Saucy Onion: Lemon Delicious

"Saucy Onion: Lemon Delicious: People are always surprised to discover that I've managed to keep a lemon tree alive on my 20 metre square balcony. And it hasn't always ..." By Indira Naidoo

Ranted by Doomboy

The Beginning Of Automation

Been reading a series of SF books by Vernor Vinge, called the Zones of Thought.

Vinge is a computer scientist with emphasis on automation.

The premise of the universe is that the closer you get to the galactic core, the less advanced tech will work
to the point where even biological systems are affected. The further away, the more advanced systems will operate... blue sky things like anti-grav and nanotech.

The series hints that this system was set up in bygone times by advanced races who saw that supreme intelligences were dominating everything, allowing no new intelligences to emerge. At the galactic fringes, or "Slow Zones", a kind of creche for intelligence to evolve was created, with no FTL or AI.

Yep, we're deep in the "Slow zone". All the advanced things we speculate about become the "failed dreams".
His depiction of human life under these conditions is pretty grim; like here and now, and often worse.

Interesting concepts, but his writing can suffer from filler and pointless sub-plots.

A Fire Upon The Deep is the first one, quite good.

A Deepness In The Sky is a sort of prequel, very good.

The third one, I'm reading now, not much happening in it so far, Children Of The Sky.

Ranted by Doomboy

A Scotsman In Space

After the alien attack: I punched the heading into my touchpad.

"Being a Scotsman in Space in't really all its cracked up te be, Pal," said Dave Fraser, puffing on a cigarette.

"It's no like Mr Scott on the Enterprise, God naw. It were more like being a stableboy, really. Muckin' out cages and hosin' down wee beasties. Och, it were a shite job."

Dave Fraser is the only surviving crew member of a deep space transport vessel known to frontier authorities as K147729. Prior to its wreckage being discovered by a naval patrol, it had been observed and scrutinized intermittently by customs. However, despite suspicions of smuggling, there were never any obvious transgressions of the law that could be proved against her.

Dave is a short, wiry man with cropped hair and a straggly growth of beard. His eyes are darting and haunted, and he drags heavily on the cigarette he wields in a shaking hand. This is a hardened space veteran who has seen much, but now perhaps, has seen too much. He has walked on the surface of strange, lawless worlds where humans have been abandoned and left to themselves for centuries. He has witnessed wonders and events that belong in some old-fashioned sword and sorcery fantasy rather than in an ordered, sane universe.

I'm told the authorities don't seem to know quite what to do with him. Until they rule out the possibility that he murdered his crew-mates himself, he'll stay right here on the interrogation block.

"I didn'y murder anyone! If ye're lookin' fer someone to put in the picture for murder, it'd be that wee Zarrian bastard, Seamas. Aye, Zarrian! Don't look so skeptical, Pal. It's a real place."

Dave states that on board they had a number of non-coalition citizens working, with fake papers and passports. One of these was a native of the planet Zarr yet no record of any such world exists. He was taken aboard as a boy, to provide help with menial tasks and to facilitate transfers between ships and various on world traders.

"The wee scrote was voracious! He was like a fucken termite! He burrowed through our entire library in under two years, but when he came aboard he was a dirty barefoot farm lad who could'ny read. At the end he knew more about the ship's systems than anyone except the skipper, and mebbe one or two others. And then there were the disappearances. The mutilations. The bizarre occurrences that just happened to benefit one person. Aye, him. I'm tellin' ye, the lad was evil like. Son of the devil or something."

Dave paused for a moment and drew longingly on the cigarette until it was exhausted. He looked up and began to recount the final hours of the doomed ship.

I hammered the information into the system as he spoke:

The cage was broken, its seams had been burst by its introduction to a bulkhead. The alien creatures that had been in the cage were now long gone. Not that Dave was sad to see them go. They were repulsive, pale things that looked for all the world like todgers with legs.

"Who stowed the cage?" the Skipper demanded, upon being notified of the escapees. Today he was wearing his long mustaches plaited, and had on his sparkling South Seas pirate suit. Old Wang had turned a bit eccentric in his long years in space.

"I stowed the cage, Skipper," Dave said to him. "But I stowed it correctly. All proper. There must've been a weak link in the chain or something. A fault in the tie-down!"

The Skipper looked him in the eyes; they'd shipped together for a lot of years, and Dave could tell he was believed. He knew Dave did his job well; it wasn't the best job in the world but it was important and rated a high cut of the loot.

"Find out what these creatures can do and if we can catch them easily. If there's no way to catch them, we exterminate them!"

Captain Wang had spoken. Dave sought out the resident expert on the native life of the planet Zarr, himself a native. Young Seamas was an unremarkable looking fellow. Brown hair, blue eyes and about 6 foot of lanky frame. His manner was quiet and brooding, and often he would break into fits of rage and yelling over seemingly inconsequential things. Once he had had to be stopped from clubbing another crewman to death with a support strut pulled from a table. He was always watching, always sneaking up on the crew when they least expected to find him there. Out of all the things Dave had seen, it was this simple looking boy that made his hair tingle, ready to stand on end.

Dave found Seamas working on some electrical equipment in the loft.

"Hi there, Seamas. Hows it going?" Dave greeted him in a friendly fashion.

"Dave," he nodded in reply.

"Just a quick question, mate. Do you know anything about the wee creatures we're carrying, the ones that look like todgers?"

"They're called 'Knobuloc's Folly' or Knobmice. They'll eat anything. They'll chew through copper and insulation. They don't die easily, 'cos they eat poisons and don't breathe."

As he spoke, Seamus kept working on the complex electronics with a deft touch. Dave could see why he wasn't cleaning out muck for him down in the cargo spaces. Skilled technicians were a rare and valuable breed out here.

"Dammit. So how do I get rid of them?"

"You hit them. With one of these," he replied, handing Dave a 12 pound lump hammer. "Hard."

So off he went around the ship tracking the little bastards down. They were hard to find, and they did indeed eat anything and everything. The first one he smashed with the hammer was surprisingly hard to kill....it was like hitting a rubber tyre. The hammer bounced back, braining Dave in his thick forehead. It occasioned much amusement from the crew, watching old Dave crawl around the deck after these things. 
Especially Seamas.

The mirth died off quickly enough when serious things started to get eaten. Valuable mementos, cargo, the captain's furry rug and the ships store of flour. The captain assigned helpers, and Dave coordinated the search for the remaining beasts. Finally the body count against the cargo log showed they were down to a single fiend. Somewhere.

Panic erupted at the loss of sensors. All the techies were clustered around the stations in the control centre scratching their heads and talking hysterically. It appears the final beastie had been found. It was fried and blackened inside the racking for the sensor control equipment.

There wasn't much Dave could do at this point. The ship was drifting sightless through dangerous unpatrolled space, crippled by small penis-like creatures. Dave reflected on the insanity of it all, but insanity is commonplace when you deal with the company he keept.

Cargo was now running smoothly, so he wandered away to let the boys do their jobs and headed for the mess. Passing the junior quarters, something strange happened. The air became warm, tinged with a metallic smell he couldn't identify. Colour began to leach out of everything as if the very reality of timespace was being disturbed and strange blaafing noises echoed around the walls like the mating call of some deranged walrus.

Dave staggered, rubbed his eyes, thinking he'd overdone it crawling around after the beasties. When he opened them, that strange bastard Seamas was standing barely a foot away looking at him as if he was going to cave his head in.

"You right, Dave?" he asked innocently.

"Yeah thanks mate," he replied, pushing past him quickly. He'd had all he could take of Seamas's company for one day.

With the techies working non stop to rectify problems, the skipper paced around the place in a barely concealed rage, kicking people and smashing breakables. Not happy.

When it happened, it happened fast. The crew had barely enough time to arm and prepare before the boom. 

Abominable aliens swooped down on Dave and the crew, seemingly out of the walls of the bulkhead.  In the confusion, Dave thought he saw a strange figure standing unscathed out in the midst of it, laughing with one of the crew in pieces at his feet.

Shots went in all directions; a giant morass of confusion, screaming and blood.

"Fuck you beasties!!" yelled Dave at their chaotic heads as they came for him.

They were doomed. They couldn't win against sheer numbers. At the last it was some freak of the cosmos that saved Dave. Just as the last of his comrades fell dead from being gouged by some enormous spiked beast apparatus, strange scythe-blades started flying out of nowhere. They had knobby weights on their ends that sliced and diced in some impossible, yet clever articulated fashion.

"One minute: extremely humongous army of bad tempered big fanged beasty fuckers, next minute swiss dicer and chip maker has visited and it's bony beastie salad all around," Dave concluded, breathlessly.

"I tell ye, I haven't seen a retreat that quick ever. As those alien bastards fucked off they left the big hole in tha side of our ship, rendering it fucked. Everyone was dead. I lived for three days in that fucken' suit before the navy boys showed up and dragged my arse here. And that's where we're at, Pal."

He finished recounting the story like he'd just relived it. I couldn't help thinking there was something nasty out there, beyond the rim, that we'd had no prior knowledge of.

Ranted by Doomboy

Me Old Pal Mucus

Mucus, mucus, mucus, me old pal Mucus.

I thought one day with a grimace,

A Mucus needs a name!

So out he popped one morning,

Much to mother's shame.

I shouted out quite loudly, "Linus is to blame!"

To which a startled Father o'er,

The top of his great tome did mutter,

"Marcus, more like it, you little green bastard."

Ranted by Doomboy

A Man Of Unequaled Disposition

Would you aspire to be a man of unequaled disposition? Sit in a comfy leather armchair; reading The Times while smoking a cigar and supping a brandy. Wouldn't there be others doing that, and thus you would be equaled by those around you? 

You look up. 

You see me now.

What if I was soooo good at sitting around smoking cigars and drinking brandy that there was no one who could equal me at it?

I'd be the man of unequaled disposition in the room then, methinks.

Ranted by Doomboy

Lawn Of Destiny

So there I sat, mowing my lawn of destiny and being caught in the face by the slanty red rays of the setting sun. Behind me across the verge the beetroots grew quietly bigger, dreaming peacefully of the days near at hand when they will blissfully garnish someone's hamburger.

Or so I thought. For as I completed another neat row of the lawn, something caught my eye... something long and green and red lurking in the scrub of the verge. As I trundled closer more and more of them became apparent. All watching me as I mowed. 

Beets! They shuffled slowly out of the scrubby grass to stand in neat rows upon my lawn. MY lawn. The Lawn of Destiny. Fuckers. I pulled up in front of them, my eyes glittering with the sunset light.

"What ho, Beets?" I demanded in my best British General's voice. 

A beetroot raised a finger and took a breath... and my dream went pop. Still I found myself in this place bereft of certain thingies. Beetroot grew everywhere, from the slushy tundra to the sweltering tropics of this place. I pooed beetroot, I sweated vomited and pissed beetroot.

Goddammit.

What I wouldn't give for an honest block of Gruyere.

Ranted by Doomboy

A Certain Room

One day, as I quietly resisted the urge to vent messy spleen on my colleagues, realisation sprung full blown upon me about the nature of a certain room.

Its a square room, with plain quarter-circle cornice and dark grey glossy architraves and frames. The walls are off white with a hint of ocher; the floor is diagonally laid black and cream square tiles with a mat-red border of oblong tiles. Light glows softly from indirectly-recessed niches in the ceiling. There is a single window, a bay affair made from cyprus pine and sky blue toughened panes. The blue tinge to the glass makes the grassy sward vista appear impossibly green.

As I took note of the view, I noticed also that there seemed to be a crowd of people forming.... stopping seemingly at random on the sward and standing there stupidly, eyes gazing up towards me as if towards the ledge of a messiah.

Just below the window, set into the flawless cream wall, an oblong hatch was positioned above a tapering cone that appeared to disappear big-end-out through the wall. 

I puzzled over this for a minute or two, examining the strange contraption from several angles. My stomach rumbled alarmingly, and as I straightened up from my examination I noticed that the crowd down on the sward was now huge. 

That was it! That was when the realisation sprung.

Opening the hatch revealed the outside, the sward population all staring up with dumb expressions. Quickly I undid my pants, bent over and stuck my arse out of the hatch. With great relief I let forth a huge brraying jet of farts. 

"Suffer, you bastards!" I yelled, amplifying my voice through the convenient cone. "Suck it down!! Ahahahaa!!!"

Summoning my dignity, I stood straight, did up my pants, closed the hatch and departed the room, my work there done.

Ranted by Doomboy

The Hun And The Mullumbimby Madness

I guess the anecdote that first springs to mind while contemplating the last few months is the tale of The Hun and the Mullumbimby Madness. It's a story that begins well enough, with an ordinary trip to the north in a hired car by a group of friends. 

One friend is uncomfortably from NZ, one from Australia and the remainder are Germans of varying pedigrees. The Bavarians are cool, their banter is amusing and they show a distinctly angelic flexibility of thought. The northern Germans though, are at first quite reserved but unfailingly polite. It seemed to the Aussie that they couldn't quite forget the old conflicts... couldn't quite get it out of their minds, for instance, that when 5000 of them parachuted into Crete in 1941 there were 800 Aussies waiting for them with bayonets fixed and a ridiculously stubborn attitude that would see the Germans have to land another batch of gormless Dortmunder's on the island before they'd shot all the antipodeans that were lurking in the feta sheds waiting to stab someone multiple times.

Or it could have just been the fact that their English was poor. 

Anyhow, with the trundling north, many stories and rude phrases were taught to the Germans. Much beer and wine was consumed. Many camping grounds were slept upon and roused from torpor by oompah-loompah-ish chantings. 

Then one night, around the citronella candle, out came the story of the Plantation Bunyip. A Bunyip, for those who don't know, is a mythical creature that dwells in water holes and is quite fearsome of temperament with the tooth and claw to match.

The story was about a man lost in the bush who stumbles upon a shady billabong and there stops to rest and take stock of himself. As he's quenching his thirst up surges the Bunyip, its reed covered hide and horrible fanged visage gurning unattractively forth upon the cowering man.

"What do you at my billabong, little man?" it growled, for Bunyips are reputedly intelligent and imbued with magical powers, and are fearsomely protective of their waters.

"A drink! A drink for a parched throat only, mighty Bunyip!" cried the man, falling back from the water in dismay. 

As I mentioned, Bunyips being territorial are fierce and particularly protective of their water. The Koori's know that to drink from a Bunyip's billabong is a dangerous desperate business, and should you be forced to, its best to present the creature with a gift. The better to ensure one's survival.

The Bunyip though, was intrigued by this strange man. All dressed in strange colours he was, with pink-pale skin underneath. As the billabong was full to overflowing at this time, it felt it could afford to be generous and disposed kindly to the man.

"You must pay for your drink!" rasped the monster, deciding not to kill and eat the man immediately, as not only was the billabong full, but also his belly was full of an unlucky wallaby that had strayed too close to the reeds to drink.

The man's eyes opened wide at this demand, and hurriedly he searched his multicoloured pockets for a trinket to appease the beast. His frantic patting and searching became desperate as first one pocket and then the next yielded nothing but fluff. Lastly, around his neck on a string of beads, hung a small tin. With trembling hands the man turned open the lid and with visible relief extracted a long fat joint. 

"I have only this to give, fearsome Bunyip!" said the man, tentatively holding out the spliff. 

The Bunyip pincered down two huge claws and gently took the joint from the man's grasp, a curious expression in its black eyes. The man produced a match from the tin and lit the joint, then mimed taking a drag from it. Tentatively, for the Bunyip being a water dweller is wary of fire and smoke, it brought the lit spliff to its black lips and inhaled. So mighty were the creatures lungs that the entire joint disappeared down to the roach in two breaths. 

Then suddenly it gave a mighty heave, and the most horrific barking gargle issued forth from its throat, draining the blood from the man's face with its volume... until he realised that the great beast was laughing uproariously, slapping its belly and giggling and cackling with its eyes all red and crinkled up. Great tears welled up in those eyes at the gales of laughter that issued forth, and long did they issue, the man joining in for a while in sheer relief. 

After its laughter had subsided, the still-baked creature in a moment of clarity, laid a powerful geas on the man to provide for the Bunyip forever more spliffs of the strongest, finest weed available. 

So the man, not quite unwillingly, found himself establishing a huge plantation around the quiet billabong, hidden from others by the magic of the bunyip. Thus Mullumbimby Madness was born, that rarest of weed enhanced and bred for the Bunyip and indeed enriched by the Bunyip's magic.

Legend has it that that very man, sustained beyond his years by the spells of the Bunyip assembly (for all Bunyips found the weed to their liking), can still be found peddling his wares anywhere from Mullumbimby to Nimbin.

The Germans expressed fascination with the story and demanded to know about all sorts of bush mythology. Bunyips figured strongly in their questions, as did the legendary Mullimbimby Madness itself.

Anyhow, the journey progressed, and much fun and sun was had. Eventually they came to the region of the story, and at majority insistence they turned aside to visit the valley and hamlet of Nimbin. 

As those of you who know the town are no doubt aware, the place is a haven of hippie values gone mad. Buds and cookies may be bought with impunity on the streets from totally baked strangers. This was quite a novelty for the Germans, as you may have guessed, and to put it lightly. Vast quantities of weed of varying quality was bought. The alpha Northern German, lets call him Hans, was particularly intrigued by the tale of the Bunyip and in his conversation with a particularly scruffy hippy he learned that local legends put the site of the billabong near a certain local swimming hole.

The next morning, much to everyone's consternation, the friends found that Hans and the car had disappeared. Later, the police found the car abandoned near the local swimming hole, but of Hans there was no sign. The friends waited 2 days for news of the missing troublemaker, and in the end they decided to return to the city as speculations as to Han's horrible end had rather put a damper on things. Weeks passed, and Hans faded from immediate memory. The Germans flew out, off to another destination. The Kiwi went back to his hole by the sea and sat on his arse. The Aussie went back to reality, speculations about the whereabouts of his missing companion circling occasionally in his brain.

Ranted by Doomboy

An Adventure With Friedrich

I woke up this morning, the lingering dream of an adventure with Friedrich and the retinal pattern of his enormous mustache fading slowly from my immediate consciousness. It was a particularly harrowing dream, that one, filled with vicious Quolls, ominous portents and legions of dark-suited accountants on roller-skates. 

Nietzsche and I, you see, were charged by the Kaiser with ridding the alps of alien onions. We spent weeks hiking in the mountains, pulling up the dreaded root-vegetables wherever we found them... burning and stamping and grimacing our way along the snow lines. 

Aha, I hear you think.... but Nietzsche was a mad-man! Yes indeed! And much to my horror (and the Kaiser's chagrin) we discovered that not only was he a madman, but that his mustache was also an alien, a fifth column if you like, controlling the philosopher and leading us completely astray. I only found out because, while resting in the town of Füssen, the composure of the noted thinker dissolved into ground-lying fits of sobbing at the sight of a horse being whipped. 

Recognising something amiss, I shook the whole plan out of the man, or should I say his mustache.... You see they had manifested not as onions as we had been led to believe, but as small long patches amongst the manes of horses. Their fiendish plan was to bray and huff about the place, filling our streets with horse poo and rolling their host's eyes a lot. Unfortunately for them... fortunately for us... I was there to put the Germans onto this plan and so they invented the motor-car to save us from this fate. 

Thus the aliens were thwarted, and instead switched to plan B... which involves eating a lot of grass in paddocks, participating in racing events, rolling about on their backs and demanding feed and a rub-down. When the dream ended we had yet to come up with a counter-offensive.

Ranted by Doomboy

Outsmugged

All in all, I think of myself as a pretty hard guy to out-smug. I'm pretty fucken self satisfied. Well I can appear to be, which is all that matters in this instance. I'd fit right in with the cast of Star Trek, smirking, out-smugging each other with wilder and wilder and stupider and stupider nonsensical theories about fuck-all. Wouldn't you crack the shits if your farken plumber spoke like the crew of the Starship Enterprise?

Plumber: "It's no good! I can't get enough flow to get the fecal-matter package around the liquid/atmosphere hygiene valve! I'm going to have to re-route through the hydro-assimilating phase-state matter/anti matter transporter!"

Me: "You can't get enough pressure to flush the shit around the S-Bend so you're gonna suck it out with that wet and dry vac?"

Plumber: "It's working! We have flow again! Now just a minor adjustment of the liquid pressure regulator limb switch.... gurrrgle splash errrghahhh!"

Me: (pushing plumbers head into toilet bowl and flushing) "Take that, septic boy! Ahahahaaaa!"

What was the point I was trying to make with this nonsense? Oh yes, smugness. Star Trek is all about being smugger than the next guy. So is working in IT. You sit there with a slightly superior smirk on your face and say a few impressive things when a boss is paying you attention and Bob's your Prime Minister - Instant work karma that's good until that boss gets ousted or you make a stupid mistake in front of everyone. Or you're out-smugged. Being out-smugged in front of a boss is bad. It's like negative karma but it lasts longer and affects more things than good work karma.

The relevance of all this talk of smugness? Well, I sat through a battle of the mighty today, smugging away at each other with obscure logic and facts right in front of the CEO.

It was like being in the trenches of the Somme! Trying to keep your head down as you go over the top with your buddies, bullets zinging around and splattering them as they run. The relentless chugging of the machine guns and the horror of the limbs and the trees and the mud and the death and the bad haircuts and the King!

Okay, so maybe not quite like being at the Somme, maybe more like a civil war, with words for muskets and beer-bellies for horses.

Or perhaps not, who can say?

Ranted by Doomboy

The Maw

The landscape was a dire red,
The Newelsie's cart bereft of all but sense,
Down, down into the maw of death,
We had descended... until the very air echoed our progress with mocking caws and fluttery breath,
My gaze was caught and held,
As like a thing foredoomed the cart caught up with Jeff,
And left him head bereft,
Nooo! I yelled,
This place of death and caws had caught all one by one,
'Til like Judas watching Jesus burdened,
I stood alone and witnessed the track of those red murdered.

Ranted by Doomboy