Eternal Winters

Tallinn cityview CC BY-SA 3.0

 Zigomar - Own work

So, Disney's been doing this thing lately where they give their films one-word titles with a lot of nuances and multiple meanings:  Tangled, Brave, Frozen...

When those movies are switched into different languages, the new movie is often given a new title to fit the new market.  For example, Tangled was retitled "Rapunzel" in many non-English versions.

Hmm.  Calling a movie about Rapunzel "Rapunzel".  Who would have thought of such a thing?

Anyway, "Frozen", being loosely based on "The Snow Queen" is being called (you guessed it)  "The Snow Queen" in various translations.

The Estonian version (which I'll probably end up buying - I do like my Disney in Estonian) is called "Lumekuninganna ja Igavene Talv" - which translates as "The Snow Queen and the Eternal Winter".

The Eternal Winter?

Last I checked, "eternal" meant more than "two days - possibly three, max".

This is why I wanted the story to play out over a longer time period.  Okay, so the summer suddenly turns into the deepest, most snow-filled winter you've ever seen.  Day one, you'll be all "my, this is unexpected!"  Day two might see you crank up to "I haven't darned my socks since last winter, but fortunately I live near the Arctic so I've got plenty of blankets".  If you're agriculturally minded you may be thinking "but the crops!  They won't like this at all!"  Day three you may make it to "Do we have enough food if this lasts?"

At some point that week you'll be thinking "we should find the queen and tell her to knock it off."

Personally, I don't think you'll get to "we must stop this Eternal Winter no matter what it takes" until after at least a week.

But then, maybe I have more patience than most...

Ingredients

This amuses me no end.

The following are the complete ingredients listed on the back of a packet.  See if you can guess what the product is:

Ingredients:

When reconstituted: Maize Starch, Onion (26%), Maltodextrin (from Wheat), Flavours (contain Wheat, Milk Derivatives), Salt, Parsley (3%), Flavour Enhancers (621, 635), Creamer [Vegetable Oil (Contains Soybean Derivative), Glucose Syrup, Milk, Protein, Mineral Salts (339, 450)], Mineral Salt (Potassium Chloride), Hydrolysed Soy Protein, Colour (Caramel lV), Sunflower Oil, Spice Extract.

Allergen:

May Be Present Crustacea, Contains Soy, May Be Present Egg, Contains Wheat, May Be Present Sesame, May Be Present Fish, Contains Milk, May Be Present Peanuts

Can you guess?  The answer is here.

I just love looking at all of the things that "may be present", while thinking about the one thing that definitely isn't.

Let the storm rage on... a little bit longer

So, I finally caught up with Disney's Frozen.

As a Disney fan, I felt it was a bit flat compared with Tangled, but I thought it grows on you on a second viewing.

It needed more time.  Not in terms of being a longer film, but in terms of letting the story play out over a few more days.

Disney seems to be doing a thing lately where everything happens so quickly that most of the events of the film end up occurring over one or two days.

Maybe I've just been brainwashed by things like the Narnia books, but I like to think an "infernal, unnatural Winter" should last for more than a couple of hours before people start panicking and talking about saving the kingdom.

And a "quest" to find a missing ice queen with magical powers could potentially take more than 24 hours.

And did anyone else noticed that Anna basically fell in love with someone she just met (two different 'someones') twice in less than 48 hours - even though the second guy made a point of stating that love doesn't actually work that way?

All I'm saying is:  give it a week.  Maybe even two.

Give the ice queen a day or so of running off into the woods before deciding This Winter Must Be Stopped!  I'd like a bit longer, actually, but a couple of days is better than a couple of hours.

Give the questing heroes a few days together to get to know each other before the trolls try to marry them.

Let the devious prince have a bit longer to convince the kingdom he's a good substitute for their own royals.

It's not too much to ask, is it?

On an unrelated note:

Okay, I know I've spent too long as an undergrad studying literature and media studies, where they force you to notice and comment on these sorts of things, but...

That "Let it Go" musical number, where the frigid ice queen sings about trying to control her emotions and be a "good girl", but now she's just going to let the storm inside her rage - letting down her hair, changing into a slinky dress and sashaying around the place?

Seriously, dude, if no one has written a book about the symbolic representation of women's sexuality in Disney's film already - they will now.  I'd be very surprised if this movie doesn't end up being a staple of undergraduate film studies, purely for this reason.

Sporting

You know, I think my teenage self and I would not get along very well.

For one thing, she thought that sport was terribly boring, the sports pages were a waste of newspaper space and people who talked about sport were dull (and probably devoid of real intelligence).

Why watch sport when there are plays?  Who needs football if you have Shakespeare?

And now?  Now I will actively choose to go to a sporting match rather than a musical.  Partly because I loves me my sports, and partly because I can see a football game for $10, while the musical will cost me $45.

The sports pages are pretty much the only part of the newspaper I read.  That, and the comics (which I always loved, so there's no big change there).

And I blog about sport.  I yammer on pointlessly about baseball and lawn bowls.

What's with that?

It's not as if anyone I know would actually be interested in reading about that crap.  Most of my friends did not inherit the "mad about sport" gene.  Somewhere along the lines, though, my DNA just sucked it right out of the air.

When did this happen?  How did this happen?

I'm enjoying it.  There's lots of sport in the world and it's really fun to watch and read about.

It just doesn't make any sense at all that I would go from "Pffft!  Sport is so boring!" to "Yay sport!  Sport is totally awesome!"

Do other people do that?

Games that should exist: Short-pitch Gaelic Football

This game might very well already exist, but if it does no one is using my key terms to write about it on the Internets.

I want there to be a version of Gaelic football played with fewer players on a soccer/football pitch and using a size 4 soccer ball.

I want this to exist because:

1. Gaelic football is awesome, but Gaelic football pitches are not common outside of Ireland.  They exist, they're just not common.  Every town as a soccer field, though.
2. Gaelic football is awesome, but fifteen people (plus substitutes) is a lot of people.  If you had 30 people interested in playing, and teams had 15 players a piece, you'd only get 2 teams out of that.  But if teams had 7 players each (Goal keeper, three backs and three forwards), you'd be able to rustle up some more teams and get a bit of a league happening.
3. Gaelic football is awesome, but an actual Gaelic football is a bit of a speciality item.  Size 4 soccer balls are much more readily available.  Although, I don't know if they'll bounce as well...

The way I see it, if you could just sort out some sort of pole extension for a normal football goal and re-purpose any old soccer field into a Gaelic football field, you'd have a lot more people playing the game world wide.

Granted, the short-pitch, cut-down version might not prepare people for the big-kids' version, and it might end up being one of those things where the "let's bring this to the masses" version ends up eclipsing the traditional version (hello, 20/20 cricket) and building skill sets that don't transfer easily to the "real game"...

But, still, Gaelic football is awesome, and it would be nice if it could be played in any town with a soccer pitch (which is pretty much every town on the planet).

If you know of such a game, and it has a name and rules and stuff, please let me know.

Let me tell you about this bird

So, my first tattoo?  The one I didn’t get because I’m not ready to spend quality time in a tattoo studio?

It was going to be this bird, or something very much like it:

At first blush, it probably looks like I’m just another silly chick who wanted swallow tattoo (one of the biggest clichés out there) and found a pretty picture on the internet.  But let me tell you about this bird.

This is a barn swallow.  It is the national bird of Estonia, the country where my grandmother was born.  When she was a child, my grandmother fled the country with her mother and sisters because of the Second World War.  She never returned – partly because, as a working class woman with five kids, she could never afford it and partly because the country was occupied by the Soviets and was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

As far as she was concerned, that country and its culture were part of her past, and would stay there.  My cousins and I have slowly been making it part of our present.  Many of us have visited the country, and some of us have made the effort to reconnect with the culture.

My first trip back to Estonia was also my first trip overseas.  It was also my first cycling tour, and I was travelling solo.  The first day of my tour I was terrified.  I was so worried I was making myself sick.  I thought I would get lost.  I thought I would hurt myself.  I thought I would run out of steam and have to stop before I reached my hotel for the night.  I was almost certain I was going to have to call someone to rescue me.

But I made it to my hotel.  At one point in time I thought I might have been lost, but it turned out I wasn’t.  I didn’t hurt myself.  I had enough stamina to even survive a side-trip to a golf club for lunch.

And there I was, at the end of the first leg of my journey, sitting on the balcony outside my room in the only hotel in a tiny fishing village in the middle of nowhere.  I felt an incredible sense of achievement.  I felt like I could conquer the world.

I *could* do this.  I *can* do this.  I *am* doing this!

This was the most audacious adventure I had ever attempted, and I felt like I could actually survive it.

There were some barn swallow nests under the eaves of the balcony on which I was sitting.  As I sat there, feeling exhausted yet empowered, I watched the swallows shoot out from underneath me, swoop into the air, weave in and out of each other in an amazing display of aerial acrobatics and dive back under the balcony.

I could see why the Estonians chose this little bird, of all things, to be a symbol of their country.  It was small, it was commonplace, it was simple – but it was also bold, elegant, full of life and the embodiment of freedom.

It was beautiful.  It was magnificent.

The beauty of a barn swallow is different to the beauty of a swan or lorikeet.  The magnificence of a barn swallow is different to the magnificence of a hawk or falcon.  It is so small, delicate and compact – so fragile.  And yet there is a power in that bird.  You only need to see it shoot out into space and swoop in a high, fast arc to see that.

I can see why the Estonians would want to see something of themselves in that bird - why they would want to see something of that bird in themselves.  It made sense that they would put it on their 500 Kroon note, and it was such a shame that the design on that note stopped being in common circulation when Estonia changed its currency to the Euro.

The picture of a barn swallow on the 500 Kroon note is one of the best images of a swallow I have ever seen.  It does such a magnificent job of capturing the elegance and power of that little bird.

That pose.  That poise.  I wanted the spirit of that bird – the essence of it – to be the first image I had had tattooed onto my body.  And it almost was.

Maybe one day it will be.  Somewhere, under the skin, I think it already is.

Not Inked Yet

It turns that that, while I am ready to get a tattoo, I’m not ready to be in a tattoo parlour.  I got as far as the shop, full of adrenaline and ready and prepared to have someone create a wound on my arm and shove a foreign substance in it in order to leave a permanent scar behind.  I knew what I wanted, I knew what I was prepared to negotiate and I knew what sort of fuss and bother I was about to make for myself.

But then, I was standing in the shop, waiting for the tattooist to come speak to me… and I started to look around.

It was clean and modern – looked kind of like a barbershop or hair dresser.  I suppose that’s what “not terrible” tattoo parlours look like these days.  Ironically, I would have felt more comfortable if it had looked more like a dentist’s clinic, but you get that.

I started looking at the pictures on the wall.  The ones they have in the waiting room to give you something to point at and say “I want that!” if you came in without a good idea of what you wanted – and also the ones they had in the work area, over the chairs.

The artwork was starting to creep me out a little bit, and then I noticed that some of the pictures in the work room were “artistic” photographs of actual piercings of intimate body parts.  Okay, they do body piercing in this joint and it’s not unreasonable for them to advertise that sort of thing on the wall, but still…

The more I looked at the pictures and at the woman who was probably going to be doing my tattoo, the more I was overcome with a sense that this was not my place, and these were not my people.  I didn’t belong here.  I didn’t want to have something so close to me done here.

This was going to be my first tattoo.  You don’t get another chance to have your first tattoo. I had chosen a design that had a good story behind it – a bright and shining story that was worth commemorating with my first tattoo.

I didn’t want to add to that story the fact that I got the tattoo in a place with pictures of pierced schlongs on the wall.

I chose that particular place because I looked a few places up on the internet and I liked the sound of it and I liked the look of their portfolio.  But now I know that, for me, I have to like the vibe of the joint when I walk in.

And... I didn’t.

So, I’m not inked, yet.

That thing with the ink

I think there's a level at which my mother has always known I am likely to get a tattoo.  She hates the idea.  She really and truly hates it.  She hates it so much that, if I so much as mention the word "tattoo" in her presence (for any reason), she clenches her jaw so tightly you can feel the pressure from the other side of the room.

If she could, she would forbid me from doing such things.  I half recall she even tried, back in my twenties, "in jest".

So, seeing as I have no intention of letting my mother dictate what I do with my own skin (she had a responsibility for that once, but that time has past), I am stuck with an interesting question:

Do I tell her I'm going to get one, tell her I have one after I've already gotten it, or simply never tell her and cross that bridge only if she happens to notice?

I'm leaning towards the latter.

By the way, there's a very good chance I'll be getting a tattoo tomorrow.

Owning stuff

So, my latest hair-brained idea is to buy an investment property in Caloundra.

Actually, this is just the latest instalment of a hair-brained idea that keeps popping up in various guises and then disappearing again under a mountain of "Oh, maaaaan - even thinking about this seriously is too much effort."

I am now in my mid-30s, and I don't own anything.

Well, I own a car.  Technically, a van.  Theoretically, I could put a bed and some curtains in that van and call it my "home", and then I would own my own home.  This does not seem like something people who actually have jobs should do.

I live with family, or I house sit.  I have rented and probably will again.  I just don't own my own place - I never have - and every now and then a little voice tells me I should.

For years now I have toyed with the idea of buying a unit or a house or something.  I have even gone so far as to actually inspect a couple of units in the past.  The problem is that I have deep philosophical issues with the current property ownership environment.

Housing prices are based not on what you can conceivably afford by saving up your money for, say, five years.  They are calculated on what you can borrow.  No one is going to ask for what you can reasonably afford if they know that they can ask for an extra $100,000 or $400,000 - and you'll just borrow that from a bank because that's what people do nowadays.

Have you ever read a property lift-out from a news paper?  Perfectly ordinary houses are now being sold for over a million dollars - not because the house is worth that much, but just because people have asked for that, and people have been willing to borrow the money necessary to pay it, and now there's a precedent.  It's crazy stuff, man.

Even if you save aggressively and aimed modestly, the whole housing loans things will forever push the prices just a few hundred thousand dollars beyond what you could save for.  There's no option other than taking out a loan - and then you don't really own a house so much as a bank owns you.

I can't possibly save up enough money to buy a place without going into debt.  I don't want to owe anyone more than I can pay back in a couple of years.

This basically puts me out of the housing market.

But, on the other hand, I've played enough Monopoly in my time to know that owning property is a good and useful thing.  Not as useful as owning the waterworks, the electrical company and all of the train stations - but that's not as easy to arrange in the non-Monopoly environment.

Part of the trouble is I currently live in the same town as two other family members, and it just seems weird to buy my own place when that means there will be exactly three of us, and we will each be living in three separate abodes paying three separate lots of rates.  It's actually practical and sensible for me to live with my family and split the "running costs" and house-work duties.  It's what used to be considered "normal" before our Western concept of a nuclear family decided splitting the atoms was the way to go.

So, owning my own place here just seems silly (as well as expensive and debt magnetic).

But, the other day I read an article about people who rent the house/unit/whatever where they live, but still own investment properties.  Apparently, renting your house out to someone else while you rent yourself makes things like property maintenance a tax-deductible thingy-whatnot.  And there's all that negative gearing stuff that people talk about as if those were words describing real things.

And it occurs to me that, while I'm paying board rather than rent, I'm in a pretty good position to take advantage of this.  It could be that buying my own home makes more sense if I'm not living in it.

Since my grand plan is to try to shift the family down Caloundra/Buderim way in the future, it makes sense to try to buy something in that area so I've got property at Caloundra prices to sell when the time comes to buy a house in that area...

So, yeah.  I'm currently toying with the idea of buying an investment property in Caloundra, even though I don't live in Caloundra and I still won't own my own home.

Although, there is always the van...

Shadow Tennis

So, I've decided to jump on the latest fitness craze and I've ordered some Tae-Bo DVDs.

I was sorely tempted to try Tap-Out, but figured I already owned enough expensive white elephants.  If I want to experiment with finding out whether I'm a "work out in your home in front of the TV!" person, I may as well chose yesterday's fad.  By getting a really popular DVD that no body wants any more, you can get it really cheap.

Four DVDs for under $25.  That's all I'm saying.

Anyway, while I'm waiting to do whatever the heck it is you do when you do that stuff, I've been using the one and only other exercise DVD I have - it came with my dumbbells, and goes for about half-an-hour.  It's not bad, but after doing it three times I'm a bit board with it.

Then, last week, I noticed Wimbledon was being screened of an evening.  It suddenly occurred to me that there's actually a pretty fine line between televised tennis and televised aerobics.  You have to squint and turn your head sideways, but the similarity is there and you can see it.

So, here's my current "fitness craze":  shadowing the ball in on-screen tennis.

I "serve" with whoever is serving, then chase the ball from one side of the screen to the other (well, I have a slightly larger playing service than the width of my TV, but you get the gist) and "hit" it whenever one of the players hits it.

Essentially, I'm playing both sides of the tennis match at the same time.

It's actually really fun.  Certainly makes watching the tennis more entertaining.  I have a better appreciation for the really tricky shots, too.

In the ad breaks I do some sit-ups and push-ups to turn it into a more elaborate work-out.  I can tell you, after an hour or so of this, I feel like I've been exercised.

Baby Bear Steps

Regular readers of this blog may recall that I came back from a trip to Brisbane late last year having made the (admittedly, rather obvious) observation that fencing – while one of the most inherently awesome sports on the planet – is the least useful martial art in the history of martial arts.

It is so useless as a martial art that I think we can safely say it isn’t a martial art at all – even if books about fencing are filed in the same place as books about karate and tae-kwan-do in most public libraries.

It is so useless that I actually think the cross-country running component of a pentathlon offers a better set of skills for surviving dangerous situations.

It is so useless, in terms of fostering real combative skills, that in a truly combative, life-or-death situation, I would not put money on a fencer to win a sword fight.

If you were actually faced with another human being wielding a sword and intending to do you harm, almost everything you learn in fencing would get you killed within seconds.

I was standing in a poorly lit, sparsely populate train-station car park one night, waiting for a lift, when this observation occurred to me.  I was not, thankfully, attacked – but if someone had tried to attack me I would've been, well, attacked.  All I have is the ability to run away – which is a good ability to have.  I’m now at the stage where I could run flat-chat for 30 seconds and then keep up a steady (if slower) pace for 10 minutes.  If they wanted an easy target, that would hopefully give me an advantage.

However, I realised my ability to survive long enough to run away would be greatly increased if I had the ability to incapacitate any attacker first – and this is not part of my current skill set.

I decided that I needed to pick up a proper martial art – one that would enable me to be the most dangerous person in any given car park.  As I said back in October, the best way to protect yourself against bears is to be scarier than the bear.

I started trying out a few things.  I went along to a karate class, a kung fu class, a goshin-something-or-other-actually-I-don’-t-even-know-what-that-was class…  One thing led to another and I joined a softball team.

That doesn’t make any sense to me, either.

Anyway, my studies kicked up a few notches and I had to stop playing softball.  Quite frankly I don’t have time to fit in more than one sport.

Which is why I’m still not sure how, this week, I managed to start two new sports. 

I’ve taken up Tai Chi.  This was actually so I could convince my mother to take up Tai Chi.  I’ve been trying to convince her that some sort of exercise would be good for her arthritis.  It’s been an uphill battle, but I managed to talk her into coming along to a slow, gentle movement based activity with me.  At our first session, last week, the instructor pointed out that Tai Chi was a martial art. 

I had to keep a straight face while trying to envision the circumstances under which Tai Chi would be your best form of self-defence.  Perhaps if you were attacked by a low-flying tortoise.  Or an 80-year-old with poor health.

I think it was some sort of subconscious psychological response that drove me to go back to trawling the internet for real martial arts classes the next day – and I discovered something that I hadn’t noticed last time.  The PCYC I never remember exists (we have three PCYCs in town, one of which I attend regularly, one of which I used to attend as a child, and one which I’ve driven past once and never remember) has Japanese ju jitsu classes on Wednesday and Friday nights.

I blew off fencing that night and drove over to check it out.

There were various reasons why I didn’t take up any of the other classes.  Some were too awkward to attend regularly.  Some were too expensive.  Some were taught by wankers.  This one doesn’t seem too wankery and, if I alternate between fencing and ju jitsu, I can still make sure Friday is my only night for sporting things.  Most importantly, classes are $4 a pop.  That is unspeakably cheap.

So, (in addition to doing Tai Chi until my mother is ready to fly solo) I’m going to trial doing that for a while:  alternating between fencing and ju jitsu on Friday nights, and possibly (if study time permits) throwing in an extra Tuesday night session for fencing or Wednesday night session for ju jitsu once a month.

Baby steps, but I might end up being scarier than the bear after all.

And, unless I’m very much mistaken, I think my Friday nights just went up a level of awesome.