Curiouser And Curiouser

At some point about a week ago an ice-cream freezer appeared at the bottom of my stairs. The sort you get in get in milk bars*.

You know the type. One of those long bench affairs with the sliding glass top and the brightly hued casing that is supposed to remind you of the joy and brightness of a summer's day... or drive you into an ice-cream buying frenzy by hypnotising you with vivid colour combinations and dynamic shapes.

This, as I'm sure you'll appreciate, was all a bit of a puzzler.

I didn't order a large cooling unit for frozen dairy snacks and no-one else in the building seems to be doing anything with it. As far as I can tell.

I mean there is a blue plastic tarp taped over the lid.

Probably to protect the glass and to prevent people from opening the lid and leaving it open to the elements and potential damage.

Probably not to hide the fact that it is filled to the brim with carefully sectioned and stacked dismembered body parts, like a better padded version of the Parisian catacombs**.

I mean it's not plugged into anything so if it is full of cadavers it'll probably start to smell soon. It's been pretty cold recently but not that cold...

Y'know I'm going to be really disappointed when I sneak a look under that tarp and find out it's empty or full of old Tupperware or something.

I always assume abandoned items are full of bodies. Well, except for that shipping container near my Dad's work. I'd just watched Resident Evil 3 when that one turned up so I figured it'd be full of... other things, but technically they'd still count as bodies so...***

What with all the lovely exciting crime dramas we have entertaining us and giving us unrealistic fantasies about the heart-pumping excitement of forensic labs, is this assumption surprising?

You can't open a port-a-loo door, garbage skip, investigate an abandoned car, frolic innocently near the local storm drain outlet or wake up in a strange bed without having a cadaver leap out at you in an exciting way just in time to usher in the opening credits. Anywhere a body can fall out in a startling manner, a body will fall out in a startling manner.

Of course I probably shouldn't automatically follow my first instinct on these sorts of things given that I am the kind of person who whilst having a shower will wonder if my having Awakening by The Damning Well blaring away in the background makes it more likely that I'll be attacked by a psychopath****.

I know I'm just being fanciful.

There's probably a perfectly logical reason for the ice-cream freezer to be there.

I'm pretty sure one of the fellows downstairs owns a couple of businesses. He's probably just keeping the fridge there until it can be delivered to its end destination.

Or until I play something appropriate on the stereo so he can stab me up in the shower and then put my bits in the ice-cream freezer.

Either/or.

*Uh... corner stores? Small shops with overpriced merchandise. Like the 7-11 except independently owned so they get to use the excuse of being 'small business' and 'battlers' to justify charging $4 for a 1-litre carton of milk.

**I shouldn't have watched the entire first season of Dexter in one night, I really shouldn't.

***Does that count as a spoiler? Nah, I don't think it does.

****Or, y'know, vampires.

Extra Protein And One-Sided Arguments

Oh gross! There's a fly in my beer!
Argh, I have been drinking that for ages!
How long has it been in there?
Oh jeez, it's still moving! It's swimming in my beer! That's just not on!
I mean I've never been that excited about the idea of the worm in the tequila* and fly in the beer was not part of my plans for the evening!
Game little bastard is still paddling about.
See, now I feel torn, I can't in good conscience sit here and watch the fly drown but if I pour it out I'll feel odd about swatting it like I usually would. The temporary reprieve would feel too much like mental torture. But I don't want a sticky, beer-flavoured fly buzzing unsteadily about my lounge room, bumping into windows and explaining to my Venetian blinds that they're great really, they're like his most awesome best friends ever and if anyone says differently he'll punch them right in the cord toggle.
I guess a quick death is more merciful than a slow one and at least it'll be drunk and probably won't notice.
Huh, well it looks like I managed to drink enough of the beer to be having an ethical dilemma about a fly (dialogue included) so I suppose I'd better forge on.

[Empty bottle, squash fly, hold memorial service, obtain fresh beer, place protective thumb over mouth of bottle]

OK, so before I got distracted by anthropomorphising insects and weighing up modes of execution I was doing what now?

Oh Right! Blogging! Right, OK, back on track...

I'm trying to work out whether I'm obsessed with advertising or just addicted to sass-back.
I thought I had gotten the bug out of my system with the exposé about the car wash but it persists. Then again, seeing as I've been talking back to the television for about as long as I've been watching it I shouldn't be surprised.

One of those exciting 'drugs = hugs' ads came on just now, explaining with upbeat music, a suspiciously happy family and some mumbling about dosages and side effects how if you take this magical pill your crippling back pain will dissipate and you will be able to swing your 30kg** child above your head like a loveable sack of potatoes and I found myself snorting and saying something like...

"Oh that's fabulous, so instead of addressing the root of the problem you briefly dull the pain enough for you to do extra damage to your already faulty body so that your kid, momentarily elated by their whirl about your head, will be extra crushed by having to resort to child slave labour to support your crippled ass when you crap out like a pile of crap"***

... or something completely rational like that.

The ones that tend to send me off on mini Lord of the Rings style rants with everyone's family trees and complex retellings of other rants included are the stupid cleaning product ads for toilets.

Did you know that there are germs in your toilet!?
No really!
The place where you put your poo has germs in it!
Oh my God!
But if you use this magic new cleaning gel you can get rid of the germs you can't see!
In your toilet.
Like inside the toilet.
WHO CARES!?
What are these magical germs going to do?
Form an army and dive up your bottom?
They're in the bowl of the toilet!
They are only a concern if you routinely drink out of the toilet and if you do that you've already got problems!
If you wash your hands properly after you've been to the toilet it doesn't matter how many 'scary invisible germs' you have in the bowl of the toilet which you don't touch, your hands are as clean as they're going to get!
Stop drinking out of your toilet!

Ahem.
I should probably take a bit of a time-out. I got a little overexcited.
Also I seem to have my thumb stuck in the neck of my beer bottle.
You carry on without me and I'll catch you up later.



*I don't think we even get that in Australia, probably against the quarantine laws. We are an incredibly laid back people until it comes to things like crop contamination, invading insects or suss looking animal products. On the upside, the cavity searches are is surprisingly gentle and they hardly ever hose you down with pressurised water any more.
**About 66 lbs.
***I had already had a couple of beers by this point (hopefully fly-free) and was a little more detailed in my objections than might be considered usual. For other people.

Trial And Error, My Friends, Trial And Error

Soooooooooooooooooo anyway I set fire to my kitchen the other day...

Not like in a big way. It was just the oven. I mean, just the griller of the oven.

I was making lamb chops and those things spit like bastards, so they were sparking little bits o' fat up at the gas element and I decided to take a "eh what's the worse thing that could happen?" approach rather than panicking and looking on like a nervous nancy. People are too nervous these days, don't you think?

Apparently one of the worst things that could happen is the fat that has been slowly gathering around the chops can finally catch fire, leading to a tiny re-enactment of Sodom and Gomorrah* as fatty spitty fire rained down upon the hapless chops.

It was really quite instructional.
I realised that I hadn't gotten around to buying a fire extinguisher for the house**.
I figured throwing water inside the grill would be tricky and a bad idea.
I noticed in time that if I pulled the grill out to extinguish the alleged 'fire'*** I would melt the knobs off the front of the stove...
So with my mad improvisational skills I took a pizza tray, shoved it into the grill over the burny thingy and bits of unfortunate and victimised meat and successfully extinguished the tiny tiny blaze.
Also I found out that meat that has caught a little bit on fire can still be quite delicious and still maintain a light flavour of seasoning and pepper.

It's the second episode in my latest series of Xtreme Housekeeping Events.

The first was flooding out my local Laundromat.
Technically I can't claim full credit for that one though as it had more to do with a faulty washing machine than it had to do with me but still... Having a washing machine jittering and spewing water and suds from both ends, freaking out both young and old alike was quite entertaining.
I do own a washing machine which should exempt me from the Laundromat experience but apart from the fact it was a little venerable to start with, it got dropped a little bit between the moving van and my latest place and has never actually, y'know, worked again.
Hence the local Laundromat and the joys that it brings****.

The simplest solution to this particular dilemma would be to buy a brand new washing machine.
That just seems a little extreme.
I don't really want to go into an electronics store because the barely controlled desperation and resentment lurking in the eyes of a salesperson on commission is second only to that seen behind the eyes of clowns.
There is also the little surly old person voice that has muttered from within me since mine birth that keeps on insisting that appliances aren't what they used to be and that the minute I buy something it'll either break down or be featured on a hard hitting news program as the sole cause of global warming.
This is, as I'm sure is obvious, a lovely lovely excuse for not having to go shopping and wade through a sea of minor differences between products and lies with the end result of being allowed to give other people money for an object that may or may not get dropped a bit on the way up the stairs...
Ah well. I expect I'll snap sooner or later.
Probably the next time someone comes up behind me whilst I'm folding sheets and tells me that I smell nice and not at all like socks.


*Just the 'fire and brimstone from above' imagery, not the ridiculous twitchy-eyed behavioural accusations and blatantly discriminatory bit.
**No! No! Bad! Buy!
***OK, yeah, it was really fire.
****Eg: Getting to see other people's smalls, being accused of stealing someone's drying after they'd only left it in there for seven hours whilst they rustled someone else's cattle (just going by smell here), wondering how on Earth you can raise a kid to be morbidly obese by the time they're, what? Seven? I can't quite tell...

The Secret Meanings Of Dreams (Or Why You Shouldn't Eat Cheese Before Bedtime)

It looks like even the earnest flowery 'Interpret the Meanings of Your Dreams' books and websites are trying to get with the times. Or at least keep their source material relevant enough to maintain the rate of crystal sales.

A few years ago there would never have been any mention of what it means when you dream about zombies - not so much as a passing reference - leaving those of us who had seen Dawn of the Dead without any way to work out what our subconscious was trying to tell us.
Apart from 'have a zombie survival plan' of course.

Now you can find online dream dictionaries and the like that tell you that dreaming of zombies means that 'parts of your greater self are stalking you'*, whilst others suggest that it means that someone might be threatening you in real life 'emotionally, mentally or physically'**. Oh, and if you dream that you are a zombie it means you are 'not in touch with your humanity, compassion, feelings etc'***.
The bit where you are terrified of being ripped to pieces and communally devoured like a large dish of paella isn't addressed in the various entries for 'zombie'. You have to look at entries for 'cannibalism' for any hint of what the consumption of flesh might signify****.

Unfortunately these illuminating guides to the collective human psyche still dwell heavily on the meaning of individual symbols without giving you any clue as to how to combine and interpret them as a whole.
If waterfalls indicate 'goals and desires' and a unicorn means 'high ideals, hope and insight' does a dream about a unicorn by a waterfall mean that you've had an insight about your dreams and hopes or is your idealist unicorn thirsty for direction?
What if you barely notice either of them because you're too busy running from zombies?
The nerd in me wants a point-based scoring system where zombies are clearly trumped by monster trucks which therefore dictate the overall message of any dream that features both*****.

So despite having access to this new information I am still unable to determine which parts of my greater self are stalking me when I dream that I'm hiding in a butcher's shop while zombies rage around looking for meat and whether this reveals a self-destructive streak or a more than healthy dose of stupid.
And I've got even less to go on with the dream that starred a bungee-jumping Indiana Jones-esque sheep!

Maybe I should just stop eating so late at night.
Or start drinking less.
Or more.
Or possibly just accept that my dreams are crazy goobaloo nonsense and that I can't apply blanket or standardised interpretations to every item or event.

But seriously, if anyone could explain the dream with the bungee-jumping sheep that'd be awesome.



*Whatever that means!
**Thanks for the vague warning, I'll get right on that.
***Sociopaths Anonymous: Your membership card is in the mail.
****You are concerned about exploitation and submission/domination apparently. Nothing to do with being eaten alive at all. That'd be too simple.
*****That you should go out and commandeer a monster truck and mow down zombies!

Additional: Sure I could link to various dream dictionary websites but imagining hapless folk searching the interwebs randomly for dream interpreters and analysers is so much more rewarding.

Back In My Day...

The world is changing at such a rate that we've become old fogies decades ahead of schedule.

You start talking about something with someone else anywhere near their mid twenties and at some point or another you might accidentally use that type of phrase. You know the one.

• You can remember when petrol cost 60 cents a litre (or your local equivalent).
• You can remember when the milkman used to deliver glass bottles of milk to the door.
• You can remember when the internet was empty and boring.
• When you were a kid there were no mobile phones, handsets were still shackled to the wall and when someone couldn't contact you by phone they assumed you were just out instead of dead.
• When you did assignments at school we had to look in books and encyclopedias, there were very few electronic journals/books and no such thing as Wikipedia*.

You see!?

I can honestly remember saying to a friend something like "Pfft, these DVD things are never going to take off. What is everybody going to do? Get rid of all their VHS?"

*coff coff* Yes, well we all make mistakes. Nostradamus I am not.

I expect to be completely confused by the changing technology years before my 82-year old grandmother was and to have to ask younger relatives to give me a hand with my visual medium recorder** well before my mother had to.

See how advanced we are?
We're moving so fast my knowledge has become obsolete before I've even gotten to my midlife crisis!
And by the time I do I probably won't know how to operate my shiny new car!

*That bastion of reliability and truth
**I'm not going to date myself by naming the recording medium

Hey, Did I Leave A Blog Post Around Here? It's About This Big...

It's no picnic being absent-minded.

Sure you get a decent amount of exercise as you wander endlessly through the house trying to remember where you were going and why but there are drawbacks as well.


CONS

• Self-Inflicted Social Alienation

1. Step One. Almost give yourself heart failure when you get back to your car and realise that the laptop you had carefully camouflaged with environmentally friendly shopping bags is gone.
2. Step Two. Scare the crap out of a small child and his unamused mother as you start to swear like a sailor and perform a frantic little dance whilst trying to work out how anyone managed to steal anything from a locked car.
3. Step Three. Finally remember that you stopped off home before going to the shops and your laptop is safely there and have to come down off an adrenaline high as those around you try to decide whether you are epileptic, schizophrenic or have Tourette's before they finally settle on 'you're just a weirdo'.
   

• Outing Yourself as Pants-On-Head-Retarded*
  
  "Holy crap..."
  "What?"
  "Holy crap!"
  "What? What is it!?"
  "I can't find my phone! It's not in any of my pockets or my bag! It's just not there! It's gone!"
  "Oooooooooooookay, then what are you talking to me on?"
  "What? I... Oh. Oh right. Heh."
  


• You Always Assume You've Forgotten Something

1. This may sound helpful but means that you end up looking for things on the off chance you might remenmber what they are when you see them.
2. You will check that you've locked the front door three times before you leave the house because your short term memory always cuts out halfway down the stairs/driveway/street.
3. You will realise that you were right and you did forget something but this will happen when you're either halfway to your destination or have arrived and it is too late to do anything about it.

Though to be fair there are some definite advantages.

PROS

• Being Forgetful Could Be Mistaken For Existential Philosophy And Net You Some Hot But Pretentious Party Booty
  
  "Why am I here?
  "What am I looking for?"
  "Where am I meant to be?"
  


• It Cuts You Some Slack For Being An Inconsiderate Ass-Hat
  
  "Oi! Where are you?"
  "Um, at home watching The Mighty Boosh. Where are you?"
  "I'm down at the pub where you're supposed to be."
  "What!?"
  "You said you'd meet me at the pub at 7pm on Friday."
  "... Is it Friday?"
  "Oh for the love of- *sigh* Are you coming now?"
  "Yeah, gimme 10 minutes."
  "Bye."
  


• You Probably Won't Notice When You Actually Start To Lose Your Marbles

1. Slip further and further into good natured befuddlement.
2. Get quite excited when the nurses take it in turns to explain that you are actually Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie, Hugh Heffner or Evil Knievel.
3. Believe them implicitly when they tell you that you're "going home" and quite enjoy the slide show of green fields and waterfalls and the like until the spiked drink kicks in and you get sent off to the Soylent Corporation.

And of course if you completely forget what you'd been planning to write about this week you can always write about having a mind like a sieve and hope that anyone reading this does as well so they won't notice when you do it again a few months down the track.

*Oh Yahtzee, you visionary poet!

What Do You Mean They Don't Have To Make Sense?

Despite the fact we are all well aware that the advertising industry is a seething pit of con artists and shysters there are some bits near the edge of the pit, the ‘shallow end’ if you will, where the small time or slightly slow advertisers dwell.

There’s a carwash in my home town which I won’t name* which sends me off into a spiel every time I see it.
The sign above the carwash depicts a small pod of dolphins energetically leaping out of foaming waves.

There are few things that weird me out about this:

1. The town is two hours inland.
2. Unless the dolphins want to face-plant on the beach, why are they leaping forwards out of crashing waves?
3. The hell do dolphins have to do with cars? Does anyone ever see a dolphin and think wax polish? And if they do… ick.
4. Either the dolphins are leaping about in soapy fresh water (bad for the dolphins) or the carwash appears to be suggesting that you wash your car in salt water (bad for your car) Does anyone else remember that cartoon where Goofy/Donald Duck backing his boat and car into the ocean? I rest my case**

The number of people who are actually willing to let me wax poetical about this topic (few) and those who haven’t heard it at least once before (even fewer) always try to reason with me.

“It’s a sign for a carwash. It isn’t a scientific treatise***” they say, “So Sammy Signwriter isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed! It got your attention didn’t it?”

Yes, I reply, it did get my attention but in a way that makes me worry about their facilities and/or what they do to dolphins in their spare time. I’m certainly never going to patronise their carwash.

“I’m sure they’d be devastated to learn they’ve lost one crazy person’s business… You don’t even have a car!”

That’s not the point. It’s a matter of principal.

“Sure not taking the car you don’t have to a particular carwash is a matter of principal. Say does someone already have your power of attorney?”

I’m already leaving you my CDs imaginary composite of everyone I know, don’t get greedy.

Fair enough, Sammy Signwriter probably isn’t running with the big boys of the advertising world and possibly there are those less OCD than I who, once their attention is caught, forget about the dolphins and focus on sluicing down their cars who love that sign. I guess what I’m more worried about is what advertising is doing to the way we think

Someone I met recently works for an insurance company (but I forgive them) which ran a light-hearted ad about a family building a new house and the little daughter being downcast to find a brick wall behind the door where her new bedroom should be.

They had been expecting a few calls from the usual overexcited people accusing them of child abuse for putting such a broken-hearted look on the little girl’s face but what they hadn’t been expecting was the flood of other complaints.

People calling up to say that the little girl was too ugly to be on TV and asking what the insurance company intended to do about this.

So after years of bemoaning the overly pretty and slim folk with uncomplicated lives or speed-freak levels of energy pedalling our consumer faff to us we’ve come to this.

Go home little girl.

You’re too ugly to be on TV.

Worries me, it really does.

But if you’ll excuse me I’m off to pay some of the local ne’er-do-wells to spray paint ‘SAVE THE DOLPHINS’ on a certain carwash. They’ve already got the spray paint and if they get caught at least they’ll be able to plead ecological conscience and the passion of youth as a defence.

And I’ll be able to deny everything as long as everyone I’ve ever met can keep their mouths shut.

*I can’t remember what it’s called.

**Stay tuned for my post on how we should be using that invisible paint on our heavy artillery equipment in Afghanistan and Iraq.

***They didn't actually say treatise but I wanted to make them look good for the internets.