That thing about things on the thing thing

I just had a conversation with the Baron about things.

BARON: The thing has just finished.

ME: Yes, in order to go out I have to put the things on the thing. 

BARON: We'd probably better put the thing inside. 

ME: Yes, the thing is inside, but in order to put things on the thing I have to take the things off the thing. 

BARON: Oh. 

ME: Yes. 

I have no idea either. This is basically what married life is like.

A little later, we had another conversation:

ME: The things are all on the thing, but I have more things, so I think I will put it on the thing. 

BARON: What? 

ME: I need to put these things (pointing at these things) on the thing (pointing into another room somewhere).

BARON: (In a strained voice) I have no idea what you are talking about. 

At this point, I could only point awkwardly at the things and the thing, as I had done before, and the Baron helpfully said "Oh yes, now I know what you mean."

I wish she'd tell me.

UPDATE! -  Reader competition! Perhaps people reading this post - yes, all one of you - could offer creative suggestions as to what the 'things' and the 'thing' is. The best entry gets a hot date! But not with me though. I'm not sharing my hot dates with anyone.

Variations

For some reason I really like sending up T S Eliot.

I grow old... I grow old

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. 

T S Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old I grow old

And the nurse says I haven't taken my medication this morning either.

***

I grow old I grow old

And I think I am having a heart

***

I grow old I grow old

I am not wearing any trousers either.

***

I grow old

And tomatoes.

***

I grow I grow

And life says Deepak Chopra is all about growth

Or is that my daughter

Anyway

***

I grow old

Is the train always this late?

***

How come I grow old

But don't shrink anything,

Just shrink

Every day the same

But

Less?

***

I grow old I grow old

Until one day

I don't. 

Forward in being backward

Today I will attempt to be ahead of the eight ball, behind the curve, off the money, under the facts, arrive with a whimper, not a bang, and leave with a clash of thimbles.

Fudge making for sado-masochists

I know what all you sado-masochists are thinking. "My life as a sado-masochist is rich and full! I inflict pain and have pain inflicted on me with others in a fully consenting adult relationship already, so why would I need more help?" But hear me out!

Fudge making involves intense heat, can go wrong in a number of ways, will quite possibly inflict a large amount of pain on yourself, and involves working with high heat for long periods of time. What's more it is extremely time consuming and tedious. Not only that, but if you do it in the right way (by which I mean the wrong way), you will end up with a product that will inflict a great deal of suffering on your teeth and jaw by cracking into shards in your mouth, and possibly gluing it together for good! So let's begin.

To make some fudge, you will simply need some sugar and double cream, a pot to melt the two together in, a stove, and some butter. Obviously the sado-masochist angle will work better if you do all your cooking in your kinky bedroom costume, as when the mixture is close to boiling, it is likely that it will spit hot liquid all over you, and you may well want to maximise the pain involved (TIP! - things become even more dangerous, and therefore desirable, if you are wearing bondage gear), though of course it all depends on how you are feeling on the day.

Don't forget to keep stirring! The sugar crystals will dissolve better if you keep stirring as the mixture gradually rises in temperature. You want to get the mixture to reach a temperature between 115 and 117 Degrees Celsius. How can you tell if it is that temperature? I'm glad you asked! You can use three tests: the thermometer test (the name says it all), the cold plate test (drop some of the liquid on a plate that has been in the refrigerator, and if it forms a soft ball, it is ready), or the finger test (stick your finger in the liquid and if it feels searingly awful, it is ready). Obviously for our purposes we'll be wanting to use the finger test, but again, it all depends what you feel like on the day and if you don't want to do it then that's completely fine and all right. Anyway, it might get a few goes before you get the 'feel' of fudge making, but don't worry, you have ten fingers, and many other body limbs that you can dip into a dangerously hot liquid, so it should be fine.

When it's all done, just stir in the butter, pour the liquid fudge into a pan lined with aluminium foil, and leave to cool. Done!

You will be left with a tray of pleasantly sweet, tasty treats that you and your sado-masochist friends can enjoy eating in your fully consenting adult relationships in your own time. Sounds awful, I know, but you can content yourself by looking forward to the heart attacks and diabetes and other horrible diseases and medical syndromes that eating too much fudge can cause.

Bon appetit!

Fancy foreign bubbles

Just as it is wrong to picture her [Margaret Thatcher] as some autocratic bossyboots, so it is equally mistaken to think of her as so obsessed with free market economics that she would privatise Buckingham Palace if she could... I remember once asking for a Perrier water when she was buying me a snack. She obviously regarded it as treachery to drink a French product and asked why I wanted it. I explained it was because it was naturally fizzy. She replied that the bubbles were artificially added. We then started arguing about whether the bubbles in Perrier were natural or not. I realised that the situation was becoming absurd and the conversation moved on to matters of high policy...

David Willets, Working for Mrs Thatcher

Little did this public servant know, but those bubbles in Perrier were actually crafted in Yorkshire and exported to the Perrier company under a trade deal with the French, where they were later added to the Perrier water. Although we cannot know how history would have turned out, it seems likely to me if the Tories had campaigned strongly on her British Bubbles for British People platform instead of ousting Thatcher, they would still be in government today. Oh wait, they are. Hang on....

Anyway, we need to apply this rigorous approach to beverage-quaffing more often. The froth they put on top of coffees, for instance. Right now, I'm sure there are plenty of Australian small business coffee froth producers who are willing to produce workable, durable, longer-lasting coffee froth ready to be packaged and sent out across the world at reduced rates.

It is clear, Margaret Thatcher made Australia the man it is today.

Questions inspired by a certain television show

"Oh, come on, if you claw your way out of a grave, are you really going to do that?"

"But I thought he liked vampires now, what's he doing with them?"

"What does she want with him anyway?"

"Why doesn't he just turn into a lion?"

"Why isn't he affected? Is it because of the alcohol?"

"Wow, is she developing new powers?"

"How come he's in a trance and still able to do hostage negotiations?" 

"Wait, was this just a dream all the time?"

"Why are they doing that now?"

"Why are we even watching this?"

"Have we got time to watch another one?"

You sure ask the big questions when for some inexplicable reason you find yourself watching another True Blood DVD. 

A Loris named Doris, a Sloth named Roth

I just learned the other day of the existence of a creature known as the Slow Loris. It is just about as reprehensible as it sounds - it is small, slow, and with extremely large eyes, reminiscent of irritating Japanese anime characters or pointless Pokemons. I immediately wondered why there was no Fast Loris - the Fast Loris, you understand, being the quicker, more spritely, less annoying Loris cousin to the aforementioned Slow Loris.

It made me wonder, too, about the Sloth. We always hear about the Sloth, the slothful inhabitant of the trees, whose purpose, it seems, to be hang about on branches not doing particularly much, and not doing it very quickly either. Why does nature give us the Sloth, and not the Industrious, I wonder? Nature is perverse.

Then again, just today I was wondering about the Panther and the Giraffe. What on earth could the opposite to these creatures be? It's easy enough when it comes to Sloths and Lorises. Bloody Nature!

Sassinating

A thing occurred to me just then (well, no, it actually occurred to me this morning) and of course I had to immediately (in a matter of hours) rush to my blog to post about this thing that occurred to me just then (actually this morning).

People in Arkansas. How do they get described when they're in groups? Arkansassians? Arkansassies? Arkansissies? Or even, um, Arkansaurians?

 

An Arkansaurian. 

Thank you for reading this urgent post about a thing.

The Ironic Lady

On the day that the Ironic Lady came to power, few would have guessed the monumental effect she would have on the history of her nation.

"If the honourable Prime Minister's economic policies really work, then perhaps she'd like to sell you London Bridge," proclaimed the leader of the opposition and former Prime Minister about the incoming Prime Minister, the Ironic Lady.

The next day, the Ironic Lady sold London Bridge to an antiques dealer in Yorkshire. It was the first of many victories for the Ironic Lady.

Later, when she was confronted by a group of protesters outside number 10, Downing Street, calling for the banning of genetically modified food, she proclaimed, "if genetic modification of food is really that dangerous, then tomorrow London will be attacked by flying pigs."

No-one could have expected the Flying Pig Blitz of 1980, but yet again, it seemed, the Ironic Lady had been proven strangely and unexpectedly right.

Over the years, the influence of the Ironic Lady grew. In the election of 1987, it seemed to some that her power was waning, causing the Opposition Leader of the time saying she was taking a spoon to a knife fight.

As it turned out, later that same day, the Ironic Lady interrupted a knife fight between two young men, and simply by waving her teaspoon around, managed to scare off both the criminals. She had struck again.

It was only after she left office that it was finally revealed that the Ironic Lady was actually a man.

It was quite ironic, really.

Macho man's machinations

There's nothing like a manly afternoon sawing and nailing things in the backyard while wearing a tie. This afternoon I have been doing just such a thing. I just hammered together a vanilla blanc mange with plum sauce with nothing but three old planks of wood and some nails of various sizes. Next, I plan to weld together a few pieces of corrugated iron to create an authentic pre-revolutionary French merkin, before sawing up a couple of old existentialist philosophies and setting them to run out in the backyard with the chickens.

What manly activities do you plan on doing this afternoon, readers?

Ringadingdingthing

Hello dingaling it's me dingaling

Have you time do you mind just to talk won't be long

Pick it up ringading ringading ringading

I'm the voice dingaling on your thing thingaling

Do you own have you thought do you say is my song

Hello dingaling it's me dingaling

Let me ring ringaling all your bells tingaling

Is your bill was it gas have you cash am I wrong

Pick it up ringading ringading ringading

What I bring bringaling with my bring bringaling

Will you switch what about as for me from Taiwan

Hello dingaling it's me dingaling

I've got zap zingaling I've got zwing zingaling

If you stay you will buy I was right all along

Pick it up ringading ringading ringading

All the bells ringaling mingling mingling

All the bells all the calls in the world ringing strong

Hello dingaling it's me dingaling

Pick it up ringading ringading ringading.

My humble fumble bumble grumble

This morning I set off with hope in my heart and a song on my lips, and a little sheaf of papers in my hands to get photocopied and then sent off at the Thomastown Post Office. My hope and joy turned out to be sadly misplaced. In short order (although that turned out to be a rather long short order), I found myself

• Sent from the Thomastown Post Office to the local MPs office to take advantage of their free photocopying,
• Walking from the local MPs office, which, in spite of its free photocopying, was closed, to the Lalor Library,
• Finding a queue for the photocopier at the Lalor Library, which photocopier required details about my library card for me to be able to use it, although I was not, in fact, in possession of a library card,
• Approaching the lady behind the desk at the Lalor Post Office and being told to take my photocopying to the Lalor Library, because they never photocopied documents over 10 pages long, 
• Walking all the way to Office Works at Epping because bugger Lalor Post Office anyway with their 40 cents a page photocopying
• Discovering a notice on the front door of the Office Works at Epping saying that all their self-service photocopiers were out of service. 

 At this point, it occurred to me that today might be a very good day for me to go and buy a racehorse, get that racehorse in a prominent race, and place all my money on some other racehorse, because quite clearly, I was having a terrible run of luck.

PS If you like queues, I would not hesitate to recommend the queue at Epping Post Office to you. It is undoubtedly the best - or at least the longest and most tedious - of all the queues in all the post offices I have been in today. In fact, the queue is so long, that I'm probably still in it now.

Roaratorios and uproars (and twitter)

Across Twitter today, users found new and exciting vectors through which their head might connect with their desk, discovered a hitherto unknown gravitational relationship between their ocular organs and a series of sharp objects generally used for writing or drawing, employed dessert cutlery to gouge out those same ocular organs repeatedly (repeatedly), made major innovations in the theory and practice of literature by deploying upper-case letters for hyperbolic effect, followed hash tags with a series of observations of things that needed to be observed, became outraged by shockingly scandalous disgraceful dramas, dramatically shockingly disgraceful scandalously outrages, or all three of the above, fumed, fulminated, fretted, and generally frowned upon the activities of various other people in the world at large.

In other news, Beatrice the cat is sleeping peacefully on the purple couch. The end.

Victoire!

The 2013 AFL season has drawn to a close after just one round, leaving Richmond Football Club the champions for another year, along with several other exhausted clubs.

The unconventional decision was taken in an unconventional manner by Brendon Gale, the CEO of the Richmond Tigers, making this the best season in thirty years for the underperforming club.

"We've fought long and hard, and sometimes it looked like we wouldn't make it, but in the end I knew our boys had it in them to come out tops," said Gale. "and in the end, we humiliated Carlton, which is all that really matters."

The victory in the grand final, which also turned out to be the grand opening, makes this the best year yet for the Tigers, who Gale says "will continue to grow stronger, healthier, and better, ready for the footy season next year."

For some, this year in football, or more accurately three or four days in football, has turned out to be a year of triumph, while for others, it has been a year of loss. The next few months will be a chance for the losing teams, such as Carlton, St Kilda, and the Demons to regroup and think about the opportunities lost. The winners of the finals, such as Richmond and Port Adelaide and the unexpected winners, the Gold Coast Suns, will have given their fans much to celebrate.

However, a little known official from elsewhere in the AFL known as Andrew Demetriou has denied that the season has come to an end, and that the next round in the season will go ahead as planned.