Representational

I scored brownie points yesterday by being the first person to arrive at work and the last person to leave. I'd like to say that it was because I am a Dynamo of Productivity and simply could not get enough of the Research Quality Assessments* project but, of course, I'd be lying.


In truth, I hung around at work so that I could go straight from there to the opening of an exhibition of the best 2004 graduates of the city's various art schools. There's nothing more relaxing after a hard day at work than sauntering around an art gallery, taking in the works and swilling wine like there's no tomorrow. They were serving a very good white, but it went straight to my head because the canapes were few and far between, dammit, and largely being monopolised by a handful of art sprogs.


The exhibition was interesting. Not thrilling, but definitely interesting. The friend of a friend who invited me had contributed a series of exquisitely detailed life-sized moths, rendered in fabric and feathers, and so realisic that one had to be repaired earlier in the day after a cleaner tried to kill it with a rolled-up newspaper. Another artist had fashioned something akin to a monstrous dream-catcher/spiderweb out of copper wire and fabric, and suspended it over a series of mandalas made from loose poppy seeds and sea salt... a brave choice given the number of roaming toddlers and the occasional liquored up arts patron.


The centrepiece to the exhibition was a classic Victa lawnmower, hotted up with chrome plated exhausts and engine housings, and with its catcher refashioned to resemble an enormous powder-blue scrotum. It wasn't a new take on gender stereotypes, but it was cute. According to the blurb the mower still worked, although whether the asking price of $8,800 is worth it just to terrify your neighbours and make your mates feel inadequate is open to discussion.


My favourite works were a couple of paintings hanging in the mezzanine level. They were very simple portraits, in monotonal acrylics on canvas. Both of them were the size of one of the walls of my office, and I am a firm devotee of Big Art. If it's not big enough to cause serious injury or death if it falls on you, I'm not interested. In my opinion you need space to say anything worth saying.


Ever since the exhibition, I've been thinking. Hmmm. Big Art. $1,100 each. Not unreasonable. Good technique. A certain haunting beauty. Do I have room for it? No. Don't I already have a lot of monotonal art? Yes. Aren't I supposed to be saving money for other projects? Yes. Still. Big Art. Big Affordable Art. Hmmm.


*I take this opportunity to point out that Microsoft Word abbreviates the Research Quality Assessments document to Research Quality Ass when it's minimised. Tee hee hee. I are teh mature.

Famine

Last night I discovered that the Last Drop Brewery Restaurant is not the only bastion of high-quality trough-snuffling on Canning Vale's Nicholson Road.


There is also Nicholson's, an eatery famous among locals who rely on it to pick up dinner on their way home from the office. "I couldn't be bothered cooking last night, so I just made a Nicholson's run" is a common phrase among the busy and the harried and the nutritionally oblivious.


We were celebrating the birthday of a friend at her house, and her parents brought Nicholson's takeaway so that no one would have to cook. Others got lasagna, or chicken parmigiana, or chicken marsala. I got the ribs... and how. My meal came in a tray the size of my briefcase and contained three racks of ribs, plus chips. Many chips. There were so many chips that, had I the technology, I could have gone back in time to 1847 and offset the Irish Potato Famine for six months.


Not that it wasn't tasty. Despite having enough meat for three separate people I ate the lot, because it was porkilicious. And the chips were absolutely incredible, largely because they'd been dipped in beer batter before being deep fried. As for vegetables... well, there were a few shreds of red and green cabbage strewn over the meat, but I think they were intended merely as ornamentation. I ate them anyway, partly because I needed the nutrients, but mostly because even raw cabbage tastes good when it's been floating in hot barbecue sauce for half an hour.


I suppose in a way it's good to know that in modern health conscious cholesterolophobic society, there are still restaurants making their way by serving up real, honest, robust, filling foods at reasonable prices, without resorting to McDonaldsesque plastic chicanery.


On the hand, it's also good to know that I have plenty of salad vegetables in my refrigerator for tonight.

Easter

What I Did On My Easter Holiday

by Blandwagon


- Church, church and more church. You'd think I was running for Pope or something. Although given that I'm a Presbyterian, it wouldn't be the Pope, but the Protestant equivalent. John Piper, possibly.


- I went to McLernan's on Welshpool Road. McLernan's is a second-hand shop fittings dealer, and has several warehouses containing old office chairs, filing cabinets, reception desks, mannequins, computers, refrigerated cabinets and huge, baffling constructions of plywood and plastic that probably made more sense when they sat in the middle of a department store displaying sunglasses or Playstations or whatever. I bought an illuminated sign for $80. It's about a metre and a half long and has PAY HERE written on it in large red capitals. I've turned it on one end and put it in my living room, where it has a nifty pop art quality.

You see, it's not a piece of old junk. It's an installation. Although when it's lit up all red and white in the darkened room, it does rather look like a Coke machine.


- I made tiramisu. Hmmmm... coffeelicious.


- I cleaned my car inside and out, and helped my friend AB and his cousin do the same with their cars. AB has certain tidiness issues, and his car (a badly mistreated Russian hatchback that was never much good to begin with) needed a lot of attention. It was hard work. AB did all the actual cleaning, but I was the one who had to stand over him, crushing his fantasies that Woolworths junk mail soaked in old coolant fluid might be recyclable, listening to the tortured logic that claimed that an empty video cassette box or a broken clutch cable might have any sort of conceivable value to anyone, and constructing water-tight cases such as how the door seal from a completely different car didn't need to be stored in the backseat of this one (admittedly, all that water-tight case consisted of was a raised eyebrow and a few moments for him to consider what he'd just said).

Next I need to get him to deal with his living room, which will require a rubbish skip, an industrial vacuum cleaner, earth-moving equipment and a Catholic priest with a good supply of holy water.


- I got stung by a wasp in the garden department at Bunnings. I felt something tickle at my neck, I brushed it away, and suddenly BAMMO! It hurt like hell.

My brain 1: Oh man, I think I was just stung by a bee or something!

My brain 2: Ow. Yes, feels like it.

My brain 1: Wait, aren't lots of people allergic to bee stings? What if I'm allergic to bee stings! I could puff up and die at Bunnings! I don't want to die at Bunnings! It'd be embarrassing!

My brain 2: (patiently) You've been stung by bees before, when you were a kid, and you were fine. Stop being such a big pussy.

My brain 1: But... but... maybe I've become allergic since then...

My brain 2: (rather less patiently) No you haven't. Be a man for once in your life and go and look at wood veneers.

So I did. The pain subsided after five minutes, and the swelling went down after a few hours. And the wood veneers were pathetic. Stupid brain.

Fur

On a whim, as I was shaving last Sunday for the first time in a week, I omitted to do my upper lip and chin. There was no good or even recognisable reason for this. I just thought, well, hey, let's see how it looks.


So far the reaction has been 100% positive... if we don't include me. My friends like it, and the secretaries at work approve, but I'm not very happy with it. Fifteen years ago, when goatees were hip, then I would have been impressed with myself. Ten years ago, when every second footballer had one, I knew that the look was over in terms of cool. Now we're at the goatee's very nadir, when it is the face-fur of choice for middle-aged suburban males who are attempting to look rakish, or fat bald men trying to draw attention away from their scalps and double chins. I'm not cool enough to sport one as an ironic, anti-style comment, so I might just have to shave it off and wait a few years.


I've never had much luck with hair. My hair is very fine, very straight and until the last year or so, very oily. It's a brown so mousey it's almost not a colour at all. I have a double crown, which tends to make the hair in that area sit bolt upright like a vigilant meercat. And as I age and lose what mediocre hair I have, it's retreating in the least cool manner possible. Cool baldness creeps in at the temples, leaving a little peninsula of hair in the centre, which actually doesn't look all that bad. Uncool baldness marches back in a straight line, as if your entire stock of hair is migrating backwards towards the nape of your neck, like a knob of butter sliding off a hot pancake.


Cool blokes can compensate for retreating hairlines by growing sideburns (although not those overextended ones that finish in a stiletto-like point - they're a little too rockabilly for their own good). And, of course, I can't do that. I have little bald patches right in the middle of where my sideburns would go. I tried to grow them once, and it looked like someone had stuck a couple of hirsute ten cent coins to the sides of my jaw.


I should just give up. From a genetic perspective, I was destined to be a peasant - low, broad and durable, without any fancy features, using solid stamina to achieve required ends rather than grace or finesse. It's not my genes' fault that I ended up with a taste for nice suits and abstract art, working in an office in a safe, tidy city, where the ability to knot a tie correctly is more important than being able to push a plough around a field for twelve hours.

!

Finally, I have all the proof I need that my blog is not the biggest waste of bandwidth on the Internet.


Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer... re-imagined as an episode of 'Neighbours'.

Key

The quandary over how to spend my Surprise Freezer Money came to an end sooner than expected. I spent it, and a little bit extra, on getting into my house.

The whole tale of woe began around lunch time on Friday, when I realised I couldn't find my keys. I'd had them when I left the house (you can't get out the front gate without them), but now they'd vanished. In searching for them I realised that what I'd thought was a tiny hole in the pocket of my suit was actually a fairly sizable hole in the pocket of my suit, and my keys must have fallen out sometime after I'd left the house.

And caught a bus to work.

And taken a little stroll around the city to fill in time waiting for my connecting bus.

I left work early and retraced my steps between my house and the bus stop, but if the keys were ever there they were long gone. I phoned the bus company and asked them to look in their lost and found bins, but the keys weren't there. Finally I spent $77 getting a locksmith to pick the locks on the gate and the front door so that I could get inside and get the spares. It took him all of sixty seconds to get through a normal lock and two deadlocks.

"Crikey," I said to him. "Why don't more burglars use those little lockpick tools?"

"Because they're idiots," he said, with a sanguine air.

I had spare house keys, but I didn't have spare keys for the car. I rang the local Volkswagen dealership, and the man at the other end told me that it was no simple matter getting a new set of keys for a '94 Golf Cabriolet. There was a transponder inside the plastic key housing that deactivated an immobiliser behind the dash, he said. I had to get down to the dealership somehow with ID and the car's VIN to prove that I was the owner. Then new keys had to be ordered from Volkswagen's Sydney office and shipped over to Perth. Then the Golf had to be towed to the local dealership, where the keys and the car could be re-coded to match each other. Then the keys could be cut, and I could dole out the several hundred dollars needed to complete this process.

All this sounded sort of wrong. I asked him if he was sure, since the '94 Golf Cabriolet used an older body type than the '94 Golf hardtop. He assured me that this was the case. I recalled my old key - it didn't look big enough to have a microchip embedded in it. He explained to me, in words of few syllables and in a conciliatory tone, that the microchip is very small and is sealed inside during the manufacturing process.

I hung up and looked in the owner's manual. I noticed that the car originally came with a spare key, (not included when I bought it last year) apparently made entirely of metal. I rang back and asked the man about this. He explained, with great patience, that they key wasn't really 100% metal - the picture in the manual just didn't have the resolution for me to see the plastic inset. I hung up again, feeling chastened.

I got a friend to give me a lift down to the dealership, and met the nice man in person. He declined to look at the picture in the manual I'd brought with me. Instead, he sent me over to the parts office, where I spoke to another man. He deigned to look at the picture, and of course the key isn't a transponder key. It pre-dates transponder keys. The car doesn't have a built-in immobiliser. The spare key is indeed solid metal. The '94 Golf Cabriolet is a substantially different vehicle to the '94 Golf hardtop, and it uses the older style of key.

Getting a new key made was a matter of getting a profile code from Volkswagen Australia and some blank keys from the spare parts counter and scooting off to the nearest locksmith. Total cost - $34.

"Why did they tell you all that crap about transponders and immobilisers and towing the car?" my friend asked me when we got outside.

"Because they're idiots," I said, with a sanguine air.

Forgotten

I mentioned a couple of days ago that my Flatmate had decamped for America, leaving me with a few odds and ends too big or too worthless to pack. This included nearly $300 in loose change, which he was apparently keeping around in case he was suddenly called upon to take over the duties of the Tooth Fairy.

He also left the contents of his refrigerator - we had separate fridges and cooked separately*. I decided to raid it last night for some dinner. I discovered about five different varieties of crumbed fish fillets, a couple of Lean Cuisines, some yummy chicken satay sticks, some frankfurters with a use-by date from last year, a piece of wizened fish that I refused to touch, let alone eat, a bottle of tomato juice that I know went in there during a cocktail party in April, a solitary unwrapped muffin that had succumbed to terminal freezer burn, three apples, half a dozen condiments, and some bread rolls that had cemented themselves to the ice in the back of the freezer.

There was also a plastic bag right at the back, which I at first thought contained steaks or something. As it refused to budge I assumed that it was just frozen to the floor of the compartment. It was only when I tugged harder that I realised that it was loose, but really, really heavy. And it was only when I hefted it out onto the bench that I realised that it wasn't steaks; it was money.

Sweet merciful crap. The man was like a cashed-up squirrel, hiding spare change for the winter.

I counted out the coins on the living room floor and discovered that it came to more than 68 dollars. My working hypothesis is that he put it in there for safe keeping following the burglary we had about two years ago, then forgot about it. Judging by the other contents, that freezer was something of a recollective blind spot.

At this point, I have several options:

1. Silence, you fool! It can be ours!

2. Transfer an equivalent amount to his bank account.

3. Donate the money to a fund for struggling disabled orphaned oh who am I kidding.

4. Send him an extravagant birthday present.

5. Send him a mediocre birthday present and spend the rest on an enormous bottle of gin.

Further suggestions will be gratefully received.

*I've always believed that separate food arrangements allow for a more harmonious household relationship. There's no bitching over whose turn it is to cook, or whether someone is hogging all the Frootloops, or how I spent more on steaks and you just bought mince when it was your turn to buy the groceries, and so on and so forth. Who needs that?

Observance

After making a fuss about it on my blog, I felt I had to observe International Eat An Animal For PETA Day, even though I wasn't all that hungry last night. So I had two scotch fillets for dinner, instead of one.


Hmmm... beefilicious. Even my colon is happy.

Disaster

I came across this picture somewhere, and of course it instantly appealed to my sense of humour.


But it worries me that no one else in my office seems to get it. I showed it to my boss, and both of the secretaries, and they just looked at me with expressions of puzzlement. The Chief Finance Officer gave a wizened little chuckle, more to demonstrate that she got it rather than because she found it amusing.


Then again, one of the visiting professors saw it on my wall and broke into a gale of uncontrollable guffaws that could probably have been heard in the carpark. I guess different things appeal to different senses of humour.

Eulogy

My Flatmate has moved out and scooted back off to America. His student visa had expired and he couldn't find any work worthy of the name here, even though he's become very attached the Australia. He left behind a bed, a table, a lamp, a rice cooker, a guitar, a big stack of unreadable business ethics textbooks, half a packet of Tim Tams, and nearly $300 in loose change.


He had this aversion to small currency. I'm planning to spend it on his half of the phone and electricity bills, and anything left over is going into the Blandwagon Overpriced Coffee Addiction Fund.


He was a good Flatmate, if not without his little foibles. He always turned on the mixer tap on the kitchen sink halfway between hot and cold, even though this had no effect on the water temperature and stressed the gas water heater. He used up the ink in my printer and never offered to contribute to replacing it. He opened up dubious attachments while using my computer and infected it with viruses. He generated vast amounts of rubbish, and could go through an entire roll of toilet paper in a single day. And he made this irritating ticking noise when he was mildly stressed.


But these are tiny non-issues, more than offset by his amenability to having my friends come over at a moment's notice and watch DVDs until the early hours of the morning, his dedication to cleaning the bathroom, and the fact that he took the garbage out to the bins about eight times for every one time I did it. He was an ideal Flatmate and I have absolutely no hope of replacing him with someone better or even equivalent.


This has been brought home to me by my Houseguest, who's now been here a week. He ties up my phone line with incessant internet use, changes the settings on my computer so that I can barely work out how to turn it on, and spent yesterday evening lying on the floor in front of the TV, farting up a storm, so that when I got home and opened the front door I had the impression that a small animal had died inside the airconditioning ducts.


I'm going to be in such trouble when I get a REAL Flatmate From Hell.

Chocotastic

While in an experimental mood last night, I invented a new cocktail.


Into a blender, pour half a cup of milk, a quarter of a cup of cream and a quarter of a cup of white rum. Add two dark chocolate chili Tim Tams. Blend thoroughly, then strain through a fine mesh over ice.


The goop left behind in the strainer can be used for... well, anything that requires sweet grainy chocolatey goop. Use your imaginations. The cocktail itself tastes like a decent chocolate milkshake with a good kick to it, as the chili and the rum work together in a delicious harmony that the UN could only dream about.


I have no idea what to call it. Other than 'lunch'.

Dining

I went out to dinner to celebrate a friend's birthday on Friday night. It was held at the Last Drop Brewery Restaurant, a faux-Tudor monstrosity that appeared, apparently overnight, just off Nicholson Road in Canning Vale. It was as if some modern-day Aladdin had said to his genie, "Bugger building me a luxurious palace in one night. Just build me a big-arse beer barn with olde worlde plastic light fixtures and laminex tables, then dump it next to an arterial road in the middle of an industrial zone."

As a fan of fine dining, I would offer the Last Drop a few pieces of advice on how to tweak their establishment so that it raises the bar for the whole Canning Vale Industrial Zone dining scene.

1. Few really classy restaurants serenade their patrons with a middle-aged couple doing Captain and Tenille impressions on an electric keyboard.

2. Few middle-aged couples doing Captain and Tenille impressions on an electric keyboard are so hopelessly out of touch with the post-Simpsons world that they would call their combo The Be Sharps.

3. 'Chardonnay' is not supposed to have an 'e' in it... unless you're at a rave, I guess.

4. Nor does 'blonde' have two 'l's, 'vinaigrette' two 'a's, or 'chef's' a complete lack of apostrophes.

5. Really well-prepared calamari shouldn't bounce.

6. I know the rest of your patrons tell you otherwise, but quantity isn't a substitute for quality. But at least you don't have an all-you-can-eat buffet. For that I thank you.

7. When determining your prices, try to avoid matching one of the best restaurants in the city unless you're prepared to match their exquisitely talented chefs as well.

8. A selection of promotional swatches from a gelati manufacturer clipped together does not constitute a dessert menu.

And as for the beer... actually the beer was rather good. I had the wheat and the light, and they were both pretty damn tasty. If they just ditched the food, the decor, the music and the Menu that the Spellcheck Forgot, and squatted in the dirt of a vacant lot pouring beers, it'd be a step in the right direction.

The final nail in the Coffin of Judgement was an application of the Blandwagon Carpark Class Indicator Test. Take the total number of cars in the carpark, divide by the total number of European cars, and the closer the result is to 1, the classier the establishment. In this case I took the total number of cars (fifty), divided it by the total number of European cars (one - my Golf) and got a BCCI of... fifty. Not good.

Few things in this world are as depressing as walking through a carpark and realising that more than one person has had $70,000 to spend on a car, and chosen to buy a beige Toyota.

Meaty

Tuesday March 15 is International Eat An Animal For PETA Day! Hurrah! The aim of this worthy program is to encourage people, just for one day, to eat more meat than they would ordinarily, just to piss PETA off.

If, like me, you regard PETA as a power-crazed cult of economic and cultural terrorists, then join in the gravy-slathered fun and Eat An Animal For PETA. Then, if you have the time, drive over to Charlize Theron's house and slap her upside her silly, thoughtless head with a veal T-bone.

Fans

I'm not linking to this for any good reason. I'm just tickled by the phrase 'New Testament fan fiction'. Hee hee hee. It sounds like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Seven of Nine should be in there somewhere.


"And then St Paul cast the demons out of the Borg vampires, and there was all this bright light and smoke and stuff, and everyone was like, whoa, cool, then they all went to the inn and did some shots to celebrate."

TINYPNIS

Yesterday evening on my way home from work I was cruising my Golf up the onramp for the Kwinana Freeway. Just at the point where the two lanes merge into one, I was overtaken on the wrong side by a bright red Ferrari. It accelerated past in a noisy roar so that it could be one space in front of me in the traffic crawl.


It had colour-matched personalised plates, reading 'FASTLOVE'.


No doubt they should have read, 'BEHOLD, THE OWNER OF THE WORLD'S SMALLEST PENIS'. However I believe there's an eight letter limit.

Dream

It's the ultimate dream of geeks and nerds everywhere.

"First I will overcome Agent Smith and save all humanity. Then I will catch the bus down to the shops and get some more Clearasil and Diet Dr Pepper."

Drivers

On Friday night I had a few friends over to watch a couple of DVDs, as is my wont. First up AB insisted that we watch 'Paris, Texas', a Wim Wenders film from 1984. About an hour into it, we had the following conversation:

Me: Are there any car chases in this movie?

AB: No. There is a sort of car following scene later on though.

Me: Skidding around corners? High speeds?

AB: No, but you can definitely tell that one car is following another car.

There was some nice dialogue and some elegant visuals, but it took two and a half hours to tell a story that could have been just as deftly expressed in one. I'm not a big fan of Wim Wenders.

As a tonic, we followed it up with the American remake of Luc Besson's 'Taxi', which was nothing BUT car chases. After an hour of that, I sort of wanted the characters to stop and talk awkwardly about their feelings. There's obviously no satisfying me.

But the highlight of the evening came as the last DVD switched off and the TV came on, at around 1am. It was showing some program called 'Jet Set', counting down the World's Top 10 Truck Stops. We found ourselves watching, in the manner of people staring in horror and disbelief at a mangled car wreck.

Number 5 was the World's Classiest Truck Stop, so called because it has live music in one of the bars (country and western, naturally) and a dance floor for you to practice your bootscootin'. Afterwards you can head up to the hotel rooms to unwind in a jacuzzi (which sits in the middle of the bedroom as if someone's forgotten to put up an intervening wall) with, like, candles and wine. Boy howdy, if that ain't classy, then my ass don't smell bad.

Number 2 was the World's Yuppiest Truck Stop, for all those high-powered corporate truck drivers in their BMW M3 rigs and Armani trucker caps. The stop is classed as Yuppie because it has one of them Starbuck's joints in it, and they clean the bathrooms occasionally. Also, as the narrator mentioned, the building itself was designed by an architect. As opposed to Cousin Cletus with a pencil on a McDonalds napkin, presumably. You can tell that they got one of those fancy big-city architects because the front wall is all steel-framed glass, and the roof is curved. You don't see that on a double-wide trailer, no siree bob.

And in a terrible blow to American pride, the Number 1 Truck Stop in the World is in Germany. It's chief attraction, according to Jet Set, is that it has mixed, nude saunas, spas and swimming pool. Oh, and a drive-thru large enough to handle the biggest of big rigs. Drive-thru food and a chance to see some Teutonic titties - what more could a truck driver ask for?

Blessings

The Christian life is not an easy one, what with the limitations on swearing, the lingering guilt over watching certain cable TV shows, and the occasional martyrdom. But on the plus side, you have a relationship with the Almighty Creator of the Universe, and He not only loves you but has it within His power to grant you all sorts of boons.


Don't believe me? Then go here, and scroll down to the entry entitled "Me and the Wife".


You see it?


NOW tell me that God doesn't bless his good and faithful servants with far more than they deserve!


Sheesh, I'm obviously doing something wrong. Note to self: pray harder, and stop putting foreign coins in the church collection plate.

Democracy

Well, the election is all over bar the shouting, and the shouting so far has been of a desultory and listless sort. The people of this state decided to go with proven failure rather than potential disaster. Better the devil you know and all that. The last thing you want when being jabbed with pitchforks or thrown into a lake of fire is inexperience. We are a cautious people.


That may also explain why the referendum to extend commercial trading hours was defeated. I was surprised at that, even though referendums in this country usually result in a mandate for the status quo. I'd thought that we were a society of intemperate shopaholics who would stop at nothing to increase the availability of our drug of choice. But it seems this is not so.


Thus the election didn't serve to advance my own personal political and social causes. And I've realised that I'm okay with that. Having seen the responses to the American and Australian federal elections, I realise that there's nothing tackier than bemoaning 'your' loss. The re-election of President Bush was blamed on mouth-breathing Rove-addled red-neck Jesuslanders. The re-election of Prime Minister Howard was blamed on selfish racist gullible suburbanites. And we're not just talking about the comments sections of Far Left blogs here; we're talking major metropolitan newspapers and respectable broadcast networks. Accordingly if I bitch and moan that the election was won by people incapable of seeing bigger pictures, or the referendum defeated because of narrow-minded parochialism, then I'm just as bad. Love or hate the result, one must respect the will of the people.


So I celebrate the election and referendum results. Not because I agree with them, but because the people have spoken. The word of the poorest and most disenfranchised is worth the same as the richest and most enabled, and that doesn't happen very often. You may not agree with them, but you've got to love the fact that they can say it and be heard and obeyed. Democracy rules.

Sorry. 'Roolz'.