successful pair gets the opportunity to…are you sitting down?…go back to the Space Pod and Name some More Lists.

The whole thing takes an entire hour, all told, because of the swooping Flight of the Navigator camera and the Plunging and the unPlunging and the formula with which the pod people have been indoctrinated to speak (“We’d like to add ‘Raindrops on Roses’ to the List, please, Jason.”)

It is a programme that, if you were not doing something else at the same time – such as learning the bagpipes or drafting the federal budget – would inspire you to commit some violence upon yourself to relieve the agonising boredom.

It is exactly what I need for completely rewiring the settings and becoming half-normal again.

Can anyone suggest an equivalent band-aid, before my brain does itself an injury?

Dear Large Publishing House

2009-02-16T08:47:00.003-05:00

Dear Large Publishing House,

Editors work for you, right?

Then you will forgive me for losing a little bit of respect for you when you have grammatical errors in a catalogue advertising books intended to help children learn to read.

I can let typos go. It’s an awfully big catalogue. I am also ok with a few mistyped ISBNs. When you’re listing 900 or so books, typing in 13 digits for each one, a zero per cent error rate is unrealistic. There’s bound to be a slip of the finger somewhere.

But entire grammatical dogs’ breakfasts, when the people you employ are editors?

Most people may neither know nor care about dangling participles. But it’s an editor’s job to know and care. Getting it right would have the sentence in front of me saying the book is ‘packed with bright, full-colour photographs’. With its merrily dangling participle, at the moment the sentence tells me the young readers are packed with those very photographs.

It’s not only confusing, but it sounds deeply uncomfortable.

Sincerely,

Amber

I don't like them

2009-02-15T10:12:00.007-05:00

No, I don’t like them at all.

I don’t like the colour and I don’t like the holes.

But they’re not for me, so it’s all right.

It’s fun sometimes to knit things you don’t like, because otherwise you’d never do anything different. The person these are for picked the yarn and will like the pattern. And this pattern was just the right amount of complicated – not boring, but not ripping it back and weeping every row

because of my inability to count to five repeatedly. It’s sort of pretty, in the sense that I wouldn’t want to wear it.

The black behind the holes, by the way, is not part of the sock; it’s just so you can see the hole pattern. It turns out, after spending November to February emphatically not kicking around New Zealand in Birkenstocks, my feet revert to the pallid blue-ish colour of, well, these socks, so you can’t tell what’s sock and what’s hole.

Ugly socks done with, can you have a look at this for me?:

Purple, meet orange.
Was this a huge mistake?

It’s going to be a bag. But is it the sort of bag I might have knocked around travelling with, say, ten years ago? Should I have grown out of purple and orange by now?

this book wot I loved

2009-02-10T19:09:00.005-05:00

I read about Diamond Dove over at Matilda and wanted to read it from Middlemiss’s post of an interview with Adrian Hyland. And it wasn’t straightforward, because you cannot get Diamond Dove here. It turns out you will be able to get it, soon, but the English Branch had to come through for me on this one. And hooray that they did.

I was put off by the phrase “An Emily Tempest Mystery” on the cover, because 1) I’m not a big fan of The Mystery Genre when it’s purposely identified as a genre, and 2) I just hate that construct on a book cover. You might as well put “A Pigeonholeable Sort Of Mystery”. Y’know? Which it isn’t.

So. I’m not a marker-up of books. Yet here it sits, bristling with yellow stickynotes at the many bits I loved. Almost all of them turns of phrase and dialogue. Hyland rocks at dialogue. You’d want to talk to every single character in the book (or have them talk to you, endlessly. Even the bad guys. Especially the bad guys). Everyone’s a collection of images (miner dad Jack’s a rock-hard torso and piercing blue eyes), fleshed out in how he or she talks.

This is not a quiet novel; it’s big and messy and noisy and seedy. Everyone shouts; everything’s filthy and held together with number eight wire. It’s a great yarn, no doubt. A murder mystery with a good cast of suspects, tangled up in land rights and geology and dreaming and drinking and dangerous dogs.

But I was secondarily interested in the story (partly because I’m so incurious about whodunthings; like I said, not a Mystery fan). I’d have read a year-in-the-life of these people just to be around the characters in the places in which they find themselves.

Ok…not quite true. There’s a bit where it gets mired in relationshippiness and leaves alone the mystery, and although the narrator makes a point of telling us she got distracted, I found it…distracting. I was not so taken with the grown man in a red beanie (that is where the Canadian word for it, toque, should come in, because it sounds like at least a half-grown up item of clothing; o gods, could the beanie be the whole reason I was not on board with the sex in this book? I think it was).

But. That was truly the only point at which my wild enthusiasm for every single thing in this novel dipped even slightly.

I’m sad I won’t run into these characters again. (Apparently there’ll be three books in this series, but Hyland reckons he’s aiming Emily off to far-flung places for the next ones, or something.) I will miss them. I already do miss them, since I finished the book. You can’t go about being spoilery and ruining endings, but I was especially keen on minor heroism from an unexpected quarter at the end. I should like to see more from that quarter. And Emily’s dad had better be around again. When Motor Jack starts “marshalling his narrative forces” there are very few people I’d rather listen to.

today's post is brought to you by the word 'disposed' (and some prefixes)

2009-02-05T18:23:00.006-05:00

I read a book. It was an advance copy from a publisher, and it didn’t look like my kinda book. But the pub said it wasn’t her kinda book either, but she read it and was delighted and laughed like a drain. And, you know, sometimes it’s good to read not your kinda books.

Tell you the truth, I didn’t find it the best I’ve ever read. But it wasn’t at all bad. The pub was right; I laughed. The protag is an old guy who is smart and funny, and I am totally pre-disposed to get behind smart, funny old guys. But. Oh, but.

The protag is always talking about how he has a full head of hair.

Wow. Did I ever not like that. First, as we all know, old boys should be bald. There are very few exceptions to this rule. If they are unlucky enough not to be bald, they can slink away until they are grown-up enough to become bald, or maybe even get out the razor. Full-head-of-hair-as-important-characteristic is not likeable. There I was, reading along, laughing, and suddenly, he'd make a point of the hair thing again, and I would feel all cross and ill-disposed. (Also, this is a protag we are supposed to like. He’s no anti-hero. The hair thing isn’t an authorial conceit to show the protag’s, well, conceit. We’re meant to approve of the hair).

Then I checked out the author bio. He has, says his blurb, a multi-million-dollar business. Like that. Multi-million dollar.

I liked the book less.

Lots of people have talked about separating author from work – can you like the book if you know the author is a raging homophobe, that kind of thing (I made a typo there initially, and wrote ‘homophone’. Man, how eye hate their two bee homophones. Ewe?) But those are often things you learn about authors by really looking, not things they put in their bio on the back cover. But here is an author a) whose protag goes on about what a tremendously fetching and important thing his hair is, and b) who wants it noted in his bio that he has a multi-million dollar business.

So, the truth. I would’ve liked this book better if its author had not been someone who wanted me to know about his multi-million dollar business. It’s not the fact of having the multi-millions, but the wanting it to be part of the selected information people know about you, that turns me off it.

And the other truth. I would have been better-disposed to like it if I knew it had been written by, say, Carl Nixon. Nick Earls. Tim Winton. And maybe that’s the thing of it. I don’t know if Carl Nixon and Nick Earls and Tim Winton have multi-million-dollar businesses. Why? Because they don’t go on about it in their bios.

I don’t mean I would have done an about-face on a book I wasn’t all that keen on if the author had been a granola-munching pinko whale-saving do-gooder in Birkenstocks. It still wouldn’t be my kinda book. I would emphatically not have suddenly seen the light and realized it was in fact the greatest novel ever written, and the hair thing would still have got right on my wick. It doesn’t even mean I automatically like anything and everything Carl Nixon or Nick Earls or Tim Winton comes out with.

But I am pre-disposed to like it - yes, mostly because a)I know I have liked their other novels, but also because b)I am not put off by what they want readers to know about them.

I feel smaller and more confused as I go along. Help me out. Has reading what the author wanted you to know about him/her ever put you off reading the book? Are you brave enough to admit when you don’t like your favourite author’s latest? And, most importantly, what is up with these men and their hair? It’s that important? Really?

lord of the dance

2009-02-01T13:55:00.003-05:00

My mum and dad are out dancing at a ceilidh.

My dad heads off for drinks after twirling my mother through something relatively strenuous.

My dad says to a woman nearby, “I’m getting too old for this.”

The woman nearby says, “Oh, no. Look at that man over there dancing. And he’s seventy.”

My dad makes international phone calls to his daughters to tell them a complete stranger thinks he’s younger than seventy.

Yes, really.

We may never hear the end of this one.

not right

2009-01-25T09:32:00.005-05:00

Golden Guitars, go stand in the corner and think about your behaviour. I frown upon you.

The shouldawon that didntwin (anything, unbelieeevably)? The ~~hamster-cute~~ very talented Peter Denahy, because aside from everything else, what encapsulates between guitar and piece-a-cake the eternal universal cycle like That Song? (oh, all right, yes, and banjo, but you might just have to get over it). If you haven’t heard it, quick, catch up with everyone else…

Sort of Dunno Nothin'

…because you were either that kid, or you dated that kid. My nephew will grow up to be that kid, and my mate’s daughters will grow up to date that kid… and the world turns.

(Incidentally, when will Peter Denahy start to age? Is he another one who’s got one of those hidden portraits knocking around?)

the lost verse

2009-01-22T18:25:00.004-05:00

I heard an old, old song done to a very pretty tune on the radio this week. The pretty tune was a morris tune I can’t remember the name of, and the song was Sir Arthur – or Sir Arthur and Charming Molly (or even, “Mollee”, but I suspect if you’re going to go that far you might already have your fingers in your ear and your eyes closed, and don’t need anybody else’s input on the subject).

As is usually the case with pretty folk songs, you’re best not to listen to the words.

In short, Sir Arthur fancies poor-girl ‘charming Molly’ and offers her everything if she'll (heh, heh) love him. Molly says she'll never lie with a married man till his wife is dead, which if nothing else, is disarmingly honest.

Well, in some versions of the story, Sir Arthur waits seven years until his wife dies, and in other versions, he waits seven years till his wife ups and takes a lover, and then he's free to marry charming Molly, who becomes a lady. The moral: lucky poor girl gets what she wants – providing, that is, what she wants is to marry Sir Arthur, which to be honest isn’t all that clear – by standing firm, as outlined in the last verse:

Now charming Molly in her carriage doth ride,
With her hounds at her feet, and her lord by her side:
Now all ye fair maids take a warning by me,
And ne'er love a married man till his wife dee (or runs off with a lover, whichever)

This is all well and good, until you look at the verse tucked in the middle, just after Molly rejects Sir Arthur the first time:

'Oh, charming Molly, lend me then your penknife,
And I will go home, and I'll kill my own wife;
I'll kill my own wife, and my children all three,
If you will but love me, my charming Molly!'

YES. Now, credit where it’s due, he doesn’t kill his wife. He waits. Until she decides she’d rather go off with presumably just about anybody who isn’t plotting to kill her with a penknife.

What a catch.

Eternal worship to the ethnomusicologist who unearths the buried real final verse that nobody sings any more because the world of folk music is controlled by the bearded and the mad. I believe it has something to do with how, after the penknife comment, charming Molly gathers a bunch of her mates and warns them if they ever see that big freak Sir Arthur come within five mile of her again, they should run like dogs for the constable. I think she also tells the lass who milks the cows on Sir Arthur’s estate, in this same lost verse, that she should probably hie her up to the big house as soon as possible and warn the wife she’s married a dangerous lunatic, and she and the kids should get the frack out of there and go stay with her mum.

Alternatively, eternal worship to the songwriter who can come up with this infinitely better version.

the Hat redux

2009-01-16T17:52:00.007-05:00

Janet has kindly set me straight on the multitude of reasons why my Harry Manx Hat version 1.0 isn’t working. I mean, she didn’t do it in a setting-me-straight way, because Janet is obviously quite nice. But her comment and website have helped me understand everything that's Wrong with my Hat.

The first and foremost reason is, I am not Janet. Dude, those are some extraordinary hats right there. The extraordinariness of those hats is something Peter Mansbridge should probably bring up on the National.

But they’re _woven_? You’re kidding me. I guess my nine-foot musician radius isn’t close enough to determine that pretty freaking vital fact.

One thing that became immediately apparent after my Hat was worn, oh, twice, was that it hasn’t got enough substance – it’s flopped and gone head-shaped. (I was at least right about the ‘tube with a round top’ thing though.) The flopping would happen with this quite loosely put-together knitted thing, over a more substantial woven thing. I was going for version 2.0 in some sort of much more tightly-knitted sock yarn, though now I may still have to rethink things. (local yarn shop sale tomorrow, as a matter of fact. Thank you, universe).

There appears now also to be the magic scratchiness element, that is to say, musician's preference for only scratchy wool. I tried really hard to avoid scratchy wool for the sake of the lovely and the bald. My Hat is 100% pure merino. (and it’s still itchy. I’ve looked for something softer but apparently they don’t make yarn out of pixie wings).

Now I hear scratchy wool is the Harry Manx thang. Shpff. Musos, eh?

While you wait for the exciting next chapter of the saga, go and check out Janet’s hats and straw bales and suchlike. They will delight you. They will do things for your soul. I suspect, in fact, they may be instrumental in the restructuring of modern Canada. These are some powerful hats.

booklust

2009-01-11T09:33:00.005-05:00

So there’s been a lot of Work lately. In the bits where there wasn’t Work, there was Knitting, and getting Things knitted In Time for Things. It all conspired to create a certain leanness in the Reading area, such that one or two Advance Reading Copies may not, strictly speaking, be Advance any more. But Santa was generous to the lucky, lucky booky chick, and brought a definitive end to the drought. He started with this:

The Knife that Killed Me, Anthony McGowan

…and I grabbed it with wanton abandon and read it in an afternoon, so I could share it among my booky mates. I love how Santa in an international entity, because this can’t be got in North America, and yet! I still get to have a copy, and more importantly be the bringer of it to others.

The desperate edge taken off my appetite, I started on this:

Stargirl, Jerry Spinelli

Which, I realise, everyone whose job is YA books should’ve read actually years ago, and wish I had, but at least I got to it now.

But then, this – another one you can’t get here, or not in this format – took up a siren call from the bookshelf:

Diamond Dove, Adrian Hyland

(Be interesting to see what the North American ed. has done to this actually. Different cover, different title (Moonlight Downs). Anyone know what's been done to the words on the inside?)

Anyway I’ve slipped, and I started cheating on Spinelli with Hyland, who is quite magnetic, but you know what? I can totally juggle two, and neither needs to know about the other; it’s not fair to ask me to choose between them right now, because I kind of need them both for different reasons, and nobody’s getting hurt and I can handle it, so if you can’t be supportive and accept my choices then just get off my freaking back, okay?

But Hyland and Spinelli are paperbacks, and sometimes I need a sturdy hardcover that will lie flat on my knees while my hands are occupied knitting all the many new request items, and I promise you it was just once, and just casual, but I dipped into this:

The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness

I’m pretty sure I’m still in control, so long as Ness remains with the knitting pile and Spinelli and Hyland stay on the bedside table and don’t see.

Trouble is, I know Santa also dropped in on New Zealand, and I have it on good authority that these good-looking Kiwi specimens will shortly be knocking on the door and asking me out for a flat white, nothing implied, no strings, just to acquaint ourselves:

New Zealand Book of the Beach 2 and Best New Zealand Fiction 5

…and I don’t think I can say no.

best lines

2009-01-06T18:30:00.002-05:00

For so very different reasons.

From Neil Gaiman, in The Graveyard Book (which you can hear him read aloud in full online at www.mousecircus.com)

‘At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined.’

And then from Radio 2’s Mike Harding, about everyone bemoaning how The Folk Scene got too Professional and It’s A Shame:

‘Yes, I know it was a lot better when we all sang in folk clubs for nothing and knitted our own concertinas from recycled policeman's bicycles…’

Best lines you’ve read/ heard lately?

discoveries

2009-01-05T18:46:00.003-05:00

Things Aunty Amber discovered this holiday

She discovered what she is best at:
Pushing swings for the longest time
Playing footy in the street for the longest time
Towing a toboggan uphill the most times

She discovered what she is not best at:
Anything that looks like actual mothering

She discovered the socks she knitted for her wee nephew have magical properties. They enable him to win at basketball AND football AND running AND table tennis AND fighting dinosaurs AND EVEN Ludo. More magical socks have been requested.

Finally, she discovered a kids’ TV show called Word Girl. Word Girl is a superhero whose superpower is - are you ready? - a really extensive vocabulary. The bad guy in Word Girl, clearly conceived of in the time-honoured drugged-out tradition of most children’s tv, is a butcher who shoots weapons-grade meat products out of his hands. He also makes grammatical mistakes, which Word Girl is always on hand to correct. Aunty Amber is finding herself a superhero costume as we speak.

What did you folks discover at the turn of a new year?

universal truths

2008-12-30T07:59:00.016-05:00

Let it be agreed: the loveliest men are the bald men. It is a great pity for the men that are not bald, to always know they are not the loveliest. But it is the way of things, and they will simply have to get over it.

If you are unlucky enough not to have one of these lovely specimens in your life, you may not know the following fact: every bald man secretly, deep deep down, wishes this were him:

This is Harry Manx, and if he is not the coolest cat that ever existed in the history of the entire planet, then he is at the very least in the top, say, three.

Note the Hat.

The reason the bald men want to be Harry Manx is because this Hat is the way to rock bald like nobody ever rocked bald before.

If, as a bald man, you were to wear the Harry Manx Hat, you would be at least 25% cooler. It would confer upon you the aura of one who feels, thinks and kisses more deeply than other men; one who is sexier, more skilful and more imaginative; and one who might be about to hunker down with any one of about fourteen different instruments and oh-so-casually do something way cooler than anyone in a four hundred mile radius could hope to do even if he were trying really, really, hard and had a head start and the wind in his favour.

You can imagine, then, the combination of bald man plus Harry Manx Hat, would be a pretty freaking magnificent fortress of lovelitude. Beautiful ladies would almost certainly do things for that fortress. (The rest of us would, too, but the fortress would not need to look any farther than the beautiful ones).

So, if you are a person who does have a lovely bald man around somewhere in the recesses of your life, you should probably do him a solid and start looking into providing him with The Hat.

The first step to bringing the Hat into being, is observing the Actual Original Hat. It looks quite like it is made of felt, which is a problem in itself, because felting a hat – never mind The Hat – is a serious business that involves one of those head-shaped busts and is very, very easy to bugger up spectacularly. Felting slippers is one thing; you wear them on your feet and nobody really looks and it doesn’t much matter if they are a bit creative, but a hat is out there before everyone and it would be deeply unfair to make a man wear a crap hat, especially if he is supposed to be wearing The Hat and getting all its attendant benefits, viz., the fortress, the beautiful ladies etc.

But on closer inspection – that is, at a discreet distance of about eight or nine feet, because even I draw the line at approaching Harry Manx post-gig and saying “nice music, dude, but I really came to check out your Hat” – it’s definitely sorta stretchier than felt (a relief) but also has a bit of structure to it. Like it’s got a top and sides, rather than being more of a stocking cap affair.

That is awkward, because tops of hats are round, and knitting round things is hard.

Cue a yarn shop trip, Harry Manx album covers and bald man story in hand, and three of us figuring out a conglomeration of bits of three patterns, plus my usual hefty dose of making it up.

As with so many things, when you are told what something will measure in inches, you should remain sceptical until the thing you’re told will measure a certain number of inches is actually in your hands. The yarn lied and lied and lied to me, and the upshot was one false start that was too big, one that was too small, and finally, a baby bear one that was just on the small side of right. The Prototype Hat was born:

The Hat was not earmarked for the Aged Parent, but look: even the Aged P looks cool in the Hat. It’s infallible. (Also, hands up who else thinks Harry Manx might look like my dad when he grows up?)

It's not a bad start, but I learnt a lot from the first go and the Hat now requires some modifications. It will be evolving into a more accurate representation over the coming weeks. Bald (or not-bald) men and those who love them, you'd better start emailing me with your Hat requirements (address up there at top left; replace the AT and the DOT with symbols). You don't want to miss out. Your fortress might depend upon it.

Song the Third

2008-12-22T21:21:00.003-05:00

And why this especial video, with all the quality of someone’s cameraphone quite literally pointed at their telly?

For God so loved the Mandolin, that She gave it unto the handsomest Boy upon the Earth, and said unto him, play thou upon it, and thou shalt be a Fisher of Women.

How to Make Gravy (Paul Kelly)

(Get this to see it properly. And go here for the legit downloads and stuff.)

dear singers

2008-12-20T09:57:00.004-05:00

If there’s one thing I absolutely. Freaking. Hate in a singer, it’s a mid-Atlantic accent.

I hate “I”s that become “Ah”s, “like”s that become “lahke”s, people who ordinarily enunciate a ‘t’ making it into a ‘d’ – making something “better” into something “bedder”.

If you are not from North America, in the name of sanity, stop doing this when you sing. You do not sound like yourself. You just sound weird. Long live the Sara Storers and Kate Rusbys of the world, for they know how it should be done.

snowmageddon

2008-12-19T10:49:00.003-05:00

Gripped by a Deadly Storm!! The ploughs are doing their best, but the wind is whistling round like a film sound effect and the drifts are building (another new thing encountered recently: snow fencing. Temporary fences rolled out across open land alongside roads, so the snow drifts against the fence instead of on the highway.)

Some people, who are clearly mad as a bag of snakes, are actually still making their way out in it – including, bless them, the post office vans. The people walking by my window all look like Shackleton. I say, unless you are on your way to hospital with major organ failure – or on your way to hospital to perform surgery on someone having major organ failure – today, you stay indoors.

Song the Second

2008-12-15T18:37:00.006-05:00

No, it's not the solstice yet.

But I have not seen the sun in over a week, and I don't know about you, but it's starting to get me right down. Unpleasantness and malfeasance lurk in this Dark.

Take yourselves hither at once:

Solstice Bells (Jethro Tull)

Feel better? I do.

youth and age

2008-12-13T12:42:00.012-05:00

At the doctor’s office this morning, two girls sitting next to me, with mobile phones, reading their messages.

GIRL 1: Omigoooodddd, Melanie and Josh totally got engaged.
GIRL 2: Gross!!!
GIRL 1: Claire. Is going. To FREAK.
GIRL 2: I’m going to text her right now!!
GIRL 1: You’re such a bitch.
GIRL 2: I know.

Then, a man of about seventy walked in, and all the chairs were full. So I got up to give him my seat, but he said no. And then I felt kind of weird. What’s the right thing to do there?

Because to be sure, today’s men of seventy are nothing like seventy-year-old men of, say, the seventies, when being old was actually old. Today’s men of eighty aren’t even as old as yesterday’s men of seventy. You know? God. Nobody even gets half going till they’re sixty now. Compounded with, men of seventy are also of the generation who would give up their seat for a woman, regardless of whether she were older or younger. So maybe he was kind of pissed off with what I was implying by offering him my seat.

The young and the old are a mystery to me.

In other news, I did this last week, with hand-spun Saskatchewan alpaca:

But I fear I may be too late with my talk about what happens when two socks love each other very, very much, because then this happened:

By the way, I absolutely agree that socks is a crap gift for a soon-to-be-four-year-old, but let it be announced here that he specifically requested socks be made for him. Weird kid. But I am an obliging aunty, so here we are.

Song the First

2008-12-11T20:13:00.003-05:00

No, you're quite right...I can't figure out 'embed' (that is, putting in a wee video thing so you can watch it right here instead of going somewhere else to watch it. You know)?

So now I have to send you somewhere else.

Click the link and be off with you, but you might as well check in your cynicism and leave it here before you go.

Song for a Winter's Night (Gordon Lightfoot)

*waits*

Told you.

This is the song that makes me homesick for Canada...even when I am in Canada.