Deborah Kalin's Blog, page 19

like i have trouble earning nicknames

Today I learned that my name gives not one but two awesome anagrams:

Bad Hero, and

Do Rehab.

Seriously. Who can complain about that?

How did I never know this before now?

a crick in his neck is far too banal an explanation

There are no stars close enough for this little fellow to see. But I like the thought that he's trying anyway.

everything is a gamble, one way or another

This is Jack. In this photo he's rather busy building his bower. He ran away as soon as I arrived, but when he realised I wasn't going to leave any time soon, he decided to trust that I also wasn't going to come any closer. After a short but piercing trill, the meaning of which I cannot pretend to understand, he ignored the monkey paparazzi and got back to building.

I didn't have the heart to tell him there wren't any female bower birds nearby.

Who knows, maybe his bower will bring all the girls to the yard anyway.

This is Quetzalcoatlus.

Doesn't matter how often I visit the museum, I could stand and stare at this fellow until time itself started to decay. For scale, that smaller pterosaur in the background is a pterodactyl, which is, I don't know, approximately pelican-sized? Give or take.

thank all that's holy they're (barely) less than an inch long

being the same doesn't make you safe

wherein the author triples her screen and acquires digital. the end.

For quite some time now, I've been living with a television which had a screen the size of, oh, a postage stamp. This was never made clearer than when I attempted to watch a movie in widescreen, and the TV obligingly rendered it in letterbox format and I found myself watching a screen that was … 5cm tall. Handy. At one point a couple of months back, I watched a movie with subtitles. Or I should say, I attempted to. White lettering superimposed on a dappled-forest-floor background is kind of difficult to read at the best of times. But when the powers that be in the film/tv industry, in their infinite wisdom, render that writing as only 0.5% of the screen size,1 the letters showed up on my TV as about 0.5 microns tall. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I had to haul ass off the couch and kneel with my nose all but touching the screen in order to wade my way through reading these subtitles. (It was not the best movie-watching experience ever, no.) (I didn't finish the movie, either, no.)

Oh, and did I mention the TV was analogue? And I don't have a set-top box?

Being addicted to story in pretty much every form, I absolutely adore TV shows — but finding them among the dross of reality drivel, the perpetual search for a charisma at the expense of skill, and the crime and cop shows is not exactly appealing. Meaning mostly I watch my TV in the form of DVDs these days. So the lack of digital channels wasn't bugging me, but for the sake of movie-watching I admit I have been toying with the idea of upgrading to a proper grown-up TV. For, you know, the last couple of years.2

Problem is, I don't see the point in buying something interim. If I'm going to spend money on an upgrade, I'd rather do it properly, and get something I can love and pet and call George. Other problem is, a new TV is at the bottom of the financial priority list. There's things I need first, like a new desk, and things I want more, like travel.

These two personality traits would appear to be contradictory.

But! I have found a solution, and the solution is canny, and the solution is this: know someone who's upgrading their proper-but-not-digital TV. And say yes! omg! thankyou! when they offer you their old TV and set top box.3

This way you get a proper grown-up TV, complete with a set-top box, without sacrificing the money you've saved up to buy a desk that won't break your wrists every time you try to work. And people will stop laughing every time they walk into your loungeroom.

OK, so she's not state of the art (any more). And she's wearing a fetching texta tattoo. And she's so heavy I have a sore back from just watching her being carried up the stairs. But I can see the picture from more than a yard away! So I love her.

But instead of George, I'm going to call her The Consumption.4

Because seriously, it's 2010, who owns a 34cm mono curved-screen TV any more?Is five still a couple? what about, um, ten?And if you happen to live three flights up, it helps to have a burly, strong neighbour type arrive home just as you're standing at the base of your stairs, wondering how, precisely, you can inch your new-old TV up 34 marble steps. Most timely introduction, ever.Mainly because I mispronounced TV as TB yesterday. But hey, it fits.

google patents. it's better than tv.

One of the misconceptions I had buried in the back of my head, before I started my current dayjob, was that inventions were all, by necessity, clever.

This turns out to be not the case.1 See, in assessing whether something is an invention, there are two main hurdles:2 it must be novel, and it must also be inventive.

Novelty's easy, and fairly self-explanatory. There are some technicalities in terms of what constitutes usable proof, and timing considerations as to who had the idea first etc, but basically it's either been done before, or it's new. Easy.

Inventiveness isn't any more complicated, per se, although it is more subjective. The test for inventiveness is simply: is it obvious?

Pay careful note to that. Something that's unguessably clever is not obvious, yes — but equally, so is something downright stupid.

office consensus is not inventive in light of a porcupine

Actually, I don't know that I'd argue the shark protector suit there is stupid, as such. Let's just say I'm dubious as to whether it's really a better solution than, say, a cage. Which will protect you. The suit itself, so far as I can see, will simply give the shark some nasty scratches while it's giving you some nasty scratches. But maybe that depends on the size of the shark.3

If you want to talk about inventions that see commercial success, that's a whole different conversation.There are other hurdles, quite a few of them, but they're less to do with whether it's an invention and more to do with whether the invention is allowable, legally. So for the sake of simplicity…That's the other thing with inventions. There's always, always a smaller niche.

it's ok to eat fish, cos they don't have any feelings

For me, last year was going to be about writing. After spending most of 2009 coping with the move south and the new dayjob, and the various settlings-in and sortings-out that followed, I wanted 2010 to be about being quiet and settled, and wordily productive.

Life, it turned out, had other plans.

Don't get me wrong, there was writing this year, writing of which I'm proud and can't wait to finish. Mostly, though, my drafting efforts in 2010 can be characterised by being achingly slow to produce, or requiring five steps back for every step forward. Or both. The faerie novel gave me a major breakthrough while I was in Mongolia — or so I thought, until I tried to write the synopsis and discovered just how many holes were still missing. (I think I've plugged them all now.) The thorn girls short story was agonisingly demanding, fighting me for every word, a process not helped by how often my writing priorities forced me to put it aside for a spell. The possible third book for The Binding series was all but doing my head in, what with the sheer weight of ideas that needed dealing with. My Melbourne stories gathered in the corners of my mind, gleaming and shining with wanting to be written, while my blogging dropped to a frequency of weekly-at-best.

I could claim it was basically due to the eternal battle for time, which is not untrue. Between the dayjob and the commute and the basic-necessity-errands, time's always at a premium. One of the things I want to achieve this year is to prioritise my time smarter (I'm not quite sure how to achieve that, but here goes anyway), and work on a writing routine which is more flexible but at the same time more consistent.

But scarcity of time is not particularly new, and it was merely one of the symptoms, not the cause, of the course of the year. The real culprit was emotional burnout. I had no inkling whatsoever, this time last year, of what lay in store for me, but 2010 turned out to be one of the most momentous years I've lived through in a long time — and between family traumas and career dilemmas/changes among me and mine, and the various illnesses that plague naked monkeys, I've had my share of momentous years. This one took everything I had, and then some. More than once.

Last year broke my heart. Last year took my preconceived notions, and even my experienced and jaded and well-worn-in notions, and twisted them into the equivalent of a balloon giraffe to hang upon my wall in remembrance of everything I never knew. It took everything I'd worked hard to accept, and put the feathered thing — that cruellest of creatures — in their place. Last year showed me what people are made of.

Maybe, if 2011 slows down a bit, I'll be able to share some of the story of 2010. First, I need to take a little bit of time to step back from it, and let it fall gently into the past.

So this coming year? I'm going to spend breathing out. And writing.

And rediscovering whimsy.

starting with these trees

burn, baby, burn

The last day of this year is forecast to max out at 38°C.

I learnt this more than 24 hours ago, and even though I've waited very patiently, the forecast isn't changing. At all. I was kind of hoping, this being Melbourne, that it would.

You would think that I would be spending the day immersed in water. Or squarely ensconced in air conditioning. Or at the very least in my bathtub, touching no one and nothing.

Instead, I'll be in my car. My black car. Because I'm clever like that.

that quaint city council, keeping it real

We kept the railway tracks because they were historic.

We put the light-post in between them purely and simply to f#ck with your brain.