Breaking Bad Season Two

I bought a new laptop, which means that this post will probably be the last I write from my old one. An interesting bit of trivia. Anyway I fnished the second season of Breaking Bad, which like the first season is awesome, maybe more so since they introduced that Saul character, who with his suit and combover has to be the lawyeriest lawyer I have ever seen. I've been to court, I've been in law offices and this guy reeks of more lawyer than any of those places combined. But he also reeks of crooked lawyer, which is just what he is. More on him later.

The first two episodes of this season were all about Tuco, a deranged drug dealer whom Walter and his meth cooking sidekick Jessie were very much afraid of. And for a good reason. He was the kind of guy you wouldn't want to lock eyes with on the street for fear he'll bludgeon you to death with his crack pipe. He's just lethal. The last season ended with this guy beating the shit out of one of his henchmen in a meth-trip rage, and because the guy died and Walt/Jessie were witnesses, they're expecting a visit from Tuco soon. Suffice it to say this whole plot was intense and ended with the kind of epic, bloody showdown you don't often get on TV these days.

Another thing this season dealt with was all the moral consequences of Walt's actions. He lies to his family, he engages in criminal activity on a regular basis. In some ways Breaking Bad is Scarface the TV show, and you just know it can only get worse. Walter is still dying of cancer and is still struggling to come up with the money for treatment. His wife is so pregnant you're expecting the baby to shoot out at any second. So he has a lot of problems for the writers to exploit and mould into clusterfuckery. Saul comes into the picture about halfway through the season, after Jessie's dumb fuck friend/distributor accidentally deals meth to a cop (he thinks he's safe to bring out the product after he asks the guy if he's a cop and the guy says no - such is his sheer stupidity). Saul becomes their very own "Tom Hagen" legal go-to-guy, and also recommends they do business with Gustavo Fring, this creepy mysterious businessman who apparently owns fourteen fast food restaraunts. So you know he's your guy for setting up a crystal meth enterprise.

As much as I love this show, it has its fair share of random subplots. Season One had Walt's sister-in-law's shoplifting problem for some reason, and this season had her DEA husband Hank's post-traumatic stress disorder after a firefight. But this season also had a guy getting his head crushed by an ATM, which cancels out any other problem I might have because that was just great.

Now for Season 3...

Anti-establishment

It's party time. I got tickets to a Science cruise party thingo which means I'm going to have to pretend I'm not an Arts student. So, uh, physics, man. Quantum mechanical theory of robotic genetic alterational methodological scientistics. Graphs. Atoms. Fuck I don't know. Anyway I was hitting up Eureka Tower yesterday on a date and I have some ways they could make the Edge Experience more fun. Firstly, they need to hire actors. Before you step into that glass box which juts out of the tower, there's a person who explains the rules to you and who takes your photo at the end. During the experience, this person should be able to act all panicky and upset as they inform you over the speakers about a malfunction. After that, fake computer generated cracks should appear in the glass. Then the whole thing should start rumbling and shaking. Finally, the compartment should tumble about thirty stories like that ride at Dreamworld. That would an experience.

Is the Kony thing making a comeback? It seems people are putting posters up all over the place. I put a poster up today. It was for my musical act. I'm a one-piece post-grunge indie jazz-folk vegetarian indie industrial artist. I play out-of-tune guitars and toy keyboards from the K-Mart bargain bin because I'm anti-establishment man. Buy my album. It was recorded with a rusty old tape recorder I pulled off someone's front lawn during the last hard rubbish collection. It's so anti-establishment it's almost it's own establishment.

Which reminds me:
Dear world,
we have our own Kony. His name is Tony Abbott. Can you please send your entire combined military to come and tear him a new asshole. The nation would benefit from such action.
Yours sincerely,
H.O.I.T.
P.S. Kill the cast of Dancing with the Stars too.

Conspiracy Theory

I'm getting a new laptop soon. (don't tell my current one because it'll get upset). Anyway I've been looking around and I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter which one I get because anything will probably be better than this one. So I've done a bit of research and there's no denying that as they keep coming out with new models, all the features get better because they've clearly realised how freaking stupid some of the older features are. External disk drives? Give me a break.

One thing that will forever freak me out are webcams. Webcams seem to come with every laptop now, and you know why? So that the government can spy on us. Somewhere, deep underground, there's a huge facility with millions of monitors, all of them windows into our bedrooms and studies. An army of people in suits and sunglasses are watching us malevolently. Occasionally they'll pause this colossal invasion of privacy to mumble something into the spirally cord thing sticking out of their ears. Maybe an order for someone's arrest? It's like the Matrix. Or 1984. There's some food for thought. Think of it as a jumping off point for a conversation the next time you're as high as a kite, although you should probably put the drugs away because they're watching you, man...

Anway, to conclude, here's a review of the entire Matrix trilogy:

The Matrix: Good
The Matrix Reloaded: Freeways and albino twins. Shit
The Matrix Revolutions: Explosions and robots. Also shit.

Advertising 101

I have this great idea. I figure the government could kill two birds with one stone and save a lot of money by combining car ads with car crash ads. Think about it. The first half of the ad would talk about how great the Mazda 6 is with its Ipod Connectivity and its powerful accelerator and brake and all that shit. In the second half of the ad, the model driving the car hits a cyclist and the music turns from "Bittersweet Symphony" by the Verve or whatever to some morbid Dido dirge as we watch paramedics desperately try to revive the cyclist, who it turns out is a child and whose arteries are pumping geisers of blood in all directions. The model who was showing off the Mazda 6 would break down in tears and we'd cut to forty years later when she's in a retirement home and still haunted by flashbacks of that accident. Why am I NOT in advertising?! I should host the Gruen Transfer. Bring it on!

Seriously though, the Mazda 6 is a good car. It's our family car and I guess if I had to get run over, I would choose to be run over by either that or a Dolorian. Or anything other than whatever the fuck Bryan Cranston drives in Breaking Bad. That is the most teachery car I have ever seen.

Actually, if I had to get run over I'd choose a steam roller. That has to be quick, right? As long as you go under head first. Also I could get them to frame my two-dimensional remains with a caption underneath: "Remember: Go under headfirst."

Change

They've changed the layout of this website and even though it's probably better than it was, it still took me a minute to find everything. It feels like I've moved into a new house. People always complain when the Facebook design changes, even if the new design is better. It makes me wonder whether people are just afraid of change.

I was reading a Cracked article about cartoons that are secretly disturbing or something like that. It seems like most articles on that site are random lists. This one was about all the sexual or violent implications the writers slipped into kid's shows that were able to soar over our little heads. When I was almost four I moved to Australia, where I settled in quickly into a life of riding kangaroos to school and throwing boomerangs at bunyips. I would also wake up early on weekends, because for some reason, when you are small, you don't sleep in. Maybe it's because you don't yet have a job that requires you to be up at a quarter past six to make salad, or because you don't go a private school where they dump a mountain of homework in your lap every night and tell you to fit it around the extra-curricular crap they make you do (thank god that part of my life is over). Anyway I would watch cartoons and nineties music videos until breakfast time. I can't remember many of them, but there was the one about claymation aliens and there was also one about Elvis' illegitimate son or something, which had a theme tune so annoyingly catchy that it's still kind of stuck in my head.  Most of the good cartoons came on after school though. Does anyone remember Cow and Chicken? Because I forgot about that abomination until it came up on Cracked. Apparently that was full of sex jokes. Catdog was one of those shows that makes you wonder about the implications of the world you're watching. How the hell did that thing go to the toilet? Similarly, why did Cow and Chicken have human parents? What kind of genetic horror story led to that outcome? I don't want to think about it. But the toon that takes the cake for the most effed up thing ever marketed to kids is Rocko's Modern Life, which for a time was my favourite show in existence. It was about a talking Wallaby who moved to America and befriended a talking cow. It was loaded with not-so-subtle sex jokes. But I think they may have cut those out for Australian TV because I don't remember seeing any of the more adult-humour moments you can now find on Youtube.

On a side note, Eurovision is coming back. I'm ready to laugh at all the weird songs and costumes and gimmicks they can scoop out from every nook and cranny across that strange continent. Last year bored me to tears, so this year needs to make up for it with the most hilarious trashy Europop it can get. I'm looking forward to watching them struggle to find famous stuff from Azerbaijan to celebrate (this year's competition is set in Baku, its capital city). What is there to see or do in that country, anyway?

Kony 2012???

What happened to taking down Joseph Kony? I remember there were about five minutes back in February when killing Kony was going to be the big thing of 2012. Mankind's next big achievement, like a collective New Year's resolution. Now he seems to have disappeared off the face of the Earth again which makes me wonder whether the internet is really the platform we should be using to draw attention to him. I realise the idea was to spread the word like a bushfire and get global support against him, but like all memes he seems to have worn his welcome and been shunted aside for the next thing. That's right, I'm calling Kony and his career in kidnapping children and murdering people a meme. Because in the end that's all this amounted to. He's on the same level as Keyboard Cat and Sneezing Panda and fucking Slenderman. He was a bit of a Facebook fad at best. I thought you guys wanted to make him famous. What happened?

Breaking Bad

I've had this show lying around my room for a month and it's taken me this long to check it out. It's basically the best show I have ever seen in my life. Nothing else even comes close to the absolute awesomeness that is Breaking Bad. Every other show I have ever loved and preached about pales in comparison and it's no surprise that I was more or less addicted from the first scene of the first episode.

Bryan Cranston plays Walter, a Chemistry teacher and a Dad and it's amazing how I can look at him and not think of Hal from Malcolm in the Middle because I thought I'd always remember him as that guy. But here, despite playing a down on his luck family man, he's completely different. First of all he's super-smart and second of all he has terminal lung cancer. In order to raise money so that his family can live on without him after he dies, he decides to check out the world of drug dealing. During a ride-along with his brother-in-law, who happens to be a DEA agent, he comes across a former student of his named Jessie and proposes that they start making methamphetamine together. At the same time he puts off telling his family about his cancer, and as he begins to spend more and more time out setting up his new scheme, his annoying wife begins to get suspicious and follow up on every little thing he does. But because he teaches chemistry and because he's such a brainiac, he's able to synthesise crystal meth like a pro and it's 99% pure which has Jessie pretty excited. So it would seem like they get off to a good start. But shenanigans ensue...

So far I've only seen the first three episodes, which establish just how out of their depth these two are. As soon as they begin cooking meth they manage to kill two dealers, albeit in self defence. Except then it turns out one of them isn't dead so they decide to flip a coin to decide who gets to take care of the corpse and who has to murder the survivor. Meanwhile they're constantly bickering which makes for the kind of dark humour I love. At one point Jessie decides to get rid of the body by dumping it in a bath on the top floor of his house which he fills with hydrochloric acid. Needless to say it turns out porcelain doesn't hold up too well against acid and after a few hours the ceiling downstairs caves in, showering the house with bits and pieces of dissolved drug dealer. This is the kind of tone Breaking Bad sets for itself and is the reason I am now going to lock myself away until I am finished with it.

Holiday Hot Spots

There is no skin left on my hands. I must have spent the better part of yesterday putting a chest of drawers together. But funnily enough, even with its many strange symbols and often ambiguous diagrams, the instruction manual was so much easier to navigate than the fucking labrynth that is IKEA. It took me while and there was one part where I was trying to put this one bit in which just wouldn't budge, but in the end I got all the proper bits in all the right places and now I've got a fully functioning, sophisticated looking, office-quality chest next to my desk. It even has a combination lock on it which is surprisingly simple to operate. I thought I'd have to call Hugo to come and help. You know, the little French kid with the British accent who builds robots and lives in a giant clock above a train station? Did anyone see that movie? Because I heard it won a whole bunch of awards and...well never mind.

So anywayzzz, yesterday I put up a rant about pokemon and apparently everyone and his dog read it because I came back later and I had about five times as many views as I would normally get in a day. Everyone loves pokemon. Even the people who hate everything else love pokemon. In fact the only people I can think of who would even dare to dislike pokemon are the older generations who grew up on backyard cricket and riding their bikes to haunted mansions. Those people can see how videogames are ruining the world because they know better and we don't. But ignorance is bliss and anyone who says otherwise is just being ignorant about how blissful ignorance is.

Even so, those respectable old farts are right - videogames are destroying the world and turning everyone into introverted, hunchbacked mutant people. The internet and TV are also to blame. So for the purpose of getting people outside into the fresh air, here are some great holiday destinations.

Iraq
I hear there's been a lot of fighting there of late. So bring a gun. It's quite exciting though, kind of like an action movie with all those explosions and gunfire. The food is generally good, but depending on where you are you might have to pick a few body parts out of it. Iraq can be such a fulfilling experience that you may find yourself extending your stay, especially if you get kidnapped. The great thing about staying there long term, however, is that you can rent a half house for pretty cheap. Although since it's literally half a house you may have to do a bit of rebuilding work.
Activities: Public suicide bombings. Live beheadings.

Heathrow Airport
This place is more of a maze than IKEA. You actually have to catch a taxi from one end of a terminal to the other and no one who works there speaks English. Like most airports the whole place reeks of sweat and exhaustion but like most aiports it also boasts a variety of good bars, cafes and zillions of bathrooms. It's the perfect holiday for the kids if you're the world's stingiest parent.
Activities: Watching planes take off. Watching kids have tantrums.

Ross Ice Shelf
I'm so big they named the biggest Antartic ice shelf after me. There's not much to do there but at least you'll have a place to put your books...lol...
Activities: Glacier rides: $55 per thousandth of an inch.

The Island from Lost
You won't need to bring much. It seems the only way you can get there is by crashing so listen carefully to the flight attendant's safety demonstration/interpretive dance thing they do before you take off. Nevertheless the island is a great family destination with plenty of things the kids can enjoy, like a giant stone foot and an old shipwreck which for some reason is in the middle of the jungle. Watch out for the evil pillar of smoke though, because it's been known to eat people. There are also stray polar bears and a haunted cabin.
Activities: Drinking Dharma beer. Playing with volatile explosives. Wondering what the fuck is going on for six seasons.

So there you go. There's a whole world out there and it really is an amazing place. Alternatively you could just put down your DS and go for a walk you lazy twit.

The end.

Pokemon

Alright muchachos, you wouldn't believe the week I've had. And that's because nothing happened. I'm a bit concerned they might be underpaying me at work, but of course they are. That's what these places do. They dodge taxes, carefully weave their way through loopholes and go out of their way to keep pay rates as low as possible. If you want something, like more money or for someone to teach you the skills required to do the job so that you're not just doing dishes every shift, than you have to make demands.

That's what I do.

There are a lot of Pokemon memes floating around the internet at the moment. Particularly on Facebook. The past couple of years have also seen a surge in Pokemon LPs on Youtube. It's like a decade on we're celebrating what defined our collective childhood - how it came along, shoved everything else aside and bathed in our attention until we got sick of it and moved on to Digimon or whatever came next. I can't remember because I had trouble letting go of Pokemon. I just can't get over my appreciation for the genius marketing put into this franchise. At some point, a group of people in a meeting must have asked "what do kids like? Cute animals? Collecting things? Fighting? Video games? Well let's mash all of that into one thing. We shall call it...Tiny creatures. No, wait...how about...Pocket Creatures? Pocket Monsters? That's it! Pocket Monsters! We'll shorten it to Pokemon!

Hence Pokemon.

Suddenly kids everywhere were spending twenty-four hours a day on their Gameboys, training their little animals into giant beasts capable of starting earthquakes, tsunamis, searing their opponents with lightning, manipulating the Sun's energy into some kind of solar beam, or stomping their enemies, tackling them, punching them, throwing eggs at them, throwing rocks at them, slashing them, breathing fire at them, poisoning them, paralysing them, confusing them, freezing them. And all of this led to the same outcome, which was that your critters fainted. Because if you killed them off or body slammed them into paraplegia the kids would get upset.

Then the cards came along and suddenly the schoolyard had an economy. Seriously, anthropologists need to study this phenomenon! Back in the day, whoever had the most/best Pokemon cards basically ruled the school yard, kind of like the real world and money, eh? As soon as Pokemon cards went out of fashion, ie. became worthless, the playground plunged back into chaos and would remain that way until the next big thing came along. Are you reading this, people who study human nature? Don't bother going to Africa and living with its weirdest tribes. Look no further than your local Primary School.

So anyway, that's the story of my 1999. I think my 2000 was more about Dragonball Z or some other Japanese brainwashing scheme.

The end.

Daniel Day Lewis

Another thing I forgot to mention about the Hunger Games: if I was the boy from District 12 and they hadn't introduced the new rule about letting two kids survive, I'd have bashed Catnip or whatever her name was in the head while we were snuggling in the cave. It would beat having to fight her to the death later because damn! That girl was deadly. 

So anyway, the topic of the day is...I dunno. I have the week off so I don't have any quirky uni anecdotes to draw on. I haven't had any HUGE nights out lately. They're always ripe for storytelling. I've run out of weird gimmicks, like fake trailers and ironic acrostic poetry. All I did today was go to the gym and watch There Will Be Blood. What a fascinating day! That Daniel Day Lewis is one hell of an actor, though. Everyone says he's really intense. Last year I caught Paul F. Tompkins at the Comedy Festival. He's the guy who morphs into the Devil/Dave Grohl in Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny. Anyway he joked about how intimidating it was working with Daniel Day Lewis because the guy gets in the zone, and by that I mean he takes his role very seriously. He adopts the character like a new personality, living as that character, eating and sleeping as that character. There doesn't even have to be camera pointed at him, he'll truly become that person for as long as the movie is in production. That's what I've heard, anyway. I've never met him but if he was to star in my biopic I have no doubt he would enrol as an Arts student, hang out with my friends, find out who I am down to every last, miniscule detail. Then he would start behaving like me with eerie accuracy because he's such a great actor. I'd get freaked out and try to get rid of him but he'll have taken over my identity to such an extent that he has decided my life is now his. "Fine," I'd say. "You be Niall. I'll be Daniel Day Lewis." So I'd go and stand in front of a mirror, shouting "I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!!!" until it sounds convincing.

It's a good movie, There Will be Blood. The weird thing about Daniel Day Lewis apart from everything above is how he never picks a bad movie. He never sells out and does garbage just to make a quick buck. In fact he only seems to pick movies that are either super-arthouse or hugely epic. The guy is one hell of an actor.

The Hunger Games

I was in Prahran today, being young and checking out all the young people places. Actually I was there for a chiropracter appointment which is as old man-ish as it gets, but it's alright because I'm much better. Soon I'll be back in action, running around skyscrapers saving hostages from Alan Rickman and fighting Jaoqim Pheonix to the death in the Colosseum. What do old people think of young people these days anyway? I'd say they're probably asking "what's a skyrim?" and "what's a caller duty?" while reminiscing about how much fun it was to shoot the Japanese out of the sky in real life instead of on the X Box. "What's an X Box anyway?" they probably ask. "And why do they call it a box? Can you put your pills in it between meal times?"

Anyway I walked past this place called Greville Nails. I can assume you get manicures there, judging by the amount of women inside reading Cosmopolitan, but I still felt tempted to walk in and ask if they had a box of nails I could use to build a cubby house. The girl would either laugh and direct me to the nearest Bunnings or actually give me some nails, having realized she can make some extra money off mistaken idiots. I also saw a dog who looked blind and made me realize blind people would be shit out of luck if their seeing eye dog suddenly lost its sight and led them into the middle of a busy freeway or whatever. What do you do if your seeing eye dog goes blind but you've grown attached to it and don't want to replace it? Do you get it its own seeing eye dog? Then you'd have a dog walking down the street leading another dog leading a human. If that went blind you'd need yet another dog. After a while you'd have a conga line of blind animals with a person at the back wondering why the fuck he's in Tasmania. So the moral of this story is: get a dog with good genes.

If I ever go blind I want a seeing eye zebra. Just to be different.

I also had a chance to see the Hunger Games. I like the bit where the girl got bitten to death by wasps.

That is all.

House of Leaves

This book is the Holy Bible for every pseudo-intellectual or hipster who thinks linear narratives are too mainstream. It took me a bloody while to get through this ripper because I kept giving up. It's the literary equivalent of talking to an institutionalized nutcase who tries to tell you his life story but keeps changing the facts around because his multiple personalities jump in with their own versions. It's a nightmare.

When you open up to the first page you'll find it devoted to a single line of text. "This is not for you" it reads, which is so freaking true. It's a kind of anti-dedication in a way, if that can exist, but it's also a warning for every normal person of sound mind who makes the horribly misguided decision of trying to read this book. I consider myself to be a keen reader when I can actually be bothered to read, but with work, homework and an entire internet at my disposal it's hard to prioritise reading. I see it as a form of recreation. If I've got nothing else to do then I'll read, but this book is anything but recreational. This book is a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle and I mean that literally. Just look at the page layout.

What the hell??? If you were after one of those "traditional" books where the text starts at the left side of the page and ends at the right, at which point you get a new line of text arranged in much the same way, then you'll have to look elsewhere because this book is indeed not for you. Many pages of this book consist of blocks of text sitting inside other blocks of text so that it looks like a collage or like a typewriter had diarrhoea. Some pages only have one or two lines, situated in the centre of the page or off to one side, because the author thought a great way to get the reader involved in what was going on would be to have the words mirror the actions of the characters. The book also makes excessive use of footnotes, and some of these footnotes themselves contain footnotes. Footnotes within footnotes? What will they think of next???

Now, let's get into the plot. The story of House of Leaves is a very complicated one, so bear with me. House of Leaves is a book about a guy called Johnny Truant who finds a manuscript by an old man called Zampano which is an analysis of a film called The Navidson Record by a guy called Will Navidson about a house whose dimensions are larger on the inside than on the outside.

Did you get all that? The whole thing is intricate and layered to the point of gratuitousness. This story alone is half the reason this book is basically unreadable. But anyway, more specifically, the story is a Blair Witch-style horror story (sort of) which flaunts itself as a collection of documents which someone chucked together and released. So what you end up with is an explanation of the events in the Navidson Record framed by zillions of footnotes which reference material outside House of Leaves and detail Johnny's sex life for some reason. We also get editor's notes and references to other parts of the book in case some of us are interested in flicking back to earlier parts to make sense of whatever the hell is happening in the right now.

What about the characters? The book DOES have characters, they're just really weird. Johnny is a twenty-something hipster living in LA (although he represents what a hipster was back in the nineties which makes his subplot feel very dated). Johnny finds Zampano's manuscript in his apartment after the old man dies and decides to publish it with some of his own stuff inexplicably sprinkled throughout. So you'll be reading about this effed up house and find yourself feeling more and more interested when suddenly the story turns into the time Johnny went over to this girl's house and had a threeway with her and her friend or some shit. Great! I don't care! Did I mention Zampano is a blind movie reviewer. This is all we learn about his character and I can't for the life of me work out why this is in the book. Is it meant to be some kind of attempt at satire, having the only person who has seen the Navidson Record be a blind man? Is it a comment on the film industry or is it just stupid? I vote the latter.

Will Navidson seems like someone we could actually relate to. So does his wife. Will is a Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist who decides to start a new life with Karen and their two kids. They move into a seemingly normal house on Ash Tree Lane and for a while everything is hunky dory. The unusual thing about Will, though, is how the author decided to make him a fictionalized version of Kevin Carter, the famous (and late) photographer. Will wins the Pulitzer Prize for taking the photo that Carter took, of a starving child lying in the desert while a vulture looms nearby, which is weird when you consider that House of Leaves is supposed to be a real document. What do you get when something that's supposed to be real is filled with things that can't possible exist in the real world? A headache. That's what.

So Will decides to measure his house for some reason I can't remember, and in doing so realizes that the dimensions of the interior fail to match up with those of the exterior by about a millimetre. He takes his findings to every expert and scientist in America and they all try their best to prove him wrong but at the end of the day there's just no denying that his house has some serious Cube 2: Hypercube shit going on with it. After that they notice a door where a door didn't use to be, and when they open it find a dark hallway leading off into nowhere. Because humans have that natural curiosity for exploration, without which we wouldn't have good old Aussie or the United States of America etc, they decide to hire a team and explore this dark void, and that's where the author decides to break out some experimental shit and have pages with only three words on them and stuff like that. It's meant to create an atmosphere of claustrophia and isolation as the team explores these dark, seemingly endless parts of the house and in some places it works quite well.

Other stuff happens too. At one point the house goes batshit insane and kills some of its occupants which was probably the most intense part. But after the book is done with Zampano's analysis we get this bit called the Whalestoe Letters, which is a series of letters written to Johnny by his mother during her years spent in the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute. As beautifully written as they are, they're...well...fucking pointless. They add nothing to the story other than to provide Johnny with a past. But I don't give a rat's about Johnny's past because I picked up House of Leaves so I could read about a weird house. Not a guy who drinks, fornicates, goes insane and ultimately disappears off the face of the Earth.

Ultimately, like the house on Ash Tree Lane, House of Leaves is a labrynth. A maze of avant-garde story-telling techniques. It says it's a novel (on the front cover it says House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski: A Novel) but what it really is is an explosion of poetry, technical flourishes, in-your-face intellectualism and semiotic bullcrap which the author has swept up into the pages of a book. Because of this there is no point in the story where you are able to forget you are reading a book and become absorbed in what's happening. It insists on itself far too much.

Another thing it does, which I forgot to mention earlier, is to have every instance of the word "house" appear in blue text. Why this is I don't know, but plenty of pretentious people say it's an allusion to the blue screen. You know, like in movies.

Whatever.

So I wouldn't recommend it, but if you like that sort of thing then by all means give it a go.

IKEA

Why is it that the moment I step foot inside IKEA I feel tired and depressed? Does anyone else have that problem? What is it about that place that gives off such a morbid atmosphere? Is it the size, the dimly lit labyrinth of furniture and other boring home decoration stuff? Does it remind me of the stress of moving houses? Does it remind me of all those Saturdays spent following my mum around looking at displays? I think it's all of the above as well as the way it destroys your perception of reality. There's no sense of time in that place, especially after you've been in there for hours with picky parents. And after a while it seems like the illusion of all those display rooms begins to soak into your mind and you wish all those people would leave so you can collapse on one of the display beds and sleep, or read a display book. Or maybe turn on the display TV and watch a display movie. Seriously, if I need help I have to ask the guy at the information desk whether it's just a display information desk. Is the playground where you dump your kids just a display playground full of display children and if so where do they take your real children? Maybe they give you a set display children when you return to pick them up. Maybe the car park is just a display car park and that's why you can never find a space, because they fill it with display cars. The ticket machine never works because it's a display ticket machine. Maybe IKEA itself is just a display store and the real IKEA is out there somewhere getting tips on how to run its stores based on what happens at the display stores. That would certainly explain why service is so awful. I have no doubt in my mind that the exchanges desk is just a display exchanges desk because they don't exchange anything. My house, the one I'm sitting in right now writing this blog could just be a giant IKEA display home. My suburb a display suburb. The city of Melbourne a display city. My parents display parents. This laptop a display laptop. THIS BLOG A DISPLAY BLOG. FRANKENCAT A DISPLAY CAT. THE WORLD A DISPLAY WORLD. THE SOLAR SYSTEM A DISPLAY SOLAR SYSTEM. THE MILKY WAY A DISPLAY GALAXY. THE UNIVERSE A DISPLAY UNIVERSE.

Well that's it. I don't know what's real anymore.

A blog post in 3D (it really works)

I just got home from work and it's Easter which means I have to catch up on chocolate. This also means I'll be hyper by the time I go to bed tonight but a man's got to do what a man's got to do and all that delicious goodness isn't going to eat itself. We didn't get many customers today - just a few people who don't celebrate Easter and the odd divorcee dad too lazy to make a proper Sunday lunch for his kids. I work in a Mexican fast food joint which, based on my H2B in Culture, Media and Everyday Life last year is an example of Glocalisation. You take something foreign and make it local. No one at my work knows anything substantial about Mexico. I found myself wondering what Mexicans do on Easter and was hit with a vision of people dancing around in Sombreros, running from bulls, pitting chickens against each other and throwing their ponchos over barbed wire in an attempt to cross the border into the United States of America. In other words, my understanding of this no doubt sophisticated and multi-layered nation is limited to a series of stereotypes. I just don't know any better. It's subconscious and it's caused by movies and TV. Producers think no one's going to know our story is set in Italy unless the Colosseum is in the background, or that no one's going to know the main character is Mexican unless he has a moustache and a pet chihuahua.

So anywayz...I feel this strange urge to watch Titanic again, but not in 3D because I don't see the point unless there's a whole new subplot hidden in that extra dimension. The first time I ever saw it was when I was five years old. It was on VHS and I think the mother of the kids I saw it with must have cut out the scene where Leo paints Kate Winslet naked because I don't remember that bit at all. Also I'm glad she did that because every time they play it on TV and that scene comes on I have to fight back a Niagara Falls-worth of projectile vomit. Kate Winslet is repulsive and if I were Jack I would have pulled her off that floating piece of debris. "I'm not dying for you, bitch," I'd say, imagining all the brawds I'd be able to pull back on the mainland with my boyish good looks and courageous story.

"I was on the Titanic when it sank," I'd boast, two women hanging off me with parasols and ringlets (unless I've got the time period wrong in which case they'd have the right to vote and ringlets or just ringlets.) "I tried to save as many people as I could but there weren't enough lifeboats. Just ask Billy Zane."

It's true. To this day I don't understand how Jack, who with his charming, nineties haircut and prettyboyness could have banged anyone on that ship, ended up with a horsey British redhead who looks ten years older than him.

Just sayin'.

But not only does this woman manage to get a man who's way out of her league (I think) to sacrifice himself for her, she also forgets all about her family after the Titanic. Let's adopt one possible explanation for the ending and assume that (spoiler alert) she dies in her sleep and reunites with Jack, along with the rest of the people who died on the voyage. So then what about her husband? Where's he? Waiting in some other part of Heaven with their deceased friends and relatives, looking at his watch and wondering where the fuck she's gotten to when she's probably doing it with Jack in that steamy car again. Gross.

Even if she's dreaming it's still clear she never quite got over this man she knew for at most a week. If I were her I'd have asked Bill Paxton to search the ocean floor for his corpse. One look at his disgusting skeleton ought to put her off.

But putting all that aside, if you went and saw it again in 3D and came out of the cinema with dry eyes, then I commend you for your emotional detachment and ability to listen to Celine Dion fucking wailing without feeling like someone is soldering your ears. It's definitely one of the saddest and most touching movies I have ever seen. It's also funny in ways both intentional and unintentional and it's no mystery why people consider it to be a classic. It deserves eternal recognition, unlike ava-blue-alien-pocahontas-dances-with-wolves-star-wars-the-matrix-atar.

Easter and Eavesdropping

I had to eavesdrop on a conversation today. I was in Script for Performance and because the topic of the week was documentary theatre they wanted us to use something someone had actually said to write a script (like when people record interviews). So I went and camped out on the South Lawn next to two British girls with my Ipod earphones in to disguise the fact that they had my full attention. At first I was worried they wouldn't give me anything interesting to write about because they were having a boring conversation about university and their social lives. Nothing particularly insightful. I considered finding a different group to invade.

...and then they brought up their sex lives, not just casually but in extreme detail. Suddenly I was hearing all about what they got up to with boys and how they lost their virginity etc. It was so unexpected that I nearly had a heart attack. After that they started giggling and rolling around on the grass like they were high on some blissful drug, still describing their experiences in disturbing detail. By then I'd decided I had enough to bring to class. Uni is such a fucking weird place.

So anyway... it's Easter time. Good Friday is tomorrow and I'm going to stick a sign on my door saying "do not wake before 1pm" because I'm sick of getting up early. But that's besides the point. The story of Easter is a long and epic one. Jesus died on the cross and somewhere else a mutant rabbit was so touched by his sacrifice he decided to wrap his excrement in foil and put it in a basket to be distributed to everyone in the world once a year. Unlike Santa he doesn't have a sleigh so he has to use public transport to reach every house in the world. Suffice it to say that every year he has one very long night. But he knows he must keep going because otherwise the son of God will have died in vain.

Also he's really good at convincing adults he doesn't exist. The kids all know he's real but adults say he isn't. Of course we say that - it's what he wants us to think. But rest assured he's as real as the Carbon Tax.

So that's the story of Easter. I may have inserted a few bits here and there but you can call them theories because the real story makes no fucking sense. I understand that Jesus died and at one point he bled water or something but where does the rabbit fit into the tale? Where does chocolate? But I'm hardly complaining because I would sell my soul for a shit-ton of chocolate and Easter is one of the few days of the year when you're supposed to stuff your face with it.

Happy Easter, and may your blood-sugar levels remain within safe limits.

The end.

Acrostic Aspirations

Unfortunately I don't have anything to write about. So here's an acrostic poem.

Friendly
Unbelievably nice
Caring
Kind

Obscenely generous
Full of good cheer
For you my door is always open

TV Tropes

The cat got his cone removed yesterday, which is good because I was about to fill it with dry food and time how long it took him to eat his way to freedom. He's lucky he doesn't understand what a reflection is because he must have been looking at that ugly creature in the window by the door, wandering "what the hell happened to that guy's face?!"

Ignorance is bliss.

Every now and then I scan tvtropes.org, captivated by all the tricks of the trade writers use. Anyway, because this blog doesn't have a TV tropes page I'm going to list some of them myself. Here they are:

"This blog contains examples of:" (in no particular alphabetical order because I can't be bothered)
Unreliable narrator - my life isn't all shootouts with Danny Trejo and delivering sermons to the brainwashed members of Niallology. I frequently run out of personal anecdotes to draw on so I make shit up. Fair enough. You should be able to work out what is true and what isn't. The most interesting story I have right now is I went to a party the other night and we were playing poker and I was running out of chips. So I went all in and won with two pairs, scooping up a table's worth of chips and thinking this story would have been more interesting if someone's car keys had been mixed in with them. So let's lie and say they were. I now own a Chevrolet. It's already riddled with bullet holes.
Eldritch Abomination - See Frankencat above. This applies to the kind of hideous, unimaginable, ungodly horrors described in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Monsters with thousands of eyes and millions of noses and stuff like that. Frankencat's wound started bleeding a bit yesterday. It was gross.
Seinfeldian conversation - what I need to do more often. For instance, what's the deal with potato chips? You open the packet and there's like ten chips in there. But the bag is big enough to fit at least five times the amount of the chips. What a waste of space! And money! You think they could at least try to fit more chips in, so that they spend less money on the packets because the chips won't be so widely spread.
Cosmic horror - I think I mentioned what it would be like to be stuck in space at one point. Not nice. I think it's about time they sent the first civilians up for a look around. I'm talking about common people like you or me and not fucking Bill Gates or whoever. Except they'd have to make it very clear that you might die. Sort your will out before you put your spacesuit on, folks!

I can't think of many more right now and I would risk sounding utterly and irreprehensibly self-indulgent if I tried. Like that movie where Zach Braff returns to his home town because his mother died and broods until he meets Natalie Portman and they listen to the Shins and scream into canyons.

That movie sucked.

The end.

AnNIALLation - Time Travel

In the future, when the Church of Niallology begins to fall apart because of its dissenting members and my pyschic powers begin to fade; when we fill the sky with toxic gases and poison our oceans; when we're out of oil and have to find some other way of powering our cars (if we still have them); when we've survived several alien invasions and the entire world has been brought together as a single nation, "cosmically callused" against future invaders; when we discover the super-intelligent, mutant descendants of our pet fish in the radioactive sewers beneath our towering mega-cities - it seems we'll be looking for a way to undo such a mess.

I'm talking about time travel. (Cue theme from Back to the Future).

But you'd think if it were possible there would be people walking into the United Nations right now claiming to be from the future with some golden ideas on how to work together against the coming alien apocalypse. You'd also think the World Trade Centre bombings would never have happened because scores of self-proclaimed heroes from the future have tried to stop the attacks and, statistically speaking, someone has to succeed eventually. But then again, maybe no one travels back this far because they've read what passes for historical records in their time and don't want to encounter the primitive, murderous barbarians of the 21st century. Or maybe they think they'll freeze instantly in the biting, below-one-hundred-degrees-celcius frost of the world before global warming.

Or maybe the concept is impossible. Now I know this is old news, but I'll bring it up anyway. A while ago someone came across a background extra in Charlie Chaplin's film The Circus talking to herself with her hand against her ear. It looked suspiciously as if she were on a hand phone and everyone was like "OH MY GOD SHE'S A TIME TRAVELLER!!!"

...Ok then, budding representatives of man's intelligence. If that's the case, then WHO WAS SHE TALKING TO? Did someone else travel back in time with another cellphone. Can cell phone towers travel through time? Thankfully someone offered an explanation about a hearing aid or something which shut those rumours up.

Time travel is an interesting plot point in movies and books. But as a thing that people take seriously and want so desperately to believe, because they dream of walking with dinosaurs and getting wasted on water-converted wine at the Last Supper, it's a bit too much like some weird cult for my taste.

Join the Church of Niallology today! Just leave your bank account and credit card details in the comments section below.

TV rambling

It's late, I'm tired and I have an assignment to finish but at least I got through the last season of 24. I'm finally done with that show. All I can do now is wait for the movie to come out (if it ever does). Apart from that if I feel like I need a TV action fix I'll go back and watch Season 1 or 2 or one of the other good ones. 24 was that show where Keifer Sutherland tortured people and shot terrorists in real time. It just so happens that every terrorist and his dog had it in for L.A. because the first six seasons were all set there. It was only when Season 6 rolled around and the writers realised there was no way they could force out more excuses to keep their show set where their office was that they had to bite the bullet and move to Washington. Season 8 was set in New York, and that's the one I've just finished.

I brought my 24 checklist/drinking game with me and unsurprisingly I've checked off every recycled 24 plot cliche I could think of. At the beginning of the season, Jack Bauer doesn't work for the government anymore but some sort of tenuous motivation reels him back into SUVs and Kevlar. Check. Someone has a deadly weapon which they threaten to use unless the President does something. Check. The President sits around for four episodes debating whether to give in to these demands while Jack actually does something about it. Check. Someone plans to assassinate a world leader. Check. The Counter Terrorism Unit is run by a moron who, despite knowing who Jack is - the son of Chuck Norris and John McClane with some Jesus mixed in - still doesn't believe anything he has to say about a possible threat to national security and when the threat proves to be true still doesn't believe any subsequent knowledge Jack may claim to have. Fucking Check. All the analysts working for CTU are social misfits. Check. One of them is a mole. Check. Someone references the death of Jack's wife, even though it's been seven seasons since she died. Check. Nearly every non-Jack character from the previous season is missing for no apparent reason. Check. Except Chloe and she sucks. Check.

Anyway now that that's over I need a new show. I've got the first season of Breaking Bad lying around so if I get time I'll chuck it on and rant about how good or bad it is.