Tweetable?

Is anything in my life tweetable?
Do I really need another on-line forum for airing my opinions and brain farts?
The only way to know is to give it a go.

Hey, that would make a good T-Shirt!
The only way to know is to give it a go.

Maybe done in some bubbly hippy font and a smiley face at the end.

Gee, you can tell I've had a few days off and wound right down. Anyway, I'm on the Twitter, it is part of the interwebs. If anyone can tell me how to drive it, that would be swell. I think my phone needs a different thingo to be able to talk to it. As usual, look for me as orbitaltorch and say hai, I love that.

We had a GIGANTIC storm a few days ago - sheet lightening, Thor stamping about the place, rumbly thunder to move the foundations, flooding rains, wind to tear the atmo off. It was brilliant. Went for hours and took the power intermittently. I live on top of a hill and my street flooded to about knee height (so just above most people's ankles-ish) so there was a lot of water around. I loved it, and I loved that it cooled everything down by at least 10 degrees for the next few days and we've been back to mid 20s temps, and now everything is green and growing manically to catch up. There's even cool breezes! Oh how pleasant life can be when the physical world is not trying to scald you off the face of the planet.

I stood outside for a while after the bulk of the terrifying bit had passed and took some video on my phone so I would have a sound file of the rain and the frogs going all poly rhythmic gamelan style. Later in the summer if it goes all dry again I will have 45 precious seconds of proof that water can and does sometimes fall freely from the sky. Folk wisdom says that we'll have a wet season this summer. Why? I've heard everything from the large number of flies, ants in the house, 3 dust storms equals a wet season ahead, and my favourite of all, my mother's trick foot. Yes, her barometrically sensitive foot has been aching. It is accurate slightly more often than the meteorologists, but I'm not going to buy another lemon tree just yet!

The weather aside, I baked a banana cake* last night as a house warming gift for Sister2 and her partner who have moved into their dream(ish) home this weekend. I doubled the recipe, thinking that would make for a nice generously sized cake. Kindof an innocent thing to do but the outcome is a monster. I did not think through the fact that getting the larger sized spring based pan and then doubling recipes would result in a cake too large to fit on any plate, serving platter or tray that I have. If I could handle it safely, I would weigh it just to satisfy my curiosity but I am loathe to put it under any further structural strain than just sitting there, being a presentation problem. Hmmm. At least I know it fits on the base of the pan it was cooked in. That will be my back-up position. It is tall too, nearly 7 cm by what I can judge. Holy giant cakes Batman!

I was hoping that it would be a short-lived problem, that we'd be tucking into the moist banana-ry deliciousness of it for morning tea today. But no. They are inconveniently busy with cleaning the old house. I will have to wait the endless hours until afternoon tea. The cake is implacable. It knows it must be gifted whole. My mouth is uncontrollably watering in anticipation. Oh Caped Crusader, if only I had made a little muffin from just some of it!

BTW, while I've been telling you about the cake, twitter has told me about the new Cory Doctorow novel 'Makers' that's out. Happy Happy!

Make cakes people, and be happy.
The only way to know is to give it a go.


*I used the recipe from "Women's Weekly: Old - Fashioned Favourites" which I can recommend heartily to anyone with a sweet tooth and a preference for simple classic dishes. Easily found in good newsagents and occasionally even in the supermarket.

Battle Lines

My sister mentioned in passing yesterday that the family is considering holding an intervention on me. Well there's some news.

Which of my many antisocial and problematic behaviours could they be planning to target I wonder? Could it be my relentless cynicism and brooding depressive belief that life is pretty shit and it is best to pretend otherwise so one doesn't spiral helplessly into an abyss of self destruction? Could it be my venomous and acidic disregard for my fellow humans and seething hatred for politicians, derivatives fund managers and smokers? Could it be my addiction to Spider Solitaire - that sensuous and seductive siren who lures me endlessly onto the rocks of lost time?

No. Apparently, these things don't rate a mention. The family takes it all on board with barely a flicker. There are bigger issues. Issues that threaten the fabric of my life if only I could wake up to their horrible implications.

I look again. Is it the dead lemon tree that I haven't removed yet from the barren (possibly poisonous) part of the yard? No. The trees need trimming? I Mean they're kind of touching those wire things at the front of the house again - that can't be good. No, not that, but yes, they do need a trim. The obsession with re-watching Chronicles of Riddick? Nope. Dodgy and worth keeping an eye on, but no.
What then!?

The evil that hides in plain sight gentle reader is this:
Too many books.

To come here I jettisoned about two thirds of my library, and I have culled and thinned and negotiated ever since. Sure there's a few "rainy day" reads put aside, there's a few in the "maybe read" pile that need to be evaluated, there's the "read once - possibly keep for re-reading" pile, there's the room full of books that fall into the "LOVED IT" category, there's the small collection of first editions, there's non-fiction and reference collection, there's the Batman collection. Very humble collections they are too! There's a few piles here and there I admit. But there are no books in the bathroom! There are no books in the hall! And there are only cookbooks in the kitchen! The shed has only 3 tubs of books, that's not bad considering how much room is in there, but I just don't trust the tubs to stand up to the bugs and pests that rule the kingdom of Shed. All the doors in the house open and close without hindrance. Oh, well, except for that one! But other than that I think the house is, frankly, thin on the ground for intellectual stimulation!

Too many books indeed!
There's barbarians at the gate. Raise the drawbridge! Fly the flags of resistance, rattle your swords in their scabbards, release the monsters into the moat! Prepare for battle!

(Oh, and if you're going to pop by, you're welcome to stay, just let me know a day or two ahead if you can so I can unearth the bed in the spare room, it just has a little "filing" on it for the minute.)

Does my mind know my mouth is typing?

I'm not sure I've got anything to say tonight, but I wanted to squeeze one more post into September as a pretty soft way of making up for the whole lack of an August thing.

This month has seen a small variety of fairly mundane things happen (that is to say - on top of the interesting things which I have already written about so very entertainingly) (stop fishing and get on with it!- Ed) ...

My leg has healed well and the physiotherapist certainly shamed the doctor with her knowledge, professionalism and capacity to give helpful advice about healing. It also gave me an interesting series of cultural vignettes - she kept tying to give me analogies and motivation based on the Broncos and football. I kept giving her utterly blank looks. I feel for her. That stuff probably works with the vast majority of people who sustain a "sports injury". It would be tough for me to find an upbeat parallel in, say, the life and works of Jane Austen or, worse, Virginia Woolf. No, I'm not ready to wade into the Bremer with my pockets full of stones. Not yet at least. Certainly not over a calf muscle. Anyway we're back up above 80% and frankly I'm not sure I even had a 100%. She lost me when she said "when you start running again..." and I was all "What do you mean again?" and she had a moment and just plugged the electric current octopus thing onto me and left me humming happily with my book. That thing is awesome. I asked her what it is called and she didn't know. It has no labels on it, and these weird 50s plastic tube things that end in a large suction pad that has a bit of sponge roughly cut to fit inside. It vacuums onto one's body and then they let it make a circuit and just run an electric current of some kind through you. Brilliant! I asked what kind of current - couldn't tell me. I asked how it worked, or what it did - couldn't really tell me (she literally waved her hands). How fantastic! I go to a scientific-y type place (where people have clipboards and machines that go "ping!") to get ritual magic performed on me. I so wish I could hear what Tesla would say about this.

Also, from the "it had to happen sooner or later" basket, Ma&Pa bought a 20something year-old caravan which they've parked next to the house and I don't reckon will move again for at least 6 - 9 months, but that's probably why they're not talking to me. Rationality ought never be injected into tightly held dreams. I got confused about that and now I will be given the cold shoulder until I am considered to have learnt my lesson. As with many of the baby boomers, my folks wish to spend their grey years nomadically traipsing this wide brown land soaking up the pleasures of the road and seeing the myriad sights of wonder. I can get behind that vision. I just thought it would make sense to wait until my Pa could fit the the door and maybe walk more than 5 or 10 meters unaided, or my Ma had finished working as a wage slave, or they'd sold the 155 acre property that takes up every available waking minute and dollar to keep functioning, but no. They scrimped and saved their whole lives for this and BY GOD they're going to have it. Well I am glad for them that it has manifest in their lives, and I hope they enjoy looking at it from their bedroom window as they run endlessly around the wheel of their life waiting for the pattern to change.

I really didn't want to get too caught up on that. It's an ugly mofo too - all brown and beige as only the very early 80s can be. *sigh*
But I digress.

In funnier news and for no apparent reason I have a massive, crippling crush on Jeremy Piven. I know nothing about this person (I had to point to a picture of him and ask around until someone knew who he was) other than that he is an actor who recently suffered mercury poisoning from living on too much sushi (no, really!), he does yoga, and he portrays a basically horrible agent in a tv show. How terribly modern! But none of that really matters, can it? After all I only found these meagre half-scraps out *after* the crush had formed. Ergo, he is a symbol of something (or someone) else. Still, it is entertaining. I've printed out a picture of him from the interwebs and stuck it on the wall opposite where I sit to eat my dinner. Hilarious!
"How was your day?" I ask
"Oh, the usual, but tell me all about you! You look tired, howabout a foot rub while you unload?" he answers....
haha. no I'm making that up.
I don't really say that out loud.

Was than an overshare?

Anyway. I have also spent some quality time with the "Amazon Recommends" software this month and that is a relationship that I can heartily endorse. It may not be fabulously healthy for the credit card, but the results will warm your reading heart and keep any problems in the real world with family or fictional lovers at bay. It will take anything and everything you might wish to throw at it - Batman, Georgette Heyer, Buddhism, esoteric reading, poker, sushi, peak oil, roman empire, gardening, knitting, sewing, and give you a hundred, two hundred recommendations, and you plough through those babies, rating the ones you've read, hooking the finds into the wish list and ploughing the corpses of the undesirables back into the database to fertilise the way forward for the next hundred. It is like some kind of Aztec blood cult for media. It is strangely addictive and although fundamentally consumerist, also culturally pleasing because it augments the ring of trust friends have - "oh I just read this - you'll love it!" and usually you do, or kinda do and want to find some more. In that way it is also often wrong, but then it just tries again, and doesn't entirely give up.
A bit like me and this blog (...sortof. Ok not really, but it would have been a nice tight ending, hey?! Now you'll have to make do with this limping "no you hang up" ending.) Bye.

Westward Ho!

I never met a Western I didn’t like until I watched this film. Occasionally films have poor production values, or stilted acting, or a plot that just is too implausible, but not usually all at once.

Released in 1935 (originally in B&W) starring a young John Wayne as John Wyatt, this is the story of two brothers and their paths in life after the brutal murder of their parents on the trail (and the theft of all their cattle). The elder brother (Wayne) is left for dead while the youngest is taken as a protégé of the bad guys. As soon as he can swagger and wear a gun, John Wyatt commences his personal vendetta of tracking down and killing the men who murdered his family. The film is dedicated to a group called “The Vigilantes” active in the 1860s, and that’s exactly what happens, Wyatt can’t get funding for an actual police force so he assembles a posse of likewise wronged, angry and gun-wielding men to bring ‘justice’ to the area.

I wanted to start at the beginning of the genre, and here it is. The “good guys” (ie Wyatt’s Vigilantes) all ride white horses (I kid you not!) and most of them sing (yes, this verges on being a musical). The bad guys all have poor personal hygiene and frankly are not that bright. With the focus on vigilante justice and a moral code that makes it ok to shoot some men but not others, I found myself seeing parallels to the Batman origins stories. Batman doesn’t kill, that’s his personal line over which he will not knowingly cross, in Westerns it seems that the willingness to make that decision to shoot to kill and move on with life is what constitutes a man and it is just whether you use your power for good (killing bad men, men in your way, or anyone who cheats at cards) or for stealing cattle.

When watching older films it is useful if one has some personal sense of the period from which they spawn. This is not really a film about the 1860s so much as it is about the 1930s idea of the 1860s and possibly also about something that was topical in the 30s that the director thought might be discussed well by analogy through this story. I have enough understanding of most periods of the 1800s in Europe and North America to be comfortable getting half-way towards the mindset the filmmakers were aiming for. This film made me realise how alienated I am from the 1930s. I don’t really know what was going on, and I certainly don’t understand what was being said in this film implicitly.

The best things for me in this film is that many of the horses are part-Arabs and so are very easy on the eyes, and that it is only 60 minutes long. I had borrowed my Brother-in-Law’s 2 volume set of John Wayne Westerns to watch this film, I skipped the other 11 hours of films. Westward Ho! is sometimes listed in the top Westerns of all time. It might be a great film in the history of the genre, but it didn’t tickle my fancy.

The Magic Block

There's a threshold of knowledge needed to enjoy a city as a resident, and it is different person -by - person. The sooner each of us finds the things that make us happy, well the happier we'll be (all the best axioms are self-evident)!

For my taste, I like to find these things in close proximity. The less transit time there is the less I am exposed to undesirable elements (such as off-key buskers, old people who smell like mothballs and any women who like to team white and gold in their clothing or accessories). For example, there's a haberdashery in Ipswich, surrounded by mechanical repair garages. No good to me - too isolated. There's a teeny teeny comic store in Ipswich surrounded by hairdressers and jewellery stores getting to it is like crossing a freaking minefield. There is NO sushi train in Ipswich (one v. dodgy kiosk in a foodcourt over the river ... just terrible in every way). You see my point.

Today there was a breakthrough. I have found a Magic Block in Brisbogan. Relief. In one square block of the city is a good art store, a small and wanky but independent bookstore, a major (bland but okish) chain bookstore, hidden away next to each other under a concrete out-ramp for a carpark is a dense and nerdy comic store and a sushi train (with little carriages even! and people cooking!), a haberdashery and craft store, and a cafe with excellent coffee (and comfy chairs and steroid air-con). Finally.
It is common sense to think they're there somewhere - but until I found them it was impossible to emotionally orient and every venture felt unfulfilled. I had found an arthouse cinema, but it's closed down. No matter. This is the minimum of destinations I needed to keep afloat.

My tummy is full with tasty sushi, I have some new craft materials I can't wait to get into and I scored a hardcover of an old Batman I've been looking for (still in the plastic wrapper and half price on a bottom shelf). Who's a happy little nerd then?

G'day, how the heck did August start so Early?

Well it's been nearly a month , actually a whole month, since i posted, and I can't remember if there was a thread going, or a theme, so I'm going to just start again from here. Hi. I've been sick and you can fill in enough of the blanks from there.

Great news is that the seedling tray little Sister gave me, some potting mix and the dodgy seed packets I've been carting around for over a year (half of them had expired!) came together in a small spasm of hope last Sunday week ago, and already many of the little blighters have decided to give life a chance. It's exciting watching the tiny stems pushing the husk of the seed casing up through the soil and into the air to wave their first two triumphant leaves in the air - proud and free!! How marvellous! The pumpkins have taken a strong early lead, and look to need planting out this weekend - what am i going to do with them now? I hadn't really thought that far ahead! The seed tray is great, I've never had one with such a good lid (I usually improvise and it becomes a bit touch and go) and the resulting moisture retention is fantastic. So far almost half of the seeds have sprouted, but some have longer lead times, so I'm not giving up yet. I did make a little map of what I put where (this seeding tray is massive, about 8 or 10 punnets!!) thank goodness (i did a little x-y axis charting hehehehhehehe) (seedling battleships!) but in true style, i'm not really certain where I put the map. I'm sure I'll find it by the weekend.

So that's fun.
I've got the banana lounge of my dreams - it's a plastic and aluminium folding number (also gratis from little Sister. She's very generous!)(actually she was going to put it into the tip! So I begged it off her) and it's had a few test runs and works *perfectly*. Still a bit cold to use at night, but has had some good workouts for weekend mornings and afternoons. I'm imagining the Stig laying on it holding an air-steering-wheel.

Speaking of the Stig, Audrey is really complaining about the cold mornings, and conks out on our short commute at the slightest pause (say, to change down for a corner). I'm being understanding, but the knob has come off the choke, and it's hurting my fingers to hold onto the thin little metal spike the knob was once mysteriously attached to. She started to shake this afternoon - a full body shake. That was pretty disconcerting. So not great there. Maybe a tune-up would help her? I wonder when I last sent her to the mechanics? I've been daydreaming about buying a muscle car, pimping it, and converting it to LPG and electric. My inner bogan and the inner hippy seeming to find common ground in an unusual forum. I'm not sure I'd ever put my money where my mouth is on that one, but a charger turned my head today, and I found myself admiring a well-kept and tight-arsed Datsun 120Y in cherry red in the parking lot today. Have I caught some kind of virus?

Also, the family obsession with Texas Hold-em continues to gather more momentum. Middle sister has, using the wonders of Ebay, sourced a 1000 piece set (easily enough for 8 of us to play) of poker chips, and now, the piece de resistance, the wild turkey poker table to do it all at! Oh the illicit pleasure of well laid felt, the satisfying heft of weighted clay chips, the joy at a perfectly pitched deal. *sigh*.... It's not that I don't want to go out anymore, it's that the cards are calling. Can you hear their siren song taunting and lilting as we speak?

Papa Bear has his birthday on Friday, and I am trying to finish knitting the bedsocks he requested (one down, and one a quarter done) before the tournament on saturday. You might think, that, having been ill I would have been finishing knitting projects off at a cracking pace. Alas, my mental and physical capacities have been greatly diminished, and many nights I have simply dozed listening to music until it's late enough to take my final daily medicines and then go to bed! How exceedingly vexing. Even watching tv is too draining. Consequently, I have had a bit of tv detox (always a very good thing), heard a lot more of the recent piano competition than I thought humanly possible, and got my recipe scrapbook into much better order. Living it up :o)

There's been some changes at work, but I'm not quite up to that story just yet. I'm sure in another week my humour systems will be patched, refuelled and back on-line and I can share the highlights with you then.

Until then, and as way of parting, I say unto you: "Batman". That is all.