Jameses.org

A list, a list… everybody loves a list. Today I had a brand new installment in my list of Top 5 stupidest things I’ve carted across town on my scooter.

Betsy, my darling, my drafthorse. Bearer of a fool and his silliest whims. Today, #2 on that list was well and truly commanded by my latest acquisition. Let me explain.

Before I start, let me say that #1 on the list is, and will remain, me - drunk one night from the Regatta to St Lucia. Stupid as stupid, that one… And no further explanation necessary beyond the fact that there will be no recurrence of that feat, of that I’m sure…

So with that out of the way, let’s get to #2!

#6 - Last Thursday - Stink bug Snuss.
I should be incorporated into some sort of biodiversity metric. The recent rains have certainly amped up the levels of biomass on wings and there’s logic in having the number of times I get whacked in the face - eye, lip, throat - by a wing-ed thing as an indicator of insect population health. Last Thursday was somewhat different in the fact that the wing-ed thing that got trapped in my pursed lips was none other than a stink bug. No matter the speed with which the bug was flicked aside, it squirted its vile little bug sized load of stank into my gums and tongue, a most unpleasant experience at any juncture, let alone when travelling at 60km/hr on wet roads. Needless to say… nasty.

#5 - Mid-last year - Jimmy, Storm and $150 worth of groceries.
The groan and struggle was evident for the whole of the return journey from Coles. Betsy’s shocks - completely unaccustomed to having 200 odd kilos to counter - transmitted the finest nuances of every bump and pothole. Up hills, my normally timid Betsy was almost entirely subdued. 3 chocked green bags lay at my feet, coming up to the junction of the handlebars and making turning just that fraction more death defying. Groceries pushed up against the seat from within the compartment with much the same force as I imagine one who found themselves stuck in a coffin would apply. Storm, adorned with a backpack of the more brittle and fragile goods received the equivalent of 10 minutes on one of those preposterous shaking machines that people try to hawk to overweight and undermotivated souls in shopping centres. Thank goodness Storm purchased a car for future shopping (and beach) trips.

#4 - Sikh of an itchy head
Buy a helmet. Use it nigh on every other day for two years. Use it after showers, exercise, beach volleyball, heatwaves, head lousse cultivation conventions and tell me that your head doesn’t get itchy from using it. No detachable, washable inner lining? What are you going to do? Improvise… It started with a few pieces of toilet paper and moved on to paper towelling. From there, a chux seemed a step in the right direction despite the odd looks thrown my way when people driving or pedestrianising past notice flappy bits of blue blowing around the temples. When you’re riding a scooter with safety goggles and a mouth full of stank what are a few odd looks anyhoos? So it’s ended up with a turban. A black turban with a big knot right where a unicorn’s horn would protrude from your forehead were you thus endowed. A turban that must be removed in the same motion as the helmet so as not to look completely retarded. A turban that requires you to laugh at the idiocy of the guy it adorns. A washable, lovable, nit and itch free truban.

#3 - Sucky passenger
How big does a box need to be before it fails to be transportable by scooter? A fraction (only the smallest fraction mind you) larger than a vacuum cleaner it would seem. Wedged between the handlebars and destiny, the vacuum cleaner box protruded a foot either side of the bike. Guided by the fortune of the brave and pure arse, I was able to get the beast home in one piece. Now to figure out how to use it…

#2 - Can I leave this box here?
Today I bought a new set of speakers. Lovely, relatively expensive, weighty, dimensional speakers. Having negotiated a vacuum cleaner, it was hard to see from the giddy heights of my pride and ego the difficulties that could possibly arise from trying to get these badboys home. After securing the purchase and wandering to Betsy - proud, elegant, spatially challenged Betsy - I started to foresee aforementioned difficulties. Not even close. Not even close to close. For 20 minutes I wondered how the f$k I was going to get the speakers home on a scooter. I called 2 friends. I contemplated getting a taxi for my speakers. I contemplated delivery at a later date (never!). I cursed and smiled and did both in unison. Then I unpacked the box. Sure enough, with some spatial reorganisation - using skills honed through the likes of Columns, watching mum pack a car and redistributing a washing machine - I was able to fit myself and my goods upon my steed. With legs firmly clenched, and fingers metaphorically crossed - lest I not be able to steer or brake - I made my way home. But not before leaving the discarded box at the foot of a bemused music store clerk and contemplating the posting of this blog should I arrive home in one piece

Betsy - apple of my eye. Bearer of a fool and his foolish whims.

Ah, the random shit you find on wikipedia.

Just thought I’d share a little email exchange with you from a few minutes ago…

Subject: Overpayment fortnight ending 28.03.08

Good afternoon James

It has recently come to our attention that there was an error made when processing your re-appointment paperwork for the placement 01.01.08 – 30.06.08.

Your placement was incorrectly incremented to HEW503, however your annual increment date is July each year (not January).

Your placement has been amended to the correct level HEW502 from 1 January 2008. There will be a correction made in the pay of the fortnight ending 28.03.08.

I apologise for this error, if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards,

PooBum.

PooBum Huffletots*

Human Resources Officer
Faculty of Engineering, Physical Sciences and Architecture
Hawken Engineering Building (50) |The University of Queensland |Brisbane Qld 4072 Australia

Phone: 3365 0000 | Fax: 3365 0000 | Email: pb.huffletots@uq.edu.au

______________________________________________

My response:

Is it a good afternoon when someone informs you that they’ll be docking your pay for a few hundred bucks?

How much will I be re-donating to the cause?

Good on whoever stuffed that up, much appreciated…

James

_________________________________

Gotta love ‘em, I mean they’ve only paid me 5 times this year… I think if the lady could do the HR equivalent of spitting in my burger she’d be doing it right about… now.

p.s. In case it’s not bleedingly obvious, I have changed the name of Julia Hetherington to PooBum Huffletots to preserve her identity

Somewhere out there, in the shallows of the pacific swims (or whatever other verb describes the movements of a sea louse) a very content sea louse. A few hours earlier, the louse, no doubt hungry from doing whatever lice do, decided to feast on my sausage and spuds. After settling ‘pon my nether regions the louse must’ve gorged itself with the lice equivalent of a three course meal and free glass of house white.

Needless to say, but said anyway, I was not impressed; nor were the many beachgoers who had to bear witness to me rubbing my crotch for just a little too long.

I don’t know if I’ve rambled enough about Will Cookson to enough poor souls but this guy is ‘in my humble opinion’ bloody fantastic. The title of his new album is ‘Songs for a Sunday’ and they could easily be just that - for gardening, afternoon napping, scrabble or sipping red wine and watching birds peck through fresh lawn clippings. I can’t recommend him enough to any folksters out there - those that enjoy quiet calm music and the likes of Drake, Martyn and Jackson C Frank. Website, HISspace.

Let me know if you want to download his tracks as I have a cunning plan m’lord.

And then there’s this!

So as I was out on the lawn, slowly clunking and chunking my way through knee-high sodden grass, I reflected on a particular train of thought I’d had earlier today. Now my trains of thought are not your express City A - City B rapid and simple style… Oh no. Rather, I deviate off common tracks and end up in random stations in the middle of lazy outback towns and countryside - nowhere near where I had boarded the thought. It often happens that I say something to Storm and she says ‘how did you get there’. Upon hearing the various leaps and steps sideways through thought passages and detours, it is concluded that I am, indeed, a little ’special’. And because my thought train took me to some really cool things today, I thought I would take you on the journey with me. Let’s stamp tickets and be off.

I returned home at lunch today to await the arrival of a ‘new’ fridge for the house. A return to shelf space and fresh (fridged) food was thoroughly welcome and appreciated. Due to logistical inconveniences, I contrived to stay at home and work on a report for work rather than trundle off through the rain to work (again). As I did so, I pondered the perfect musical choice. I decided on ‘An Acoustic evening with Ani Difranco’ from 1994, an album I’ve owned for some time but barely leant an ear to in its entirety. As Ani muttered and rambled through silence and poesy and partly tuned her guitar, she mentioned that ‘It’s a good thing I have such good friends in the business and that Artis will be selling cds and casettes for me as I play”. She went on to refer to him as “the fucking shit” and worth checking out.

So I did… Typing ‘Artis’ and ‘Ani Difranco’ into google delivered our train to its first destination - www.artisthespoonman.com. A wiki search on Artis the Spoonman reveals that, not only could he play two flutes simultaneously with his nose, the Soundgarden song SPOONMAN was written about him and that he features in the song and film-clip. And so the thought train set off to Youtube station for some visuals. A search for spoonman revealed the following fantastic video,

As amazing as it was - the man turned out to be a gentleman called Hannes Coetzee with quite a devotional following on YT - it was not what I was searching for. And so off I went to find a video of Spoonman. Sure enough it was there,

And then I found the video I was looking for -

So, from a word mid-song to a video of a guy playing guitar with a spoon, to the revelation that Spoonman (one of THE songs of my teenhood) was written for a guy that literally plays spoons (and plays them well).

Now, to find a video of him playing two flutes simultaneously with his nose!

A month or so back I decided to finally fulfill a longstanding wish: I went out and bought a digital piano. I’d been wanting one in my possession for a while and now that my tutelage is not competing with a beach in the near vicinty (a la Bonny Hills), I’m bound to have a greater inclination to play and learn.

I have to say that getting the coordination back after some 18 years of inaction is somewhat challenging; however, it has been great fun attacking music with a revived sense of determination and enthusiasm. The piano itself is run of the mill digital - $699 Casio CDP-100, but with hammer action and speakers it more than suffices for the time being.

The other great thing is that I now have the pleasure of trying to transpose my guitar compositions and songs to the piano and (later) vice versa. Storm bought me a great little book full of jazz chords in all keys and it’s been amazingly useful in teaching me fingering for Majors, Minors and 7s for all the chords that I currently need. Although I have a lazy bass hand, I have still been able to muck around in G, C and D enough to beat out a few compositions - my first! yay! My first piece ever on the piano was the aptly named ‘Frog goes Plop’… And now that I have enough chords under my belt to have de-mystified the piano to some degree, I really do look forward to learning some pieces - Satie’s 3rd Gymnopedie and ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ among them.

Excited!

So, I’ve been playing music for a while…for a good portion of that time it’s possible that what I created might not be termed music so much as the strummings and murmurings of a fool. Time has been relatively kind and I now have a semblance of relative pitch that was only fleetingly recurrent in earlier years… I have recordings and playback partly to thank for this. Anyways, I still play almost every song I’ve written at least occasionally; although, more recent compositions and faves do hog the timewaves.

So when I sat down for the first time in 3 years to try and scribe the names of all my songs it was partly to be proud of what I’d achieved in a not-too-long-a-period of time but also to actually determine the number of pieces I’d written. The list grew quickly at first and then in fits and starts as songs would reappear in my consciousness. A number of these songs still don’t have names and only a few have been recorded to a standard even approaching sub-par for placement on this website and elsewhere.

Nonetheless, an additional day of ruminating and sifting backstores of metaphysical record crates in the mind saw the list splutter past thirty. At present my catalogue sits at 37 songs with lyrics (two of these don’t have musical accompaniment yet) and then about another 13 or so instrumental pieces. Not bad for a two-bit hack with a bit of spare time and a musical inclination.

So my aim for 2008 is to get a ‘decent’ draft of every one of these songs up on this site. That way, if someone hears a piece that they think is worthy of a bit more time and effort, I can maybe get a song or two that is worth sitting back and listening to on a sunday arvo. Failing that, there’ll be a soundtrack for my mum and dad as they slip into senility and beyond

In other news, I have learnt enough piano to compose my first pieces - “Frog goes Plop” and “Raindrops on a Campfire”… do not be deceived by the titles, they are masterpieces

Here is a depiction of Yellow Journalism with nasty little printers’ devils spewing forth from the Hoe press - Puck cartoon of Nov. 21, 1888.

I can’t make out all the words, but have the times changed that much in 119 years?

This article from BBC news is cool… Watch the videos and check out how quick chimps are at remembering number sequences. So next time you’re captured in the jungle by a tribe of chimpanzees, don’t bet your life on a game of concentration or you might just end up ……