WYRMLOG

Apparently he was on the Enclave payroll all along...

Friday March 13th 2009

Anyone who visits this blog regularly (not that I necessarily believe such a curious beast to exist) will have noticed a lot of activity lately. This is because I am "Making an Effort". I'm trying my best to write something every night just to keep my hand in, and to try and catch up to Helen who recently hit 600 posts despite her blog being younger than mine. Such a discrepancy cannot be allowed to stand! *grin*

That being said, I am extremely tired after a hard week's work trying to interpret the heavily accented mumblings of a man who looks uncannily like the Vault Overseer from the original Fallout (I keep expecting him to ask me to find a water chip), and have very little stomach for writing. So this entry will be short, if not necessarily sweet.

I will say before going however that if you have any money spare (a rare occurrence in this time of economic crisis I know) or you just feel like being charitable, there are a lot worse causes to send your money to than that of Hollis Hawthorne. Rather than try and compose an explanation in my own words I shall liberally quote from the post on Whitechapel (by one Theremina) that alerted me and many others to her plight...

[Hollis Hawthorne] is a performer, cyclist, and activist who lives in SF. I only kinda sorta barely know her through mutual friends, but by all accounts, she's just the most radiant, beautiful person. She moves in many of the same circles I do, and has donated her time to many of the same nonprofit events.

Late last month, Hollis was traveling by motor scooter in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India when something terrible happened. Some sort of freak hit-and-run accident that wasn't her fault left her bleeding out on the side of the road with her boyfriend Harrison frantically performing CPR for 20 minutes before a van of German tourists picked them up and drove them to a hospital. According to her best pal Eliza, Hollis was wearing her helmet and driving very slowly at the time of the accident. Now she's in a coma in a rural hospital with a serious brain stem injury.

According to Harrison, who has been with her from the moment it happened, "there are huge rats scurrying around on the [hospital] floor. I am sleeping on the ant-covered floor outside her room as I am not allowed in and the water they have used for many procedures is not even purified." When Hollis's mom flew in from Tennessee a couple of days ago with emergency support from the US consulate to see her own daughter, the orderlies were dismissive and curt. "They are not observing her brain pressure and have done nothing to alleviate the swelling in her brain. These are things that can make or break her early on in her recovery and healing process."

Through a series of fortuitous connections, her case has been reviewed and accepted by Stanford Medical; one of the best hospitals in the world ... All we need to do is get her there. The friends and family of Hollis are reaching out to everyone they can to raise funds to get her on an I.C.U. plane (aka air ambulance) to fly her back to California.

Before that can happen, Friends of Hollis must raise $150,000 dollars. They've already raised approximately $40,000, and more is pouring in all the time, mostly in small denominations. Can you spare a dollar, or five, or ten? It adds up more quickly than you'd think!

Yes, I know, life is risk, and life is uncertain. Life is also precious. If, in some small way, we can help someone in our community to come back from the brink, we really should. Click here to help, and please spread the word, if you can. This is what the internet is for.

Now yes, that all sounds like some kind of more creative than normal Nigerian mail scam, but it's all on the level and - while her situation has improved with movement to a much better hospital and she's starting to show signs of recovery - money to get her home is still desperately needed. So, if you feel like doing something good for the world and helping out a stranger - not to mention being part of a growing group of helpers and well-wishers scattered all around the world, click on the link above. If not, whatever.

That's my good deed for the week. Denys sleep now.

I am the Wombat

Thursday March 12th 2009

If you fell foul of a witch, what animal would you be turned into?

I rather think I'd turn into a wombat. Wombats are antipodean and rotund, like myself. They like to sleep, but can be tenacious when the mood takes them. They waddle along in an amusing fashion but with a look of determination that seems to say, "Yes, I may be round and antipodean and have an amusing waddle, but I have things to be doing, so please move aside".

Yeah, I reckon I'd be a wombat.

PS: Big congrats to Ali and Matt! :D

The Hideous Horrors of Home Hygiene

Wednesday March 11th 2009

Oh! How I hate to wash up in the morning,
Oh how I hate to wash up at all!
But the unkindest cut to date's,
When I run out of cups and plates,
You've gotta wash up!
You've gotta wash up!
You've gotta wash up this morning!
You've gotta wash up!
You've gotta wash up!
You've gotta wash up today!

I composed this charming ditty some years ago when once again faced with a gigantic heap of cutlery and crockery piled up on my kitchen sink. It is based (of course) on Irving Berlin's Oh how I hate to wake up in the Morning which itself is based on the traditional reveille of the US Army.

(Irving Berlin, there's an interesting fellow. Coming from a poor and Jewish background (in a time when being Jewish was a major social disadvantage) he managed to create a career as America's best loved songsmith. He fell in love with a non-Jewish girl whose wealthy father was scandalised at the thought of her marrying not just a Jew, but a working class Jew, and sent her off on a round the world cruise in the hopes she'd forget about him. Irving kept in touch with her via letter for the whole journey and wrote Always one of his biggest hits for her. They got married almost immediately on her return. Irving was pretty much persona-non-gratia with his in-laws until the stock market crash of 1929 when his wife's father lost huge sums of money and found himself heavily in debt. Irving was still pulling in cash hand over fist despite the economic collapse (or perhaps because of it - it can be argued that the worse things get the more people need songs) and paid off all his debts, refusing to hear a thing about being payed back. From that point on he was a welcome member of the family. Or at least that's the story I heard. But I digress.)

The reason I detail this rather awful parody of an American classic is that, once again, I find myself confronted with a sink piled high with used plates. This is because (as the song suggests) I hate doing the washing up. I hate spending time on a menial and slightly disgusting chore when I could be doing other far more interesting things. Which means that I tend to use every bit of crockery and cutlery I have (eating my dinner off saucers is by no means unheard of) until I completely run out and have no choice but to buckle down and do it.

Now yes, I could get a dishwasher, but frankly I've never liked them. They're big, noisy, use criminal amounts of water and (in my admittedly limited experience) don't do a terribly good job anyway. You have to wash down the plates and cups and things before putting them in, and then have to finish the job by manually scrubbing off tough stains and dried food bits that the machine missed. This is frankly not very efficient, and I won't have a bar of it.

So I am once again doomed to spending the next forty minutes or so with my hands submerged in soapy and increasingly filthy water, trying to find drying space for the huge piles of cups, knives, forks and plates that have accumulated in my kitchen for the last week. And once again I will promise to myself to do the washing up on a nightly basis. And once again I shall immediately break that promise and start the whole process over again.

I'm gonna need a bigger sink.

Jack Sprat and the Doom of Dogs

Tuesday March 10th 2009

Many years ago, when my brother and I were young kids our parents would occasionally leave us in the care of our aunts overnight. They lived in a small, yet somehow rambling house in North Perth with our two cousins - both boys about eight years older than us. It can't have been much fun for them as teenagers babysitting two little kids, but they did a good job and I can't remember a single incident of teasing or cruelty towards us on their part.

One thing they did do however was teach us two very important and little known facts, which I shall now reveal to the world at large.

The first concerns the gap down the back of an armchair, between the cushions on your couch, or even between a bed and the wall. You may think this is nothing but a depository for loose change, but in fact it is a dimensional portal that opens solely for members of the canine clan. It is The Doom of Dogs!

I have to admit I was a bit shaky on exactly what happens to any pooch that falls into the Doom of Dogs - the cousins seemed a bit shaky on that themselves - but whatever it is it must be fairly terrible because their aged terrier Suzie (her full name was actually Suzie Wong, but that's a story for another day) would run for the hills whenever we placed her on the couch and started pulling the cushions apart.

(Of course we would never have let her actually fall into the Doom, we were merely using her to demonstrate the concept. Repeatedly. Every time we went over there in fact.)

The second important thing they taught us was the real words to the nursery rhyme Jack Sprat. You are no doubt familiar with the traditional version, learnt from books and at nursery school...

Jack Sprat could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean,
And so betwixt them both, you see,
They licked the platter clean,

Well the real version, passed down through our cousins' family line for generations (or at least since they made it up the previous week) is...

Jack Sprat forgot his back,
His dog was green with envy,
So together they sat, on Old Shag's back,
And told stupid stories,

Now the meaning of this rhyme (not that it rhymes very much, if at all) is naturally an ancient and terrible secret. I could of course tell you, but then I'd have to condemn you to the Doom of Dogs, and no one wants that...