Articles in “Life, the Universe, and Everything”

We don’t, generally, because we’re a small family with a small pool of recipients—but the family has developed, by some strange sort of Christmas osmosis, the habit of adding what we call “the five-dollar present” to the main gift.

To add to that, my mother really enjoys anything that lights up and, for preference, makes an obnoxious noise. She the kind of woman who presses all the buttons in the toy section of Kmart.

(Something that Nick made me promise to stop doing, on pain of not coming shopping with me any more.)

So my brother and I wandered down to find something to add to Mam’s obnoxious Christmas orchestra, and found a jumping Santa playing the saxophone.

Brilliant, right?

Less brilliant that night, after my nephews figured out how to turn it on themselves—a jumping, singing Santa takes quite a while to become boring for a two-year-old and a four-year-old.

But they had fun singing, “Jump, jump, jump, ‘cause that’s what I do.”

It wasn’t until tonight that we heard the full lyrics:

Jump, jump, jump, ‘cause that’s what I do,
Jump, jump, jump, ‘cause I’m the Easter Bunny: it’s true.

Methinks Santa has been dipping a little too deep into the sherry.

Warning: Do not combine soft drinks and DVDs of Bill Bailey’s stand-up routines.

I know—it sounds like the ideal way to spend a horrifically muggy Saturday night.

But be warned: you may well find yourself aspirating Schweppes Traditional Lime while listening to a description of football players as “vain, illiterate, millionaire would-be rapists whose job it is to shepherd a piece of leather into an outdoor cupboard.”

This has, of course, never happened to me.

Ever.

I decided to put our Christmas tree up tonight, partly because I like to have it up early, or else we don’t have the advantage of it for a full month, and partly because I got a little squiffy and it seemed like a good idea at the time:

We’d never put up a tree before last year, but last Christmas I rebelled and decided I had to have a tree.

It’s a tiny little tree: according to the box, it’s something called a “Canadian Black Pine,” but I find that unlikely, since the tree also has sparkly silver and purple highlights—I’m quite certain there’s no tree in the wild, Canada or elsewhere, with that type of colouring.

But we are limited to a small tree by available space and it was this or a fluorescent pink one.

Frankly, though, the main reason I determined to put the tree up so early was because I adore my lights:

Falling in love with these lights at Tandy was a determining factor in deciding to buy a tree to display them on.

I don’t want to spoil their novelty as Christmas lights by displaying them on non-Christmas occasions, so putting them up a month before Christmas seems a fair compromise.

I’m too tired to update properly.

We spent half the morning struggling to get out to The Gap in the aftermath of yesterday’s insane storm; Nick’s mother was stuck there in a damaged house with no electricity and no phone, since she doesn’t have second sight and didn’t know to charge her mobile phone up before the suburb was stomped by what they’re calling the worst storm in twenty-five years.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

And we saw almost all of The Gap, since the suburb is essentially inaccessible once Waterworks Road is cut off—which it was, with both trees and downed powerlines. So we circled through the back streets first on one side of Waterworks Road and then on the other, until we finally found a way through.

We thought the storm was one of the most severe we’ve ever had, and all we got was heavy, heavy rain and some winds.

Apparently, the winds out at The Gap were 120-130 km per hour.

It looks, if you can visualise this, as though someone took a whippersnipper to the suburb.

Every road was littered with tree branches.

All the power was down until the next suburb. It’s still down now, more than twenty-four hours later.

Even the treeline on the hills was denuded—every piece of greenery for a seven-kilometre radius is circling down a storm drain somewhere. You can see houses that were invisible behind greenery yesterday: from my mother-in-law’s back verandah, you can see the nearby dam through the gaps where the trees used to be.

We saw trees with girths of one-and-a-half or two metres snapped off, or pulled from the ground by the roots.

We saw bits of corrugated-iron roofing twisted and wrapped around tree trunks, metal playground equipment lying in pieces, fences smashed into kindling.

I’ve never seen anything like it, not even when I was caught in the 2000 storm in Sydney, the damage from which took nine months to fully repair.

In a way, I’m glad not to have taken my camera out—it would have felt exploitative.

But I’m ever more glad I wasn’t there for the storm, that my mother-in-law’s house wasn’t more badly damaged, and that I don’t need to drive in those conditions again.

We have a house inspection coming up, and I’m determined that the study will be spotless for this one: the rest of the house usually is, but the study is often dusty and cluttered, since it’s the smallest room in the house and crammed full of papers and books.

And when house inspections come up right when I’m due to submit my Ph.D., or in the first week of teaching for the semester, or when I have a pile of marking towering over me, then I never have the chance to do the cleaning as thoroughly as I’d like.

But this time there’s no excuse: plus, my parents will be visiting in a fortnight, so if I give the house a thorough cleaning now, they’re less likely to run their fingers over the furniture when they arrive.

One of the spots I’ve always ignored was a pile of papers resting on an archive box (also, oddly, full of papers) sitting under my desk. It was a neat pile, but dusty and, as it turns out, full of unnecessary rubbish.

So I thought I’d clear all that out this afternoon. And, in addition to an enormous pile of papers from four or five years ago that were completely unnecessary, I found the following rather more unusual items:

1. An unopened pack of eight, bright-yellow, microwave-safe, extra-strong plastic plates. I have no idea what they were doing there. Seriously—no idea. Or how long they’d been there.

2. Two pictures of my brother: one from the newspaper back when he was still working as a chef and one from when he was a toddler, with the world’s most adorable cat sleeping on him.

The latter is such a gorgeous picture that I almost added to this post, but felt that if he ever reads the blog, he’d probably kill me.

3. The instructions for operating my stove-top kettle. That kettle is brilliant: it’s burnt orange and makes a grotesque screaming noise when it’s boiling. But we became frustrated with it—it took three times longer to boil than the electric kettle—and I think it’s now in the back of a cupboard somewhere. But the instructions are under my desk, for reasons unknown.

4. A name-tag from when I was still the Words editor for M/C Reviews—that was a while ago. I assume this was from a function at some point: I don’t recall just making up my own name-tag and wearing it around the house.

It’s possible, I suppose.

5. A picture of a sea otter cut out of the newspaper. Self-explanatory, really: who doesn’t adore sea otters?

6. Two photographs of my mother. She used to send us those wallet-sized pictures when she was still teaching and had annual photographs taken with her classes. I have no idea why they’re under my desk (though there’s at least one, and possibly two, more stuck to my fridge).

Still, at least she and my brother are equal.

7. Two Ginger Meggs cartoons to do with language—including one on gerunds that I should probably start using in lectures. If only they hadn’t gone that unpleasant yellowy colour that old newspapers always go . . .

8. Two (what is it with the pairs of things?) Lord of the Rings character cards that probably came out of chip packets. I can understand why I kept Aragorn, but I’m less certain why I kept Merry.

9. A print-out of the Geek Hierarchy, which—frighteningly—is starting to look less like a joke and more like a map of my life.

10. A receipt for the online purchase of a book called Their Chastity Was Not Too Rigid, which sounds like Victorian porn, but it actually a book about leisure activities in early colonial New South Wales.

No, honestly. It is.

1. Blowing up Star Destroyers is improbable, but fun.

2. Life in space comes complete with entirely irritating camera angles. This makes jumping in any environment or running along the edge of a platform on the Death Star fraught with danger.

3. There are many excellent reasons to spend all your money buying invulnerability (see point two). But the best reason is that when you’re playing as Bounty Hunter Leia, don’t quite get close enough to a lever to pull it down correctly, and instead drop a thermonuclear device, you don’t die.

Of course, that begs the question of who thought it would be unproblematic to have the actions “pull lever” and “drop thermonuclear device” controlled by the same button.

4. Ewoks run like girls.

I know, as a good feminist, I shouldn’t use phrases such as “run like a girl.” But it’s true: the female characters (which is to say, Leia) and the Ewoks have the same odd, splay-legged run, as though their knees flick out ninety degrees when they move.

I’m uncertain as to the significance of this, but I’m sure it can’t be good.

5. Girls are a bit rubbish.

Oh, sure, Leia has thermonuclear devices and can open bounty-hunter specific doors. That’s helpful. And if you play as Lando Calrissian and let Leia get too close to him, she’ll slap him in the face, which is frankly hilarious (if a little inconvenient when it happens in the middle of a battle).

But she’s not a great shot. And if you leave her standing around, she’ll put a hand on one hip, throw the other hip out, and stand there posing while stormtroopers try to kill you.

Of course, there aren’t any female Jedi characters, either, but I can’t blame the game for that—George Lucas doesn’t believe in female Jedis, either. (Oh, wait: there was that one in Revenge of the Sith, wasn’t there? The one who got cut down from behind without even having a chance to draw her lightsaber? Yep: I remember her.)

6. Nobody respects Darth Vader.

You’d think he’d be a force (ha! I crack myself up) to be feared throughout the galaxy. And at points, to get through stormtrooper-specific doors and to move objects that are only susceptible to the Dark Side, you have to play as Vader.

And the stormtroopers shoot at him.

The temptation to shout, “I am Darth Vader, your lord and master! Stop shooting me, you daft gits!” is overwhelming.

I think their helmets must affect their hearing, though, because they don’t stop.

7. Allies are more trouble than they’re worth. Really. They get in your way while you’re trying to kill stormtroopers (or when you’re jumping, and then you fall in a pit of lava and die, and there’s crankiness all round).

And then you catch them on the backswing with your lightsaber, and they die.

And, really, they deserve it for getting in the way. If they only stood behind me, it wouldn’t be a problem.

But . . .

Some of them make horrendous noises when they die. The Ewoks and R2D2 are particularly plaintive.

And who want to be the person who slices R2D2 into spare parts?

(Special Additional Lesson I Have Learned While Blogging About The Lessons I Have Learned Playing Lego Star Wars: when you microwave a cup of coffee, it doesn’t just make the coffee hot. It makes the cup hot, too. I feel this is a serious design flaw. Or, just possibly, my failure to realise this is a serious design flaw in me.)

8. Most spaceships have low ceilings, which makes it impossible to do the patented Jedi double jump then forward roll in mid-air.

This in turn negates any value in being a Jedi Knight, at all.

(Nick was showing me his barbarian character in Diablo yesterday, and pointing out how awesome the character was, since he can jump enormously high. “I can do that,” I said. “Plus, I have a lightsaber.”)

9. General Grievous really is a dreadful character. (A four-armed robot with four lightsabers? Gee, George Lucas, why not just give everybody lightsabers?)

Similarly, his level in Lego Star Wars is rubbish.

Possibly, I’m only saying that because it’s my least-successful level, even though it’s only one giant landing platform with some vague rocky landscaping around it. (And yet I can’t work all the way through it. It’s a blow to the ego, that’s for sure.)

But I prefer to blame it on Grievous. He’s no Jar Jar Binks, but still . . .

10. Few things on earth are quite as much fun as watching a Lego version of Darth Vader push boxes across checked surfaces. He really puts his little Lego back into it.

I make Vader do all the required box pushing.

He has to expiate his crimes somehow.

I’ve just seen the new advertisement for Cadbury Brunch Bars (fruity muesli bars with a chocolate coating).

In this ad., two cannons face one another.

An angel is shot from the cannon on the left.

A clown is shot from the cannon on the right.

I said to Nick, “Oh, this is going to end badly.”

Sure enough, the two collide in mid-air, explode into a cloud of white dust, and magically transform into a Cadbury Brunch Bar.

Then the tagline flashes up on the screen: “Goodness mixed with happiness.”

And I shouted at the television, “CLOWNS DON’T MEAN HAPPINESS!”

(Oh, yes: I shouted in capitals.)

I know for a fact that I’m not the only person in the world who suffers from fear of clowns, which the Internet tells me is called “coulrophobia” (although my browser dictionary doesn’t recognise that word, and Wikipedia tells me that coulrophobia is an exaggerated or abnormal fear of clowns).

I need to make this point: no fear of clowns is exaggerated or abnormal. Clowns are freaky.

I can trace this in my own experience to three distinct factors.

I watched It at a sleepover, and have never entirely recovered from the experience. I’m not a big fan of Stephen King at the best of times, and not because he’s a bad writer: frankly, he’s too good a horror writer, and scares the pants off me. And Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown scared me even more.

I was in Year 12 when John Wayne Gacy was executed, and what really freaked me out about Gacy was his tendency to dress up as a clown during block parties. Yes, his crimes were what horrified me, but what’s stuck with me, as a disinterested party, was the Pogo the Clown persona.

And, finally, I blame my coulrophobia on Doctor Who‘s “Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” and those psychotic robot clowns. Those were terrifying.

So, thank you, Cadbury, for the nightmares.

Clowns are bad enough.

Clowns combining with angels in mid-air and then becoming edible?

Oh, that’s not right.

I realise that this doesn’t count as a real update but, thanks to the advice Heretic gave on the super-macro post, I’m getting better at using the function.

It is a volatile function, highly susceptible to shaking and losing focus. But these were taken on the Portrait setting, rather than Manual, so the camera dealt with its own shutter speed and ISO setting, and by using a bag of rice to help stabilise the camera.

A small print:

(The entire print is 10 by 15 cm, but the section included here is roughly 4 by 6 cm.)

My watch:

(I love the detail on that one, especially on the second hand, which was moving as I took the photograph.)

And, finally, some funky beads, in two different levels of close-up:

Some day, I might become bored with my camera and stop posting pictures of irrelevant objects on the blog. But, for now, I can only say, “Sorry! I’ll update properly soon.”

My current favourite song lyrics are from Jonathan Coulton’s “Skullcrusher Mountain,” which I only discovered today:

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys; you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

Oh, and I’m so into you
But I’m way too smart for you
Even my henchmen think I’m crazy
I’m not surprised that you agree
If you could find some way to be
A little bit less afraid of me
You’d see the voices that control me from inside my head
Say I shouldn’t kill you yet

How could you turn down such a sweet-talking supervillain? Especially one who has a golden submarine.

And who ruined a pony making a gift for you.

Thanks to a conversation with my baby brother, who has the same camera as I have, I’ve been made aware that my camera has a super macro function.

So, naturally, I immediately took some pictures of the Warhammer miniatures. I mean, what else was super macro invented for?

For the record, this miniature measure 4 cm from the top of the axe (which isn’t even visible in these pictures) to his feet.

The section of him visible in these pictures is 2.5 cm, total.

Sure, they’re not the best super macro photographs around. The super macro function is only available as a manual setting, which means I have to play around with the shutter speed and the ISO setting myself—and I’m not familiar enough with either the camera or with manual photography to be confident with doing that.

But I’m still fairly impressed that the camera can do this. (Mind, I need a tripod. My hands aren’t steady enough to manage super macro without some support.)

I mean, I took one look at these, and said to Nick, “Wow, this miniature is quite dusty.”

And it is.

If you look extremely closely.

I call this series “World’s Most Awesome Lizard, Who Was So Busy Sunning Himself On What Might Be Charitably Called A Barbeque That He Didn’t Care How Close I Came With The Camera.”

Too long?

Spotted in the back garden while I was having an early morning cigarette:

Who’s a pretty boy, then?

Would you like a cracker?

Would you like me to stop patronising you? Okay, then.

And I had to include this one:

Because a bird eating with its feet is adorable.

This post is brought to you by the difficulties of marking while Nick is holding a shouted video-cam conversation with my father a metre away: mind, I’m not blaming him for the shouting. It’s just distracting.

But if my obsessive reading and watching of television has taught me anything, it’s that some rules can be broken, and some are inviolable. These are the inviolable rules, as far as I know them.

1. Never go shopping with Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan.

2. Never mess with Veronica Mars.

3. If in doubt, nuke the planet from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

4. Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

5. Don’t go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

6. Always take a banana to a party.

7. Don’t wear a T-shirt reading “Clone” around Captain Jack.

8. There can only be one.*

9. Don’t forget your towel.

Have I missed anything important?

*(I have no idea why I’m currently obsessed with Highlander; I haven’t seen it in years, and I was never thrilled with the “rape as an object lesson” sub-plot. Yet I keep making jokes about it recently.)

I was listening to Tripod’s “Astronaut,” a song about the lack of a Japanese space programme, and heard these lyrics:

Because you can’t carry out a ninja style assassination dressed as an astronaut,
It’s the luminous fabric (Too visible.)
And they don’t let you (Ooo-ooo)
Use a samurai sword when you’re an astronaut,
You might puncture the suit.
You might depressurise, like a Gremlin in a microwave.

And then my thoughts ran roughly along these lines:

Hee!

No, wait.

What happens to Gremlins when you put them in microwaves? They explode, don’t they?

But they don’t explode because they depressurise, do they? It’s more of a . . . boiling effect.

Ew.

But, then, you do explode when you depressurise, yes? (Wait, wasn’t there a Mythbusters episode about that? No, that’s not important.)

So is that a sufficient similarity to make that an effective simile? After all, they both explode.

No, but they explicitly suggest that Gremlins in microwaves depressurise, and I’m fairly certain that’s not what happens.

You know, I really don’t think that’s the best simile.

No wonder my students think I’m overly pedantic.

Great song, though.

If there can only be one, why does it have to be Christopher Lambert?