Okay, I’ve really lost continuity with the whole ‘week that was’ concept, but unless I can find something big to write about I’m going to stick with them. I do have a couple – the not-really-anticipated-by-very-many Arsenic & Old Lace post is one; there’s another that I’m keeping under my hat for the moment – but I don’t know when they’ll appear.
My main problem is focus. Really, if I don’t write something in pretty much one go I find it very difficult to want to bother finishing it. This, of course, is a huge problem when you consider that, like anyone else who writes, I’d like to actually get some kind of long-form work published or produced. But the only way I’m going to manage that is if I do it in one go – which is not really all that likely, considering how much I like sleep But you never know.
For now I’ve got blogging1 to keep me entertained.
1Have I mentioned I really dislike the word ‘blog’ and all its derivatives? I suspect it may have contributed to my not getting into online publishing earlier. Maybe I’ll spearhead some kind of campaign to come up with a new word.
The weird weather
We had a patch of very hot weather a week or so ago, and I can’t say I enjoyed it. One of the reasons I was happy to leave northern Queensland was to escape the heat – though it is, as anyone will tell you, a different kind of heat. And they’re right; the difference is the humidity, which there is a lot of up there and little of down here.
In terms of maxima, though, South Australia gets a lot hotter than Queensland – or, at least, the part of Queensland I’m from. Summer temperatures don’t tend to go over 35° in either Bowen or Townsville, the two places I lived when I up there. But while it’s not as hot per se, it is still warm – and it’s warmer for longer, i.e. there are more months of the year where the temperature is in the high 20s/low 30s.
Combine that with the humidity and you get a place that, although it’s less hot at its hottest, and far milder in winter, is sticky and unpleasant for a greater proportion of the year. Mathematically – for me at least – it’s better to be down here.
Though when we get eight street days of maxima above 35° – as we did in the middle of November – I start to wonder. And even that pales in comparison to the record heatwave we went through in Feb/March of 2008; that was eleven consecutive days above 38°. Of course, it isn’t really the daytime maximum that I have a problem with – it’s the overnight minimum. Generally I can sleep in my unairconditioned bedroom (with the windows open to catch the breeze – if there is one) if it gets below 25°. But on at least several occasions in both those hot spells the temperature didn’t drop that low, instead staying in the low 30s the whole night.
While I have airconditioning in my place, the unit is installed in the dining room2 and isn’t capable of cooling the bedroom – so, if I want to make use of it on hot nights, I have to sleep in the lounge on my spare mattress. It’s better than sleeping uncooled in my proper bed, but - between being on a thin mattress on the floor, and the effects of the airconditioning (which I’m convinced isn’t good to sleep in) - I almost never get as good a night’s sleep as I’d like.
And I really, really hate not getting a good night’s sleep.
But it’s become cool again over the last week or so, and I’m a lot happier as a result. Not that I don’t expect it’s going to heat up again before too long, but the fewer days that I have to spend checking different weather websites3 to see if the temperature is going to drop enough that it’s worth opening up the house and sleeping in my room the better.
2This might be somewhat of an exaggeration; I live in a unit, not a house and by ‘dining room’ I mean a kind of combined kitchen/dining/lounge room area.
3I’m contemplating buying a thermometer so I can work out if it’s cooler inside the house than outside of it.
Glee
It’s simple: I love Glee, to the point where it’s probably my equal favourite show on television - it ties with Castle for my affections. The premise is simple: it’s a musical/comedy/drama series about a high school (the fictional William McKinley high in Lima, Ohio) glee club and their attempts to become good enough to reach the state championships.
Though it is a bit more complicated than that; pretty much everyone (teachers and students) in the show has a host of social/emotional/psychological problems which threaten the continued existence of the club, and the school’s cheerleading coach is out to destroy them.
Many of the characters are stereotypical – the standard glee club ‘losers’ (in the sense of being low on the social ladder of a high school in the US), for example, include a camp gay guy, an ambitious Jewish theatre tragic girl and an R&B-loving don’t-take-shit-from-anyone black girl. However, they do mix it up a bit by having a couple of football players and cheerleaders who defy the ‘natural order’ to be involved.
Friends of mine who don’t like the show have commented that there isn’t really anyone to like in the show, and I kind of agree – but that doesn’t seem to stop me from enjoying it. A lot of it is to do with the music, which I’m kind of surprised by because – for the most part – they sing cover versions of songs that I dislike the original of. To me the show gives them something the earlier renditions lacked - with the exception, of course, of The Thong Song, which I realised I hated even more than I did before when the lyrics, in all their lameness and inanity, were revealed.
I think the key to my liking it is probably the humour – which is quite dark and very dry. And the writing in some of the episodes has been superb, particularly the dialogue given to the ‘evil’ cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, who’s played by the always-brilliant Jane Lynch4. One episode contained this voice-over:
‘Glee Club. Every time I try to destroy that clutch of scab-eating mouth-breathers it only comes back stronger, like some sexually ambiguous horror-movie villain. Here I am, about to turn 30, and I’ve sacrificed everything only to be shanghaied by the bi-curious machinations of a cabal of doughy, misshapen teens. Am I missing something, journal? Is it me? Of course it’s not me. It’s Will Schuester. What is it about him, journal? Is it the arrogant smirk? Is it the store-bought home perm?’
I rewound and watched this bit about seven times before I stopped laughing. Scab-eating mouth-breathers? For someone like me who loves well-phrased insults, that’s absolute comedy gold. Offensive? Sure. But still gold.
Some more of Sue’s dialogue:
‘Let me be frank. Your husband is hiding his kielbasa in a Hickory Farms gift basket that doesn’t belong to you.’
‘Guidance counselor. Real floozy and a man eater. Wears creepy brooches like the kind my nana was buried in.’
‘I’ve always though that the desire to procreate showed deep personal weakness.’
‘Unless you want to lose your man to a mentally-ill ginger pygmy with eyes like a bushbaby.’
I could listen to this kind of talk all day.
Whether or not Glee can maintain the high standard remains to be seen – it does kind of lend itself to a short lifespan, considering that the characters are high school students and will eventually graduate – but I’ll keep watching for now.
Oh, and I recently learned that Joss Whedon will be directing an episode early next year – I don’t think I could ask for a better combination.
4You might know her from her work on the mockumentaries A Mighty Wind and Best in Show or her guest appearances on Two and a Half Men (as Charlie’s therapist) and Criminal Minds (as Spencer’s institutionalised mother).
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
A novel by Alan Bradley5, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a murder mystery set in country England in the 1950s; the twist, however, is that the sleuthing is done by ‘very-nearly-eleven-year-old’ Flavia De Luce, who is forced to investigate the murder of man whose body is found in the back garden of Buckshaw, her family home, after her father, Colonel De Luce – a reclusive philatelist and widower – confesses to the crime. Flavia – a prodigious child whose chief love is for chemistry, thanks to her discovery of her late mother's chemistry textbook and her late uncle Tarquin’s having built a fully-stocked laboratory in a wing of the house - sets about following the trail of clues, starting with the discovery of a dead snipe with a stamp impaled on its beak left on their doorstep.
In her efforts she’s forced to contend with not only the local constabulary, who are also attempting to solve the crime, but with the local townsfolk, the De Luce’s shell-shocked gardener/driver Dogger, and her two unhelpful older sisters, Daphne and Ophelia.
The book was lent to me by Miriam6, who gotten it for her birthday this year; I was there that night and had had a glance through it – this is generally how I judge a book; I open to a random page and see what the prose style is like – and thought it looked interesting.
I was right; it was a fun read. The prose is excellent; an example:
‘Mrs Mullet, who was short and grey and round as a millstone and who, I’m quite sure, thought of herself as a character in a poem by A.A. Milne, was in the kitchen formulating one of her pus-like custard pies.’
Brilliant.
It is, of course, a bit unrealistic: the ten-year-old protagonist has more esoteric chemical knowledge than the average university student and, as is often the case in child-centered fiction, the adults tend to be more than usually lacking in insight – but, when it comes down to it, it’s not a huge barrier to overcome; that’s what suspension of disbelief is for. Flavia is an excellent character, the story is well-thought-out (and impeccably researched, particularly the chemistry and the history of British stamps) and the prose is delightful.
So, if you like a good ‘ripping’ story in the English tradition then you’d probably enjoy this – it’s a bit like Harry Potter but with science rather than magic.
If you’ve already read it and liked it, some good news: there’s a sequel coming out in early 2010. As long as the author doesn’t just do a Dan Brown and copy out the same basic plot with only minor cosmetic modifications then chances are it should be good.
5No, I’d never heard of him before either.
6Not the one who got married, the other one.
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