Buffy Shmuffy

The other night, Tash and I finally got around to watching the final few episodes of the last season of Buffy.
What a gyp.
Let's start with the second-last episode. Buffy and Spike have just shared some touching moments. They'd cuddled all night, and Spike had finally let his emotions do the talking and confessed his love to Buffy. I gotta admit I had a tear in my eye. I've always had a bit of a soft spot for old Spike, and it was lovely to see those two kids being so very much in love. Then in walks Angel. Not five minutes after leaving Spike, how does our vampire slaying harlot say hello to Angel? By sticking her tongue down his throat and 'basking' (her term) in his fabulous presence! What a tramp! I was grievously offended, and most indignant on behalf of my old mate William the Bloody.
But enough of that. Besides, Tash (who seems to be on the side if the Angels) reckons I only got pissed off because I've got a crush on Spike. I don't -- but I wouldn't mind scoring a leather coat the same like his...
What really got my goat was the grand finale, the ultimate showdown between good and evil, the culmination of seven years worth of complex story arcs and character development, the scene that let us in on what it was all about. What do we get? Metaphysical denouements of the nature of the universe? A fusion of the moral polarity so integral to the 'buffyverse', leaving a world where everyone can just be happy and get on with life? (Boring, I know, but it seems to be so many people's idea of nirvana.) Proof (or otherwise) of the existence of some supreme being?
I'll tell you what we get. We get a frickin montage showing us that girls can play baseball too. Yay. Girl power. I mean, really: what the fuck? Isn't that what the whole damn series was about? Seven years of showing girls rising from humble beginnings to become serious kickers of butt and holders of esoteric wisdom, and the best the producers can come up with for the ending is a cheesy little homily on girl power? We know girls can kick butt -- that's why the show's called Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead of Buffy the Big-haired Mall Rat. I felt like a three-year-old having to have it explained to him that Aesop's fables aren't just stories, but also have moral lessons not-so-cunningly woven into their plots.
I'm very disappointed.

Night Skating

I love skating at night. I just skated home from our birthday bbq, and I'd completely forgotten the rush that you get skating in almost total darkness. It's kind of zen, if that doesn't make me sound like too much of a wanker. During the day, you're constantly, automatically scanning the track ahead of you. If there's a nasty little gravel patch up ahead, you've registered it and subconsciously planned some evasive action well before it becomes a real threat. You're aware of upcoming surface changes, you can see all the cracks and bumps -- basically, you can plan ahead.
At night, all that changes. You have to feel every change almost before it happens to be able to react fast enough to deal with it. It's kind of like that scene where Luke Skywalker is training with his lightsaber on the Millenium Falcon and he's got the blast shield down: if you wait to the point where you can consciously think 'Hey, that feels like a big enough chunk of gravel under my left skate to chock my wheels completely, better shift weight to the other--oops! Seed pods, shift back again--' then you'll be faceplanted and painting the pavement with skin before you can say 'When did they dig up that patch of asphalt for the new drain?'. You have to be your skates. You have to be one with them. And you have to do it all while you're pumping it so hard that you're lungs are screaming and even if it were daylight you wouldn't be able to see for the sweat blinding your eyes. I love it.

My apologies if all this comes across as a total toss, but I had a long, boring day after too many other long, boring days that I would rather have spent hanging out with Tash and Iola,
and my skate home kind of brought me back to life.

Happy Birthday!

It's Tash's birthday today. I love Tash very much. Happy birthday Tash.

And that's about all I'm going to say about that, lest I get all soppy and sentimental and anyone reading this hurls their lunch. I'd hate to have that on my conscience.

Arrrrrrrr

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Hurrah!
When I first came across ITLPD a few years ago, I was pretty excited. I was unleashing 'Aaaarrrrs' and 'Shiver me timbers' and 'Pieces of eight' all over the place. But then I thought it through a little further. Why was I conforming to these stereotypical perceptions of the vocabulary of a seventeenth or eighteenth century pirate?
For one thing, if I were to be a pirate, I'd want at the very least to be a pirate Captain, if not an honest-to-God Pirate King, with his own secret island fortress and all that funky stuff. Now here's something that most people don't really think about when it comes to the job description of a Pirate King: you actually need to be quite well educated. Navigation, logistics, tactics -- these things aren't instinctive, they need to be learned. Your average Pirate King is probably more likely to say something along the lines of 'Gosh, I can't wait for someone to invent a reliable and portable timepiece so I can accurately calculate both latitude and longitude' than 'Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.'
Imagine the job interview. You're up before a panel of the Brethren of the Coast. One of them says 'So, Captain Fergal. We'd like to address selection criteria number three now, if we could. Perhaps with a hypothetical? Let's say that the construction of your island fortress has fallen two months behind schedule. The stone masons' guild is striking for a bigger beer ration, you're still waiting for your black powder shipment to clear Jamaican customs, and in just two weeks a convoy of fat Spanish merchantmen will be sailing the trade route three hundred nautical miles to the south. Half of your ships are still careened with bad cases of shipworm, and the Royal Navy has just put a price of 10000 guineas on your head. What do you do?'
Wouldn't sound terribly professional to reply with 'Well keelhaul me for a landlubber if ye ain't the scurviest bunch of bilge rats I've ever clapped eyes upon. Where's that thrice-cursed rum? Bring me a saucy wench!' now, would it?
So maybe as I observe ITLPD this year, I'll leave all the yo-ho-hoing to my deckhands, and find someone to discuss the perils of employing locals to do the plumbing in one's island hideout with over a nice cup of tea.

No Sleep Til Bedtime

It's nearly two o'clock in the morning. Tash is crashed out with Iola spread-eagled across her chest, and I'm sitting here with a glass of wine that I'm pretty keen to finish before I collapse in a dead heap and sleep the clock 'round.
I love Iola to pieces. She's without a doubt the best thing that's ever happened to me, bar none. But I gotta tell ya, sometimes it's hard work.
She's usually pretty good when it comes to kipping out at a relatively civilised hour, but tonight she just wanted to party. I've spent the last couple of hours singing to her, which was supposed to put her to sleep, but instead seemed to spark this little flame in her eyes that said 'put another coin in the jukebox, baby.'
So tomorrow morning (later this morning?) she'll open her eyes and shoulder up to her usual stool at the NPR Milkbar; I'll wake up at the sound of her voice, she'll go back to sleep for a few hours, and I'll stay up and try to be functional.
Rock on Iola.

This IS Art, Tina

So I've always wanted to travel the world, and I guess I've done more traveling than most by now, but I've always felt a vague emptiness, a sort of hollow feeling, like I was just going through the motions for no particular reason. Well, now I've found it. My tag. My hook. My reason for wanting to bum around the globe just generally looking at weird shit and not necessarily achieving anything much in particular.

I want to do a comprehensive survey of crap art. Especially crap art executed by the owner/s of the sorts of lodging and eating establishments where such art is more often than not found.

Here's a couple of examples. One is fairly run-of-the-mill crap. It's a classic example of the topless island girl designed to faintly titillate middle-aged white tourists and give a vaguely Gaughinesque vibe of tropical raunchiness to the room. Why did I like it? It was in a hotel room in Tete Batu. This is in the hills of Lombok. The place is so resolutely Islamic that you can't buy a beer, and there's just no way you're going to be chilling by the pool with a dusky native maiden clad only in a grass skirt and a sultry smile.

The other two are quite special. Both are from the Butterfly Farm in Batchelor, NT. The mermaid takes up the entire wall of the bathroom -- quite a sensory assault. She pales, though, next to the main wall of the master bedroom. A viking ship stirringly sets sail into a lurid sunset, embarking on a voyage of who-knows-what feats of derring-do and skullduggery. A particularly nice touch (unfortunately offstage in the photo) is the round wall light that becomes the full moon in the mural. Why did the owner of an inland tourist establishment in the wet/dry tropics of northern Australia feel that mermaids and vikings would put the punters in the mood? I don't know, but I love it.

Shanghaied

I don't know why, but some atavistic remnant lurking in my otherwise totally snag-like personality feels like a bit of a girly man after that last post. So here's a picture of a fuck-off industrial catapult I just made for a friend's eleven year-old. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to me, some petty, bureaucratic minded sod has made these things illegal since I was eleven myself. So any law enforcement officials viewing this page should rest easy in the knowledge that the weapon of minimal destruction in question has been disposed of as thoughtfully as all the signatories to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty have disposed of their little toys.

Pass the Cheese, Please

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS DANGEROUSLY HIGH CHEESE LEVELS. IT SHOULD NOT BE VIEWED BY ANYONE SUFFERING FROM SCHMALTZ ALLERGIES, OR ANYONE WHO ALREADY HAS A HIGH BLOOD/CORN CONTENT.



When Tash was pregnant with Iola, I read everything. I read new-age books on natural pregnancy--most of which were quite irritating, although they did tend to have amusing illustrations (every man with afros and big beards, every woman with long, straight, centre-parted hair and the idyllic facial expression of a lotus-chewing brood cow). I read textbooks on gynaecology and obstetrics, which were often very disturbing because (for obvious reasons) their focus was on all the dire and dreadful things that could go wrong during pregnancy and labour. I read Kaz Cooke and Sheila Kitzinger cover to cover. I read books on how to be the perfect dad. I studied massage techniques for labour and learned a range of origami-like nappy folds. I knew about cradle cap and proper breastfeeding style. I spent hours reading through every additional info link on birth.com.au. I knew perhaps a little too much about normal changes to the colour and consistency of a baby’s excreta over the first two weeks of life. I was au fait with SIDS risk factors, and I could discourse knowledgably on the relative merits of Bugaboo versus Phil & Teds prams (not that I could afford either of them). I knew about lotus births and induction techniques, caesarian procedures and contraction timings, labour stages and apgar scores.

Basicallly I was a little smarty-pants know-it-all who thought he had this whole baby thing pretty much covered. If you had to take tests on this stuff, I would have nailed them.
But you know what? When you’re actually holding your baby, when you can feel her skin on your skin and her little heart beating, when those little blue eyes look up into yours, all of that goes away. You don’t give a shit about apgar scores and physiological development. All that matters is that this is your baby, and you love her and want to cuddle her and protect her and try your damnedest to give her a good life. The first time you kiss your little girl and she smiles at you, you’re hers for life.

Iola. Yay!!!

And now ladies and gentlemen, here by popular demand, fresh from her command performance at Nanna's House of Blues, it is my very great pleasure to present to you, for your education, edification and entertainment, the one, the only, the littlest pirate, Iola Persephone!!!!!

[yay, yay, clap, clap, whistle, whistle etc etc]

Maybe someday...

Okay, so if I'm going to do this facebook thing, then I guess I might as well go the whole hog and go back to the blogging thing I was flirting with last year. But today I'm sick, so all I'm going to do is try and import the old beast into facebook. Stand by for fascinating, informative and amusing rants. Maybe.