I just came from the grocery store where I happily discovered that Vanilla Coke is finally available in Australia. I’m tasting it for the first time right now. It’s… surprisingly good! I read that some people thought it was overpowering or chemical-ish, but I think it’s just right. Of course, as sugar is a no-no on Atkins, it might just be the shock of having my first “real” Coke in three months. Do they have a Diet Vanilla Coke? They didn’t have it at my store. If they do, I’m all over that stuff.

Update: ACK! I just realized that the 600 mL bottle (of which I drank the whole thing) has 66 grams of carbs, 99% of which come from sugar! That’s three times the recommended Induction limit! No more Vanilla Coke for me til I locate Diet.

Saturday the Snook and I were strolling through Newtown when we saw this book in a local shop window: Gordon’s Got a Snookie! How cute is that? We went in and read it. It’s a picture book about the new male gorilla at the zoo, whose arrival has all the other animals excited. When they see he has a snookie (a security blanket) though, they laugh at him and make fun of him. He ends up all by himself hugging his snookie (because a snookie is something you hug when you’re all alone and you want your mommy). But then one day the baby gorilla falls in the water and Gordon uses his snookie to save him. All the animals think he’s a hero and he gives them all pieces of the snookie. Isn’t that sweet? I’m glad I have a Snookie. 🙂

The Snook and I were watching Star Wars yesterday and we started discussing the worm that lives in the Death Star trash compactor. I was telling him about the McSweeney’s article that examines the implausibility of the Empire’s waste management system. As we pondered what the worm was doing there in the first place, we both suddenly exclaimed in unison: “Worm farming!” Who knew the Empire was into vermicomposting? 🙂

“It has been our own, in a sense, 11th of September; it’s a tragedy.”

More than 180 are feared dead in the Bali nightclub bombing. Is this getting any play on foreign news outlets? Here in Australia, it’s being treated like it was domestic terrorism. Bali’s pretty close and to Australians, it’s like the Ibiza of this hemisphere. Everyone goes there for their big vacations. I read an estimate that 75% of the wounded are probably Australian. Several community football teams were there celebrating the end of their season. This will probably end up being the greatest loss of Australian life during peacetime.

I thought we were away from it all here. I thought by avoiding Europe and the U.S. we’d be free from the bombings and the anthrax and the snipers and the threats. Nope. Sometimes it just sucks to be a human.

Friday Five:
I don’t like these questions so much. I’m too indecisive.

1. If you could only choose 1 cd to ever listen to again, what would it be?
Ugh. There’s no way I could pick just one. It would have to be a mix CD that I burned myself of all my favorite songs.

2. If you could only choose 2 movies to watch ever again, what would they be?
Pride and Prejudice and the Star Wars Trilogy. (I can count Episodes 4-6 as one movie, right?)

3. If you could only choose 3 books to read ever again, what would they be?
Jeez. No clue. Seeing a pattern here? If I absolutely had to pick… To Kill a Mockingbird, The Stand, and a book of Greek mythology. That covers a lot of ground.

4. If you could only choose 4 things to eat or drink ever again, what would they be?
This one I like. 1) Mountain Dew. 2) My aunt Berb’s chicken and dumplings. 3) The Snook’s chicken risotto. 4) McDonald’s french fries. *dries drool off keyboard*

5. If you could only choose 5 people to ever be/talk/associate/whatever with ever again, who would they be?
What, you expect me to answer honestly? My family reads this site! Actually, if you’re talking face-to-face association, I don’t think I even have five people here that I see on a regular basis. There’s the Snook… and that’s it. Yeah, I really need to make some Australian friends.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you… Punk Kittens. That’s the funniest Flash I’ve seen in ages. Be sure your volume is cranked up LOUD so you can rock out. And be sure to watch for the little guy stage-diving on the left.

And after that, check out this one for some surreal-ness. Say it with me kids: “dirigiberbil“. (For you Yanks, Mark Lamarr is a UK comedian and Jarvis Cocker is from Pulp. You should recognize the third guy. 🙂 )

The Chicago Sun-Times has a great online photo gallery. I particularly liked Richard Chapman’s series of pictures of primary colors he found in the Loop.

I just fixed a tiny bug in my “Roll Your Own” PHP comment system. Basically I had a random “)” on line 45 of comments.php. If you’re trying to implement the code and that line’s giving you errors, that’s probably the culprit.

I finally managed to track down the text to a very elusive and rare Roald Dahl short story entitled “In the Ruins”. I am absurdly proud of this. I like being an expert at something. Granted, it’s not in a very lucrative field, but I take some pride in the notion that (other than his relatives and biographers), I probably know more about Roald Dahl than anybody else on the planet. Isn’t that nuts? The thing is, it’s gotten to the point where I don’t actually enjoy his books anymore. He’s an academic challenge for me. I started the site as an exercise to learn HTML and produce some content, but somehow along the way it turned into something else. It’s like a job now. I do it because nobody else does and I think somebody ought to. There’s an odd feeling of possessiveness involved. Dahl is mine.

Which reminds me, I recently read A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which (among other things) is about the “cult of the author” and the way fans/critics/scholars deconstruct and construct writers’ lives. I identified with a lot of it. There’s quite a thrill associated with discovering something the “average” fan doesn’t know. I surf eBay and I have to restrain myself from the impulse to buy every crap piece of Dahl-iana that’s on offer. I don’t need the stuff, but the urge to possess everything is powerful. I found the character of Mortimer Cropper distasteful yet sympathetic. There but for the grace of God (and lack of a lot of money) go I.

To bring it back to “In the Ruins”, this story has only been reprinted a few times. It’s obviously not one that Dahl or his family felt would contribute to his legacy. So should I have bothered tracking it down? Do literary scholars have any responsibility to respect their (dead) subjects’ privacy? Is it wrong to make museum pieces out of someone’s personal items? I’m rambling. I think about these things though.

(Oh, and if you decide to read the story, be forewarned that it’s pretty gruesome. Best not read it right after lunch.)