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- Written by Garry
There’s a lot going on at the moment. It’s difficult to know what I should be writing about. In fact I would go so far as to say I don’t want to write about any of it, largely because I don’t want to think about it. But sometimes you just have to sit down and write your way through the important issues of the day, month, or year, depending on how much time is ganging up on you all once on this particular occasion.
I downloaded a new computer game this week. It lets you (among other things) design and fight your own spaceships against giant alien pandas. And given the amount of time I want to spend not thinking about how I have no job, no car and no clue what’s going on, it’s highly likely I’m going to spend a fair bit of time wailing on said pandas with my supercharged spaceships of destruction.
Besides, it’s clear I’ve been flagrantly abusing the “spaceship” tag on this blog for far too long now. It’s about time I actually wrote a post that fits it properly. So here we go.
How to make a spaceship for Garry
General hull shape
Anticlimactically, this is probably the most controversial choice of them all. Naturally I decided to lead with it, in this very thoroughly researched and carefully thought out post. I’ve spent a stupid (and rather embarrassing) amount of time checking out everything that Google images throws up when you search the word “spaceship” in order to decide which spaceship design looks the sexiest. I couldn’t really get past USS Voyager from the Star Trek universe in the end.
I mean in the vacuum of space, the general sleekness of a spaceship is completely irrelevant. But Voyager still wins. If you’re going to find yourself lost on the other side of the galaxy, you want to at least look good, with reliable drive shafts while you’re doing it.
It would also be cool if it was orange instead of grey, made out of unobtainium instead of the traditional titanium alloy, and bigger on the inside.
Propulsion
Again, Start Trek’s warp nacelles are probably the standard here, although the hyperdrives from Star Wars would also work I suppose. Basically anything that’s going faster than light is going to be okay. It’s going to need it over the next few months. I’d also be interested in an improbability drive, or alternatively a temporal distortion drive from the soon to be released Samantha Triton novels.
Soon to be released, that is, if my friends ever send me my freaking feedback already.
It would be nice if you could fuel it with pasta rather than minerals or fossil fuels.
Armoury
“Damn yokels can’t even tell a transport ship ain’t got no guns on it”.
Yeah, well my ship is going to be able to blow your stupid transport ship out of the sky. Sorry Mal. I can take the sky from you. Bwa ha haaaaaa!
The planet busting laser from the Death Star would be ideal, but might be a little impractical, not to mention expensive. I’m thinking of a nice tasteful combination of photon torpedoes, EMP cannons, a picture of a bear holding a shark and a big old dalek gun mounted right up the top. As long as it makes that awesome bwoooooh-piiiuuuuuuuu noise. I don’t care if you can’t hear it in space. I’ll know.
Special Effects
Well, obviously when it lands you want the organ music from ET. And it would be cool if you could hear Darth Vader’s mask in the corridors every now and then. Oh, and I want it to glow blue and leave a trail of fire when it takes off, like the De’Lorean.
Oh freak me sideways. What was I thinking? A Flux Capacitor. Definitely we need one of those. Even if time travel turns out to be against the laws of physics and easily comprehensible plot lines, we can just have it installed on the wall, right next to the name plate that looks like a serial number but is really a bible verse.
This is going to be awesome.
Crew
Captain: Me, obviously. Why would you even ask that?
First Officer: Hmmm… would you go with Malcolm Reynolds or Commander Chakotay? I would… what’s that? Really? Well… okay.
First Officer: Kimberly Webster
Pilot: Samantha Triton. Yes, okay she only exists in my head. So does this whole spaceship. What’s your point?
Chief Engineer: The Doctor(s). All eleven of him. The ship will never go where it’s supposed to, but at least it will always get there. And if it ever explodes, we’ll take the whole universe with us.
Chief Science Officer: We don’t need one of those. We’re already on a freaking spaceship. How much more science do we need? … no we don’t. … I don’t have to do anything. … No we don’t. … Okay! Fine.
Chief Science Officer: Dr Sheldon Cooper.
I'm hoping to have the GSS Velociraptor commissioned and ready for departure sometime before the end of June. I have no idea where I'm going, but since when was that any reason not to run away in a spaceship?
Make of that as little as possible. Or just make me a spaceship already.
Garry with 2 Rs
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- Written by Garry
We have it pretty good in this country. I know I do. Most of us have a roof over our heads and access to reasonably useful food. And for those who don’t, there’s access to services, welfare and community aid programs. No-one in a privileged place like Australia really has much to complain about.
And yet…
I’m having a hard time finding a job. I mean… I have a job, but my contract expires in June and there’s no funding available to keep me on after that, so I’m looking for a new one. I’ve had a couple of close calls for jobs which would have been fantastic, but even after making it to the interview stages, I’ve been denied. So that’s disappointing.
Another thing that’s annoying me more than it should lately is the NT Literary Awards. More specifically, my failure to get shortlisted for them. I don’t want to seem like a bad sport or like I have a higher opinion of my own writing than I should, but I was quite disappointed not to make the last round with a play I submitted. That’s fine. I decided to submit a request for feedback to find out what went wrong. I got this reply from the organisers:
Unfortunately, of your four pieces, only one has received written comments. It’s one of the hardships of dealing with a panel of volunteer judges, that you can’t tick them off for failing to follow orders! Please find one piece of feedback attached for Traditional English Hospitality.
I don’t want to bag the Lit. Awards too hard, because they do a great job promoting NT writing, but I do wonder how they made the decision not to shortlist me when there was no feedback on anything I’d written. Well… whatever. I’m not bitter. I’m never at home to Mr Bitterbottom.
And it doesn’t matter anyway. I’ve always been of the opinion that as long as I’ve got my keyboard and my car, there’s nothing I can’t do. It seems a strange thing to base my independence and self-confidence on, but there you have it. If I can go anywhere and I’ve got Samantha with me, we’re all good.
On Saturday night my car broke down. This is a calamity in anyone’s life, but in Darwin it’s particularly disastrous, as buses tend to come about once every fifteen years. And for me it was a double blow as I watched the otherwise faithful GSS Unity being hoisted onto the tow truck: Genius that I am I left my keyboard sitting on the back seat.
Fortunately I’m in a position where I can walk to both work and church from my house, so the loss of my car doesn’t cripple me completely like it did when I was without a car in Palmerston. But here I am in the middle of the year when everything was supposed to be falling into place for me and I can’t get a job, apparently I can’t write, and now I have no car and no keyboard. At times like this a man falls back on the only recourse left to him: Whinging about it on his blog. I mean… praying.
Fresh from last week's spectacular demonstration of things going right for me, I'm just a little frustrated at my seeming inability to catch a single break. Ah well. One Body and Happy Yess comedy are both coming up. Hopefully that will turn things around.
Make of that what you will.
Garry with 2 Rs
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So our monthly comedy gigs at Happy Yess are ticking along nicely. Last night we had a virgins night- A night for all first timers doing stand-up comedy. It had potential to go either way, but we were all blown away by how much fun the night was.
It started out with the usual panic attacks when we realised that we had an hour and a half to fill, and only two comedians on the list. None of the regulars had prepared anything, so we were all wandering around figuring out what we could pull off at short notice, when Amy wandered in with four other comedians in tow and we went from there.
You wouldn’t expect to get seven good ones in a row at a first-time amateur comedy night, but that’s exactly what we got. Everything from dark yet somehow self-deprecating socio-political commentary (from someone else this time) to an entire string of mother jokes made about the comic’s own mother (who was in the audience). And one particularly inventive man who attempted to pick up the previous comic by impersonating an amputee construction worker.
Basically the point is that Darwin is awesome, hilarious and packed full of more talent than most would expect. I suspect it’s something to do with laughing to distract ourselves from the weather. So next month we’re having Ladies’ Night at Happy Yess Comedy. A night when we all get to make fun of… no wait, that can’t be right…
Make of that what you will.
Garry with 2 Rs
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It’s been a little over five weeks since my last trip to Sydney for Easter, so I was very excited to have Kim coming up for the May Day long weekend. I spent a bit of time planning out the weekend and making all the bookings: we were off to Kakadu for three days and I wanted to make sure everything was perfect. There was fuel in the car, food in the bags (!) and plenty of time to take things easy.
We made pretty good time and arrived in Jabiru with enough time in hand to check in and relax before heading out for a Yellow Waters cruise. I was quite excited for this, because although I’ve spent plenty of time floating on wetlands and looking at birds in the past, this time in addition to the sunset cruise we were booked on a night cruise, which was aimed at star gazing and sharing some of the Dreaming stories of the local people about the stars and how they came to be where they were.
Unfortunately the arrangements for cruises had changed a bit since the last time I was out there. The car park for the boat dock was still slightly underwater from the wet season which we are rumoured to have had (I saw very little evidence of this), so the idea was to arrive at the resort just around the corner and get ferried over by someone with a large bus. So you need to get there twenty minutes before the departure time.
I did not realise this.
We arrived about fifteen minutes before and were summarily dismissed and told to come back the next day. It was a bit of a nuisance, but after rearranging our bookings, we jumped back in the car and headed for Ubirr. I’d planned to do Yellow Waters on Saturday and Ubirr on Sunday, but there was no reason why we couldn’t do it backwards, right?
Well, the traffic on the road out to Ubirr is a little bit steadier than you might normally encounter on a road out to the middle of nowhere, and not every car out there is as awesome as my Focus, the GSS Unity. Some prefer to take the road at something a little closer to what I might be able to manage on a golf cart. By the time we made it to the Ubirr car park, the sun was very low in the sky and we were in serious danger of missing the sunset altogether. Fortunately Kim was wearing the sneakers she had assured me she wouldn’t need, so we were able to manage a quick sprint up to the lookout.
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to run straight up a rock face. In my experience it’s not really conducive to the kind of contemplative/romantic serenity I’d had in mind when I planned the trip. Nonetheless, we made it up in time for me to watch the sunset and for Kim to take about sixty identical photos of it.
The next day we were all set to take another run at the Yellow Waters. We took no chances and I made sure I had us down at the resort a full hour before we were due to depart. Unfortunately this meant we had to sit around in the heat for forty minutes waiting for the guides to show up. My father would have been proud of me.
The sunset cruise itself actually went pretty well. The air over the water wasn’t as hot and the guide was out to practice his upcoming comedy routine on us. We didn’t see any jabirus or brolgas, but we got some great views of some White Breasted Sea Eagles, which are my favourite bird and Kim’s favourite rugby team (Don’t ask me why).
We had some dinner and waited until the night cruise was ready to start. It was cloudy, with a slight chance of rain, so the guides did what they could to talk us out of making them take the boat out. We were really keen to go, so we stuck our heels in and asked for the tour to go ahead. After a few delays, a massive and yet still ineffective dosage of insect repellent and an apology that we weren’t going spotlighting, we got moving and went down to the boat dock again.
The boat had a flat battery. We turned around and came back.
I don’t know what dreaming story they tell about that, but I do know that we drove back through the rain, and that by the time we got back to our hotel the sky was clear as a bell. At least we got our money back.
Monday afternoon we got moving again and headed back to Darwin. I wouldn’t exactly say the Kakadu excursion was a complete disaster, but I certainly hadn’t been everything I had imagined. We had a dinner reservation at Nirvana that night, which was handy because I had a voucher I had won at an open mic night a few weeks previously and had stored carefully in the glove box in my car for just such an occasion.
Naturally, it was nowhere to be found when I needed it. That's not unusual; things go missing in my car all the time. But they usually do show up when i need them. My car is a bit like the Room of Requirement. But not this weekend. And I think that's the second one that's gone missing. I can only assume that at some point in the future I'm going to find myself in dire need of Nirvana vouchers (I have no idea why) and there'll be a stack of six of them waiting on my passenger seat.
We had a lovely dinner anyway, and were contemplating desert when Kim got a text message from Jetstar. With just four hour's notice, her flight home had been cancelled. Not postponed, or rescheduled, just cancelled completely. There was a phone number for her to call so that she could organise her own way home, and a promise to pay for accommodation for the night. So we quickly paid (Full price. Oh well.) for dinner and then wandered off into the night to find Kim somewhere nicer than our living room floor to stay.
I took her to the airport the next day only to find that the entire airport had been dismantled by an army of demonic nuclear powered scarab beetles.
Not really.
There are a number of lessons that can be learned from last weekend.
1) Don't use Jetstar ever. I have yet to meet anyone who has had a positive experience with them.
2) Boat rides in Kakadu at night sound really romantic, but probably aren't
3) It doesn't matter how comprehensively wrong a weekend goes, if you have the right company it still turns out pretty good.
Shut up.
Make of that what you will.
Garry with 2 Rs
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My housemate makes a mean ANZAC biscuit: Crusty on the outside and gooey on the inside. Kind of like me. Of course, she negates all the awesomeness points her baking skills accrue by insisting on calling them ANZAC cookies. We’ve reached an uneasy sort of peace over this: she agrees not to use the C word in front of me and I agree not to shoot her. Occasionally I get careless and shoot her anyway, but only with a nerf gun. And she’s always awake, facing me and armed. Well… usually.
I was munching thoughtfully on one of her latest efforts the other day, considering the deep mysteries of what elements go into creating the perfect ANZAC bikkie. I should have known better than to tempt fate like that, and sure enough there was a puff of green smoke (sure, why not?) and an eerily familiar voice echoed through my bedroom.
“Do you have any fish for me?”
What the hell? I was totally expecting Biscuit Lady. She explained that Biscuit Lady couldn’t make it, on account of my having killed her off last year. But that still did not account for what Fish Girl was doing here. And how did she make my bedroom echo? That was fantastic.
It turns out Fish Girl’s television wasn’t working and she really wanted to watch Celebrity Splash. I rolled my eyes in frustration with my own generation’s insane taste in popular culture. But I had to admit the bodybuilder belly flopping off the high board was awesome.
Where was I?
Oh who cares. Cum Tacent Clament! Internally consistent plot lines since... never.
Make me what ANZAC biscuits you will.
Garry with 2 Rs