The week that was #13

Yes, I'm resurrecting the weekly recap posts. I'm disgusted with my pathetic efforts over the last few months so I've resolved to be more prolific. For the moment it's just random stuff, but in the next few weeks I'll have Tempest to talk about as well as the likely purchase of a netbook and with it my entry into the world of open-source software operating systems.

Actually, I started writing about Tempest and then realise that's probably better put to use in a big post that covers the whole experience. So, you're going to have to wait to hear more about it - though you can, if you're in Adelaide, come see it. Details are here on the Mixed Salad website.

The puncture party

Sometime last week I noticed the rear tyre on my bike was low so - after a few days of just pumping it up each time I needed to go anywhere; it was obviously only a slow leak that wasn't going to cause me too many problems as long as I didn't have to travel very far, though, being the cautious sort, I tend to carry a pump¹ with me just in case - I went through the rather irritating (mostly because of how dirty my hands get) process: taking the wheel off (extra effort required for the rear, since the derailleur mechanism is in the way), levering the tyre aside; stripping out the tube; finding the hole(s) by reinflating the tube, filling a bucket with water, immersing the tube in the water and looking for where the air bubbles are emerging; patching the hole(s) and putting it all back together again.

But it seems to have worked okay - though the real test will be how well it holds up after actually being ridden.

This all took place on Monday night. Tuesday morning it was raining; after a fruitless search in the usual places I remembered my umbrella was in the car so I went to get it - and, in doing so, noticed that the rear right corner of my car was not where it should be, i.e. at the same height above the ground as the rear left corner: my car tyre was flat.

What are the chances? I get maybe one bike tyre puncture a year, but it's been so long since I had a flat car tyre that I suspect I went through an entire car (the Celica) without having to change the wheel - making it maybe eight years since the last time.

I couldn't fix it then and there; I was on my way to catching the bus to work. It wasn't a pressing issue because I didn't have to drive it that evening after finishing work because I was staying in town to go to the movies (more on that later) - but I knew that Wednesday afternoon I'd be going straight out and couldn't leave it until then; I'd have to deal with it after I got home on Tuesday night.

So, once I got home and got changed I set to it. Although it'd been ages since I'd done it, the process is by no means rocket science, and because the car was in the garage² I didn't have to worry as much about in terms of making sure the jack was properly supported and so forth.

I located all of the relevant bits and pieces - jack, jack handle, tyre iron³, spare tyre - without much difficulty; it did, however, look like none of it had been used before so I could assume that either the previous owner(s) had been lucky and never had a flat or, if they had, they called for help.

Despite the fact my type of car (a Mazda 323 Protégé, which is a small four door sedan) does not, as far as I'm aware, tend to be owned by construction workers, professional arm wrestlers or bodybuilders, the wheel nuts were on so damn tight I came very close to giving up and calling the RAA for assistance - as embarrassing as I knew that would be. I suspect it was only because I had some WD-40 handy that I was able to get the blasted things off without help. After that it was pretty easy.

At the time of writing it's been taken to a tyre place - but I haven't collected it yet so I've no idea what it's going to cost.

¹Actually, pumps plural; one standard (for the front) and one French (for the rear) - because for some unknown reason my bike has mismatched valve types, and since this determines the rims (because the valve stems are different diameters), changing would mean buying a whole new wheel, which strikes me as a waste of money.
²Or car-hole, if you aren't a la-di-da Mr French man.
³I'm pretty sure that's not the correct Australian term but a) I don't know what else to call it, and b) it sounds cool.

Growing the beard and dyeing for my art

I've grown a goatee for Tempest, mostly because the character I play has two children, presumably in their teens - and, despite my actually being old enough to have two teenage children (at least by the ages at which people tended to become parents in Shakespeare's time), I don't necessarily look that old - and, more importantly, I don't look that much older than the actor playing my on-stage son.

Hilariously, the term 'grow the beard' is actually an expression used in pop-culture analysis - see the TVTropes page - to describe when something improves in quality; if you can't be bothered following the link (remember, TVTropes can be hazardous to your health) the expression comes from Star Trek: The Next Generation where one of the characters (Commander Riker, played by Jonathan Frakes) starts sporting facial hair at around the same time the show supposedly⁴ got better.

Dyeing for your art is also a trope, but the meaning is much more obvious, and in this instance it is the aforementioned facial hair that’s been coloured for theatrical purposes.

I have to do this because my facial hair – at least some of it – is so pale in colour that it’s almost translucent⁵. Which isn’t, in and of itself, a problem; it’s just that when I need people to actually see it that it becomes an issue.

Last time I had to grow the beard and colour it (for my role as Karl Brezner in Popcorn) I went down the slightly less permanent path of brushing through some kind of makeup (mascara?) to darken it. But I had to wash that out every night, which was kind of annoying – plus there’s a scene in Tempest that calls for my character to be splashed with water, which might have cause problems for water-soluble makeup.

So, I’ve gone the dye option. Tracking down a product was not as difficult as I’d first imagined; there are actually several brands, most of them aimed at covering grey. So, I hit the pharmacy and grabbed a box of Light Brown.

Facial-hair-dyeing scientists have obviously been working very hard because the process is very simple: combine gunk from two tubes, smoosh them together and brush through the thing you want coloured and after an appropriate time, wash it out.

It seems to have worked okay: the hair is noticeably darker, but not so much that it looks like it isn’t natural. I’ll have to do a slightly more thorough job prior to the show opening, but that’s okay; it’s another three weeks until we open, and by then I’ll be in need of a trim anyway so I’ll clean it up and colour it again so it’s at its best for the run.

⁴No, I’m not just saying that because I don’t want you to know that I secretly watch Star Trek TNG in secret – I admit to much worse – it’s that I honestly haven’t ever watched it.
⁵It’s also oddly coarse, particularly the moustache part. I suspect I could make a living trimming it and selling it to people to make nail brushes.

Beneath Hill 60

This week’s cinematic experience was Beneath Hill 60, a film about a contingent of Australian sappers on the front lines in Europe during WWI.

What’s a sapper? Good question. According to Wikipedia they’re the military’s mining and excavation engineers and they’ve been doing their darndest to help their sides win wars for over two and a half thousand years, mostly by using their digging skills to bring down an enemy’s fortifications.

And it wasn’t all that much different in WWI. Since the two sides were situated at ‘the front’, with forces gathered either side of a ‘no man’s land’, battles usually consisted of one side deciding to charge at the other in the hope of pushing the other side back. If a side could find a way to make that push more successful then it’d increase the chances of success and – though it didn’t always seem like a priority – save a lot of people’s lives.

Well, people on the side charging at least.

Anyway, what the Australian sappers were doing was, in unison with other sapper units all along the front, digging underneath the enemy lines and planting explosive charges so that, when they were aware that the enemy troops had gathered in sufficient numbers, they’d detonate the explosives and kill a vast number of them.

The film is centered around this, all from the perspective of one Australian, Captain Oliver Woodward (played by Brendan Cowell) and includes some of his back story, including his relationship with a family who’d lost a member to the war.

It’s a bit slow to start off with, but once the unit travel to the eponymous Hill 60 (which was in Belgium) the tension starts to build and it develops into a really engrossing film. The dialogue is a bit grating at times – it just sounds unnatural, at least to me – and some of the more dramatic moments struck me as having been thrown in to add ‘human interest’.

But I enjoyed it⁶, and it was a great history lesson. Plus they also didn’t gloss over the impact or try to glorify war; there were scenes of mutilated and shell-shocked soldiers at the front, as well as a characters obviously suffering PTSD in a scene set after the war was over.

On a vaguely related note, it was directed by Jeremy Sims – which, since I saw a production of The Wild Duck directed by him a few years back, means it’s the first movie I’ve seen directed by someone who has also directed a play I’ve seen.

⁶It did, however, have Gyton Grantley in it; not that I mind him that much, but I really dislike the combination of weird given name and alliteration. It just irks me.

The dreaded head shot

One of the aspects of theatre I dread the most became necessary this week: having my photo taken for the program/foyer. The reason it is so loathéd⁷ is because, thanks to my poor (or, as I like to put it, non-existent) bone structure, my face does not take well to having one of its dimensions removed and the resulting image is almost always one that I dislike immensely.

Put it this way: I don't really like the shape of my face at the best of times, but I can live with it; when it's in a photo, though, it looks fat and flat and weird and huge⁸ and I hate not only having to see it myself whenever I enter a foyer/read a program/look at a webpage, but that other people see it as well.

Really, if I could enforce it I'd never let anyone take a photo of me, ever. But that's not really an option since there are always theatre programs and ID badges and driver's licenses and so forth; my freakish two-dimensional melon will always be there to be seen .

Anyway, these particular head shots were being taken by a professional, so at least I had that in my favour. Still, professionals at least realise exactly how much of a challenge they face when they struggle against the combination of physiology and the laws of physics and try to find ways around it - however, unlike amateurs, they aren't just going to shrug and say 'fuck it' and just go with what they've already got after spending twenty minutes adjusting the lights while I try to find the one good (as opposed to the nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine bad) facial expression that keeps me from looking like either an overly-cheerful serial killer or the poorly-reanimated corpse of someone very surly.

Making it worse was the fact that the other cast members started showing up. This served to make me even more nervous about the process since my inability to produce something worth shooting would now be inconveniencing others as well.

Given the choice I'd rather have been in a dentist's chair.

But he managed to get a couple that he liked - or, at least, was content with. I didn't ask to see them because I probably would have hated them; he'd have noticed and then made me sit back down again to keep trying to get one I was okay with, and everyone would have been sitting around for even longer wondering why the bloody hell it was taking so long.

Part of me is optimistic, though. It's not impossible for there to be photos of me I don't immediately want to set fire to - it's just not very likely. Still, there's really not a lot I can do about it.

⁷That's right, loathéd. I'm kicking it old school.
⁸Okay, fatter, flatter, weirder and huger.