Sunday, June 25, 2006
Code Brown
It must be common behaviour, a genetic predisposition or possibly evidence of genius; my kids love covering themselves in their own shit.
I have three lovely, beautiful little daughters. Precious angels. All three of them are shit artists. By this, I don't mean they are liars (although the oldest two are learning quickly), rather I mean that they have all decided to paint themselves and their immediate surroundings with their own feces.
I will admit that it was during their very young days. My eldest daughter would delight at putting her hands into her freshly filled nappy, pulling out the contents and spreading it all over her cot, wall and self. The first time it happened was a revelation. You could smell it before you entered the room. That's how you knew something was wrong. That, and the silence. The silence was first. You would hear the gooing and cooing of a child falling off to sleep. Then there would be nothing. It was not the silence of sleep, it was the silence of "something wrong". Parents know the difference. You rise to check out the source of the silence, and then the smell hits you. I have smelt it so often now that I can recognise the sub-sensory tingling of such odours. It is like the hairs on the back of your neck standing up.
The sight of a child covered in their own excrement is actually something that can be easily described. The scene is one of a kid covered in chocolate. You wonder, for a good amount of time given the strong olfactory evidence to the contrary, how your little one got hold of so much chocolate in their cot. Reality quickly catches up with fantasy, tackles it, grabs it by the hair and forces its face in the ground.
The only thing you can do is grab the demon spawn and put them, at arms length, into the shower. It is times like this that you are glad every shower product is pleasantly scented and every cleaning product smells of pine. What can you do but clean it all? It amazes me where you find it, although it probably shouldn't. When I was younger I was friends with a competitive body builder. One night his girlfriend, myself and a few other guys painted said bodybuilder with several coats of fake tan in preparation for a competition. That night, still wet, he slept on top of a canvas drop sheet on top of his bed. In the night he sleep walked and spread the fake tan in the most bizarre locations; how the hell a fake tan hand print got on the roof I will never know. How a baby, that can barely stand let alone walk, can get shit five feet up a wall will remain equally mysterious.
This happened so often that we began calling the situation a "Code Brown". When those words were uttered we would fall into an efficient and well practiced routine: get the baby, clean the baby, pull all sheets off, get wipes and disinfectant, wipe everywhere (even if you can't see anything there - trust me, it probably is), reassemble bed, reassemble child, go back to normal life (What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas). She eventually grew out of the behaviour, but it was taken up by our second daughter when she was about the same age. Now our third one is coding with proficiency.
Maybe all babies do this. If so I wish they would put a chapter on it in the baby books. If this is what we were meant to expect while we were expecting...well, it wouldn't have made a difference, but would have been nice to know. If it isn't common, maybe it just runs in our family. In which case, I really hope it doesn't skip a generation. Maybe, just maybe, the girls have worked out a way of communicating this type of behaviour to each other. Maybe the cot, used by all three girls, has some hidden messages scribed in some sort of baby language, each user adding to the sum of emergent knowledge. If so, then my daughters are geniuses, and the future recipients of an antique cot.
I have three lovely, beautiful little daughters. Precious angels. All three of them are shit artists. By this, I don't mean they are liars (although the oldest two are learning quickly), rather I mean that they have all decided to paint themselves and their immediate surroundings with their own feces.
I will admit that it was during their very young days. My eldest daughter would delight at putting her hands into her freshly filled nappy, pulling out the contents and spreading it all over her cot, wall and self. The first time it happened was a revelation. You could smell it before you entered the room. That's how you knew something was wrong. That, and the silence. The silence was first. You would hear the gooing and cooing of a child falling off to sleep. Then there would be nothing. It was not the silence of sleep, it was the silence of "something wrong". Parents know the difference. You rise to check out the source of the silence, and then the smell hits you. I have smelt it so often now that I can recognise the sub-sensory tingling of such odours. It is like the hairs on the back of your neck standing up.
The sight of a child covered in their own excrement is actually something that can be easily described. The scene is one of a kid covered in chocolate. You wonder, for a good amount of time given the strong olfactory evidence to the contrary, how your little one got hold of so much chocolate in their cot. Reality quickly catches up with fantasy, tackles it, grabs it by the hair and forces its face in the ground.
The only thing you can do is grab the demon spawn and put them, at arms length, into the shower. It is times like this that you are glad every shower product is pleasantly scented and every cleaning product smells of pine. What can you do but clean it all? It amazes me where you find it, although it probably shouldn't. When I was younger I was friends with a competitive body builder. One night his girlfriend, myself and a few other guys painted said bodybuilder with several coats of fake tan in preparation for a competition. That night, still wet, he slept on top of a canvas drop sheet on top of his bed. In the night he sleep walked and spread the fake tan in the most bizarre locations; how the hell a fake tan hand print got on the roof I will never know. How a baby, that can barely stand let alone walk, can get shit five feet up a wall will remain equally mysterious.
This happened so often that we began calling the situation a "Code Brown". When those words were uttered we would fall into an efficient and well practiced routine: get the baby, clean the baby, pull all sheets off, get wipes and disinfectant, wipe everywhere (even if you can't see anything there - trust me, it probably is), reassemble bed, reassemble child, go back to normal life (What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas). She eventually grew out of the behaviour, but it was taken up by our second daughter when she was about the same age. Now our third one is coding with proficiency.
Maybe all babies do this. If so I wish they would put a chapter on it in the baby books. If this is what we were meant to expect while we were expecting...well, it wouldn't have made a difference, but would have been nice to know. If it isn't common, maybe it just runs in our family. In which case, I really hope it doesn't skip a generation. Maybe, just maybe, the girls have worked out a way of communicating this type of behaviour to each other. Maybe the cot, used by all three girls, has some hidden messages scribed in some sort of baby language, each user adding to the sum of emergent knowledge. If so, then my daughters are geniuses, and the future recipients of an antique cot.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
I Fought With Light Sabers
I haven't posted anything lately because (a) I am a lazy bastard, and (b) I have been busy marking exams. Exam marking is without doubt the most mind numbing part of teaching.
To take my mind off of things I was asked to help present a seminar on sword fighting for a sci-fi/fantasy writers convention , Conflux 3. This was held in Canberra on the weekend and I got to fight with light sabers.
We were there to do some serious fighting, and we did. Basically we were trying to show fantasy writers what "real" sword fighting actually looked like. This was done in the hopes of getting more realistic sword fights in fantasy novels - I hate ready a novel where my "suspension of belief" is shattered by something I know is impossible. This is the problem of being a sword fighting comp-sci lecturer.
Anyway, in addition to the steel on steel fighting, there was a stall at the con. selling Master Replicas Light Sabers. They were about $300 a pop, but they were very sweet. They light up sequentially, they have the right sound effects, they make the right noises when they hit something and they are quite robust. My instructor, Paul Wagner, were given some Light Sabers to play with for a photo shoot. Then later during our seminar we did an Emperor versus Luke battle. I was Luke and did all of the standard twirling and whirling in my attacks. Paul just stood there in a defensive posture and cut at my hands every time I stuck them out. No wonder Luke lost his hand - who came up with the light saber fighting system?
I can thoroughly recommend these sabers as a safe investment in geek chic.
To take my mind off of things I was asked to help present a seminar on sword fighting for a sci-fi/fantasy writers convention , Conflux 3. This was held in Canberra on the weekend and I got to fight with light sabers.
We were there to do some serious fighting, and we did. Basically we were trying to show fantasy writers what "real" sword fighting actually looked like. This was done in the hopes of getting more realistic sword fights in fantasy novels - I hate ready a novel where my "suspension of belief" is shattered by something I know is impossible. This is the problem of being a sword fighting comp-sci lecturer.
Anyway, in addition to the steel on steel fighting, there was a stall at the con. selling Master Replicas Light Sabers. They were about $300 a pop, but they were very sweet. They light up sequentially, they have the right sound effects, they make the right noises when they hit something and they are quite robust. My instructor, Paul Wagner, were given some Light Sabers to play with for a photo shoot. Then later during our seminar we did an Emperor versus Luke battle. I was Luke and did all of the standard twirling and whirling in my attacks. Paul just stood there in a defensive posture and cut at my hands every time I stuck them out. No wonder Luke lost his hand - who came up with the light saber fighting system?
I can thoroughly recommend these sabers as a safe investment in geek chic.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Don't call me "Sir"!
I am sick of being called "Sir". I wish everyone would stop doing it. I don't call anybody "Sir" and unless you have been on your knees in front of the queen (note, I said THE queeen, not a queen - not that there's anything wrong with that, of course) then there is probably no way I will be calling you "Sir".
From this you can probably tell that I don't work in a service industry. Well, actually, I do work in a service industry but not one in which I have to address anyone overly politely. On the other hand, they (and by "they" I mean my customers) frequently call me "Sir".
I am a university lecturer, and every year I have to deal with a group of new first year students who have just left high school and who bring all of their bad habits to uni. In high school they call their male teachers "Sir" and they think that this is de rigeur for tertiary education.
It all starts in preschool. Teachers think that being called "Mr", "Mrs" or "Miss" is respectful. I suppose that this is fair enough; people should have some say in how they are addressed. But have these people ever stopped to think for a moment about why it is respectful? Being called "Mister" is just another way of saying "male member of a particular family". I mean, my Dad, brother, grandfather and uncle are all Mr. Halfpenny's. "Miss" and "Missus" is even worse since it identifies a woman based on their marital status. Is that really respect?
When these kids get to high school, after six or seven years of being respectful, they take things to a new level and just use "Sir" or "Miss". No family name, just "Yes, male teacher" or "No, female". Isn't it the ultimate form of rudeness to relegate someone to just a member of a particular sex?
My parents loved me enough that when I was born they gave me a name. Call me "Dave". If you feel the need to be respectful, call me "Dr. Dave". If you can't remember my name, "Mate" will do at a pinch. But don't call me "Sir".
From this you can probably tell that I don't work in a service industry. Well, actually, I do work in a service industry but not one in which I have to address anyone overly politely. On the other hand, they (and by "they" I mean my customers) frequently call me "Sir".
I am a university lecturer, and every year I have to deal with a group of new first year students who have just left high school and who bring all of their bad habits to uni. In high school they call their male teachers "Sir" and they think that this is de rigeur for tertiary education.
It all starts in preschool. Teachers think that being called "Mr", "Mrs" or "Miss" is respectful. I suppose that this is fair enough; people should have some say in how they are addressed. But have these people ever stopped to think for a moment about why it is respectful? Being called "Mister" is just another way of saying "male member of a particular family". I mean, my Dad, brother, grandfather and uncle are all Mr. Halfpenny's. "Miss" and "Missus" is even worse since it identifies a woman based on their marital status. Is that really respect?
When these kids get to high school, after six or seven years of being respectful, they take things to a new level and just use "Sir" or "Miss". No family name, just "Yes, male teacher" or "No, female". Isn't it the ultimate form of rudeness to relegate someone to just a member of a particular sex?
My parents loved me enough that when I was born they gave me a name. Call me "Dave". If you feel the need to be respectful, call me "Dr. Dave". If you can't remember my name, "Mate" will do at a pinch. But don't call me "Sir".
