From The Morgue

Brad once said my hiphop name would be MC NoShame. I think my shame glands have expanded since those days.
Svend has been recounting his tales of Edinburgh at Festival time. Yeah man. I ran into (Kiwi comedienne) Cal Wilson on the street recently, I was talking to my Cal on cell at the time so just kind of walked straight past. CalW was waiting for a taxi, and when MyCal finished talking to me I thought about turning around and going back to say hi. I decided not to. It seemed like a vaguely sad course of action that would embody all the saddest aspects of that “Kiwis are all one big family aren’t we when we’re overseas aren’t we aren’t we please validate me!” tendency you see now and then.
My main memories of Cal Wilson are going to see her standup show ‘Telebimbo’ in the late 90s, and her performance in a pilot for a shameless NZ-Friends-ripoff ‘Flatmates’ as the potential love interest of Kevin Smith (RIP). Now ‘Flatmates’ was dire and my primary recollection of ‘Telebimbo’ is that sitting around with Stuart, Michael, David, Svend, Pearce, etc was just as funny.
My other main memory is that she was hot as a sweating chili pepper.
And while I’m thinking back on NZ’s dubious comedy heritage, does anyone know who those guys were that VUW orientation year, who yelled out ‘look! Arnold Schwarzenneger is having an accident!’ to summon a crowd to the dungeon cafe? Because dammit if that joke hasn’t stuck with me all these many years. It wasn’t even funny then.
Cal and I have just planned out some of our trip through Ireland. We roughly know where we’re going – basically, starting in Dublin and going anticlockwise around the whole island. Sa-weet. Very excited.
Lordy. My brain is tired. I still haven’t written up the Paris escapade for morgueatlarge. Will try to do it tomorrow night before we embark on our expedition to spend the night at Derby’s Haunted Gaol.
(If anyone reading wants to sign up to the morgueatlarge travel email list, just fire off a blank email to morgueatlarge-subscribe@topica.com.)

You know, Phase IV. The one with the ants.
You people. I dunno.
Yeah, we’ve got a Svend staying with us, funnily enough he’s here for the festival but not here For The Festival if you know what I mean, and I think you do, nudge nudge. Oh, crikey, now I’ve innuendoed all over my explanation. Hmm. Ah well, carry on. Yes, Svend is here, filling our evenings with wit, wisdom and a rather large amount of catchup gossip. I know what you’re all up to, you people! (Yes, Giffy, including you. Especially you.)
And we went to Monster Mash for dinner. When the waitresses (and they’re waitresses, not wait staff or waitpersons) take your order, they sit at your table. They all do this, every time. It’s a strategy. It works. It makes me feel at home. Lovely.
Um, that’s all. Chavez not ousted, again! Tall Blacks nearly beat Italy! Tall Ferns beat Korea! Peurto Rico beat the US “Dream *cough* Team *splutter*”!

Shortly before going to bed last night, in our bedroom, a fly buzzed past my nose. I thought to myself, bugger. I need to evict that fly or it will wake me up by buzzing insistently in my ears at 6 in the morning.
Kindly, the fly waited until 7 in the morning. Gah.
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Cal and I wandered into the middle of town yesterday and decided we’d like to see something at the fringe. Ideally, something free. That happens sometimes, you walk around and someone gives you free tickets. So we walked, but evidently our ‘give us free tickets’ faces were slightly too desperate and haunted, like a guy with too-prominent car keys at a speed dating night, and we were left unmolested.
So we went into the box office at one venue, which happened to be selling Flight of the Conchords tickets, and figured we might as well see how far in advance we needed to buy them. F O the C (which is sort of a street term for Flight of the Conchords) have been doing very well again, selling out right from day one, getting good big notices and murmurs of winning the Perrier this year. And the nice person at the box office said, ‘well we just had some returns so you can go tonight if you like’.
So we went to see F O the C last night. And it was good. Everyone laughed. I laughed a lot.
Special irony-filled punchline: right after buying tickets, we walked outside and were immediately offered free tickets to a show! But it was too late because we were already going to see F O the C! If only we’d found the guy first, how different our night would have been!

All the downgloom I was feeling about the spreading influence of racism was nicely countered last night by watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. The Olympics have always been fiercely nationalistic, despite the ideal, but racism has no home there. (As far as the two can be separated, at least.)
And its hard to stay gloomy when you’re seeing athlete after athlete marching into the stadium and grinning like they were the luckiest people in the world. Which they were, I guess.
The roar of applause for the Palestinian team cheered me up too.
I only watched bits of it, managing to miss New Zealand among others, but it was a happy occasion nonetheless. I watched more than I did of the 2000 opening ceremony, at least. (Cough cough.)

So the festival has begun here in Edinburgh. [grumpy local] And the streets are crowded and the buses are always running late and there are morons everywhere grah grah grah[/grumpy local] Flight of the Conchords had a cover byline on today’s Metro and were the cover page of the Festival insert. This is good. They are, according to Metro, tipped to win the Perrier this year.
Cool.
————–
Feeling deeply disturbed by the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Makara on the heels of a smaller, similar act in Thorndon. My unease about the trend towards racism in New Zealand of a few months back has returned. The extremist forces of ethnic fear are particularly hateful. Normally I’m more concerned with the small-scale creep of prejudice into the mainstream discourse – but in the past week or so I’ve had a few contacts with the extreme prejudice that will never be mainstream. It’s sickening.
I know that the incredibly vast majority of New Zealanders are equally sickened. But I hate that there is a National Front. And I hate that Don Brash has been playing the race game. They are two extreme ends of the same nasty prejudices and I hate them both.
We are meant to be Better Than This in New Zealand.
Rationally, I know there’s lots more to say and to be said. These issues are not simple. (Actually, the cemetery issue is simple – it’s hateful and disgraceful and wrong.) But all I have at the moment is this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that the worst things I’m seeing on this side of the world are going to be at home as well.
Ugh. Enough. I need to sleep. Go read David’s blog, it is funny.

Back from Paris. Was great. Yes. More to come.
Old lady at airport: How do you make a potato puff?
Cal: I don’t know.
Old lady at airport: Chase it around the garden.

Tomorrow morning, in fact.
Very excited. I have never been. Should be fascinating.
Sorry for the low rate of blogging the past few weeks. It coincides with a high rate of writing Ron the Body, so that’s for the good.
All-time best quote from an NZ movie:
“I’m a New Zealand zoo official, and this monkey’s going to Newtown!”

continues to be the delightful H-blog: bringing up baby and maintaining your sanity all in one tidy package.
“With trills, sweeps, whoops and chirrups, the Bug is exploring the upper register of her voice. Every day she adds another octave to her range. At this rate, one day I’ll be suddenly unable hear her, then will look out the window to see the neighbourhood dogs gathered on our front yard.”

Sometimes it’s hard to get too upset over a rejection letter. From the commissioning editor for the Doctor Who range at BBC Books:
“While your writing sample and technique were good, the plot is not something we would consider pursuing – by this, I mean that the idea of the support group set up for victims of the Doctor’s actions is a little too ‘controversial to use as the basis of a novel.”
Cowards! Philistines! They are too imbecilic to appreciate my genius!
(Actually they ask me to propose something else. But I’m writing Ron the Body now, so my sad fascination with Doctor Who will have to wait.)

Stuff and nonsense this week – the SPSC petition online discussion was being trolled by a particularly nasty SOB who was determine to smear Cal as a Maori-hater with a dark past before fleeing New Zealand. It sounds ridiculous, but when someone’s posting crap like that in a public forum and bleating about free speech and the truth, its hard to stay calm.
So I gave Cal some words to live by. When the shit hits the fan, she just needs to take a second and ask herself: What Would Helen Do?

Helen don’t take no shit from nobody.
—
Anyway, its all sorted now, the troll has been slain. Hurrah!