How to Greet a Scotsman

Should one spy a Scotsman and wish to extend the fellow a friendly greeting, utilise the following procedure…

1: Gain his attention with a loud cry of “Och Aye!”
2: Make eye contact. Maintain steady eye contact throughout the following steps.
3: After a pause of a few seconds, make a fist with one’s left hand and raise the corresponding arm up until it is level, pointing straight at the Scotsman’s face.
4: Stride forward purposefully and boldly with stiff legs until one’s fist is just short of the Scotsman’s face.
5: Announce loudly “Can’t see ye Jimmy!” in one’s best Scotch accent, and await the response of “Och Aye the Noo!” at which point polite conversation may commence.

In carrying out this time honoured tradition one will show oneself to be a ‘true highlander’ and gain the respect of all Scotch folk in the vicinity.

Musical Whenever – Angels and Beads

Yesterday morning Doc Neeson of the Angels finally lost his battle against brain cancer. I can’t really add anything to the outpouring of tributes except to say he was a true great of Australian music and post one of his best songs. No, not Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again (NO WAY GET… ahem), but the equally wonderful No Secrets from 1980. Get a load of that riff!

Thanks Doc!

On and off for many years now I’ve been hoping onto the net and trying to find any evidence that Perth’s own Rosemary Beads were anything but a figment of my RTR addled 90’s imagination. They got played all the time, and I even had the privilege of seeing two thirds of them live at a lunch break concert during my short lived university career (they were great, even if I seemed to be the only person there who was actually paying any attention), but they seemed to be completely invisible on the web. Today they popped back into my mind, so I decided to search again, and bang! Up popped their biggest hit, 1994’s beautiful Breath.

I also happened upon a site where you can download all three of their albums, which I shall be doing as soon as I have the opportunity.

Well, back to work…

There But For the Grace of God

If you’ve got a strong stomach, have a look at this Jezebel article concerning the ‘community’ that produced UCSB shooter Elliot Rodger.

Lessons From a Day Spent With the UCSB Shooter’s Awful Friends

Reading it over is actually pretty terrifying for me, because I can see how easily I could have ended up as one of those sociopaths. I’m an aspie – an aspie who wasn’t diagnosed until in my late 20s – and as a consequence have always had massive problems with relationships, socialising and sex. I can see the kind of thought processes these guys are operating, and in a lot of ways they’re startlingly similar to the way I thought as a teenager and young adult.

The big difference is that where these individuals turn their rejection and rage outwards against society and women (mostly at women, 99% at women) I turned mine inwards. I reached the conclusion that there was something horribly wrong, not with society, but with me, and that I deserved to be shunned and neglected (as I saw it). I was the deformed monster lurking beneath the Opera House, the misbegotten construct fleeing to the Old Mill, or the cancer hiding amongst the healthy cells and it was right and just that society try to destroy me, for the crime of being broken.

It was a pretty horrible way to exist. It’s little short of a miracle that I didn’t end up self harming. I think my (at the time) strong religious faith went a long way to helping me hold it together. I found Isaiah 53 (“a man of sorrows acquainted with grief”) comforting – if not necessarily in a spiritual way then in the way it framed the idea of suffering and rejection as something grand, poetic and meaningful.

Nowdays – years later – I’m slowly getting better. It’s a long term job, you don’t just snap out of years of delusional, destructive thinking overnight. I still have plenty of issues, but on reading the kind of sick thought that can result from my kind of social dysfunction I can only be thankful that I *did* turn my anger and confusion inwards. I’d rather suffer a lifetime of pain and self loathing that burn out in a short lived blaze of hatred and violence, anyday.

Here’s some otters playing with a keyboard…

Atlantis

I’m trying to blog a bit more often, so you’re all going to have to put up with some real filler material.

Like how last night I dreamt that I was being driven up to Yanchep by a racist to attend a wedding that I really didn’t want to attend. Once at Yanchep however I realised that I could take the opportunity to photograph the old Atlantis Marine Park. Unfortunately I hadn’t bought my camera with me. So I slipped out of the reception and headed down the breakwater to a tourist shop where I paid far too much to purchase a couple of disposables. My plan was to show my face back at the reception then slip out again, but I couldn’t find it!

Please send your analysis and interpretations to wherever the heck you feel like.

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