Freckles & Doubt

Thought for the day: dear spammer, if your email has a subject line which reads "PLS OPEN YOUR ATTARCHMENT AND FEW YOUR WINNING PROCEDURE" it is so utterly doomed before it starts that it's causing me actual pain to contemplate the mere fact of your existence. Not that the existence of spammers is anything other than painful at the best of times, but I mean, really. If you're going to be a pestilential blot on the face of the modern internet community, can't you at least be competent at it? Incompetent evil gives me toothache.

Talking of which, I am still attempting to live down the fact that I inflicted G.I. Joe, now with added pointlessly inept bad guys, on jo&stv for our Friday night movie veg-out, on the grounds of (a) probable cute crash-boom special effects, for which I have a well-documented weakness, and (b) Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In the event we spent most of the movie wincing sympathetically on behalf of JGL and other unfortunate actors (Christopher Ecclestone? noooooo! Arnold Vosloo? shaaaaame!) clearly forced by incipient starvation to sign on the dotted line for the ginormous cheque. (Theory: JGL does this sort of thing to fund his next three indie movies of choice, and it is our duty to support him on the grounds that we might get another Brick.) G.I. Joe is a bloody stupid film. It has occasionally cute if somewhat predictable special effects. Channing Tatum is unexpectedly likeable if more or less mahogany all through - it's particularly interesting to see him doing the action thing given that I last saw him bopping around the show in Step Up, about which I decline to be embarrassed on the grounds that Jo gave it to me as a joke present.

Following the random association game, I have just scored a copy of Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing courtesy of Jo's birthday, since she received a duplicate present and passed on one to me. This is a weird, lateral, poignant, beautiful, delicate, intricate, heartbreaking and very, very odd piece of graphic art, and I'm more than slightly in love with it. Have a look.

I'm also slightly in love with the new version of Firefox, which has produced all sorts of minor innovations with things like new tab placement: it now all conforms much more closely to my personal logic, which either means (a) score, the design team think like I do, or (b) score, they've trained Firefox to read my mind so it thinks like I do. Not that I think much today, being still a little short on sleep after Jo's raucous party on Saturday night, with attendant booze levels, epic clean-up and more wine for dinner last night. I don't think I was hungover, but I'm a tad fragile still.

We also watched The Hangover on Friday night. I didn't expect to enjoy this nearly as much as I did. It looks as though it's going to be the usual horrible frat-boy dick-joke gross-out collection of misogynistic bullshit, and at every point in the film where it starts moving in that direction, it takes a sudden hard left turn and goes somewhere else instead. It was refreshingly unexpected. It's also more or less completely sold by its cast, who are superb, and by the pleasing levels of surreal generated by the flashback format. Drunken manly antics are much easier to deal with when they're all postmodern. Bonus tiger, Mike Tyson, Bradley Cooper giving a surprisingly good imitation of a total dick dead against type, and a completely inexplicable chicken.

I'm going to stop there, because this wayward puppy thing could get out of hand. Tomorrow I shall attempt to post about the house, which is almost finished and looking, while still inexpressibly grimy, rather excitingly new.

Huh. Yesterday was, in fact, my blog's fifth birthday. Somehow I always miss it, which must be significant in some way or another. I always forget the anniversary, but during those five years of blogging I don't think I've missed posting for more than three days in a row at any point. Is this (a) obsessive-compulsive, (b) unduly verbose or (c) sad? Also, They Do Say blogging is dead (replaced, no doubt, by Twitter), which I take a bit personally and tend, in truly bloody-minded fashion, to set out to prove wrong out of sheer principled cussedness.

Today was completely unspeakable. I gave curriculum advice solidly from 9am to 6pm, finishing off by walking back to my office in tears owing to utter exhaustion. At this time of year I can't go anywhere without being stopped every ten steps by students for advice on problems which are clearly more important than anything else to which I could possibly be dashing. In this kind of space all I can think of is how much I hate this job, which is sad, because mostly I don't. Memo to self, must prevent self from succumbing to a frenzy of frustration and resigning from it during these hectic periods, I'd probably regret it. Probably.

Not even the vague desire to see if the tilers have actually tiled the kitchen is dragging me back home tonight. I think I'll take one look at the household filth levels and my soul will waft gently from my body, leaving a peacefully restful corpse curled cat-like in the grime, while my last remnants of consciousness drift off among the clouds in search of cleaner climes less filled with dust and the persistent narcissisms of students.

Hmmm. Wayward brain, c'est moi. The last set of subject lines on this blog have referenced, from the bottom, Belle & Sebastian lyrics, heraldry humour, a weak and inexcusable pun, Crowded House lyrics, A. A. Milne, netspeak, Yoda, The Firm's "Star Trekking", and a quote from the Spike sexual-dysfunction scene in Buffy Season 4. Either I'm ridiculously well rounded or I have the attention span of a stunned herring.

In the Department of Consciousness-Challenged Members of the Genus Clupea, this morning I woke up about half an hour before my alarm clock went off and decided to dash up to campus in the first flush of nasty traffic at about 7.15 instead of waiting until it dies down a bit after 8. Twenty minutes later, inching through Rondebosch, I realised it was Wednesday and I'd joyously locked up the house and set the alarm in blithe disregard of the fact that it's the gardener's day. Three seconds later I also realised that I hadn't switched off the alarm clock before I left. Gritting my teeth and turning the car around with a fine insouciance in the face of oncoming traffic, it was forcibly borne upon me that I had one of my contact lenses in back-to-front. I consider it to be a triumph of the will that I returned home with only a few restrained cuss words, and didn't immediately crawl straight back into bed. But my noble plan to finish the marking before the day started was, alas, doomed.

The vagaries of the week have been slightly complicated by the fact that my dad's in Groote Schuur this week, going through a batch of tests in the neurology ward, so the levels of Kafkaesque surreal have been increased materially by the need to negotiate the Giant Medical Bureaucracy That Ate Observatory. The people are surprisingly sweet, but I swear that building warps space-time. It has more floors than it should, and they're all twice as tall as they should be so that one flight of stairs is approximately endless. Also, directions don't work. A compass in that place would merely spin, in a desultory and hapless fashion, until rescued by kindly doctors.

However, consolation from the Department of Helpless Fangirling: China Miéville on crime novels. I've always stoutly maintained that crime novels are non-realist and offer the same narrative pleasures as fantasy, so it's nice to have my opinion (and large collection) confirmed by someone of Mr. Mieville's intellectual stature. This last being indexed by his ability to perpetrate, apparently straight-faced, not only the wonderful phrase I have snagged for today's subject line, but the following set of statements:

The various manly Virgils who appear ex nihilo to escort Marlowe through his oneiric purgatories are not characters, but eloquent opacities in man-shape: much more interesting. Dalgliesh’s irresistibility to hyperrealised moral panics du jour – the poor man manages to contract SARS – is an elegiac opera of Holland Park angst, rather than any quotidian gazette of a policeman’s unhappy lot.

Of course, he's China Miéville and therefore gets away with it, but any student who pulled that on me in an essay would acquire righteous quibbles in the margin in green pen, probably along the lines of "you're over-writing!", "somewhat prolix (look it up)", and "do you actually know what these words mean?" Also, probably, "aargh".

I enjoy Animal Review, they're bloody amusing as well as being moderately scientific. With the bat one they're also entertainingly rude about Batman, which seems to be my new theme. The article is giving me flashbacks to that weird, repetitive cut to a swooping bat which is used in the middle of the consummatory vampire-bites-supine-woman scene in Herzog's Nosferatu. I'm used to lecturing about film techniques for not showing moments of sexual climax - cut to heaving bedclothes, falling trees, thunderous storms, trains rushing through tunnels, synechdotal relaxing of hands... and diving bats? Yes, well.

Stv, whose tendency to acquire interesting domain names is more or less at the level of a nervous twitch, has set up The Salty Cracker Club for the purposes of documenting the end-of-month informal dinner club which takes the four of us off to a new and interesting Cape Town restaurant with each paycheck. Witterers are cordially invited to add their mite to the foodie discussion, if your proclivities should run in that direction. We're always looking for restaurant recommendations.

And, while we're on the subject of food: pie. Specifically, a book I remember reading when I was still at junior school, about a family of bakers who are asked to make an enormous pie for the King, in the midst of competition and scheming from rival pie-making families. The main character is the daughter of the family, and I have vivid memories of the scene in which her family smuggles in the giant pie dish by floating it down the river, with the daughter lying in it like a boat, dreamily watching the trees passing overhead. Of course, evil rivals intervene and the pie ends up sabotaged with too much pepper. I have absolute no recollection of how the story ends, but Google assures me¹ that the book in question is Helen Cresswell's The Pie Makers. Now I'm infecting myself with this nostalgic "gosh, must find a copy" thing.

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¹ Once, that is, my internet connection had consented to connect to more than one page in five, randomly, while giving me 504 gateway timeouts on the rest. What's with the internets? Honestly, technojinx!

Too weird. The comments numbers on this blog seem to rise and fall in graceful sine waves which seem absolutely uncorrelated (in my opinion, at any rate) to the actual interest, artistry or amusement value of the posts to which they're attached. I think I should be looking for significant relationships by plotting comments stats against something like the phase of the moon, the gold price, my hormonal cycle, or possibly the wibbles in the space-time continuum caused by the flappings of Cory Doctorow's cloak.

V. tired again, all sinusey and headachy and post-nasal drippy. It's been a busy week, and this weekend is madly full of the soon-to-be-traditional End Of Month Salary Celebration Eating Out With the jo&stv (Jewel Tavern tonight), jo's birthday party tomorrow, and another play practice on Sunday. In all of this I have to finish updating this paper, illegally acquire and watch Enchanted, get cracking on the book updates, annotate a Masters student's Tolkien thesis, and, oh, yes, go through a 2cm thick wodge of board schedules, which I should have been doing today but haven't had time to, owing to a continual string of disorganised students. In other, unsurprising news, I clambered on the scale last night to discover another kilogramme has mysteriously vanished. I'm currently losing one approximately every two weeks.

Oh, yes, and The Bruise is now red, angry and even larger. Butt flab is apparently the sadistic artist's medium of choice.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was attending some kind of large-scale gathering in the woods at night - lots of cars, picnics, families, what have you. Afterwards I drove off through the night, preventing myself from falling asleep by the application of buckets of ice. A stop in a surreal and Cthulhoid small town for more ice resulted in unsuccessful visits to a series of poky corner stores staffed by strange, creepy people, after which I miraculously found buckets of ice standing in the main street. (I think my subconscious is actually revelling in the possession of money, here).

In the Department of Vocabulary Badly Needed By Capetonians: wwftd informs us that south-west Englanders refer to the hordes of summer tourists as grockles, which is a lovely word. Grockle, grockle, grockle. Rolls off the tongue. In Cornwall they're emmets, which is the Cornish word for ants and thus also pleasantly apt.

Alternatively, of course, you could argue that this falls into the Department of Vocabulary Capetonians Should Be Denied By The Geneva Convention, on the grounds that we're all quite snooty enough already about emmets and grockles.

wolverine_nun accuses me of becoming very boring on my blog, what with the excessive amounts of Morrowind taking up my days. She is, of course, absolutely right, although in my defense there's a limit to the number of times one can blog about irritating cliff racers, and I should imagine you're all glad I don't. In expiation, here's the link I promised: the physics of an operatic soprano. (The voice, not the gravitational effects of the traditional body type. I said traditional, starmadeshadow, i.e. unlike yours).

In other, unlikely news, three weeks back at the gym is making me feel exuberantly healthy. I keep bending lissomely over to touch my toes in a sort of incredulous delight.

It's a sad, sad fact that I find myself uttering the pregnant phrase "I am so going to blog this!" a lot more frequently than I actually remember the interchange in question in the cold, hard light of day. I blame (a) my characteristic cheese-brain, and (b) the Demon Alcohol. Tonight's usual excesses of superlative Thai food, good wine and more or less hilarious bullshit, courtesy of the usual jo&stv, were accompanied by many gems of linguistic and cultural wit, none of which I can remember. Sorry.

Bunny Threat level is at least holding, on account of how I spent yesterday, in between teaching, marking, curriculum advice and staggering around drunkenly because I was too tired to walk straight, updating the Carter chapter according to the Nicest Ex-Supervisor's editorial comments. I am pained to note that I am capable of using some version of the word "particular" four times in the space of a single paragraph, and that the perennial favourites "evoke" and "resonate" turn up, on average, once per page each. Other than that, it actually makes sense. All is not lost.

Bunny Threat Level: Holding in the amber. As of tomorrow, pop culture is toast.

I honestly cannot seem to get my subconscious out of Zimbabwe, and I still can't work out what these dreams are trying to tell me. Most recently it was a particularly surreal post-apocalyptic dream-Zimbabwe, with a pitiful remnant of survivors picking through the massive, brooding ruins of the city while mist wreathed their ankles and strange things threatened from the dark. Once again I was in my grandmother's house, although this time with half the furniture missing. The apocalyptic bit is clearly a straightforward reflection of the country's current disaster state, but why the preoccupation with the grandparents' house? Too odd.

Not enjoying this weather. I'm always slow and stupid in the heat, which is not helping this chapter much, although I think some kind of new, improved version is slowly emerging from the mass of verbiage and cobbled-over logic holes. In a vague, hopeless attempt to dilute this endless sunshine, here's a cloud. A metatextual word cloud, thus encapsulating several obsessions. Note the importance of tea, cats, moles and chocolate consumption.

September! My Star Wars calendar for this month features Yoda, which has to be an omen of somethingorother. Also, although possibly unrelated to Yoda in any way, today is wolverine_nun's birthday. Happy Birthday, wolverine_nun!

I've just finished watching Season 2 of Doctor Who, and have to say how much I liked the finale. Apart from delirious scenes of gratuitous bad-guy suction disposal, the episode brought to a thoroughly satisfying close the season's emotional resonances, which were delicate enough that it would have been very easy to stuff them up completely.

The relationship between the Doctor and his... um, lovely assistants is always a bit dodgy to delineate. While Rose clearly has the standard giant-sized crush on him, his responses are rather interestingly layered: by definition, he cannot form anything like an actual romantic bond with said ladies, on account of how it's rather depressing for an immortal Timelord to watch the poor wenches decay and fall. But, although one-sided, it's a valid emotional bond nonetheless. The only thing that seems to make indefinite and unlimited Tardis-travel bearable for the poor sod is the fact that he has the chance to experience the universe continually anew through the naive eyes of his travelling companions. Without that the whole epic slog must get a bit stale. Rose has to go: she's not only getting clingy, she's seen too much to be a viable filter for any sort of surprised delight.

It interests me to watch how the two different actors have played the Doctor: both have judged rather nicely, I think, the nuances of interaction which dictate that their response to Rose is emotional and intellectual, at times even physical, but never actually sexual. Quite a feat, given the considerable physical energy of their respective screen presences.

I have to add - the closing few shots of the last episode have plugged straight into one of the major obsessions in my fangirly perve tendencies - ye gods, but David Tennant has the most incredibly beautiful hands.

(More oo-er - I didn't notice when LJ started putting the tag list down the sidebar, but I definitely approve. 's cool. And means I may actually remember them. Tags that one invents on the spur of the moment are curiously pointless, although I don't propose to let that get in the way of the considerable pleasure of randomly inventing them anyway.)

'Tis the season to be jolly, yesterday's post notwithstanding, or at least faintly smug. Today is the first anniversary of my Very First Post Evah! (thanks, Stv, still with the Evah! infection...). 365 days, 223 posts, 1240 comments, altogether a successful one-year trial of the wittering, frittering and twittering which constitutes the Most Time-Wasting Invention Known To Human Kind. Also, I should celebrate the fact that a year of blogging has not yet caused my Evil Landlord to fling me forthwith into the snow as a result of the Dial-Up Phone Bills From Hell. Why, I'm not quite sure, because they're hellish. I suspect he may be working up to it.

It remains only to note that (a) blogging was clearly invented specifically to pander to my personal tendencies to verbosity, unsolicited cultural analysis and ongoing love affair with the English language, for which I thank it, and (b) it wouldn't work without an interesting array of responses, for which I thank you, gentle readers. Or not so gentle readers. Or downright argumentative readers, sometimes. In a good way...