Me, Masked and Revolutionary

En route to my regular Marxism discussion group, incognito and anonymous.

Word of the Day: Subordifriend

Good morning my subordifriend.

Taken from 30 Rock. Use this term to let your team-members know how affectionately you regard them.

Not 99 Red Balloons

Instead, here's one large one that appeared from nowhere overnight. It's being used to prop up the sagging overpass. Or it's alien pod that will burst open to reveal baby ET's when they're ready.

Car Park Cat is Haunting You

He haunts a Fremantle car park, emerging at dusk, entrancing passersby with his emerald eyes.

Gathering and Hunting

We instinctively feel that the hunter-gatherer diet, as eaten by our prehistoric great-great-great-(x57)- grandparents was healthy compared to our modern intake of processed foods. The idea of nibbling on fruit and nuts all day supplemented by the occasional feast of meat or fish is tempting. But we forget that those people were on the move much of the time, walking hours from one fruit tree to another, burning up the calories continuously. It doesn't compare to our current lifestyle where we gather our food from the fridge and then walk ten metres to the lounge and collapse into a sofa.

So I propose that the hunter-gatherer diet can be replicated if an accomplice hides food around the house and garden for you. After an hour of searching, you come across a couple of sultanas hidden under a pebble on the side-path, and buried in the flower bed is a carrot and an almond. Not only do you consume energy in the search, you also have the satisfaction of finding food.

Try it.

Word of the Day: Tmesis

Tmesis describes a word which is cut in two and surrounds another.

Examples:

Un-flippin-believable
Who-so-ever
Abso-bloody-exactly

Reluctant Homecoming

Her walk was over but she wouldn't budge. She made it clear that she needed a dip in the lake before returning to her home. Request denied.

Three Things I've Learnt Today

1. A cause of dementia, including Alzheimers and Parkinsons, may be algae. Repeated exposure to blue-green algae has been linked to much greater likelihood of contracting one of these conditions. People living closer to bodies of water have higher incidence. Read more

2. Until the last century, the regular sleeping pattern was four hours in the early evening, then a couple of hours awake and then another four hours sleep. Read more. So if you find yourself awake in the dead of night, don't fret. It's a natural break that doesn't indicate insomnia. You may as well make use of the time and mow the lawn, or fry up some doughnuts.

3. Cupcakes can contain jam.

King of the Elves

I spotted the King of the Elves in the far boggy corner of my back garden as the sun left the sky this evening. A glimpse of his slender fingers reaching into a satchel on his shoulder and then sewing sparkly seeds into the bare patch of earth under the bougainvillea. He was only visible for a second before my gaze was distracted by a pair of dragonflies buzzing in my face. Only they weren't. Looking closely, they were winged faeries, sent to divert my attention. Then in a flash the garden was empty.

No, this is not the elf I saw.

What may sprout from those charmed or cursed seeds, time will tell. An enchantment of wickedness or a blessing?

Meteorological Reminiscing

I once dated a weather forecaster. She was unpredictable and tempestuous, and often had an occluded front. She was frosty in the mornings, but that usually cleared up after a hot cup of tea. Later in the day after long sunny periods, there was often a mid-level disturbance, and a moderate risk of severe storms as the pressure rose.

Fun times. I could never predict how she'd be more than a few days into the future. And sometimes a butterfly flapping its wings too vigorously would change everything.

It's Shrove Tuesday so Start Tossing.

The day with the greatest cultural significance of the entire year is upon us. Pikelets and crepes and pancakes and blini and poffertjes and flapjacks are consumed with zest, although I'd recommend lemon juice instead.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Lack of pancake flipping skills amongst the current generation (who have been spoilt by the ready availability of spatulas) is a great concern. I pity those who resort to a tool rather than exuberantly fling the pancake skyward with a delicate amount of rotational energy. It's one of the greatest kitchen joys, only behind discovering a lost box of liqueur chocolates under a packet of naans.

Spying on Citizens

With another proposal for all electronic communications to be stored by the government (this time in the UK), I for one am thankful that the all-seeing eye of the government is there to make a backup copy for me in case I lose a hard disk, or a phone memory card.

Also, I'd like to mention that a nuclear dirty bomb in Iran or North Korea, or terrorism against Obama are surely not trigger words for surveillance. It would be terrible if I was placed on a terrorism watch list.

And finally, a big hello to all the secret service agents now reading this blog. I need all the audience I can get.

Waterising the Garden

In the early morning, the rising sun is aligned with the side of the house, and its rays illuminate the path and garden. So it's a pretty time to water the plants, with the individual droplets visible.

Sleepy Cat Head

He needs a lie down to recover after a solid day of sleeping.

Being Transdogrified

Having read Kafka's Metamorphosis, I'm aware that one day I could awake as a dragonfly. But being an insect is too alien to comprehend, so instead I've spent many a quiet Saturday afternoon working on my strategies should I be transmogrified into a household pooch, and I'd cope quite well.

Making contact with humans and letting them know my identity would be my first priority. I'd start by writing SOS with my dog food, smeared strategically over the floor. If that weren't noticed, I'd start barking patterns. One bark, then two barks then three barks then four barks and so on. Or perhaps I'd bark the digits of pi. The difficulty is that a human might not pay attention and mistake me for a messy eater who won't shut up. After all, they'd not be expecting any mathematical significance in a dog's bark. So then I'd howl popular music: Who Let the Dogs Out, Hound Dog and How Much is that Doggie in the Window? Eventually I'd crack their consciousness and then I'd move onto stage two.

Establishing an efficient form of communication would be vital.
Typing and writing with claws and paws might be problematic, but not out of the question with the right tools. So I'd expect an intelligent and sympathetic human to come up with some method that would allow me to convey more thoughts easily.
Then I'd be able to specify my requirements precisely. My diet would switch from a can of minced beef to something more classy. And I'd regain control of the tv remote.

More details to come...

Staring into Eyes

Do you ever wonder where to look when you're chatting to someone? Clearly you should be focusing on their eyes. It's normal to habitually choose either the left or the right eye, but either way,  your conversation partner will feel at ease - they won't even notice which eye you're looking at. But let your gaze stray too far away and it can get awkward. Don't glance at their ears or head or body while they're engaged with you. Maintain your eye discipline at all times, and stay classy. Don't get transfixed by spittle emerging from their mouth, or a weird mole on the side of their head.

I bring this up is because people have at times made me uncomfortable by randomly staring at the top of my head (is there a sprinkle of dandruff up there, or a bird splatter?), or an ear (is there a freaky oversized hair sprouting?). That's why I hope that my writings today will educate others.

Before I go, let me warn you of the unblinking unending death-stare. Should you be transfixed by the piercing eyes of someone who won't release their gaze, close your eyes immediately or fake a faint. At all costs avoid being hypnotised. If you don't escape, your next memory will be waking up groggily in the back of a van with hands and legs bound, trundling along a dusty track in the bleak back-blocks of Canning Vale, towards a dark destiny. Not the ideal situation when you should be home watching soap operas.

Oversized Lotus Flower Terrorises Innocent Ducks

The headline says it all.

Painting in a North-South Direction

The eight nearby tennis courts were resurfaced last week. Gone are the cracks and the humps and hillocks that gave them character, and instead an emerald green field is sparkling in the sunshine, waiting for the local Federer and Sharapova to start hitting again.

But in an unexpected twist, the repainting of the lines on the courts has taken longer than expected. Last week painter no 1 did all the north-south lines, so each court looked as shown left in this artist's impression.

And this week, the east-west specialist was called in to paint the other lines. So why not paint all the lines on half of the courts and let the people play a week earlier? Or does the line painting require specialised equipment that doesn't operate in all directions? Is it sensitively calibrated against the earth's magnetic field and cannot cross through lines of flux?

Assigning Priorities

Do you have a To Do list? Are jobs assigned priorities: urgent, medium, low? Do you ever receive emails with an angry red exclamation mark denoting high priority? If the answer is yes then you'll understand the feeling that anything marked urgent should be ignored. If someone rudely wants you to drop everything and help them then instantly because they have some deadline then how can they know whether you also have a deadline. And if it's urgent, why didn't they ask you 24 hours ago before it became urgent? Their slackness in waiting till the last moment has contributed to this situation. So the solution is to completely ignore anything urgent or high priority. After all, the deadline is so close that it will soon pass and then there is no point in responding at all. Even if the request came from yourself, don't stress. Make a hot chocolate and sit down. Nobody will die,(unless you're working in casualty or piloting a plane).

Similarly, any job marked low priority can safely be forgotten. Why even bother mentioning it if it's low priority I wonder. Preserve those precious electrons by not writing it in an email; save those molecules of graphite in your pencil.

That leaves medium priority. This is where all your attention should be. But fortunately, having excluded the urgent stuff, the medium priority stuff can wait.

Habitual Commuting

Do you ever arrive somewhere with no memory of how you got there? Today I found myself at work again, for the 4,105th time. But why? My last recollection was sitting in my kitchen finishing a puzzle in the newspaper, then playing Words with Friends, taking a sip of tea and next like an automaton I assumed I headed into my car and made my way to my place of work. I could have instead been playing tennis, bodysurfed in the ocean, finished writing my long awaited third autobiographical volume (covering ages 14-15, the wilderness years), seen a movie, or waged battle with the ant hordes who are excavating cavern underneath my paving for nefarious purposes. But no. Instead I turned up at work.

Maybe tomorrow the unexpected will happen?

Apologies

Lewk's Photos is currently at the movies, and unavailable to blog. In the meantime, I suggest you find some other way to entertain yourself.

Normal service will resume tomorrow.

Dress Like a Worker Day

Yesterday it was evident that most of my colleagues had dressed for the office as if they were working in retail or hospitality. It's heartwarming to see the effort they'd made to make the workplace entertaining. Here are some of the costumes we spotted -

• Behind the counter at a high end fashion boutique, or maitre d' for a posh restaurant
• Working at a circus, or in a workshop for blind people (myself)
• At Woolworths
• In JB Hifi

Sleepiness in a Box

Sleepy cat is happiest boxed up in his cardboard house. He even brings his takeaway meals back to the comfort of home, be it a chicken leg or corn on the cob.

Measuring Happiness

Spoken by a character in the novel The Lady of the Sorrows by Cecilia Dart-Thornton:

The measure of happiness is merely the difference between expectations and outcomes. It is not concerned with what one possesses - it is concerned with how content one is with what one possesses.

This also applies to movies. Enjoyment of films is related to the difference between expectations and outcomes.  Go into an unknown flick with no knowledge of reviews, Oscar nominations or plot and you can judge it on its merits. But the day after the Academy Awards, go and see the best picture winner and your expectations are stratospheric, and the chances of the experience measuring up to expectations are slim.

Distractions in the Classroom

Reading that hundreds of iPods are being supplied to primary school students in Perth to help them learn, I'm jealous that such tools weren't available in my time. And look at university lecture theatres this year and you'll see most students taking notes on their laptop or tablet or fiddling with their smartphone. How wonderful is this use of technology in education. Or is it? This is in fact an unmitigated disaster. Rather than focusing on their lecturer and condensing their wise words into study notes, most people are on Facebook, instant messaging, checking the weather online or gaming. A short attention span and an addiction to the instant feedback of networked technology easily trumps a dreary professor mumbling away. And primary students are even more easily distracted from their focus on learning. How will these people be when they mature?