Freckles & Doubt

O, billboard poets of Cape Town, how much do I love thee? I arrived at work in a fit of giggles this morning, having passed in quick succession the following three billboards:

1. BAFANA GOES DOWN!
2. PETROL GOES UP!
3. N1 AND N2 TO BE ONE-WAY FOR WORLD CUP.

This last was a beautiful delayed reaction. I'm even more muzzy than usual this morning, having woken up with a lurking sinus headache after a dodgily enjoyable dream involving, for some reason, me plus Vin Diesel and an unspecified but attractive Arab gentleman on the floor of the library, and I actually looked vaguely at the headline for a few seconds thinking "but they're not even parallel highways!" before I realised the date. Hee resulted.

I'm amused by how far this kind of joke heading makes use of the usual cognitive delay in attempting to parse the compressed meanings of a typical headline: you're so used to trying to make sense of the damned things, the absolute lack of sense in this particular context sneaks up on you.

While we're on the subject of the date: Unicorn School: The Sparkling is actually something I'd totally read, if only to watch Charlie Stross ruthlessly dissect it.

Four-day weekend coming up. I'm stoked.

Oh, happy day! the billboard poet is at work again. Most notably:

ALL BLACKS ARE AMAZING!
and
TIGER'S WIFE HAS KITTENS!

In defiance of the evidence both of these are probably about sport, rather than, respectively, affirmative racial politics and Zooborns. But they made me giggle despite the fact that I woke up at 5.30am angsting about the training sessions I'm giving today, and was at work by 6.45 in a state of smouldering resentment.

In other news, Ursula Vernon finally does the gold-leaf Klimt thing to owls, with predictable results, i.e. it's marvellous:

.

Want.

There's a series of noticeboards in a Groote Schuur corridor with heading labels which read, from left to right, "NEHAWU NUPSAW DENOSA PAWUSA HOSPERSA PSA". This is clearly an infernal incantation of some sort; it's obviously in an alien tongue, and has a definite rhythm to it. Chant it seventeen times in the presence of black candles, African garlic and a goat, and you'll summon something horrible. Probably Manto. In her true form. The one with the tentacles.

In other news, kiddies respond to the Beatles. This is terrifyingly cute, and in tone not unrelated to the Tiny Art Director.

I had a whole long District 9 response written but I seem to have lost it. Well, phooey. I don't think this film wants me to review it. I may reconstruct it this afternoon in between excursions to the fifth circle of Hell, aka board schedules.

Today's Daily Sun billboard reads:

BEDROOM IS ENERGY BOX!

Possible interpretations (and I'm not sure why I think of the smutty ones first. Blame the rigours of curriculum advice):

1. Couple has sex in cruel booby-trap bedroom with hidden wiring, is electrified.
   
2. Couple has wild tantric sex in pentagram, provides electricity for entire house.
   
3. Couple remove roof from bedroom, lie naked on bed, soak up rays, photosynthesise.
   
4. Ghostbuster widget with flashing lights and extendible ears goes wild at very high occult readings in bedroom. (I watched Ghostbusters again last night, can you tell? Had forgotten how pleasingly silly it is. Also, how good the cast).
   
5. Families huddle together for warmth under giant duvets. Which is odd, as Cape Town is currently suspiciously warm, with berg winds.

Owing to unfavourable cosmic wossnames I was on the curriculum advice tables from 8.45am to 4.15pm yesterday, with one 20-minute break for lunch, while magpie, Möbius trails of students stretched down the stairs. This necessitated staggering home and vegging in front of Ghostbusters in default of actual brain, which worked surprisingly well. Today I rinse, repeat, only this time with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Clearly the first week of term causes me to retreat into 80s nostalgia. I also have Weird Science and The Breakfast Club in reserve.

I have no brain from curriculum advice, so therefore am wimping out on a Random Ginormous Fantasy Epic for today. Instead I request witterers to ritually reflect for a few minutes on the manifest iniquities of Stephen Donaldson. Any particularly pithy insults can be left in the comments, where they will improve my day enormously.

Trust the Daily Voice to respond to the current swineflu crisis in the perfect tabloid idiom:

HORROR OF EVIL CHICKEN!!

Says it all, really.

I have my car back (the oil pressure gauge, ironically enough, had sprung a leak, which, since the gauge is positioned at the point of highest oil pressure, basically spewed all the oil out more or less instantaneously. Engine, fortunately, undamaged owing to driver paranoia). I had a horrible day in which I was so flat-out I flat-out forgot to eat. Tomorrow will be better. (She says, in tones of low menace).

Clay Shirky is an interesting man. This discussion notes the fascinating parallel between the effects of the printing press on the Church's monopoly of religion, and the effects of the internet on newspapers' monopoly of news. DRM and other horrors are in fact quasi-religious panic, an attempt to remove power and knowledge from the hands of the people on the grounds not that it isn't good for them, but that it threatens your control. I'd be happier about this if it weren't for the fact that there are still die-hard pockets of religious fundamentalism insisting on the Bible as absolute received Word of God in the face of all its contradictions, five hundred years after the invention of the printing press allowed non-priests to see such contradictions for themselves. This suggests a likely scenario in which fundamentalist groups of the dying breed of copyright lawyers infest the twenty-sixth century with apocalyptic on-line demonstrations, to the derision of educated beholders. Like the fundamentalists using their access to the Bible to protest the dissolution of its monolithic truth, future copyright-protestors won't be able to help using the medium of their downfall to protest its existence. We can haz irony. Yay.

And while we're on the subject of newspapers, in the Department of Billboard Poetry: VILLAGE EATS GREEDY GIANT! This is an absolutely beautiful re-statement, in a fairy-tale vein, of the classic man-bites-dog trope. I cannot for the life of me imagine the actual, real-world context, except that vague visions of righteous revenge on hungry cannibal pumpkins are drifting through my head...

The Billboard Poet is getting a bit frisky for the festive season. Yesterday:
THE DOEKS OF HAZARD!
And a few weeks back:
THAT'S THE WAY THE DOEKIE CRUMBLES!

For non-Saffricans, a doek is a woman's headscarf, worn largely by black and Afrikaans ladies of the more matronly persuasion. I am now plagued by the necessity for imagining endlessly-ramifying scenarios in which plump, comfortable, Afrikaans or Xhosa ninja ladies in doeks perform a variety of unlikely and probably criminal acts.

This is also generating helpless flashbacks to an incident in my childhood featuring the reaction of a Shona matron to the sight of one of my dad's peregrines, hooded and sitting on the back of the car seat, as was their wont. She burst out laughing and insisted on calling all her friends to see the "shiri with a doek!" ("Shiri" is the Shona for bird). I should add for the record that a leather falconry hood, while tending to make falcons look slightly silly, looks nothing at all like a doek.

The Billboard Poet of the Daily Voice strikes again! This time, I must admit, I'm mystified.

WEE PEES ON LIONS

I can't find a likely organisation for which W.E.E. is the acronym, and cannot work out if the lions here are literal or if it's referring to the English rugby team. Either way, points for assonance, potty humour, and a mental image rife with both defiance and the potential for total disaster.

I've just finished Season 7 of X-Files. It's interesting, watching them off the DVDs like this - I'm realising how scrappy and incomplete my original experience was, missing probably more than half of the episodes when they were on TV. I'm very much appreciating the season arcs and character development, and the meta-plots actually make much more sense than I'd originally thought. Season 7 suffers slightly from anticlimax, with a couple of long-running plot threads tied up early in the season so that the rest of the episodes feel unfocused, slightly groping, without the engine of Samantha's disappearance or the machinations of the Syndicate. I also don't think the writing is quite up to scratch at times. Undying though my devotion is to Mulder and Scully, the Duchovny- and Anderson-scripted episodes were a tad flawed - "Hollywood A.D." in particular was just silly. On the other hand, it's given me quite my favourite feel-good ending of the series, with all the dead crawling out of their graves to do solemn, happy, beautiful ballroom dance on the deserted set. I don't know why the mental image should cause me so much pleasure, but it does.

I am distinctly unpleased to report that Sid is still rampant, and that in addition to the headache this iteration has given me a four-pack-a-day habit in tissues. However, I am now at home for a week to finish this indexing, so at least I won't have to give curriculum advice while students cower in the far corner of my office, repulsed by the levels of mucus.

Gaah! This accursed and thrice-spat-upon campus so-called internet (hah!) is joyously swooping between no connectivity because the main server is faulty and keeps choking and dropping the connection, or no connectivity because there's malware on the system so the bandwidth is choked and keeps dropping the connection. Since any connection-droppage causes the web browser to frantically look for login confirmations, repeatedly, with increasing paranoid desperation, basically one may as well not bother. It's just taken me fifteen minutes to load this LJ post page. Pshaw. Likewise, Tchah! and Phooey!

So, the Billboard Poet of the Daily Voice is back:
VROT LIVES OF THE POTATO PEOPLE!
In my ongoing spirit of random analysis I draw your attention to the nifty correlation between "vrot" and "potato", "vrot" being a term equally applied to rotten vegetables and to a more general and abstracted sense of ickness. "Potato people" likewise invokes the classic tabloid interest in mutants, aliens, monstrosities and other weird humanoids. The whole gives a pleasingly fantastic spin to the underlying story, presumably one of straightforward poverty and poor working conditions.

I seem to have been very bad with blogging lately, and have not much to plead in mitigation other than above connectivity joys, and an entire weekend spent reading J.D. Robb and going to bed ridiculously early. Other than the bit where I spent the better part of eight hours lounging in a jaccuzzi drinking gin and tonics and eating Lindt chocolates, while appropriately 80s hits played rather loudly. (There's something terribly 80s about a jaccuzzi. What's with that?). Same house-sit place in Sea Point as last weekend, only more decadent. Apparently lounging in jaccuzzi, or possibly the bit where you jump into the pool at intervals to cool down, works all your muscles almost as much as a gym workout. Who knew?

Incidentally, in the Department of Subject Lines Not From A David Bowie Lyric, this one's from Order of the Stick. Meta orcs make me very, very happy.

Last Night I Dreamed: maddened fantasy politics, with me as a junior member of cabinet for a strong-minded female ruler who caused fluttering in dovecots by appointing her admittedly brilliant twenty-something daughter as Minister of Finance. Much hanging out around long wooden tables in mansions and castles, and using secret passages and concealment behind wall hangings to overhear conversations.

Good grief.



That's ... disturbing. In a horribly excellent way. It comes from here, where there are some very bizarre and definitely non-excellent playgrounds.

The Billboard Poet of the Daily Voice is back:

RASTA'S PANGA ROL OVER ZOL.

Note the characteristic compression - "rasta" is a highly resonant stereotype conveying a world of assumptions, as does "panga", which has all the attachments of insane homicide. There's also nifty play with assonance (rasta, panga) and rhyme (rol, zol), and a sort of subliminal riff on "roll over". Actual meaning is, however, less obvious - what the hell is the significance of "rol" in this context? I can't find anything on Google, and am assuming it must be quite specific Cape slang. Even I, however, know what "zol" is.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was wrestling with an affectionate bobcat. This was strangely sexy, with an undercurrent of fear at the thought that I could get my head ripped off any second. In retrospect, it's probably a potent symbol for my general feelings about romantic relationships.