The Mystery resolved

The guests have left, bodies litter the landscape. I get to gather up the crumbs. Literally.

Offspring #1’s Mystery Party was a success. Yes, the plot was lame, but the guests got into the spirit of the thing with some enthusiasm, committing several additional “murders” over the course of the evening.

And believe it or not, there was food left over; not what you expect from a healthy bunch of late teens. Thus I took away a large amount of left-overs. But no cake, of course!

The concept (the murder/mystery party) is a good one, and there’s certainly a lot of work in setting up all the characters and scenarios. If I were organising one again I’d first spend a fair amount of time checking the track record of the game and feedback from previous players. (there’s a forum for the “Dinner and a Murder” customers). As for writing one yourself – a formidable task, probably best not commenced on a tight schedule!

Offspring #2 and his girl celebrated their 6-month-iversary today.

j

Agatha Krusty

The Writer-and-future-filmmaker-in-training is having a 1950’s themed 19th birthday bash tonight.

It’s a Murder Mystery party with a prepackaged kit from “Dinner and a Murder” . This one’s “Class of ‘57“, set at a high school reunion. One of the classmates was recently murdered. It’s up to the guests to figure out whodunnit. It’d be interesting to see how 20 Gen-Y’s interpret the 1950’s. (If I were going.)

I had the job of reformatting most of the character packs so they could be emailed to the guests beforehand; thus I know who done it. I also got to read most of them.

Of course you don’t expect Agatha Christie in the plot or the writing. Nevertheless, the character packs leave a lot to desired. They’re hard to read and not very engaging. Worse still, they’re formatted very badly (supplied as PDF files) The writer doesn’t seem to have heard of paragraph breaks.

As for the”mystery”; not very exciting. It would be nice to have a real clever whodunnit – in the vein of the old puzzle (of course you remember it!) about the man found hung from the lightbulb in an empty, internally locked room. There is a wet patch on the carpet.

Scaring up some fun

Got my arse kicked on Friday.

It’s been a while since my soaring trike has seen any airtime. There were some cobwebs on the exhaust! I needed some thermals.

I’d been looking at the weather forecast all week, and for days the long range view said “fine and light winds” on Friday 26th . Which is of course, a public holiday.Of course, I get up early on Friday and the latest forecast is less encouraging. “Light winds turning west-southwest and strengthening”. But it’s the only day of the weekend that might even possibly be flyable!

On the road then, to Locksley bright and early. There’s no wind to speak of as I drive, but a bit of high cloud. When I arrive, there’s a light westerly; a bit worrying so early. But I set up anyhow. By the time I’m ready, it’s a tad stronger.

I launch at about 11:30am and climb-cruise out to 1km from the field where I contact light lift. It’s disorganised. I can’t get established. Too early perhaps? I spend 1/2 hour bumbling about, at one stage climbing to 2000 ft, but decide to go back, refuel (as I launched with only 1/3 tank) and see if things improve. Back at the field the windsock is showing more wind. My landing is rough and difficult; I have to land diagonal to the runway because of the crosswind.

I rest for a while and have some lunch. There’s a sailplane being dragged out to be winched up, so I refuel and then push the trike out to the end of the strip to save fuel. I watch the sailplane get towed up. He works a little lift for a few minutes, which is encouraging, but then he comes back and lands. It’s 1pm and things should be working. The sailplane lines up again and launches. I move to the flight line and take off as soon as he’s clear.

As I lift off I see the sailplane coming back on downwind leg to land already, and he’s really, really low. I find out why – there’s massive sink all over the strip area. By the time I overfly the winch, I’m still at less than 200ft! Rather than continue on over trees, I turn early and head at right angles to the strip and quickly exit the down air.

There’s more lift now, and I actually get the chance to kill the engine. But every time I get to about 2500ft, it gets really, really rough and the thermal gets torn apart. I know what’s happening. There’s a strong westerly up there above an inversion and it’s ripping the thermals apart at the interface.

I bang my head against this barrier again and again. This is ceasing to be fun, and it’s scary. Clouds begin to form at about 3-4000ft. Obviously some of the stronger thermals are getting through the inversion. But these clouds show streamers and raggedness. The wind is tearing them apart too.

An hour of this is enough. I land. The wind in the teardown area has picked up substantially . I can hear it roaring through the trees. I decide that that’s my limit. I pack up.

A sailplane launches. He finds a thermal and climbs away, but he’s drifting downwind at a great rate. Too strong for me though.

So, back on the road. Days like this are frustrating.

Shame, Reilly, shame!

(A contender for the worst book I ever “read”).

A couple of years ago, on a long drive to a fly-in, I made the mistake of borrowing the Audio book of “Ice Station” by Matthew Reilly ( a young Australian author), to keep me amused. It’s 12 cassettes long.

Matthew, I want those wasted hours of my life back!

Reilly writes like a cross between (bad) Dean Koontz and RL Stine at his most cliffhangerish (and I’m talking “Goosebumps” here!). His books are “fast paced action” with nary a pause. I don’t think he knows what a pause is.

Which is a shame, because he, his proofreader and his editor should have taken a long one to consider their credibility before they published this book.

Put bluntly, Reilly tried to write “techno fiction” without a technical clue. It’s blindly obvious that at the time, Reilly was operating on one part 6th grade non-physics to nine parts of caffeine.

You can (grudgingly) accept stuff that’s obviously science fantasy that he’s made up and warned you about before using it (like scuba diving on air to depths of 3000ft with just some magic pills to save you from the bends, oxygen poisoning and the like). But when you encounter real world objects you expect them to work the way real world objects behave!

I’m about to give you an example, so if you really want to read Reilly’s book (not recommended for anyone who has a scientific clue and wants to stay sane), tune out now.

In a climactic scene, the hero and his nemesis are in a diving bell way down deep. The bad guy forces the hero out of the bottom of the bell (open to the water as diving bells are). Then the hero cracks the window of the bell. The bell implodes, squashing the bad guy to death.

The more perceptive among you will no doubt realise that the air inside the bell and the water are already at the same pressure, thanks to the hole at the bottom. All that’d happen is that the air would bubble out through the broken window.

The book’s riddled with this sort of stuff – real world objects that work in strange ways; abberant behaviour that’s pivotal to the plot and action.

Matthew Reilly is now famous. But I can’t forgive him.

Oh how we danced…

“Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed….
we danced and we danced ’cause the room had no bed…”

Ms Canada and I have returned from our first dancing lesson at the Ritz Ballroom suitably cowed.

We tried though. We tried hard. Our little group, 4 middle-aged men, their partners and about 5 extra women “of a certain age” shuffled in approximate step . Eventually we were actually allowed to shuffle with a partner instead of doing the waltz as a kind of individual line dance. It wasn’t pretty. It didn’t get prettier either.

Let’s just say that wearing  sneakers was a good idea.

I really don’t think they should hold beginners lessons right beside the folks practicing their choreography for dance competitions. Especially couples doing the whole Latin thing.

That’s just cruel.

Looking at the sharp end of the chicken

OK,  I can’t deny it, business is getting slim.  The marketplace is changing as the “ultralight” aircraft disappears in favour of heavier and heavier machines that “qualify” as ultralights.  That’s thanks to the ultralight organisations pushing the definition up the weight scale so they can administrate an even greater swathe of the light aviation market.

So the market for stuff designed for open cockpit high noise planes is contracting.  So it goes.

It’s nice to work for yourself, especially from home as I do, but I wonder how long it can continue unless I diversify.

sigh….

Tripping? the light fantastic

Tomorrow night, Ms Canada and I are off to a ballroom dancing lesson, just for fun.

This is in response to the appalling showing we made at Ms Canada’s work Christmas party where the Company supplied a “band” (basically a singer, a drummer, guitar player and a backing tape – you couldn’t tell when the real performers decided to pause) and a couple of annoyingly competent Arthur Murray dance instructors to teach us the basics.

If I tell you that after a few minutes we were forced to abandon our shoes in favour of keeping our toes intact, you’ll have some idea of our standard.

I’ve never been a fan of “dancing” as my generation practiced it. Just doing whatever you felt like seemed like a cop-out. I was never sure if I was doing it “right”. My parents’ generation had the ballroom stuff and while I was approaching puberty in the 60’s, there seemed to be a whole bunch of named dances with formal moves – the swim, froog, the Wat/Batusi, whatever. But suddenly it was “do your own thing”, leaving a whole generation of boomers basically embarrassing themselves on the dance floor prior to Disco Fever. Not that that wasn’t embarrassing too.

With a bit of luck, we’ll learn enough not to get toe damage if there’s any dancing at Ms Canada’s mothers 90th birthday party in a few months.

j

On being talked about

Apparently everyone likes to be noticed. Parenting books (or at least all the ones that were in vogue when my two were littlies) are fond of telling you that children crave attention. Apparently it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. Just being noticed is all they want.

And I’m pretty sure we don’t grow out of it*.

The question is, how should we feel about recognising that need in ourselves?

Case in point. I ride a recumbent bicycle. Like most recumbent riders, if I’m asked, I tell people that it’s more comfortable and potentially** more efficient than a normal bike. (That’s actually true. After all, a recumbent bike (faired) holds the pedalled vehicle speed record at 132km/hr. And the comfort can’t be gainsaid).

But if I have to be brutally honest, I think like many of us, I enjoy the attention riding a weird bike brings. And I wonder about that. Is it a character defect? Am I, (and others) lacking something elsewhere in our lives in that we get noticed based on what we can afford to own rather than the person we are? Am I just as shallow as the show-off hoon in the tricked out sports car with the underbody lighting and hydraulic jumping suspension?

Of course, the bike IS comfortable! 
j

* example: President Shrub?
** The bloody things are harder to ride up hills though.

Mustela putorius furo

Yes, they smell. Yes, they nip. Yes, they can get into anything. I repeat – anything.

But they grow on you.

I’m technically not a ferret owner myself. That honour belongs to my first-born, who’d wanted one since she was about 10 or so. The ex and I relented when she turned 16 and appeared to have acheived enough maturity to care for one. This was of course before we discovered that owning ferrets means a whole new level of commitment, pain and expense.

The ferrets themselves cost nothing much. $30 or so and you get the pick of a litter. Then you find out that there aren’t many vets who can “do” ferrets. And ferrets need a lot of “doing” indeed. Expensive doing.

The jills (males are “hobs”) have to be desexed before they first go on heat unless they’re breeders, or they die from hormone overload. They have to be given distemper shots, too.

Worse, they’re fragile animals for something that’s basically an inbred domesticated weasel. They have no sense of danger and their eyesight is very poor. So they’re forever climbing and falling off things. They will chew and eat entirely inappropriate items such as power cables and foam rubber. Intestinal blockages and electrocution are leading causes of ferret mortality. My daughters first ferret ate a foam earplug and suddenly died of the blockage some weeks later.

Ferrets are cold weather animals and will die if overheated. It’s been 40 degrees (Celcius) here a lot this summer. We have a special ferret “ice cave”.
Now we have two desexed jills, “Cambridge” and “Snuffles”. So far we’ve managed to keep them alive for a year.

And we all smell a bit funny.

J.

PS: a random quote from the net:

“A ferret’s favorite place to be is ‘there’ and favorite direction is ‘up’. No ferret has ever been ‘there’, but they keep trying. “

The post that starts it all.

Admit it, you were expecting to see a mini-biography here, weren’t you?

Not on your life, gentle reader;  I’ll only open the kimono* by degrees.  Watch this space for insight into the life and times, such as they are, of this first time blogger.

Let the adventure begin.

J.

PS:  This phrase was in vogue at IBM in the 80’s.  See, a clue!