:: Sunday, January 30, 2005

Lazin’ on a Sunday afternoon


It’s Sunday.

Weather is outstanding.

Kids are gone.

Oldies are gone.

I feel a Floyd moment coming on.

Hehe.

I think Shari can hear it already…

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re sayin’.

Lyrics to “Comfortably Numb” shamelessly lifted from at least 15 different sites.

Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!






:: Thursday, January 27, 2005

A cutting wit.


I am redundant.

I think I am going to be made redundant soon, too.

My little niche role as server admin that was so interesting, useful and horribly underpaid is about to blow away into cyberspace if someone pulls the plug on this server

So I will be looking for a new job. I suppose it might not be so easy to find a job to fit my criteria.

¥ - Executable at any time during a given 24 hour period.
¥ - Involves working in a dark environment
¥ - Does not require me to interact much with live people
¥ - Pays in sheer job satisfaction as well as money
¥ - Allows me to choose what I do and how I do it.

I didn’t come up with many jobs; actually only one. But that doesn’t matter, cos the one I did think of would suit me down to the ground, well, when I lose a bit of flab, that is.

I’m going to apply for the Grim Reaper’s job. This sounds like a bit of me, dunnit? I do look so much better in trailing black clothing and the Hood is an added bonus! That scythe is pretty shit-hot as well.

So, who wants to help me practise for my job interview?

Awwww don’t be like that…

** Random Mindless quiz of the day **The Black Plague**.



“No one knows what it’s like
To be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes
And no one knows
What it’s like to be hated
To be fated to telling only lies”
Pete Townsend - Behind Blue Eyes






:: Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Art Attack


One of my favourite pictures is this one -



“A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” - Georges Seurat

Not a man of bold brushrokes, more a man of poignant pointillism… and pointillism was what he developed and gave to the art world.

He’s cool, huh. Bet he liked playing join-the-dots when he was a kid.






:: Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Neurotic




If this is how the doors feel, what are the poor windows going through?

I bet they are really broken up…






:: Monday, January 24, 2005

Mother


I want to put this on my back lawn.



I can just see it all done up…plush, padded, soundproof, air conditioned interior; heavy duty sound system; beer fridge; library; networked to the house; steam jets around the base and flashing, rotating spotlights and a fucking BIG lock on the door.

Imagine it, if you will… when the kids piss me off I can just say, “Right, that’s it, Im off back to the Mothership", hop inside, close the hatch. roll up a doob and grab a beer, power up the lights, thrusters and Pink Floyd and just fly away from everything.

**sigh**

When I win Lotto…



Yeah Baby






:: Sunday, January 23, 2005

Once in a blue moon.


looted from:
here

The Fishing Party - Fitz Hugh Lane

Hands up who has seen a blue moon?

You have so. Everyone has.

There are two kinds of blue moon (if you ignore those of a herbaceous variety);

1. The repeat occurrence of a complete full moon inside a calendar month and
2. The third of four complete full moons in a season. You can blame the God Botherers for that one.

Over the next twenty years there will be a total of 17 blue moons. There will be an almost equal number of both types of blue moons occurring. There will be no blue moon of any kind in the years 2006, 2011, 2014, and 2017.

“Blue moon” appears to have originally been a colloquial term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first reference to a blue moon comes from a proverb recorded in 1528:

If they say the moon is blue,
We must believe that it is true.

Saying the moon was blue indicated an obvious absurdity. In the 19th century, the phrase until a blue moon developed to mean “never.” Today, once in a blue moon has come to mean “every now and then” or “rarely” but its association with lunar events remains unproven.

I love this shit.






:: Saturday, January 22, 2005

Af-Ford-able


Vogon poetry rulz.

See, see the dead sky
Marvel at its big puce depths.
Tell me, Morticia do you
Wonder why the mammoth ignores you?
Why its foobly stare
makes you feel rundown.
I can tell you, it is
Worried by your fdgsshhettst facial growth
That looks like
A booger.
What’s more, it knows
Your flummoxing potting shed
Smells of weed.
Everything under the big dead sky
Asks why, why do you even bother?
You only charm shits.

Get your own Vogon Poetry here.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams






:: Friday, January 21, 2005

Neon Pewter








:: Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Frooty


I just ate a nectarine
“Opey” was it’s name
It wore a little name tag
Without a taint of shame
It looked just like it’s brethren
And their name tags looked the same
$2.99 a yummy kilogram
And “Opey” is their name.






:: Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Lushous Lipstyx


Adam is attempting to turn me into a lush.

It’s all come about since I bought a 6 pack of stubbies a week ago, and then didn’t drink them fast enough. I’m drinking my third one as I type. You can see I have a wee drinking problem. Anyway, it’s very simple. Adam wants me to drink my beer so that he can take the caps off. At least he has stopped opening them and drowning ants with it on the patio. Damn, that really pissed me off - bloody ants got drunk and I didn’t.

So, here I was figuratively rummaging through my music today and hooking out some oldies and I found an old fav from way back and it got me thinking about ancient history and some of the classical studies stuff I did at school way back in 6th form (arrghhhhh shit, can you say 25th anniversary thereof??) and the Greek and Roman myths and gods/goddesses and the parallels that exist in their mythical histoy. I dug that stuff.

For some reason (I know not why **rolls eyes **), I always liked the River Styx, one of the one-to-five Rivers of the Underworld, depending whether you eat pasta or olives. Now call me old fashioned, but there is something elementally final about a river that apparently bubbles with fire. Burn, baby, burn. The Greeks didn’t like Hades very much so they created their own Heaven and Hell within it. How very Christian of them. Elysian Fields for the good folk, Tantalus for everyone else. Neither of them sound quite me, if you know what I mean, like, all that lovely lush greenery and beauty and happiness everywhere would mean I gotta get off the computer to go out and enjoy it, right?… You say that like it’s a good thing…

Anyway, the song I was lsitening to that started all this thinking was Chris Be Burgh - Don’t Pay the Ferryman.

Don’t pay the ferryman,
Don’t even fix a price,
Don’t pay the ferryman,
Until he gets you to the other side

I went out for coffee today with one of the Dear John recipients. Not a word was said about the letter. By anyone.

I’m not paying for transportation in advance any more and if I want to buy a ferry, I’ll damn well pick which one I like :-)

Same goes for red race cars.

“Thinking without saying is no better than saying without thinking".

Both suck.






:: Sunday, January 16, 2005

Ok, so you didn’t ask for it...


Much of some of the following has been shamelessly lifted from folksong.org.nz.

It appears we all have this man to thank for a good old Kiwi tradition.



Sir Jack Richard Butland KBE
(1896-1982), pioneer food manufacturer and philanthropist.

Creator of Chesdale cheese.

We are the boys from down on the farm,
We really know our cheese
There’s much better value in Chesdale,
It never fails to please.

Chesdale,
Slices thinly
Never crumbles,
Theres no waste.
And boy, it’s got a mighty taste!
Chesdale cheese!

It’s finest cheddar
Made better!



Ches and Dale
Dick Frizzel & Sam Harvey

I used to love those flavoured Chesdale wedges in the plastic disc container. But you couldnt make cheese toast with the slices.

Here’s another one for you.. This TV advertisement was filmed aboard the Kingston Flyer in the mid 70’s.



Crunchie Train Robbery

Life’s a whole long journey, boy,
Before you grow too old,
Don’t miss the opportunity
To strike a little gold.

Out West the folks are crossing you.
The way to make them stop,
Is to quick draw your Crunchie bar…
-And fill them full of choc.

Have a Crunchie
Hokey pokey bar
Golden Crunchie
Hokey pokey bar.

Goodnight Kiwi is next… I got a few more flashback posts in mind too.

Now I feel old.






:: Saturday, January 15, 2005

Seeking words of wisdom


I discovered the Flat Earth Society website tonight.

Wow, what an eye opener.

I found these little gems there - “As shit dissolves in a bucket, so are the days of our lives.” and “Doesn’t using a third-party penis void your warranty?” There are more little gems like that at the Mr Teapot Campaign.

I might even do a post on why the Earth is/isn’t flat one day soon. Have to figure out what I think first.

You know that could take a while….






:: Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Self-poetic


You made me become someone
I hoped that I would never be
You made me see such things
I wished I’d never have to see
You made me think such thoughts
Of hate and pain and doubt and fear
You made me love to be with you
And hate to have you near






:: Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Historia 2


If I could live in any house in town, I would live here. I utterly adore this house.



This is “Maungawhare", built in 1878, and still standing gracefully on a ridge at Otumoetai, not far from “Woodhill", in Parkvale Road, just off Grange Road.

My favourite place is here.



Our family cemetery, going back to my great-great-great grandmother Olivia Kensington who was buried there in 1896.

One of her daughters lived in this house.



Who said dead people are boring? Even their tall, mossy gravestones are fascinating.








:: Monday, January 10, 2005

Loving God


A hippie gets onto a bus and sits next to a nun in the front seat. The hippie looks over and asks the nun if she would have sex with him.

The nun, surprised by the question, politely declines and gets off at the next stop. When the bus starts again, the bus driver says to the hippie, “If you want, I can tell you how you can get that nun to have sex with you.”

The hippie of course says that he’d love to know, so the bus driver tells him that every Tuesday evening at midnight the nun goes to the cemetery to pray to the lord. “If you went dressed in robes and some glowing powder,” says the bus driver, “You could tell her you were God and command her to have sex with you.”

The hippie decides to try this out. That Tuesday, he goes to the cemetery and waits for the nun. Right on schedule, the nun shows up. While she’s in the middle of praying, the hippie walks out from hiding, in robes and glowing with a mask of god. “I am God, I have heard your prayers and I will answer them but you must have sex with me first,” he says.

The nun agrees but asks for anal sex so she might keep her virginity. The hippie agrees to this and quickly sets about having sex with the nun.

After the hippie finishes, he rips off his mask and shouts out, “Ha ha, I’m the hippie! “

The nun replies by whipping off her mask and shouting, “Ha ha, I’m the bus driver!”






:: Sunday, January 09, 2005

Historia


Grandmother makes cheap prophylactics,
She punctures the end with a pin;
Grandfather performs the abortions.
My God, how the money rolls in.
� Anon., Sung to the tune of “My Bonnie
Lies over the Ocean,” 20thC

What a let down huh.

Condoms (not to be confused with condominiums, not if you want to walk ever again) have been around a long time. You could say they have been big for millennia, at least three of them to be more precise. The Egyptians really were ahead of everyone else.

The the Romans reputedly made them from the muscle tissue of warriors they defeated in battle.

Combarelles in France has cave paintings depicting them as early as 100 to 200 AD.

They’ve been made of weird and wacky things such as oiled silk paper and fish bladders; the Japanese had two kinds; ‘Kawagata’ or ‘Kyotai’ made of thin leather (is THAT where “Rawhide” comes from?) and ‘Kabutogata’, made from tortoiseshell or horn (gives a whole new meaning to “hard on” doesn’t it??).

They’ve been tied on with ribbon (and Tony Orlando thought he had it tough, at least his were tied on a tree).

Rubber condoms were developed shortly after the creation of vulcanized rubber in the 1840’s, by Goodyear and Hancock. (Goodyear = 12 in a pack?)

They come in all sizes (no pun intended) from wee little nippers for that small prick in your life ( up to 2 inches, no wonder they are boxed in numbers of 48, you need three to make a real dick of yourself)


to really gigantic er, suckers

Damn, fill one of those upwith the “right stuff” and your eyes are seriously gonna water on the job, huh.

There are flavoured ones, coloured ones, glow in the dark ones and novelty ones - camoflage ones (so they won’t see you coming) and cowboy ones (just to keep the sheep on their toes), lollipop ones (suck on THAT, baby), astrological sign condoms (for guaranteed pleasure compatibility, maybe?), St Parick’s Day ones (like any Irishman ever really knew if he was coming or going anyway), Soccer and Golf ones (for those who are a good sport), Zoo ones (for the real animals out there), Christmas ones (yep, Santa really only comes ONCE a year) and the ruler condom with measurements all up the shaft (just to catch out them wot sez |——————————————-> is 6 inches “pffftttttt").

No wonder women have trouble parking if THAT’S 6 inches, mate.

I was going so say “well fuck me” but I don’t think I will. I mean, we haven’t even got down to the sex toys and BDSM stuff yet. Oh well, there is always tomorrow.


A little internet condom humour.

Enjoy.

TROJAN CONDOM COMPANY
6969 Slippery Root Drive
Drop Trouser, Sydney 2120.

Dear Mr. Shlypdych,

We regret to inform you that we have rejected your application to model and represent our product, TROJAN CONDOMS.

Although your general physical appearance is not displeasing, our Board of Directors feel that your wearing of our product in advertisements does not portray a positive romantic image for our product. A loose, baggy and wrinkled condom is not considered romantic.

We did admire your efforts to try and firm it up by using poly-grip, but even then it slipped off before we could get the photographs taken. We would like to note however that yours is the first we have seen that looked like a bicycle grip.

We appreciate your interest and would like to thank you for your time. We will retain your application for possible future consideration. If by chance we decide there is a market for mini-condoms we will call you.
We send greetings and sympathy for your lady.

Sincerely,
Dick Burly, President
TROJAN CONDOM COMPANY, INC.






:: Saturday, January 08, 2005

Music to my ears


I love music. I have it going nearly all the time, even if its only in my head.

I once learnt to play the guitar you know. Reg bought me a lovely acoustic guitar and I had all these lessons. I still have it to this day.

I can hardly remember a bloody chord though. That’s a bit disappointing. Reg has a kids sized electric guitar upstairs and all the necessaries to use it, but we lack someone to teach Adam and/or Heather how to play it. H plays around on the baby grand piano a bit, Adam is quite ok on the drums when it suits and they both like to perform and sing. And best of all, they really dig all kinds of music. But learning to play electric guitar this young would be cool. Imagine, Adam a cross between Don Henley and Lenny Henry with diggers and bulldozers all over the back yard.

Better than being forced to play a classical instrument and berated savagely for not complying. I can’t believe some people do that to their little kids. What 5 year old kid really “wants” to play a violin? The ones I’ve seen have hardly been budding virtuosos, not judging the coercion I’ve seen over practicing.

Its funny where preferences, talents and abilities do come from though, isn’t it? Is it Nature or Nurture? Or is it deeper still? How come some people are just able to compose beautiful music and write expressive lyrics while the rest of the world is left trying to say “happy birthday” adequately in a greeting card and hum in tune to elevator music? And why does REAL talent show up so early, so strongly in some people?

Take someone like Don McLean. He wrote some wonderful music in his early years that have stayed with each successive generation as classics. Like “American Pie", which 30 years after its release was voted 5th in a poll of the favourite 365 songs of the century.

And like “Vincent”.

Starry starry night
paint your palette blue and grey
look out on a summer’s day
with eyes that know the
darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills
sketch the trees and the daffodils
catch the breeze and the winter chills
in colors on the snowy linen land.

And now I understand what you tried to say to me
how you suffered for your sanity
how you tried to set them free.
They would not listen
they did not know how
perhaps they’ll listen now.

Starry starry night
flaming flo’rs that brightly blaze
swirling clouds in violet haze reflect in
Vincent’s eyes of China blue.
Colors changing hue
morning fields of amber grain
weathered faces lined in pain
are soothed beneath the artist’s
loving hand.

And now I understand what you tried to say to me
how you suffered for your sanity
how you tried to set them free.
perhaps they’ll listen now…


Powerful imagery combined with a wonderful melody. “Vincent” came out on his 1971 album American Pie, even bigger than the famous album title track. It reached #1 in the UK and #12 in the US.

When this album was released, Don McLean was 25 years old with the depth of feeling and expression of an old, old man.

How do they manage to do that??

Got me stuffed, that’s for sure. But I bet no one was whacking HIS legs to make him play his guitar.






:: Friday, January 07, 2005

Dear John


Do you remember that advertisement for BASF cassette tapes that was a US Army camp where this dweeb-looking bloke here



got a Dear John letter from his girlfriend in song format? And the sergeant said “play it again John” at the end. I have a feeling the singer might have been Beaver. Or was it that incredibly talented Jackie woman whose name escapes me?

“Dear John,
Oh how I hate to write.
Dear John,
Oh how I miss you so, tonight.
But my love for you has gone,
So I’m sending you this song.
Tonight I’m with another.
You’ll like him John,
He’s your brother.
So adieu to you forever.
Dear John. “

No, I don’t remember it either. Wait until I don’t remember the Chesdale Cheese ad as well :-)

I sent out a few of my own “Dear John” letters last week. I got sick of always eating shit sandwich from a few people and handed out some sandwiches of my own. No cheese and hold the mayo.

I’ve gone right off eating. Funny that.

Hello, hello, hey is that you?
I thought I’d ring so I could hear
What’s been happening in your life
I have ten minutes I can spare

We’ve been so busy doing things
Tidying up the yard
And going on our holidays
Thank God for credit cards!

Having parties, seeing friends
Rushing all about the place
Oh dear I think your email
Must be lost in cyber space

Oh well, dinner’s nearly ready
So I guess I’d better go
It’s been really good to talk to you
We’ll catch up soon, you know.






:: Thursday, January 06, 2005

blockages


I have writer’s block.

Well, that’s not strictly correct. Im burning and hurting inside and out so bad that all these fabulous, rivetting blogging ideas I have are shelved in the meanwhile until I can do them justice.

Bah, humbug.






:: Wednesday, January 05, 2005

On the other hand…


In my heart are many places
Cluttered rooms and empty spaces
Boxes crammed with memories old
Of broken china, bands of gold

Blank pictures that I cannot paint
Lyrics that my voice would taint
Music that I cannot play
And concepts that I can’t convey

Feelings so long unexpressed
And two large fledglings in my nest
An empty place where love should live
Hands filled with things they long to give

Sometimes knowings not enough
That things are rotten, times are tough
Most people come into their own
When hearts are given, never loaned

Dignity and justice go
Along with truth and love, you know
And disappear as life turns beige
Without a wisdom lined with age

These sentimental values rule
For not all is the gold of fools
And help to fill those empty spaces
For my heart is filled with many places






:: Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Happy Birthday!


Shari is another year older. She is also in the depths of morning sickness.

I can’t give her chocolate.

I can’t buy her booze.

I can give her shit though :-)

Happy Birthday ya old bat, we love ya heaps!!






:: Monday, January 03, 2005

Amiable


Today is Heather’s 14th birthday. Happy birthday, my sweet.

We have just spent the best New Years that I can remember with my friends in Thames. It was “bloody brilliant", to quote Billy Connolly. We even put those cds I made on the dvd player yesterday, turned the volume up and had our own impromptu karaoke session to Steppenwolf, Queen, Aerosmith and Don McLean. Their poor 16 year old neighbour learnt a whole new concept in participation watching my kids getting into some old time rock and roll with their dear old Mam and her chronic cronies.

Magik.

Adam is heavily into Kate Bush singing “Wuthering Heights” at the moment. Strange boy.

I wonder where he gets that from?

I really should have taken all my Morticia gear to Thames with me - the long black dress, the black lace gloves, the Gothic finger ring and the whip.

That woulda fucked them :-)






:: Saturday, January 01, 2005

New Year felicitations


May your year be filled with an abundance of all the things you value.

And chocolate.

And sex.

Amen.