Brendon has already posted one of his poems from the Hack Hack Spurt Spurt bad poetry writing jamboree. Here are a few of mine:

Love Poem
What is love, really?
I mean, really?
If you get right down to it?
And really make a point of thinking about it carefully?
Is it a perfect liquid orb of dew nestled within the complex crissy-crossed leaves of a plant?
The crissy-crossed leaves could represent life or something.

The Service Station [1]
Oh magnificent monument, the service station! [2]
Where a man [3] abides to water his steely steed [4]
A way-chapel for the congregation of hoons [6]
Who gather at the crossroads. [7]

[1] A poem.
[2] The author is not being sarcastic, but intends to make the reader think about how a service station is really just as noble as a fine public building in some senses.
[3] Or a woman.
[4] Not an actual steed, but a metaphor for an automobile. [5]
[5] Also, “steely steed” is alliterative.
[6] The conjunction of the archaic “way-chapel” with the modern colloquialism “hoons” is intended to startle the reader out of the lethargy of a bourgeois life
[7] Cross, like the Christian cross, only more shocking in its secularism. Also, I’ve just realised that “service” in “service station” could be like a church service.

The Other Poem
Oh no!
What if I’m the only person in the universe
And everything else is my imagination?
My God!
I must be the first person ever to have thought of that.

And if you all had rooms, would you still have room for me?
Maybe, Split Enz

As a test of the photo-blogging capabilities of Movable Type, here’s a picture of two nests that Raymond found in my roof a few weeks back. The one on the left was made by a bird, and the one on the right by a bunch of wasps. The wasp nest is made of masticated paper and is extremely fragile, but beautiful.

Update:
Took a bit of fiddling to get it to work, but I think it’s OK now.

Music: Double Flash, Leftfield

The latest game sweeping the virtual chattering classes is the five-question interview conversation starter. It works like this see: I ask some people to send me five questions which I answer as I see fit. But by doing so, it is understood that I invite other people to request questions from me, which they answer in turn. It’s like a pyrmaid scheme, only you send searching questions instead of money. Also, nobody gets arrested. Not at first.

Angmonster asked me the following questions:

1. Why did you choose to become a teacher?

By about my fifth year of university I was getting a little tired of it. I felt I had really reached the limit of my abilities in mathematics, and probably wouldn’t have much to offer the world by attempting a PhD in the subject. Especially at the point where I was getting bogged odwn in my master’s thesis trying to make stuff work, I found tutoring first-year students a lot more rewarding than research. So I decided to see the thesis through, then go to Teacher’s College.
While I was there I learnt that teaching high school students isn’t all that much like tutoring at university. That is, the seventh form classes are pretty similar, but younger classes involve a lot more annoying discipline stuff and a lot less actual guiding young minds. Teaching has its own different rewards.

2. What activity do you find the most calming?

Calming. When I have trouble sleeping, which is often, I usually find the things most likely to help me sleep (apart from other people’s medication - specifically some sleeping pills my Mum had left over from a prescription which she thought I wshould try, and which worked very well) are spoken-word recordings. Nicki always used to swear by her tapes of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, and stand-up comedy works well too. It has to be familiar enough not to keep your full riveted attention, but interesting enough to be distracting.

3. How would you describe your sense of humour?

Light, yet filling.

Mostly it’s just random associations, which I try to mentally filter for unintended insults before giving voice.

4. Name one unattainable dream you have.

I try not to dwell on unattainable dreams. Life’s too short. Or too long. But it’s not my prerogative nor my desire to shorten it.

5. Name an attainable dream you have.

To get through each day without hurting people. Which I don’t always succeed at, but I keep trying.

Bit intense at the end there, perhaps.

Comikaze (or Jeff, as he is known by the overlanders who dwell in the Cavern-With-No-Ceiling) asked the following questions:

1) You get to do a project with either Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore or J Michael Straczynsky (spelling pending). Who do you choose and what would the project be?

I’m going to choose to wilfully misinterpret this question and pretend it meansthat I get to pick a project for each famous person.

If it was Neil Gaiman, I’d propose working on a novel or comic based on the Great Trigonometrical Survey that the British Raj conducted to triangulate the entire Indian subcontinent, starting from about 1800 in Madras and culminating decades later in the discovery of the Himalayas, and the measurement of Mount Everest. As in real life, there would be a series of complicated adventures along the way.
I started doing this as a roleplaying campaign once, but after a few adventures I realised it needed more authorial control than the medium allowed. My version of the story also involves Lord Ganesa (the elephant-headed Hindu god, and also I think the one who cares most about the affairs of individual humans), the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (in Buddhist tradition, one of the souls who has attained the threshold of Nirvana, but instead turned back to help others - the noblest of all possible acts). There were also Kali worshippers, man-eating Bengal tigers, an impending war between the British and French, and hijinks a-plenty.
I want to do this story one day, but Neil Gaiman could definitely help. it’d be his sort of thing.

With Alan Moore or Michael Straczynski, I’d work on stories in the Spaces Between setting that my friend Duane and I have been working on. I think Alan Moore would be good on the stuff set in the main time-frame we have in mind, around 2500 when there are interstellar colonies and contact with alien sapients. If it were Michael Straczynski, I’d ask him to help me with the novel I want to set earlier in the history of the Spaces Between universe, running from the 2070s through to the 2090s - a period that covers the Belt War, growing unrest on a corporate-dominated Earth, the Pacific War, the emergence of the nation-state of Pasefika encompassing most of the Pacific Basin (not the Pacific Rim, the actual ocean basin) and the diplomatic battle to establish a global federation in the aftermath of the war.

These are all projects I plan to work on sometime anyway, but if Gaiman, Moore or Straczynski had their own ideas I’d be willing to listen.

2) What is a hobby you’ve always wanted to try?

That I haven’t already tried a bit? I had this idea to make indoor gargoyles that go into the square corners of rooms to make them look less square. I’d like to try that. I’m thinking papier mache.

3) After an encounter with a mysterious radioactive cannister, you gain one superhuman power. What is it?

An actual radioactive cannister? That would be the power to have my hair fall out and die slowly and painfully from radiation poisoning. Depending on how radioactive it was. If it was only a little radioactive, perhaps I could use it to cause annoying static on stereos.

4) You can visit one alternative reality where an event in your past happened differently. What is the reality you visit?

That would be the one where whatever started Nicki’s cancer didn’t happen.

5) You can spend a day as any animal. What are you?

Yes, I can. I am a human being.
Wilfull misinterpretation aside, I think I would try to choose an animal that had the greatest chance of surviving to the end of the day so I could be a human again. Any zoo animal would do. If it had to be a wild animal, then… actually, it’s pretty hard to think what the safest animal to be would be. You’d want to be near the top of the food chain, but not hunted by humans very much. Perhaps a condor.

If you would like five questions of your very own to love and cherish and answer, add a comment to this post.

An interesting observation noted here:

“Countries with high oil revenues tend towards oppressive governments, as they do not need to rely on the consent of their citizens for tax revenues. ”

Perhaps it follows then that taxation is crucial to the stability of a government. Not just as a financial necessity, but as a connection between the public and the governed. On the face of it, it seems like a good idea if a government has other sources of income and doesn’t have to impose taxes on the public. But if the money doesn’t come from the citizens themselves, there’s less incentive to spend it in the citizens’ interests.

Caught in its swirl, yeah that’s the way I wanna go.
Music: Cast Stone, Straitjacket Fits

I am talking to a lot of people about career prospects. That is what I do at the moment - talk to people to find out what the possibilities are.

Tomorrow I will be calling to arrange a meeting to talk with Ulatralab South, who do stuff with IT and education. It seems like a promising place for someone with my set of skills and experiences.

On Monday I have an appointment with Tim Bell, the head of Computer Science at the University of Canterbury to talk about their PhD programme. I gather that it would take a couple of years for someone with my set of skills and experiences to catch up before attempting a PhD, but that wouldn’t be too bad. There’d be an undergraduate diploma and a postgraduate diploma along the way, which would certainly help even if I didn’t go on to the PhD for some reason.

Tonight I had a talk with my friend Sam Strati, who knows stuff about design. It seems that there aren’t many opportunities for design work in Christchurch. There are good courses here, but the work is elsewhere. But then we got on to talking about all sorts of other stuff - comics and theology and this film he wants to make about vampires. Sam is fun to talk to - I really should do that more often.

Unfortunately, this has once again left me feeling creative and dynamic at about 10pm, when no useful good can come of it except more insomnia. This has been a common problem of late.

Somewhere along the line there I even got some marking done and had dinner with my parents.

He walked on the water, and swam on the land. He would tell these stories…

Jesus Was Way Cool, King Missile

I’ve spent the evening looking at possibilities for employment or re-training.
I have a good job. The hours are good, and the workload in my school and my department is pretty manageable. I get long holidays, and I work with pleasant people.
Only for some reason, I want a change. And I can’t figure out what I want to do.

My interest at the moment revolves around either programming or design. And I’m in pretty much the same situation with both of them - I have the ability, but I don’t have qualifications or experience. That would suggest to me that I need to retrain, but I already have a fulltime job and a mortgage - I can’t afford to drop everything and go back to university. That is, if I really knew what I wanted to do, I’d find a way. But I don’t want to spend years retraining without any clear idea of where it’s going to get me.

It’s somewhat depressing to find that a master’s degree in mathematics doesn’t seem to be worth of anything on the job market.

It would be very easy to just carry on with the job I’m doing, because it’s not actually a bad job. But I do know I want a change.

The next Hack Hack Spurt Spurt workshop will be at my place (e-mail me if you don’t know where that is) on the afternoon of Saturday 7 June. Apart from the usual productive afternoon’s writing on whatever projects you have going, this month’s workshop will include a special challenge: to write the worst possible poem. Release your inner bad poet. If necessary, selected readings from Very Bad Poetry can be provided to get you in the right mood.

We carried him right to the top, and down again

Music: Hellzapoppin, 3Ds

It’s Queen’s Birthday weekend, the weekend on which the loyal subjects of Elizabeth the Second, Queen of New Zealand and other places, honour her by pretending it’s her birthday. It’s not actually her birthday, but we say it is, and take an extra day off work. It wouldn’t be a proper tradition if it made sense. The Funtime Massive observed the Queen’s fake birthday with our own tradition, the Midwinter Comics Retreat. Following our triumphs in previous years in such well-known regional centres as Coalgate and Laverick’s Bay, this year we made for the bright lights of Akaroa.

Akaroa is a seaside town on Bank’s Peninsula, most famous for being the initial site for what would have been the French colonisation of the South Island, had the British not signed the Treaty of Waitangi first and claimed the whole country, rushing down to put up a Union Jack on the hill just before the French settlers arrived. But they were good sports and stayed anyway, leaving as their legacy to the nation a small town that to this very day pretends to be a little bit French.

We were very well supplied with food throughout. Jared excelled himself with a fine lamb roast dinner, Rebecca made a lovely mushroom pasta, Darren produced a delicious pumpkin and peanut soup, and I made pikelets with jam and cream. The house had a little stream at the front, and a spirograph set which provided many happy hours of entertainment.

On the first evening I managed to convince some of the other denizens of the Funtime House to go for a walk to the Lighthouse. I was less successful inconvincing anybody else that we should all hug the Lighthouse, although it seemed appropriate to me at the time. However, some kind of spark was lit, because when we returned we embarked upon a collective endeavour entitled The Case of the Big Pink Lighthouse, concerning the adventures of Rene Champignon, who was more than a little bit like Inspector Clouseau except that he got caught up in a James Bond adventure. It is, I think, some of the best collective work we’ve done, due in a large part to our sudden decision to swap pencil and inking duties around - you can learn a great deal by inking someone else’s work. And I drew a pretty good lighthouse, I thought.
I also managed to finish an abstract piece that I had been working on very slowly for several months - it was sped up dramatically by using Jason’s lightbox. And I planned out the second half of Remains, which I started about ten years ago - hopefully the second half will go some way towards mitigating the many failings of the original. I sort of feel obligated to finish it, since Darren, on one of his crazy whims, published the original part in the last issue of Funtime Comics Presents. It’s a duty to my readership.

On Sunday I went to the museum. Akaroa has a fine museum, but the exhibit that impressed me most was the sack with a stick in it. It was not labelled, but it had a special wooden stand to hold the sack up, and the stick was sturdy and strong. I imagine it has a special place in the hearts of the Akaroans.

Music: In The Morning Of The Magicians, The Flaming Lips