31 August 2006 at 11:25
This is a freelance Taoist blog.
Every true story contains a wee lie.
Can you tell what's untrue?
There is no greater delight than to be conscious of sincerity on self-examination
--Mencius
I should have known right from the first day at the conference that my own star billing was jinxed.
On the first morning I had got stuck in traffic, so by the time I arrived flustered at the venue, the conference was already starting and everyone else was already seated in the lecture theatre.
Someone handed me a name-badge, and to avoid missing too much of the first presentation I tried to pin the badge to my chest at the same time as I raced to the toilet for a leak.
Standing at the urinal - hurry! hurry! - I wrestled the badge one-handed to pin it to my shirt, but after a few attempts it still wasn't straight.
So I had a brainwave - hurry! hurry! - waddle over to the mirror, adjust the name-badge, then finish my pee.
Which is why the guy who came in the gents at that moment took one look at me apparently admiring my willy in the mirror, turned and went back out.
If he was one of the conference organisers, that would explain why my own paper was then mysteriously "dropped" from the programme.
The lie is that the photo isn't of me. I found it through Google Images.
If you missed previous HNTs, you can access all the old half baked thursday posts here.~
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30 August 2006 at 14:41
Winston Churchill's black dog came ashore here a couple of days ago. I hadn't seen it for years. My, how it's grown in the meantime!
It seemed to think there was a bone buried round here. For a while I considered taking it for a walk down by the railway tracks, but this morning I summoned the resolve to chase it away again. Shoo! Go and dig up someone else's garden!
Ah, that's better!
When the doctors give you the black spot, everything goes into a mad panic, and it's like a TV emergency room drama. Everyone talks of beating this thing. It's war, it's going to be tough, and we'll have to chop off your pecker (or your head, or whatever) but then you might be alright again.
Part of you is enthralled by all the activity focused on you, and you yourself need do nothing except drop your breeks for the peckerotomy and the poisoning and the frying.
20 years later, and you've lost your fear of the black spot (hooray!) but the side-effects of the peckerotomy get steadily worse. Most days, you're a happy survivor making the most of things, having a great life with a lovable partner. What would you do without her? What a fortunate creature!
Just occasionally, you find yourself wishing for the end, and for a moment you understand why some people throw themselves under trains. And the world wide mess doesn't exactly help the jollity levels. Time to curl up into a foetus and whimper. Just keep the supply of quadruple-dosage Somaloft coming, or is that made from oil too?
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27 August 2006 at 22:15
My old friend
hotboy has started being nice to me, occasionally even using words of praise. This false consciousness is unsettling. At first I wasn't sure whether to take it as sarcasm. But then I realised what his game is. He's planning ahead, so when the nuclear backpacks start going off in Blighty, he wants to be welcome to come ashore and take refuge on my island, camping out here in the back garden. That'll be okay, I need a gardener anyway. I'll just have to bury the beer stash before he gets here, and brew a bucket of my special no-alcohol lager as a decoy.
Other blog refugees who come here are advised to get here early and stash their own Margarita and MGT supplies before his arrival. That should help. UnHeard Of survivors, what fortunate creatures we'll be! With my genes and hotboy's severe fitness regimes, we'll build a new super-race. What skills will you contribute?
Update: hotboy has now issued a
fatwa against me. He's back to his old fundamentalist self. That's more like it.
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24 August 2006 at 16:33
Months ago, even before the World Cup, I was tagged by the incomparable Lelly to write "Six weird facts/habits about yourself".
The Rules: "Post six weird facts/habits about yourself. These cannot be used against you later on! At the end of the post name the six people you will tag next. Leave them a comment to let them know they've been tagged and to read your blog."
Well, I've broken the rules in several places. I'm not tagging anyone (unless they ask me), and because this post was getting too long for an HNT, I'm going to save the heavy-duty weirdness about sex, chocolate etc. for another post.
Children. I have no kids of my own. There have been times when I have enjoyed looking after friends' kids, but I've never wanted to own one. I have a huge admiration for parents, but I agree with Jimmy Savile, who said "Kids? I love them, but I couldn't eat a whole one."
Like my father before me, my skills lie in raising dogs, not humans. Of course, if my father had stuck to breeding spaniels I wouldn't exist now. So I shouldn't complain.
My parents before I was born
(click to see how my arrival changed their lives)
Yes, my father's dog-training skills were useful with children too. He brought up me and my brother using commands like "sit!" and "stay!" and "don't move!"
Conception. A one-night stand, decades ago, resulted in a daughter whom I have never seen, and even if I wanted to track her down, what would be the point? Let sleeping dogs lie.
Therapeutic inappropriate behaviour. I would love to have been a clown. I like to use shock tactics to make people feel good. With adults, I delight in inappropriate remarks and stories. At funerals and weddings, I specialise in the sort of tactless remark that leads to horrified laughter or sometimes stunned silence.
Or I'll brutally ask friends about their bodily functions, as if we were discussing the weather. I think I learned this approach when I trained and practised as a counsellor - you make people gasp, and some of their repressed feelings come spilling out.
With kids, a good way to loosen them up is to pretend to get things wrong. I'll sing them a well-known song with deliberately wrong words. For example, Madonna's song becomes:
When you call my name, I'm like a football player, I'm down on my knees, I'll take the kick from there. Kids go mental when you get the words wrong.
Or if I'm looking after 2 children, I make sure I mix their names up. Or I might swear blind that Zinadine Zidane played for Zimbabwe. Kids love being able to tell adults off. This usually works well, though occasionally a kid reacts by clubbing the stupid adult over the head.
Housework. I find housework easy. At age 6 or so, I used to do the vacuuming in our house. My mother brainwashed me to believe that it was a big treat, and I'm glad she did.
But I don't like to do unnecessary work, so I try to streamline things whenever I can. For example, after cooking porridge for breakfast, cleaning the saucepan is a real pain. And then you're only going to dirty it again tomorrow morning. So why bother cleaning it? Instead, simply stick the porridgey pan in the fridge to prevent the stuck-on stuff from festering. Then tomorrow, just re-use it, and the heat will re-sterilise it. With this system, you only need to wash the porridge pan once a year, at the end of winter. Result - you get back several extra hours of your life, to spend doing other stuff. Like blogging about the time you've saved.
If you missed previous HNTs, you can access all the old half baked thursday posts here.~
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at 14:00
Using the
Next Blog button, I came across
4th Avenue Blues , by a guy who blogs, it seems, from his tent. If he can do it, so can
hotboy from his tent at the Buddhist place, or from the bliss hut.
He seems like a good guy (not hotboy), and goes to AA meetings. I used to go to AA too, despite not being an alcoholic. I went for the acceptance and friendship. I know that's what they all say, but in my case it's true.
Next month with any luck, I'll find myself sitting beside an AA member in the plummeting fuselage. That would help.
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22 August 2006 at 07:38
If you want to understand the detailed metaphysics of a chair, or how to stand on your head while rolling your eyes inside your skull, hotboy's your man. But to know the real Scotland, you have to ask a tourist.
At What's New PussCat?, a blog written by an Australian visitor to Scotland, I discovered that loutish behaviour, which was the birthright of Scots males when I used to live there, is now
an equal-opportunity activity. They're calling it "ladette culture".
The blog also tells you more than you probably want to know about Scottish
food and
Meat Products. Enjoy.
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20 August 2006 at 19:32
Until recently, most people thought that the worst thing about Gunter Grass was his work as a body double for Saddam Hussein.
Now the Nobel-prize winning novelist, has admitted he was in Hitler's SS as a teenager. He says that his public confession has been a great relief to him.
Of course now everybody's saying that the truth should have been obvious all along - his name even ends in "SS"!
There's another writer, a Scottish novelist, who has a secret past in the IRA Bellshill juniors. For obvious reasons I can't identify him, except by his operational codename of Madymira. I think going public would be a load off his mind, and might allow him to give up the self-flagellation.
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18 August 2006 at 17:52
You know the old Police song, Message in a Bottle?
Woke up this morning. Can't believe what I saw,
100 million bottles washed up on the shore.
Except for me this morning it was 18 comments washed up on this blog, but the principle's the same. Just when I was feeling uncustomarily low. What a fortunate man I am to have blogfriends!
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15 August 2006 at 20:23
Ever since the dawn of time, when war happens, it's the young people who join the military, while the old and feeble stay safe at home and watch the whole thing on TV.
I know Americans and Australians who were the right age to be called up in the 60s for the Vietnam war. And when I was a kid, we had to go to school in military uniform every Monday, and
march around a parade ground for hours. We were told that if there was ever a war, we would be called up first.
From my large collection of
embarrassing photos.
Beat that Keda if you can!
Then as we grew older, people of my generation began looking forward to one of the perks of age - the right to wave off the next generation of young cannon fodder, and thank them for their sacrifice.
So I think it's bloody unfair that, just as I have finally become too decrepit to ever fight for my country, the whole deal has changed.
For one thing, the military would collapse if it had to call up people of fighting age - they're all too fat or surly or drug-ridden. Or they're too busy harming themselves to ever harm an enemy.
Also, the whole nature of war has changed, and we're all collateral damage now. Whose idea was that? I didn't agree to it. Bang (literally) goes my cosy retirement. What a swindle!
Next month I'll be taking a 23-hour flight to the old country via Heathrow, but my enjoyment of the in-flight movie might be spoiled by the thought that at any moment the plane could disintegrate. I may suddenly find myself gasping in the stratosphere at minus 50°, hurtling into the ocean, or plummeting towards Afghanistan. If I'm lucky, I may still be strapped to my seat. At least that should help absorb the impact.
To distract myself, I may have to take advantage of the 23 hours of free booze. What a fortunate creature I'll be!
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13 August 2006 at 14:55
Where I work at the McDonald Institute, the basins in the toilets were all installed by the institute director, who runs a plumbing company on the side. All the taps are dodgy - either full blast or nothing. And they're angled so the jet is deflected straight back out over the front of the basin, and all over the floor. Or all over your clothes if you don't know to step aside. A fine example of McDonald Island workmanship (and the McDonald Island business tendering process).
The day I went for the job interview, I went to the gents beforehand. At the interview, they said "Oh I see you've experienced our plumbing" because my breeks were wet all down the front as if I'd peed myself.
Still, I got the job. 11 years later I'm still there and so are the taps. I've learned how to sidestep the spray. What a fortunate creature I am! Some people have much bigger worries.
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10 August 2006 at 17:40
Like most people, over the years I've learned from a lot of different people.
As a kid, my middle-class parents did a thorough job of beating the spirit out of me, so in later life I've had to re-learn spontaneity and mischief from my working-class chums.
One of my chums when I lived in Edinburgh was Biffo, a very funny and argumentative guy, who taught me how to win arguments.
One thing I learned from him was how to sabotage any discussion, using tricks like "there's new research that proves ..." or "98% of people agree that ..."
Another trick he used was confusing an irate opponent with irrelevant interruptions like "no, you don't need to apologise."
But one skill I never managed to pick up from Biffo was how to grope a woman friend while she's getting out of the taxi, though I saw him do it often. On the way home from the pub in a packed taxi, you pretend to help her out by placing your hand on her bum to steer her out, you just forget to take your hand away again as you follow her out. This also works when getting into the taxi. He used to do this to the woman I was nuts about, and whose bum I eventually spent several happy years exploring, though not in public.
Though I was always too polite to try out the taxi grope, I've lost my manners over the years, so I suppose I could probably pull it off now. Of course, I'm so old now that the only woman I know worth groping is my partner, and I can do that at home, no need to wait for a taxi ride.
I was reminded of Biffo today when I found an ancient birthday card that he sent me just after I had split up with Mary Hopkin. It contained this verse which he wrote to try and cheer me up:
I eventually fell out with him too, one of the best friends I ever had, my last remaining friend in Edinburgh. Soon after, trusting myself as advised in the verse, I jacked in my job, and escaped to begin a new life in Glasgow.
Mary, John Doe and Biffo,
before I fell out with them all
I almost forgot to include a picture of a body part. This one's also from my album, and you can click it:
Mary sometimes made me
a camembert sandwich
(click to zoom out)
PS - Lee Ann has recently quit HNT while she's at her peak. I owe her a lot. It was she who got me started in the whole Half Nekkid Therapy programme.
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08 August 2006 at 17:47
I lost my equilibrium a few weeks ago. I suppose it started when I had the screaming neck pain, and I couldn't use the PC for a couple of weeks. I lost sleep and lost touch with my blogfriends.
Yet since the pain lifted and I got back online, I've been blundering around offending people all over the place, in my posts and my comments. And I almost triggered a diplomatic crisis here in the UnHeard Of and McDonald Islands, when I dressed up an attack dog as a St Bernard, and sent it up the mountain to sniff out the Buddhist fundamentalists. Worst of all, I've lost the will to drink. I've got about 200 bottles under the house, and I'm not doing anything to get it down.
I need to find a way to get my mind back into balance. I was going to ask you to help, but I realise nobody can fix it except me. Which brings me to a serious point about jihad and ijtihad:
Who can fix the problem of jihad?
Nowadays everyone knows the word "jihad", which apparently has several meanings including pious duty, struggle, war on the infidels, etc. As a westerner, it is easy to get caught up in the widespread assumption that islam has to be authoritarian, that islam equals jihad, full stop.
I saw a documentary recently where a French progressive muslim thinker explained some stuff. He pointed out that islamic fundamentalists teach that the west is the enemy of all good muslims. But he says that in fact it is easier to live as a Pakistani or Iraqi in the west, than to live at home. "Let's face it, in islamic countries there is no freedom. In Saudi, you're either a slave or a prince."
And he points out that islam has another word, "ijtihad", which means independent reformist thinking. So there is already a tradition of independent adaptation of islam, evolution of islam, which western muslims actually use to improve their lives.
Lastly, this guy said that western muslims are perhaps the only ones who can "fix" the problems of islam in islamic countries, by practising "ijtihad" to modernise islam.
Regular readers and Taoists will know already that everything balances up in the end. The time is long overdue for ijtihad to balance jihad.
If only the ghastly administration in Washington knew this, they would realise that the hundreds of billions they're wasting on the "war on terror" (i.e. finding helpless countries to attack and further destabilise, just to appease to U.S. voter fears) would be better spent on helping western muslims to modernise their religion. If western democracy is really so much better than Middle Eastern life (and I still believe it is), wouldn't it be good to be able to show that Western islam is also demonstrably better than anywhere else? Another $100 billion should cover it.
Of course it'll never happen, just like the Israel/Arab solution. The only back-up policy that the neocons have is called "Nuke Iran".
One ray of hope today - the American system is starting to pick off supporters of the Iraq war, starting with a Democratic senator. Is this too little too late? If the world can just limp to the 2008 U.S. election without another 9/11 or a major conflagration, it's just possible that the Republican posse will be disbanded before they can do much more damage.
Whatever happens, I'll be safe here with the penguins on the UnHeard Of and McDonald Islands, just as soon as I've destroyed the Buddhist rebel hideout. What a fortunate creature I am!
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at 14:36
| My Musical Tastes Match: Weird Al |
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A lazy post, I know. Let me know if you do the test.
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05 August 2006 at 12:39
Home brew. Nothing to beat it. Someone gave me a 24-pack of normal beer, Toohey's Ice, recently. I drank a bottle last night, up against another bottle of my own Canadian Blonde number 10. The Toohey's had no taste at all, the only thing it had going for it was strength, but that doesn't interest me. I'll have to give away the other 23 bottles. If
hotboy will pay the postage to the other side of the island, he can have it all. He actually likes alcohol.
This weekend is turning into a great one. No weddings or funerals to go to. The sweet sound of the new brew bubbling away in the barrel. The beloved partner sick in bed with the flu so I can take her bowls of soup yet she's too weak to argue with me about anything. And I beat her at Scrabble, including 92 points for a made-up 8-letter word ("boardage") which turned out to really exist when I Googled it.
Last night I lay on the floor watching The Alan Clark Diaries on TV through the light-bending glasses, a warm black gundog lying beside me. Can life get any better than this? You'd hardly know there was a war on. What a fortunate creature I am! For now.
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03 August 2006 at 07:49
I've decided to give people a rest from my tortured tales of a previous life this week. The picture is from a recent outing to North Island, one of the group of islands where I live.
While walking on one of the deserted beaches there, I decided to expose my favourite body appendage, the long thin one with a vein running along it. Here's a section of it, blown up.
If you click the pic, you'll be able to see what is special about the beaches on that island.
If you missed previous HNTs, you can access all the old half baked thursday posts here.~
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01 August 2006 at 13:41
One of the best ways to get ahead in today's competitive world is to claim some special consideration because of your unfortunate circumstances. I have friends working at the UnHeard Of University, and they tell me that anyone can get admission to a course without any academic ability at all, as long as they have some special handicap.
There are students who gained admission by being one-legged, or a single mother, or an indigenous islander.
But the fastest-growing area of access to privilege is through personality disorder. In most courses, several places are reserved for students with Asperger's Syndrome or other learning difficulties, and universities employ full-time disability consultants and counsellors. So it's a system that selects learners precisely because they cannot learn. Sadly, many of them flunk during the first term, but apparently that's beside the point.
Each application by a special student takes the university administrators a long time to evaluate (e.g. interviewing applicants, reading their life-stories, substantiating their symptoms, ranking their applications against all the other special applicants, etc.).
What is needed is an international system for grading personality disorders, to streamline the investigation and certification of people's problems.
This is why I am working on a project with
Lee Ann and my colleagues at the McDonald Institute.
We are aiming to set up the world's first
Institute of Advanced Personality Disorder. This professional body will have a number of functions, including standardising and regulating the award of qualifications such as
O.C.D., N.P.D. and R.D.D.
Now is your chance to register and get in on the ground floor of the organisation, before standards are raised and it becomes harder to gain recognition for your disability.
Only genuine cases need apply. No time-wasters please.
late edit - I am grateful to the commenter who pointed out that this post can be interpreted as disrespectful of disabled people. I intended to take an affectionate swipe at institutions who, with the best of PC intentions, go out of their way to attract special applications, only to end up failing most of the students for whatever reason. I was also looking at the increasing medicalisation of problems, whereby half the people in the western world now warrant some disability acronym or other, NPD and RDD being a good example. I see now how this post could be read in other ways, especially by carers of people with real disabilities. I have several disabilities myself, some frivolous and some more serious. I apologise for any offence taken.
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