It’s a Brave New World!

Finally did the thing I should have done long ago

You know the hardest thing (for me) about maintaining a blog has always been the amount of work necessary to actually make an entry. Not the writing bit – I suffer from near permanent literary diarrhoea (wow, that sounds unpleasant) – but the spell checking, the mark up, the logging in to my account, the posting, the proofreading – you get the idea.

(Yeah, yeah, this is what comes from co-opting a system never intended to do blogging for the purpose of blogging – I’m lying in a bed of my own making, I know it.)

When the blogosphere (or at least my own personal part of it) was fresh and new, this wasn’t a problem. I was so enthused about posting my own brand of inane chatter on “the interwebs” that the inconvenience was worth it. Seven years on (I’ve been writing this thing for seven years!? Copre Sanctum!!) the allure has faded. I can’t count the times I’ve had things to write about, but just haven’t had the energy to face the rigmarole of getting a post up. The end result? A posting rate declining faster than the US dollar.

But no more! I stayed back at work tonight and got a nice, simple, secure and (above all else) easy page up that automatically takes care of spell checking, markup, logging in and posting – all in one integrated action. I write, I click, and the post is up!

(You know, the kind of thing proper blogs have had for years.)

So, from now on expect more blogging action, more often! Who knows, I may even have time to catch up with the rest of the web and program in comments.

Lolwut - or The Biting Pear of Salamanca

As a final note I thought I’d write about something (or rather someone) I’ve been meaning to mention for ages. About a year ago it suddenly occurred to me (I was probably quite bored) to track down the origin of that bizarre “lolwut” picture. You know, the pear with the teeth, and the giraffes, and the lighthouse thing?

So I poked around, and discovered the deviantART portfolio of one Ursula Vernon.

I was hooked (go on, go take a look).

Not only is her art fantastic, but she accompanies most works with a short piece of narrative, which merely hooked me more (go on, take another look!).

I make a point of checking her gallery for new work at least once a week, and recommend that you do so too. Go on! Do it! πŸ™‚

(My favourite is the Carousel Walrus)

OK, enough waffling for now. Look forwards to more posts. More posts! MORE POSTS!! MWAHAHAHAHA!!!

Folklore in Action!

An example of how history becomes story becomes myth.

Well I’m currently in the middle of two weeks’ holiday. You’d think this would give me time to actually catch up on various projects (including updating this blog more often) but I just seem to be kicking back and, well, hibernating as it were – sleeping late, watching DVDs, taking photos for Wikipedia articles, that kind of thing. I should probably feel guilty about this (well, maybe apart from contributing photos to Wikipedia I guess) but I’m working on the assumption that it’s what my brain and body need – I still have a week left to actually get things done in after all.

(Great, I now have Brian Dury and the Blockheads running through my brain πŸ™‚

Anyway what prompted me to write something today is a post on a Delta Goodrem forum. I was not browsing this forum out of any affection for Ms Goodrem or the pained, Celine Dion style caterwaulings she produces under the guise of “music” – I was directed there after a Google search on Monte Cristo – the Junee residence alleged to be Australia’s most haunted house.

The post was written by a presumably (based on the fact that she’s posting on a Delta Goodrem forum and can’t seem to spell, use capitals or insert punctuation) young inhabitant of Junee going by the screen name of “VictoriaBush”. It starts of with an account of a rather amusing nightmare about evil Catholics, and then segues into a history of Monte Cristo, which I reproduce (with some improvements of grammar, spelling, punctuation and capitalisation) below…

Originally the house was built and five people lived in it – two sons, a daughter and their parents – and sometimes also two caretakers. They also had workers ’cause they owned cattle stock or something. Nowdays the house has extensions and wealthier people live there in the extended part of the house. Weirdos but yeah.

One [of the original inhabitants one presumes] went mental and shot two of his friends after seeing a movie. You know, the one that got banned? Well it got banned ’cause of this guy. I forget the name, I’ll ask mum later.

So he went insane, shot his two friends, dragged them back to his house and wrote on the door in the little back toolshed “Die Johnny die”. Then he carved it into the back table (which is still there). So his parents chained him up, and fed him bread-crumbs once a day and sometimes he got water. He was about 18 when this happened.

This is when things started to get haunted.

They couldn’t and still can’t have animals because they always end up mutilated, or the kittens or puppies do. The father died of blood poisoning and then the mother spent over 15 years in the mourning room and she died in there and the caretakers had to do everything for them. The daughter was found burnt to death in the stables. This is when the house went on sale.

It was brought almost immediately by a family who found the boy still in the back toolshed with really long nails all curled and in bad shape. He was sent to a mental asylum. About 10 years ago he died.

Then they renovated, and they knew the past behind the house so they have started a Ghost Tour business. So far I have only gone on the day trip. I’m NOT game enough for the night trip.

The little boys’ room is the most haunted and if you go in there, it’s just so ehh. And kids always go berserk in there.

OK, so what did I find so remarkable about this account that I had to share (or possibly inflict) it on you? The fact that it’s a stunning modern example of folklore in the making!

How so? Well, the events “VictoriaBush” relates are all based in fact (or at least reported fact), however they’re actually scattered across almost a century of time and happened to numerous different people and families. She’s conflated them all together to create a coherent narrative in the same way humans have done for millennia – creating a story about how a young man went mad and brought a curse down on his family. It’s great!

So what are the historical facts behind her tale? Well Monte Cristo was built in the 1880s by one Christopher William Crawley, a farmer who made a lot of cash when the Great Southern Railway came through town. He lived there with his family until 1910 when he died of blood poisoning from an infected carbuncle on his neck.

His wife (who had always been regarded as a terrifying harridan by the staff) went into mourning, converting one of the rooms to a chapel, obsessively reading the bible and only leaving the house twice in the next 23 years, dying in 1933.

Their several children went on to be quite successful, and the house remained occupied by the Crawleys until 1948. They then moved out and the place remained vacant – looked after by a series of caretakers – while they tried to find a buyer. One of the earliest caretakers was a housekeeper who had worked for Mrs Crawley and was allowed to stay on after her death. She had a mentally retarded son who was kept chained up in one of the outbuildings. On her death he remained chained up and unfed for several days before the police came to investigate her absence. He was discovered in appalling conditions (including uncut fingernails having grown into his palms) and was removed to the Kenmore mental home in Gouldborn, where he died not long afterwards.

The house remained empty, but watched by a series of caretakers until 1961 when the then caretaker was shot to death in an apparently motiveless crime by a local youth, who’d watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho three times. He (or someone else with a macabre sense of humour) scrawled “DIE JACK HA HA” onto the inside of the door of the caretaker’s cottage in chalk (this has been preserved by the current owners). In the wake of this incident no new caretakers could be found, and the property was left derelict.

(It should be noted that Psycho has never been banned in Australia, although the more recent movie American Psycho has encountered classification problems.)

In 1963 the current owners moved in and began restoring the by now badly degraded and vandalised property. In the years since they (and their visitors) have encountered many puzzling and frightening phenomena including difficulty getting pets to stay in the house, and several instances of pet kittens being discovered mutilated in the kitchen (birds don’t seem to do well either). They’ve stayed on however and the house is now a major tourist attraction for fans of Victorian architecture and ghost hunters alike.

Over the years many rumours of murders and fatal accidents at the house during the Crawley’s ownership have surfaced, notably including stories of a baby or child dying on the staircase. Self styled mediums have also contributed their own impressions of the house’s history, including one story of a stable boy burning to death in the stables. No historical evidence of this incident has ever been found.

So there you have it, a round up of the full cloth “VictoriaBush”‘s story is cut from. One can see that her version has much more storytelling appeal, and it’ll be interesting to see if it manages to spread – at least among fans of Delta Goodrem πŸ™‚

I’m a bad, bad man…

Tuesday roundup

The very first thing I thought when I heard Charlton Heston was dead was “I wonder if anyone’s prised the guns from his cold dead hands yet?”

*sigh*

In other news this link does a fantastic job of explaining why I don’t use instant messenger programs. And this one is a petition to stop Uwe Boll making movies. He claims that if it gets one million signatures, he’ll quit. Sign it! For the sake of humanity sign it!

Dip the Apple in the Brew…

Let the sleeping death seep through

So I get up this morning and (after showering, shaving and getting dressed – eating breakfast in one’s bedclothes is so uncivilised πŸ˜‰ head into the kitchen to get breakfast. I open the fridge and immediately notice a number of things…

1) The three litre plastic bottle of apple juice in the fridge door seems to have imploded, and is around two thirds its normal size.

2) The bottom of said fridge is full of a liquid that looks suspiciously like apple juice.

3) The floor around the fridge is covered in the same liquid.

Forensic examination of the scene quickly revealed that at some point during the night the bottle developed a pinhole leak, drip-siphoning juice all over the bottom of the fridge, which then leaked it all over the floor. Great.

So, I get down on my hands and knees with a big wad of paper towels and start to mop it all up. It’s at this point that I notice the apple juice has pooled around the big chunk of rat poison down the side of the fridge – the one whose instructions strictly forbid touching it with bare flesh or even breathing deeply within a fifteen foot radius. So not only is my kitchen floor covered with apple juice, it’s covered with poison apple juice!

I eventually got it all cleaned up, hopefully without poisoning myself. *sigh*

Superfreaks

Being born psychic should really free me from having to get out of bed this early in the morning

Once again a big break between entires. I’ve been busy at work, and a lot of my writing mojo is going into another project, so I haven’t had much to left over for chronicling my oh so glamorous life. But I’ve decided to get off my backside and actually try to catch up a bit.

So, while my social life hasn’t really been more active than usual the extreme gap between entries has let things build up a bit. For instance, a few weeks back (Easter Sunday actually now I think of it) it was up to Fabian’s new place for a pseudo housewarming sort of thing. We (which is to say myself, Ryan, Matt, Juan and – naturally – Fabian) ate large quantities of food (all prepared by Fabes who will make someone a very good wife some day πŸ˜‰ and watched Beowulf in the home theatre room, which was quite impressive. The room that is, the movie… not so much.

(They took a lot of liberties with the plot, which as a bit of an elitist classicist I took objection to. If I’d known Neil Gaiman was involved from the start – a fact I didn’t discover until the credits rolled – I wouldn’t have been quite as annoyed, because it was really a typical example of Gaimanian story remixing which I usually enjoy. But I didn’t know, and found the whole thing fairly irritating.

I guess I’m also slightly miffed by the fact that people all over the world are now going to think the oldest story in English literature is about a loudmouth jock who sleeps with a demon, cheats on his wife and cuts off his own arm to kill a dragon who just happens to be his own son. *sigh*)

After Beowulf we watched some of Revenge of the Sith, during which I amused myself by heckling Aniken and doing shadow puppets in front of the projector. Senator Palpatine may never recover from having his head crushed πŸ™‚

The following week (which is to say last week) I went around to Rebecca and Dom’s for lunch, which was interesting because Rebecca had decided to do something with the dried barberries from the hamper I gave them for Christmas. Unfortunately the barberry rice that resulted wasn’t exactly a rousing success. But the conversation and company were (as usual) excellent, and a good time was had by all (or at least me).

(On the subject of Rebecca she’s managed to slip over in the kitchen and break her ankle in three places – they’re putting in screws and a plate tomorrow. Apparently she’ll be off her feet for several days, then on crutches for a few months. I’ve convinced her to see if she can get a cane instead so she can perfect her House impression. Get well soon girl!)

Hmmmm, what else? Oh yeah April Fools. I keep meaning to do something really creative with my site each year for April Fools, and always run out of time and end up redirecting it somewhere stupid instead. This year was no exception, and any visitors trying to reach Wyrmworld would have found themselves forwarded to the website of the Australian Liberal Party (I figure Brendan Nelson needs all the help he can get ;). I decided to leave the redirect up all day on the basis that the web is an international medium, and if I took it down at 12:00 Perth time then overseas folk wouldn’t be able to share in the confusion. I know at least one person *cough*Ryan*cough* got caught, so that makes it all worthwhile.

I’d better get to bed shortly (I foolishly stayed up until midnight last night watching season three of Battlestar Galactica which arrived earlier this week) but before I sign off I though I’d direct everyone to take a look at FreakAngels – a free weekly comic by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield. Set in a partially flooded future London it’s about a gang of twelve young adults with freaky powers (and purple eyes, and names heavily featuring the phoneme /k/), who are somehow responsible for the apocalypse that pretty much destroyed the world six years beforehand. Six pages get released each Friday (which is to say Saturday here in Australia), and so far we’re up to episode eight.

Given that it’s post-apocalyptic, a bit steampunk and set in London I am naturally loving it. So much so that I spent an hour or so the other week throwing together a Google Earth file of all the identifiable locations featured. I may or may not maintain this as the series continues – I haven’t decided yet πŸ™‚

Anyway, enjoy (keeping in mind that it’s “recommended for mature audiences” that is, and probably not exactly safe for work πŸ™‚

All Aboard the Good Ship Milkybar

Farewell to the milkiest Battlestar of them all

Well they’ve (apparently – I’m not looking up the exact details for fear of spoilers) announced the end of Battlestar Galactica – conincidently on the same day my season three box set is shipped by Amazon. This is actually perfectly fine by me, the basic plot couldn’t possibly keep going season after season after season without the series turning really stale. Ending while it’s still a reasonably good show (as far as I know, only having seen seasons one and two) makes sense.

(It also gives them a great opportunity to pen a really crappy sequel series featuring flying motorcycles πŸ™‚

As regards my box set, it’s going to take over a month to get here. This is merely more evidence for my sea otter theory regarding Amazon deliveries to the Asia-Pacific region.

PS: Why Milkybar? Trust me – linguists will be wetting themselves over that one πŸ˜‰

News from the Briney Deep

A mystery solved.

Well it looks like they found the Sydney, and only a day after the Kormoran. Nice work!

Really that’s about all I’ve got to say. Didn’t do much over the weekend, just did some cleaning and watched five straight episodes of Stargate Atlantis so I could return the DVD box set I borrowed from Daniel at work. I also managed to hurt my shoulder somehow – it’s quite painful, I may need to get it looked at.

Oh, and Sam didn’t make it in on Friday (sick apparently, although she may have just been sick of us πŸ™‚ so she’ll finish up some time this week. Don’t know if we’ll do the lunch thing or not.

That is all (ain’t my life just fascinating?).

The Continuing Search for my Nemesis

Television Redux

You know, I’m really enjoying Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles which started its run here a few weeks back (it’s fair to say that it’s the closest we’re ever likely to get to River Tam Beats Up Everyone). Unfortunately however it’s already begun the slow slide towards the early hours of the morning suffered by all sci-fi on Australian TV. It began in a blaze of glory at 8:30pm Tuesday nights, stuck there for three episodes, went AWOL for a week, then came back at 9:30 this week. Before long it’ll drift to 10:30, then 11:25, and before long it’ll be on at 2:10am alternate Wednesdays and Tuesdays – when not bumped by repeats of the Red Shoe Diaries.

I’m also quite enjoying That Mitchell and Webb Look on the ABC (sorry! ABC 1!). Entertaining English sketch comedy with a touch of the surreal. There’s BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner, the Bad Vicar, the Lost Tribe of the Garden Center, and (best of all) the Surprising Adventures of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar. I find the latter so amusing that I can hardly keep from bursting into gales of laughter every time I’m waiting to be served at Sumo Salad (which no doubt says much more about me than it does Mitchell and Webb).

Still on the subject of television, Channel Nine is rerunning Friends at 6:00 nightly. Sad to admit I was quite a fan of the show in its original run, so it’s nice to get home from work and turn it on in the background. For some reason though (probably to do with the earlier time slot) the powers that be at Nine are butchering the hell out of any even slightly risque content, leaving rather jarring jumps in its place…

Ross: What is the name of Chandler’s father’s all male drag review?

Rachel (leaping up): Viva Las!

(cut to Chandler looking disgruntled amongst uproarious audience laughter)

Chandler: Unfortunately that’s true.

…rather hard to follow I think.

On a more personal note I’m feeling rather disgruntled myself this week. Sam – who’s been doing a traineeship with up for the last 18 months or so – had decided to leave the company, tomorrow being her last day. This means that the office is going back to a dead-boring all male environment. In a previous entry moaning about the now-departed cute girl at the supermarket over the road I commented that starting the day with a smile from a pretty girl makes work a lot more bearable. It seems that that’s even more true when you’re actually working alongside said pretty girl. And in addition to any totally inappropriate pulchitrudinous aspects Sam is smart, efficient, a quick learner and generally pretty cool (not to mention that from the all important giant-personal-ego viewpoint she laughs at most of my jokes) so while I’m going to miss her on a personal level the company is going to miss her too. But hey, lunch on the company budget tomorrow, so it’s not all bad πŸ™‚

Additionally on the upside, feeling sad about something real – as opposed to just being generally depressed – is actually quite refreshing.

Well, now I’ve potentially opened myself up to all kinds of sexual harassment suits I suppose I’d better go πŸ™‚

PS: A quick web search suggests that while, strictly speaking, “pulchitrudinous” retains its meaning of “physical beauty” it has in the last few decades… taken on a connotation of, shall we say, a much earthier kind of appeal (thank you Wikipedia). For the sake of clarity I would like to state that in this particular instance I intended “pulchitrudinous” as a humerous, faux-pompous substitude for “attractiveness” and nothing more. You know, just to be perfectly clear πŸ™‚

PPS: The missing word is “Gaygas”

We Gotta Move These Colour TVs

Foam related antics and reckless endangerment of compact cars.

OK, well I haven’t made an entry in ages, so I figured I’d better jump on and make some attempt at doing so, lest the Wyrmlog turn into one of those abandoned relics from the golden age of Blogging that litter the web like the tumbled ruins of an ancient civilisation (there, that’s a good start).

So it’s the Labour Day public holiday, and I’m celebrating by labouring – that is going into the office and catching up on some work. But that’s OK – I’ll get paid for both the holiday and the time I’m giving up, and with no one else in the office I can fire up some internet radio and listen to cheesy 80’s music with no complaints.

The more observant of readers may have noticed that it was my 32nd birthday last week. How very depressing, I’m practically ancient now. To celebrate, the family went out to Savinni’s in Mount Lawley on Saturday night. The food was excellent (as it usually is) although the service was a little bit dodgy – but then they were extremely busy, so I can forgive them. Katie (who isn’t technically family, but might as well be *Lest anyone get over-excited by this statement I would like to point out that she’s practically family because we’ve known each other for decades – we’re just friends people!) wanted to go dancing/clubbing afterwards, but even in the unlikely event that dancing/clubbing was something I’d actually enjoy (as opposed to regarding with unreserved horror :)) I was far too tired after helping Fabian move all day.

Now that was a fun way to spend the day. Matt, Ryan and Myself turned up to Fabian’s place mid-morning and spent about the next two hours hauling trash down his precipitous driveway in the blazing sun, while he was out and about dealing with some kind of “IKEA emergency”. Well, actually I jest, he turned up not long after we started and joined in. We then spent the better part of a half hour debating on what we wanted for lunch (we ended up settling for kebabs as none of the local fish and chip places seemed to be open), and then drove around in a two car/one trailer convoy picking up new furniture from various places, one of which kept us waiting for about 45 minutes before informing us they didn’t actually have what we’d arranged to pick up from them. (This journey was made all the more exciting by my salvaging some extremely large sheets of foam insulation that someone was throwing out and having no other place to put them than in the passenger cabin of the ute I was sharing with Ryan)

We then hauled said furniture over to Fabian’s new mansion. I say mansion because it has about five bedrooms, two bathrooms, a gigantic kitchen and dining area, and a home theatre room with built in projector. Oh, and a small chandelier in the hallway. That counts as a mansion in my book. Ryan and I had great fun testing out the acoustics by bawling bits of opera at the top of our lungs, while Matt and Fabes cringed (as Fabian observed, Ryan’s version of Oh Sol Le Mio would be a great introduction to his new neighbours, many of whom are probably Italian and could therefore fully understand the rather obscene version of the lyrics he was using).

It was then back to Fabian’s place to load as much furniture, boxes and other junk into the ute-with-trailer as we could for one last run over to the mansion. Unfortunately I needed to get home to prepare for dinner, so Matt and I had to leave before the improvised “bed sheets and three bits of rope” baggage containment system we devised to hold everything in was put to the test (I hope it worked, otherwise the roads would have been littered with Fabianallia for miles).

The trip home was once again complicated by foam, as we passed the same house that was throwing out sheets of the stuff, and Matt decided to grab the quite substantial pile of it that I’d left behind. Unfortunately he was driving a rather small and beaten up Hyundai rather than his usual beast, and the only place the stuff would fitΒ  was rammed through the back, filling the rear of the vehicle from floor to ceiling with the hatchback wide open – the general dearth of rope once again coming back to haunt us. He successfully managed to make it all the way down the freeway to my place though without crashing or getting pulled over for reckless endangerment of a compact car – so that’s all right then.

So, a good day was had by all (except possibly Fabian’s new neighbours) and Fabes should be more or less moved in by now (there was still moving planned for today apparently).

Well my self determined lunch break is now over, and I’d better get back to it. People waiting on emails, expect them soon!

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