onward brave soldiers etc October 28, 2007  

Good weekend; pretty mellow. Went to my cousin Jennifer's wedding on Friday; surprisingly, we somehow emerged from the wedding and four hours at the "at home" barbie the next day without ever meeting the groom, Morris. I had him pointed out but I've never spoken to him. Odd one. Seems like a good bloke, though; and Jen's happy, so that's a good 'un. Had a nice time, though I did massively overdo it at the wedding itself and got my annual hangover on Saturday. About once a year I get the chance to drink too much and foolishly take it, not remembering that childcare the morning after is a bugger. This time, Rebecca wet the bed at 4am, so I ended up changing bedsheets in a darkened room while trying not to wake the baby, four hours after a protracted session of drunken regurgitation, while unable to stand up for more than thirty seconds and continually breaking out in a cold sweat. I managed not to wake the baby, and didn't actually make a complete dick of myself at the wedding (it wasn't until I got home that the full horror of the consequences of the last hours' drinking hit), but that's about the only good things you can say about the episode. Heather nearly killed me, which in retrospect is fair enough. Still, we live and learn, although it wasn't too pleasant to realise that I basically re-enacted one of those "It's not what we're drinking, it's how we're drinking" ads. Och.

Otherwise all good. Had a relatively quiet day in the sunshine today, pootling around the garden. Didn't get around to taking the kids off for a bonding session of father-daughter plant theft from the vacant lot around the corner (I've got my eye on some of the bamboo there for a planter full of plant stakes); it'll do next weekend. Rebecca has a spot of conjunctivitis, which we've nipped in the bud via some highly efficacious eyedrops. They're great, and after some serious problems on day 1 and 2 of the course we've managed to hit the right point in the fine balance between bribery and threats, so she's now obligingly holding her own eyelids down for the administration of the drops. She's a good girl.

Maggie appears to be left-handed.

Rebecca can sing the chorus to "Wuthering Heights". This is not because we inflict Kate Bush on the poor child, but because Heather really likes the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain's version of it and it's a staple for car journeys. I tried to teach her "Waiting for the Man" today, but after two lines she started yelling "Stop, Papa! Halt! HALT!!! Song over!".

So it turns out that Dumbledore waves his wand with the other hand, so to speak. I must say I'd always suspected as much. It's part of J K Rowling's well-noted subliminal agenda to normalise left-liberal concepts. Mind you, since this is the first mention of homosexuality in seven books - and it's not even mentioned in the books - it's not as if it's particularly overt, is it? Particularly when you consider the role that adolescent homosexual play has at single-sex boarding school environments (like the boys vs girls dorms at Hogwarts), you'd expect there to be some mention of night-time games of spunky chocolate frog in the boys dorm or similar. Still, us liberal lefty woofters have to take what we can get, and good on her for giving the traditional asexual mentor character a sexual identity; it's a bit like revealing that Obi-Wan Kenobi was into the pink side of the force.

And congratulations to all the media outlets that came out with variations on the phrase "Wizard is a friend of Dorothy".

The internet has given us a new kind of joy. A joy for which a long, compound German word is required. It's the joy you get when you read a comment with which you violently disagree, then click through to the author's homepage and discover they spend most of their free time producing poorly-written erotic fan fiction. There's got to be some German phrase for "i thought you were a waste of space and now I've had it confirmed"-freude.

Reading: The Walking Dead. It's good stuff. The sort of horror I find most compelling is the most plausible. Outlandish supernatural stuff is frightening, but ultimately a bit silly. What's really scary is mad people with guns. So, for example, I found the worst part of 28 Days Later the segments at the end with the squaddies. Because this sort of thing can, and does, happen. What happens when society breaks down and people just do what they want? Bad stuff. So in The Walking Dead, the interesting stuff isn't the zombies running around everywhere eating people. Zombies are an external force, like a force of nature. They could be replaced with army ants, for instance. Or a large-scale Ebola outbreak. Or civil war. The interesting thing is not the zombies; it's how people interact with each other in the face of such crisis, when all the normal strictures of society are removed and it basically comes down to the strongest prevailing. In this way it's a return to the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction popular during the 70s and 80s when people had the very plausible fear of nuclear holocaust, and what would happen. After the end of the Cold War, people stopped worrying so much about waking up one morning and finding that everything had changed. Now we have to posit a supernatural disaster to reach the same psychological space. What's horrifying here isn't what the zombies do to people; it's what people do to each other as a result of the social change wrought by the zombie apocalypse.

Compare this to the other thing I've been reading, Safe Area Gorazde. This chronicles people who did, in fact, wake up one morning and discover that all their neighbours - people they'd grown up with, played football with, been drunk with - had decided to wipe them off the face of the earth. The resulting civil war is harrowing, terrifying, and happened not fifteen years ago (the Bosnian civil war). Reading a page in a comic where rotting corpses shamble through the streets is, at its heart, a harmless frisson of fake fear; reading a page in a comic about digging rotting corpses out of a mass grave, showing the reactions of the relatives as they recognise missing brothers, suns, fathers, and elucidating the evidence of torture on the corpses, is a chilling reminder of just how nasty humans can be. Just proving that if you want real horror, you need to be reading history, not fiction.

This impression is further reinforced by reading The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes. It's an interesting work of social history, about the convict settlement of Australia. Combines Dickens with splatter; some of the colonial administrators, particularly on Norfolk Island, were quite literally power-mad sadists. Compelling reading.

sheep shit and diesel October 19, 2007  

Been a few weeks. The trip to Auckland was good fun but a bit of a whirlwind, it's been full on since we arrived back, and I'm very busy both at work and at home. This has combined with serious pain in my left hand (one tendon is agonising - not sure why) have compiled to mitigate against long evenings blogging. So rest assured that we're alive, well, and fulminating on current events (terrorism arrests! the rugby! Astana signing most of the ex-Team Discovery staff and riders! swearing does you good!) as much as the next person.

Auckland was good. We spent most of our time referring intra-cousin wrestling matches, watching 3-year olds conspire, conducting guerilla raids into in-laws' neighbours gardens to surreptitiously dig up bamboo rhyzomes for transplant back down to Wellie (OK, that was mainly just me), talking twilight bush walks, watching various rugby matches, cooking, palming the kids off on the grandparents, catching up with various relatives, and generally seeing the whanau. Unfortunately, the time in Auckland was a bit truncated, so we ended up only really having the time to see whanau and not enough time to see friends. Still, we'll be back up for Christmas, so we can catch up when we're up there.

Maggie has now learned how to roll onto her front. From her back, obviously.

For the curious: yes, I am supporting the English rugby team in the final. I'm not sure if this means that I've finally passed the Tebbit-test; I'dve supported the All Blacks if they'd got through.

Today's inspiration: an excellent textual tattoo inspired by cut-ups, text from Neuromancer. Nice.

Heather's getting worried that I'm getting obsessional about bamboo. I'll admit, it's a legitimate concern.

Peanut butter and whisky: two great tastes that taste great together.

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