The Jamjar

Winter

Count your stars

The conversation started with a famous physicist and wound around the garden path in a wheel chair until it ended up with a famous baseball player and a debilitating disease they share.

Lou Gehrig, for whom the motor nurone disease Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is named, died in 1941 from complications of the affliction.

As you can see from the links in the last paragraph, I have been following a train of thought around Wikipedia.

An excerpt from Lou Gehrig's retirement speech lifted from Ken Burns' Baseball (damn fine documentary) cuts out most of what he had to say, so I'll lift it from Wikepedia and recount it here for you to appreciate:

        Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky.

When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift — that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies — that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter — that's something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body — it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed — that's the finest I know.

So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.

Lou Gehrig at Yankee Stadium, July 4, 1939

Flight of the Conchords: Footloose

This made me very happy when I watched it last night. You might just like it today :)
Original Footloose scene

Club Useless

Last night when I got home, I wasn't able to use the elevator as a woman had passed out, falling and blocking the lift doorway. One of my neighbours was looking after her until the ambulance arrived. She also suggested, with a knowing nod of her head towards the street, the woman was one of the "those" people. I knew what people she meant, the people I have come to know as "Club Useless".

Club Useless consists of about a bunch of people from the local commission housing who like to drink and generally abuse themselves on the streets around where Fox and I live.

I live one block from Smith Street, the main drag of Collingwood which, it seems, has always been notorious for druggies, drunks and "the derelict". While the Council has been trying to "clean up" the area, it's a consistent problem that does bring a lot of "local colour" to the area. I don't mind that they're in our neighbourhood, they have to be somewhere, right? There are a raft of problems in the Big City, including homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness. I don't think the Council needs to "clean up" Collingwood necessarily - sweeping problems out of sight never solves much of anything.

I also understand that there are some who thinks Club Useless poses a threat to personal safety, and they do have their moments - public buildings and plate-glass windows are never safe when things get crazy. When they're on the booze, which is the majority of the time, it seems to be managable; but when someone scores some paint or glue and the unpredictable behaviour that particular type of substance abuse carries with it I start to get nervous.

This "local colour" isn't appreciated by everybody though, especially as this once textile factory suburb is becoming a popular residential area, with apartments filling up empty warehouses and selling for upper-end inner-city prices. Do you really want to pay AU$550,000 for your apartment in an area where it's not that unusual to get off the tram on the way home from work and see a drunk man throwing his teenage daughter through the glass door of the Panama Dining Room? Probably not.

Club Useless is a soap opera of abuse, violence, intimidation and, at times, just general grossness. It's not unusual to have to weave past swaying clusters of arguing drunks, step over jagged broken beer bottles, or find foil packs of medication lost in the street.

I certainly feel I need to have my wits about me some nights when they're particularly animated. Sometimes it's just a long drunken conversation outside the chemist about the origin of faded old tattoos, other nights it's punch-ups, plate-glass surfing, screaming matches, cops arresting, dogs barking. There are fights because of love triangles, spurned lovers, shared lovers, stolen booze, domestic arguments, jealous rages; there is also guitars, and singing, and gut busting laughter and the smell of BBQ sausages (various volunteers deliver food and support).

The woman who collapsed in the elevator doorway last night comes to our building fairly regularly - I think she has family on our floor - she smells bad, but not of booze - just of dirt and age and illness. She often seems vague and talks a lot about how the lift makes her dizzy and how she doesn't like taking it, fearing she'll be trapped inside if it breaks down - I've travelled in it a few times with her, and she gets quite nervous. I don't know how she is today, the paramedics took her away to hospital last night. Poor old duck.

There but by the grace of God and all that.

Giant Squid

        This is the first time the Museum has done a dissection in a public forum, and we expect the interest to be enormous... we hope to achieve greater awareness and understanding of these little-known and rarely-seen deep-sea creatures

Dr Mark Norman
World-renowned squid expert and
Deputy Head of Science (Marine Zoology), Museum Victoria.

        Museum Victoria's Live Squid Dissection video.

        Are you still going on about that?

Ian Williams, Ballarat.        

Snow!

This weekend, I went with a bunch of friends to Mt Hotham for a skiing weekend. We stayed in a beautifully big snugly warm chalet in Dinner Plain and had a good time, on and off the snow.

I don't have any pictures as I decided not to take my big camera and my phone takes really dodgey shots at the best of times. But you don't have to photograph everything Michelle, that's why God gave you a memory.

Highlights:

• marino long johns
• snugly warm accommodation
• vodka and a fire and the Williams brothers
• Jen's pasta
• Fox's breakfasts
• getting ski boots that fit just right
• glorious white snow
• Ben's Yakka drink (re purposed from water skiing weekends)
• Pick-up sticks
• grooviest australians to spend a weekend with

On Ya New Zealand

The heart of our New Zealand is not sparkling filtered distilled mineral water, but drinking straight from the stream – it’s usually ka pai but sometimes it gives ya the runs.

Ournz.co.nz

We heard the aussies are coming, so we're gettin' ready.

Bum deal

What is it about organisations and their inability to provide decent toilet paper? Don't tell me it's the cost - I'm sure if you factor in the vandelism and plumbing problems associated with toilet paper dissatisfaction it would work out about the same as just buying Sorbent right across the board!

The toilet paper we had at boarding school was brown and so waxy you would be better served wrapping your lunch in it than trying to do anything that required absorption. And those little tissue box deals that some places have, while the dispenser may be easiier to install and maintain, the paper tears into shreads as it leaves the container. The paper used in the bathrooms where I currently work is in the form of a huge roll, about 8 cm wide and encased in an opaque dispenser that has just the right amount of tension that the paper rips free every 10 cm or so.

I don't know about you, but one piece of 8cm x 10cm boarderline absorbant paper doesn't do it for me. And to make things more annoying, as the paper rips, the dispenser spring leaves the tail end up inside the dispenser to be fished out again and again and again, trying to obtain enough toilet paper to finish my business.

Imprefect toilet paper has always frustrated me.

If it's not soft, white and well perforated, I get grumpy. It has to be easy to dispense and do it's job, dammit!

At boarding school, we complained about the non-absorbant, harsh brown greaseproof toilet-paper they provided us with. The Sisters (Catholic School) listened and said they would replace the paper with something more suitable, after the brown paper had run out. It would take several months to go through the supply. Unfortunately for them, we were determined to go through it as fast as we could and just started flushing the stuff until, because it was as unkind to S-bends as it was to bott-ends, we blocked up all the toilets on the ground floor and the plumbers had to be called in. An expensive exercise for the school, and a fairly fruitless one for us as Nuns are stubborn sons-of-bitches and they just restocked with the cheap brown wax paper for the rest of my days there.

But at least they provided toilet paper. At my first job in Multimedia, my boss seemed to consider toilet paper a luxury and not within his realm of responsibility - we had to supply our own. I'm considering doing that again, but just need to figure out where to stash the stuff so I'm not providing paper for all the female staff of the building.

At least I never had to use a corn cob I guess.

PS: Last week, when walking home from work I took a few photos of possums in Carlton Gardens. One particular possum sat on a fairly low hanging branch for a long time so I got a nice closeup. Because it was so dark when I took the photo, I didn't notice until I got home and downloaded the photo to my computer, that the reason Mr Possum sat there so long was he was in the middle of Number Twos. After some cropping of the image, I saved the possum's dignity and made it suitable to put on Flickr. The original would be perfect to include on this post - but I will not as I'm aware of the delicate sensiblities of one of my regular readers.

Walking to work..

Walking home..

Monday Briefing Sunday

Afternoon Tea

Recipe for pikelets.

Overheard

So they were victims?
No, they were vampires.
But they had to be a victim of a vampire to become a vampire.
Ok, so they were victims one time but they're not victims any more.

It's a tough row to hoe

While finding the proper meaning of "you can't teach a dog new tricks" (answer: it is difficult to make someone change the way they do something when they have been doing it the same way for a long time) I pottered off on a tangent and discovered that age doesn't affect memory as much as it affects the ability to concentrate (point: proven).

Distracted as all get OUT because I can't find where to download Data Management Services WEB-INF folder and files are let alone install and run them - unriddle me these sayings:

• A vessel under optical supervision never reaches a temperature of 100 degrees Celcius.
• One feathered aerial biped imprisoned digitally is equal in value to twice that many aboreally located.
• Inquisitiveness on the part of a member of the feline species was responsible for its extinction.
• Never subject a presented equine to denticular inspection.

PS: apparently magnesium helps as well. Helps what? memory! God dammit, pay attention!

woof!