Metamorphosism

Story problem

Q: You have one fourteen-year-old harpist, pretty, for extra bonus points pretty in the way the pretty ones in your family are, pretty like your cousin who defined beauty for you, and she plays beautifully, you were so moved, everyone in the church was, the way she led two violins and a cello through Morfar Frenhines and The Burning of the Piper's Hut. When did she get that big, you wonder, her in a borrowed skirt and motorcycle boots up in front of the altar, when did she get so grown up? When you leave, and she climbs into the car, a medium-sized car, a Fiat Dobló say, containing four people, a harp and maybe three cubic meters of air, and she climbs in and asks, "ew, who farted?" and it turns out she has a bunch of dog shit in the sole of her motorcycle boot, how long does it take for the car to fully air out?

Unjustified

We had the friskiest dawn this morning. Out moving the cars before work, shifting wife's car out to the street, backing mine out of the driveway, reparking hers, it was impossible to ignore the frisky pink light, the bubble of unearned springtime in the warm air. November here is grey and cold, wet and foggy, black, brown and the muted green of stuffy felt and decay. Yet here were pastels arcing from horizon to horizon and flocks of winter crows swooping like swallows while it lasts. Tomorrow, cold again. The way it should be.

We thank Thee, Lord, for this strudel.

Happy 'Id al-Fitr to those of you celebrating that.
Likewise, happy Thanksgiving to those of you celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow. For the first time in recent years, we are skipping it this year. A stray dog broke into the turkey pen at the farm where we buy turkeys, and as a result they were 40 or so turkeys short this year.

To be honest, it's a big relief to just eat ramen or schnitzel or something.

Harp moving tip

Watch the speed bumps.

Moving the harp

Pick up kid at train station in 45 minutes. Rush her to music school. Move concert harp down stairs, into Dobló, over to church for a concert. Back to music school afterwards. She's accompanying some recorders. A recorder concert. Last year I accompanied them on the cello. We're in the recorder accompanying business here. I don't mind them, although I think tin whistles get the same job done and are cooler. She seems to have a certain disdain for them, however. I suppose a harpist looks down on most instruments. You should hear her talk about the accordion.

Novel just took a 180 today. Big epiphany, plot-wise. Like, "no, she doesn't shoot him after all. And she doesn't go into the joint."

OTOH, just made it past 50k words on that one, so can concentrate on the other one. I love them both.

The rewrite, though. Boy.

Picking up women at the supermarket

Seriously, one was looking me over this morning.
Giving me the eye.
About 35 or so, pretty.
Wearing baggy sweatpants, though. Yuck.

I was the only man in the store, the only one under retirement age. It's a different world when you have the day off from work and see things at hours you normally don't. Supermarkets full of retirees and housewives instead of harried, hurrying commuters. Roads empty but for tractors. Kids all lined up in rows, packed into their schools.

Thousand jobs waiting for you at home.

Blogging secretly while wife runs to store for shiny christmas baubles...

Bare naked and steaming

Looks as though I might punk out on the Metamorphosism Challenge. Only 70K words so far and another busy week coming up at work, not sure if I'll manage 30,000 words in 7 days. Or is it 6? How many days does November have anyway? What day is today? In fact, I still haven't "won" nanimomo fair and square, since I haven't surpassed 50K on a single "novel". Right now stuck around 40K on one and 30k or so on the other. So I suppose I'll try to finish the longer one first and then get going on the other one...

Took the weekend off completely and went here, didn't get anything written on the novels but, as I had hoped, the R&R provided a couple important new ideas and inspirations and trying to explain the stories to my wife exposed a couple weaknesses to be corrected.

Mostly, though, it was great fun.

I mean. Standing naked in a field at night, next to a big boulder on a hill, looking up at the stars, one's body steaming because you've just exited a very hot sauna; standing there in the freezing cold next to a naked lady also steaming. With a couple other naked steaming people dotting the landscape here and there.

And all that other spa stuff.

And eating at the breakfast buffet. A gigantic fry up, plate stacked high with eggs, sausages and ham tastes twice as good when you've just come off a movie star diet, triply good when everyone else in the restaurant seems to be eating muesli, fruit and or yogurt. Mmm.

And they had a decent single malt selection at the bar. And a live Latino band, guys from Uruguay, Chile and Peru maybe, playing guitar, bass and the gigantic bongos and hitting on blondes in their breaks.

Swell.

Slacker ants

What will they find next? Goldbricking beavers, just playing in the mud. "Stop swimming on your back like that, you look like an otter! All you need is an abalone!" the other beavers will say. Or, in the beehive, "Hive-Unit 10043303 you have failed to meet your projected nectar quota three weeks in a row!"

Scientists have discovered the slacker ant. I quote, in full, an article found in the Sunday 16 November 2003 issue of the Japan Times (without permission, I apologize in advance to the Kyodo news service and will of course remove the article if they so desire, just let me know guys):

20% of worker ants idle lazybones: study
SAPPORO (Kyodo)
Contrary to popular belief, 20 percent of worker ants are not particularly hardworking, researchers said Saturday.

The discovery is the result of observations of three separate 30-strong colonies of black Japanese ants (Myrmecina nipponica) according to Eisuke Hasegawa, an assistant researcher in evolutionary biology at Hokkaido University's graduate school of agriculture, and his research team.

The team transferred three colonies of ants to a man-made nest and marked them for observation. Hasegawa and his team said they observed the ants three hours a day for about five months from May last year.

Hasegawa said they discovered that about 80 percent of the ants engage in some sort of work, such as cleaning the nest or gathering food, but that the rest are mostly idle.

The situation remained the same when the researchers removed six busy ants from one colony; the busy ants that remained had to work even harder while the lazy ants continued to do little or no work.

Scientists have suggested that some ants may avoid working due to old age or inherent laziness. Hasegawa said the idle ants could be contributing something to the colony that they have not yet determined.

Of course

The cello-Led Zeppelin connection.

Getting there

No time, must run to a conference or something.
32K to go. May make it, if the diet doesn't kill me first.

As Beta said, "are you sure it's a good idea for both of you to go on the diet and both get cranky at the same time?"

As Beta's friend said, "didn't they swear they'd never do that diet again?"

But seriously, this is the absolutely last time. Supermodels can afford to do this, they don't need brains, they have personal assistants to think for them.

What a cello looks like when you're six

Proof deer are stupid

There they are again, in that timeless space they inhabit, grazing in the field as if they owned the place. As if they were the alpha predators and not the hunter who built the blind beneath which they stand.

But we can't write about deer can we. Must not write about deer, my precious. Mustn't drive away our readers with stories about cats, dieting, cello frustration or wacky kids.

Or, wait, you don't actually come here to read about that do you? I mean, I could probably write about something else for a change. Like, I was at a men's clothing shop once in downtown Vienna and saw some famous guy shopping there. No idea who he was, but he had that rich and successful aura they have, and some babe half his age with a huge rack and a silk blouse open down to her navel was helping him pick out ties. I looked at them, they looked at me. No idea what they saw but I felt like a piece of cheese at a fondue contest.

You know, essential to the success of the over all scheme, but still just a small piece of cheese.

Do any of you have any idea what a marvelous feeling of triumph and satisfaction it is to finally crack the Jacques Offenbach cello duet you've been working on for weeks and weeks and just feel that music flow out of those F-holes? If you do, send me a mail because I sure as hell don't, although I sense I'm getting closer. I'm sure it's a grand feeling.

Upping the ante

The monitor started doing the Blink-blink. Blink. Blinkblinkblink-thing again so he switched it off and took a break. Things were going smoothly. Too smoothly - it was making him nervous. He decided to up the ante. Brushing red cat hairs from his black sweater and black jeans, he walked downstairs.
"Honey, I..."
"You're not scattering red cat hairs throughout the house, are you?"
"No, I..."
"Because I had the cleaning lady here today."
"No, I just wanted..."
"You know they're delivering the new harp in a few minutes. And you remember how clean their house was when we were there."
"Yes, yes. No problem. I just wanted to suggest we go on that diet again."
"What, the one that made us both dizzy and forgetful?"
"Yes, I even had cheekbones there for a few days, before the pendulum swang back."

So we're doing some movie star diet this week, is what it boils down to. Only two and a half days and I'm already cranky and crazy. On the plus side, I'll feel better about myself when we go to the spa next weekend and frolic in the luxurious healing waters and pig out at the buffet.

On the really, really big plus side, Beta now has a beautiful new concert harp. Woet.

Halfway there

Only 50k to go.

Favorite places

The Virgil Chapel in Vienna is one of my favorite places. I have more though.

Chuck on art. Or life.

Everything we do is a self portrait.

Traffic tips

Tip #1: When stuck in the mother of all traffic jams with a teenaged girl, parked there on the freeway with nothing to read, why not while away the time by playing Twenty or More Questions?

Q1: Are you a vegetable?
A: No.
Q2: Are you alive?
A: Mmmm, yeah.
Q3: What do you mean "Mmmm, yeah?" Are you a living organism?
A: Sort of. Look, those people in the next car are reading the paper.
Q4: Which paper?
A: Sorry, just yes/no questions are allowed.
[15 minutes later]
Q35: So you live on a person. Do you live on a person?
A: Yes.
Q36: Do you have legs? Wait, you said you didn't have legs. How do you move around?
A: Yes/no, please.
Q37: Do you move around?
A: Sort of.
Q38: Sort of? What's that mean? Are you a parasite of some sort?
A: No.
[Traffic moves ahead a few feet. Everyone jumps in their cars, starts engines, etc. Then firetruck and ambulance wend their way through the traffic. Resume game.]
Q67: You sure you're alive? How can you be alive if you don't reproduce?
A: I'm alive.
Q117: How about a knuckle sandwich? Would you like a knuckle sandwich?
A: No.
Q321: A hair? You're a hair? You said you were alive! A hair's not alive.
A: The follicle is alive. It's a living cell.
Q322: Okay, my turn.
A: No, you have to guess where I am.
Q323: Gah. A butt hair! You're a butt hair.
A: No.
Q324: [sigh] Face? Are you a face hair?
A: Yes. Where on the face.
Q325: Moustache.
A: No.
Q326: Beard.
A: No.
Q327: Eyebrow/eyelash.
A: Which, eyebrow or eyelash?
Q328: Eyebrow?
A: Yay! Got it. Your turn.

[Round Two]
Q1: Are you a butt hair?
A: That's no fair. I get to go again.
Q1: Okay. Are you a traffic sign?
A: No.
[five minutes later]
Q12: You're on a computer? You're a computer part? Forget it. How'm I supposed to know anything about computer parts, if you're not a mouse or a monitor? Forget it, I quit.
A: C'mon.
Q13: Tell me what you are, and I'll tell you what I was going to be next time.
A: The "L" key on a computer keyboard.
Q14: The dead DNA in a serving of mashed potatoes.

Parenting tip

Skimming through the CI* T*rture M*nual at lunch today, it occurred to me that if one were to substitute the words "parent" for "interrogator" and "offspring" or "child" for "resistant source who is a staff or agent member of an Orbit intelligence or security service or of a clandestine Communist organization", this might do pretty good as a parenting how-to book.

I'll keep you posted.

Call for articles

Raising Hell is looking for funny stories about kids. If you can write intelligent, funny, well-punctuated and brief stories about parenthood etc and don't insist on being paid money, please consider sending your stories, in the body of an email message to Editor X at editor [at] rhzine.com. Thanks.

Typing on my heimcomputer

The plan was to type on the PC until the lunar eclipse in one big burst of creativity and inspiration. But after the usual two hours the monitor started going blink. Blink. Blink-blink-blink. Shutting itself off and turning itself back on at a rapidly accelerating rate. I had to turn it off, the monitor, and let it cool for 15 minutes in order for it to remain 'on' long enough for me to shut off the computer. The sky was crystal clear, the moon large and full and yellow, just waiting for that shadow to crawl across its face. I was tired, I went to bed. No way was I going to wait up until 1.30 or 3 or whatever for some eclipse.

This morning she was all, "two novels huh?"
"Yes."
"About what?"
"Um..."
"Yes?"
"A guy who gets a job torturing people because he doesn't feel sorry for them, and a guy who gets eaten by a tiger."
"I see."
"Warm up your coffee?"
"No, thanks. Why can't you write about something nice?"
"A pain suit's not nice? Tigers are nice."
"How much did you write this weekend?"
"One thousand words. Then the monitor started the blink-blink thing. My goal is 4,000 a day."
"So when you going to write that?"
"Good question."

Multitasking

Here in the future, we do many things at the same time. Just now, I was relaxing on the sofa, reading Chuck Palahniuk's "Diary - a novel", digesting my lunch and serving as the east wall of a burrow a 6-year-old girl had built out of sofa cushions, pillows and her father.

She called it a tunnel, but it was a burrow.

A brief history of typewriters

Nietzsche's mother and sister once gave him one for Christmas. He hated it.

Must keep typing. Must not stop.

Church sign generator

[via Joeri]

Strata

Using one of my old toothbrushes and a tool I'd made out of a bicycle spoke, I carefully removed the folder from the stratum labeled "office cupboard". It contained short stories and poems dated "1993". They had been printed on a machine that called itself a text processor and printed using this cartridge that looked like a cassette tape only smaller, which held a plastic band from which the pigment was transferred to the paper using a technology we no longer understand. "Pressure," perhaps, or "heat," or both. There were several copies of each story and each poem, indicating that the author had intended to send them out to potential publishers; the fact that they were still in the folder indicated that

1. he had worked somewhere where he could use the copier for free and had therefore made more copies than he could ever use and/or
   
2. he had given up

They were all written with an antiquated cuniform script.
Some were not so bad. This was a surprise. Normally, finding old stories is like finding old love letters, they make one cringe. The stories included the last one the author had written back then, before his kid was born rather early (the stuff was dated 1993 but that was just the date everything had been rewritten and copied; some of the poems may have been more recent, but carbon dating puts the last story at around 1989, just before the kid was born. We've mentioned this here before. The story came true, just in a different way than expected, that freaked out the author and he stopped writing. Someone else had a similar experience, or not, and writes about it better.)

Green River suspect arrested confesses

The Internet has its limits. I was doing a search to find out whether the person who has apparently confessed to 48 murders in the Green River Killer case is a Republican, but found nothing. Obviously a big cover-up.

Ted Bundy was, though.

MT question

I'm currently using Version 2.63 of MT to run this site. My question for those of you with knowledge of this sort of thing is, look, because see, this being November, I'm writing the two novels, and since I'm very used to typing into a blog interface I'm posting them to Pain Suit, right, the chapters, and the ones that I have time to rewrite a little I even publish there, despite the fact that they're just rough drafts. Anyway, I just wrote a chapter there in which a logger takes his axe one winter and chops his son's cello into tiny bits, but when I tried to save it, it vanished. So my question is, does this version of MT have a crap filter installed or something?

Bloggus interruptus, or How I met my wife

I nearly posted this story in the comments here but realized at the last moment that it had nothing to do with the internet, besides the fact that I shall now tell said story on the internet, and refrained because we don't want to look like a corny old guy on someone else's weblog do we.

I was visiting a friend back in the days when nearly everything happened exclusively in real life. I was visiting a friend, in fact staying at his house for an extended period. I won't say that he left me to my own devices a great deal, but I did spend a fair amount of time watching his pet squirrel run in the wheel mounted in its cage. It was a rather small cage, and being a squirrel the animal had lots of energy, and spent a lot of time running in its wheel, and I spent a lot of time watching it - being a lazy human I had less energy, at least relatively so; or perhaps merely more indolence.

One day my squirrel-watching was interrupted by a blonde woman who, well, not "burst," and not "barged" ... who "entered the room with a certain dramatic flair" and announced to everyone there (at this point I had reached a stage where I watched the squirrel closely even when other, potential conversation-partner types were in the room) and announced, "Boy do I ever hate American men."

I sort of looked up, then went back to my squirrel-watching, thinking, "it's you and me, little buddy."

I also thought, "wonder if all Austrian women are like this." (I should interject at this point that this took place in Austria, you see, a stone's throw from where we now live. Well, a bit further. How far is a stone's throw... fifty meters would be a good toss, wouldn't it? Depending on stone and wind conditions? More like thirty stone's throws from where we now live, but by car it takes just a couple minutes, it's very near. But it was a long, roundabout story between that meeting and moving into the house where we now live.)

And that's how we met.

The squirrel's cage squeaked, faintly but constantly.

Banshee Studios

Banshee Studios.

Call for articles

All you hip travellers out there might be interested to know that a new online travel magazine, The Hip Traveller, is seeking article submissions.

Poor deluded fools

Either real people are actually signing up for the Metamorphosism Challenge or someone's playing a joke on me.

Wish I would have thought of this.

Living in the future

Did you know that there was an episode of Space:1999 called The Metamorph? Not to mention the whole "Moonbase Alpha" thing. Driving to work today, after the fog cleared, I saw a pedestrian, a woman in her late forties with a savage red dye-job and a hairdo just like the sort of fluffy page-boy do's that the women on some television science fiction show had; I think it was Space 1999, but cannot find any images online. As a boy, that sort of defined the ideal woman for me. Dressed in silver, with a haircut like that, wow.

[Correction: As pointed out by Eeksy-Peeksy in the comments to this post, the show I was thinking of was UFO. So just forget all the stuff I say about Space:1999 except that Barbara Bain is pretty hot too. But really. The girls on UFO were something, weren't they? And look, their hair was purple!
I never knew that -- we had a b/w set.]

And now that we're here in the future, look at it. What a ripoff. I mean really. Is this what you thought it would be like?

There was an article in the editorial pages of a newspaper I read. It was about robots and how they're doing our work for us. And how we'll have all this leisure. What it didn't mention was that said leisure will be consumed in the form of unemployment, unless you happen to own a robot. When I was a kid, in the 1960s, we were told that increasing productivity would mean greater leisure, more time to educate ourselves and pursue hobbies. In fact, those of us with jobs, some of us at least, are working longer hours than before. If you don't own the means of production, improved productivity does not help you.

Other than that, the future is pretty cool.

In the forest

A good thing to do, try this, a good thing to do is lay on the floor. Lie there and listen to whatever. The traffic, the hum of electrical devices charging on your nightstand, your heartbeat.

It's okay if it's a wooden floor, you get used to it fast and it doesn't hurt. Extra points if you have a walk-in closet. When designing your home or shopping for your rental, did you think of that? How nice a walk-in closet is? It is, because when everyone else is downstairs or in another room, you can get in there on the floor and scoot over underneath the rack where your suits hang and lie there. Looking up into the tubes of the suit sleeves and pantlegs, it's like a delicious rest in a peaceful wool/polyester blend forest. Instead of moss it smells a little bit like you, and you'll be happy to learn this turns out to be a nice thing. You always thought you had some nasty BO, because if you stick your head into your armpit after a bad day, of course it smells gamey. But just a little, like this, is pleasant. This is what people smell when they smell you; except for the relatively few who stick their heads into your armpits.

It is dark and it smells nice and it's warm here under the suits. No wonder the cats are always back here. You can close your eyes and doze a little while everyone looks for you. Where is he? He has to put gas into the car. You would make a nice smelling, pleasant forest. What a relaxing discovery. You would like a forest like that. You could spend a lot of time there.

10/31-11/1

So we forgot why we swore two years ago no more Halloween parties and some idiot, me, didn't pay attention and 45 kids got invited but luckily a couple didn't come but I still spent a few days hanging black plastic tarps and fakey spiderwebs in the cellar and more webs in the kitchen and one little girl came early and told us "Gamma is the best reader in class!" and so we fell in love with her and let her put on one of Gamma's Disney princess outfits, the pink one, what, Cinderella I suppose, but for trick-or-treating I think she changed into dark streetclothes, because here in Austria Halloween is relatively new, dating roughly to 1995 at most, and still entirely witch/vampire at this point; the costume party season here is the Carneval season in, what, February I guess, mardi gras and all that. So we had a lot of 6 year old and 14-15 year old vampires etc. And they had fun. And a few kids came trick-or-treating, fewer than last year, very polite, and a conservative Catholic bishop condemned the holiday celebrations as heathen so a good time was had by all except I got really tired because 8 hours is just too much for a Halloween party - we started early so the big kids could take care of the little kids, and then still have time for their own stuff later on; of course it just mushed into one long chaotic mess, but like I said, turned out well. Nothing broken, only one little boy pooped his pants because all bathrooms were occupied, a little glitter on one cat, that was it.

The next day was the big holiday here in Austria. All Souls. Radio traffic advisories warned people to take public transportation to the big cemeteries, because the parking lots were full. It began to rain.

All the best

Happy birthday, Shauna.