ME: Could you fight off a mountain troll?
NICK: I could try.
ME: O . . . kay.
NICK: You can’t ask for more.

Of course, as a feminist, I should be able to fight off my own mountain trolls. But since I can’t even remove a spider from a bathtub, I’m sanguine about my chances with a troll.

I consider this an oversight of epic proportions. In fact, I suggested devoting a blog post to the movies he’d never seen, but he felt this would be embarrassing. I felt this was an exaggeration, since—as I pointed out—the blog is read exclusively by people who’ve met him, but he still resisted.

But I still think a man with two degrees in Cultural Studies should have seen Apocalypse Now.

Of course, he insists he’s seen The Godfather, both Psycho and Rear Window, and Citizen Kane.

In fact, he thinks he’s seen the latter many times, which I think is unlikely, but he should know best.

On the down side, he’s never seen a Jean Cocteau film, which puts me ahead in the strange, competitive world that is our relationship.

(Although I note, from looking at Amazon.com, that it’s hard to find Jean Cocteau films on DVD, and that they’re immensely expensive. Still, there’s a Criterion edition of Beauty and the Beast, which might be interesting.)

I have a feeling that I should have been able to think of more films that Nick should have seen—to thus embarrass him further—but my inspiration ran out with Cocteau.

My family have never done anything special for Mother’s Day, although I believe my sister usually sends flowers these days. Nick’s family do, so we go and buy something pretty and then have a nice family meal.

But every year, the thing I’m most thankful for is that I no longer work as a waitress. Mother’s Day was always the most awful night of the year for waitresses.

The Chinese restaurant I worked at years ago went all out for treats for the customers on special occasions: candied fruit and vegetables for Chinese New Year (I liked the peanuts, which my boss told me would increase fertility. When I expressed a hope that they certainly wouldn’t, she said, “But you won’t have a baby: you’re not married.” Oh . . . yeah, that’s right.); roses for Valentines Day; chocolate eggs for Easter; and buckets and buckets of multi-coloured carnations for Mother’s Day—which arrived in huge bunches, and had to be split into small arrangements and attractively wrapped in cellophane. By the waitresses.

That was the start of it.

Then we’d be booked out for weeks in advance, but would still have to argue with customers about the availability of tables, even though there were only twelve tables in the entire place.

Then there’d be the angry walk-ins, who couldn’t understand why they couldn’t have a table on the busiest night of the year, even though the entire restaurant was packed and they weren’t prepared to wait.

Ah, Mother’s Day—I’m so glad I won’t ever spend another one of you asking, “And what would you like to drink, sir?” and getting patted on the bottom.

Still, I suppose it’s not the worst thing that ever happened in my waitressing years. That would be either the time a man punched out a window because he’d been waiting too long—my fault how, exactly?—or the time a customer hired, without warning us, a stripper for his friend’s 50th birthday.

We had a “no shoes, no shirt—no service” policy.

Maybe we should have made that “no shoes, no shirt, no bra—no service.”

And the friend wasn’t that impressed, either.

Well, you have to start a new tradition somewhere.

Nick and I have had difficult couple of days, so we decided to hit the tequila.

(Of course, once we made that decision, I’d already had half a bottle of wine, hence the title of this post. Nick is dancing to Hunters and Collectors as I type.)

We’ve just been listening to up-beat music and generally chilling out. (And if my 17-year-old students hadn’t already convinced me I was old, my unironic use of the phrase “chilling out” would be all the evidence I need.)

But Nick was also poring over iTunes, which led to the following conversations:

NICK: Scarlett Johanssen’s new single is being previewed. You know I have to listen to that.
ME: Count me out. Her rack’s not that good.
NICK: It kind of is.

He’s right—but I still couldn’t be bothered.

But later:
NICK: I can’t judge whether that was good or not.
ME (from the back verandah, where I was having a cigarette): What?
NICK: It’s a cover of a Tom Waits song.
ME: What?
NICK: Seriously. It’s a whole album of Tom Waits covers.
ME: Really? Even Tom Waits could barely get away with a whole album of Tom Waits songs.

Game One: Smack talk
During Wii Bowling, Nick comments on the fact that I have better bowling stats than he does:

NICK: Treena . . . pro.
ME: Did you just call me what I think you called me?
NICK: It’s a compliment.
ME: Pardon?
NICK: It’s just means you’re good at the game . . . and they pay you money for it.

That comment cost me a spare.

It also prompted my desire to, as Nick puts it, live-blog our Wii Sports competition. It’s not real live-blogging, but I am typing it as it happens.

Of course, the sensor bar has been moved, which is what I blame for my 50-odd point deficit.

I suppose the plus side to that loss is that I lost my “pro” status, so at least there’ll be no more ambiguous compliments.

Game Two:
NICK: That’s some weak sauce, young Nick.

See, everyone talks about themselves in third person. It’s normal. Totally.

Nick claims he’s not doing as well this game, which I blame on his years in Australia; it’s never that the opposition just played better, is it? Nope, he claims he’s “lost his mojo already,” which is strangely sad.

That’s probably why he’s cheating, sitting in my way for my next shot on the grounds that his feet hurt. On the other hand, he is getting a lot of difficult splits, while I’m getting spares and strikes.

COMPUTER (off Nick’s shot): Nice spare!
ME: That wasn’t a nice spare; it was a weak spare.
NICK: Spare me.

Oddly, I beat Nick comprehensively, but still didn’t regain my “pro” status. Still, at least I’m spared old jokes (except the bad puns I make myself).

Game Three:
Nick seems to have got his mojo back, and all I can manage are spares, despite the tried-and-true method of shouting “Fall over!” at the pins. I might have to challenge him to golf.

On the plus side, Nick has the most hilarious bowling action ever. Still, he wins—and I move further from my pro status. Golf it is.

Especially since the computerised bowling spectators boo gutter balls, which is intensely rude and rather off-putting.

Golf:
Hole 1 goes to me, with a rather neat par—if I say so myself—even including the fact that I stuffed a practice swing and cost myself a stroke.

But Nick insists that I mention that he wouldn’t have ended up with a triple bogey if I hadn’t distracted him at a key moment, which meant a 4.6 yard putt ended up sending his ball back onto the fairway.

And all in the comfort of our living room!

The golf crowd are much more polite than the bowling-alley guys.

Hole 2’s a tie, both pars.

But Hole 3’s an awful par 5 dogleg and Nick ends up behind a computer-generated tree, so we’ll see.

ME: I think I’m in the rough.
NICK: You always look good to me.
ME: No, I mean . . . never mind.

He’ll regret that when my birdy assures me victory. Really, once he admits that I’m better at Wii Sports than he is, I can stop boring people with my blog entries on, to paraphrase Dilbert, a computer simulation of a game that’s almost a sport.

But I don’t see him making that concession any time soon.

In fact, he wants to play again tomorrow. If he smacktalks me again—he’s just gone into the Wii newsfeed to gloat “Bowling pro status lost. Oh, dear”—we might just have another blog entry.

Nick and I have been watching 30 Rock, which led to the following conversation.

ME: You really fancy Tina Fey, don’t you?
NICK: Yep.
ME: But she’s nothing like me!
(Long pause.)
NICK: I love all humanity!
ME: The correct answer is ‘No, honey, she’s exactly like you.’
(Pause of about ten minutes.)
NICK: And you both wear glasses.

Sure, anyone who knows me will suspect a degree of hypocrisy in my answers. (Did that coughing noise sound suspiciously like “Lord of the Rings,” or was that just me?)

But in my defense, I am really tired.

I’ve just seen an advertisement for Zoo Weekly—or perhaps Zoo Magazine; I neither know nor, at this point, care—that showed the offices festooned with women in their underwear swinging on swingsets.

I realise I’m not the demographic for this magazine, but I still couldn’t stop myself turning to Nick and saying, “They do realise that we make up more than half of the population, don’t they? And that we have the franchise?”

Nick points out that the demographic is men who experience a certain sense of unease when faced with the facts I mentioned, but still.

Half the world’s population, here—we no longer need to work in our underwear.

I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, which is convenient, given that the new movie is coming out this year.

I can, however, think of a very long list of extremely good things about it.

1. Possibly the two most parodied moments in movie history, excepting perhaps half of 2001: A Space Odyssey: the original raid on the temple of the golden idol and the abortive sword fight in the Cairo markets.

2. Karen Allen. Man, I can’t express how happy I am to see that she’s going to be back in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. She was Indy’s only non-irritating sidekick, if we don’t count his father as a sidekick. No offense to Kate Capshaw; she’s a stunningly beautiful woman, but her nightclub singer was intensely irritating.

3. Spy monkey—I love the idea of using a monkey as a spy, even if the monkey is wearing a little waistcoat, and plan to put spy monkeys to work in my own, far-distant, intergalactic empire. I’m always sorry when the spy monkey falls victim to his master’s perfidy.

4. Alfred Molina. Sure, he dies about five minutes into the movie, but I do love him even when he’s evil. That’s why he made such a good Doc Ock.

5. John Rhys-Davies. Sure, he’s playing his natural height here—which negates some of the fun I got out of watching him as a dwarf in Lord of the Rings—but . . . well, see Alfred Molina above, minus the comment on villainy.

6. I’m slightly ashamed of this, but I secretly rather like Karen Allen’s wardrobe in the movie. Not the awful dress that the French archaeologist buys her as a prelude to seduction, but definitely the funky if high-waisted red trousers she’s strolling around the Cairo markets in. I even rather like her “what to wear when you’re stuck running a Sherpa bar in Nepal” chic.

7. Indy manages to keep his job without, apparently, assessing any student work. I am somewhat in awe of this.

I will say this, though: his work does look far more exhausting than marking end-of-semester exams has ever been. Given a choice, I’d probably rather mark than engage in an extended chase sequence with Nazis.

8. Unlike most teachers presented on television and in the movies, Indy seems to have a vague understanding of time management. Most of the teachers you see on television seem to be halfway through a lesson every time the bell rings, which has always seemed like poor practice to me.

9. In his lesson, Indy has to pause halfway through writing the word “neolithic” to make sure he’s spelling it right. I’m so relieved that I’m not the only person that that happens to.

10. I’ve always enjoyed the moral ambiguity of what Indiana does. While I’m in sympathy with the idea that cultural artifacts should be in museums when the alternative is placing them in the hands of private collectors, there’s a neo-colonialist aspect to raiding the tombs of the world to increase the collections of American museums. It’s an ambiguity that perhaps rests more in the eyes of the viewer than in the mind of the move maker, but I enjoy it nontheless.

Of course, in the Indiana Jones movies, the collector is Adolf Hitler, which does tend to ameliorate much of that ambiguity.

11. I’m not in favour of Indy’s homicidal approach to the problem of snakes, but I do have a certain sneaking sympathy with it, as long as they’re prop snakes—I’m not keen on snakes myself.

(I’m less keen on spiders, though, which is why—while sorry for my brother—I’m quite relieved that his enormous pet funnel web has gone to a happier place. I was always a little concerned that she’d get out of her tank and I’d find her in my bed one Christmas. I mean, really—does this look like the sort of thing that one should keep as a pet?)

12. This movie gave me one of my most valuable life lessons to date: never engage in fisticuffs anywhere near a spinning propeller.

(The other valuable one is “never kiss a monkey with a cold sore,” which is good advice regardless of who has the cold sore, you or the monkey. Oddly, though, people give me very strange looks when I impart this advice.)

13. The gunfight scenes in this movie, though, always remind me of an exchange from Red Dwarf:

LISTER: Why do we never meet anyone nice?
CAT: Why do we never meet anyone who can shoot straight?

14. Because the only Germans in the film are Nazis, and therefore unsympathetic, I like the subtle dig at legendary German engineering in the way that bits of the Mercedes Benz truck keep falling off while Indy’s trying desperately not to end up underneath it.

15. I realise that Marian’s a rough-and-ready kind of woman, but that’s a lovely satin frock she’s wearing on board ship, and she should know that blood doesn’t come out of satin. Let Indy tend his own wounds.

16. Even though Indy has a far more aggressive approach to his discipline than any archaeologist I’ve ever met, he does have at heart a love and reverence for the objects that he pursues and studies. He manages to be both scholar and action hero, which is a rare combination.

17. The final scene with the opening of the Ark of the Covenant clearly inspired Mike Mignola’s construction of Hellboy’s origin story.

18. Although the special effects don’t seem so cutting edge these days, I still find the melting Nazi one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen.

19. I would desperately like to know what’s in all those tens of thousands of crates in the warehouse where the U. S. government store the Ark. Are they all religious and occult artifacts? Because that would be awesome.

Have I missed anything?

I haven’t blogged for while, excepting the short pieces I just uploaded, largely because I’ve been taking advantage of the long weekend to have a bit of a break—the first time in seven weeks I haven’t had assessment to mark. W00t!—and partly because I’ve mostly spent that time rewatching Veronica Mars season two, and I have nothing to say about that, except that I miss the show.

But I have been reading something recently—Kerry Greenwood’s Death by Water, her fifteenth Phryne Fisher mystery, according to Wikipedia. And it reminded me that somewhere along the line, I started to get really annoyed with this character.

Way back when I edited the book review section of a review journal, I never either published or wrote a hatchet job—and I don’t intend to do so now. It’s not Greenwood’s novels that I have a problem with; they’re enjoyable murder mysteries/period pieces.

But at some point, Phryne started ringing false for me.

I read Cocaine Blues and Flying Too High after finding them in a secondhand book shop many years ago—I don’t know how many years, but well after they were published. Wikipedia, frustratingly, offers alternate dates of 1989 and 1991 for the first book and I don’t have it on my shelf, so I’m not even sure when it was published. But I can’t have read it before my undergraduate years, which still makes it over a decade ago.

Back then, we were told that Phryne was the daughter of minor aristocracy: her father had been an unsatisfactory younger son, shipped out to the colonies, in traditional fashion, where he had lived in abject poverty until a couple of the people between him and the title died and he was whisked back as the now comfortably affluent heir.

I’ve always wondered why the colonial branch was so straitened, when Phryne’s own resources indicate that the baronetcy was an unusually wealthy one, but that’s not important.

The important point was that that back story made sense: Phryne hadn’t always been rich, but she was now. She enjoyed the money, but wanted something a little more exciting, and slipped into detection almost by accident. Not, perhaps, as convincing a back story as that of Hercule Poirot, ex-Belgian Police Force, or Miss Marple, an unusually intelligent person constrained by the late-Victorian restrictions on her gender, but it was plausible.

But at some point, it came to seem that Phyrne was capable of anything, at which point I started wondering about how the back story worked. Phryne’s years driving ambulances behind the lines in World War One, working as an artist’s model, and barely avoiding a career as a prostitute seemed to fill to short a gap.

I think it was around the time that I read Queen of Flowers that the character struck me as suddenly infallible. I’d not read all the books leading up to that one and those that I had read I hadn’t read in order, but in that book, Phryne managed to leap onto a stampeding horse—one of a herd of stampeding horses—as a result of her earlier experience in a circus, and it rang suddenly false for me.

It’s not as simple, I suspect, as describing the character as a Mary Sue. In fact, I don’t think she is a Mary Sue, because to me—although the definition might have shifted a little recently—the key point of a Mary Sue for me is a desire for wish fulfillment on the part of the author, and I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.

(Similarly, I note from the Wikipedia page on Mary Sues that Bella and Edward from Twilight have been read as Mary Sues, and I don’t think that’s entirely the case, either—although I suspect the author is partly fulfilling the perceived wishes of her readership, I still don’t think that’s quite how a Mary Sue character works.)

But Phryne is increasingly infallible, surviving drownings and being thrown over her horse’s head—something that, due the nature of the act, can kill accomplished fox hunters. And even if you find fox hunting morally repugnant, as I do, it does provide an extraordinary challenge to a participant’s horsemanship.

Unfortunately, for me, this increasingly infallibility brings with it a commensurate lowering in the amount of sympathy that I can generate for the character, because she seems less human. That’s not a problem with superheroes, but it is a problem here.

Call me old fashioned, but I enjoyed the old days, when Phryne changed lovers every book—before she became formalised in the slightly disturbing position of “concubine,” in her words, to a married man—and the outfits were lovingly detailed. Then I enjoyed both the mysteries and the period.

As it stands, the deumanising of the character means I can’t sympathise with her. And that effects my enjoyment of the depiction of 1920s Melbourne society and of the murders, and drives me straight back into the arms of Rex Stout.

The following conversation is even stranger than the one I just posted.

NICK: So, I thought I’d just cook the corn tonight, not the green beans. I’ll save those for tomorrow.
ME: But I need the green beans—they soak up vodka.
[Note: It is a long weekend. And, anyway, I’m onto wine now.]
NICK: Maybe vodka is made out of beans.
ME: I don’t think so—it’s a grain alcohol, I think. You know, made out of grain.
NICK: Like potatoes.
ME: Potatoes aren’t grain; they’re tubers.
NICK: It’s not a . . .
ME: If you say ‘It’s not a tuber,’ I will have to kill you.

Nick and I have had a number of strange conversations over the past few days, including one at the end of which, when I playfully suggested there were tensions in his band Thrice-Damned Fiend, he said to me, “Steady on there, Yoko”—a comment for which I still haven’t fully forgiven him.

But my favourite so far is this:

ME: What’s that strange rumbling noise?
NICK: The world—it quakes in my presence.
ME: How much vodka have you had?
NICK: Not as much as you.

He was right—but it was still a bit rude.

Nick’s given up on making me stop posting these conversations, so I’m going to continue them as an ongoing series—because, frankly, Nick and living with Nick are hilarious things, and everyone should get to enjoy them.

This one took place after Nick came back from buying dinner and was getting changed.

ME: (swearing for some reason.)
NICK: Don’t swear.
ME: What?
NICK: Don’t swear.
ME: (unable to keep myself from smirking.)
NICK: I’m just saying.
(Pause)
NICK: Bugger, I can’t get my shirt off. Help! It’s stuck! (Ripping sound.)

I’d be lying if I didn’t say my next action was to laugh and laugh.

If it makes it better, he didn’t rip his shirt badly. I just liked the lack of association between his assumption of authority and his inability to remove a shirt.

And it takes a fair bit to make me laugh on a day when I’m once again regretting getting my belly button pierced in my distant, barely rebellious teens.

No, is the short answer.

The episode we’re currently watching, though, is full of grammar jokes, which just makes me love it more.

We’re 29 minutes through the episode, and we’ve already had a reference to my favourite comeback to non-specific pronoun use—“She’s the cat’s mother”—as well as a tautology rant and a comment on conditional clauses.

But my favourite so far?

The irritating villain responds to the suggestion of space travel by sighing, “Oh, if only that was possible.”

At which point, the Doctor and I said simultaneously “If only that WERE possible.”

“Grammar nerds of the world unite” is a good slogan.

“Grammar nerds of the world celebrate your union by sharing your amusement at in-jokes embedded in the script of a cult sci-fi TV show” isn’t a slogan that will fit on a T-shirt, but it works for me.

Since the final episode of Robin Hood has just aired, it seems an appropriate time for a final post about the things that irritate me.

(Prior to that, though, I need to ask an important question: am I the only person who thinks the Children’s Nurofen advertisement with the winged babies is intensely creepy? I really hope not.)

But back to Robin Hood, and yet another list of improbabilities.

1. Kudos, Robin Hood, to bringing Alan a-Dale back into the fold. But wasn’t that storyline a little improbable? Come on, you know it was. I’ve never seen anyone change their core beliefs so rapidly in my life.

(Whoops, the Max-Walker-cons-the-Third-World advertisement is back on. It’s even creepier this time around.)

2. Speaking of Alan a-Dale, do you remember, Robin Hood creators, when I suggested that he was actually a really important person in the Robin Hood mythos?

Well, that goes double for Maid Marian.

Maybe triple.

I mean, I’m not an expert on the subject, but I don’t actually remember the source that you must be using here, the one where Marian exits the narrative in a shallow grave in the Holy Land. I’d be interested in reading that one, actually.

3. As a slightly connected point, I realise that I’ve been enthusiastic in a couple of posts about my strong desire for characters with whom I sympathise to get married, live happily ever after, and produce lovely babies.

But that desire for weddings? It’s somewhat ameliorated when the characters are hanging by their arm in the middle of a desert, and there isn’t a clergyman in sight.

4. Oh, and on that note? If you’d thought to add Friar Tuck to the cast earlier—as Nick and I have been complaining for two years—perhaps that wedding would have been legal.

Nick and I have been debating this issue since the episode aired, but we’re not sure whether Richard’s presence would have made the wedding legal—I know nothing about the religious climate of England in this period, but I assume it was Catholic, so would the king have had any ecclesiastical standing?

It doesn’t matter, because the show isn’t known for its historical accuracy and Richard didn’t take a role in the second ineffectual wedding, anyway—but it’s been intriguing us.

5. Almost all these points have related to the movement of characters, so here’s another one: Harry Lloyd is one of the shining lights of that programme, and if he isn’t in season three, I’ll be very irritated.

6. Taking my lack of knowledge about the period into account, I’m not a big fan of Richard the Lionheart—he seems, even for the times, as an overly masculine warmonger who paid little attention to his civic responsibilities.

But I never imagined he was as big a prat as this episode made him out to be. Perhaps he was rather too prone to taking long walks in the desert in the middle of the day? Mad dogs and Englishmen, they say.

Nick was also deeply annoyed by the “King Richard as a man of peace” angle.

7. I might be doing a disservice here to Richard’s equal-opportunity employment practices, but I’m also strongly suspicious that his right-hand man is called “Carter.” I realise that they introduced the character so that they could have an episode called “Get Carter,” but it just seems that “Carter” is too working class a name for the period.

8. I’ve just asked Nick what else annoyed us about the episode, and he reminded me of the fact that the Sheriff got away scot-free at the end, giving the entire episode an “I’ll get that wascally wabbit” vibe.

9. I strongly suspect that King Richard saying “We are Robin Hood” would actually represent a radical alteration to the English constitution.

But, really, it’s starting to feel like shooting fish in a barrel, if I can be excused the odd cliche. There is fun to be had out of the programme, if you can suspend your disbelief: maybe I should pour my energy into that from now on.

After a highly convivial Doctor Who night, Nick and I are both feeling a little tender. We were committed to another event today, but when we rang up to get directions we found that it had been cancelled.

So, with the unexpected gap in our schedules, Nick is planning on downloading more of the Sam and Max episodic video game, and I’m reading another Stephenie Meyer book.

(I should be finishing my marking, yes—but werewolves are more compelling right now.)

But the conviviality of last night might explain the following conversation, held while Nick was trying to put together a load of washing.

NICK: Once again, key T-shirts remain elusive.
ME: You just don’t have the skills. Treena has mad T-shirt-finding skillz. [Yes, I occasionally speak of myself in the third person. It’s perfectly normal. Shush.]
Pause
ME: I’m sadly domesticated. I don’t want mad T-shirt-finding skillz. I want mad ninja skillz.
NICK: Ah, well—you have to work for those.
ME: Hey! I worked for my T-shirt-finding skillz!

Still, you don’t get quite the same kudos for being able to regularly locate a Penny Arcade Photoshop Hero T-shirt as you do if you just flip out and kill people all the time, do you?