Smokey the Magnificent

Christmas is approaching (fools), and I have begun angsting about gifts. A while back I discovered a rather lovely rhyme - purportedly from the Victorian era, although I doubt it - designed to make the process easier. It goes thusly:

Something they want

Something they need

Something to wear

And something to read.

Gosh, I thought. That’s nifty. And I vowed to do it. But it turns out, it’s not as easy as it looks. For instance, do craft supplies for the snortlepig come under Want or Need? She doesn’t, as far as I know, actively want anything for Christmas; I don’t think she’s figured out the concept of a wish list yet. So does it count if it’s something I know she would want? Does it break the whole principle to divide, say, Something They Need into four separate gifts - say, crayons, chalk, stickers and glue? Does the poem include Christmas stocking presents, or exclude them? What if Something She Needs is also Something To Wear, and possibly Something She Wants as well?

Pottering around the internet, I discovered that mothers more cunning than I have wrestled with this selfsame problem, and overcome it. Basically, they cheat by changing the poem. So a mother who has already planned to give her child, for instance, a handmade tote bag, a toy that goes ping, a zoo membership and a bag of cocaine will simply justify the purchases by altering the poem to read:

Something handmade

Something bought

Something to do

And something to snort.

Or, if I were to retroactively justify various presents bought for Helpdesk Man over the years - a whiskey glass with a moustache etched on it, a hip flask, a wallet and some hand-embroidered manly hankies  - I’d make it something like this:

Something unintentionally hipster

Something from which to swig

Something made outta the dried skin of a dead lamb

And something not very big.

No Shakespeare, but it gets the job done. And y’know, the existence of this literary form this really sheds some light on the origins of the poem “Three Rings for the Elven-Kings under the sky”; don’t you think?

A few days ago I babysat two preschoolers, while their mother was gallivanting off to hospital with a breast abscess. It was a strikingly traumatic experience. Not that anything happened - we made coconut macaroons and Mother Please Don’t Die of a Breast Abscess cards, and ate toasted sandwiches and carrot sticks for lunch. But for the angst and turmoil it cost my scabby soul, I’d rather have washed lepers in Namibia for a year, or saved an uninteresting species of beetle through a letter-writing campaign.

Other people’s kids are scary. I have thunk on it, and here is why.

1. Watching other people’s children brings all my insecurities to light. Children are judgy little smeggers, prone to looking at you with withering xenophobia when you inform them that you do not stock avocadoes, are unfamiliar with the Wiggles’ oeuvre, or cannot provide them with a Thomas two-handled cup. You can just see them thinking “What kind of one-horse Mickey Mouse operation is this, in which I have to wipe my face on a cloth of the wrong colour?” Or “Off-brand peanut butter? Spare me.” Their mother, they clearly think, is far more capable than myself; and they’re probably right, so after about half an hour I start to think so too and find myself hoping they won’t ask to see the state of my linen closet or tax returns. And the worst part is, whereas with an adult one could conceivably salvage one’s pride by saying snootily “No, I don’t keep that in the pantry; it has nitrates in it, you know”, or “We try to stay away from licenced character toys”, basic decency prevents one from explaining to children that their Mummy probably doesn’t care about their gut flora, but I do.

Especially because I don’t, really.

2. I’m always worried they’re going to drown or commit self-immolation on my watch. It only takes a second, you know. The other day the snortlepig was sitting next to me on the couch, quietly eating scrambled eggs, when she suddenly said in resigned tones, “Mummy, the fork went in my eye”. Not dreadfully far in, apparently, because she just blinked for a bit and went back to having her eggs; but still. And should something dire occur, it is not just my negligence that will be scorned (ie. “You let little Johnny play in the Iron Maiden?”), but also my medical care (”His arm was off and didn’t give him any Rescue Remedy?”). This frightens me.

3. Bodily fluids. I’m agin them. One can be inured to one’s own child’s faecal matter, in much the same way as one can become inoculated to the grease-borne pathogens of one’s local fish and chip shop; but substitute a strange child (or deep-fried won ton) and the results are too ghastly to contemplate. My usual method is to avoid the issue until the parent comes back, and then lamely say “I think I might have smelled something before”, in the hopes that the parent will believe that the bulging, reeking nappy was filled just as they pulled into the driveway. Actually, it works quite well - at least, they don’t complain, after all I just watched their kids - but it is a cowardly move, and unworthy of me.

4. You know how some people emit a brisk, no-nonsense vibe that commands respect from the young? I do not have it. I have more of a wimpish, craven aura that broadcasts “I only realised last year that Megan was mocking me that time when we were nine”. (She could hear me after all. It was a revelation. I think it broke Helpdesk Man’s little heart when I told him. He looked at me as one might look at a marsupial that was not only crippled, but the last of its kind.) What is one to do (to take an example from the other day) when a child throws all the carrot sticks on the floor, or (to take an example from thirty seconds after that) starts up a shouting match with her brother while the baby is trying to sleep in the next room? I don’t know. I suppose I could bite off the tip of my own finger and just silently start drawing tally marks on the wall in blood, maintaining eye contact all the while; but it seems a bit subtle for the preschool crowd. Seven to eight, certainly.

The amazing thing is, I know people who are not like this. I know mothers who say things like “What’s one more?”; staunch women who say “Can I take the kids?” without their eyes begging “Please no”. It fascinates me. But then, they probably clean their guttering every six months as well. Freaks.

I just discovered an awesome webpage. It is, somewhat inexplicably, hosted by ecclesia.org; it is titled simply “Handy Hints”; and it is mostly gems of wisdom along the lines of “Prevents brooms from slipping when you prop them against a wall. Cut off the finger of an old rubber glove and slide over the handle”; sooth stuff, mostly. But then suddenly, in the “Insects and Animals” section, underneath “Prevent flying insects. Hang fresh bunch of stinging nettles to front of door”… there is this.

“Outrun Crocodile/Alligator. Run in a zig-zag pattern, and not just in one straight direction. When making left or right turns, the crocodile/alligator has to come to a crawl to move in that direction because of its short legs.”

This isn’t an isolated tip, mind you. The same section includes advice on Elephant Attack (”If one runs after you, and tries to stomp you, get out of their line of site. For example, if you are around some trees, hide behind a tree. If it comes after you, zig zag to another tree.”), Bee Attack (”If you are being stung by a swarm of bees, don’t breathe. Bees are attracted to carbon dioxide.” But repelled by the STENCH OF DEATH, presumably?) and, most handily of all, Shark Attack:

“Do not swim away, because sharks are attracted to erratic movements. When a man swims away from a shark, it looks to the shark like he is struggling, squirming, and panicking, and the shark will attack! Also, do not play dead. A shark has all the senses we have, plus more, and a shark will know that you are not dead, but will be confused why you are not acting like you should be. So, it will get curious and may start to knaw at you.”

That’s knaw with a K, folks. If I ever become a fascist dictator, I’m going to make that the official spelling. Dissidents will be forced to breathe at bees.

Okay, I have a question.

If you are dining in a restaurant and notice a severed human finger in your dish, is it illegal to eat it?

See, I don’t know whether cannibalism per se is actually against the law. Kill-your-own, yes (well, presumably); desecration of the dead, ehh, probably. But if it’s already pre-desecrated, and you’ve paid for it…?

I asked Helpdesk Man, and he did not know. He thought maybe you could be charged with obstruction of justice, because the finger could be evidence in a crime. But I think that a normal, un-cynical restaurant-goer would be justified in assuming that it was severed accidentally; I’m sure the number of criminal amputations or corpse-dismemberments is fairly low compared to your run-of-the-mill ham-slicing accident. I mean, if you come across toenails on your carpet and sweep them up, and it turns out later that a burglar broke into your house and clipped his toenails, you wouldn’t get clapped in the clink for destroying evidence; surely?

After some consideration, I can only think of two potentially litigating issues.

1. If the finger were obviously recently severed - like, it was still spurting blood - and it was nestled in a salad or better yet, a sorbet, so that its chances of reattachment were fairly good (as opposed to, say, being slow-braised alongside a lamb shank), consuming or even withholding it could be considered tantamount to kidnap. To analogise: if you came across a car accident in which someone’s foot was severed, and you grabbed it and waved it around and said “Ha ha” and ran off, I’m fairly sure you’d be arrested. But then. perhaps this is more like finding the foot in a ditch by the road, in which case actually returning it could be perceived as supererogatory… legally speaking, I mean. So perhaps if the maitre’d clapped his hands and shouted “Anyone got a finger in his moussaka?”, you’d be arrested for cramming it hastily in your mouth and saying “Nope”; but you would not be punished for failing to venture off your own bat back with it to the kitchens, where I hear there can be strong language.

2. In all seriousness, I think it’s possible the Treaty of Waitangi applies here.

Thoughts? And be honest: if you found the finger in a $200 entree at a five-star restaurant, how many of you would put on your sophisticated faces and just go with it?

This post is only for the eyes of those* who commented on the last one. The rest of you: clearly you have failed to grasp my awesome pwnage of the sonnet form. Go back and read it again… peons.

1. Miles has awesome abilities. According to the smell of his lone tuft of hair, he has mastered the art of being sick onto his own head.

2. If your lover was beheaded in front of you by a savage madman, which bit would you cradle in your arms as you wept? I think I’d go for the body, even though it seems sort of counter-intuitive, just because my sense of decorum would probably fail at the vital moment and I wouldn’t want Sven’s** last ebbing image to be of me wearing a horrified smirk.

3. I have decided to become a medical man, just so I can waggle my fingers archly at patients and say “lobes”. Try it. “Mr Smith, I’m sorry to tell you that you have a tumour in your [waggles fingers] lobes.” “Inform the Countess that she will live until the season ends, but we will have to remove her [waggles fingers] lobes.”

*Mother.

**I mean Helpdesk Man.

***Probably isn’t though, honestly.

****To the disappointment of the snortlepig, who, upon being gently told about her Grandpa’s impending operation, simply responded “Will they use scissors?”. (”Do they gots trolleys?” would probably have been her next question, but she lost interest. Curiously, upon meeting my great-grandmother today for presumably the first time in her tiny memory, the question she most wanted answered was “Do you got a red wall or a white one?”, which threw said relative a bit. She rallied, though. White, apparently.)

Shall I compare thee to the snortlepig?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate
See’ng my clean dress (when she was small, not big)
With a thin coat of puke she would distemper it.

My first pig’s face was yellow like a fright
But no such jaundice see I in your cheeks
And, being changed, you kick with great delight
Cheerful and sweet, despite your poop, which reeks.

She screamed; you sleep. She wailed; you gurgle. She
-Though arguably cuter in the face-
Pooped only once a month (from neck to knee)
Your active bowels denote the Master Race.

But if you turn out bad (and I suspect it)
My abdomen shall sue you. ‘Cause you wrecked it.

Last week Miles pooped while having a bath with me and the pig. I’m not sure what was more depressing - finding myself suddenly in a poop-infested tub, or realising that I didn’t actually care that much. Come parenthood, “It’s only vomit” is a necessary attitude to survival; “It’s only urine” is passable; but when you get to the stage of thinking “It’s only poop”, you have crossed some sort of line. You will probably never wear mascara again.

Also, I have two questions.

1. If you were a ten-year-old child, would you rather lose both legs and your sense of smell, or both parents? I asked an impromptu* panel that, and the results were.. interesting.

2. Would you willingly die that all the fish might live?

*Reluctant is probably a better word.

Helpdesk Man and I have been experiencing a bout of penury. Ever the helpful spouse, I got out Living Off the Smell of an Oily Rag in New Zealand from the library and read a bunch of thrift blogs. The results have been largely unhelpful.

I don’t know what I expected, really. There are only so many variations on the save-more spend-less theme, and I’ve been baking my own bread and using cloth nappies (not personally, you understand; for the pigs) since the dawn of time anyway. I think I was secretly hoping to find a website that suggested “Look in the linen cupboard; I popped a tenner in it last time I was around”; but nope.

Tips, I have found, can be categorised thusly:

The Privileged: “Go out for lunch instead of dinner. Share an entree. If you’re really worried about paying your beach house decorator, order water”. Any helpful suggestions to sell one’s boat or to eliminate 200 or so television channels also come under this category.

The Naive: “Maybe your mother could watch the children while you take on a part-time job”. “Try asking your landlord for a reduction in the rent”. (I’ve considered ringing mine and saying “Will you charge us half-rent if we actually keep the place clean?”; the pig sometimes bargains this way and, while it shouldn’t work, sometimes it does.) “Knit potholders to sell at craft fairs”. “Perhaps a friend will let you house-sit for a few months”. “Why not dust off that novel you’ve been working on?” “Start a blog. You can make a lot of money, like Pioneer Woman!” Etc.

The Bleedin’ Obvious: “Buy cheaper cuts of meat”. Well, by gum. You mean to say they cost less than the expensive cuts?

The Frankly Sad: “To save on water, stand in the shower and turn it on for 10 seconds to wet yourself; better yet, dampen up by using the dregs of water from glasses people have left lying around the lounge. Turn shower off. Tip a packet of Borax over your head and rub in vigorously; this way if you lie around the kitchen at night you can also deter roaches. Borax doesn’t clean body odour very effectively, so you’ll need to use a little elbow grease, but that’s okay; it will save that costly gym membership! Turn the shower on again for 20 seconds to wash off the blood and Borax. If you keep a bucket over the plughole, you can use the runoff as a nutritious soup. Turn the shower off again. Using this method, my husband was able to save 60 gallons of water a day, before he shot himself.”

I also found a tip by a woman who swore you could make stew by putting boiling water, chopped veggies and bits of meat into a thermos. I doubt it.

The Vaguely Illegal: These tips involve saving pennies at the expense of by-laws or one’s fellow-man: in other words, cheating. One should, apparently, check the stamps on all one’s mail, so that if the cancellation stamp missed its mark, one can cackle with glee and go write a letter to one’s aunt, on The Man. Similar tips include dumpster diving (which I would totally do, incidentally); selling home-baked goods in defiance of food health and safety laws; pretending to one’s electricity provider that a rival electricity provider offered one a better deal, and if the first electricity provider does not top that deal one will pack one’s toaster and be gone; and contesting perfectly valid speeding tickets.

The Stanky: I probably shouldn’t get too precious about these ones, because let’s face it, I do use homemade deodorant and haven’t looked shampoo in the face in years. But I did come across one tip in which a lady told us how she collects roadkill, places it on a rack in her yard with a tray underneath, and as the maggots drop off, feeds them to her chickens. And well, for the record, I don’t do that.

The Brag: These are not in fact tips. These are unreproducible, jealousy-inducing anecdotes about someone’s sweet haul from the thrift store/dump/wealthy neighbor. “I enter competitions, and the other day I won $500 worth of free skincare products just by writing a sonnet to the T-zone”. “I found a $50 bill in the carpark”. “Today in the Salvation Army I found a set of limited-edition Disneyland teaspoons, a Moby wrap that was only slightly puked on, and a ten-dollar bill in the pocket of an old fur coat”. “I attended a taxidermy closing-down auction and got all my Christmas presents for a steal”.

The Ideological: Sometimes the tips themselves aren’t bad, but one is left with the distinct impression that the tipster isn’t so much wanting to save you money as make you a better person. “I became a vegetarian for financial reasons and my colon has never been lither. Best of all, I’m not participating in the brutal slaughter of our cloven-footed friends; their blood does not spurt in my dreams. You too can be murder-free for the price of a cube of tofurkey”. “Cloth diapering isn’t just better for my wallet; every child in disposables creates a pile of dirty nappies as tall as the Empire State Building, which will stand tall long after his meagre achievements have been forgotten and his phthlate-ridden corpse has festered under a parking lot”. “I started eating only rice on Mondays to empathise with the plight of the Haitians. Not only do I save a ton, but it gives me a spiritual connection to these people who I bet you don’t care about, because you don’t eat rice on Mondays. Do you? Do you care about the Haitians? Say it with RICE!”

There are doubtless other categories. After perusing these for a few days, we were still not rich. I decided to write my own list of frugality tips. Of course, just like building your own home (which the Oily Rag book blithely suggests you do if you are, and I quote, “handy with a hammer”), it turns out it’s not as easy as it looks. After much thought, I have come up with only one tip, and I give it to you now.

CHEAP ENTERTAINMENT: Arson.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. Donations gratefully accepted.

1. The snortlepig has invented a new word: strinky. After some investigation we discovered it refers to anything wrinkly, corrugated or ridged; raisins, for example, or one’s fingums upon emerging from the bathtub. Or Morgan Freeman.

Also strinky.

The pig being a minor, I give the Internet this word on her behalf. So next time you’re inspecting the roof of a shanty house or the texture of a fine corduroy… or Morgan Freeman… you can be all “Hmm. Strinky.”

2. Today Flatmate Man left a lone sausage festering in the frypan, so Helpdesk Man and I tied a ribbon round it and left it on his pillow. He was less appreciative than you’d think.

3. The weather is unseasonably dry. Helpdesk Man’s lips have gone all strinky.

4. I have just spent the better part of an hour trying to take a photo of Tiny Miles. It is harder than you would think. Firstly, my photography skills are non-existent and I was sitting in a room with the curtains drawn; secondly, I had to hold Tiny Miles up with the one hand to prevent him plummeting to his doom; and thirdly, every time I held the camera up he would cease his adorable smiles and stare at the camera with the fixed intentness of a magpie; and that was not attractive. Also, sad to say, he has inherited the family lack of photogenicitude. In real life he is toothsome and comely, a marvel of chins and cheeks and more tender fleshy bits than his anatomy strictly requires. In photos, though… well, he could be anyone’s pig. This was the best I could get:

5: Ten minutes ago.

SNORTLEPIG [while drawing at the table]: Mummy, I stomped on Miles before.

ME: Don’t stomp on Miles.

SNORTLEPIG: He liked it!

6. Helpdesk Man, the pigs and I are currently watching TNG. (The pig likes it; I was most impressed the other day when she saw the spaceship in Forbidden Planet and said “That’s like the Enterprise!” On a recent playdate, however, she found a toy saxophone and said “Is this a trumpet?” and I said “It’s a saxophone; you know, like Riker plays on Star Trek?” and the Other Mother found it hilarious, which shocked me a little, because when one is insulated in a cosy cloud of geeky friends it’s easy to forget how the other half lives. This is the friend who said, just prior to the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, “Ooh, I’m a huge Harry Potter fan, I’m so glad to meet someone else who likes it!”, and then it transpired she hadn’t even seen the last two movies. Lovely girl, but really.)

Anyhoo. I’m not generally a fan of digitally remastering old films (coughLucascough), but I think I have hit upon a method for making TNG distinctly more awesome. They need to go back in and add a character whose sole function is to follow a certain Acting Ensign and say “Shut up, Wesley” every time he speaks. I shall provide a few examples so that you can see how it would improve the show.

PICARD: There’s no greater challenge than the study of philosophy

WESLEY: But William James won’t be on my Starfleet exams.

SOMEONE: Shut up, Wesley.

Or

WESLEY: We thought we could do it. We thought we could do anything. We were wrong. And Josh died.

SOMEONE: Shut up, Wesley.

Or

WESLEY: Sir… you don’t know this. No one knows this. Because I’ve never told anyone. All of the things that I’ve worked for - school, my science projects, getting into the Academy… I’ve done it all because I want you to be proud of me.

SOMEONE: Shut up, Wesley.

Don’t you see how it improves the flow?

7. Panna cotta is my new big thing. I’ve just discovered it, courtesy of David Lebovitz, who is now practically my favourite food blogger even though he routinely annoys me. I’ve made vanilla bean, raspberry (with freeze-dried raspberry powder I bought at the food show - intriguing, but underwhelming in the clinch), double-layer coffee-caramel, and (last night) double-layer chocolate and coffee with a thin layer of chocolate ganache on top. I am now harboring a tentative plan to make rosewater-coconut cream panna cotta, but I doubt I actually will. I am hampered by what a nasty man on the internet once called my parochial upbringing. In this respect I am not unlike my mother, who recently in a fit of daring painted one of her bedroom walls aubergine, but is clearly both proud of and a little embarrassed by this act. We neither of us would survive in LA.

Nearly every famous speech from history and the arts can be given new meaning by adding “like, so“. Like so:

“I came, I saw, I, like, so conquered”. -Julius Caesar

“Frankly my dear, I, like, so don’t give a damn.” - Rhett Butler

“A woman without a man is, like, so like a fish without a bicycle.” - Gloria Steinem (attrib.)

“E, like, so equals M C squared”. - Einstein

“Make it, like, so so!” - Jean-Luc Picard

“Unfortunately, no-one can be told what the Matrix is. You, like, so have to see it for yourself.” - Morpheus.

“Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak’d meats/Did, like, so coldly furnish forth the marriage table.” - Hamlet

“It’s, like, so a trap!” - Admiral Ackbar

“We are, like, so not amused.” - Queen Victoria

Amirite? It’s nice to know that my $12,000-plus-extras-for-Cookie-Times-from-the-library-vending-machine degree in English didn’t go to waste.

You, like, so shall not pass...