Smokey the Magnificent

Gentle Readers, I have hit a snag. I’m supposed to be writing an article about good wholesome films for girls - you know, the kind you could watch at a 10-12-year-old’s sleepover and not have parents ringing up later wanting to know why little Maisie is gibbering in the closet or where Susan learned That Word. Nudity-free, decapitation-free, the cinematic equivalent of organic grass-fed pastured beef.

Trouble is, I can’t think of any.

So far I’ve got Singin’ in the Rain, The Sound of Music, Pollyanna and Anne of Green Gables - the sorts of films it takes a particular type of modern 12-year-old to stomach, and even then I’m a bit dubious about the cake scene in Singin’ in the Rain. So I thought of adding some more recent, snazzy fare. But nope. Ever After? Has a bad word. The Disney/Pixar films? Most 12-year-old girls would probably think they were too babyish (not being old enough to know better), and besides, they do tend to have a fair amount of violence and even suggestiveness in them. Plus, a lot of parents are anti-Disney. Then there’s The Princess Bride, but nope, bad word again; or Labyrinth, but nope, David Bowie’s trousers. In despair I went back to the oldies, but even the cheesiest musicals I could think of have distinctly dubious elements. I briefly considered The King and I, Oklahoma! and The Wizard of Oz (no good, magic and witches, somebody would be bound to object) before giving up and pounding out an article on media portrayals of fat people, about which I am currently disputing Suite101’s editor on whether it constitutes an opinion piece.

So. Thoughts? I am looking in the 10-12ish category, so no Beatrix Potter, however immaculate. Something fun, girly or less girly as you please, but no guns, in which all the characters are clad neck to knee and say “Oh bother” when disaster strikes. Anyone?

Oh, smeg. NaNoWriMo is kicking my cotton-clad hindparts. 2000 words a day isn’t too bad if one keeps up, but flake a few days on account of relentless partying and tiens! how it creeps up! I need to write 5000 words by tonight, and it’s nearly 4PM.

On the bright side, by relentlessly churning out articles I’ve learned a lot. Adipositivity, for one thing, is very interesting; so is uncanny valley, Disneyland’s accommodation for autistic and gluten-free patrons (quite impressive, incidentally) and the health risks of pasteurised milk. And I’ll stand a bar of choccie for whoever can link those topics via Wikipedia articles in 50 steps or less.

My dear mama remains at large in England. Apart from a brief phone call shortly after her arrival I have not heard a peep, which leads me to conclude she misses me tremendously and is afraid to hear my sweet dulcet tones, lest they open the floodgates and cause her to come over all peculiar in the Bird and Baby. But today I got a pleasing card in the mail, indicating that she is still a) alive, b) kicking and c) having the jolliest of larks. Of course, that was a week ago now. She could be at the bottom of the Seine as I type. But we will dwell on cheerier matters. For instance: what is the funniest book you’ve ever read?

I’m torn on this myself. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would probably be the obvious pick, or 1066 And All That. But then I found Professor Branestawn high-larious as a youngster, and the Jennings books likewise - and while I don’t find them as funny now, I’m not sure HG2G and 1066 made my older self laugh as heartily as my younger self did with the aforementioned. But that could, of course, be due to my gradual shrivelling into a Scrooge-like, cynical shell of a woman.

On a related note, I am not a fan of Terry Pratchett. His parodies are laboured and overly in-jokey, making it very difficult to dive into a series without having already read several previous books (which is obviously unacceptable on the grounds of creating a universe-ripping time and causality paradox). I’ve read a half-dozen or so of his novels and tried gamely to find them funny, but… nope. Nothing. It’s like waiting for a sneeze that doesn’t come. PG Wodehouse on the other hand is corking, but doesn’t come into the running because I find his books witty rather than funny. What is the difference, I wonder? Some kind of viscerality to the humour, a response reached by the head rather than the gut? A “Heh!’ rather than a “Haw!”? A certain distancing from the humour, appreciating it rather than letting it sock you unawares? Three years, $12000 and a BA and we never covered this. Tsk.

You know how people do things like reading the Thousand Books You Must Read Or Out Yourself as a Prole list, or wearing the same pair of Spanx for a year to protest the girdle industry, or vowing to eat no more dairy than can be produced by keeping a cow on their patio? And then they blog about it, and end up on Oprah, and write a book based on the blog called My Year Pretending to have Astigmatism: A Social Study, and become enormously wealthy? Yup. Well, I don’t think I could be oosed actually doing that, as it would require a modicum of effort (and look at me, I’m about 8000 words behind on NaNoWriMo). But if I did, here are some things I might do (but again, and this is important to remember, probably won’t):

1. Read through the entire adult fiction section of the library, A to Z, in alphabetical order, and make pungent comments on my blog about the new authors I had thusly discovered, as well as making arty charts showing the percentages of various plots, genres, stereotypes etc within said books.
2. Take a photo of my squish every day for a year and watch it expand and contract interestingly according to my diet and gluten intake and such. (Could be depressing, though.)
3. Attempt a different hairstyle every day for a year, photograph the results and make tutorials of the process (not a bad idea for a niche blog, actually. My photography’s rubbish, though…).
4. Watch films in chronological order from the very earliest motion pictures to the present day, choosing five of the top-box-office movies worldwide per year (at least, from when they started having a box office). Make sage comments about how films are not what they were.
5. Make a reproduction Gucci handbag, Christian Dior dress or similar object using only items gleaned from the neighbor’s trash and a bucket of mod podge. Do this once a week, prompting Thoughts about Waste and the like.
6. Try to stretch a single chicken into a year’s worth of meals. (I suppose the key would be to start with a live one and eat the eggs.)
7. Live solely off free food samples from the supermarket.
8. Read the religious texts of every major or semi-major religion… the ones that have texts, anyway - and draw deep theological conclusions from therein.
9. Take videos of self performing random acts of Broadway song in public places. Tenuously link this to anti-terrorism or the Universal Power of Song to break down barriers, find true love, get self arrested &c.
10. Attempt to teach the snortlepig one new animal a day, until she can name the obscurest members of the animal kingdom at an impressively tender age.
11. Track down classmates from primary school to make a point about Internet safety, the academic standards of said primary school, rates of early marriage among Dutch Reformed Christians, etc.
12. Declutter household down to a fixed number of items (say, 200).
13. Write a sonnet every day based on the news headline in the local paper.
14. Go on a quest to educate cafe owners in my town about how to make a decent iced chocolate. Become the Internet authority on the subject of NZ iced chocolates; add video tutorials to the website, and end up being flown down to Wellington by restaurants on a regular basis to review their iced chocolates and thus give them the coveted Smokey Seal of Magnificence.
15. Boycott all words derived from Romance languages to make an obscure political point.
16. Campaign for a knighthood, then insist on being knighted as Sir Smokey. (I’d totally do this if it ever came up, incidentally. Refusing knighthoods is weedy and smacks of false modesty and/or communism, but a firm yet tactful insistence on being Sir, not Dame, is all about equality. Dame Smokey. Eugh. Who needs it?)
17. Refuse to look in a mirror for a year and note impact on self-esteem, muse on body image and tally embarrassing spinach-between-the-teeth anecdotes as they occur. (Difficult to implement, though. Would have to avoid shop windows, driving and the like. Not that I drive anyway.)

Any further ideas?

Today is Guy Fawkes’ Day. Give Catholics a look of wounded innocence in commemoration.

Unless you live on the wrong side of the world, in which case you should wait until tomorrow. Otherwise it would just be mean.

Meself, I’ve had a pretty busy week. I had Bible study this morning, for which I had to make items of yumminess. Then tonight is singing group, which requires further items of yumminess; and Helpdesk Man’s singing shindig, for which he has to take a big ol’ plate of yummy items. Tomorrow night (Friday, try to keep up) Helpdesk Man’s three ex-flatmates are coming over for a post-Guy Fawkes barbecue, which means I will have to make savoury as well as sweet items of yumminess. And the next night, three ex-cinema-employee friends of mine are coming over for dinner and a movie, which involves feeding them… wait for it… items of yumminess again.

Too much yumminess! My head asplode!

Plus I’m supposed to be writing 2000 words a day for NaNo. So far, amazingly, I haven’t gotten behind. I haven’t even started today though - and I should, while I’m trapped under a sleeping snortlepig, because when she wakes up I will feel obliged to go make two kinds of pie. And cinnamon almond cookies. And rice-stuffed roasted pumpkin. And focaccia. And fudge.

If I had time and more spirulina in my system, I’d also make stock. I’ve been reading up on Traditional Foods and wallowing in angst and guilt as a result, so today I bought chicken carcasses and beef bones from the butcher. Also beef dripping, which is staring at me stolidly from the fridge and making me feel nervy. Anyone have any luscious dripping recipes?

And since I’m currently out of library books… what is the most hideously depressing book you’ve ever read? For me I think it was The Book of Sorrows by Walter Wangerin, Jr.

Need four thousand words

Before accusing night falls.

Less eleven now.

Ever noticed that everyone on the internet is American? This puzzles me. Is it because Americans are more prone to forum use? Is it simply the forums and blogs I frequent which are American-centric? (Unlikely, because the blogs I like are a pretty eclectic mix). Or did New Zealand somehow just get tacked on to the American Internet, and are other countries in fact happily surfing away on their respective nets? An English Internet, for instance (no smileys) and a Canadian Internet which is presumably bilingual? I do not know. Sometimes the fact that there must be billions of web pages out there in Japanese, which I do not speak, awes and frightens me: the thought of hundreds of separate Internets for hundreds of people groups is just too much for my tiny brain. What if I’m missing something? What if someone once said something really witty on the Internet for Ex-Pat English-Speaking South Africans, and I missed it? What if the Northern Irish Internet has a blog dedicated to photos of steampunk reptiles, but I can’t see it? Boggles the head, is what.

Anyway. My point was, pumpkin pie good, Grand Canyon good, liberty and justice for all, swell; but it peeves me that the US of A has so thoroughly taken over media that we feel Othered in our own living rooms. If we post a message on a gardening forum we have to gulp and explain that our seasons are the wrong way round and we’re not, in fact, mad to be planting tomatoes in October. If we post a recipe on a message board we automatically substitute light corn syrup for golden syrup, knowing that nobody reading it is likely to know what golden syrup is. If we watch a movie we don’t even notice the American accents, but a Kiwi accent popping up has us all wincing. Not just because the Kiwi accent is fairly atrocious - so are plenty of American accents, I happen to think - but because it just seems wrong to hear a Kiwi on the big screen… because, well, that’s where Americans go. (And Brits, yes. But even though British accents aren’t as jarring, I think we do notice them more than American accents. Or don’t we? I do.)

Anyway, the reason this is getting my goat is that I notice I’ve started to use American spellings. And I don’t even like American spellings. They may be etymologically purer and easier on the fingers, but they don’t have the quaintness and class of British spellings, and in theory I eschew them. But after years of reading message boards dominated by Americans - not to mention writing for Suite, where American spellings can be better for SEO - I find “labor” creeping up in my writings.

It frightens me.

It also frightens me that I know a considerable amount about Twinkies, Oreos, Dr Pepper, Ding Dongs and Cheese Whiz, despite the fact that none of these items are available in this country. Actually I think Oreos may have crept in pretty recently. Also Reese’s Pieces, but I’m comfortable with that.

That is all.

Last night my two small sisters came over while Helpdesk Man was out gadding. We watched The Truman Show, made a kind of faux pie thing with fruit salad in it and fettucine carbonara, researched the Great Exhibition and started making a kimono top for the snortlepig. Great larks.

I finished the top this morning. I’m not entirely sure about it, but it was very quick to make and covers her delicate wee neck and arms from the blazing sun better than my shirred tops do. And after all, if she ends up with a freckled decolletage before she even has a decolletage, her chances of making a profitable match are slim to nil. And who will support her during her bitter long years of barely-respectable old maiditude? Muggins here, that’s who. So I was thinking of doing another kimono top in a nice lineny colour, with slightly darkish red bias binding and some chunky appliqued flowers on stems. Thoughts?

We wandered over to the Gardens this afternoon for the shots.

I include this last not because it shows off the top, but because it is one of approximately three photos in existence in which the snortlepig and myself occupy the same frame. If I ever had to prove she was my daughter in a court of law, this could be an issue. In other respects it is probably a Good Thing, as I photograph about as well as Elijah Wood (no, really. Candid shots? Hoo boy. He does OK if you tart him up with lights and discreetly applied eye makeup, but slap him in a crowd full of fans and he tends to look geekier than they do. Which is endearing really, if anything, but presumably must be a trial to him as an actor. Interestingly, after I saw Sin City he has looked retroactively creepy in all the photos I took from the Return of the King premiere. Not that I look through them on a regular basis or anything; we were moving house. Still, though. And actually, my photography has improved somewhat in the intervening years… most of the premiere photos were of my thumb. And even my thumb is unphotogenic. It’s not the most Herculean of thumbs to start off with, me having dropped a ladder on it in my youth; but on camera you can practically see it squinting and holding its mouth funny. Quite fascinating. I wonder if it’s pathological.).

Other items of note:

1. I just discovered the best craft blog: Ruffles and Stuff. Lots of clothing recons, adult-to-toddler stuff in particular, and a lovely Victoriana twist to many of her projects which I can pretend is steampunk, not that she uses the term.

2. Helpdesk Man’s best friend mentioned the other day that he wanted to see our wedding video, and a cold chill ran down my back. Not just because of the oddness of a human voluntarily signing up to watch someone else’s wedding video - he was the best man and made a speech, so it sort of makes sense - but because in the three-years-in-November we’ve been married, I have been unable to bring myself to watch it. Is this common to brides, I wonder?

3. A flounce is like a ruffle, but instead of being gathered at the top which produces a bulky and textured top section, the flare is created by sewing the concave portion of a curved (as in gently U-shaped) piece of fabric to a straight piece of fabric, thus creating a smoother line. I learned that today. I learned what a peplum was the other day too, but I forget the finer points. Jackets have them flaring gently over the hips, sometimes. Not in my wardrobe, though.

4. As of the tail end of Season 6 Mulder’s hair has gone distressingly poofy. I hope this is a mere two-episode aberrance, not his new look. It’s practically a pompadour. Incidentally, does it not seem to you that hair in TV shows tends to get worse rather than better as the shows progress? Not universally - Friends comes to mind - but look at Cordy in Angel. Or Willow’s Season 7 look. Or Felicity, of course…

5. November starts tomorrow. NaNoWriMo. I feel distinctly uninspired.

I currently have 43 article titles jotted down for my NaNo challenge. Of course, now I have them I keep wanting to write the articles, which would be counterproductive, although still ultimately useful. This is the problem with challenges. Too often the artificial constructs suppress creativity or cause one to look for weaselly loopholes.

We’ve been sick again this week. Helpdesk Man took two days off, and I spent many hours languishing on the bed while the snortlepig pulled long strings of gore for her nose and then freaked out because her hands were “yucky!”. Sweet child, not too bright.

Well anyway, I think the sickness caused my brain leach out my ears because I can’t think of a thing worth blogging about. Saw 500 Days of Summer… made a tiny apple pie… saw the best episode of The X-Files yet (season 6, the one where the alien pretends to be a Black baseball player, and Scully and Mulder indulge in  witty tofu-related banter)… sent the pig to visit her grandparents, but she came home early in disgrace after tipping her bowl of dinner upside down… bought two wooden crates off TradeMe that were meant for storing jeans in (an oddly specific function, I felt) and planted punkins in ‘em… made cupcakes… you know. Nothing uber. Nothing that would sway a slightly conscientious gunman from shooting me in the head. Well, I washed my hair. No, that probably wouldn’t do it. Maybe I’m still suffering from residual sickness-related Moops?

Anyhoo. I did finish two tops for the snortlepig, so here they am! I apologise for the lousy photo quality, and by “apologise” I mean “blame Helpdesk Man”. Any time nice photos appear on this blog, they were generally taken by my small sister. Photography is one of those talents I admire from afar, marvelling with some fear at its technical aspects. Similarly, synchronised swimming.

I wasn’t too sure about this one when I made it - it has a few rows of shirring at the waist (if the pig had a waist) as well as the bust (ditto). I kinda like it on, though. It bulges pleasingly around her midriff.

The colour isn’t great in these photos, but I’m very fond of it - a deep chocolate brown, with pale pink for the straps and what the snortlepig calls the “dottos”. I shirred this top out of a remnant, which turned out to be a wee bit too narrow to wrap around the pig; so rather than stretching the shirring, I added a vaguely corset-laced affair on the back with some rather nice chocolate and pink double-sided ribbon. I’d hoped to find pink ribbon with dark chocolate dottos, but this works too.

My next project ought to be finishing the baby quilt, given that the baby in question is now a week old; but I have been smitten with the desire to make the snortlepig a bubble dress, so we will see. It’s odd; up until now I didn’t even like bubble dresses (or skirts, or tops), but I suspect the pig would look pleasing in one. Perhaps I am compensating for my own lack of fashion sense by wishing to dress the pig according to the latest trends, thus perpetuating the cycle of slavery to fast fashion and bondage to The Man while bypassing it myself?

You recall my case of the moops? Of course you do. And I’d just like to offer a heartfelt thanks to those of my readers who rallied around with chocolates, flowers, homemade cards and generous monetary contributions. It does my heart good to know that my modest literary efforts touch so many lives. Thank you, shiny people.

Hmph.

Anyway.

If you can bear to look up from your bally frosted flakes and cast a glance of cynicism at the screen, allow me to inform your turgid eyeballs that I am No Longer Moop. The secret for curing the moops, apparently, is as follows:

Make Mexican almond cookies and fling a bit of lemon in for luck; make chocolate chip cookies also; send them off with Helpdesk Man for his marvy young vocal collective’s marvy Labour Weekend singing workshop (ooo!); have the tin return empty with enthused compliments; bake a second batch of chocolate chip cookies for the next day while at the same time baking cheese profiteroles, mocha pecan pie, plum chicken with rice and caramelised carrots for guests; finish the straps on the snortlepig’s top; watch two Disney movies, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Little Voice; plant a zucchini seedling; spring-clean the bedroom, and dry a successful load of washing before the rain can sneak in.

Interesting, no?

In other news… NaNoWriMo. Until yesterday I was planning to cheat, spending the month updating my pretentious fable about an autistic penguin from last year’s 22,000 words to a chunkier 50,000. For various reasons - not least of which, I’m not sure I can squeeze another 28,000 words out of a pretentious autistic-penguin-featuring fable - I have decided to go for the more mainstream cheat of completing 50,000 non-fiction words within the month. That’s articles, queries… blogging, I guess, so be prepared for several more What I Dreamed Last Night posts, folks… shopping lists will be excluded, but only because in these economic climes they tend towards fantasy in any case. *sigh* Which brings me to another compelling argument re the change of plans: viz, it is more lucrative. (And so the soul of Smokey the Magnificent dies a little, dreams crushed by the Muse-strangling spectre of a mortgage. Except I don’t even have a mortgage. I can’t afford one.)

Anyway, that gives me six days in which to prepare. Planning being allowed under NaNo rules, I was thinking of writing as many article titles as I could on a bit of paper and simply attempting to plow through as many as I can in a day. My Suite articles tend to be 600 words or so, so three a day would do it; but I was hoping to do some print stuff too, as well as the article on historical maternity wear that’s due December 1.

So, anyone have any article ideas for me to write? Dad suggested some time ago I do a piece on the benefits of raw milk, so I just might query a newish eco magazine on the topic. Hey, do you think I could expand “Which is more absorbent, a poodle or a horse?” into a full-blown op-ed?

1. I have discovered a new breakfast: Greek-style yoghurt mixed with a little cream and holier-than-thou Anathoth seventy-four-strawberries-to-the-inch jam. It’s verrah nice.

2. A few weeks ago I made a list of all the things we need for the new house, including bookshelves, a single bed, a desk, several chests of drawers and a hutch dresser. Panicked, Helpdesk Man went on TradeMe and bought a projector and a fedora.

3.Yesterday practically my only mother left for the other side of the world after having lunch with me and the snortlepig. It was unrelated, though. She’s probably at Singapore airport right now (and when I say “probably”, bear in mind that geography was never my strong point and she could be anywhere from Auckland to London, not discounting the bottom of the Seine).

4. Helpdesk Man and I had a lovers’ quarrel yesterday due to him being a friggin’ tard. You may help us settle it in my favour. Is a goose more similar to a duck than a fox is to a dog? Answer carefully. To foster impartiality I will not reveal on which side of the question my loyalties lie, only pointing out that good grief, foxes dig burrows and leap!

5. A wily reader will note I have not updated my Challenge progress from last week. It was… passable. “Lacked Vigour”, I would have scrawled on it in red pen if I were the teacher. But I did write several articles (no queries, though) and do a fair few houseworky things. My raised bed is now snugly full of earth - and if the weather clears up, I’ll plant spring onions and carrots in it today - and I’m slowly filling the half-wine-casks with garden mix.

6. I am making a baby quilt. It was going to be a very simple affair, 5-inch squares of pink and leftover brown from my patchwork skirt. But when I did that I wasn’t too thrilled with the colours, and my squares lacked the gridlike precision every other quilter on the Internet seems effortlessly able to accomplish |)how, people, HOW?). So I thought I’d disguise both aspects by covering the thing in appliqued leaves and Suffolk puff flowers. So far the effect is pleasing, but it has tranformed the project from  a quick whip-it-up-in-a-spare-morning affair to a fairly labour-intensive gig. And the woman in question tends to have her babies a few weeks early; so. Wish me luck and expedient blanket-stitching.

7. Two words that should be banned from the English language? Manky and sook. It is a little-known fact that Anakin Skywalker may never have turmed to the Dark Side had Obi-Wan not happened upon him after the death of his mother and sarcastically enquired “Having a bit of a sook?”