If you had a stethoscope, you could hear her name.

[reddragdiva]

• Life imitates art, but only if stupidity is conserved.

• The low point in a writer's career.

• Pumpkin catapults. And Acceleration and Density Testing of Standard PC Keyboards.

• So, you want to learn Japanese.

• Why Siegfried left Roy.

It is so very good to be on holiday. I could sleep in this morning as long as I liked. I woke up, lingered in bed for another hour and a half, then decided I was rested enough to greet the afternoon. It was 9:30am. I think this is a middle-age thing that evolution has bestowed upon humanity for the purpose of annoying one's children.

I braved the tattered remains of the public transport network to the Dev for pixel_person's birthday drinks. I arrived an hour and a half late, but she was two hours late. Hung out with froodthehoopy and Jane meanwhile. pixel_person arrived with anappleater and Sarah. We discussed the relative annoyance value of fellow starving artists versus fellow starving actors.

In Australia, fireworks mostly cannot be purchased by the general public. Most people are happy with this arrangement - it keeps them out of the hands of fuckwits. In Walthamstow, they go off ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Like when I'm walking past on the way home from the pub this evening. Jesus fuck! But tonight it's not drug dealers warning their fellow members of the lower classes of raids; no, for the next three nights, it's Diwali. Next are the several weeks around November fifth^[1]. Then the end of Ramadan. I can't tell you how this thrills me.

Then home to a visit from poggs. We have just been watching 100 Scary Things Uh-Huh Really on Channel 4. The viewing public has voted Misery and Blue Velvet lesser horror features than the video for "Where's Your Head At" by Basement Jaxx.

We have a remarkable amount to organise before Wh*tby. redcountess has drawn up a checklist, which includes 'boobs' for me.

[1] One wonders why one does not see more pik downmarket persons with eight or nine fingers. Not born that way, I mean.

Comments

[fluffymark]

If you think fireworks are bad here, never go to Italy. I spent the new year in Rome, and was shocked to see children playing with fireworks all the time. They'd light and throw fireworks at people, and walking anywhere became a minefield. Literally. Especially as the ground was covered in broken glass from people smashing champagne bottles.

Rampant kiddies + Broken glass + Fireworks = me running away very scared.

[redcountess]

As David has mentioned, fireworks are illegal without a permit in Australia, and the only time you are likely to hear them on suburban streets is at Orthodox Easter or Chinese New Year.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Eeep! Rome is one of the places I've always wanted to see. I'll make sure I don't go there around New Year then!

[fluffymark]

Rome is beautiful. I'm so tempted to move and live there someday, its *that* good. The scary fireworks only happen once a year (I hope).

[arkady.livejournal.com]

I've never been abroad; don't even have a passport as of yet! But I speak a little Italian, and Rome is definitely on my list of places to visit.

BTW, do you have all your Faery outfit done yet?

[fluffymark]

It's an Angel outfit. I have the wings (with a large array of real white feathers) and the halo (white glittery flowery hairbands held together with hairclips) and the costume is being sewn together tonight by taimatsu, and tomorrow I'm popping over to Reading to try it on - so I'm very excited to see how it will all work. :)

As for Faery outfits, I'm tempted to do a repeat of my April Faery costume one evening at Whitby.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

I was going to volunteer a very sheer white dress of mine. It's the one I'm wearing over a white summer dress in this picture:



I might bring the dress and belt with me anyway to Whitby and do an Elven Queen outfit for one of the Spa nights. I don't have the blonde hairpiece any more, and I've no idea what happened to my tiara - but I have a beautiful black and red tiara with black feathers that would look stunning.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

News-sewer pitching? I approve mightily. We should probably have done that to purple (Gradwell's original INN machine which blew up every August. Eventually I became bored with its recalcitrance and installed diablo on the beast. It expired permanently in about a half-hour of full feed thrashing. These days, the only thing Usenet's good for is showing misbehaving machines who's boss...) but it ended up as a doorstop for a while, before being pressed into service as a network monitor or something equally menial.

Bastard thing fucked several other people's lives. I recall being on the phone to Alien, who was in Telehouse carefully wrestingling a new SCSI cable into it, while I was test-'driving' a chipped/blown Saab 9-3 ragtop round Leamington Spa... I think I advocated pulling the thing out the rack and heaving it out the window and into the pond in front of the building. But perhaps that answer was too rock&roll.

Sorry, I appear to be rambling. Champagne does that to a chap. Have I mentioned recently that I have a number of splendid friends?

Fireworks

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Is it ironic that fireworks are illegal where I live?

[silverfiligree.livejournal.com]

Allegedly the Argos Extra catalogue does those silicon chicken fillet boobies if you're interested. Hmm, I feel Steve's birthday present plan forming...

[mr-e-cat.livejournal.com]

AFAIK you can still buy them at certain times of the year in Darwin.

[reddragdiva]

And in Canberra.

[reddragdiva]

These shall be constructed from stockings filled with rice. For that extra-crunchy effect.

[wednesday]

I can't tell you how this thrills me.

I hear you.

It's not that fireworks have always been illegal everywhere I've lived; it's that, when I come up against BANG FLASH, I think "GUN!" and get out of the area.

I once went to some Guy Fawkes fly by night carny hell thing in Cambridge, and there were fireworks there. It was like standing in a field of cold cow pies, waiting for the bomb. Oh, wait. That's exactly what it was.

[wednesday]

Oh, and I do believe that's the scary reason why Sigfried left Roy we saw at AWA last month. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. The remark we were using: "Hey, Sigfried called. He said no."

[poggs.livejournal.com]

'twas cool to see you in your natural habitat, and not Sainsburys or St Albans City station... and also meet Liz, and also eat delicious pizza and get lost and wet trying to get back home \o/

[fluffymark]

Mmmmmmmmmm. Nice Dress. Alas my outfit of angelic goodness is now complete (almost...) and very fab.

Oh but I do like that dress of yours too. If I ask nicely can I borrow it for one evening at Whitby? Feel free to say no, as I can see why you'd want to wear it yourself. But....its pretty!

[hserus.livejournal.com]

You think it is bad there? Come to India. There are apparently regulations that say "no fireworks after 10 PM and before 6 AM".

That's the sort of regulation that's just there on the books and nothing more.

The noisier the better is the operating rule (when you aren't talking about rockets and stuff that goes way up into the sky, spits out a tiny shower or two of sparks and goes bang).

Nothing like the sort of fireworks you'd get on a 4th of July celebration, or chinese new year in HK ... beautiful would be the only word for those.

--srs

[vatine]

Around Diwali 2001, at the time living in Poplar (and being on-call), I was rattled enough I couldn't actually concentrate on checking teh network and fixing problems, because teh constant barrage of fireworks sounded *just* like being on a battlefield filled with small arms and the occasional mortar round. Freaky.

[mickmercer.livejournal.com]

What has happened to society? When I was a kid we could buy fireworks easily enough, plus those 'flare matches' and we'd be out all day lobbing bangers around, and it's not like we throwing them at people, unless we counted each other?

We'd take them into school, as would virtually everyone else. It was very lively for a few weeks. You'd spot your least favourite teacher lurking near somewhere like the bike sheds, go in, fill a milk bottle with a few bangers with long fuses, then run out, pausing briefly to star at him in an 'oh no, spotted!' manner, and flee as he ran in to see what you'd done. Kaboom-tinkle-tinkle.

And best of all you could buy these really slim bangers, so when they handed out the Gideon's Bible to us all, you could open the book out and the covering over the spine gave just enough room to slip a banger into. Light it, hand it to someone claiming they'd dropped it, and you had a few seconds before they were after you for your blood.

This was character development where I come from.

[hserus.livejournal.com]

> This was character development where I come from.

Sure was. My cousin was all for it, till he lost an eye when someone didn't really look where he was throwing a banger.

--srs

[mickmercer.livejournal.com]

Well that's kids for you! I never encountered a single accident of ths sort while I was a kid. Then, many years later, they had an organised fireworks display in the nearest town and some kid actually tripped and rolled into a bonfire! Not badly burnt or anything, just amazingly stupid.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

On the low point of a writer's career: been there, done that, bought the video game. I know for a fact that my folks ditched the sole copy of my first book at the first available opportunity. (Then again, I know that my parents were thrilled when I was quoted in the New York Times three years ago, because my name actually appeared in a major publication without the prefix "convicted cannibal and necrophiliac". Parents should be thankful for the small miracles.)