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a Pig-Tel Refugee Solution

Story and Photograph by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Well he died, my cat, just the other day. I heard about it from my student who heard about it from the woman who lives nearby.

My cat was supposed to be living with my student but he ran away on about the second day and wasn’t seen for quite some time after that. Finally he surfaced and it turned out that he was living at the house of a woman who had several cats.

My student took him home for the winter when it was very cold and then he took off again when it got warmer. He says that the woman told him some stories and he will send them to me soon.

I was running a school there, in my house, maybe you all remember that. I had decided I would make the educational program, the curriculum that I believed in. I used to go out and take my dogs for a walk, and some of the cats would come too.

We met these boys with their grandmother, they were about 12, twins, and they were walking with the dog. They were funny kids, they asked if they could visit with their friend and that was also nice. One day those three kids stole a heap of money from me; a heap, and I had been saving up for a wood stove.

When I realized I thought a lot about what to do, and then I went to the Police Box to talk about it with the local policeman. He said it had nothing to do with him, I argued a lot about that, and then I went to the City Hall and argued a lot with them too. I thought it had a lot to do with them, I thought they should really take some interest. We argued a lot, me and the Police, and me and the City Hall, but we generally didn’t get mean.

I thought they were kind of funny even when they didn’t respond like the Police and the City Hall people always responded on the Television. But they didn’t take an interest and anyway one of those kids came round and kind of confessed.

They were such funny kids, even when I had them lined up in a row and was interrogating them in the most severe way possible I couldn’t help but think how funny they were. Really really sweet, and then at the same time total ratbags. We thought you must be rich, they said.

Anyway they had already spent the money trying to make friends, there wasn’t a lot I could do. Eventually I had a visit from the grandmother, she wanted to know if I’d noticed anything stolen from my house. So I told her about the wood stove money. She was a really nice woman. She was going once a month to study about a kind of pastoral education, in Tokyo. She gave me the money back and enrolled the kids in my school.

I asked my student to teach them, because I thought he was a good teacher for them. He told her: it might take a while for their grades to improve, because I’m trying to help them in more things. And I would listen to him teaching the kids, because I usually didn’t have students at that time, and was usually painting a picture or something, and it sounded good. But after a couple of months she came round and took them out of the school. She decided to put them in cram school so their grades would improve.

That was about the time I left.

Simulated picture of Foodge’s recent problem – Man Boobs

Story by Big M

It had somehow fallen on Foodge to take Granny to the doctor. When he thought about it, Merv was busy with the pub, Merv’s missus (Foodge never remembered Janet’s name) was busy with the twins, young Wes was busy studying, and working at the Sisters of the Emphaticocordiae Nursing Home, Manne was…oh shit, he thought, Manne was still staked out in front of the Edelweiss Double Billing Clinic. Anyway, they had been to the local doctor, who must have just been told a really funny joke, because he kept laughing and shaking his head, and then directed them to see a Professor of Gynaecology at Sidney Uni.

Granny went in to see the Professor. She was initially a bit cranky, as he had examined her, and then asked her for her real name and age, which she begrudgingly gave, then sat down and perused some pathology results.

“Do you take any medicines?’

“No.” Granny replied.

“Any herbs or vitamins?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” The Prof cocked a bushy eyebrow in a very John Howard sort of way.

“I take a sort of herb.”

“What, a green herb that one doesn’t get from the chemist?”

“Yes, but I have to, I’m under so much stress.” Granny suddenly gushed. “There’s these dreadful friends of Merv’s who make up the most horrible stories about me ‘n’ Mr Foodge, an’ Rouge an’ O’Hoo?” Granny was on the edge of her seat.

“Who are these fellows?”

“There’s a mate of Merv’s called Emmjay, but the worst is some hanger onner named Big M, full of talk, and gulpin’ down free drinks.”

“Clearly that sort of herb may be of some benefit, but I suggest that you and this Merv fellow need to distance yourselves from these characters. Any other non prescribed medicines?”

“Well, I did buy a performance enhancer from a bloke in the Gents, you know, for me weight trainin’ an’ so on.”

“Did you happen to bring any of these performance enhancers?”

“Of course.” Granny handed over a small brown bottle.

The Prof scanned the label, and then laughed. “Granny, these are a type of anabolic steroid. Anabolic, in that, they will enhance one’s feminine attributes. These are pure oestrogen!”

“What, like pregnant lady, menstrual cycle type oestrogens?”

“Certainly!”

“Oh, poor Mr Foodge.” All of the colour had drained from Granny’s face.

“Don’t tell me you gave them to a man?”

Granny could only nod and point to the waiting room. The professor went out in search of this Mr Foodge. All he could find was a plump fellow of indeterminate age, wearing a dark grey suit, Fedora pushed back on his head, asleep with a copy of Raymond Chandler’s, ‘The Big Sleep’ on his lap. Foodge seemed to rouse, as if he knew he was wanted. “I’m a shamus…I’ll try to be taller…the flesh of orchids are like the flesh of men…” Foodge mumbled.

“Mr Foodge, could you come into the office, please?” The Professor held out a hand to guide out hapless detective through the doorway.

“Now, Mr Foodge, it seems that…” Granny interrupted the Prof.

“Let me tell him. I’m sorry Foodge, I was trying to build you up…give you a little pep…. Oh, God, I knew they were steroids. “She sobbed into a hanky.

The Prof took over.” Mr Foodge, have you had any feminine type symptoms…gynaecomastia?

“I think that’s for me and my solicitor!” Foodge was covering his confusion with fake opprobrium.

“Any galactorrhoea?”

“Now we’ll have to involve my barrister!”

“Mr Foodge, we won’t need to involve the legal profession, it seems that you have been exposed to high doses of female hormones for some time. I guess it explains the strange adiposity.” As he nodded towards Foodge’s  recently expanded derrier.

“Alright…. the treatment is the same for both of you. I was going to prescribe a powerful oestrogen antagonist, but I think a placebo may be better.”

“A powerful placebo?” Enquired Foodge.

“Yes, quite powerful.” Acknowledged the Prof.

May 16, 2013

Tags: 3D, 4G, Dutchman, Lentils, Parsimonia, Yorkshire Posted in Gerard Oosterman |

Playlist by Algernon

I’ve taken a little diversion this week. This list is based on The Band’s The Last Waltz concert with a few side trips then a return to the main theme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjCw3-YTffo

The weight – The Band

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF2tTft3MPc

The night they drove old dixie down – The Band

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOAT0AocD1c

The Last Waltz (evangilne) – The Band with Emmylou Harris

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8VUolqWr8U

Helpless – Neil young, Patti Smith and others

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KxiEjPCXA8

Like a Hurricane –Neil Young and Crazy horse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_ENjos_PpE

Groovie movie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RE7WD6hiqE

Good Hearted Woman – Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, Everly Brothers, Willy nelson, Chet Atkins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOi45FFfjG0

Up on Cripple Creek – The Band

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z95jsjKn5BU

Baby Let me follow you down  -The Band and Bob Dylan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUKUMmM89IQ

Forever Young – Bob Dylan and The Band

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WDmMWF83x4

The Band with Eric Clapton & Robbie Robertson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHZgTTaxd6c

Caravan – Van Morrison with The Band

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5GMHzPeEyA

Tupelo Honey – Van Morrison

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYPVyJwzerM

Who do you love – Ronnie Hawkins and The Band

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js1hjL8evmM

I shall be released – The Band, Ringo Starr, Ron Wood, et al

Story and photographs by Emmjay

Just above the hot plate the lid and handles of the kettle start doing their impression of a samurai warriors’ headdress.  The smoke from the fire changes its mind and swings away to the East.  The wood is damp and rotten, but it dries easily and burns peat-like.

Tiny insects rush about as their world goes up in smoke.

Big Lars’ Point. Forty minutes’ walk along the edge of the mangroves to the clearing not far from the base of the waterfall.  The sound of a lazy trickle running off the cliff out the back.  Idle birdsong.  The bush is busy relaxing, but it takes a careful eye to see this business.  The possums are elusive this trip.  And the kookaburras are reluctant to take their free lunch from the bird feeder.  The whip birds and the lyre birds discuss with each other the agenda for the day.

The leech is an elastic band with a yellow racing stripe, silently hooping its way across the wet grass, over the battered ding boot and up the inside of the leg of a pair of Levis stiffened by sweat, dirt and grease.  It takes several sweeps of consciousness to feel the damp trickle and to roll the fabric up until he’s spotted.  Barely started his day job.

I flick the leech off.  This is not the correct way.  He hands me the salt.  I stomp the leech into the soft earth.  That won’t kill him!  And he’ll just come back for another go.  But the leech is deep within a heel mark and under a blanket of opprobrium.  Surely it’s curtains for him.

He knows the bush.  This is his patch and he’s usually right.  I cast the occasional glance towards the leech hole,  sure enough.  There it is, looping the loop up a grass stalk to take a sniff around.  I salt the leech.  He goes into a dance of exquisite torture.  Shrinks to a thin strip of leather and lies motionless.

The kettle starts to raise some steam.  Takes its time and offers up the chance to slow down and appreciate the peace and savour the tea when it arrives.  I uncross and recross my legs and toast the left leg a little, watching the steam rise from my boots.

FM, McCubbin Style

Big Lars’ Point has a curious effect on time.  Sleep comes easily.  There is no hurry.  Breakfast starts with a sweet coffee.  Play with the fire.  Eggs and bacon, grilled tomato and mushies on rough bread toast.  Another coffee, maybe time to play with the brush cutter and thrash a few metres of path through the palm grove.

Just time for lunch.  Half past one and the sun moves behind the cliff top.  Cool and damp setting in.  It’s three o’clock and time for a dram and to stoke the fire again.  A few beers and it’s time to think about dinner.

Barbecue, dancing in the firelight and ducking and weaving with the torch.

Big Lars’ Point has no electricity.  The water is drawn from the creek for washing and heated in the kettles.  We carry in drinking water because nobody trusts the creek any more beyond washing and watering the plants.  The shower is an army khaki canvas bag hanging from a pulley off the veranda.  Cold.  But the kettles on the fire warm the shower water up.  Candles.  Kerosene heater.  How blue is the kero ? Gas and batteries.  Heat and light when the fire has its night.

The house has trod the fine line between growth and decay for almost thirty years.  It’s hard to know which is winning.  There is no road in and it’s a long way up the river and a long walk from the jetty along the edge of the mangroves and through the rain forest to the house.

Thirty or forty years ago, Big Lars tried to land an old ford truck near the point – to carry building material and fire wood, but the truck slipped off the barge and sank up to its doors in the black mud.  The mangroves and salt water have been eating the old truck slowly but they are almost done now.

At the edge of the clearing slumbers the other failed attempt at automotive transport.  The powder blue Holden station wagon landed successfully.  She only ran once or so the story goes.  In the night, the rats ate her radiator hoses, and when Big Lars returned next trip with replacements, they had stripped her wiring.

It’s said that that was the last straw.  Big Lars gave up and sold his spread to a Kiwi carpenter who completed most of the house and when his bride fell pregnant and (wisely, I reckon) refused to try to give birth and raise a bairn there, they sold it to the old bloke who owns it now.

Big Lars was a Swede. A giant habitué of the river. A surveyor, it was said, who saved a few of the better plots for himself.

This is his silence.  The bird calls and the crash of the dead branches are his.  The black mangrove mud is Big Lars’ and also the shallowness of draft of any boat wanting to land her passengers on the point.

It’s a struggle, etched in raw timber, grime, spider webs and candle wax, fought over thirty years.  And as the sinewy old bloke feels the cold and damp in his bones, he wonders how long he can keep the clearing wide enough to give him a decent margin before the snakes and ticks and leeches territory begins.

The forest would claim the clearing, given half a chance and it sends out scouting parties of ferns and reeds – and native grasses where the sun breaks through the canopy in the middle of the day.

The mowing’s done.  By the fire, I pull up an old easy chair.  It migrated in on some long forgotten high tide and stuck itself in the mangroves.  I pick the corkscrew grass seeds out of my socks and slowly sip a cold beer from the kero fridge.

It’s five in the afternoon.  The light is failing and it’s time to create order, signifying the end of the day and preparation for the night.  The evening mist rolls in off the river and the darkness inside the house seems not so dark.  The kero heater beckons and the first drops of rain shush over the tin roof.

* not his real name

Continuing Story by Nevile Cole

Marley was vaguely aware that he was dreaming someone else’s tale. He and a tiger alone on tiny iceberg adrift in an endless ocean…it was all too familiar. Of course, he hadn’t had an original thought in so long that everything seemed vaguely familiar all the time. Every book he read had been made into a movie he had already seen. Every movie he saw was based on a book, or another movie, or a TV show, or a video game, or an historical event or just a basic plot with which he was very familiar. Everything that happened to him on a day to day basis seemed oddly similar to something else that had already happened. It was as if he was stuck in an endless déjà vu.

He dreams now that he is sitting with some shaman smoking peyote. He vaguely remembers a similar scene in the Oliver Stone movie about Jim Morrison. He is relating to the shaman the story of how he ended up on the iceberg with the tiger and the shaman says: Oh, wow! Life of Pi I loved that movie. You tell me. How did that not get best picture?  Seriously? Argo? Argo fuck yourself, indeed!”

“You think too much,” the tiger says munching happily on a meal of flying fish. So you are stuck on an iceberg with a tiger. So it is melting. Is your lot that bad? The fish literally fly into our mouths. The rain it raineth every day. We are clearly going somewhere. Why do you have such very little faith?”

“I get this is all a metaphor,” Marley says. “But what am I supposed to learn? How am I supposed to feel?”

“Every story you ever heard or will ever hear is a metaphor,” the tiger laughs. Your life is a story and that makes you a metaphor too. The sooner you realize that reality and metaphor are the same thing, the better off you will be. Why don’t you just feel happy? I for one am perfectly content being a metaphorical tiger.”

“You are content being the content of someone else’s dream?”

“Semantics is a slippery slope. Besides, who says I am in your dream? You may be content in my dream.” With that, the tiger grunts and rips the guts out of another fish.

Back in his World News Central bunker, Don Williams is thinking too much too. “News, news everywhere…” he smiles while swishing the ice around and around his whiskey glass. “but not a lot who think.” Don has been around. He knows a thing or two about news. He remembers when WNC was a city on a hill, a shining light, the answer to the world’s woes. One World, One News. Don made his way in this business during the heady days of the 24 hour news cycle. In those days newscasters were still called anchors. Anchors! When there was a storm, when seas were rough, when all seemed lost we held on to our anchors for dear life. Once upon a time we trusted the news to see us through; but now Don knew he was just a newscaster like everyone else. He threw his line into the news waters just like A.J. Clemente, just like all of them; but, and this is an important but, Don Williams isn’t about to go after bottom feeders. He still dreams he can mean something; he just doesn’t know what exactly. After all, clearly there is no longer time for news. There is an unwritten law in the news biz: news plus time equals old news and nobody is interested in old news. Time is the enemy of modern man and the news has been boiled down to an endless streaming ticker tape of tragedy, bombast, and lies. Don blamed twitter. At some point the world decided that anything that had to be said had to be said in 160 characters or less. Who made up that rule anyway? Who decided to set the bar so low? Don Williams freely admits he doesn’t know much anymore; but he knows enough to know that the end, or glory, is near.

May 10, 2013

Tags: Kindle, Tolstoy, Macular, Pernod, E-Reader, Soni, Amazon, Degenerative, Kippling, Jungle book, Jules Verne Posted in Gerard Oosterman |

Deputy Leader of the Opposition

Images and Story by Sandshoe

I was visiting within clear sight of Mt Taranaki and the closest township to there is Inglewood, the regional centre Mt Plymouth.

One version of Maori history claims Te Maunga o Taranaki (Mount Taranaki) once lived in the centre of New Zealand’s North Island with the mountain gods: Tongariro, Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe.

Pihanga, another mountain, is incriminated at this other location, called ‘a lovely maid’ who was desirable to all the mountain gods.

A great conflict arose with geophysical consequences.

The face of the earth was pretty well re-arranged and changed.

There be dragons. Watch a dynamic skyline day and night and the centricity to culture of mythological creatures that appear in transitional forms. I knew of the taniwha from previous experience living in New Zealand where its importance as a powerful element to maintain order is paramount in children’s literature and written in the history of the British invaders who were told of of places of its alleged presence by Maoris exploiting superstition.

I became childish and disingenuous intellectual texts had ever been published in my excitement observing these beasts and faces of leering gods as if they were entirely a matter of my new discovery.

Pihanga  gathers her mists and veils around her and I observed that occurs in many forms. Taranaki is veiled and weeps.

Taranaki is cast as masculine gender.

Taranaki seems  all things rather than an imagined monotheme and masculine.

Taranaki, a living god but the mountain as a natural phenomenon of geoscience has been made by subsequent explosions each separated by many years, but a great upheaval that fell into itself and caused a depression before it rose again on its momentum. I looked out to the saucer-like rim caused at its surround when I walked across farmland made available to my use and to not be conscious of the living god, Taranaki, is to be unaware.

The story of the mountain is displayed in the museum in New Plymouth, Puke Ariki, where nothing else was I found other than the local dilemma of the Occupation. The attempt by the British to degrade the Maori and Maori history is its story.

Around this corner of Marsland Hill once a British garrison I have walked to by a bitumen road, now descending in the footsteps of the redcoats I eerily recognise, I find Charles Brown, mentor and friend of Keats laid to rest in this perfect place.

New Plymouth was once gated. The view of the White Hart Hotel is taken from the base of the New Plymouth clock tower.

I visit places, see sculptures New Plymouth seems practised at installing as if possessed of infinite will to display sculpture or perhaps the environment with its blue sea not far from any point is ideal.

The façade of the City Council is magnificent stainless steel.

I return to where I was living to reach again to the mountain. It was hard to concentrate on anything in its vicinity, but the interrelationship of clouds and light through them and on the peak of the cone that begs the story of a dramatic yearning for unity and rejection. The lyrical balletic dancing of clouds that scud and their shade come from the mountain; it governs weather.

A blue sky and a hot day and I went walking to the mountain.

This dinner trout seems fierce, menacing. It was fished from the stream that sourced in Mount Taranaki flowed through the property where I stayed.

I photographed on a day Taranaki was crying creeks with dark places I could look into over their bridges and coils of the great fern, the cyathea dealbata, the ponga; it is the silver fern in pockets of sunshine and its full shine that causes a characteristic shimmer of silver in roadside verges and fields it has hold over. Everywhere I look I see Taranaki, the living god of an ancient regime of story telling.

I saw the foregoing image through the window on my way from New Plymouth to Auckland on an early morning bus. The bus slowed to accommodate traffic and the corridor of the mist – as I saw it – was Pihanga whose presence between the mountains of Taranaki and Tongariro is still said to dissuade people from the locale lest the rumble start up between these jealous and aggrieved suitors.

I supposed conflict between the environment and dairy farming.