Articles in “Life, the Universe, and Everything”

Ear infections are horrible. The cold, as well as settling on my chest and giving me a racking cough, has led to a secondary ear infection: a middle-ear infection, no less. Why? I have assessment to mark!

Plus, driving with a raging cold and a burgeoning ear infection is not fun. Driving with a raging cold and a burgeoning ear infection when it’s also pouring with rain is even less fun.

I also find it terribly difficult to concentrate when I’m ill.

When the woman in the chemist recommended that I take some kind of probiotic in conjunction with the antibiotics, to prevent all sorts of unfortunate side effects that I won’t go into here because they’re actually quite horrible, I paid no attention whatsoever.

Partly, it was because she was recommending Inner-health Plus, and I despise their advertising almost as much as I despise Lynx advertising.

(No, that’s not fair: I despise Inner-health Plus advertising in the same way in which I despise Dodo Internet advertising. Seriously, Inner-health Plus, if you’re going to use a seesaw to show how your product “restores balance,” your last shot probably shouldn’t show all the weight resting on one side of the seesaw, you know? And Dodo? The slogan “Internet that flies” is really stupid when your company is named after a famously flightless bird.)

Partly, this was because the illness and the increasing pain in my ear had made me spacey—and the increasing pressure of the infection meant I could only really hear out of one ear, anyway.

But mostly it was because I was suddenly gripped by a terrible fear that “probiotics” and “antibiotics” might just cancel each other out, and I’d be left with this ear infection forever.

See, having someone else take you to the doctor’s isn’t just to stop you from running over pedestrians.

I know. I know. And I don’t have anyone to blame but myself.

Well, myself and a combination of the following:

• my parents visiting this week, which necessitates scrubbing out the spare room: it hasn’t been slept in since they visited last December for my graduation, and the dust levels were fairly bad—as you’d expect from a largely unoccupied room containing some thousand-odd books. It also contained the entire contents of the office that I had to give up last semester, so cleaning it wasn’t just cleaning it, but also involved finding space for eight years’ worth of office clutter. But I succeeded! Mostly. I still need to dust and vacuum.

• a hideous cold, which I suspect I caught from either the wizard or the other ranger at last weekend’s Dungeons and Dragons session—I don’t know which, so shall mutter mild imprecations directed at both of them until I feel better. [Slight update: the wizard blames the halfling, but I have my suspicions about the veracity of that.] In the between-mutter spaces, I shall panic about how I’m going to lecture tomorrow, and what the chances of infecting my students are.

• technically, the weekend’s Dungeons and Dragons session was another interruption to ordinary blogging activity, but it was such excellent fun that it doesn’t count.

• interrupted sleep patterns. I think I know, largely, what’s causing them, but last night’s bad night (I didn’t get to sleep until well after three a.m.) was down to this hideous cold’s first symptom, a sore throat beyond any that I have previously experienced. After spending hours trying to beat it into submission with hot tea and my other favourite sore throat remedy (hot water and honey with a tablespoon or two of vinegar), I eventually had to take Panadol—Panadol! for a sore throat!—so I could snatch some sleep.

So now I’m snuffling, feeling sorry for myself, and drinking enormous quantities of tea, but the tidying of the spare room has at least turned up some odd stuff on the shelves.

I see a real post in the future . . .

I’m only aware that it is Ada Lovelace Day thanks to The Memes of Production, but there’s not much I can contribute to a discussion of women in technology.

Women in literature, sure. But technology and I don’t talk much these days, not since I bought my Mac and stopped going to technology singles bars to chat to—really tortured metaphors.

Sorry about that.

I do know a little about Ada Lovelace, though—only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron. And that’s how I know her, really: I know a little of her contribution to mathematics and science, but I mainly know her in the shadow of the famous father whom she herself didn’t know.

And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

This has never been a link blog but here are some links about the woman herself for Ada Lovelace Day:

• her biography from the fascinating Biographies of Women Mathematicians.

• her page from Women in Science at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

• her Wikipedia page, if only because I admire a woman who can programme computers and look gorgeous in silver satin.

• a page on the Analytical Engine, with Ada’s own notes.

• and, for further reading (if you have access to a scholarly databases, anyway), why not throw Ada’s mother Annabella Milbanke into the mix, in Judith S. Lewis’s examination of mathematics and gender in the nineteenth-century British aristocracy.

Happy Day, Ada. I’m sorry I don’t know more about you and I haven’t followed in your footsteps, but, if it helps, I always thought your dad was a bit of a prat.

1. I’m being stalked by radioactive broccoli.

2. There’s a man here who says he’s Namor the Sub-Mariner and he’s here to view the kittens we advertised in the local paper.

3. A bomb just exploded in the living room.

4. Apparently, I’ve been elected Queen of all the monkeys, and I have to go and live on an island off the coast of Patagonia. On the plus side, I get a pension for life.

5. I’m thinking of becoming a cannibal, to cut down on the cost of groceries.

6. I adopted a giant panda. It’s called Beryl.

Unfortunately, I was just getting into the swing of it when he actually started responding.

Once you’ve purchased your Victorian Barbie from Harrison and Smythe, Toy Suppliers to Their Royal Majesties, then what do you need?

High-quality playsets and accessories, of course! Buy your Barbie the best accessories and social situations.

Charity Ken!

Pull a string and see Charity Ken hand an urchin a penny and simultaneously gesture the filthy object of charity away from him!

Sold separately:
Pompous Letter to an Expensive Periodical Explaining that Charity Stops the Working Classes From Helping Themselves
Port-Fuelled Diatribe in a Gentleman’s Club

Note
Gentlemen’s Club playset sold separately, but Harrison and Smythe will require proof of gender before selling this item.

Pompous Baronet Ken!

Comes with Monocle, Fetching Plaid Trousers, and Improbable Pectoral Development.

This item also comes with your choice of either Friedrich Nietzsche’s treatise on men and supermen, or a witty essay from G. K. Chesterton explaining that it’s one thing to accept that the aristocracy is richer and more attractive than us, but quite another to expect us to believe that they’re also wittier.

Barbie’s Dream Carriage!

Comes with Detachable Wheel, for arranging those convenient meetings with eligible single men away from the eyes of Victorian Barbie’s chaperone, and Faithful Hound.

Sold Separately:
Debonair, Cigar-Smoking Ken

Note
To the imaginative child, Faithful Hound may serve as either a means of safeguarding Victorian Barbie’s virtue until she is safely married and in receipt of handsome settlements, or as a symbolic representation of the hidden violence in nineteenth-century marriages. We also recommend purchasing Debonair, Cigar-Smoking Ken’s Private Rod accessory pack.

Barbie’s Loveless Marriage of Convenience Playset!

Comes with two dolls: Beautiful But Ambitious Victorian Barbie Who Will Regret Her Decision When It Is Too Late, and Extremely Wealthy But Unattractive Ken.

Sold separately
Extensive Parisian Wardrobe
Slowly Eroding Sense Of Self Worth
Faithless But Physically Attractive Lover
Humiliating And Extended Appearance Before The Divorce Courts
Act Of Parliament

Note
Older children may wish to choose one of two accompanying playsets:
Death By Arsenic, The Agony Of Which Not Even The Romance Of Suicide Can Alleviate
or
Suicide Under A Freight Train At A Russian Railway Station

Stepping out of the pages of the popular weekly fiction journals, Victorian Barbie lets you reenact extravagant emotional scenes from your favourite melodramas right in your own nursery—as long as Nursie isn’t watching, of course!

Choose from these options, available now:

Seduced But Penitent Barbie!

Available in kneeling position only. Buy with the Barbie’s Deathbed playset, and create your own tableaux vivant.

Sold separately:
Stern, Unforgiving Ken
Symbolic Blasted Oak

Neurasthenic Barbie!

Press a button on her back, and watch her faint away!

Sold separately:
Attentive Swain Ken
Chair
Emotionally Traumatic Letter
Restorative Glass of Wine

East-End-Theatre Ballet-Dancer Barbie!

Comes with tambourines, rosettes for her slippers, and an entirely inappropriate amount of cleavage!

Sold separately
Horrible Accident With The Unscreened Gaslights During The Christmas Pantomime
Stockinette For Ineffectual Treatment Of Third-Degree Burns
Agonising Death Some Six Weeks Later

Botanist Barbie!

Comes with attractive flower-collecting outfit and flower.

Sold separately:
Nervous Breakdown On Realising That Science Is No Fit Subject For a Lady

And don’t forget to visit Harrison and Smythe for all your Victorian Barbie playset and accessory needs.

My Gmail programme runs unobtrusive banner advertisements across the top of the page.

Sometimes, these frustrate me beyond measure, as when, on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, I was offered “fantastic” deals on “Impeach Obama” T-shirts. Clearly, my e-mail programme—which, if it were sentient, would know me as well as anyone, being privy to most of my everyday communication—doesn’t have the faintest idea about my political leanings. It probably doesn’t care, either.

Sometimes they bewilder me, as when they declared that dictionary.com’s “Word of the Day” was “obscure,” which really isn’t that (forgive me) obscure a word.

But today they’ve annoyed me. Not much, just a mild degree of annoyance.

Today, I have a quote of the day from Charles Kettering: “Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.”

Well, no. I’d say that’s probably true.

But, Charles Kettering, holder of over three hundred patents, man responsible for the development of Freon and the first practical coloured paints for mass-produced cars (to paraphrase Wikipedia), they do quite frequently tax the items that help us to think more broadly, more deeply, and more intensely.

Look, for example, at the fact that paperback books cost a small fortune now, compared to their prices before the introduction of the GST—after which they rose by considerably more than ten percent, I might add.

And it’s nothing new: think of the Taxes on Knowledge (not the best link, but good on dates), which increased the prices of papers carrying political content well beyond the reach of any but the well-to-do, and which existed for over one hundred years.

(So when you see an inexpensive Victorian journal telling you that it’s “A Weekly Journal of Science, Arts, and Literature,” it’s not telling you what is contains, it’s telling you what it doesn’t contain: no religion or politics, and therefore not taxable.)

So they may not be able to levy a tax explicitly on thought, though it wouldn’t surprise me if they tried.

But they can certainly levy taxes on those objects and institutions that facilitate, enrich, or inspire thoughts.

So stop being fatuous, Gmail’s Quote of the Day.

The saga started, as you know, with the disappearance of my fabulous tweezers.

Then my tweezers returned.

And I thought then that the gecko insurrection movement might have gone underground, or that, perchance, they were abandoning their revolutionary plans.

But, no.

Because I’ve just been in the bathroom.

And my fabulous tweezers are still there, but one of the other two pairs has disappeared now.

So perhaps the return of the fabulous tweezers was a sympathetic gesture, a kindness from the small lizards to the humans they are planning to overthrow.

But, clearly, they still need tweezers to carry out their plans—whatever those plans might be.

(This, incidentally, is the one-year anniversary of Circulating Library: I wrote my inaugural post on the 13th of February last year. So the fact that this, my 513th post, is about my revolutionary geckoes, is a nice encapsulation of the way the blog has expanded its boundaries in the last twelve months.)

I have found my fabulous tweezers. On the kitchen windowsill.

Now, that’s just odd. I use the kitchen windowsill to store all sorts of things, not least my cigarettes. And I’m sure the tweezers weren’t there when I grabbed a packet of cigarettes yesterday.

There’s only one plausible solution.

The geckoes have clearly worked out how to lift the lid of my laptop and, since the computer is not password protected, have been reading the blog, and have discovered that their plans for an insurrection have been rumbled.

(Or, I suppose, the possums could be telepathic as well as telekinetic.)

Now it’s only a matter of figuring out whether they’ve returned the tweezers out of a sense of “Fly, all is discovered!” or whether they’re trying to lull me into a false sense of security.

Well, that and wondering why they haven’t returned my cheese slicer, as well.

I came back from grocery shopping this afternoon, and noticed that the possum was sleeping under the floorboards again, but in a different position.

Now, I’m not one to waste the opportunity to demonstrate that the wildlife under my floorboards isn’t actually dead:

Then the chair I was standing on to take the photograph exploded.

This chair:

That wasn’t the most pleasant thing that’s happened to me all day, I must say. Nick took this picture, because the chair and I are no longer on speaking terms.

Then I noticed I could take an equally cute picture of the possum from another angle, an angle in which you can see that they’ve pulled some of the insulation up to use as a pillow:

Nobody can excuse me of being unable to see the silver lining.

I’m still working on the corrections (but I think I’ve managed to make the weakest section work with the whole argument now, so I’m happy), but I do want to mention something odd.

I have a fabulous pair of tweezers. That’s not odd in and of itself, of course. Everyone needs a good pair of tweezers.

I also have an inadequate pair of tweezers, which I’ve never bothered throwing out.

I noticed this morning that my fabulous tweezers have disappeared from their accustomed place on the bathroom shelf. That’s also not that odd: tweezers have a tendency to wander around the house and bathroom.

But in their place is a pair of tweezers I’ve never seen before in my life.

Now, that is odd. Nick, surely, is not the type to buy a new pair of tweezers. So where did this new pair come from? Why do I now have two pairs of inadequate tweezers instead of one inadequate and one fabulous pair?

Why is life so frequently surreal?

Or do I simply need to sleep more, get out in the fresh air occasionally, and stop drinking so much coffee?

(And find my tweezers.)

I have no real update this evening, since I am entertaining my father-in-law to dinner, but I feel the need to share, from Wondering Willow’s blog, this absolutely hilarious photograph of my younger nephew.

His mother claims that there’s no caffeine in what he’s drinking, but who would actually believe that, given this photograph?

(Secretly, I believe. But only a little and through force of habit.)

I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone who has ever read this blog before that I find advertising always confusing and frequently grotesquely offensive.

But I’m seeing more and more ads at the moment, due to thoroughly enjoying watching Australia lose the cricket to South Africa: I normally mute or ignore ads where I can, but it’s never seemed worth it for a one-advertisement break between overs.

So I’ve been watching the smug prat in the Mitsubishi 4WD splattering inoffensive people going about their everyday business with water, mud, and dust, and then grinning about it.

And I’ve been watching the Johnny Walker ads, which always astonish me, because it seems as though their tagline is “It’s amazing what you’ll find yourself doing when you’re ratted.” (My favourite was the one they did a few years ago with Christopher Walken—I think it was Walken, anyway—where the subtext was, essentially, “I always need to get totally off my nut before I can bring myself to step on stage.”)

But the ones that are really driving me nuts at the moment are the Solo ads.

I know that Solo ads are dependent on a particular form of machismo: a selling position that relies on recognisable codes of homosociality and male physical strength, also seen in flavoured-milk and beer ads.

Fine: well and good. I have no problem with that, though it won’t make me buy low-fizz, lemon-flavoured soft drink.

But this new two-part one with the man making the $1000 bet with his mates? I can’t figure this one out. I simply can’t comprehend how it seems ideal to construct an ad around Andrew Symonds—who, let’s face it, is not the most advertising-friendly figure in Australian cricket at the moment—viciously body-checking a complete stranger and then smirking at him.

Add the fact that the complete stranger is cross-dressing, and you add a new, highly unpleasant subtext to the ad.

It seems to me at best thoroughly mean spirited and at worst open to accusations of something far more invidious and dangerous. It strikes me as doubly odd, since Solo ads used to be banal, rather than out-and-out awful.

Perhaps it’s the consequence of adding a cricketer to the mix? We can call it the Max Walker blood-diamond syndrome.

Of course, the blog itself isn’t a year old until February, but thank you all for your reading and assiduous commenting in 2008.

I don’t have any exciting plans for 2009 yet, but I will be live-blogging the most recent Doctor Who Christmas special when the ABC airs it in a month, and I’m thinking of live-blogging the previous three seasons of Doctor Who after that. Or at least starting on it before teaching starts.

What say you all? Fancy talking about the first three seasons of Doctor Who?

Yes, yes: I know that tagline more properly belongs to the Swedish Mafia, but it’s thematically appropriate.

One present this Christmas was a lamp. A gorgeous red glass lamp from Sweden’s premier home-furnishing store.

As well as being gorgeous, it has been amusing me for days, because it has the most imperative instruction manual I’ve ever read.

(Yes: a lamp that comes in exactly two parts—base and shade—has an eight-page instruction manual telling me how to attach said two parts to one another. I love instruction manuals.)

It also comes with a helpful illustration:

I have a feeling that the expressions are the wrong way around: which expression would you be wearing while ringing Ikea to say, “Excuse me? Your table only has three legs. Why, yes: I do have my own allen key”?

But what really delights me is the primary instruction, which, in its English translation, reads as follows:

The external flexible cable or cord of this luminaire cannot be replaced; if the cord is damaged, the luminaire shall be destroyed.

Quick, Nick! Take the lamp out the back door—the Ikea Assassination Squad is here!