Dear Harry Manx

Dear Harry Manx,

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

We appreciate your indulgence.

Love, A.xx

how not to do it masterclass, by me

Something wrong with me.

Must be kept away from those I admire.

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

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

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

Somebody. Stop. Me.

seen this weekend:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Squick.

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

A friend pointed me at this report today:

Man Wrestles Kangaroo in Canberra Home

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

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

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

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

Really? That’s what you first thought?

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

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

You?

required reading

Go here:

UN International Women's Day page

Now go here:

Grandmothers to Grandmothers - Stephen Lewis Foundation

Now here:

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

and here:

Oxfam Canada

Thanks.
A.
xx

Canadee-i-o

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Large Grocery Store Chain

Ahoy! Hoist the topsail:




















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

It’s because you didn’t check.

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

doing it by halves

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

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




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

is it on...The List?

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

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