I love my tele. Luurrve it, I tells ya. Doesn’t have to be high brow, or even of terribly good quality - schlock TV, like music, is a wickedly wonderful social commentary that should never be underestimated. But us TV junkies have our limits; a few pet hates that will move us to action despite our addiction to the box.
This week I signed up for a workshop in presentation skills because, frankly, I’d rather eat styrofoam than stand up and give a speech. The irony is that it’s not the speaking itself that I loathe, it’s the worrying beforehand. I once had to give a speech at my godmother’s birthday and followed a performance by the utterly brilliant Toni Lamond - and as far as I’m concerned, if I can do that, I can do anything. But I’m hardly a pro and I have a lot to learn so I thought, yeah, a workshop sounds tops.
It was a complete disaster. Contrary to what my husband will tell you, I am not a performer. And I came away from the day feeling like I was crap and useless and could never again talk about anything - which of course is complete bollocks. Anyway, during the course of the day we had to give a presentation about a topic with about 45 minutes of preparation. Choosing a topic is hard enough. In the end I decided to rant about how I hate it when TV stations chop and change my fave shows with no apparent care for viewers. And it turns out I’m not alone - Peter Mattessi evidently feels the same way, as he wrote in Crikey today. Actually, his rant is a lead into why he is watching The Wire. Somebody introduced me to this show in much the same way as Peter a few months ago and I couldn’t agree more.
All this is by the by, you know. What has really got my goat right now is the utterly blatant and completely annoying house ad Channel 9 foisted upon me last night while I was watching Moonlight. Yes, the show is still on at 9.30pm - yay! I was beginning to think that perhaps I had unfairly maligned the network that sickeningly ‘hearts’ TV when it came up with this little gem - an ad for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicals across the bottom of the screen. It’s a static image that sits beside the channel logo. And for a show like Moonlight, which is largely set at night, a white logo (even a transparent one) is infuriatingly obvious. I’m moved to complain - which seems to involve jumping through several hoops acccording to Free TV. You can’t send an email - you must “post or fax your complaint to the relevant body”. Are you kidding? This is 2008 we’re talking about here. Email is soooo 1990s and even that’s not an option. Deliberate perhaps? And stations wonder why people are switching off in droves. D’uh!
I have my conspiracy theory hat on here, but does anybody else find it weird that, with all those planespotters that hang around Heathrow with their digicams, mobile phones and out and out camcorders, there is NO footage of the approach of Flight BA038 or the subsequent crash rolling around the internet?
I find it very hard to believe. And, I want to see what happened for myself, thank you very much. I don’t want to have to rely on the ‘official reports’. Indeed, if I could see the footage, I’d be more likely to accept official reports. And it doesn’t make it better that YouTube had a video that had been tantalisingly titled “British Airways BA038 Approach” but the link explains “This video has been removed by the user”.
The cached comments for this vid say that the person handed the footage over the authorties, but I guess it’s just as likely that he’s sold it to a news outlet? Anyway, the internet being what it is, there’s got to be another link out there. And I hate not being able to see it for myself. So if you find it, please post it here. Thanks!
I have a lot of favourite TV shows and unsurprisingly, many revolve around food. But my favourite is The Cook and the Chef on the ABC with Simon Bryant and Maggie Beer. It’s one of the few cooking shows on the tele that I actually learn from - mostly it’s some talking head making gastroporn, but this show is all about good produce and a love of food. So I am so happy to discover that you can download episodes (I sometimes miss them because of work or gym etc). The downloads have been available for a while now, but I only just got around to checking out the website:
…but some catfish are more evil than others and yesterday, the beloved found out just how evil they can be. We’d hired a tinny from Brooklyn to do a spot of fishing on the Hawkesbury River (a last-ditch attempt to make the most of our quickly dissolving holidays). It was a humid but lovely day and a light cloud cover kept the worst of the burning sun at bay. We hadn’t actually caught a great deal – two small bream that we’d put back. I’d had an enormous bite that had broken the line at the swivel and was beating myself up a bit about it…there’s nothing worse than losing a good fish because of the fisherman’s ineptitude with tackle. Overall, a very pleasant morning. I just love messing about in boats and my morning reverie, as I was vaguely attempting to untangle a knot from a line, was broken by the beloved showing off his latest catch – a large striped catfish.
I loathe catfish. The very sight of the slimy, squirming, whiskery golems of the deep fills me with dread. And until yesterday, I had no real reason to be so horrified. But, judging by subsequent events, my reaction would seem to be based on some sort of primordial intuition. Mike, however, did not share my revulsion and was all but ready to grab the thing to dehook and send it back from whence it came.
“Don’t touch it – use a cloth,” I said and began a mad scramble in the bottom of the boat for the cloth I knew I brought along for just such an event. Of course, I couldn’t find it so threw him a Chux instead.
Note to fisherman: Chux don’t protect you from fish spines. Not even Chux of the super duper, extra thick, heavy duty variety. The evil thing flipped about, stabbing the spine on its pectoral fin straight through the flimsy protection and into Mike’s hand – not once, but twice – into his index finger and the webbing of his palm.
Chaos. Did you know catfish are venomous? Slightly less venomous than Stonefish and Scorpionfish, as it turns out, but the emphasis is on slightly. Ok, I am exaggerating. Stonefish will kill you. So the smarmy, venomous fish is flapping about the boat, there’s blood everywhere, the poison is working its way through Mikey’s body and the man with a pain threshold like an elephant (do elephant’s have a high pain threshold?) is writhing around in misery. Mind you, he’s understating things somewhat, even at this point. If it were me, I’d have been screaming. The entire Hawkesbury would have known what had happened. Mike just sat there and said “Ooh, that really hurts. My finger’s gone numb,” and then proceeded to tell me to get the hook out of the fish. Which, naturally, I was reticient to do. When he suggested I get the camera out and take a photo of the fish in case he became unconscious, however, I figured it was dire.
You know, the funniest thing about the whole situation was the pictures I took ended up looking like the rest of our fishing ‘brag’ photos. “Look at the fish I just caught!
It almost killed me!”
Note the bloody drops, tissues and ice brick. Anyway, I cut the thing off and it sunk back to its watery lair, we got the beloved cleaned up and I gave him an ice brick to put on it. He didn’t like the ice but after a while things calmed down. I figured that if catfish were deadly I would have heard about it so, would you believe, we continued fishing! Mike even managed to haul in a very nice flathead!
Once we were on dry land, however, Mike began to feel bad. By now, his hand was a swollen, angry red balloon, hot to touch. He was light headed and sweating and the pain was becoming worse. He suggested, of his own accord, that we go to the doctor and I became progressively more worried. I could tell it was really bad when he asked me to drive, because he never does that. So we made for the Brooklyn Community Centre clinic. As soon as they heard Mike had been stabbed by a catfish they organised somebody to see us almost straight away, prescribed antibiotics and a tetanus injection (which also includes diphtheria and whooping cough these days). But as for pain, it was over-the-counter medication only. I had a feeling that wasn’t going to cut it, but it was all we could do.
So we continued up the road to my aunt’s place (she was a nurse…she’ll know what to do…and she may also have drugs). And it wasn’t until this point that I thought, “I know, I’ll look it up on Google”.
Out of all the technology I own and use, the thing that tickles me the most is being able to access the internet from my mobile phone. Mike teases me mercilessly about it. He calls me his ‘little geek girl’, which isn’t true because, while I like using technology, I’m hardly a geek. Geeks hate Facebook and I quite like it, for example. Ok – I’m addicted to it. But he has had to eat humble pie in any case because thanks to my so-called geekgirliness, I discovered this site, which details treatments for marine stings, among them catfish. And it turns out the correct treatment is not ice, but hot water (ice actually makes it hurt more…and I’d made him use that ice brick and stick his finger in front of the car’s air conditioning vent)! The only consolation was that the doctors didn’t know either. Codeine did nada but hot water is a miracle painkiller – 45 degrees Celsius – for a max of 90 minutes. Today his finger is still swollen and a little sore, but the agony has dissipated – yay!
“That’s the most useful your geekness has ever been, I think.”
Moral of the story: catfish are evil and geek tendencies are to be encouraged.
