I’m having a wisdom tooth extracted this afternoon.

A man (possibly two) is (possibly are) going to jack open my mouth and take to part of it with sharp rotating cutty things that will penetrate and cut up some of the really hard and well-stuck-in bits, which he (possibly they) will then extract with shiny stainless-steel pliers.

Normally, I don’t mind minor, outpatient procedures. I don’t even normally mind inpatient procedures because they usually afford you the courtesy of ensuring you’re unconscious for the most unpleasant parts.

But I’ll be awake for this. And it’s not some ankle adjustment or in-grown toenail removal. This is a wisdom tooth, buried deep in my head. My head is where I keep my brain and other really quite important things.

It is on the lower jaw though, so I’m trying to focus on the positives here.

I’m not sure I’ve had time to prepare emotionally for this. Though I’m not sure giving myself that time would be in any way beneficial.

You can over-think these things.

I have prepared myself though, thus:

• I have told my boss not to expect me in for a day (possibly two)
• I have procured ample supplies of paracetamol/codeine based painkillers
• I have reasonably well stocked cupboards and fridge
• I have six episodes of House that I have yet to watch, and I’ve been meaning to re-visit the animated series of Aeon Flux for a while now
• I have a laptop and an ipad at my disposal

So I’m not looking forward to the procedure (not least because it means I have to sit there for an hour with my mouth open and that’s just not natural).

But the recovery, while painful, could be the break I’ve been craving for a year or two but have never had.

“What do you want for your birthday?”

Do you know what you want for yours?

I have no idea. I’m like that at Christmas too.

I usually make up stuff I need just so people don’t feel bad about not knowing what to get me:

“Mmm, what I really need is a good set of steak knives.”

I don’t really need steak knives.

My birthday is not too far away and my wife asked me that question again the other day. The difference is that this time, I know.

And it’s not anything smutty either. (I’m not saying I’d say no to anything like that, it’s just not this thing I thought of that I want, that’s all.)

So here it is.

First, I want her to organise for the kids to be looked after for the weekend.

Then, I want her to book a couple of nights at a house by the beach somewhere and to invite all our friends there for a weekend of partying, drinking, walks on the beach, morning fry-ups, games of poker, games of scrabble and general togetherness.

And while they’re all doing that, I want to be at home eating pizza, drinking beer, surfing the net and watching DVDs.

It’s raining today.

I like the rain.

Mostly.

The good things about rain are that it’s refreshing. Especially in summer. It cools things off, particularly my things, which is good because I hate that in mid-summer I’m obliged by societal convention to wear pants and a long-sleeved shirt, when I’d probably do a much better job in shorts and a t-shirt, on account of being more comfortable.

The bad things about rain are that it tends to turn hot weather into humid weather. I hate humidity. Especially when I’m wearing long pants and sleeves.

The other bad thing about rain is that people start using umbrellas.

I hate umbrellas and I refuse to use them in all but the worst weather conditions. Keeping dry in a thunderstorm in the middle of winter is an OK time to use an umbrella. Trying to stop your hair from going frizzy in mid-summer drizzle isn’t; it’s quite pathetic.

The reason I won’t use an umbrella is that I don’t want to be one of these ignorant, selfish, umbrella-weilding people:

The space hog
Why, oh why do you need a golf umbrella to keep the rain off in the city? Overkill? Y’think? Golf umbrellas are called “golf” umbrellas because they’re designed for use on a golf course. Golf courses are vast open spaces, usually populated by only four people per 15,000sqm*. With this much space you could bring your shed roof along with you and not get in anyone’s way. This is not the case when you’re in the CBD. Of a state capital. During lunch hour.
Space hogs must think they’re a little bit more special than everyone else and deserve a little bit more personal space than the rest of us. Maybe they’re important business people; maybe they’re just a bit precious and think it outrageous that standard umbrellas don’t provide head-to-toe protection. Maybe they’re just selfish pricks.

The shelter hog
These are, in my opinion, the worst umbrella criminals because when dry personal space is at a premium, they hog what dry space there is, while still brandishing their own personal protection from the elements, making an already crowded situation even more crowded, not to mention hazardous. When I see people under umbrellas walking under the shelter provided by buildings, I want to yell “Get out from under the fucking awning!” (And I want to yell it in capitals.)

Blind Freddy
You can see them coming towards you but can they see you? Their head is nestled so far into the top of the umbrella their whole heads are covered. They look like their head has been replaced by an eight-panel polyester dome. How can you see where you’re going and successfully navigate your way through a crowd of people when you can only see the feet of other people when they’re within 2 m of you? Why do you need your brolly so far over your head? Are you just incredibly ugly, or are you embarrassed about your rain-affected frizzy hair?

Spike
One of the reasons I hate umbrellas is their eye-putting-out potential. Those pointy bits, despite the addition of those littlel plastic covers, still present a hazard to passers-by. These brollies cease to become protection from benign raindrops; they’re now offensive weapons. I saw a chap this afternoon walking through the rain with a rather sorry looking umbrella. Of its eight points, four of them must have been exposed. Those sharp metal prongs pointing out are fucking dangerous. Imagine walking down a crowded street with a set of metal barbecue skewers poking out of your coat or bag. They’d have you arrested! Combine Spike, with any of the above types and you could be up for grievous bodily harm, even manslaughter charges.

Please, people. If you must use an umbrella, be considerate of others, and realise that when you’re still holding it over your head next to a building with an overhang that goes all the way to the kerb, you look like a right dick.

*I’m estimating the average golf hole to be, say 300 m long by 50 m wide.

Interesting discussion on 891 this morning with Matt & Dave discussing a local politician’s appearance and speech at a Midwinter dinner at a Masonic lodge.

While not outwardly mocking the dinner or the timing thereof to coincide with the pagan celebration, I did detect a hint of Matt & Dave’s slightly superior smugness regarding the goings-on at said affair.

The mere mention of waiters/waitresses wearing hooded cloaks was enough to convey a sense of derision to listeners. I’ve never heard them mention the attire of serving staff at other events, political or not. But because this was based on a pagan ritual that pre-dates Christianity, they saw fit to make light of it.

Now, I could be wrong, but I would think most modern functions celebrating pagan rituals do so in a fairly light-hearted not-completely-serious manner. Of course, most pagan rituals were appropriated by Christians centuries ago. Christmas in the northern hemisphere basically took over the midwinter thing, falling only a few days after the solstice, and Easter carries the legacy of the Easter Bunny, left over from the rabbit’s significance as a symbol of fertility, coinciding with new life and the vernal equinox.

But I think the ridicule was perhaps a bit misplaced. Especially coming from a team of whom at least one is a practising Catholic.

The line about sacrificing a goat was probably, well, the least tactful. And yeah, despite what I said earlier was outwardly mocking.

I would put this in perspective by mentioning that Catholics believe that the wafer and wine taken at Holy Communion transubstantiate into the flesh and blood of Christ himself.

Ritual weekly cannibalism. Nice.

I’ll have the goat, thanks.

We interrupt this near-abandoned blog to flog my camera.
I have the following for sale:

• Canon EOS 20D
• EF 28-80 f/3.5-5.6 lens
• EF 70-300 f/3.5-5.6 lens
• 1GB memory card (holds 100+ RAW or 200+ large JPG)
• Battery & charger
• USB cable
• Strap
• All in a Lowepro kit bag, below.

$600 the lot

SOLD

Send me an electronic mail, at idrewthis<at>gmail<dot>com or ask any questions in the comments.

Soup commercials.
Annoying.
It’s been the same tinned recipe for ever.
Someone presents soup for consumption, passed off as home made, done from scratch.
Oh, this soup is so good. Where did you get the recipe? What? No! This can’t possibly be from a tin!
Rinse. Repeat.
I will now outline the bait and switch concept of a soup commercial taken to its most extreme.

A contestant on Masterchef is preparing a minestrone. He looks at his competitor’s dish and grimaces in panic but then has a sly, cunning look come over his face.
From his secret bag, he pulls out a bag of Brand X minestrone and secretly “plates up” (for crap, what happened to “dishing up”?).
The judges try the soup.
Matt Preston is impressed.

I was teaching Little Miss L the joy of Roman Numerals the other night. She’s 7 now, so after explaining the concept, she picked it up pretty well.

Once she got the hang of how they worked, she insisted that I give her a quiz on them. So I drew up a page with two columns and wrote some random numbers in the first column. Her job was to write the equivalent Roman numeral in column two.

She got a couple of the easy ones, like 8 and 11 but then she got to something like 37, and rendered that as III VII. You could see her brain working and things clicking into place as I explained how to do it properly. She then blitzed pretty much all the numbers under 100. I inlcuded my birth year, 1972 and had to hold her hand through that one but she did well.

One of the last ones was 309. It was the only number I’d given her with a zero in it. She asked me “How did they write zero?”

I said “there was no zero”.

After a second or two she asked in reply, “Well how did they blast off rocket ships?”

They’re everywhere and they’ll always find something they don’t like. And if the thing they don’t like gets better, then they’ll complain about the fact that it’s not what it used to be.

Case in point:

I work for a government institution. Everyone that works here has either a government email address or an institution email address. The government addresses work on Outlook; the institution addresses run on some old-ish Novell system, which nobody likes much.

Over the break, the Novell system was switched over to the M1cro$oft Live system. It’s web based; it can be accessed from anywhere; it has 25GB of web space for each user. And lots of other bells/whistles etc.

But new technology is always something to complain about.

I run the facebook page for this institution and made the mistake of asking fans what they thought of the new system. A complainer thought this was a great opportunity to complain.

“It’s terrible,” she said. Then listed why it was terrible.

She has since removed her comments, probably out of embarrassment (and probably after I posted a slightly passive-aggressive comment of Shakespearian proportions on how staff switching over to the new system are pioneers, paving the way and overcoming the hurdles so that others may face the transition easily).

But she wasn’t disappointed with the features of the “terrible” new system, only with the fact that the changeover hadn’t been seamless.
Which is like buying a DVD player, then saying it’s shit because you can’t watch your VHS tapes on it.

My sister has a new “shack” on the south coast. I use inverted commas because it’s not a shack at all: it’s a brand spanking new house. But because it’s their house away from home by the coast, they use the vernacular and call it a shack. (All the more ironic when you consider their actual home is in a different town on the south coast and probably physically closer to the beach than their “shack” is. But I digress.)

Because the place is new, they chose to furnish it with new stuff. This included new beds, furniture, and appliances like fridge, microwave, dishwasher and TV. And they got a pretty nice 42″ plasma job.

My extended family was invited to spend a couple of nights there in the days after Xmas. And a lovely time was had by all.

On the drive home though, C suddenly made it known she wanted to upgrade our 80 cm CRT TV to a 42″ flat screen model.

Now, I’m as much into new tech and gadgets as anyone but I know that with an 80 cm TV, sitting 4 m away, the detail of the picture is just fine. I’ve never really felt the need to jump on the HD bandwagon. I might have mentioned as much before: so much of what’s on TV is either shit, or I don’t have time to watch it. I don’t need to see Deal or No Deal in stunning HD quality. It’s just overkill.

But, on the drive, home, we stopped in at Colonnades and picked up a 42″ LCD and a surround sound AV receiver.

Later that evening…

We were asking ourselves what we should watch on our new big screen and the choice was naturally a random episode of Gilmore Girls, which we love for the witty banter and esoteric pop-culture references. I think we dived in somewhere in the middle of season three.

But it wasn’t the same.

The picture was so clear, it made the whole show look like it had been shot on home video; there was none of that movie-quality softeness to the picture. It somehow broke down the fourth wall and made the show look not like genuine people in a small town in Connecticut but made it look like we were looking through the camera at actors, acting on a set on a backlot in LA. It ruined the illusion completely.

First step was to desaturate the colour. Then, I took the sharpness right back to as low as it would go (because Lauren and Alexis should be in soft focus) and then I dug through the menu and found this setting that takes the blur out when there’s panning and turned it off to put the blur back in. Save settings.

So now we can watch stuff in HD when what we’re watching lends itself to that. But when it’s more about the story, the characters and the show (as opposed to the technology), we can now apply our own “make it look like shit” user settings.

I’m in Port Vincent for New Year’s. It’s a great place to be. On New Year’s Day there is a Gala Day, with street markets, lots of really shitty but tasty food, a big bouncy castle for the kidlets and really really bad entertainment played over an ancient PA.

It’s brilliant.

We’re staying with friends who live on the main street. Which is nice.

Anyway, around this time of year, what with all the colour and summerness of the place, I like to whack a colour film in my Holga and set out to take that quintessential summer photo.

I took the kids to the beach this morning: my two and our friends’ son. He saw the Holga and wanted to know if it was a real camera. My eldest explained to him that it was a Toy Camera that took real photos.

The boy was trying to look at the back of it. I could tell why.

“Doesn’t it have a screen?” he asked.

“A screen?” I said. “It doesn’t even have batteries.”