Happiness is a Warm Car

My hatred of cars is now subsiding after an apparently successful cambelt transplant (although I am still monitoring the patient for any signs of relapse).  I don’t want to say anything prematurely, but it seems as though everything is now all well and good.  And, at the risk of sounding overly cheerful, despite the fact that a one- to two-day job turned into a five-day epic I am actually quite pleased with how everything turned out – while it is true that I shouldn’t really have needed to fork out the £45 for a new cambelt, it appears that the engine timing may have been slightly out all along, perhaps by as little as a single cam pulley tooth, since the car is now running smoother and quieter than it ever has.  Furthermore I have learned an almost absurd amount about engines over the past week or so; more than I could ever have learned by a straightforward head gasket change.  Having seen the internal gubbins of an engine (“gubbins” being a technical mechanic’s term), having to diagnose the subsequent problems meant learning exactly how those gubbins operate (with some advice and tutelage from my Uncle – actually with an enormous amount of advice and tutelage from my Uncle).

So everything seems to have worked out for the best in the long run, as things often do I suppose.  As I say, I am still wary of everything going tits up, I am spending an inordinate amount of time watching the temperature guage, I am half-convinced that the power steering is going to fail every time I go around the corner, and I’m perpetually worried about being hit in the arse with an exploding head gasket (such are the perils of having your engine directly under your seat).  Hope For The Best, Expect The Worst is my new motto, which is a significant improvement over my old motto of Expect The Worst Because It’s Probably Going To Happen.  Yes, my vehicular trials and tribulations have turned me from a pessimist into a…well…a lesser pessimist I guess.  I’m not sure I would go so far as to describe myself as an optimist, and even a realist has a more positive outlook than I currently have, but an improvement is an improvement so I can’t really complain.

I also now have heating in my car, the lack of which is an unpleasant side effect of having a blown head gasket.  Now I can be comfortably warm wherever I drive regardless of the length of the journey, and so I am preparing myself for the inevitably scorching summer.  Now if I can only get the air conditioning to work…  It probably needs regassing or something.  When I was little the only air conditioning we had was rolling down the windows and getting your head blown off.  Even now it bugs me when you’re driving along with the windows rolled down on a searingly hot day and you drive past a dozen smug bastards with all their windows rolled up and the aircon blasting away full pelt inside.

Anyway, that’s enough talk about cars for now.  If anyone has any questions about the LD23 engine then you can always leave a comment and I’ll get back to you – I’ve done quite a lot of work on the bloody thing, so I might be able to help…

Now that the car’s out of the way I’m going to turn my attention to more important matters, like Getting The Hell Out of England.  I’m still a bit stymied on that front, having no clue as to how I’m going to achieve this goal – the simplest way is to win the lottery, and then I can go pretty much wherever I want to (it’s amazing what you can do when you’ve got money…not that I’d know, of course).  Another alternative is to continue to pursue the dream of becoming a successful screenwriter, which should secure me a place in the good ol’ US of A if I can pull it off.  In all likelihood it would mean living in or near Los Angeles, which isn’t high on my list of Favourite American Places, but it’s got to be better than a dingy old suburb of London, or indeed absolutely anywhere in the Godforsaken shithole of a country.  (Don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot of absolutely beautiful places in England, but unfortunately they all have the same NHS, the same schooling, the same taxes and the same bloody Government.  Far better to just get out of the country altogether.  There’s things I’d miss, to be sure, but these would be far outweighed by all the things I so clearly wouldn’t miss.)

I’m going to head off for now since I have been working on this draft, on and off, for the past three days.  It would seem prudent to check the state of play of the writers’ strike, as I have not been keeping abreast of the news and have very little idea of what is going on in the world right now.  Apparently Prince Harry has been pulled out of Afghanistan, Global Warming may or may not be happening, and Gordon Brown continues to spew fountains of drivel into a microphone in the hope that someone will actually believe a word he says.  Frankly I think it unlikely.

 :D

Hell on Toast

I.  Hate.  Cars.

 Last Wednesday I decided that the head gasket on my Nissan Serena had taken enough abuse (it has been at least six months since I discovered it was leaking slightly – since then I have been religiously topping up the oil and water just to keep the damn thing running).  I didn’t drive it for three days and knuckled down on Saturday to change the gasket myself, since I really can’t afford the £500-£600 I was quoted to have it done professionally (an exhorbitant fee considering that the gasket itself only costs £22).

I think that’s where things started to go wrong.  Mistakes were made.  I’m no expert, to say the least, and a complete amateur when it comes to diesel engines.  I failed to realise that the fuel injector pump pulley was under compression and would spin around once the cambelt was released and, but for the sake of a single dab of Tippex, I lost the timing on the belt.  So having gone through an eight hour process, spanning two days, of disassembling and reassembling the head I found that the damn car wouldn’t work after all that effort.

My battery was on its way out as well, so I finally had to go for broke and buy a new one for the princely sum of £81.02 (including VAT).  Now my wallet hurts as much as my arms and back.

Having replaced the battery I set about, with my wonderful, life-saving uncle (who came in half-way through and has been helping me sort out my problem), trying to sort out the timing on the fuel injector pump.  After another couple of days of doing that we came to the conclusion that the pump pulley wasn’t the only problem – the camshaft/crankshaft timing must have slipped fractionally as well, and that’s something I can’t risk feckin’ about with just in case I inadvertantly crumple my valves, pistons, cylinder head and self-esteem.  So now I have to get a new cambelt, despite the fact that there’s nothing wrong with the old one – the only benefit is that a new cambelt comes with timing marks on it (it’s a Japanese thing apparently), and so I can set the timing right by just lining up the marks on the belt with the marks on the pulleys.

So that’s my job tomorrow: to change the cambelt, and hope and pray that the bloody thing works properly after five days’ work (something which, at present, I sincerely doubt – my luck just isn’t that good).  I’m still without a car a week after I stopped driving it, and I have no guarantees that it’ll work when I’m done.  God, I’m depressed.  I’ve contemplated a voluntary nervous breakdown two or three times these past few days, and come close to an involuntary one at least twice more.  I’d take anti-depressants, but a recent report suggests that they only have a placebo effect.  In light of that I am considering taking a placebo, though I’m not sure how I’m going to convince myself that the Smarties I have bought actually have an anti-depressant effect.  Perhaps electroshock therapy is the solution – pick a bunch of let’s say blue Smarties, pop them in a medicine bottle, shock myself, lose my short-term memory (conveniently leaving myself a note to take the pills in the medicine bottle) and then take the handy chocolate-filled placebos.  I think it may work.  Of course, the electroshock therapy might erase the source of my depression, thereby eliminating the need to take the placebos in the first place.  Isn’t life ironic?  Alternatively I could try to find an external source of endorphins that will make me feel warm and cosy.  I’m told that sex releases vast scads of endorphins, though as I understand it this only works if there is a second person involved in the act, otherwise it just releases Guilt Gremlins that make you feel so gosh-darned terrible that you might end up taking your own life, which I can’t help feeling is counter-productive.  (As a backup I could try consuming copious quantities of chocolate, which apparently releases the same chemicals as sex but is much less fun, though I’ll probably just end up equally depressed but fat too.)

I tried an alternative last night, which is “Watching A Scary Movie”.  I popped on Saw III and watched it all by my little self, with no emotional support whatsoever.  I even turned off the light.  It’s pretty grim.  Entertaining, but grim.  Not really scary, unless you count wincing every time somthing gross happens as being scary.  I haven’t yet decided whether or not I shall watch Saw IV.  It seems rather surplus to requirements, in that everything from the previous films is tied up neatly in Saw III, so I can’t help feeling that it’s just an excuse to continue a successful franchise.  More to the point, the films have been getting progressively more gooey, and I’m not a big fan of films that are gory just for the sake of being gory.  If gore has a point then I’m all for it, but if it’s just there to show how Big and Clever the filmmakers are then I can do without it.

Ah well, time’s up I suppose.

Summer of Love

Today’s title is supposed to be a humourous nod to the fact that Valentine’s Day is but two days away and the weather is unseasonably lovely.  Now I’m no Global Warming fanatic – in fact I’m quite the opposite – but if this is global warming at work (it isn’t, I hasten to add) then I say Long May it Last.  If ye gods are not going to grace us with eight-foot snow drifts then we might as well have some nice warm days, fresh air and – what’s that big firey ball in the sky up there…?  Ah yes.  The Sun.  We’d almost forgotten what that was.  Strangely it is still quite cool, if not actually cold, inside the house while the garden basks in pleasant warmth.  The daffodils and crocuses on the lawn wouldn’t be so bold if they were indoor plants, I fear.

It has been a long time since I last felt compelled to write a blog post, so what news have I for you today, I hear you ask?  Well a lot has happened over the past few weeks, but I’m not sure that any of it is of any interest.  My heating went on the fritz.  After much cussing and swearing and grinding of teeth (plus frequent trips into the attic to check the header tank) I decided that the water pump must have gone; a diagnosis that was confirmed by the plumber when he finally came round and fixed it.  I had a few freezing cold nights indoors, with a thirsty electric heater and a thick sleeping bag, while I watched TV and failed to play video games because my thumbs were that cold, but other than that I suppose I can’t complain – it’s fixed now at least.

I’ve done a lot of tidying up, which has the advantage of giving me room to swing a cat (not literally – my cats are too big and heavy to swing, what with my poorly back and all…), but has the distinct disadvantage of leaving me with a back garden full of crap that needs to be taken down to the municipal shite site.  I would estimate that well over a third of my garden is taken up with rubbish at the moment, and I’m still trying to find the time and the enthusiasm to make the necessary trips (sometimes I have the time and sometimes I have the enthusiasm, but the two rarely coincide).

I’ve been decorating a lot, which is something I swore I’d never do again the last time I did it.  Actually, I always swear never to do it again, every bloody time I do it.  I’ve been through more paint brushes, paint pads and rollers than a professional decorator since I got married.  I love my wife to pieces, but she’s got to learn to live with the paint she chose five minutes earlier.  Every now and again I paint a room in an absurdly dark or vivid colour, just to try something new.  The down side to this is that the next time you choose to decorate (which is often a few weeks later, when the colour’s oppressiveness has finally ground you down) you either have to strip off the old paint or else cover it up with between ten and fifty coats of your new, lighter colour.  The living room, for example, is currently a two-tone affair of dusky pink and dusky plum.  Soon I shall be redecorating in shades of beige.  I’m not entirely sure how well the beige will cover the pink, and even less sure of how it will cover the plum – I may end up using all ten litres, which I shouldn’t have to do as our living room is really not very big at all.  Perhaps I shall whip out the paint and a brush once I have finished my rambling and see how easy the job is likely to be.  Then I can thrill you all with the results in my next post.  (Was that a gasp of thrilled anticipation I just heard, or was it the final exhalation of breath after a particularly successful suicide attempt?)

What else have I been up to?  Not a great deal really – I’ve been overdosing on House MD (three seasons in under a month may be some kind of record), and am now suffering withdrawal symptoms as I await season four.  Which may take some time, as they’ve only filmed twelve episodes and are currently awaiting a thirteenth script from the striking writers.  I have supported the writers through their strike, I have to say, but it’s amazing how quickly your support starts to waver when your favourite shows go off the air.  BRING ME BACK MY HOUSE AND MY LAS VEGAS!!!  Since I don’t watch shows on TV these days – I watch them retrospectively on DVD – the wait for House is set to be long and interminable.  Once the writers have settled it’s going to be somewhere in the region of six months before a new episode airs, there’s likely to be another eleven or twelve episodes left to come this season (unless they cut it short) and then it’ll be a few months after that until the DVD release.  So, assuming that the writers’ strike ends tomorrow, the DVD isn’t likely to be released for another…ooh…nine to twelve months…  That’s, like, a year!  How will I survive?  Las Vegas season five may hit the shelves a little sooner, since they’re up to episode seventeen, I think, which means they have only another six episodes or so to shoot, and that would make a DVD release somewhere between seven and ten months away if we’re lucky.  I may just cry.

The writers’ strike has been a tough deal for me as an aspiring screenwriter.  I’ve got some finished bits and pieces which I could send off for consideration, but what’s the right thing to do?  The writers are all members of the WGA (Writers’ Guild of America, to the uninitiated), and the WGA is a very serious organisation.  That’s not a bad thing, or intended as a criticism in any way: it’s just the way it is – they take their Guild very seriously, and with good reason.  They represent the very backbone of the TV and motion picture industry.  Let’s face it, without a script you don’t get good TV and movies (watch Big Brother or I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here for proof of that assertion).  So writers are pretty darned important.  Now, on the face of it, it seemed a grand idea to send in a spec script to a Network reader while he had nothing else on his desk to read – kind of like sneaking in through the barn door to audition for the part of New Horse just after the Old Horse bolted.  On the face of it, it seemed like a grand idea to send in a spec script because the Networks will be gagging for material to move their productions along – think of it…bypassing the “foot in the door” stage by just waltzing straight in!!  On the face of it, it seemed like the ideal way to finally break into the TV or movie industry.

Then Reality kicks in.  If you take advantage of the writers’ strike to get your big break, you are guaranteed to be vilified by the WGA (and with good reason – talk about undermining their efforts).  If the WGA strikes and a writer strolls along with new material, thereby flouting the strike, it could well leave the networks with the impression that they don’t really need the WGA.  To be honest, I think there are few networks that would stoop so low as to accept a spec script from a new writer during a writers’ strike for that very reason.  So, if I am to become a screenwriter I am going to have to do it the old-fashioned way.  Once the strike is over I shall start my attack anew until finally, one day, I can break into the biz.

 Who knows?  Perhaps that wonderful day will be as sunny and pleasant as it is outside today…

 (Do you like the way I tied that in with the start?  I’m quite proud of that. <polishes nails on lapels of shirt>)

 Ciao

2008 – The Year of Promise

That’s what I’m hoping at least.  Last year was a bit crap, all things considered, what with six months of financial hell, a house full of garbage and the stunning inability to get done any of the things that I wanted.  This year should be heaps better though – the financial woes are (I hope) a thing of the past, vast scads of garbage have been disposed of (although I still have to take it all down to the local waste site, where it will look far more fetching than it does as a wall of black plastic sacks in my back garden), and I already have a list of things I need to get done which, much to my surprise, I actually feel compelled to do.

It has been a really quite groovy Christmas.  The children have enjoyed it a huge amount, and there’s really nothing nicer than seeing their little faces light up as they unwrap their pressies.  Better still, I got Super Mario Galaxy and Super Paper Mario for my presents – both supremely great games.  I have finished Galaxy already, not because it was too easy or not long enough or anything like that, but simply because I’m a persistent bugger who just won’t give up until he’s beaten a game (I suppose).  Perhaps it’s something to do with growing up with games like Jet Set Willy and Horace Goes Skiing which, while utterly fantastic, never actually ended.  Or at least it was next to impossible to finish them.  (Although my personal favourite was Auf Wiedersehen, Monty on the Commodore +4 – I don’t know if it was the game as a whole or just the C16/+4 port of it or maybe just my copy, but it was actually impossible to finish the game – you could go everywhere, do everything, complete every single square inch of game and you couldn’t get enough money to buy the island at the end…or whatever it was you had to do.)

Anyway, just to give you some idea of how amazingly successful my efforts this year have been so far, this paragraph is coming to you a full week after the setting down of the previous paragraph.  I just haven’t had the time to sit down at the computer for more than thirty seconds recently, which must be a good thing because it is the sitting down in front of the computer that prevents me from getting done all of the things which I had planned to do.  I even wrote a “Things To Do” list (on the computer, admittedly).  Yet more shocking is the fact that I’ve actually crossed some items off the list.  Wow!  Last year the number one item on my “Things To Do” list was to write a “Things To Do” list, and I never got to cross that off because I didn’t write the list to be able to cross it off of.

So I think that perhaps things are looking up, this year.  Unfortunately, when things look up there is nothing really to complain about, and so I shall cut short this little missive and get back on with all the things that I really should be doing.  I will return when my newfound zeal wears off (I’m sure it won’t be more than a week or two before my enthusiasm wanes…we shall see).

Ciao

Happy New Year everyone, by the way…

So Here It Is. Merry Christmas.

Without the jaunty music, the festive yellings of Noddy Holder and, of course, the appropriate punctuation, the phrase I have used for my title seems bland and sullen, doesn’t it?  Apologies.  I have to say that thes festive spirit has yet to grip me this Christmas.  Not because I’m turning into a grumpy old man, I hasten to add, but simply because it seems to have arrived some darned abruptly this year.  (Perhaps that’s how old men get to be so grumpy: as they realise that what little remains of their life is rapidly dashing away from them without giving them so much as a piggy back along the way.)  A year that started off so slowly has hurtled out of control – somewhere around August, I think – and before I knew it it was the beginning of December already.

And so I have not yet bought any Christmas presents, I’m not entirely sure what to get for the children, I dredged up the decorations on December 1st rather than two weeks before like I normally do, and I didn’t get round to hanging any decorations until the next day.  Here we are now on December 4th and I’m still only partially decorated, I have a list of chores to do as long as my arm, and on top of that I also have to completely clear out the house.  This last item is my Sping Clean, which I have yet to complete.  My Spring Clean from 2002.

On the plus side I have taken five rubbish bags full of good toys to the charity shop, the contents of which may furnish the houses of the less well off this year.  I almost – almost – have a dining room table, which hasn’t been clear and usable since I bought it from Ikea back in March.  I have space on my bookshelves, several more square footage of carpet than I had yesterday and bedrooms for the children to sleep in at night.  I am thinking of draping several metric tons of tinsel across the walls in an attempt to deter my wife from insisting that I paint the living room before the Big Day arrives.  Maybe I’ll hang that huge African mirror in the back room, thereby hiding the walls and making the room look bigger at the same time.

Anyway, as ever there is more for me to do.  I feel I should cut this post short so that I can get on with that which needs doing, but this blogging is just the catharsis I need to spur me into action.  Unless it makes me so supremely depressed that I lose any residual will to live that I once had.  Sorry if I sound overly dramatic and pessimistic, but I am currently awaiting a phone call that could determine the course of my life for the next few years, so I am somewhat on edge.  Maybe I should turn my attention to something a little more light hearted.  (Isn’t Christmas supposed to be light hearted?  Why is there so much stress involved?  Maybe it’s the preparations, the tidying, the present-buying, the wrapping, the decorating, the arrangements for the day itself, the overly-cautious pussyfooting around people’s feelings and so on.  Or maybe it’s all the things the schools arrange these days that you must remember and do and pay for, like the mufti days, the bazaars, the pantomime trips, the carol concerts, the christmas plays, the parties, the cards and so on.  When you combine all these things, list them, sit down and look at them you realise that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day, or days left until Christmas, to do all these things.  Blue-arsed flies have got nothing on Parents-At-Christmastime.)

Going off on a complete tangent, yesterday was a DVD release double bill, with Disney’s High School Musical 2 (which my daughter really wanted) and Transformers (which my son really wanted) both hitting the shelves.  Of course we all wanted to watch Transformers as soon as we got in from the afternoon school run, so we sat down and stuck it on the TV.  The children were a little nervous because they thought it might be scary, whereas my nervousness stemmed from the fact that I thought it might be an unmitigated pile of shite, especially when considering all the reviews it got.  I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised – having grown up with the fairly shoddily-animated Transformers cartoons of the 1980s (and loving them, of course, as any right-minded under-10 boy did), seeing the fantastically detailed live-action film was a dream come true.  A few days ago my six year-old son came tearing into the kitchen having seen an advert of TV for the impending release – he was wide-eyed and breathless as he said, “DADDY!  DADDY!  THERE’S TRANSFORMERS ON TV!  AND THEY’RE REAL!!“  How can you not love a film that evokes that kind of reaction from a child?  I say Stuff The Critics.  It is possible to enjoy a film on its merits, even if the critics slam it, knock it down, spit on it and grind it into the dust.  Besides, it’s only entertainment when all’s said and done.  That’s why I don’t get annoyed at bad films.  I even quite enjoyed Batman and Robin – it was bright, it was colourful and it was fun.  Even if it was totally unequivocal bollocks.  (I thought it was better than Batman Forever at any rate.)

And now that I have thrown away any credibility I may once have had, I must go.

 Ciao

Dolphins @ Steelers

Okay, I get it - the pseudointellectual ramblings in my last post were obviously not appreciated.  Actually that doesn’t quite add up.  I got no hits for two days, which means that people didn’t even read the last post and so were unable to form an opinion of appreciation one way or the other.  Have my last few posts been too serious?  Do people expect more pith and/or venom from me?  Can I only guarantee hits by using phrases like “Naked Celebrities” or “David Caruso”?  (Not “David Caruso naked” you understand, for that is an image that nobody wishes to see – it could permanently disable one’s libido.)  Perhaps I should return to lighter, fluffier topics of conversation such as the current situation in the NFL.

And so, being that I am an avid Pittsburgh Steelers fan, I shall turn my thoughts to the impending game with the Miami Dolphins at Heinz Field.  Where should I begin?  Well, of course Pittsburgh fell on the road last week to the New York Jets, which is fairly embarrassing considering how badly the Jets are doing this year.  Having said that, they didn’t show the game on British TV and so I have no idea how embarrassing it actually was (though Roethlisberger did get sacked repeatedly – 7 times I think – including once for 17 yards…yikes!).  Also all of the Steelers’ losses this season have been on the road, which is pretty odd considering they are historically a strong team when playing away from home, but the upcoming game is at home for them.

As for the Dolphins…they’re having an utterly miserable time of it this year.  It’s a shame for a variety of reasons, not least because it is the 25th Anniversary of their Perfect Season but also because, when all’s said and done, they’ve not actually been playing that badly.  They’ve maybe not played all that well either, for that matter, but lest we forget they did manage to rally against the New England Patriots and get 28 points on the board in that game, and scoring 28 points against the Pats (especially this year) is no mean feat.  So, will the Dolphins pull something out of the bag and beat the Steelers?  We can only hope not.  The Browns won their game this evening, which means that a Steelers loss would see them tying the top of the AFC North at 7-4 each, so let’s hope the home field serves them well.

Roethlisberger is obviously a key player with the Steelers.  (That’s a pretty stupid thing to say – the Quarterback is a key player in a football team the same way the engine is a key part of a car.  Without it you’re not going to get anywhere…)  What I mean is that when Big Ben is having a bad day it seems that nobody else on the team can get it together either.  On the other hand that kind of makes sense – the QB’s more likely to rush passes, throw interceptions and get sacked if his offensive line is crumbling around him.  I’m banking on last week’s loss giving the whole team a good reality check; losing to this year’s Dolphins would be the ultimate indignity, especially on the back of last week’s result.

Looking further ahead, the Steeler’s next road game is at New England which really does not bode well.  It seems that New England are unstoppable this year, and although there has been talk of the Steelers being the only team who can prevent a Perfect Pats Season I think losing to the Dolphins would be so utterly disheartening that they wouldn’t be able to do it.  Still, staying positive I think that they do have a chance – if Parker can get some big rushes, Roethlisberger gets some big passes and Ward et al can get some big receptions then, although it’s likely to be close, they could pull it off.  Whichever way it goes there’s going to be some bad blood in my family, as my parents are huge Patriots fans.  It seems only fair that the Patriots should win, since my parents have been Pats fans for around 20 years and my wife and I have been Steelers fans for less than five, but all’s fair in love and war.

 But now my mother’s looking over my shoulder I’d best bugger off…

Ciao

Time for some more Blather

Good dawn, good day, good dusk and good night to you all (depending on from whereabouts in this world you are reading this – assuming of course that you are reading this and not just clicking onto it and thinking “oh, that’s not what I was looking for, it’s just crap,” before hurriedly clicking the Back button or typing in a safe and cosy web address with which you are already familiar).

Today I have been hard at work moving furniture and painting the walls of my daughter’s bedroom.  Since there is very little to do while painting a room all by yourself, I have been doing a lot of thinking today, mainly about mindless bobbins and only occasionally straying onto a subject of any interest.  I did find myself thinking rather long and hard (while still painting, of course) about intelligence – what it is, how you attain it and how you display it.  It occurred to me that there may well be far more smart people on the planet than I had previously imagined.

You see, when all is said and done, intelligence is little more than the brain’s capacity for learning and subsequently retrieving information.  The more intelligent you are, the more easily you can learn and retrieve information, so really intelligence is all about connections in the brain.  The more connections you have, the faster you can learn and retrieve  information, and furthermore the more likely it is that you will retrieve information relevant to your current situation by being able to cross-reference information from many different areas.

My mother is an absolute whizz at Trivial Pursuit, and when I was younger I used to get very upset that I never won (apparently oblivious to the fact that I was only nine years old).  I would say how unfair it all was because my mother was so much smarter than me.  I clearly remember her saying, “it’s nothing to do with intelligence, it’s to do with how much stuff you know.”  The point she was making was that there’s a big difference between being smart and just arbitrarily knowing stuff.  Thinking along these lines it occurred to me that there are people who are experts in their field (plumbing, building or whatever), who can solve job-related problems in a flash, but who come across as fairly stupid.  Not to say, I hasten to add, that all plumbers or builders are stupid – far from it.  By being experts in their field they are displaying a degree of intelligence that is lost on vast swathes of the population.  Just because you may come across a plumber who doesn’t know anything about geography or world history doesn’t mean that they’re stupid.  Similarly, though I hate to admit it, there are people who can retrieve enormous amounts of information about the history of Soccer but can do little else – the information retrieval implies a fair degree of intelligence, but the lack of knowledge elsewhere suggests general laziness.  Yes, you can be smart and lazy.  If you want.

And then there’s Common Sense.  It is ironic to me that what they call Common Sense certainly appears to be a rare commodity, and there are a lot of very intelligent people in the world who seem to have absolutely no common sense.  On the flip side, of course, there are a lot of pretty dumb people who are blessed with absurd amounts of common sense.  Perhaps those are extremely intelligent and have common sense are the pinnacle of human evolution, but I wonder how often people like that appear on the planet.  Although maybe the human race develops because of the work of people who are intelligent but seem to lack common sense.

Take Isaac Newton, for example – there’s a smart man if ever there was one.  In the interests of science he one day shoved a needle right into his eye socket, between the eyeball and the bone, just to see what would happen.  Common Sense dictates that this is a remarkably stupid thing to do, but Newton did it and learned something from the experience (I’m not sure what he learned…perhaps it was simply that, yes, you could shove a needle into your eye socket without any serious repercussions).  Newton also wondered how much damage could be done to your retinas by staring at the Sun.  So he stared at the Sun until the pain in his eyes was so excruciating that he could bear it no longer.  Interestingly, perhaps even surprisingly, he went blind for quite some time.  (His sight did, in fact, return eventually – some months or years later – so he learned something new again).  And once again you find yourself wondering how much Common Sense Newton had to put himself through that.  Perhaps he shoved his Common Sense to one side in the spirit of scientific discovery.  Or perhaps he was just a nut-job.  The passage of time has swept over the answer, although there is a certain amount of circumstantial evidence which suggests that he was a nut-job.

So where does that leave me?  I’m not sure really – I just thought that I would present my day’s musings in the hope that someone might be even vaguely interested in my ramblings, or even in analysing the way my mind works.  I wonder what kinds of things other people think about while painting walls?  Please leave a comment if you would like to share your thoughts.  If you don’t want to share your thoughts then you’re welcome to leave me a comment anyway – after all, if I don’t like what you write I can always delete the comment at the moderation stage…

Now I must change my youngest beast’s nappy (that’s “diaper” to any Americans who are reading this who aren’t familiar with the term “nappy”), for it smells really quite bad.

Good night.

The worst thing about Christmas…

…is the preparation.  Right now I am sitting in a house that is doing a passable impression of an inner-city slum, and it needs to be transformed into a clean and spacious living environment before Christmas.  In fact it would be even better if it became a clean and spacious living environment before December 1st, so that we’ve actually got somewhere to hang decorations, advent calendars and set up a tree.  Our back yard is filling up with sacks of rubbish, which are the result of the last month’s activities in the arena of Crap-Clearing, and I fear that before Christmas even arrives the yard will be nothing but a sea of black sacks.  The house is garnering a collection of green sacks full of toys and clothes which I really must take down to the local charity shop soon, if for no other reason than to expose a few square feet of carpet.

I’ve never been great at clearing out old stuff, but it has now got to the point that the sheer amount of stuff around makes it an almost insurmountable task.  If it was my house, rather than a rented property, I would be tempted to take a flamethrower to everything and just deal with the associated fire damage afterwards.  That is not really an option, however, not least because I find that it is extremely hard to get my hands on a good industrial-strength flamethrower (I’m sure you can pick these up in America from just about any store you care to mention).  I do have a very small blowtorch, but it would probably take a while to get through everything I want to do – I’m not trying to burn the house down, after all.  I’m many things, but an arsonist is not one of them.

 Well, the kitchen’s nearly done.  That’s a good start at least.  We moved the washing machine and dishwasher into the hall cupboard, plumbing them into the downstairs toilet water pipes. but the unpleasant side-effect of that is that the forty-seven metric tons of crap that was in the hall cupboard is now strewn around the living room and hallway, thereby giving me that much more stuff to sort out.  I suppose ninety percent of it has been in the hall cupboard for over a year without being touched, so it can be dumped straight out in the yard with the rest of it, but there’s that awful nagging feeling I get that I might be throwing away something vital or valuable and so I just have to go through it all, a piece at a time.  God I hate tidying!

They say that things have to get worse before they can get better.  If that is true then I must have a whole load of windfalls headed my way, considering how much worse things have got recently.  I should, of course, be knuckling down and sorting it all out right now rather than sitting in front of the computer typing this, but after hoiking a washing machine around and plumbing it in, tidying up the kitchen and dashing upstairs to paint the kids’ beds I really can’t be arsed.  In a little over half an hour I have to dash out and pick up my son from school and go shopping, then I’ve got about half an hour before I have to pick my wife up from work.  Somehow I shall have to squeeze in some clearing out in the living room in between all that – it is a source of constant dismay to me that all the tidying I do do goes unnoticed by my wife, partially because a lot of it is Behind-The-Scenes stuff (inside cupboards, under beds and so on) and partially because the superficial surface tidying I get done is often ruined by the time she gets home.  When you have a three year-old running around at home it’s rather like being perpetually inundated by tornadoes.

I also want to get on with writing some potentially productive stuff, like books and screenplays, but they require rather more time and concentration than does a blog and I don’t get a chance to do it.  On the positive side I am stockpiling a bunch of ideas for when I do get time, and I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m not going to get a chance to do anything before the New Year now.  Perhaps 2008 shall be the year I finally break in to professional writing.  (I’ve been saying that for years: “2001 is the new millennium – I can start my new life”, “2002 will be the year”, “2003 is going to be good to me”, “2004 shall be the year of success”, and so on.)  Still, 2007 has been a hectic year with, as I said earlier, very few actual achievements despite the amount of work that went into it all, so I can’t be too hard on myself (yes I can).  If I can get the house tidy enough before next year then maybe I won’t have to spend my whole life rushing round in very small circles and I can commit myself to getting something productive done.  That’s my plan.  (Again, though, I’ve been saying that for years…)

Anyway, it’ll soon be time to dig out the Christmas decorations, dust off the old tree (unless the wife gets her way and we end up with a real tree) and start tantalising the children with promises of fabulous presents.  Provided that they are good enough, or it’ll be lumps of coal all round of course.  This is blessedly the time of year when you can whip the children into shape with an off the cuff “you don’t want to go on the Naughty List, do you?” type comment, which usually works a charm.  I have found it a little sinister to say “Santa is watching”.  It’s a little too Orwellian for my taste.  It conjures up imagery of a jolly, red-clad fat guy sat in a high-tech surveillance room following the movements of every child on the planet.  Does this guy ever sleep?  Of course not.  He’s Santa.  And he’s Pissed Off.

Ciao