Roll again

I have always played Trivial Pursuits. It's just one of those things we did as a family (after mum had been coerced into it); like going on holiday and reading books at the table. I always have quite fond memories of it because it was never too competitive and we always played it at Xmas with nice, family-friendly rules. For example: if no-one knew the answer to the question, then you got to have another one, and so on.

Subsequently, I'm a real drag to play with, because I'm either remembering answers from the last time I played or appearing condescending for trying to ask people a different question from the impossible one they've been confronted with. It's a curious game because it either makes you appear more knowledgeable than you are because you can remember which city hosted the 1972 Olympic Games, or makes you feel much dumber than you are because you didn't know which shoe Maxwell Smart used for his Shoe Phone, the left or right.

The game has players moving a piece around a board, landing on different coloured squares and being asked trivial questions from a stack of cards. The questions are related to the six different colours of the squares they land on (blue = geography, yellow = history, etc). When you land on a large square, one for each colour, and answer the question correctly, you are given a little plastic piece of pie which you slot into your piece. When you have collected all six pieces, you make your way to the centre of the board and are then asked a question of the opposition’s choosing from the next question card. Answer correctly, win the game.

Sit back and I’ll tell you a tale of deviousness and wrath.

My dear old grandfather is, like me, competitive. However, I’m competitive for fun and can’t really take the idea of winning all that seriously. This, I believe, is because the all consuming drive to crush and destroy has been diluted through generations. I sometimes wonder what great-grandad would have been like with a table-tennis bat in hand. Or a pistol.

One night Grandad, Grandma, my dad and an old family friend, Brian*, who lectures in psychology were playing Trivial Pursuits. The game went back and forth, wine was drunk, questions were asked and answered. Finally, Grandad collected all of his pies and made it to the centre of the board. Brian plucked a question card from the box and, together with Dad and Grandma, poured over the six choices of question to ask.

“He’ll know that one … he’ll know the one …” So goes the final question decision. Finally, they set upon a question that everyone was sure even Grandad, with his long life experience and passion for working things out, wouldn’t be able to answer. The question went like this (and I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist of the question will be clear):

“What,” asked Brian in a friendly, encouraging manner “did John Smith drive across the United States in 17 days in 1919?”

“I can work it out,” said Grandad. The thing that’s worth knowing about Trivial Pursuits is that many of the questions aren’t just random pieces of information plucked from encyclopedias and books of sporting statistics. Sometimes it is possible to make an educated guess and be correct. A question with a seemingly impossible numeric answer, eg. ‘How many kinds of blood platelets does a caterpillar have?’ won’t have any answer higher than 2 because no-one could be expected to be a caterpillar expert and so the obvious, easy answer will often be the actual answer. These questions are designed to be guessed at like this, so that when the guesser (and often the asker) gets over the initial puzzlement brought about by such a strange question, there is a great deal of satisfaction in saying “I dunno … 1?” and being absolutely correct.

Some questions, however, are beyond this kind of reasoning and require you to actually know what Babe Ruth’s real first name was (George) or when the Berlin Wall came down (1989).

“I can work it out,” repeated Grandad, after the other three pointed out that they sincerely doubted that he could and should just give up in the face of such a tricky question.

“No! It must be something like a mode of transport at that time …” and away he went, Brian acting as a sounding board for his musings and calculations.

“Okay, so it could have been a steam train, they had those in 1919 … but he wouldn’t have gotten one all the way across the states …”

“That’s true,” Brian would reply, glancing discreetly at the answer in his palm so as not to put Grandad off.

“Not a car, too obvious … a bike’s too quick … a bicycle too slow …”

“A skateboard?” Brian would suggest.

“No, too early,” mused Grandad.

After a while the booing and calls for time-up grew in volume, but Grandad would not be swayed. He could get this. If everyone would just keep quiet and let him think.

“You’re not gonna get it, Dad,” moaned my father.

“Give it up!” cried Grandma.

He ignored those and many other calls as the evening wore on. Victory was at both hand and stake. Everyone could bloody well keep their mouths shut. Even Brian stopped ‘helping’ after that.

Finally, after a good thirty or so minutes of solid thought, determination and abuse, he had narrowed it down to two things: In 1919, John Smith had driven across America either a) steam-powered car (as a stunt) or b) a hot air balloon (because, with the right wind, 17 days seemed about the correct time).

“Which is it?” asked Brian, encouragingly tapping the real answer on the thin rectangle of cardboard still in his hand.

Grandad furrowed his much-furrowed brow. “It’s not a hot air balloon, because, technically, you don’t drive them.”

“Really?”

“Yep. It’s a steam-powered car!” Victory!

Brian looked at the card. Dad and Grandma watched.

“Nope.”

“What? It’s gotta be!”

“Nope. Wrong.”

“Well what is it then?”

“A golf ball.”

And that is why I do enjoy Trivial Pursuits.

***

GTH - Point to neil for wishful thinking.

A cutting review.

I know we all love it when I review children's books. I'm so witty. I'm so thoughtful. I'm so mean. How could I trash my peers so easily? Why would I say anything detrimental to that art of arts: writing? Why do I insist on shooting myself in the foot while punching my betters in the face? (Because, let's face it, they's published and I ain't).

Because they deserve it. I would expect the same and when I receive it, I will chew my knuckle in pain and make excuses and point fingers, but the reality is that you write for your readers, whoever they are. If they hate it and can articulate why, then that's your problem, not theirs.

***

Blade: Playing Dead and Blade: Closing In by Carnegie medallist, Tim Bowler, are the first and second books in a four part series. The story follows the eponymous Blade on his adrenalin-fuelled adventures around a present-day British capital city. Blade is a fourteen year old tough kid with university-grade street smarts and a past. He narrates the action in first-person present tense, addressing the reader as ‘Bigeyes’ (an excellent touch) and placing his captive audience squarely beside him with instructions to keep watch or admonitions to stop asking so many damn questions. His voice is original and believable and his modern day street kid lingo almost conceals the fifty-five-year-old author behind it, trawling chatrooms, blogs and networks, straining for the holy grail of young adult fiction: authentic, un-self-conscious cool.

The Blade books are, on the surface, gritty, exciting, compulsive reading. Blade himself is neck-deep in action from the first page; shoplifting, back-talking, battling rival gangs, mixing up with murder, crime and intrigue and doing it all alone. He refers to past events and tragedies while still hiding them from the reader, as though Bigeyes too, must earn his trust before he will elaborate on exactly what they have to do with his current circumstances.

The target audience (reluctant, young, mostly male readers) will appreciate the honest, uncensored action and violence. Nothing is glossed over or hidden for their protection: people get hit, beaten up, stabbed, shot and killed, but the story doesn’t call for gore and glorification of the violence. We experience see these shocking events through the eyes of a fourteen year old boy who isn’t happy about seeing them. The realism of the action flows through its restrained telling.
However, the gruff, mistrustful fourteen year old narrator does create a problem. Despite the attempts to explain his verbosity and thoughtfulness through his hidden past and some-time penchant for books, the entire mis-en-scene, as described in relentless stream-of-consciousness by Blade, is shallow and black and white at best. While this is a deliberate decision by Bowler to maintain the tough, realistic feel of the story, it does rob the audience of any real sense of the world in which Blade lives. He breaks into half a dozen houses and visits different parts of the city, but none really differentiate from the others. Setting feels entirely unimportant as Blade is either running from predators through identical streets, lanes and parks or hiding quietly from them in equally-interchangeable safe house locations. There is no real vivid picture painting going on, just minimalist exposition: dark, light, locked, un-locked, urgent, quiet. There are no colours, tastes or smells. Physical descriptions are limited to functional details relevant to Blade’s progress. The sparse prose certainly serves the purpose of not impeding the action, but action without place is just interpretive dance.

There have been better action sequences. Bowler hangs grimly to his formula throughout: trouble, escape, hide, repeat. A few of the afore-mentioned realistically portrayed acts of violence are sprinkled in for (slight) variation. Suspense is drawn from the reader like an expected curtesy rather than something the author has worked for. Blade spends about half of his time demonstrating his uncanny extrasensory perception (foresight, x-ray vision and mind-reading) and the other half making decisions based on completely ignoring those perceptions. Maybe there’s a reason for this confluence of sixth-sense and foolishness, but, two books in, no explanation has been forthcoming other than Blade’s irritating mantra, ‘Don’t ask how I know, I just know.’

This reluctance to outline base facts and the Blade series’ approach to character development and structure all point towards one clear fact: these books are a rip off. Rip. Off. A rort, a scam. A tricky little scheme to make money. The series is comprised of a series of four separate books, sold as such for $14.95 each. All released at once, each containing the covers of the entire set within their back cover.

The problem is that each book isn’t a stand-alone story, designed to be enjoyed both separately and as a part of the whole. The first two books, at least, contain only minor parts of a single story arc; they provide no solutions and implore the reader on their back pages to purchase the next instalment. There are only hints pointing towards the major points upon which the story hangs: where is Blade going and from where has he come? In order to learn the answers, young readers must spend the better part of simply to finish reading a story with all the markers of an urban thriller and none of the intriguing charm. Blade should have been sold as a single book. There are no chapters to divide events into manageable sections for younger readers and the tone and subject matter both point towards an audience of an age easily able to deal with longer texts. As an artistic exercise this series is the equivalent of selling four full-price tickets to one movie and just as reprehensible on the part of the producers.

Coupled with the current fashionable hysteria in Britain over knife attacks (Blade, predictably, is a master with a concealed weapon), the Blade series reeks of savvy publishers striking while the iron is plugged in and ready to press the party shirt of the Zeitgeist. Dividing a single B-grade story over four separate, full-priced novels is a truly masterful piece of marketing at the expense of artistic product and the pockets of reluctant readers.

***
GTH - Shippy, Squib and River are all kicking goals and being awarded points. It might seem like a rip off, but it's really not!

The phrase "wrong on so many levels" is only used by people who, when pressed, won't be able to come up with more than a few levels of wrongness and are, unsurprisingly, also the kind of people who are more likely to confuse "few" with "many".

On Bribie Island if someone is wearing a company-issued name tag it is perfectly acceptable to call them by their first name every day for over a month without ever introducing yourself.

You know you live on Bribie Island when ...

You help out not one, but two little old ladies before lunch.

First off, Mavis from next door with her telephone. She sits politely in the living room and shouts in her Deaf Old Dearie voice while I call Telstra about her dead phoneline.

Me: I'm calling on behalf of the old lady next door. Her phone line is dead. She needs the phone so that her emergency "I've fallen and can't get up" button that she wears around her neck works in case she falls and can't get up.
Telstra: We are evil bastards, but we will run a line test, just to be sure you are not lying.
Me: Thank you.
Mavis: The line is dead! My emergency button needs the phone to work!
Me: I'm telling them, Mavis.
Telstra: We eat toasted babies and we can see that her line is dead.
Me: Great. So you'll come and fix it, eh?
Mavis: I had to unplug my button! It needs the phone to work!
Telstra: We defecate in hospital beds on our days off and we are just wondering, is her having the phone off all weekend life-threatening?
Me: Well, she's got this button she can push if she falls, which she has done before and she needs the telephone on for it to work.
Telstra: We kidnap African orphans and sell them to Chinese medical companies for vivisection and we were just asking because if it is life-threatening then we can have it fixed within 24 hours ...
Me: Great. Do that then.
Mavis: I fell over before and that's why I got the bloody button installed!
Telstra: ... but she has to get a letter from her doctor saying that she is in a life-threatening situation and that she needs a phone, because if we do send out a team to fix it within 24 hours and then we deem her condition not to be life-threatening then we charge a one hundred and thirty dollar call-out fee.
Me: You evil fucks.
Telstra: Thank you! (We burn household pets alive!)
Mavis: Are they coming to fix it?
Me: No, Mavis. Since it's Friday morning, now you have to wait until Monday or run the risk of being charged $130.
Mavis: Oh.

The second old lady was my own grandmother, who needed the channels set on her digital box at her brand new house in the Red Rooster Retirement Home* (isn't Queensland just shameless?). I managed to get ABC, SBS and Nine, but no Ten or Seven. Overall, I'd say she's probably better off.

*It's actually just next to a Red Rooster, but the tall Red Rooster sign towers above the new elderly living estate so much that I'm sure they must be drumming up some kind of subliminal business from the new elderly tenants.

Imaginary letter taped up outside the fruit and veg shop in Cotton Beach, Maroochydore

Dear Arsehole,

We are two young students from Adelaide. We were married last year and haven't been on a holiday since because we've been working hard to support ourselves and to save for a trip to Queensland. We chose Queensland because I have family up here who I don't get to see very often and who my wife has never met. We also chose to come here because my wife has a lot of health problems from which she can find temporary relief in the northern tropical climate before we have to go back to dry, hot South Australia.

Here we are:


Our parents pitched in and bought us plane tickets and donated money towards hiring a car so that we would not be relying on long distance public transport with my wife's health problems and so that we would not be imposing upon my relatives for transport.

We visited Maroochydore in our car and stayed in the hostel. We bought and cooked our own meals to save money. On the morning of the fourteenth we were leaving and decided to go to this fruit shop to buy some cheap breakfast.

While we were inside, you keyed our car. It wasn't an accident. You weren't simply careless with a trolley or a surf board. We can tell by the way the particles of metallic paint came out of that long scratch across the two doors and by the way you gave it a little signature squiggle in the middle.

You've never owned a car, never had to have one resprayed. You've never had to hire a car either and never had to sign all the declarations and releases they give you in which you promise to hand over enough money to cover not only a relatively small scratch but also major damage to a new vehicle and its expensive inner workings.

When we returned the car to the airport we had to sign over all of our life's savings to the car hire company so that they can send the car to one of their approved repairers (which we have no say in) for a quote (which we will have no control over). And that was after we talked them down because we simply couldn't afford to give them the large amount of money they wanted.

How much, you ask? How much could that little scratch possibly be? No problem, arsehole. I'll tell you:
We took it to a Toyota-approved spray shop. They quoted $600. (That's for the metallic paint - you know, the kind they always have in car commercials because it looks better, but actually adds thousands of dollars to the cost of the base model?)
When we took it back to the hire desk they wanted (on top of the hire fee) $3000 damage excess plus $300 GST.
Then (oh no, the money does not stop!) because your petty vandalism is viewed by the hire company as a single car accident (not a multiple-car mishap for which they can charge other insurance companies) they also wanted another $2400 on top of that $3300.
So, you, my thoughtless little fistula, turned what should have been a memorable budget holiday for healing and connecting with family into a stressful and expensive exercise, tainted by the knowledge that were handing over an indefinitely large percentage of the money we had saved up for leaner times (like after returning from a much-needed holiday).

We have no idea yet what the hire company's paint shop will quote, nor exactly what we will receive when they are finished removing whatever administration fees they deem necessary.

I wish a similar experience upon you.

Don't make me hurt you

**There are NO HP SPOILERS to be found within this blog. I have not yet read the book.**

I have only just now sent off the third draft of my seldom-discussed, often-worried-about thesis proposal that I have been slaving over for quite some time now.

But that's not the reason I haven't been posting lately.

The real reason is because ... I'm scared of the internet. You see, I was out at 327's salsa themed birthday party on Friday and discussion turned to the release of a certain popular children's book due the following day. People were looking forward to it, people were curious, everyone was at least interested in how the saga would come to a close. Speculation began about how JK would finish off what has so far been an excellently-designed series. I conjectured that Harry's fate would mirror that of Voldemort's - that he would attempt to destroy the love child of Hermione and Ron. Mele was positive that he would suddenly fall victim to puberty, thus ending the 'magic'. Before anyone could stop her, one of the woman who I hadn't met before piped up:
"Oh, the ending was leaked on the internet a few days ago! Hermione dies at the end."
Never has a jumping salsa club been so quiet.
Some cried out in pain. Others fainted. People found themselves reaching for her years-of-patience spoiling neck.
She let us hang for about five seconds and then eased the pain with a "Gotchya!"

Well played, you have to admit.
But still, that night I was plagued by a series of nightmares during which the ending was spoilt time and again by individuals careless and callous. Mele and I have been ploughing through The Sopranos recently, starting at Episode 1, Season 1 and working our way towards the final episode ever at the end of season 6. We obviously don't want to find out what happens before time and Mele in particular was being very careful in her perusal of entertainment media. The situation that kept repeating in my dreams was the one where Mele was reading an article speculating about the ultimate HP which, as a casual example, cited The Sopranos and blew the entire ending for her. This careless journalism cost her years of waiting for the final Sopranos season to come out on DVD so she could watch it properly, instead of the two and a half episodes that Channel Nine screened at 10:30pm on Tuesday night and 8:30am on a Sunday morning three weeks later before deciding to go with more shows about celebrities.

Everywhere I look there are spoilers waiting waiting waiting. We have the book, but I'm still waiting for Mele to finish it so that I can get back to reading Audrey, Read Alert and all the other internet-based media outlets brimming with earthy discussions of how Harry's tumescent Final Spell saved Wizardkind. Or something.

Anyone posting ANYTHING about the book in the comments will be DELETED.

***

Guess The Header
This was a close one. River and Neil eschewed all forms of competition and combined forces to engage in such healthy speculation that I am really going to try much harder in future.
Neil gets a point for geographic location - Thailand was the closest guess to the location of the bridge in question.
River gets a point for using the word "flow" in a menstrual context - very poetic.
And I'm awarding an extra point each for such creative thinking, especially regarding River's shot about "puberty bridging the gap between childhood and adulthood" and Neil's triple-pronged attack using STDs, unaBRIDGEd comments and the punalicious "blackboard JUNGLE".

The actual answer was a lot less creative than I am being given credit for: The photo is of a bridge in the tropical rainforest near Port Douglas. On the bridge are some dear friends of mine (all women who have indeed crossed the bridge from puberty to adulthood). That no men are in the photo is supposed to be some kind of image of what we young lads saw as we entered that classroom full of mature girls on our way over the bridge towards adulthood. Suspension was what we faced. You can more metaphorical than that, but I'm afraid this competition has come to a close, the Champions Board (bottom of this page) has been updated accordingly and a new Guess The Header challenge awaits. (I will try to make it either easier or more difficult - I haven't yet decided which).

Everything is dirty now.

There aren’t enough rotten tomatoes in all of history. There really aren’t. Like all of us, I have suffered painful, wounding experiences in my time. Been witness to some things I would rather have gone without. But Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer was a literal time machine. It robbed me of two hours of existence, stealing them away from me so that at the end of my life, as I hurtle through space, piloting the last star-fighter against the enemy fleet bent on enslaving the human race while I simultaneously write about the experience timeless and whimsically emotional prose, I will think back to this black day and curse that movie for the portion of my life it was able to claim away from me. That’s two more hours I could have spent, doing any of the millions of things that I love more than pointing my eyeballs towards a spectacle like that. That’s two hours I wasn’t enjoying the finer, more joyous activities that my life has to offer, like punching myself in the face, dangling my nuts into a food-processor or licking skittish tarantulas.

This was ground zero, people. There have been other contenders, but the most recent installment of the Fantastic Four franchise was The Worst Movie I Have Ever Seen.

What was so bad about it?

Well, dear reader, make a list of all the dozens of facets that make up a movie. For example:

Acting
Script
Plot
Visual Effects
Inter-character relationships
Underlying message
Humour
Emotion
Suspense

Any more? No? Let’s begin with those then:

Acting – The actors may themselves have been talented, but the decision to be in the movie have forever tarnished their careers in my eyes.

Script – “Let’s go for a spin!” was what the cops came up with when they busted the terrorist hideout where the script was being written and found that the writers had been put away for twenty-to-life for crimes against humanity without finishing the catchy tagline a flying bad guy needed just before he ‘spins’ the heroes away from himself.

Plot – (spoiler alert!!!) – It sucked. Feel spoilt? Seriously, I’ve seen sturdier premises at camping grounds. During cyclones.

Visual Effects – I went high and was still more interested in Trent’s score on the solitaire game he was playing on his phone.

Inter-character relationships – They look at and talk to each other. That’s as complex as it gets.

Underlying message – Actually quite difficult to surmise until the final credits. Then it suddenly becomes clear: you are two hours closer to death.

Humour – The funniest joke still wasn’t as funny as flushing nine bucks down the toilet.

Emotion – Utter horror. That was my emotion that such a thing had been allowed to exist.

Suspense – This was supposed to be list detailing my responses to various aspects of the movie and instead it has turned into a scream-fest of regret and pain.

That’s how truly awful Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is. We actually stumbled out of the cinema, unable to meet each other’s gaze, like a bachelor party that wandered into The Wrong Kind of Strip Club. My guess is that no one who went will ever mention this to anybody ever again.

This review is over, but the whole experience was so sinful that there are still two more bombshells I haven’t dropped.

1. We were there for Triton’s birthday (happy birthday buddy!) and
2. We were supposed to see Transformers, but it sold out literally as we fronted up to the counter. We were the late chumps who get the box-office ticket window curtains slammed in their faces.

So … so … painful. Trits – sorry about that. I’ll make it up to you, I swear. I got you a great present: my honourable suicide. Kidding.

Racism and shame

Overheard conversation in antique shop on Magill Road today:

Middle-aged Antique Shop Lady #1: The Aboriginals wrap their babies up in newspaper, you know, instead of blankets.
Middle-aged Antique Shop Lady #2: And they wonder why they get them taken away!

I dropped whatever I was looking at. I didn't know what to do. I just walked out.

Middle-aged Antique Shop Lady #2, calling me as I stormed by: Were you looking for anything special?
Me: No.
(Exit stage left)

I was actually reeling as I walked home. I should have bloody said something.