Well, this is the end.
Not the end of everything, you understand. Just the end. Or, rather, an end.
As most of you know, I have spent the past three years working (or, if I'm honest, undertaking a not always convincing facsimile of working) in a convenience store in order to make a contribution to the household budget while my Dearly Beloved and I candidated to the ordained ministry of the Uniting Church. But now that we have completed our Exit Year (and, presumably, have completed the assessment requirements!) and are awaiting placement in permanent ministry positions, the time has come to draw a close to certain things. And one of those things has been the job at the store.
So, I have resigned. Actually, even if I hadn't resigned, I would have gone anyway, on account of the fact that the store has been taken over by another retail chain and is currently closed for refurbishment. Owing to the business model employed by that chain, it is unlikely that I would have secured a position with the new owners; and I didn't fancy trying to get a shift at one of my former employer's stores which had not yet been taken over - having done it once, there is no way I was going to work a graveyard or whatever other unwanted unpleasant shift they thought they could squeeze me into. Besides, my Dearly Beloved and I were determined that, this year, I would be spending Christmas Day with the family, not at work.
So, no more of that for Yours Truly. But since this has been a not insignificant part of my life, and since my escapades at the store have formed a large slice of this blog's content, I thought I would mark the end of this particular era by sharing a few thoughts.
Employees. The first thing I want you to do is to urge you all to change your attitude to all the people who work behind the counter at convenience stores and other related retail outlets. I have worked in a lot of different environments, from factories to corporate offices, but in few of them have I encountered an environment in which the work was as repetitive, tedious, physically exhausting, and mind-numbingly dull. When you add to that the fact that the workload (in terms of customer flows) can switch from inertially boring to frantically busy in a matter of seconds; and the fact that an enormous burden of responsibility rests on convenience store employees in terms of OH&S, security, and corporate responsibility/reputation, then the convenience store represents one of the most demanding and least rewarding workplace environments I have ever encountered. So, please, next time you go to a convenience store, no matter how angry, busy, existentially angst-ridden, or otherwise pissed off with the world you may be, remember that there is someone who is in a much worse position than you - namely, the poor sod behind the counter who has to serve you. So try a little kindness - or, if not that, a little understand. Okay?
Customers. The first thing I want to say is that 95% of the people I encountered were basically decent human beings: just working stiffs trying to make their way in the world like the rest of us. I know I have written more than one post taking the piss out of customers and their foibles; but that is only because they were the exception not the rule. It is the exceptions that make for interesting stories, as any tabloid hack can tell you; the people and situations I wrote about were not representative of the whole. But having said that, let me also say this: that being a convenience store clerk sure brings you into contact with an especially rich cross-section of human society (particularly when you work nights or graveyards on the weekends), and much of that humanity is profoundly broken and limited. It reminds you how inadequate your own experience is, and how vast a world of human reality exists beyond the confines of your own life. And you come to appreciate how sadly constrained so many others' horizons are, a realisation that does not fill you with a sense of your own superiority, but with a lament for the inadequacy of the human condition. So, in the long run, I think you learn compassion. Yes, you also learn to deploy dark humour, sometimes as a coping mechanism, and sometimes as a necessary corrective to human stupidity. But I think you also learn to respect the struggle that is the "daily grind" for so many people, whether because of the circumstances they find themselves in, or because of their own limitations.
Relationships. Most people are used to forming relationships through work, not just because you have to operate co-operatively with other people, but because there is something innately human that seeks out the other in order to make a connection. Indeed, some work relationships become truly significant, leading to anything from life-long friendship to marriage. But that's not the case with the convenience store clerk. Because the staff are all employed on a casual shift basis, and are rarely all together in the same place (shift-changes and store meetings being about the only time more than one clerk is there at once) the bonds that tie other workplaces simply don't exist. To be sure, there were long-standing employees at the store with whom I did form connections; but with the changes of management and staff turnover that are endemic to the convenience store environment, these connections are easily sundered. Indeed, when the store closed, and after I had worked my last shift, it seemed to me that we had all become like leaves scattered before the wind; leaves that had been none-too-securely attached to the workplace "branch" to begin with. And yet, oddly, this lack of connection was made up for by an attachment to the "regulars" one encountered on most shifts, the people who lived locally and who came into the store on a frequent basis. After a while, you got to know their names; and, through conversation, learned a little about their lives. Granted, a small number of "regulars" came with a degree of "nuisance value" attached; but the bulk were, in fact, people you looked forward to seeing. They either helped mark the passing of the hours because their metronomic habits ensured they always came to the store at the same time; or, more importantly, they were the ones who offered consolation after your shift had been spoiled by some aggressive, impatient, arrogant twat. In many ways the "regulars" were a reminder that, even in the most sterile of environments, meaningful human relationships are possible.
I'm sure there's more I could tell you, but I think that's about it for now. I hated the job and every minute I was compelled to perform it; but I am also grateful for the income it provided, and for the people who meant that it wasn't the dehumanising nullity it might otherwise have been. At the end of the day, I guess all I can do is mark it down to experience and hope to learn the lessons it provided. And breathe a big sigh of relief that it is now a chapter in my life that is well and truly over!
And, since this post is about endings, I now announce that this post also represents the end of this blog. Like the job at the store, it has, I think, served its purpose. So while I won't delete this blog, it is highly unlikely that any further posts will be listed here. So thank you for listening and commenting and for coming along on the ride together. I hope you join me on my other blog The Still Circle.
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in days of old moved heaven and earth, that which we are we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts made weak by time and fate but not in will; to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. (Alfred, Lord Tennyson - "Ulysses")
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Friday, July 02, 2010
For What It's Worth...
Why, if I think it's great Australia now has a female Prime Minister, do I feel so heartsick?
Sure, the coup - and let's not be pedantic about this, it was a coup, albeit a political rather than military one - was conducted with swift, sure precision, the kind of clinical surgical strike the American military only wishes its so-called "smart" weaponry could achieve. There was no long, drawn-out saga of innuendo and undermining, leaving behind great tearing wounds of bitterness and public disillusion. We quite literally went to bed one night with Kevin Rudd as PM and woke up the next morning with Julia Gillard as our new Prime Minister.
I don't for a moment believe that Gillard didn't know what was happening. Even if only indirectly, she would have been aware of the numbers tilting against Rudd as his popularity declined and the ALP "brand" became ever more on the nose with the electorate. Maybe she even tried to warn Rudd, perhaps obliquely at first and then directly, that the forces of deposition were gathering against him. Either way, Gillard is too experienced and assured a political operator not to have seen what was coming and to have positioned herself accordingly.
But that isn't what has got me feeling as though our country has taken one almighty step backwards. True, the fact that a politically astute woman has shown herself to be as ruthless and unsentimental as "the boys" doesn't give me much confidence that our political culture specifically - or our social culture generally - has matured much. Which doesn't mean that I don't think Gillard will be a competent, perhaps even excellent, PM. But I suspect the circumstances of Gillard's ascent to the Prime Ministership tell us that while women are able to play "the boys" at their own game, the fact remains that it is still "the boys" game that is being played. No new territory has been staked out, no new paradigm has been put into place.
Still, I kind of expect that from Gillard. She is, afterall, a product of the same cynical, mercenary party "machine" that has produced her factional contemporaries within the ALP. So why am I feeling like I want to curl into a foetal ball and start keening for my country?
In part, I think it's because I'm angry with Kevin Rudd. In party political terms, Rudd was a relative outsider, having been "foisted" upon the federal parliamentary ALP via the party's Queensland administrative wing and his connections to the Queensland Premier's office. This meant that he largely lacked either a factional power-base or cross-factional support - as is the case with most parliamentarians, who do their time as footsoldiers in the factional machine before being given the nod to step up to the bright lights of elected office. But the fact of Rudd's outsidership meant that he had a great opportunity to change the political narrative of our country, both in terms of the ALP specifically and the wider political process generally.
Remember when Rudd was Leader of the Opposition, and when he first came to power? Back then, he articulated a cohesive political-social framework founded in a set of principles that spoke to the yearning of the Australian public for a new kind of politics: a politics of ideas, a politics of engagement, a politics of the "big picture" whose vision extended beyond the horizon of the three year electoral cycle. For the first time in a long time, Australians glimpsed a vision of the political process that transcended both the cynical "consensus pragmatism" of ALP factionalism, and the conceited "natural party of rule" arrogance of the Coalition and its neo-classical ideologues.
For the first time in a long time, Australians began to hope for something more.
But Rudd blew it. Once in power, and despite an impressive catalogue of initiatives that included affirming the Kyoto climate change protocols and the much-delayed apology to indigenous Australia, Rudd lapsed into an autocratic, presidential style of leadership that brooked no dissent and heard no other points of view. Decision making was limited to a restricted coterie of senior parliamentarians (the so-called "gang of four", which ironically included Gillard and Treasurer - now deputy PM - Wayne Swann), as well as a select group of staffers appointed by Rudd himself. Moreover, stories soon began to leak out about personality flaws in Rudd that presaged problems for the future: his frenetic, almost insane addiction to work; his short fuse and temper tantrums; his apparent insensitivity to the human and personal needs of those around him.
None of which was going to threaten Rudd while he was so spectacularly popular. The alienated parliamentary colleagues and factional mandarins couldn't move against a leader who so obviously had the nation's confidence. But it was in this fact that the seeds of disaster lay. For instead of using his outsider status to bring change into the ALP - and, by extension, the whole political culture of Australia - Rudd refused to persuade his colleagues to back his vision, instead demanding obedience and loyalty. Had he done so, once things turned sour he could have drawn on depths of goodwill and support that were previously absent. Indeed, it seems that Rudd's own consciousness of his "outsider" status provoked a sense of personal insecurity that drove him toward authoritarianism and the hostility from others which it engenders. Instead of being able to draw on the support of others, he found the knives were drawn against him.
And those knives came out for two reasons. The first was the "reform obsession" which seemed to characterise the Rudd government. Like the Whitlam government before it, Rudd tried to push through a raft of reforms at every conceivable level of policy, from industrial relations to climate change, from tax policy to health services. And like the Whitlam government, the Rudd government found itself swamped by the logistics of trying to implement reform across such a wide spectrum of policy areas. Which, combined with the relative inexperience of most of Rudd's ministers, and the corresponding inexperience of their personal staffers, resulted in some monumental policy disasters. Instead of tackling a couple of major projects at a time and getting them attended to in detail, the Rudd government tried to do everything at once - and paid the penalty for its poor judgement.
But the second cause of Rudd's downfall lay in Rudd himself. As noted above, rumours about some of Rudd's less attractive personality traits began to circulate earlier in his Prime Ministership. But when these were just "quirks" of the man himself, they were - electorally speaking - more or less harmless. But when they manifested themselves on the policy stage, they were disastrous for Rudd the politician, and gave the signal to his factional enemies to start organising the numbers.
Perhaps the most egregious example was Rudd's handling of the Trading Emissions legislation. Having tried and failed to get the legislation passed on more than one occasion, Rudd should have explained to the Australian public that the parliamentary process had not enabled the government to pass its legislation, as a consequence of which, the government would go to the next election seeking a clear mandate for both houses of parliament so that the legislation could be put in place. However, and in an almost inconceivable display of petulance, Rudd did the policy equivalent of taking his bat and ball and going home, declaring unilaterally that there was no community consensus on an emissions trading scheme, and delaying any legislation until at least 2012.
A response that only served to disillusion the public who had believed Rudd's image of "big picture" commitment, and who now not only questioned that commitment, but began to wonder whether his personality traits made him fit to be PM. The polls began to plummet, the knives were sharpened, the numbers counted. Rudd's continued refusal to realise his peril and change his ways only hastened the end. To borrow a classical allusion, Rudd started off looking like Australian politics' equivalent of Marcus Aurelius, only to end up its Tiberius: an isolated, ill-tempered, suspicious, and mistrusted individual whose unpopularity was largely of his own making.
And, ultimately, I think it's the rather pathetic humanity lying at the core of this tragedy that makes me feel the way I do. The almost unbearable sight of Rudd making his all-too-late appeal for support based on his record the night he realised the chickens had come home to roost; the gut-wrenching agony of watching him realise and struggle with the extent of his failure at the next day's media conference; the indescribable pathos of Rudd sitting in the backbench while parliamentary colleagues and opponents alike poured out their crocodile tears (a spectacle made all the more poignant by the presence of a delegation from Vietnam in the chamber). All these sights had me thinking: well, we could have one in a different direction in this country, but we blew it. Rudd blew it, the ALP blew it, the whole Australian electorate has blown it.
Maybe I'm being melodramatic. Maybe I'm being sentimental. Maybe I'm being a fool. But there's something within me that says, no matter how good a PM Julia Gillard turns out to be, there was a moment here for the seizing which, collectively, together as a society and a body politic, we have let slip through our fingers. And I think we're all going to be the poorer for it.
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Opportunity: that which comes disguised as hard work in order that it not be recognised by most people. (Ann Landers)
Sure, the coup - and let's not be pedantic about this, it was a coup, albeit a political rather than military one - was conducted with swift, sure precision, the kind of clinical surgical strike the American military only wishes its so-called "smart" weaponry could achieve. There was no long, drawn-out saga of innuendo and undermining, leaving behind great tearing wounds of bitterness and public disillusion. We quite literally went to bed one night with Kevin Rudd as PM and woke up the next morning with Julia Gillard as our new Prime Minister.
I don't for a moment believe that Gillard didn't know what was happening. Even if only indirectly, she would have been aware of the numbers tilting against Rudd as his popularity declined and the ALP "brand" became ever more on the nose with the electorate. Maybe she even tried to warn Rudd, perhaps obliquely at first and then directly, that the forces of deposition were gathering against him. Either way, Gillard is too experienced and assured a political operator not to have seen what was coming and to have positioned herself accordingly.
But that isn't what has got me feeling as though our country has taken one almighty step backwards. True, the fact that a politically astute woman has shown herself to be as ruthless and unsentimental as "the boys" doesn't give me much confidence that our political culture specifically - or our social culture generally - has matured much. Which doesn't mean that I don't think Gillard will be a competent, perhaps even excellent, PM. But I suspect the circumstances of Gillard's ascent to the Prime Ministership tell us that while women are able to play "the boys" at their own game, the fact remains that it is still "the boys" game that is being played. No new territory has been staked out, no new paradigm has been put into place.
Still, I kind of expect that from Gillard. She is, afterall, a product of the same cynical, mercenary party "machine" that has produced her factional contemporaries within the ALP. So why am I feeling like I want to curl into a foetal ball and start keening for my country?
In part, I think it's because I'm angry with Kevin Rudd. In party political terms, Rudd was a relative outsider, having been "foisted" upon the federal parliamentary ALP via the party's Queensland administrative wing and his connections to the Queensland Premier's office. This meant that he largely lacked either a factional power-base or cross-factional support - as is the case with most parliamentarians, who do their time as footsoldiers in the factional machine before being given the nod to step up to the bright lights of elected office. But the fact of Rudd's outsidership meant that he had a great opportunity to change the political narrative of our country, both in terms of the ALP specifically and the wider political process generally.
Remember when Rudd was Leader of the Opposition, and when he first came to power? Back then, he articulated a cohesive political-social framework founded in a set of principles that spoke to the yearning of the Australian public for a new kind of politics: a politics of ideas, a politics of engagement, a politics of the "big picture" whose vision extended beyond the horizon of the three year electoral cycle. For the first time in a long time, Australians glimpsed a vision of the political process that transcended both the cynical "consensus pragmatism" of ALP factionalism, and the conceited "natural party of rule" arrogance of the Coalition and its neo-classical ideologues.
For the first time in a long time, Australians began to hope for something more.
But Rudd blew it. Once in power, and despite an impressive catalogue of initiatives that included affirming the Kyoto climate change protocols and the much-delayed apology to indigenous Australia, Rudd lapsed into an autocratic, presidential style of leadership that brooked no dissent and heard no other points of view. Decision making was limited to a restricted coterie of senior parliamentarians (the so-called "gang of four", which ironically included Gillard and Treasurer - now deputy PM - Wayne Swann), as well as a select group of staffers appointed by Rudd himself. Moreover, stories soon began to leak out about personality flaws in Rudd that presaged problems for the future: his frenetic, almost insane addiction to work; his short fuse and temper tantrums; his apparent insensitivity to the human and personal needs of those around him.
None of which was going to threaten Rudd while he was so spectacularly popular. The alienated parliamentary colleagues and factional mandarins couldn't move against a leader who so obviously had the nation's confidence. But it was in this fact that the seeds of disaster lay. For instead of using his outsider status to bring change into the ALP - and, by extension, the whole political culture of Australia - Rudd refused to persuade his colleagues to back his vision, instead demanding obedience and loyalty. Had he done so, once things turned sour he could have drawn on depths of goodwill and support that were previously absent. Indeed, it seems that Rudd's own consciousness of his "outsider" status provoked a sense of personal insecurity that drove him toward authoritarianism and the hostility from others which it engenders. Instead of being able to draw on the support of others, he found the knives were drawn against him.
And those knives came out for two reasons. The first was the "reform obsession" which seemed to characterise the Rudd government. Like the Whitlam government before it, Rudd tried to push through a raft of reforms at every conceivable level of policy, from industrial relations to climate change, from tax policy to health services. And like the Whitlam government, the Rudd government found itself swamped by the logistics of trying to implement reform across such a wide spectrum of policy areas. Which, combined with the relative inexperience of most of Rudd's ministers, and the corresponding inexperience of their personal staffers, resulted in some monumental policy disasters. Instead of tackling a couple of major projects at a time and getting them attended to in detail, the Rudd government tried to do everything at once - and paid the penalty for its poor judgement.
But the second cause of Rudd's downfall lay in Rudd himself. As noted above, rumours about some of Rudd's less attractive personality traits began to circulate earlier in his Prime Ministership. But when these were just "quirks" of the man himself, they were - electorally speaking - more or less harmless. But when they manifested themselves on the policy stage, they were disastrous for Rudd the politician, and gave the signal to his factional enemies to start organising the numbers.
Perhaps the most egregious example was Rudd's handling of the Trading Emissions legislation. Having tried and failed to get the legislation passed on more than one occasion, Rudd should have explained to the Australian public that the parliamentary process had not enabled the government to pass its legislation, as a consequence of which, the government would go to the next election seeking a clear mandate for both houses of parliament so that the legislation could be put in place. However, and in an almost inconceivable display of petulance, Rudd did the policy equivalent of taking his bat and ball and going home, declaring unilaterally that there was no community consensus on an emissions trading scheme, and delaying any legislation until at least 2012.
A response that only served to disillusion the public who had believed Rudd's image of "big picture" commitment, and who now not only questioned that commitment, but began to wonder whether his personality traits made him fit to be PM. The polls began to plummet, the knives were sharpened, the numbers counted. Rudd's continued refusal to realise his peril and change his ways only hastened the end. To borrow a classical allusion, Rudd started off looking like Australian politics' equivalent of Marcus Aurelius, only to end up its Tiberius: an isolated, ill-tempered, suspicious, and mistrusted individual whose unpopularity was largely of his own making.
And, ultimately, I think it's the rather pathetic humanity lying at the core of this tragedy that makes me feel the way I do. The almost unbearable sight of Rudd making his all-too-late appeal for support based on his record the night he realised the chickens had come home to roost; the gut-wrenching agony of watching him realise and struggle with the extent of his failure at the next day's media conference; the indescribable pathos of Rudd sitting in the backbench while parliamentary colleagues and opponents alike poured out their crocodile tears (a spectacle made all the more poignant by the presence of a delegation from Vietnam in the chamber). All these sights had me thinking: well, we could have one in a different direction in this country, but we blew it. Rudd blew it, the ALP blew it, the whole Australian electorate has blown it.
Maybe I'm being melodramatic. Maybe I'm being sentimental. Maybe I'm being a fool. But there's something within me that says, no matter how good a PM Julia Gillard turns out to be, there was a moment here for the seizing which, collectively, together as a society and a body politic, we have let slip through our fingers. And I think we're all going to be the poorer for it.
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Opportunity: that which comes disguised as hard work in order that it not be recognised by most people. (Ann Landers)
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Cup From The Couch II
Yes, I know I said I would be providing updates about the World Cup, and that what follows is hopelessly dated, but this last week has seen my computer (and my ISP) let me down badly, so I'm afraid you've ot what you've got. Now that things appear to have returned to something approximating normal, enjoy...or endure...
Netherlands 2 vs Denmark 0
This was a dour, charmless match in which the Danes defended in depth, while the Netherlands played a possession football that was more akin to a training run than to any serious attempt at play-making. Indeed, the crowd became so restless the perennial sign of spectator boredom – the Mexican Wave – made an appearance in force. After 20 mins of stultifyingly dull play, the Dutch bean to pressure the Danish defence, cutting down the right flank and breaking through the centre; but the resulting opportunities were all-too-easily defended. Against the run of play, a 26th minute break by the Danes saw the Dutch goal in serious danger without producing a result; likewise, similar thrusts in the 33rd and 36th minutes. Granted, after half-time, the game became somewhat more engaging – but this due almost entirely to a comical defensive error inside the 1st minute after the restart which gifted the Dutch the lead. Similarly farcical moments in the 50th, 75th, and 81st minutes almost repeated the gift, while the Netherlands made strong attacks in the 58th, 68th, and 72nd minutes without result. Finally, the pressure told: in the 84th minute, the Danish defence cracked at the seams, allowing the Netherlands to score for the second time; while a third goal was only prevented in the 87th minute by a frantic clearance off the Danish goal-line. Mercifully, the game came to an end shortly afterwards; the Netherlands walked away from a technically proficient but aesthetically sterile performance with a 2-0 win and all three points.
Italy 1 vs Paraguay 1
The outstanding feature of this match was the quality of both sides’ tackling and interceptions, a fact made all the more remarkable because of the wind and rains that prevailed during most of the match. Time and again, a player in seeming control of the ball was stripped of possession, or had his apparently clean pass cut off before it reached its target. Italy were the dominant team, and for most of the first half regularly pressed the Paraguayan goal, crossing looping balls from either flank into the teeth of the South Americans’ goal. But a combination of doughty defence by Paraguay and a small amount of fortune frustrated all of Italy’s efforts. The opening score, when it came in the 38th minute, surprised everyone: a rare Paraguayan thrust resulted in a beautifully delivered free-kick, the incoming ball slotted by a neat header into the back of the Italian net. Paraguay 1-0 at the break – who would have thought it? A tense struggle after the resumption resulted in unexploited goal scoring opportunities for both sides, until, in the 62nd minute, a perfectly delivered cross drew the Paraguayan keeper off his line, only for the ball to float into the path of an Italian striker who gleefully chipped the ball home. Thereafter, Italy continually pressed the Paraguayan goal, and after the 75th minute, launched repeated attacks, including an 82nd minute strike that required a brilliant diving save by Paraguay’s ‘keeper. But the South Americans remained calm under pressure, and manfully resisted every offensive. In the end, the 1-1 scoreline befitted a gripping contest in which one of the tournament favourites was forced to work hard in order to salvage equal points.
Cote D’Ivoire 0 vs Portugal 0
This match featured what is arguably Africa’s strongest team at this World Cup in the absence of African Cup holders Egypt, up against the enigmatic but hugely talented Portugal. Portugal dominated the opening stanzas, highlighted by a blistering 10th minute strike on goal the beat the Ivorian goalkeeper cold – but not, alas, the goal upright. A pointless free kick in the 13th minute gifted Cote D’Ivoire with its first scoring opportunity, while a deft 16th minute midfield steal provided a second; both opportunities were squandered. A bit of spite entered the game in the 20th minute, as both teams, seemingly frustrated by their inability to score, indulged in a series of ugly tackles, which in turn produced a flurry of dives, fouls, and bookings. The nadir came in the 28th minute: a crude Portuguese tackle inexplicably went unpunished by the referee, and play had to be halted so the unfortunate Ivorian player on the receiving end could be attended to by medical staff. Cote D’Ivoire started strongly in the second half, producing opportunities in the 47th minute (twice), 53rd minute, 58th and 59th minutes that failed to result in any change to the scoreline. In the midst of this barrage, a perfectly lofted 50th minute cross placed the Ivorian goal in severe danger, while a 57th minute ball from deep in Cote D’Ivoire’s defensive zone again had the defence scrambling. After the 65th minute, Portugal gained the upper hand, but were unable to convert several half-opportunities into anything more substantial; poor crossing from a number of corner kicks aided the Ivorian defence, while a long-range shot in the 78th minute and a free kick in the 79th flew high and wide. After the 80th minute, the match resembled and arm-wrestling contest between two equally matched and equally exhausted opponents, although an 83rd minute thrust by Cote D’Ivoire and an 88th minute counter by Portugal provided brief moments of excitement. The three minutes of penalty time were dominated by Cote D’Ivoire, with several desperate attacks repelled by an equally desperate defence. All in all, it was a slightly disappointing match, in which two teams rich in capacity produced very little of substance.
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Netherlands 2 vs Denmark 0
This was a dour, charmless match in which the Danes defended in depth, while the Netherlands played a possession football that was more akin to a training run than to any serious attempt at play-making. Indeed, the crowd became so restless the perennial sign of spectator boredom – the Mexican Wave – made an appearance in force. After 20 mins of stultifyingly dull play, the Dutch bean to pressure the Danish defence, cutting down the right flank and breaking through the centre; but the resulting opportunities were all-too-easily defended. Against the run of play, a 26th minute break by the Danes saw the Dutch goal in serious danger without producing a result; likewise, similar thrusts in the 33rd and 36th minutes. Granted, after half-time, the game became somewhat more engaging – but this due almost entirely to a comical defensive error inside the 1st minute after the restart which gifted the Dutch the lead. Similarly farcical moments in the 50th, 75th, and 81st minutes almost repeated the gift, while the Netherlands made strong attacks in the 58th, 68th, and 72nd minutes without result. Finally, the pressure told: in the 84th minute, the Danish defence cracked at the seams, allowing the Netherlands to score for the second time; while a third goal was only prevented in the 87th minute by a frantic clearance off the Danish goal-line. Mercifully, the game came to an end shortly afterwards; the Netherlands walked away from a technically proficient but aesthetically sterile performance with a 2-0 win and all three points.
Italy 1 vs Paraguay 1
The outstanding feature of this match was the quality of both sides’ tackling and interceptions, a fact made all the more remarkable because of the wind and rains that prevailed during most of the match. Time and again, a player in seeming control of the ball was stripped of possession, or had his apparently clean pass cut off before it reached its target. Italy were the dominant team, and for most of the first half regularly pressed the Paraguayan goal, crossing looping balls from either flank into the teeth of the South Americans’ goal. But a combination of doughty defence by Paraguay and a small amount of fortune frustrated all of Italy’s efforts. The opening score, when it came in the 38th minute, surprised everyone: a rare Paraguayan thrust resulted in a beautifully delivered free-kick, the incoming ball slotted by a neat header into the back of the Italian net. Paraguay 1-0 at the break – who would have thought it? A tense struggle after the resumption resulted in unexploited goal scoring opportunities for both sides, until, in the 62nd minute, a perfectly delivered cross drew the Paraguayan keeper off his line, only for the ball to float into the path of an Italian striker who gleefully chipped the ball home. Thereafter, Italy continually pressed the Paraguayan goal, and after the 75th minute, launched repeated attacks, including an 82nd minute strike that required a brilliant diving save by Paraguay’s ‘keeper. But the South Americans remained calm under pressure, and manfully resisted every offensive. In the end, the 1-1 scoreline befitted a gripping contest in which one of the tournament favourites was forced to work hard in order to salvage equal points.
Cote D’Ivoire 0 vs Portugal 0
This match featured what is arguably Africa’s strongest team at this World Cup in the absence of African Cup holders Egypt, up against the enigmatic but hugely talented Portugal. Portugal dominated the opening stanzas, highlighted by a blistering 10th minute strike on goal the beat the Ivorian goalkeeper cold – but not, alas, the goal upright. A pointless free kick in the 13th minute gifted Cote D’Ivoire with its first scoring opportunity, while a deft 16th minute midfield steal provided a second; both opportunities were squandered. A bit of spite entered the game in the 20th minute, as both teams, seemingly frustrated by their inability to score, indulged in a series of ugly tackles, which in turn produced a flurry of dives, fouls, and bookings. The nadir came in the 28th minute: a crude Portuguese tackle inexplicably went unpunished by the referee, and play had to be halted so the unfortunate Ivorian player on the receiving end could be attended to by medical staff. Cote D’Ivoire started strongly in the second half, producing opportunities in the 47th minute (twice), 53rd minute, 58th and 59th minutes that failed to result in any change to the scoreline. In the midst of this barrage, a perfectly lofted 50th minute cross placed the Ivorian goal in severe danger, while a 57th minute ball from deep in Cote D’Ivoire’s defensive zone again had the defence scrambling. After the 65th minute, Portugal gained the upper hand, but were unable to convert several half-opportunities into anything more substantial; poor crossing from a number of corner kicks aided the Ivorian defence, while a long-range shot in the 78th minute and a free kick in the 79th flew high and wide. After the 80th minute, the match resembled and arm-wrestling contest between two equally matched and equally exhausted opponents, although an 83rd minute thrust by Cote D’Ivoire and an 88th minute counter by Portugal provided brief moments of excitement. The three minutes of penalty time were dominated by Cote D’Ivoire, with several desperate attacks repelled by an equally desperate defence. All in all, it was a slightly disappointing match, in which two teams rich in capacity produced very little of substance.
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
The Cup From The Couch
Since it is the World Cup, and since I am undeniably a fan of football at this level, I thought while the tournament was on, I'd periodically give you my thoughts as they occur to me from my perch on the Couch. I can't claim that my musings will constitute "expert" opinion, either on the game in general or on the tournament in particular (and anyway, who could possibly know more than Les Murray?); I can't even claim that the matches I comment on will in any sense be important or vital to the outcome of World Cup 2010. But they will be games I have actually watched, so my ignorance will at least be "informed" ignorance...
South Africa 1 vs Mexico 1
The stand out feature of this match was the amazing foot-speed of the South African players, and their ability to disorient the Mexican defence and charge forward into attack, either from the wings or through the centre. The Mexicans were clearly the more experienced and skillful team, a fact reflected by their near dominance of possession in the 1st half; indeed, South Africa can thank the amazing atheletic skills of their goal-keeper for the fact that they weren't 2-nil down after the first 40 minutes. But then a sea-change came over the match: for the last five minutes of the 1st half, and for the first 25 minutes of the 2nd half, the South Africans ran rings around their more fancied opponents, breaking from deep within their own defence to regularly harry the Mexican goal. It was an inevitability when the South Africans slotted home the first goal of the match (and tournament); what was less expected was the Mexican equaliser against the run of play (due almost entirely to sloppy South African defence) and the return of the game to a more even keel. The last stanza of the match was a thrilling battle of skill against elan, in which both teams squandered opportunities to score the winner. In the end, a 1-1 draw reflected a just result to what was a cracking start to the tournament.
South Korea 2 vs Greece 0
In this match, Greece was cut to pieces by the precision passing of the South Koreans, who frequently threaded the needle of two or three apparently immobile Greek players in order to find a team-mate and retain possession. While the Greeks opted for long-range aerial delivery into their forward zone, the South Koreans displayed a cohesive integration of defence, midfield, and offence to switch the ball from deep within their own zone into the teeth of the Greek goal, playing with a fluidity that made their opponents look sluggish and out of form. Despite the fact that the Greeks had the best opportunity to open the scoring, from the 5 minute mark onwards, South Korea dominated, patiently retaining possession before launching lightning attacks down and across both flanks. The Greeks frankly looked flat-footed and lacking in match fitness, while the South Koreans visibly gained in confidence as the game progressed. Greece did manage to salvage some pride in the last 20 minutes of the match by threatening the South Korean goal as their opponents tired; but their numerous assaults proved fruitless, while the South Koreans were only prevented from extending their lead by the vicissitudes of fortune. Like the South Africa-Mexico contest, this was a match in which the underdogs upstaged their more highly credentialed rivals.
Serbia 0 v Ghana 1
This was a gritty arm-wrestle of a match, occassionally illuminated by moments of excitement, in which the momentum swung between two seemingly equally matched teams. The Ghanaians controlled most of the first half without really threatening the Serbian goal; their opponents then grabbed the initiative in the latter stages of the half and troubled Ghana's defence with a series of set-pieces squandered by poor finishing. The Ghanaian offensives, while exciting at times, tended to have a quality of sameness, relying mostly on dashes down the wings finished by long-range crosses into the centre. After half time, the momentum once again swung in Ghana's favour, but they were unable to convert a series of opportunities, two of which went close to breaking the deadlock. Against the run of play, Serbia almost scored twice in moves that opened up Ghana's defence; but these chances likewise failed to result in a goal. Interest was injected into the game in the 73rd minute when a Serbian defender received a 2nd yellow card and thus earned a send off; Ghana now found themselves one player to the good over their opponents. Yet it was the Serbs who siezed the initiative, forcing two terrific saves from the Ghanaian goalkeeper in the most exciting passage of play in the match. The denoument, when it came, took everyone by surprise: a Serb defender was called for handball in the penalty box (which, despite protestations to the contrary, was a spot-on call by the ref), which in turn produced a faultless penalty kick that put Ghana in the lead. The Ghanaians almost scored again in injury time as Serbia appeared to give up the game for lost. In the end, it was victory for Ghana; but a nil-all draw would have been a more accurate reflection of a match that, while interesting at times, never really climbed the heights.
Talk to you soon,
BB
South Africa 1 vs Mexico 1
The stand out feature of this match was the amazing foot-speed of the South African players, and their ability to disorient the Mexican defence and charge forward into attack, either from the wings or through the centre. The Mexicans were clearly the more experienced and skillful team, a fact reflected by their near dominance of possession in the 1st half; indeed, South Africa can thank the amazing atheletic skills of their goal-keeper for the fact that they weren't 2-nil down after the first 40 minutes. But then a sea-change came over the match: for the last five minutes of the 1st half, and for the first 25 minutes of the 2nd half, the South Africans ran rings around their more fancied opponents, breaking from deep within their own defence to regularly harry the Mexican goal. It was an inevitability when the South Africans slotted home the first goal of the match (and tournament); what was less expected was the Mexican equaliser against the run of play (due almost entirely to sloppy South African defence) and the return of the game to a more even keel. The last stanza of the match was a thrilling battle of skill against elan, in which both teams squandered opportunities to score the winner. In the end, a 1-1 draw reflected a just result to what was a cracking start to the tournament.
South Korea 2 vs Greece 0
In this match, Greece was cut to pieces by the precision passing of the South Koreans, who frequently threaded the needle of two or three apparently immobile Greek players in order to find a team-mate and retain possession. While the Greeks opted for long-range aerial delivery into their forward zone, the South Koreans displayed a cohesive integration of defence, midfield, and offence to switch the ball from deep within their own zone into the teeth of the Greek goal, playing with a fluidity that made their opponents look sluggish and out of form. Despite the fact that the Greeks had the best opportunity to open the scoring, from the 5 minute mark onwards, South Korea dominated, patiently retaining possession before launching lightning attacks down and across both flanks. The Greeks frankly looked flat-footed and lacking in match fitness, while the South Koreans visibly gained in confidence as the game progressed. Greece did manage to salvage some pride in the last 20 minutes of the match by threatening the South Korean goal as their opponents tired; but their numerous assaults proved fruitless, while the South Koreans were only prevented from extending their lead by the vicissitudes of fortune. Like the South Africa-Mexico contest, this was a match in which the underdogs upstaged their more highly credentialed rivals.
Serbia 0 v Ghana 1
This was a gritty arm-wrestle of a match, occassionally illuminated by moments of excitement, in which the momentum swung between two seemingly equally matched teams. The Ghanaians controlled most of the first half without really threatening the Serbian goal; their opponents then grabbed the initiative in the latter stages of the half and troubled Ghana's defence with a series of set-pieces squandered by poor finishing. The Ghanaian offensives, while exciting at times, tended to have a quality of sameness, relying mostly on dashes down the wings finished by long-range crosses into the centre. After half time, the momentum once again swung in Ghana's favour, but they were unable to convert a series of opportunities, two of which went close to breaking the deadlock. Against the run of play, Serbia almost scored twice in moves that opened up Ghana's defence; but these chances likewise failed to result in a goal. Interest was injected into the game in the 73rd minute when a Serbian defender received a 2nd yellow card and thus earned a send off; Ghana now found themselves one player to the good over their opponents. Yet it was the Serbs who siezed the initiative, forcing two terrific saves from the Ghanaian goalkeeper in the most exciting passage of play in the match. The denoument, when it came, took everyone by surprise: a Serb defender was called for handball in the penalty box (which, despite protestations to the contrary, was a spot-on call by the ref), which in turn produced a faultless penalty kick that put Ghana in the lead. The Ghanaians almost scored again in injury time as Serbia appeared to give up the game for lost. In the end, it was victory for Ghana; but a nil-all draw would have been a more accurate reflection of a match that, while interesting at times, never really climbed the heights.
Talk to you soon,
BB
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Under Review II
As stated in an earlier post, I will from time to time publish on this blog reviews I've written and posted on my Facebook account. The reason being to make these reviews available to a wider audience than the select group of unfortunates who happen to be my Facebook "friends". Today's review concerns Walter M Miller's classic post-apocalyptic science fiction novel "A Canticle for Liebowitz".
A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller
Walter M Miller Jr grew up in the between the wars American South, enlisting in the Army Air Corp in WWII and spending most of his time as a radio operator and gunner. One operation in which he participated was the infamous bombing of the ancient monastary of Monte Cassino in Italy; it was this experience, as well as his encounter with the horrors of war generally, that lead him to write "A Canticle for Leibowitz"
The novel covers a nearly 1800 year time span in which an order of monks adhering to the Rule of Benedict - called the Albertain Order of Leibowitz, named for the great medieval scholar Albertus Magnus, and a fictional scientist-martyr Leibowitz - struggle to preserve the relics of the "great civilisation" destroyed by nuclear war. Their task is rendered next to impossible by the fact that, after civilisation was destroyed, a further cataclysmic event called the Simplification resulted in the systematic annihilation of books, records, and technological implements of every kind. The Order was founded by a scientist named Leibowitz who was mob lynched during the Simplification; but not before he had managed to squirrel away a small collection of precious books and found the Order bearing his name.
The novel is constructed in three parts, the first ocurring approximately 600 years after the nuclear holocaust, the next about 500 years further on, and the final section another half milennium beyond that. In the first section, a rather absurd and hapless novice monk stumbles upon a fallout shelter which, among other things, contains a precious relic written by Leibowitz himself - a shopping list. In the second section, an abbot plagued by doubts and chronic ulcers debates whether to make available to the scientists of the newly emerging civilisations the technological secrets which the Order has preserved for so long. In the third section, a civilisation more advanced than the one destroyed by the nuclear holocaust advances inexoribably to its own horrible fate - but not without the Order managing to make sure a seed of hope survives.
This is a wonderfully told novel full of wit, sarcasm, humour, despair, compassion, and frustration. Having survived the horrors of WWII Miller was desperately concerned that human civilisation was advancing along a path of relentless self-annihilation, heedless of the warnings provided by the carnage of two global conflagrations. Haunting the novel is the unseen (and, from the point of view of the narrative, possibly fictional) personage of Leibowitz: the scientist-martyr who struggled to preserve what was best about civilisation - its accumulated knowledge - all the while knowing this was the very thing that had brought civilisation to ruin. Also haunting the novel is the figure of "the Jew", known as Benjamin bar Joshua, but quite conceivably Lazarus raised from the dead and unable to die. Is he an allegory for anti-Semitic persecution and the appropriation by Christians of Jewish sacred history and heritage? A symbol of human folly? Of sheer, bloody-minded determination? Of the human experience itself, its journey from savagery to civilisation, only to inflict upon itself more savagery?
Miller's placing of the struggle to preserve civilisation within the context of an enclosed monastic order reflects both the historical preservation of Western civilisation by Benedictine monastaries during the Dark Ages, as well as the perenniel tension between the truth of science and the truth of faith. This tension is emblematic of the tension between knowledge and wisdom; and Miller's seemingly gloomy conclusion is nonetheless punctured by the possibility of hope. Perhaps we are doomed to destroy ourselves; but even if we do, it just may be that something of ourselves - some of our greatness that transcends our shame - will survive beyond our annihilation, to be picked up and carried on by whoever comes after us.
A powerful, disturbing, thought-provoking novel, well worth reading and completely relevant in this day and age.
Talk to you soon,
BB
A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller
Walter M Miller Jr grew up in the between the wars American South, enlisting in the Army Air Corp in WWII and spending most of his time as a radio operator and gunner. One operation in which he participated was the infamous bombing of the ancient monastary of Monte Cassino in Italy; it was this experience, as well as his encounter with the horrors of war generally, that lead him to write "A Canticle for Leibowitz"
The novel covers a nearly 1800 year time span in which an order of monks adhering to the Rule of Benedict - called the Albertain Order of Leibowitz, named for the great medieval scholar Albertus Magnus, and a fictional scientist-martyr Leibowitz - struggle to preserve the relics of the "great civilisation" destroyed by nuclear war. Their task is rendered next to impossible by the fact that, after civilisation was destroyed, a further cataclysmic event called the Simplification resulted in the systematic annihilation of books, records, and technological implements of every kind. The Order was founded by a scientist named Leibowitz who was mob lynched during the Simplification; but not before he had managed to squirrel away a small collection of precious books and found the Order bearing his name.
The novel is constructed in three parts, the first ocurring approximately 600 years after the nuclear holocaust, the next about 500 years further on, and the final section another half milennium beyond that. In the first section, a rather absurd and hapless novice monk stumbles upon a fallout shelter which, among other things, contains a precious relic written by Leibowitz himself - a shopping list. In the second section, an abbot plagued by doubts and chronic ulcers debates whether to make available to the scientists of the newly emerging civilisations the technological secrets which the Order has preserved for so long. In the third section, a civilisation more advanced than the one destroyed by the nuclear holocaust advances inexoribably to its own horrible fate - but not without the Order managing to make sure a seed of hope survives.
This is a wonderfully told novel full of wit, sarcasm, humour, despair, compassion, and frustration. Having survived the horrors of WWII Miller was desperately concerned that human civilisation was advancing along a path of relentless self-annihilation, heedless of the warnings provided by the carnage of two global conflagrations. Haunting the novel is the unseen (and, from the point of view of the narrative, possibly fictional) personage of Leibowitz: the scientist-martyr who struggled to preserve what was best about civilisation - its accumulated knowledge - all the while knowing this was the very thing that had brought civilisation to ruin. Also haunting the novel is the figure of "the Jew", known as Benjamin bar Joshua, but quite conceivably Lazarus raised from the dead and unable to die. Is he an allegory for anti-Semitic persecution and the appropriation by Christians of Jewish sacred history and heritage? A symbol of human folly? Of sheer, bloody-minded determination? Of the human experience itself, its journey from savagery to civilisation, only to inflict upon itself more savagery?
Miller's placing of the struggle to preserve civilisation within the context of an enclosed monastic order reflects both the historical preservation of Western civilisation by Benedictine monastaries during the Dark Ages, as well as the perenniel tension between the truth of science and the truth of faith. This tension is emblematic of the tension between knowledge and wisdom; and Miller's seemingly gloomy conclusion is nonetheless punctured by the possibility of hope. Perhaps we are doomed to destroy ourselves; but even if we do, it just may be that something of ourselves - some of our greatness that transcends our shame - will survive beyond our annihilation, to be picked up and carried on by whoever comes after us.
A powerful, disturbing, thought-provoking novel, well worth reading and completely relevant in this day and age.
Talk to you soon,
BB
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Midsommer Morons
I know this post is going to annoy my Dearly Beloved, but the truth remains that we have very different tastes when it comes to television. I enjoy shows that are interesting and engaging, which entertain and/or inform.
My Dearly Beloved, on the other hand, enjoys crap.
Now, I appreciate that "crap" is not a definitive term; moreover, it's open to claims of subjectivity. So I intend to provide, for your information, a representative sample of my Dearly Beloved's preferred programing choices, just so you can see that I'm being neither imprecise nor biased.
Midsommer Murders
This is the show that defines the whole problem. Originally conceived as a formulaic detective show set in the depths of rural England, it has morphed into a seemingly endless procession of brain destroyingly dull episodes that are absolute clones of one another. The plot premise is essentially hacked out of the same cookie cutter: a series of grisly murders, usually having their origin in some long-suppressed secret/scandal/injustice or pointless rivalry going back centuries, and which can only be solved by the show's central character, Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby.
Fairly bog standard, you might think, and not much to complain about. Except for the following considerations:
Firstly, the action is entirely restricted to a small area centred on the fictional town of Causton, and taking in a series of villages with names like Midsommer Boghouse and Midsommer Flatulence. Now, given that each episode involves at least three murders, and the area of action is confined to about five square miles, this makes Causton and its environs the serial murder capital of the world. Forget Los Angeles; forget London; hell, forget Adelaide! The viewer is expected to believe that in this tiny patch of outback Blighty blood-thirsty psychopaths lurk behind every privet hedge and thatched cottage. And never mind Johannesburg, or Miami, or Rio - if you want to increase the odds of you ending up a toe-tagged corpse on the morgue slab, then the backwaters of the Old Country is where you need to be! Is it just me, or does anyone else find this premise just a tad difficult to believe?
Secondly, and as is de rigeur for formulaic detective shows, the sleuth - in this case, DCI Barnaby - always gets his man. In other words, this is a cop with a greater clearance rate than Sherlock Holmes! Now, making allowances for the genre's conventions, the fact that Barnaby manages to solve multiple murders every episode stretches convention to breaking point. Moreover, he does so in the time-honoured way of all mystery detectives: by using a chain of logic entirely - or mostly - unsupported by evidence; and certainly not the kind of evidence that would stand up in a court of law! But leaving aside that niggling technicality, what I want to know is: how come this guy isn't running Scotland Yard! I mean, really, if you had a country plod who was clearing every case of mass murder that comes his way, you'd make him Chief Commissioner of Something Really Important faster than you could say Fast-track Promotion Program! And don't give me any tosh about Barnbaby wanting to stay in the country, either; that might work for Hamish Macbeth, but that's only because nothing happens in Loch Dubh!
Thirdly, given that the residents are apparently living on the most dangerous patch of dirt on the planet, one has to wonder: why do they stay! I mean, if it was me (and, let's face it, you) who lived in a locale where people were showing up with axes buried in their backs, or as bait for the local fish, on an almost hourly basis, wouldn't you get the hell out? But, no, the stolid yofolks of the Midsommer region aren't going to be driven out of their homes by the fact that home also happens to be lethal! They've got more staying power than super glue. And since the population seems to never diminish despite the onoin slaughter, one can only surmise that it is being constantly replenished by the kind of people who think: oh, well, what's a few murders or the likelihood that our life expectancy will be cut in half really matter? We'll still buy this charming cottage - damn the corpses hanging from the rafters!
Now do you see why I call it Midsommer Morons?
The Bill
I admit that I used to like this program when it first aired on TV. But that was back in the day, when the characters and the storylines were as gritty as the production values, when individuals like Tosh (God rest his tired old soul) recalled the glory days of Bluey (aka Bargearse), and when in many ways the program itself was a commentary on the social decay and dislocation evident in Thatcher's Britain. In other words, it was a piece of telly that both entertained and informed.
And then it turned into a soap opera. Senior officers started shagging junior officers (or the civilian staff attached to the station), gormless vice cops got seduced by the dark side (and/or a sultry vamp) and turned bad, set-piece episodes turned into a never-ending, continuous storyline whose convolutions and contortions got more ridiculous and mind-boggling with every season. In other words, the emphasis switched from the genuinely dramatic to the purely melodramatic. I know cops shag one another (or civilians) and occasionally go bad; but what I am interested in is the humanity involved in and affected by these events, not the "shock-horror" value of the event itself. But that was the nature of the change: we went from examining impacts to being titillated by what the "guv'nor" did next.
Honestly, I was astonished the Minogue sisters didn't make a surprise appearance. And so something that had been good (in the way that only the British can make social drama good) turned into a banal parade of pointless inanity. It was as if the producers (I won't dignify them with the title creators) of Neighbours or Eastenders had taken over the franchise and decided to try and make a previously adult program appeal to people with the emotional depth of tweenies and/or who possessed an IQ of six. The result was the deadliest, dullest program on the box outside anything featuring Eddie McGuire or Sam Newman.
And, yes, I know: they've now gone back and tried to re-capture the spirit of the original by having discrete episodes and adding a bit of depth to the characters. But I'm afraid that it's a case of the mould having been broken and, like Humpty-Dumpty, being unable to be put back together again. Once you've tampered with what was once beautiful, no amount of plastic surgery is going to reconstruct the original. Better just to let the whole thing die a natural death and rest in peace (take note Darryl Somers!).
Rosemary and Thyme
Oooh, here's a tricky question for all those devotees of quality telly. What do you get if you take a pair of second rate actors well past their prime (and who were never much chop to begin with), add a plot premise about as likely as Richard Dawkins finding God, and mix in a series of admittedly picturesque locales designed to distract the viewer's attention from the fact that they're watching utter dross? You guessed it: a batch of Rosemary & Thyme.
And if you think I'm being unduly severe, let me explain the basic storyline to you. Two women (one of whom is supposed to be an ex-cop, but who is about as plausible as Julian Cleary impersonating Conan the Barbarian, and who seems to know sod all about police procedure into the bargain) are partners in a landscaping business that takes them all over the UK and even the Costa del Sol for a couple of episodes. And everywhere they go, every episode, they spend less time discussing geraniums and herbaceous borders (ha! I'll bet you didn't think I knew what they were, did you?) and more time catching the demented killer who has, just coincidentally, chosen to strike while they were in the neighbourhood.
I mean, PUH-LEEZE, how stupid do the clots whose dull minds dreamed up this crap think I am? Okay, I'm prepared to admit that, statistically speaking, it is within the bounds of possibility that a pair of itinerant gardeners could, by chance, happen to be in a certain location when a series of gristly murders takes place. And I'll even accept that those bounds of possibility might be stretched sufficiently to admit of the chance that said gardeners might have the wherewithal to detect and expose the nutbar responsible. But again and again and again - everywhere they go??? As our American cousins are wont to say: gimme a break!
Honestly, these two would have to be the most prolific indirect serial killers in criminal history. And you'd think that bodies appearing everywhere this green-thumbed duo turned up might be bad for business, wouldn't you? You'd expect that people would see them heaving into view over the horizon and, with one voice, would chorus: (expletive deleted) off! But not a bit of it! They're welcomed with open arms - almost as if folks had concluded that their snappy advertising slogan - we'll do your garden while you get done in - was the jolliest jape since Herr Hitler promised Neville Chamberlain that he had no more territorial ambitions in Europe. I've heard of blood and bone being good for the garden, but this is ridiculous!
And while I'm at it, could someone please, please, please explain why it is that all the supposedly diabolical killers this pair encounter never, ever try to kill the only two people who are trying to solve the crime!?! Hollywood aside, it is an established criminological fact that most criminals - even most serial offenders - are decidedly stupid. But this show puts homicidal idiocy in the Dumb and Dumber category! I think even the jerks who make the annual Darwin Award list for the most fatally stupid bonehead maneuver of the year would laugh at the imbecility of these clowns: Ah, duh, he shoulda killed the two chicks in the overalls before killing anyone else...
So there you have it, just a sampler of what I have to put up with for the sake of this marriage. Now, I know what you're going to say - because my Dearly Beloved has already said it. First, that taste is a subjective matter, and, anyway, my Dearly Beloved has to put up with the crap shows I like to watch. And second, that the programs in question involve the suspension of disbelief. I'll address each of these defences in turn.
Whilst I concede that taste is subjective (although having said that, it nonetheless remains true that my taste is impeccable while yours is suspect until proven otherwise), it is also true that I get to watch very few of the shows I like exclusively unless my Dearly Beloved is out of the house. On the other hand, when I stagger home at midnight from another punishing shift at the local convenience store where I hire myself out as the neighbourhood whipping-boy, I frequently have to endure the MM show in silence for ages before my Dearly Beloved goes to bed. And even the faintest suggestion by Yours Truly that perhaps we might watch something a little less aneurysm inducing is greeted by the kind of vigourous protest that, in public, would result in the riot squad being summoned. So it is not the case, in our marriage, that there are swings and roundabouts when it comes to enduring crappy TV imposed by ones life partner.
Second - and I wish I didn't have to keep explaining this - the suspension of disbelief only works when the underlying premise is sufficiently believable in order to facilitate the necessary suspicion of scepticism. In other words, if the audience is initially presented with a scenario so absurd as to be unbelievable, asking them to further suspend incredulity is just a waste of time - and an insult to their intelligence. And don't give me that it's just a story guff, either. As all great speculative fiction writers know, the world in which their characters move and the events occur have to be realistic in order for the speculative element to work. So if you're asking me to believe that a tiny patch of rural England produces more dead bodies per annum than your average Baghdad suburb, I'll be asking you to believe that I'm an alien called WaldkjfhcearubyfbUScfxlmkcn from the planet Aaliruhgfunvareygcfniashef.
The fact that so many people - alas, my Dearly Beloved among them - seem incapable of rasping this concept suggests to me that I might very well get away with my alien identity scam. In which case, have I got a ponzi scheme for you....
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Television - a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything. (Fred Allen)
My Dearly Beloved, on the other hand, enjoys crap.
Now, I appreciate that "crap" is not a definitive term; moreover, it's open to claims of subjectivity. So I intend to provide, for your information, a representative sample of my Dearly Beloved's preferred programing choices, just so you can see that I'm being neither imprecise nor biased.
Midsommer Murders
This is the show that defines the whole problem. Originally conceived as a formulaic detective show set in the depths of rural England, it has morphed into a seemingly endless procession of brain destroyingly dull episodes that are absolute clones of one another. The plot premise is essentially hacked out of the same cookie cutter: a series of grisly murders, usually having their origin in some long-suppressed secret/scandal/injustice or pointless rivalry going back centuries, and which can only be solved by the show's central character, Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby.
Fairly bog standard, you might think, and not much to complain about. Except for the following considerations:
Firstly, the action is entirely restricted to a small area centred on the fictional town of Causton, and taking in a series of villages with names like Midsommer Boghouse and Midsommer Flatulence. Now, given that each episode involves at least three murders, and the area of action is confined to about five square miles, this makes Causton and its environs the serial murder capital of the world. Forget Los Angeles; forget London; hell, forget Adelaide! The viewer is expected to believe that in this tiny patch of outback Blighty blood-thirsty psychopaths lurk behind every privet hedge and thatched cottage. And never mind Johannesburg, or Miami, or Rio - if you want to increase the odds of you ending up a toe-tagged corpse on the morgue slab, then the backwaters of the Old Country is where you need to be! Is it just me, or does anyone else find this premise just a tad difficult to believe?
Secondly, and as is de rigeur for formulaic detective shows, the sleuth - in this case, DCI Barnaby - always gets his man. In other words, this is a cop with a greater clearance rate than Sherlock Holmes! Now, making allowances for the genre's conventions, the fact that Barnaby manages to solve multiple murders every episode stretches convention to breaking point. Moreover, he does so in the time-honoured way of all mystery detectives: by using a chain of logic entirely - or mostly - unsupported by evidence; and certainly not the kind of evidence that would stand up in a court of law! But leaving aside that niggling technicality, what I want to know is: how come this guy isn't running Scotland Yard! I mean, really, if you had a country plod who was clearing every case of mass murder that comes his way, you'd make him Chief Commissioner of Something Really Important faster than you could say Fast-track Promotion Program! And don't give me any tosh about Barnbaby wanting to stay in the country, either; that might work for Hamish Macbeth, but that's only because nothing happens in Loch Dubh!
Thirdly, given that the residents are apparently living on the most dangerous patch of dirt on the planet, one has to wonder: why do they stay! I mean, if it was me (and, let's face it, you) who lived in a locale where people were showing up with axes buried in their backs, or as bait for the local fish, on an almost hourly basis, wouldn't you get the hell out? But, no, the stolid yofolks of the Midsommer region aren't going to be driven out of their homes by the fact that home also happens to be lethal! They've got more staying power than super glue. And since the population seems to never diminish despite the onoin slaughter, one can only surmise that it is being constantly replenished by the kind of people who think: oh, well, what's a few murders or the likelihood that our life expectancy will be cut in half really matter? We'll still buy this charming cottage - damn the corpses hanging from the rafters!
Now do you see why I call it Midsommer Morons?
The Bill
I admit that I used to like this program when it first aired on TV. But that was back in the day, when the characters and the storylines were as gritty as the production values, when individuals like Tosh (God rest his tired old soul) recalled the glory days of Bluey (aka Bargearse), and when in many ways the program itself was a commentary on the social decay and dislocation evident in Thatcher's Britain. In other words, it was a piece of telly that both entertained and informed.
And then it turned into a soap opera. Senior officers started shagging junior officers (or the civilian staff attached to the station), gormless vice cops got seduced by the dark side (and/or a sultry vamp) and turned bad, set-piece episodes turned into a never-ending, continuous storyline whose convolutions and contortions got more ridiculous and mind-boggling with every season. In other words, the emphasis switched from the genuinely dramatic to the purely melodramatic. I know cops shag one another (or civilians) and occasionally go bad; but what I am interested in is the humanity involved in and affected by these events, not the "shock-horror" value of the event itself. But that was the nature of the change: we went from examining impacts to being titillated by what the "guv'nor" did next.
Honestly, I was astonished the Minogue sisters didn't make a surprise appearance. And so something that had been good (in the way that only the British can make social drama good) turned into a banal parade of pointless inanity. It was as if the producers (I won't dignify them with the title creators) of Neighbours or Eastenders had taken over the franchise and decided to try and make a previously adult program appeal to people with the emotional depth of tweenies and/or who possessed an IQ of six. The result was the deadliest, dullest program on the box outside anything featuring Eddie McGuire or Sam Newman.
And, yes, I know: they've now gone back and tried to re-capture the spirit of the original by having discrete episodes and adding a bit of depth to the characters. But I'm afraid that it's a case of the mould having been broken and, like Humpty-Dumpty, being unable to be put back together again. Once you've tampered with what was once beautiful, no amount of plastic surgery is going to reconstruct the original. Better just to let the whole thing die a natural death and rest in peace (take note Darryl Somers!).
Rosemary and Thyme
Oooh, here's a tricky question for all those devotees of quality telly. What do you get if you take a pair of second rate actors well past their prime (and who were never much chop to begin with), add a plot premise about as likely as Richard Dawkins finding God, and mix in a series of admittedly picturesque locales designed to distract the viewer's attention from the fact that they're watching utter dross? You guessed it: a batch of Rosemary & Thyme.
And if you think I'm being unduly severe, let me explain the basic storyline to you. Two women (one of whom is supposed to be an ex-cop, but who is about as plausible as Julian Cleary impersonating Conan the Barbarian, and who seems to know sod all about police procedure into the bargain) are partners in a landscaping business that takes them all over the UK and even the Costa del Sol for a couple of episodes. And everywhere they go, every episode, they spend less time discussing geraniums and herbaceous borders (ha! I'll bet you didn't think I knew what they were, did you?) and more time catching the demented killer who has, just coincidentally, chosen to strike while they were in the neighbourhood.
I mean, PUH-LEEZE, how stupid do the clots whose dull minds dreamed up this crap think I am? Okay, I'm prepared to admit that, statistically speaking, it is within the bounds of possibility that a pair of itinerant gardeners could, by chance, happen to be in a certain location when a series of gristly murders takes place. And I'll even accept that those bounds of possibility might be stretched sufficiently to admit of the chance that said gardeners might have the wherewithal to detect and expose the nutbar responsible. But again and again and again - everywhere they go??? As our American cousins are wont to say: gimme a break!
Honestly, these two would have to be the most prolific indirect serial killers in criminal history. And you'd think that bodies appearing everywhere this green-thumbed duo turned up might be bad for business, wouldn't you? You'd expect that people would see them heaving into view over the horizon and, with one voice, would chorus: (expletive deleted) off! But not a bit of it! They're welcomed with open arms - almost as if folks had concluded that their snappy advertising slogan - we'll do your garden while you get done in - was the jolliest jape since Herr Hitler promised Neville Chamberlain that he had no more territorial ambitions in Europe. I've heard of blood and bone being good for the garden, but this is ridiculous!
And while I'm at it, could someone please, please, please explain why it is that all the supposedly diabolical killers this pair encounter never, ever try to kill the only two people who are trying to solve the crime!?! Hollywood aside, it is an established criminological fact that most criminals - even most serial offenders - are decidedly stupid. But this show puts homicidal idiocy in the Dumb and Dumber category! I think even the jerks who make the annual Darwin Award list for the most fatally stupid bonehead maneuver of the year would laugh at the imbecility of these clowns: Ah, duh, he shoulda killed the two chicks in the overalls before killing anyone else...
***
So there you have it, just a sampler of what I have to put up with for the sake of this marriage. Now, I know what you're going to say - because my Dearly Beloved has already said it. First, that taste is a subjective matter, and, anyway, my Dearly Beloved has to put up with the crap shows I like to watch. And second, that the programs in question involve the suspension of disbelief. I'll address each of these defences in turn.
Whilst I concede that taste is subjective (although having said that, it nonetheless remains true that my taste is impeccable while yours is suspect until proven otherwise), it is also true that I get to watch very few of the shows I like exclusively unless my Dearly Beloved is out of the house. On the other hand, when I stagger home at midnight from another punishing shift at the local convenience store where I hire myself out as the neighbourhood whipping-boy, I frequently have to endure the MM show in silence for ages before my Dearly Beloved goes to bed. And even the faintest suggestion by Yours Truly that perhaps we might watch something a little less aneurysm inducing is greeted by the kind of vigourous protest that, in public, would result in the riot squad being summoned. So it is not the case, in our marriage, that there are swings and roundabouts when it comes to enduring crappy TV imposed by ones life partner.
Second - and I wish I didn't have to keep explaining this - the suspension of disbelief only works when the underlying premise is sufficiently believable in order to facilitate the necessary suspicion of scepticism. In other words, if the audience is initially presented with a scenario so absurd as to be unbelievable, asking them to further suspend incredulity is just a waste of time - and an insult to their intelligence. And don't give me that it's just a story guff, either. As all great speculative fiction writers know, the world in which their characters move and the events occur have to be realistic in order for the speculative element to work. So if you're asking me to believe that a tiny patch of rural England produces more dead bodies per annum than your average Baghdad suburb, I'll be asking you to believe that I'm an alien called WaldkjfhcearubyfbUScfxlmkcn from the planet Aaliruhgfunvareygcfniashef.
The fact that so many people - alas, my Dearly Beloved among them - seem incapable of rasping this concept suggests to me that I might very well get away with my alien identity scam. In which case, have I got a ponzi scheme for you....
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Television - a device that permits people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything. (Fred Allen)
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Far From The Madding Tools
I think even the most jaded observer of this irregular column will confess that I am nothing if not a sensitive and sympathetic chronicler of the infinite variety of human tools who walk through the door of the store where, a couple of nights a week, I engage in an elaborate charade of employment. I don't blame tools for being tools: I don't ascribe to them genetic defects, neither do I suggest their parents shared a degree of relationship closer than that which you'd typically find in, say, Arkansas or far north Queensland. No, I am conscientious and kind: tools are just tools, and I deal with them in a responsible and grown-up manner.
Until now, that is. I, dear reader, have had a gut full. And it's not just because I'm writing this at the end of a long and tiring day that has left me exhausted and cranky. On the contrary, I wake up exhausted and cranky, so that's no excuse. Neither have I lost my instincts toward the charitable and decided to become a born-again bastard; there are plenty of people out there who will suggest that I have been doing that my whole life long.
No, the plain old simple truth is that I'm fed up and I've had enough. The tools have worn me down; my patience is at an end, kaput, done, gone. I'm as mad as hell, and I've decided that attack is the best form of defence; so I'm going to name and shame. Well, I'm going to describe and shame, if you want to know the complete truth. I'm going to tell you all about the kinds of tools who walk into the store, and who blight my shifts with their ineffable toolishness.
So if you find yourself recognising yourself in the following descriptions, I have only one thing to say: shame on you! Well, okay, two things: shame on you; and sod off. I don't want to see your tool-benighted faces any more. I've only got nine or so months to go before I get out of having to do this job, and I'd like to pass it with an absolute minimum of frustration, annoyance, and general f*ing about caused by your toolish selves. And by absolute minimum, I mean none at all. So pay close attention to what follows; you may be in it. And if you are, you'd better stay far, far away from me!
No IDers
Naturally, being responsible corporate citizens, the multinational corporation by whom I am ultimately employed abides by Australian law and declines to sell cigarettes and smoking-related products to persons under the age of 18. Indeed, its sales staff are required to ask for ID when they have reason to believe the putative purchaser may be under the legal age. And so it comes as no surprise that Yours Truly has his fair share of annoyingly baby-faced adults from whom he must ask ID because they look under age; that, and the obvious under agers who are just trying it on because they think that wearing a shirt with a company logo embroidered in it automatically makes you a moron.
It is from both categories that the No IDers spring, and it's difficult to decide which of the two are more pathetic. From the legally-aged but disgustingly youthful brigade you often get protestations that they are over-age, and besides, they've always bought cigarettes here and they've never been asked for ID before. They might be right on both accounts; but the thing is, once ID has been asked for, it must be produced before the sale can proceed. Yes, sir, it might be bullshit, but it's the law. Yes, madam, I know you may be old enough to have children, but around here the age at which people start having kiddies is also somewhat below the legal age of consent. And anyhoo, you might have previously purchased your daily dose of throat cancer from this store, but you haven't purchased it from me. And I'm the one asking: so cough up or step off.
The under agers usually try to bluff their way out of the situation - yes, mate, I am for f*ing real - and then try and get one of their mates who happens to be above age to use their ID. Except that, once it is explained to aforesaid mate that since he/she is the one producing the ID, he/she is the one who'll have to pay for the cigarettes (and once again, yes mate, I am for f*ing real), they baulk at the near king's ransom it costs to indulge the nicotine habit these days and tell their under age mate to take a hike. Which usually results in a mouthful of deleted expletives heading my way from the frustrated law breaker; but hey, what the hell do I care?
But the thing that elevates (or should that be relegates?) No IDers from annoying inconveniences to outright tools is the little ritual they then perform in yet another attempt to get the cigarettes without having to show proof of age. Having been busted with no ID, they proceed to go out to their cars, where they make an unconvincing attempt to look as though they're going through their glove box, looking under the seats, and generally investigating every nook and cranny in search of the missing ID. How unconvincing is this display, you wonder? Put it this way: my attempts to look as though I give a toss about customer service are more convincing!
Anyhoo, having wasted another five minutes, the No IDer then returns to the store and explains that they must have left their ID at home. In other words, they expect me to say: Oh, that changes everything! Of course you can have some cigarettes! Except, of course, that I don't, much to their dismay and puzzlement. But here's the interesting point: having confessed that they don't have ID with which to buy cigarettes, the No IDer then confesses to being in possession of, and driving, a motor vehicle while not having their driver's licence on their person! And yes, folks, you're not mistaken: driving a car while without a driver's licence is illegal. These people are such tools they're willing to confess to one illegality in order to try and co-opt me into perpetrating another.
Excuse me, but I don't believe my name changed to Cletus, nor did I suddenly take to wearing blue overalls and a straw hat, or develop a liking for pork belly and Biblical literalism. Ergo, I'm not a moron, you moron! But, try as I may to dissuade the No IDer from their particular brand of Tom Toolery, they continue to try it on in the vain hope of feeding their nicotine addiction. The only question that remains is: did they take up smoking because they were born congenital tools to begin with; or did smoking, insidiously and by degrees, turn them into idiocy's equivalent of the Bride of Chuckie?
PIN Heads
The next category of tool to plague my life is the PIN Head. These are the people who step up to the counter, usually during a rush period, and, try as they might, can either not remember the PIN number to their cash/credit card, or who repeatedly get it wrong. The end result is a queue that started out long but grows to proportions so large passers-by join it because they think its the line to get into Sexpo, a surprise discount give-away, or both.
It used to be that I had some sympathy for PIN Heads. Afterall, who among us in this digital age of swipe cards, security access, and internet banking isn't plagued by an ever-expanding list of PIN numbers, personal ID codes, and passwords? Afterall, security experts tell us to never use the same PIN number or identification code twice, don't they? But what they don't tell us is how we're supposed to avoid the inevitable embolism that results from trying to keep track of all the numbers, letters, and combinations of same we're required to use in order to prevent ourselves from being ripped of or mistaken for someone we're not. Because we can't, not unless we write them all down - and we're not allowed to do that either, are we????
So, anyhoo, I used to sympathise. But not anymore! Because the thing I've noticed about the PIN Heads is that it's the same people every time! Whether it's the little old lady who isn't functioning properly because she hasn't had her recommended daily dose of G&T, or the party-too-hard twenty-something for whom life outside a rave, five cans of Red Bull, and a blister-pack of little yellow tabs resembles a permanent exercise in somnambulism, the PIN Head can be relied upon to turn up at the most inconvenient moment possible and turn what had been a typically mundane and mind-numbing shift into living hell.
Because, of course, the PIN will strike out twice and then come to the dilemma of trying to decide whether or not to risk a third attempt at getting their PIN number right (and potentially voiding their card) or else go to the ATM and get some cash with which to pay for their purchases. Except, of course, the ATM neds a PIN number in order to dispense the bucks, doesn't it? So that means the PIN Head will just dither in an ever-increasing welter of anxiety, not knowing what to do. Meanwhile, the other customers start getting impatient as the mood in the store deteriorates from bored indifference to hostile aggravation.
Oooooh, you can just feel the love. And you all know at whom it's directed, don't you? WRONG! Not at the PIN Head, but at Yours Truly. As if I had any say in the fact that our customers belong to various sub-species of tool! Believe me, I wish I could restrict our clientele to the members of MENSA. But I don't have that kind of power. I wonder who does...
Wrong Numbers
This particular tool used to be relatively rare, but has now grown to plague proportions. Indeed, so ubiquitous have they become that I'm thinking of calling in the exterminators to deal with the problem. Yes, I am aware that having this variety of tool eradicated will qualify - just - as mass murder; but I'm sure that, given the inestimable benefits to humanity to be derived from their elimination, any trial of Yours Truly would result in triumphant acquittal.
The variety of tool known as Wrong Numbers are characterised by a propensity to confuse the dollar amount on the bowser with the litres readout whenever they put fuel in their car. I know, I know: of course it's absolutely reasonable for anyone to confuse the spinning numbers next to the large "$" sign with the spinning numbers next to the large "litres" sign. I mean, what, afterall, is there to tell you that one indicates the amount of money you're spending, while the other details the amount of fuel you've pumped into the tank? It's not as if there's a large "$" sign for one and a large "lites" sign for the other! Oh, wait, yes, there is...
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr! It's bad enough when this happens once on a shift, because invariably the tool, having confused the cost indicator for the fuel indicator, has also completely ignored the fact that we're now in the 21st century and that a $20 purchase will not result in 33.24 litres of petrol. And so into the shop they blithely waltz, only to discover their error and the fact that they don't have enough money and that - surprise! surprise! - they've left their bloody credit card at home. Which means they then have to fill out a whole lot of paperwork giving their details, offering proof of identity (another occasion on which the No IDer makes an appearance), and committing to making repayment within 24 hours (in default of which they get a nasty phone call from the wallopers). Yours Truly then has to record the whole thing as a drive off, and fill in sundry other bits and pieces in order to assure my employer that I haven't actually recorded a false entry and bunked off with the cash myself.
So, as you can see, it's an administrative nightmare. But when it happens not once, or twice, but three times on the same shift (a shift, incidentally, made all the more wonderful by system failures and the usual procession of dweebs and delinquents who make my life the existential joyfest that it is) you'll appreciate the desperate need I experience to strangle the crap out of the next person who even speaks to me. And this need is made all the more urgent by the fact that the Wrong Numbers tool invariably argues with you, insisting instead that they were looking at the right indicator and that my computer screen must be wrong. Even when I walk them out to the bowser and show them that I'm not making a mistake (achieved by pointing out to them the "$" and "litres" signs and explaining the difference) some of them still insist that they were not mistaken and that the "computer" must have somehow "changed" the amounts!
And that, Your Honour, is when I went berserk and ripped their tonsils out through their nostrils...
Be Seeing You
In many respects, the Be Seeing You tool is the worst one of all, because you don't even get an inkling that you're in their presence until it's far too late. And that's because this variety of tool doesn't expose themself until after they've swiped their card in the reader and try to enter their PIN number. No, I know what you're thinking; but it's not No IDer syndrome again. These tools know their PIN numbers all too well - they just can't see the keypad in order to enter the wretched thing!
No kidding, this is the tool who drives to the store, fills up with petrol, and then can't enter their PIN number because they've left their glasses at home! Yes, let me say that again: these tools have driven their car without being able to see further than the distance between their face and the card reader which is right there in front of them on the counter! Which part of this proposition is the more frightening, I wonder: the fact that these tools get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle to begin with, already a dangerous thing in itself; or that they do so thinking that it's okay to drive said vehicle while possessing less visual capacity than Mr Magoo!
I jest not, ladies and gentlemen, watching these tools as they myopically fumble with the card reader and ask if they've pushed a 9 or entered their account type is more terrifying than the prospect of spending eternity locked in a room with Eddie Maguire, Kyle Sandilands, and Pauline Hanson while endless repeats of Buffy the Tool Slayer play in the background. Because you just know these visually challenged morons are going to repeat this behaviour over and over again. No, it's not just occasional forgetfulness or a "senior's moment" - they're judgementally deficient, permanently!
I'm just waiting for the day when a car comes sailing through the front door and, before I can think: shit! I'm being ram-raided and try and call the cops, some tool sticks his head out the drivers side window and asks if this is the car wash entrance. One certainly wonders what, in their befuddled state, they think traffic lights are: pretty, twinkly lights in the sky, maybe? I tell you, it gives me the shudders...
So there are, another run down of the weird and wonderful world of tools who walk into a convenience store on a regular basis. And it doesn't end there. But that's a rant for another day...
Talk to you soon,
BB
Thought for the Day: Hell is other people. (Jean-Paul Sartre)
Until now, that is. I, dear reader, have had a gut full. And it's not just because I'm writing this at the end of a long and tiring day that has left me exhausted and cranky. On the contrary, I wake up exhausted and cranky, so that's no excuse. Neither have I lost my instincts toward the charitable and decided to become a born-again bastard; there are plenty of people out there who will suggest that I have been doing that my whole life long.
No, the plain old simple truth is that I'm fed up and I've had enough. The tools have worn me down; my patience is at an end, kaput, done, gone. I'm as mad as hell, and I've decided that attack is the best form of defence; so I'm going to name and shame. Well, I'm going to describe and shame, if you want to know the complete truth. I'm going to tell you all about the kinds of tools who walk into the store, and who blight my shifts with their ineffable toolishness.
So if you find yourself recognising yourself in the following descriptions, I have only one thing to say: shame on you! Well, okay, two things: shame on you; and sod off. I don't want to see your tool-benighted faces any more. I've only got nine or so months to go before I get out of having to do this job, and I'd like to pass it with an absolute minimum of frustration, annoyance, and general f*ing about caused by your toolish selves. And by absolute minimum, I mean none at all. So pay close attention to what follows; you may be in it. And if you are, you'd better stay far, far away from me!
No IDers
Naturally, being responsible corporate citizens, the multinational corporation by whom I am ultimately employed abides by Australian law and declines to sell cigarettes and smoking-related products to persons under the age of 18. Indeed, its sales staff are required to ask for ID when they have reason to believe the putative purchaser may be under the legal age. And so it comes as no surprise that Yours Truly has his fair share of annoyingly baby-faced adults from whom he must ask ID because they look under age; that, and the obvious under agers who are just trying it on because they think that wearing a shirt with a company logo embroidered in it automatically makes you a moron.
It is from both categories that the No IDers spring, and it's difficult to decide which of the two are more pathetic. From the legally-aged but disgustingly youthful brigade you often get protestations that they are over-age, and besides, they've always bought cigarettes here and they've never been asked for ID before. They might be right on both accounts; but the thing is, once ID has been asked for, it must be produced before the sale can proceed. Yes, sir, it might be bullshit, but it's the law. Yes, madam, I know you may be old enough to have children, but around here the age at which people start having kiddies is also somewhat below the legal age of consent. And anyhoo, you might have previously purchased your daily dose of throat cancer from this store, but you haven't purchased it from me. And I'm the one asking: so cough up or step off.
The under agers usually try to bluff their way out of the situation - yes, mate, I am for f*ing real - and then try and get one of their mates who happens to be above age to use their ID. Except that, once it is explained to aforesaid mate that since he/she is the one producing the ID, he/she is the one who'll have to pay for the cigarettes (and once again, yes mate, I am for f*ing real), they baulk at the near king's ransom it costs to indulge the nicotine habit these days and tell their under age mate to take a hike. Which usually results in a mouthful of deleted expletives heading my way from the frustrated law breaker; but hey, what the hell do I care?
But the thing that elevates (or should that be relegates?) No IDers from annoying inconveniences to outright tools is the little ritual they then perform in yet another attempt to get the cigarettes without having to show proof of age. Having been busted with no ID, they proceed to go out to their cars, where they make an unconvincing attempt to look as though they're going through their glove box, looking under the seats, and generally investigating every nook and cranny in search of the missing ID. How unconvincing is this display, you wonder? Put it this way: my attempts to look as though I give a toss about customer service are more convincing!
Anyhoo, having wasted another five minutes, the No IDer then returns to the store and explains that they must have left their ID at home. In other words, they expect me to say: Oh, that changes everything! Of course you can have some cigarettes! Except, of course, that I don't, much to their dismay and puzzlement. But here's the interesting point: having confessed that they don't have ID with which to buy cigarettes, the No IDer then confesses to being in possession of, and driving, a motor vehicle while not having their driver's licence on their person! And yes, folks, you're not mistaken: driving a car while without a driver's licence is illegal. These people are such tools they're willing to confess to one illegality in order to try and co-opt me into perpetrating another.
Excuse me, but I don't believe my name changed to Cletus, nor did I suddenly take to wearing blue overalls and a straw hat, or develop a liking for pork belly and Biblical literalism. Ergo, I'm not a moron, you moron! But, try as I may to dissuade the No IDer from their particular brand of Tom Toolery, they continue to try it on in the vain hope of feeding their nicotine addiction. The only question that remains is: did they take up smoking because they were born congenital tools to begin with; or did smoking, insidiously and by degrees, turn them into idiocy's equivalent of the Bride of Chuckie?
PIN Heads
The next category of tool to plague my life is the PIN Head. These are the people who step up to the counter, usually during a rush period, and, try as they might, can either not remember the PIN number to their cash/credit card, or who repeatedly get it wrong. The end result is a queue that started out long but grows to proportions so large passers-by join it because they think its the line to get into Sexpo, a surprise discount give-away, or both.
It used to be that I had some sympathy for PIN Heads. Afterall, who among us in this digital age of swipe cards, security access, and internet banking isn't plagued by an ever-expanding list of PIN numbers, personal ID codes, and passwords? Afterall, security experts tell us to never use the same PIN number or identification code twice, don't they? But what they don't tell us is how we're supposed to avoid the inevitable embolism that results from trying to keep track of all the numbers, letters, and combinations of same we're required to use in order to prevent ourselves from being ripped of or mistaken for someone we're not. Because we can't, not unless we write them all down - and we're not allowed to do that either, are we????
So, anyhoo, I used to sympathise. But not anymore! Because the thing I've noticed about the PIN Heads is that it's the same people every time! Whether it's the little old lady who isn't functioning properly because she hasn't had her recommended daily dose of G&T, or the party-too-hard twenty-something for whom life outside a rave, five cans of Red Bull, and a blister-pack of little yellow tabs resembles a permanent exercise in somnambulism, the PIN Head can be relied upon to turn up at the most inconvenient moment possible and turn what had been a typically mundane and mind-numbing shift into living hell.
Because, of course, the PIN will strike out twice and then come to the dilemma of trying to decide whether or not to risk a third attempt at getting their PIN number right (and potentially voiding their card) or else go to the ATM and get some cash with which to pay for their purchases. Except, of course, the ATM neds a PIN number in order to dispense the bucks, doesn't it? So that means the PIN Head will just dither in an ever-increasing welter of anxiety, not knowing what to do. Meanwhile, the other customers start getting impatient as the mood in the store deteriorates from bored indifference to hostile aggravation.
Oooooh, you can just feel the love. And you all know at whom it's directed, don't you? WRONG! Not at the PIN Head, but at Yours Truly. As if I had any say in the fact that our customers belong to various sub-species of tool! Believe me, I wish I could restrict our clientele to the members of MENSA. But I don't have that kind of power. I wonder who does...
Wrong Numbers
This particular tool used to be relatively rare, but has now grown to plague proportions. Indeed, so ubiquitous have they become that I'm thinking of calling in the exterminators to deal with the problem. Yes, I am aware that having this variety of tool eradicated will qualify - just - as mass murder; but I'm sure that, given the inestimable benefits to humanity to be derived from their elimination, any trial of Yours Truly would result in triumphant acquittal.
The variety of tool known as Wrong Numbers are characterised by a propensity to confuse the dollar amount on the bowser with the litres readout whenever they put fuel in their car. I know, I know: of course it's absolutely reasonable for anyone to confuse the spinning numbers next to the large "$" sign with the spinning numbers next to the large "litres" sign. I mean, what, afterall, is there to tell you that one indicates the amount of money you're spending, while the other details the amount of fuel you've pumped into the tank? It's not as if there's a large "$" sign for one and a large "lites" sign for the other! Oh, wait, yes, there is...
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr! It's bad enough when this happens once on a shift, because invariably the tool, having confused the cost indicator for the fuel indicator, has also completely ignored the fact that we're now in the 21st century and that a $20 purchase will not result in 33.24 litres of petrol. And so into the shop they blithely waltz, only to discover their error and the fact that they don't have enough money and that - surprise! surprise! - they've left their bloody credit card at home. Which means they then have to fill out a whole lot of paperwork giving their details, offering proof of identity (another occasion on which the No IDer makes an appearance), and committing to making repayment within 24 hours (in default of which they get a nasty phone call from the wallopers). Yours Truly then has to record the whole thing as a drive off, and fill in sundry other bits and pieces in order to assure my employer that I haven't actually recorded a false entry and bunked off with the cash myself.
So, as you can see, it's an administrative nightmare. But when it happens not once, or twice, but three times on the same shift (a shift, incidentally, made all the more wonderful by system failures and the usual procession of dweebs and delinquents who make my life the existential joyfest that it is) you'll appreciate the desperate need I experience to strangle the crap out of the next person who even speaks to me. And this need is made all the more urgent by the fact that the Wrong Numbers tool invariably argues with you, insisting instead that they were looking at the right indicator and that my computer screen must be wrong. Even when I walk them out to the bowser and show them that I'm not making a mistake (achieved by pointing out to them the "$" and "litres" signs and explaining the difference) some of them still insist that they were not mistaken and that the "computer" must have somehow "changed" the amounts!
And that, Your Honour, is when I went berserk and ripped their tonsils out through their nostrils...
Be Seeing You
In many respects, the Be Seeing You tool is the worst one of all, because you don't even get an inkling that you're in their presence until it's far too late. And that's because this variety of tool doesn't expose themself until after they've swiped their card in the reader and try to enter their PIN number. No, I know what you're thinking; but it's not No IDer syndrome again. These tools know their PIN numbers all too well - they just can't see the keypad in order to enter the wretched thing!
No kidding, this is the tool who drives to the store, fills up with petrol, and then can't enter their PIN number because they've left their glasses at home! Yes, let me say that again: these tools have driven their car without being able to see further than the distance between their face and the card reader which is right there in front of them on the counter! Which part of this proposition is the more frightening, I wonder: the fact that these tools get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle to begin with, already a dangerous thing in itself; or that they do so thinking that it's okay to drive said vehicle while possessing less visual capacity than Mr Magoo!
I jest not, ladies and gentlemen, watching these tools as they myopically fumble with the card reader and ask if they've pushed a 9 or entered their account type is more terrifying than the prospect of spending eternity locked in a room with Eddie Maguire, Kyle Sandilands, and Pauline Hanson while endless repeats of Buffy the Tool Slayer play in the background. Because you just know these visually challenged morons are going to repeat this behaviour over and over again. No, it's not just occasional forgetfulness or a "senior's moment" - they're judgementally deficient, permanently!
I'm just waiting for the day when a car comes sailing through the front door and, before I can think: shit! I'm being ram-raided and try and call the cops, some tool sticks his head out the drivers side window and asks if this is the car wash entrance. One certainly wonders what, in their befuddled state, they think traffic lights are: pretty, twinkly lights in the sky, maybe? I tell you, it gives me the shudders...
So there are, another run down of the weird and wonderful world of tools who walk into a convenience store on a regular basis. And it doesn't end there. But that's a rant for another day...
Talk to you soon,
BB
Thought for the Day: Hell is other people. (Jean-Paul Sartre)
Monday, January 25, 2010
There's a Moose Loose in the Hoose
I have a confession to make: this week, I have been killing other living beings.
Now, before you reach for your mobile phones to start calling the police, let me clarify. The living beings I have been killing are mice.
This is the second infestation of mice we've had in the last six months. It's a matter of disagreement between my Dearly Beloved and I as to their origin: she insists that there's been a mice plague this year and the little buggers are sneaking into the house by the various devious ways known only to mice; whereas I am convinced that we've been transporting them to our house via the tons of stuff we've lugged from her mother's house now that her mum has moved into a retirement home. My conviction is sustained by the fact that mum-in-law lived on a semi-rural property with plenty of acreage and lots of long grass and sheds - in other words, all the things that mice love. And there has, in fact, been plenty of mouse-related activity at her house of late. Moreover, both appearances of mice in our humble abode have coincided with occasions when we have transported stuff from MIL's digs to ours. Until we started doing so, we had no trouble with mice at all; now we've had them twice in 12 months. QED.
But how, I hear you ask, have they ended up at casa nostra? Quite simply, the same way that mice stow away in ships' holds and planes' cargo bays and cars' luggage boots. On at least two occasions when we've carried things from MIL's place to ours, we've also carried mice, secreted away in whatever nooks and crannies mice can find in bags, containers, furnishings and fittings. And once at our place, they've fanned out to locate all the wall-spaces, skirting-board gaps, and hidden thoroughfares our little home has to offer.
So...we've had rodents in our nest, and it has fallen to Yours Truly to exterminate the unwelcome guests. Not that I volunteered for the job, you understand. It's just that my Dearly Beloved has been so catatonic with fear that I've simply had no choice.
Actually, catatonic is the wrong word. Hysterical would be a more accurate description. Except hysteria doesn't quite capture the paroxysms of screaming, jumping-on-the-furniture, climbing-up-the-walls frenzy that is evoked in my Dearly Beloved at even the hint of a suspicion that she's seen a mouse. Indeed, she doesn't need to actually see a mouse - just catching sight of a drift of dog hair wafting across the floor is enough to send her spiralling into a whirlpool of panic that makes an anxiety attack look like the acme of calm serenity.
No kidding, I always thought that old stereotype of women standing on the kitchen table and shrieking their lungs out at the first sign of a mouse was just a tired old sexist caricature from 50s TV shows. Little did I know that the spirit of Bewitched is alive and well in my life-partner!
Anyhoo, this little black duck has been stuck with the job of dealing with our unwelcome house guests. Not that I was anticipating much trouble. A few mouse traps, some bait, and WHAM! Dead mice, solved problem.
Not so fast, smart guy! No matter what I tried, I couldn't catch any mice. Which didn't mean the cunning little sods were staying away from the baits - they were stealing them without tripping the traps! Didn't matter what I tried - cheese, ham, peanut butter - the furry blighters were just waltzing up to the bait trays and swiping whatever was on offer. Smorgasbord for mice!
I was explaining all this to my brother and bemoaning the fate that had me encountering the world's first species of mice with an IQ, when he laughed and suggested I try Cheetos Cheese and Bacon Balls. I looked at him like he'd just turned into an alien who'd slipped through a crack in the space-time continuum and landed unexpectedly in my lounge-room; but he insisted that he'd had experience with the anti-rodent capacity of Cheetos and assured me of their efficacy.
Well, it's a
n understatement to say I was reluctant to try this proffered solution, especially since all my previous baits had been the result of "expert" advice from various people who assured me of the mouse-killing power of their favoured lure. But with the mice becoming so bold as to start making appearances while we were still awake, and with my Dearly Beloved's caterwauling becoming ever more ear-splitting as a consequence, I was desperate. So the next time I went within cooee of a store, I grabbed a bag of Cheetos and set my traps.
Well, shut my mouth and stuff me full of chitlins if they didn't work a treat! Within 48 hours, every last one was defunctus est. And this has happened twice now: both times the mice have appeared the Cheetos have cleaned them up faster than you could say bubonic plague. I'd be sitting in the lounge watching the TV and there would be this distant snap followed by a quiet and short-lived thrashing. I'd wander over to one of the traps to discover a mouse wedged by the trap arm in the cold embrace of rodent death. No mouse could resist the Cheetos; no mouse could escape the fate held in store for them.
Now, before you reach for your mobile phones to start calling the police, let me clarify. The living beings I have been killing are mice.
This is the second infestation of mice we've had in the last six months. It's a matter of disagreement between my Dearly Beloved and I as to their origin: she insists that there's been a mice plague this year and the little buggers are sneaking into the house by the various devious ways known only to mice; whereas I am convinced that we've been transporting them to our house via the tons of stuff we've lugged from her mother's house now that her mum has moved into a retirement home. My conviction is sustained by the fact that mum-in-law lived on a semi-rural property with plenty of acreage and lots of long grass and sheds - in other words, all the things that mice love. And there has, in fact, been plenty of mouse-related activity at her house of late. Moreover, both appearances of mice in our humble abode have coincided with occasions when we have transported stuff from MIL's digs to ours. Until we started doing so, we had no trouble with mice at all; now we've had them twice in 12 months. QED.
But how, I hear you ask, have they ended up at casa nostra? Quite simply, the same way that mice stow away in ships' holds and planes' cargo bays and cars' luggage boots. On at least two occasions when we've carried things from MIL's place to ours, we've also carried mice, secreted away in whatever nooks and crannies mice can find in bags, containers, furnishings and fittings. And once at our place, they've fanned out to locate all the wall-spaces, skirting-board gaps, and hidden thoroughfares our little home has to offer.
So...we've had rodents in our nest, and it has fallen to Yours Truly to exterminate the unwelcome guests. Not that I volunteered for the job, you understand. It's just that my Dearly Beloved has been so catatonic with fear that I've simply had no choice.
Actually, catatonic is the wrong word. Hysterical would be a more accurate description. Except hysteria doesn't quite capture the paroxysms of screaming, jumping-on-the-furniture, climbing-up-the-walls frenzy that is evoked in my Dearly Beloved at even the hint of a suspicion that she's seen a mouse. Indeed, she doesn't need to actually see a mouse - just catching sight of a drift of dog hair wafting across the floor is enough to send her spiralling into a whirlpool of panic that makes an anxiety attack look like the acme of calm serenity.
No kidding, I always thought that old stereotype of women standing on the kitchen table and shrieking their lungs out at the first sign of a mouse was just a tired old sexist caricature from 50s TV shows. Little did I know that the spirit of Bewitched is alive and well in my life-partner!
Anyhoo, this little black duck has been stuck with the job of dealing with our unwelcome house guests. Not that I was anticipating much trouble. A few mouse traps, some bait, and WHAM! Dead mice, solved problem.
Not so fast, smart guy! No matter what I tried, I couldn't catch any mice. Which didn't mean the cunning little sods were staying away from the baits - they were stealing them without tripping the traps! Didn't matter what I tried - cheese, ham, peanut butter - the furry blighters were just waltzing up to the bait trays and swiping whatever was on offer. Smorgasbord for mice!
I was explaining all this to my brother and bemoaning the fate that had me encountering the world's first species of mice with an IQ, when he laughed and suggested I try Cheetos Cheese and Bacon Balls. I looked at him like he'd just turned into an alien who'd slipped through a crack in the space-time continuum and landed unexpectedly in my lounge-room; but he insisted that he'd had experience with the anti-rodent capacity of Cheetos and assured me of their efficacy.
Well, it's a
n understatement to say I was reluctant to try this proffered solution, especially since all my previous baits had been the result of "expert" advice from various people who assured me of the mouse-killing power of their favoured lure. But with the mice becoming so bold as to start making appearances while we were still awake, and with my Dearly Beloved's caterwauling becoming ever more ear-splitting as a consequence, I was desperate. So the next time I went within cooee of a store, I grabbed a bag of Cheetos and set my traps.Well, shut my mouth and stuff me full of chitlins if they didn't work a treat! Within 48 hours, every last one was defunctus est. And this has happened twice now: both times the mice have appeared the Cheetos have cleaned them up faster than you could say bubonic plague. I'd be sitting in the lounge watching the TV and there would be this distant snap followed by a quiet and short-lived thrashing. I'd wander over to one of the traps to discover a mouse wedged by the trap arm in the cold embrace of rodent death. No mouse could resist the Cheetos; no mouse could escape the fate held in store for them.
I'll confess that I was delighted with the results, not least because it put my Dearly Beloved at ease. But I'll also admit that there was an aspect of me that was anything but elated to be killing mice. As mice go, these guys I was slaughtering were actually handsome little chaps, with soft light brown fur and small dark eyes. I could see why mice feature so often as positive characters in children's literature; there was nothing obviously nasty about these mice - as I say, they were handsome little chaps.
But perhaps the most poignant moment occurred on the occasion when I heard that sharp, significant snap! one day and went to investigate. On the kitchen floor lay a little mouse; instead of being pinned by the bar and having his spine broken, he'd tried to pull out of the way and been brained by the bar as its swung downward in its deathly arc. He lay on his side, a small halo of blood around his head - a sad, touching little sight. In that moment, the immediacy of death bore down on me; it occurred to me that we humans are just like mice, not knowing that we play within the jaws of a trap that could wipe us out in an instant. We have the power of death over mice; other things - sometimes even mice - have the power of death over us.
But now the second batch have been duly exterminated, the thing that puzzles me is the amount of mouse dirt these critters leave behind. I mean, they must be constantly shitting themselves to judge by the amount of crap they leave in their wake. Mind you, the sound of my Dearly Beloved's screaming would be enough to turn a commando's bowels to water; maybe the mice just copped an earful of her ear-splitting screeching and it had a permanent effect on their innards. In any event, clearing up the mess afterwards is a worse job than prising their bodies out of the traps and dumping the corpses in the garbage bin!
Anyhoo, we are mice-free for the time being - pending, that is, the transport of any more stuff from MIL's house to ours, no matter what my Dearly Beloved says! I just hope that's the last we see of them, too; I can think of much better uses to which to put Cheetos than feeding them to mice.
Talk to you soon,
BB
Quote of the Day: Hunting - the most effective way of getting rid of vermin, provided a sufficient number of them fall off their horses and break their necks. (Hugh Leonard)
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