Wyrmlog – Page 49 – Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings

The Red Castle

Back in the day, the Red Castle Motel was the place to be in Perth. Situated just outside the CBD with river and city views, and on the main road to the airport, it was a medieval themed paradise. Many couples (this being in the days before cheap airfares made international honeymoons from one of the most isolated cities on Earth viable) spent their wedding nights there – numberless are the Perthites who claim to have been conceived with its walls. Not only a place to stay, the castle was also a well regarded nightspot, where you could dine beneath the watchful gaze of suits of armour in the revolving King Arthur’s Table restaurant, or wander the gardens where a hand grasping the sword Excalibur would emerge from a pond on the hour, every hour.

But alas, time moves on. Faux Arthurian medievalism went out of fashion as Western Australia slowly moved away from its British roots and started to look towards Asia. The Castle gradually changed from fashionable accommodation to slightly shabby, to a glorified truckstop, to a regular truckstop and eventually into a complete fleapit. The revolving restaurant struggled on under a variety of names before eventually shuddering to a halt and closing, and a fire that destroyed the penthouse level in September of 2012 was the final straw. The once iconic structure is soon to be demolished, and the site redeveloped for housing.

So naturally, as a badly decayed landmark that is soon to vanish I made some time today to go and photograph it.

The set can be seen here. The place is pretty well locked up. I would have been willing to try and find a way in, except for the fact that there was a car parked inside and some lights were on in the front building, so I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and just photographed from the street. Nonetheless you can tell that it would have been an impressive place back in the 60’s – particularly in sleepy little Perth. Burswood will never be quite same without that tower looming over the horizon, no matter how awful the establishment below it may have been.

It may be of some interest that among the photos is the 10,000th one in my photostream. How about that then?

Just Another Day at the Office

You know you’re having a rough day when the only way to stay awake is to boot up the Fadades.

Number Crunching

Had a million dollars worth of nickels and dimes,
She sat around and counted them all a million times,
— Cab Calloway (and many others) – Minnie the Moocher

It occurred to me this morning, just how long would that take?

The first thing to establish is just how many coins would a million dollars in nickles and dimes add up to? A dime is ten cents, so a million dollars worth of dimes would add up to 10,000,000 coins (which incidentally would weigh 22.68 tonnes). A nickle is five cents, so a million dollars worth of them would be 20,000,000 coins (weighing 100 tonnes). We don’t have any information on exactly how Minnie’s cash is divided, but we can average it out and assume that she has 15,000,000 coins to count (weighing about 61.34 tonnes – better hope that gold and steel house she got from the King of Sweden has reinforced floors).

We can make a not unreasonable assumption that it takes about a second to count a single coin. Furthermore over the course of counting 15,000,000 coins Minnie would probably get pretty good at it, so let’s assume that it takes her only half a second per coin. This means that to count the whole lot would take Minnie 7,500,000 seconds. This is 2,083.3333 hours, or 86.8 days – assuming that Minnie takes a whole bunch of stimulants and never sleeps. It’s actually more reasonable to assume that she spends only 8 hours a day counting coins, so she has time to enjoy racing those horses and riding around in her diamond car.

Taking that into account, counting all the coins once would take 260.41 days, or 0.71 years.

That doesn’t seem too bad – but remember, she counts them a million times. To achieve this Minnie would need to spent eight hours a day counting coins for 713,001.49 years.

Poor Min indeed.

Musical Monday – Final Thoughts of Latvia

I’ve always had a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards Nirvana.

My parents were in their 40s when they had my brother and I. They were children of the second world war rather than baby boomers and came from fairly conservative stock – as such they viewed the popular music of the latter half of the 20th century with disdain and did their best to inoculate this view into us. As a result my childhood was marked with a stubborn refusal to entertain the idea that that horrible “rock and roll” music that got played on the radio could be anything but degenerate trash, a view that persisted until I started to develop a personality of my own around the age of 11, a point at which I would reluctantly concede that Livin’ on a Prayer was quite catchy and maybe some other rock music might be OK in limited quantities.

In my teenaged years this prejudice evolved into a kind of carefully maintained contrarian elitism. If a new band came along I would be willing to give them a chance, but if the great mass of unwashed plebs (ie: everyone except myself and my close associates) were crazy about them they were clearly populist garbage not worth considering. Nirvana’s Nevermind arrived right in the middle of this phase and its sudden, massive popularity led to my declaring the band emblematic of the worst excesses of youth culture and an anathema to all right listening folk. I regarded Kurt Cobain as a talentless hack distracting attention away from more worthy musical acts such at the KLF and Dire Straits, and refused to even listen to his works.

By the time Kurt did himself in, the year after my high school graduation, my attitude had mellowed a bit, but not enough to have any sympathy for the hordes of my peers who fell into various states of hysterical grief. I thought it unfortunate in a general sense that he’d taken such a step, but really didn’t care either way. Kurt Cobain dead meant as little to me as Kurt Cobain alive, and I regarded the crowds of mourners with the kind of disdain we reserve today for Beliebers and Directioners.

Over the next decade my attitude towards the music of Nirvana softened while at the same time my attitude towards the ongoing apotheosis of the band hardened. Being told that Kurt Cobain was the voice of my generation, and Smells Like Teen Spirit was the anthem of my youth would drive me towards a state of apoplexy. I’d go out of my way to point out that there were plenty of us who couldn’t stand Nirvana and thought that Kurt was a dickhead – a dickhead who came out with a few decent tunes, sure, but still a dickhead rather than the tragic hero everyone was making him out to be. It was about this time that I discovered the Pixies, and I reframed my criticism of Cobain into classing him as a sad, Black Francis wannabe – someone who could ape some of the sound and style of Doolittle while missing the weirdness and bizarre sense of humour that gave the Pixies their edge.

In the years since I’ve mostly made my peace with Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. As you get older you realise that what other people think about you and your ‘generation’ matter less than what you think about yourself and your place in the march of history. If someone looks at my birthdate and decides I must have spent my teenage years wearing plaid flannel and wishing I lived in Seattle, well good luck to them. Nirvana had some great songs and Kurt Cobain was a gifted, but troubled soul who didn’t get the help he needed. I don’t even mind Smells Like Teen Spirit any more, although it remains without any special meaning or significance to me. Which I guess is why I can enjoy madness like this so much, when many other people my age would regard it as absolute blasphemy 🙂

The more you listen to this insane mashup, the better it works, although even on my first listen there were bits that I found absolutely sublime – the descending chords during “oh no, I know a dirty word” for instance, and the “hello” chant after each verse. The smoky images of moshing teenagers somehow really seem to suit the epic 80’s buildup at the start and the Europe guitarists at 0:55 seem to have internalised the old axiom that when playing rock your guitar is every bit as much a weapon as an AK-47 or M16.

Well I’m all pooped out after all that reminiscing, and still need to include another music video, so – apropos of nothing – here’s Laimutis Purvinis.

Musical Wednesday – Moulds, Spores and Fungi

When I was a kid, Egon Spengler was my hero. He was a weird, socially awkward nerd, but he was a genius, he got to run around hunting ghosts with a nuclear accelerator strapped to his back, he got all the best lines in the movie and he ended up getting the girl (at least until Ghostbusters II). Ghostbusters is still my favourite movie. So the passing of Harold Ramis, has hit me a bit hard.

Given this sad occurance, what song could I feature this week but the iconic movie theme itself?

The song was written by Ray Parker Junior, who had a lot of trouble trying to find a rhyme for “ghostbusters”. In the end he gave up and wrote an advertising jingle. An advertising jingle that became a number one US hit in August 1984, holding the position for three weeks. It was also nominated for an Oscar, but was beaten by Stevie Wonder.

Of course it all wasn’t all fun and containment grids. Huey Lewis sued Columbia Pictures over the song’s quite-obvious-once-it’s-pointed-out similarity to I Want a New Drug, which was released in January of the same year…

Columbia settled out of court on condition that Huey keep his mouth shut. He slipped up in 2001 though and told VH1 about it, resulting in Ray Parker Junior suing him. And round it goes…

Then of course there’s this work of genius…

Anyway. So long Harold. We’ll miss you.

New Concepts in Psychology: The Brosh Limit

Brosh Limit: The point at which, when reading Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and Half, one stops identifying with Ms Brosh and instead thinks “Wow – that’s… weird…”.

My personal Brosh Limit is page 276 – being annoyed at a picture of an otter for being a picture of an otter rather than a real, interactive otter.

Are We Not Men?

Very sad news this morning with the death of founding member of Devo, Bob Casale.

In place of a proper Musical Tuesday this week (still really busy at work which is leaving me with no energy to blog when I get home) here’s a controversial Devo track that embodies their core, mock concept of the superiority of de-evolution, 1978’s Mongoloid.

Great stuff. He will be sorely missed.

The Life of Miles O’Brien

Well, today I have what I believe is conventionally described as “a date”. We shall see how this goes.

In the meantime, you should all check out Chief O’Brien at Work, which points out that life aboard the USS Enterprise D isn’t all exciting adventures…

A Game of Drone

Just when you think Glascow’s Chvrches can’t get any cooler they go and do this…

Is it just me, or does Game of Thrones + Synthpop sound oddly like the Tripods theme?

All Your Questions Answered

What was the first meme ever created?
Put a rock on your head and walk like Ugg does. It became popular during the spring of 38,423 BC, but was completely played out by late summer.

What actually happened to JFK?
During surgery for a cranial blood clot in 1960 a surgeon operating on orders from the British Royal Family inserted a small, radio controlled explosive in his skull. This was set off in Dallas by an MI6 operative when Kennedy started making moves to reveal British Intelligence involvement in the Sudan.

You have just become the emperor of the Roman Empire. What do you do now?
Poison my mother and marry my horse.

In your honest opinions, will the sitcom “Friends” have an anniversary reunion of some sort this year?
The studio won’t allow it. If all six actors are ever in the same location again Matthew Perry will reclaim his horcruxes, evolve into his final form and cast the Earth into a bottomless abyss of torment and hellfire for all eternity.

Which Ninja Turtle would you be and why?
Giotto – the one the other Turtles were too scared to talk about.

Traffic jams start and stop for no evident reason sometimes. What are some interesting explanations for this phenomenon?
Deep underground there’s a civilisation of malicious, degenerate dwarfs called Deros. They use mind control machines to make people randomly slow down their cars to cause traffic jams and accidents, and hence spread despondency, hatred and despair to the human population.

Why isn’t Glenn Beck on the radio anymore?
He finally evolved from his larval form. They tried to keep going with the show, but had to banish him back to his home dimension after he devoured three separate production teams.

Why do cats like boxes so much?
They’re all publicity whores by nature, and are trying to muscle in on the fame of Schrödinger’s Cat (sadly most cats lack the intelligence to comprehend the macro-scale implications of quantum entanglement, or notice the bit about the vial of poison).

Which famous person is thought to be dead when she or he truly isn’t?
Niels Bohr. As long as he remains unobserved he’s immortal.

Has the ABC finally admitted that Mr Squiggle was a Puppet?
Please, this is such an obvious COVER UP. Mr Squiggle was a living, breathing lunar ALIEN – this is simply the latest LIE from the New World Order to hide the TRUTH about the soulless deals the NSA and Illuminati have made to SELL US ALL OUT to the extraterrestrials. Sure Mr Squiggle is just a puppet, like Denver Airport is just a transport hub and Kurt Cobain shot himself. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!

The year is 2213, what is your most realistic idea/view of how everything will be?
Well if man is still alive, and woman can survive they’ll find that they’ll need to wait 312 years to be featured in a Zager and Evans song.

Which movies best represent their respective decade within popular culture?
Battlefield Earth is a surprisingly accurate depiction of the 2020’s when the… I’ve said too much.

Why is Garden City being evacuated?
The real question is why have people been allowed in there at all for the last twenty years?

Why do people willingly chose to be Juggalos?
Well the kids, they listen to the ICP music, which gives them the brain damage, with the rainbows and the magnets, so they don’t know what dressing and behaving like a civilised person is all about!

Why were there no new TV shows this week?
TV has finally run out. Too many houses with multiple TVs finally exhausted the supply. From now on there will be nothing but repeats, forever.

What’s your best joke about a specific nation?
An Elbonian walks into a bar with a pig on a leash. The Bartender says “Hey, you can’t bring that pig in here!” “Pig!?” replies the Elbonian “That’s my wife!” (The joke is that he’s too poor to marry a cow)

Why do toasters always have a setting that burns the toast to a horrible crisp, which no normal human being would eat?
It’s so when FEMA and Barrack HUSSEIN NObama steal half your electricities you’ll still be able to make toast.

If his name is Chuck E.Cheese, what does the “E” stand for?
Emesis. It goes along with “Chuck” and explains what happens if you eat his food.

If you could make a disease, what would you call it, and what are the effects?
Contagious Botulotourettism. Sufferers randomly and uncontrollably shout the word ‘THAUTHAGETH!’ in the stupidest voice they can until they shake off the virus.

If Santa exists, but parents don’t believe in him, where do they think the presents came from?
Santa brainwashes the parents of the world to think they bought the presents. He does this by harnessing the Earth’s magnetic field – why else do you think he’s based at the north pole? To maintain the illusion, he debits the parents’ accounts by an appropriate amount, which – combined with the fact that the elves are paid only about 25 US cents a day – makes him one of the richest individuals on Earth. The US Government is aware of this massive scam, and set up HAARP to try and disrupt his nefarious brainwashing apparatus. Results so far have been mixed.

How does McDonalds food make your farts smell like McDonalds so quickly?
All McDonalds food contains the carefully collected and dried sweat of an alien being Ray Kroc captured outside of Roswell New Mexico in 1947 (this creature is the model for Ronald McDonald and actually appeared in several early McDonalds commercials). Amino acids in the sweat make the food highly addictive, but certain alien salts are immediately absorbed by the stomach lining, circulated through the blood and deposited into the intestines, where bacteria rapidly convert them into gas. These salts bond strongly with volatile compounds in the food, and carry them through this entire process, with the result that the resulting rapid flatulence strongly smells of the original food.

What happens if you cut off a mole?
He’ll give you the finger at the next set of lights. But a more important question is how the hell did he pass the visual component of the licensing test?

How would it feel to be turned into an athletic woman’s shoe for eternity?
It’d be kind of soul crushing.

If you had a theme song that played every time you entered a room, what would it be?
The old Thames Television ident theme. Short, but attention grabbing.

What are some loopholes every Vatican City citizen should know?
When arrested, if you can recite the 51st Psalm in Latin from memory you can claim “Benefit of Clergy” and get off scot free. They also have to supply you with up to half a pound of holy water and/or incense on demand, which is why the Swiss Guard have those big puffy pantaloons (that’s where they keep it).