Touching elbows

Every time bloggers talk about touching elbows, this is what I think about (sorry if I've doubled up on any images!):











Taken (with many grateful prostrations) from It's Pickering's Best, (Australia: Pickering Promotions Pty Ltd, 1976).

Something Awful

The three of us came down with a nasty bout of gastro on Monday night. No need for details, just suffice to say that although things have stabilised, we're a tad wobbly today. I've been cruising the internet in quest of distraction, while Best Beloved's choice of distraction is a hot bath with a book (I know, so bad for the book!) and Bumblebee flakes out on the couch with a movie, currently Superman I.

I found a place called somethingawful.com, which seems to be the source of many of the odd things that circulate around the internet. Lots of whiffy things, but I did find their Photoshop Phriday segment, and it is fun, lots of movie photo fun, and sci fi image fun. They mount a picture and encourage people with photoshop to make up their own variations and send them in.

Here's one from a section that played with fad-diets:


And these are from the Dick & Jane section:



They have Lord of the Rings, Superheroes, ads, you name it, they encourage you to tinker with it. Very tempting to join in, but it would be a huge timewaster on my part. Fun to check in on occasionally, though. Much more fun than gazing at the photoshop work in mainstream newspapers and magazines, and far more believable.

(I also found my Pickering 'elbows' cartoon, so I'll put that up later today.)

Feeling the bomb

I thought, since it's that anniversary, that I would share one of my favorite graphic experiences with whoever visits this site. When I was significantly younger than I am today, I discovered Speigelman and Sacco, but my favorite discovery was Keiji Nakazawa. His Barefoot Gen rocked my world.


[Barefoot Gen (UK: Penguin, 1987)]

Barefoot Gen is a Japanese manga about Hiroshima, drawn and written by a man who had lived through it and was determined to make his fellow countrymen think about what had happened.



According to the introduction of my edition, it was first serialised in 1972 in a comic magazine with a circulation of over two million. Apparently it has been made into a full-length animated film, but I haven't managed to catch that yet. The story has, over the last fifteen years or so, been translated into English by a group called Project Gen. I've collected all four of the volumes: Barefoot Gen (above),

Barefoot Gen: The Day After (UK: Panguin, 1988),


Barefoot Gen: Life After the Bomb (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989),

and

Barefoot Gen: Our of the Ashes (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1994)

If you have teenage children, I really recommend these stories. They don't preach or moralise, and they present the facts very clearly. He also goes into the structure of the Japanese family pre- and during the war, and has a hard clear look at the militaristic nature of Japanese society. Gen has a big brother fighting for Japan. He is forced to watch his younger siblings die in the firestorm after the bomb drops, and he witnesses his mother's mental deterioration and death. He then has to look after his infant sister through the whole ordeal. For added political interest, there is a Korean neighbour, who allows Nakazawa to explore the troubled Japan-Korean relationship.

This must have been terribly confronting stuff to post-war readers; Nakazawa wrote it because he was distressed to find that twenty years after the war most students knew nothing about the atomic bombs and many teachers were also too young to know anything. Drawing these images must have been like pulling out his fingernails, or picking at scabs. But he did it, and the books have made a huge impact.

I pick them up every few years to read; they stayed burned in my brain in between times. Together with John Hershey's Hiroshima essay, these are mandatory reading for anyone who wants to know what it was like to be in or around Hiroshima when the bomb dropped.

PS After I wrote this, we turned on the radio to find Radio National's The Night Air was featuring Underground Comics and Manga. It was great. Funnily, the website doesn't mention it at all, concentrating on last week and next week's show. If you can catch the repeat of the comic show, it's aurally over-stimulating, but inbetween all the effects are some good comments on comics by those creating them, including some Australian artists.

Travel Warning Upgrade

Today, for some obscure reason I won't go into now because I'm fairly inebriated and I could end up digressing majorly, Bumblebee and I were discussing job prospects. Being an 8=year-old, he wants to be something that involves telling the rest of the world what to do, preferably with a weapon or two. I.e., soldier or policeman. I refrained from mentioning that he could just be the head of a multinational corporation. I did, however, being the mother of an 8-year-old boy who promises to be a gorgeous man, mention that both jobs involved a large element of danger. He asked what sort of jobs were safe. I replied that Best Beloved's job, while not something I would recommend to Bumblebee as a career, was perfectly safe (Public Servant).

'But what about the tourists?' says Bumblebee, 'What if the tourists get into his work?'

'Tourists?'

'You know, the ones with bombs and machine guns... what if they break into his work and blow up everyone?'

I had this vision of a bus pulling up in front of the Department of Hem Hem and a mob of hawaiian-shirt-wearing dudes flocking in to blind everyone with their camera flashes...

Bumblebee is right. Tourists are a danger in this world. We should be alert, and alarmed. Everywhere.

Daily aversion therapy

I didn't know goodtimes was one word... all that design effort and there's still a typo, originally uploaded by Ampersand Duck.

For years now I've made phone calls from my home, said goodbye to the person concerned, and walked away humming something to myself. Halfway down the hall from the phone, I'll stop and think 'what the frick am I humming?'. It'll usually be something I haven't heard in years, something really annoying that won't get out of my head.

I couldn't work out why this happened EVERY time I got on the phone. Was my memory jogged by what had just passed on the phone? But it happened even if the other line didn't pick up!

The I gave my phone a good listen and finally understood. On my phone line is a faint echo of music, as if someone's put me on permanent hold. But it's not just muzak; it's Hits and Memories music. I'm tapped into Canberra's only radio station that plays music from the 50s, 60s and 70s. ARGHHH! Let me demonstrate. I'm going to pick up the phone right now. [does so] It's playing that song which goes something tells me I'm into something good.... If I turn on the radio and tune it in, yep, it's playing.

DOUBLE ARGHH!

I found out at For Battle! today that these annoying songs can be called 'earworms'. So now I know what's wrong with my phone. It's infested with earworms. And it's a bit hard to sing 'Only For Sheep' (suggested failsafe cure) while you wait for someone to pick up their phone because you sound like a complete berk (or you've forgotten why you've rung them and sound like you've finally got that demensia that has been on-setting for years).

Mind you, once I do get off the phone, 'Only for Sheep' by The Bureau works fine. So does the start of Vince Jones's 'On the Brink of It', which is what I was experimenting with before today. Anything to switch brain channels.

The thing that worries me the most is that my brain is being secretly stashed with all these crap songs, and who knows what will emerge in moments of stress a la 'Touching The Void'. I don't plan on getting stranded on a mountain in the near or distant future, but anything can happen, and if it does, which particular horror from this station will come whizzing back ad nauseum?

Do you think I've got grounds for a mental torture case against the radio station?

Speculative queer-y

Riding home today I started thinking about a speculative fiction short story I read years and years ago and I've never seen since. I would dearly love to read the story again, and so I'm hoping that if I mention it someone might be able to tell me if they know it. So, here is as much as I know:

-- I can't remember if I read it in an anthology of short stories or the original volume, or if I was reading it from the actual book or from photocopied pages. I did a huge essay during my Masters in English on women's speculative fiction, so I'm assuming (although I could be wrong) that it was written by a woman.

-- My course was between 1990 and 1993, so I'm guessing it was written in the 80s or earlier.

-- It is all about rich people in the future pushing cosmetic surgery to the point of perfection and then finding that really boring, so then a trend started of finding really ugly people and transplanting the rich person's personality into the ugly body. They would change appearances every 'season' and try to outdo each other's ugliness. There's a lot more to it than that, as usual, but that's the part that really sticks in my head.

Does that jog any memories? Also very happy for suggestions on dystopian fiction to read, published in the last ten years or so, preferably human/soft/personality-based, not hard-techno.

Remember to breathe

from www.thesunmachine.net, originally uploaded by Ampersand Duck.

Too cute? Probably.

Can you tell I'm bored at work?