An Absent Serpent

[izmeina]

Once again Izzie is not lurking like in the old days when posting online involved acquiring a weekly ration of happy hours on Cheap Tuesday and then slinking down to the local nasty netcafe hoping to find a free keyboard amidst all the pimple faced spring chickens playing war games.

It’s so easy to get distracted these days but all that will have to end at the stroke of midnight. Then begins the foolish adventure of April Camp Nano. Amusing to think that I am aiming for 1,111 words per day (rather than the usual 1,666 or so) when lately 1,000 a month seems an unsurmountable obstacle.
I guess there will be a lot of aimless meandering which does not matter too much since the point is to get back into the habit of writing regularly.
Been resorting to sneaky tricks in order to create and continue good habits offline which was in part helped by the recent online course on gamification. Much to my shame, while doing very well on the weekly quizzes, did not reach the pass mark of 70% due to not doing a single one of the 3 writing assignments which were worth 35% of the total between them.

Then there was the creepy sad saga of the recent plane crash in France. That little side trip to Vienna back in January involving two flights each way began to look like a bit playing Russian roulette with 4 bullets and beating the odds. It is scary what some people will do for their 15 minutes of fame or when they feel their identity or job security is threatened. The copilot lost more than his job in the end but insisted on sharing his misery with the world. But it is his parents and ex girlfriend who are left to live with the endless "if only"s. Creepy to think that by a terrible quirk of fate, the call of nature could have such catastrophic consequences. “A horse, a horse. My kingdom for a horse” comes to mind. Even Old King Richard got himself another 15 minutes of fame.

The Fearless Leader of Oz and his never ending episodes of foot in mouth disease have also been the source of hours of being glued to Youtube. Such Schadenfreude that the lame Labor lapdogs who approved some outrageous meta data retention laws only last Thursday now also have egg on their faces over some sloppy security lapses concerning private information about international big wigs at last year’s G20 conference. The one where the other mad monk rasPutin was caught cuddling cute koalas in the company of his hero worshipping lover boy.

Maybe I should steal the pair of them as characters for the crazy foolish April adventure.

Comments

[ozfille]

I wondered if you had gone over to Vienna to meet the lovely Vic again. I hope she and her mother were both well and happy. I'm sure Vic was busy, she seems to live in a whirl of activity.

[izmeina]

Yesss. That's exactly why the emerald serpent went slinking down south. Didn't get to meet her ma this time as she was on holidays in Madrid but by all accounts she is healthy and happy. I am so glad to have visited back in 2006 when I got to see her mother and grandmother, Buddha? (the gorgeous golden labrador) and the amazing bat cave. October 2006 was much colder than January this year when it didn't even snow during the several days I was there.
I do hope some of her energy and ability to just get lots of interesting and useful stuff done rubs off on me. Vic did her duty in attempting to convert an innocent abroad to join a certain Captain's cult ;) But so far I have resisted. There was so much gossip to catch up on and months later I'm still drooling over the Hapsburgs grand library. It was even more gorgeous than the one at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam but not quite as cute and cozy.

Vic was already plotting and planning her attendance at the royal funeral of the century. It did get a mention over here but the plotting and planning of a certain copilot happened around the same time.
They definitely intend to be at the big fat Eurovision street parties in Vienna in May.

[ozfille]

Well it ought to be called the Ship Surgeon's cult, but considering that Vic and Em are Aubrey acolytes, I understand their point of view, but the real brains of the outfit is Maturin. *g*

OK, I'll bite. What is the royal funeral of the century, other than perhaps, Betty Windsor's.

[izmeina]

The Royal Funeral of the Century? It's this one
Yesss - technically it's a reburial not a funeral. But her Royal Battiness was intending to be there and Izzie has no reason to suspect she didn't make it.
Even a critter like Izzie who finds most royal paraphernalia excruciatingly boring would have been delighted to attend such an unusual event.
In spite of his bad reputation and lack of spin doctors, I find it hard to believe that he could be worse than creepy old "Off with their heads" Henry VIII

PS I was in an op shop book store last Saturday and seen 5 Patrick O Brien's on the shelf and walked away without being tempted in spite of Vic's excellent efforts to convert my infidel soul.
Now if there were a couple of budgie smugglers wearing pirates and captains calls, well that would be an entirely different matter ;)

[ozfille]

Oh, that funeral. Well Vic did always have a soft spot for a villain. I gather Richelieu was another favourite historical figure in her pantheon. Though having come across a few very fierce Ricardians who feel it is their bounden duty to protect his reputation from the vile slanders of the Tudors and Shakespeare I would not dare to dispute his character. Though he does seem to have had a remake of his character recently, much like Thomas Cromwell's character being rescued by Hilary Mantel's books and the subsequent reversal of opinion on Thomas More, from a perceived fighter for human rights against the evil King Henry to a Catholic fundamentalist heretic burner. She certainly presents a much more positive spin on Cromwell's character but she still presents Cromwell as outrageously ambitious and willing to do what needed to be done to retain the King's patronage. Not that it did him much good in the end with the blue-beard king-monster.

It seems the opinion piece writers are now at work on one of our own monsters, the perfectly horrible Scott Morriscum, our newly minted, collegiate and all-round good guy Social Services Minister, boldly going in like a white knight and saving the poor and desperate from the evil cutbacks to programs instituted by the evil Kevin Andrews and even agreeing to the quite sensible suggestion that the rich bodgies fiddling their finances to get a part-pension should be cut off rather than paying less to all the people who truly are poor enough to be entitled to the pension. I think the first bit about the reversal of the sneaky cuts to programs was to get back at Kevin Andrews not through any great desire on his part to help women or indigenous people, etc but because Kevin got the job he really wanted, Defence Minister. Maybe Morriscum is lining himself up to don the royal budgie smugglers himself. He certainly has indulged in enough high-seas piracy in his former position to be eligible.

[izmeina]

Oh Yesss. Good cop bad cop. I so love that name Scott Morriscum (from Moon Dog I assume?)
Suddenly he's all Mr Nice Guy. Izzie for one is not convinced. And as for Kevin Andrews, I will always associate him with the despicable treatment of Mohammed Haneef and dirty dog whistle politics.

I still think that Peter Costello should be called to account for the ridiculous mess he made of the superannuation system. It's always about the short term fix. Give away lots of freebies and upper class welfare in the future when you are long out of office and some other sucker is left holding the baby. And if it's one of your razor gang mates then it's the perfect excuse for them to do a bit of slash and burn.

I remember him raising the limits on super contributions to ridiculous levels back in 2007 as an election bribe. Folks were selling or shifting properties, shares and whatever and stashing millions in their super funds. Then the shit hit the fan in 2008 and they were not happy little campers. But the most outrageous thing was to charge the 15% tax going in but letting all superannuation generated income be tax free as well as taking away the govt co- contribution for those folks in the 30-40,000 income bracket.
It's much fairer to have no tax on super contributions (with a cap of course) so that compound interest can work its magic and then treating any earned income like just like everyone else's.

By the time this serpent gets to pension age, they'll have compulsory euthanasia and the silver bullet retirement plan