Ask and ye shall eventually receive

OK, so there's been a lot of big talk about some kind of decent blog, I'll admit. And calls that go along the lines of 'you suck!' are in fact starting to mount, although you'd think people would have something better to do with their time then come here and see what I've failed to come up with...I don't know, youth of today...anyway, time to at least actually start writing something of a decent length, I suppose. Unfortunately, at this stage of proceedings, I'm not sure I can live up to the hype and expectation created by my constant stalling. To be sure (to be sure, begorrah), there may be a few tales worth telling from the last couple of months that have yet to find their way onto this site, but most people have heard them in some way or another, or they are no longer immediate enough in my mind to recall in the appropriately splendiferous detail. So I'm afraid you'll have to suffer through the ignominy of the following inadequately detailed summary, certain sticky-out-in-my-mind-points of which I may elaborate on:

1) I went on a couple of bus trips, the first being organised by Dramasoc, the second by the Political Science department. To the former I actually have an official membership, having paid my 5 dollars at the start of the year (although I can't be called a card-carrying member, having never received on of the membership cards they seem to talk about issuing every year), but as far as the latter is concerned, I seem to have been adopted as some kind of official mascot, having hung around long enough within the confines of the Political Science department during postgraduate study that people who didn't know better seemed to assume I actually belonged there, despite the fact I have not taken a political science course, ever. And why not? It was where the actual writing of my thesis largely took place, after all. In fact, it seems pretty clear to me that the merging of the schools of Pol Sci and Communications was merely an attempt by the establishment to finally acknowledge the harsh reality of the Ben Classification Problem, and save on embarrassment all round through a belated attempt at official legitimisation of my status. So that was nice of it.

Anyway, the Dramasoc bus trip was marked by a few points of interest, but perhaps the most significant was 'Yellowbelly', the worst RTD known to man, and indeed, probably to sentient life throughout the multiverses. The fact that Dramasoc, a society always on the lookout to save itself money (Question: "This play needs candles / a hat / a broom / a grand piano / as props. Can we go buy or perhaps rent some?" Answer: "No, you must paint toliet rolls white and set fire to the tops of them / wear pants on your head / mime the action of sweeping / convert this bright red mock fire engine prop we have from the last play into a piano") actually provided a bottle of this stuff free to everyone with a bus ticket purchase should perhaps have been a giveaway; another giveaway might have been the label, the design of which seemed to scream 'made in Equitorial Guinea for 17 cents a litre', and on closer inspection revealed that Yellowbelly was a 'lemon-flavoured malt liquor'. Ignoring even these misgivings, one might have even been somewhat warned by the liquid within the bottle itself, which looked greatly like it had somehow escaped its properly appointed task in life, which of course was to sit in a test tube on a shelf, awaiting the attentions of a urologist. Indeed, some might point out that all of these signs screamed, in some kind of reverse of the bottle in Alice in Wonderland, 'DON'T drink me! For the love of GOD, DON'T DRINK ME!' And a few sensible souls on the bus took these warnings to heart, their Yellowbellies remaining unopened.

Not me, however.

Like some kind of alcoholic Pandora, my doubts were overcome by:

A) Curiosity
B) The desire to start getting drunk
C) The by-now-legendary good; bad; free principle

...and so I opened my Yellowbelly for sampling. Fool. This was no good; bad; free. This was a case of the much, much more dangerous good; bad free. Wow folks, this was a bad tasting drink. This was at the level of the Gangrenous Wound shooter (chartreuse, tabasco sauce, purple death, for those that missed out on that particular horror, or have since successfully repressed the memory of it), but packaged en masse for sale. To humans. As a beverage. Actually I think Ralph Wiggum sums it up most succinctly. Somewhat rampant in the afterburn, one might say. Anyway, I, who I suppose pride myself (or if I don't actually pride myself, I have at least come to happy terms with the reputation I have been saddled with by my friends) at being able to drink most things struggled to get through half of it. Then, like many on the bus, I found myself with the problem of having an open, impossible to reseal bottle of stuff I really didn't want to look at, let alone drink, and was having (with apologies to Samuel Coleridge) unpromising visions of the stuff hanging around my neck like some albatross for the rest of the night . Luckily, I have the best girlfriend in the world. How can we tell? Because she drank the rest of it. You can keep your wussy Bess the landlord's daughter malarkey - Karen actually drank this stuff for me. Oh yes, feel the love.

Anyway, this initial obstacle was overcome, in a surprise move, the bus went to some bars (commercial enterprise idea: 'Mystery Bus Trips' in which a bus takes you out to a field somewhere in the dark, gets everyone out, and then burns off, leaving everyone there to solve the mysteries of where the hell they are, and how to get back) and we succeeded in getting pretty nicely toasted, one and all. Huzzah! Incidentally, there is a bar in Lincoln Rd that has a Confederate flag painted on the wall, and is probably best avoided. Sadly, we only seemed to work this out in sort of unspoken hive-mind fashion when it was 5 minutes until 'back on the bus' time. As everyone sort of spontaneously decided that that particular bar sucked, and started to drift down the road back towards the bus, we saw another bar across the road, went into it, and found a live band playing Van Morrison, and a clientele who on the whole were less likely to drop the phrase 'squeal like a pig, boy' into everyday conversation. This was good. For 5 minutes. A shame, but it ended up being quite comical, as about 20 of us suddenly rumbled into the bar, danced madly for the length of one song, and immediately all ran away again, as the singer told us sarcastically "have a good night guys, but maybe buy some beer next time". Hmmm, yes. Sorry about that, chief.

We visited our last bar in Sumner, just after we stowed Jeff Clark safely in the overhead compartment. Karen and I went in search of the ocean and nearly missed the bus, but we did grab a 3 metre long toi-toi stalk on the way back, and ferried it into town to leave it propped against a wall in Bedford Row, so that immature inebriates might interpret its incongruity, incredulous.

The Pol Sci bus trip seemed slightly better organised, and a mighty crew was assembled. An Andrew and a passing James (M) were press-ganged, and this time unencumbered by the horrors of lemon-flavoured malt liquor, we once again set out to journey to...bars (what a cliche). After buying beer at the first pub / bottle store and being forced to cache it in the bushes because the locked bus meant we couldn't put it anywhere in the meantime, the undoubted highlight of this particular trip for me was the second stop, O'Malley's on Byron Street, because of course it was sort of the local pub for work when we were at Armourguard, and I love to recall the many happy days I spent toiling there...oh wait, NO. O'Malley's was the Armourguard local, but that wasn't why it was fun. It wasn't the cheap drinks either, because I never made it as far as the bar. It was in fact the touch screen 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' pub quiz / prize version just inside the door, in front of which I spent the entire allotted time in the bar, surrounded at various times by a simply ridiculous number of postgraduate degrees, with broad knowledge across many subjects, somehow failing (alcohol may well have had something to do with it, along with a tendency for almost everyone playing at some point to say 'well it's definitely not that one', point to the wrong answer, and accidentally press it - damn) to win the $80 top prize. Nonetheless, as a syndicate we probably came out about even, and many agreed at least in principle that we should return to the machine with the same number of clever brains in hand (so to speak) while sober some time, and take it for all it was worth.

The bus trip then progressed to other bars, who were good enough to sell us some of their stock. Jolly decent of them. And that was a good night.

2) I was in a play in 3some, which was generally good fun. However, I found the experience slightly less satisfying than the previous two 3somes that I was in - I wouldn't really make any comparative comments about the overall quality of the show in total between the years, or even say that the play I was in was worse or less funny than the plays I was in in the previous two years, but I found my own character less fun (probably because there was less scope in the part for show-off adlibbing), and felt that we suffered for being seriously under-rehearsed before the performance. We were of course seriously under-rehearsed last year as well - the whole thing about 3some of course is that it is thrown together on no-budget in about 3 seconds flat, with those 3 seconds generally being the ones that immediately proceed the doors being opened to a paying audience - but somehow our play last year seemed to gel better than it did this year, and unfortunately our best performance was (somehow) on opening night, when we seemed to have a more appreciative audience. Somehow Andrew's play (sorry, musical) was one that seemed to suffer a bit more from the last-minute / no organisation / budget nature of the show in general - many of the visual gags, and general audience enthusiasm, might have been better with a bit (or lot) more polish I think. It's strange being in a play, doing bits of it at a time, and thus not seeing it as a whole until other people do - it hadn't occurred to me that the end of ours would seem to drag on, or in fact that people just might plain not understand what was going on during it - until I heard people who had seen it on opening night say these things, and quite validly too. I suppose they don't have the script notes. A weird thing in rehearsing comedies is that you do the same parts over and over again in practice, and they stop becoming funny, and then you get surprised when the audience laughs uproariously at what seems to the cast to be one of the lamer jokes. The reverse is also true - the parts that seem funny when you are rehearsing, because there is a bit of room for variation and larking about each time you do them, can fall totally flat with the audience. In the play last year, I had a line towards the end of the play which I thought was pretty uninspired and unfunny, so I tried changing it during a rehearsal, and found that the director and cast thought the new idea was really funny - so much so that everyone cracked up every time we rehearsed that bit, and we decided to leave it in. Yet that particular line barely raised a snicker from the audience in 3 shows. It shouldn't be a surprise I suppose when cast in-jokes (pretty much most of the fun part of doing shows comes from cast in-jokes, or from group dynamics getting all dynamical up on it, anyway) fail to make the transition to the stage, yet it is anyway. It feels a bit like 'wha...oh', or maybe 'laugh damn you you fools, that's funny!'. Anyway, there was more of that feeling this year for me, but I still enjoyed myself, and I think people generally had a chuckle at us at least.

Of course, performance issues are all moot, as everyone knows that people only get into university shows for the after-parties, anyway. Some people think they can cunningly just turn up to the parties, bypassing the whole show part. There is merit in this idea, but you must be very careful - Nic for example tried it for a while, and has ended up being sucked into committing himself to the actual shows part in reverse, through some kind of theatrical retro-engineering. You can tell he's firmly ensconced in the vortex now, because having successfully convinced him he's a stage manager, people are now after him to actually be on the stage, singing and everything...you've got to watch these theatre types, when they've got their claws in you. Anyway, the 3some after party was fun enough, but the night was more distinguished for Dave being drunk at a level that has not been witnessed by many before or since. Oh yes, nissed as a pewt was young Dave. He has already mentioned this in his own blog of course, along with instructions that we should never speak of that night again. It is only as a matter of public interest then, that I provide these samples of dialogue:

"We were at the bar. There were girls there - girls! I coulda scored them. No, truly!"

(To Josh) "You're pretty" (repeated many times)

Dave: (Coming up to me with a can of KGB in his hand) "Ben, Ben! Heeeeey, hey - this isn't beer. Whatizhit?

Me: "KGB, Dave."

Dave: "KGB!? What? That ishn't beer. Heeeey. HeyheyheyBen - I'm drinking KGB!!! (snigger)"

Me: "Well done, Dave."

Dave: (raucous Dave chuckling) "Awwwwwwwwesome!!!"

Actually, for a while there, absolutely everything that came out of Dave's mouth had me, Tim, Karen and Josh almost paralysed with laughter. Oh for a dictaphone, or a video camera. Never mind. We were witnesses, and that was enough. Tim and Dave's party crashing was brief, and they toddled off, probably so Dave could chat up somebody else's sibling (possibly his own. He was very drunk, and does after all come from Milton...no, I'm joking), and Karen, Josh and I continued an assault on the keg of icebreaker until around 2:30am, doing the prerequisite Dramasoc party things, like seeing how many people we could fit in the shower (12), and so on. And that was a good night.

3) I voluntarily took myself off the dole, er, sorry, the Unemployment Benefit. This has been both good and bad. Bad, in that I no longer have any money. As yet, this isn't a super major drag, as with careful sponging (e.g, returning to my Wellington ways and drinking only of a select brand of alcohol, which I like to call 'Other People's Beer'), the odd bit of scabbing money off Mum, and some sheepish acceptance of offers from Karen, I have been able to keep myself in Coke. However, with the scabbing and sponging, guilt is mounting, and as for the sheepishness - well, the sideburns are getting wooly, and although this happens anyway, grass is also starting to look tasty. Time to get a job, really. I'm somewhat hindered though by the fact that no-one will give me one. Word has gone out on the street, it seems. In fact, apart from the fact that my actual applications are getting shot down, even my polite inquiries that go along the lines of 'Hi, how are you, I think your thing / place is great, someday maybe in the unspecified future when I grow up, or Gepetto makes me a real boy, I'd like to maybe come and lie outside your thing / place and take up an entry level position as a doormat, if you'll have me, or if I'm worthy that is...goshdarnit, anything to be a part of the wonderment that is your thing / place...' are going unanswered. This is irritating, and adds further weight to the 'Jobs Are Pants' theory - even the process of trying to get one is pants. How can a situation be pants before it even develops?! But I shall nevertheless continue in my attempts, and probably get increasingly serious and desperate about them exponentially in response to the guilt, and the rising level of desire I have to bleat at things.

The good thing is, and it really is rather good, is no longer having to deal with WINZ. WINZ does seem to be somewhat lottery-like in its dealings with people - they leave you alone almost forever it seems sometimes, and then other times you luck out, and they hound you in such a fashion that the only conclusion you can draw is that they are of the Baskervilles. My own partcular misfortune was to run into Judy of Worktrack. Ah, Judy of Worktrack. In previous entries I may have made her sound like some kind of beneficiary-hating dragon-lady, but that's a bit harsh, and not true, while at the same sort of accurate...it's difficult to explain really. She is quite the hard-arse while remaining actually quite nice about things (and is thus probably the absolute model WINZ employee). It's a strange combination of positive reinforcement and politely expressed threats she wields, often within 5 seconds of each other: "You're such a nice young man Ben, with such fantastic achievements - why don't you have a job? I'd hate to have to suspend your benefit. Don't think I won't do it!" It really was very unsettling. If you think back to the scene in Fellowship of the Ring where nice Galadriel goes all bonkers when offered the ring, and shows how she would be all powerful and all beautiful and all would love her and despair - well talking to Judy of Worktrack it was kind of like dealing with that scenario the entire time, only with cheeriness and goverment issue stock encouragement phrases in place of ethereal beauty. Each sentence was a guessing game, sitting there thinking: is it the carrot? It sounds like the carrot, look, she's smiling, it's the carrot, relax. Wait, it's - oh, no, that's not a carrot, it's a short orange STICK, this is actually THE STICK, she's got THE STICK and SHE'S HITTING ME WITH IT, AHHHHHH!' etc. I was truly a perplexed little donkey. Just thinking about having to talk to her stressed me out. So now I don't have to, and that's nice.

4) I went to the Dramasoc Ball at Zydeco, a small upstairs bar opposite the Casino. The theme for this was 'Hot N' Spicy' which initially I thought was pretty damned stupid, certainly as far as costumes for guys went (girls could just put their flash dresses on and go as 'hot', which most did). But as it turned out, people employed some interesting lateral thinking in costuming themselves as such things as gingerbread men, or Austin Powers (huh? Ehh, whatever). I ended up shaving off most of my beard, leaving a handlebar moustache that went down to my chin. Such a moustache of course is appropriate only for two specific and culturally eclectic sets of people:

1) Cliched Western Mexicans
2) Cliched Village People style gay bikers of the 70s

While it could certainly be argued that those individuals from category 2 are "hot n' spicy" in their own way, it wasn't the look I was going for, so I also donned a sombrero and a poncho so there wouldn't be any confusion, unless of course people read some sort of Venn diagram subset into things, and took me for a Mexican gay biker. I'm not sure what that would look like exactly. It might possibly involve some kind of poncho made out black leather. Anyway, I think people got it. We ate dinner downstairs before the ball at the Zydeco resturant, which specialises in Cajun food, and it certainly tasted very good, at least during the first opportunity I had to taste it, anyway. Then upstairs to the ball itself, which was less of a ball than it was a 'standing around in costume talking to people and drinking cheap drinks' kind of event. A couple of us took the time to drunkenly harangue people approaching the casino with warnings about how the casino just wanted their money, by yelling at them across the street - and fair enough too I think, since we also asked people emerging from the building how they had done, and every single person who responded (a lot did - most seemed pretty amused to have a drunken Mexican yelling at them from a first floor balcony) indicated that they had lost money. Apparently the casino didn't think much of us preaching the drunken truth anyway, because after about 20-30 minutes of it, during which time security guards came out and looked at us and talked into radios, they rang up Zydeco and asked them to stop us. I'm not sure what method of persuasion they used - Zydeco gets a few runoff customers from the casino I guess, and probably wanted to keep them happy seems most likely, but at the time I was thinking: "Don't bow down to those Vegas hoods, man! Jeez, just because they'll send heavies over here with iron bars to smash our kneecaps doesn't mean we should give into them!" It didn't really matter though, because by the time the bar staff got around to telling us to stop, we had grown bored and stopped 5 minutes ago anyway. So they only succeeded in making me feel drunkenly indignant. The bastards.

Anyway, drinking continued. Someone had had the cunning idea of having the Dramasoc AGM at the ball when lots of members were there for a quorum. This was pretty funny, in the way that it was neat summation of student politics, I feel - 40 drunken people probably thinking really carefully about their votes - hands up who thinks this? Hurray, me! (What are we voting for again?) It would have been a lot more dodgy if anyone other than the incumbents in the various officer positions had actually wanted to run, but the people who are there have all done a good job, and were all keen to keep going, so as such needed only official (if slightly dodgy) confirmation. Brother Dan recognised the perfunctory nature of proceedings, and nominated a large inanimate stuffed chilli pepper prop as Alice's token opponent for President, but it received few votes.

Anyway, drinking continued. The valour of the people of Holland gripped me, and thus emboldened, I ate a couple of chilli peppers, one of which was seriously hot. Possibly this was my undoing, for while consuming steadily, I wasn't going totally mad about it, and would have thought I'd be OK, which lately normally means I am - but something obviously went astray, because when we got home and I drank 3 glasses of water to prevent a headache in the morning, said 3 glasses of anti-hangover water immediately backfired spectacularly, and I found that Cajun food is a lot better going down than it is coming up. All those spices remain spicy despite having spent time in your stomach, but are of course spicy in a (new and horrible) vomity way. The ongoing hangover was protracted and unpleasant and the worst, as has been said before, in some time. But you get this. And that was a good night, and a bad immediately following morning.

Right, so those are a few notable events of late. Otherwise there has been a lot of failing to send e-mail to people and applying unsuccessfully for jobs. Cricket has also recently had a season start, have me play it some, and find it super great once again (just how I left it). Truly it is a fantastic feeling to stand in an appropriately god-like pose and watch, imperious, just after hearing the fantastic sound of your bat connecting sweetly with the ball, as said ball sails some 20 metres over deep long off's head to land a couple of metres short of the long off boundary, there to roll onwards for miles. And as you watch and nearby fielders complement you on your great shot, your brain says: "What was it, exactly, that I just did to make that happen? I reacted subconsciously and now the ball's 70 metres over that way. How did I do that? Who cares! How sweet was that, quick, look smug while you can!". Also slip catches are good. And cricketing banter. And winning by 9 wickets. Even the fricking freezing easterly wind is pretty good, when there's cricket in it. Not so good are early morning starts on a Saturday and the 'will we or won't we' nature of rain delays, but everything has its price.

Also I have watched a lot of the features etc. on the new Star Wars DVDS, which of course I ran out and bought. Some changes that were made are good, others are not, but the set is definitely worth having, especially for a real fan such as myself. Thankfully, The Empire Strikes Back is the least changed movie, and I would say all the changes accept arguably one (replacing Boba Fett's original voice with Temuera Morrison is of course totally unnecessary, but not particularly annoying or outrageous so far as I'm concerned, as he does a reasonable job) actually blend in well and, dare I suggest, maybe even enhance the movie, so you can still watch the best Star Wars film without being inetermittently annoyed by a glaringly jarring addition. I can certainly accept or at least forgive all the changes in it. I was always a bit of a sucker for Return of the Jedi, but the new (1997) musical number in Jabba's palace is sooooo out of place, and Hayden Christiansen beaming in Star Trek style at the end is pretty stupid. Grrr. As for Star Wars, while the new battle footage is nice, "new and improved" 'Greedo shoots first' still just makes me yell things at the screen. So 2 of the 3 movies are marred to some extent. But still, if you haven't seen it yet, then this giant review sums it up pretty accurately for me I think with its extensively considered verdict (especially on the Greedo issue) - the changes are irritating but all things considered, a fairly minor quibble. Nice to see a little bit more of the anti-anti-Star Wars backlash from respected geeks around the web these days too.

And now, having plied it with good times and fine wines all evening, I think it's time to make my move and take my hacking cough to bed. Back with more soon...ha! Actually, there's other stuff I'm writing (or, ahem, planning to write) at the moment, so that might show up here too, or some of it at least. And I will endeavour to blog more regularly...note I said 'I will endeavour', not 'I promise'.

OK then.