Tiririca

By subjecting Francisco Oliveira to a literacy exam, Brazil's National Congress has only enriched the metaphor. Now, instead of a clown in congress, they have a semiliterate clown in congress¹. For a medley of ads from Oliveira's electoral campaign, go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK4p35wYgXI

For news stories reporting his victory, please see:

• Brazilian clown's poll win threatened by illiteracy claim (October 5, 2010). AFP
• Brazil clown secures congress seat after literacy test (December 1, 2010). AFP
• Send in the clown (October 7, 2010). The Economist

Footnote:

1. No source that I can find online can tell me whether Oliveira has become the first professional clown to hold legislative duties.

Lunch

By law, every commercial street in Australia must contain either a fish and chip shop, a laundromat or a milk bar with a sandwich board showing pictures of the ice creams. Streets, like mine, that have all three can apply for a government grant to construct a newsagents next door, which thereafter will support itself, in the main, by peddling lottery tickets. For lunch today, I ordered a vegetarian burger from a Chinese restaurant between the laundromat and the fish and chip shop. I believe the restaurateur must once have seen a hamburger at some distance and then deduced its contents. It had its points, but no person who'd seen a burger at close range could've classed it as one. In place of the bun, it had two chive pancakes with soy sauce. For the patty it substituted a loose shred of cabbage, slivered black mushrooms and bean shoots. Not one to skimp on the essentials, the restaurateur served it with chopsticks and a selection of dipping sauces.

I ate it with the chopsticks while watching Herzog's Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. Even Herzog's monster film somehow reminds me of Joseph Conrad; more human than human but unafraid of the truth about the world. I watched it on a television projector plugged into tiny, quiet speakers, but the source volume set to maximum. Every time the music swelled the speakers rattled and distorted like Hendrix wailing the seventh sharp nine in Heart of Darkness.

Declaration of principles

I have it on good authority that the MPAA intend this commercial to discourage movie piracy, rather than, as it appears, to encourage car theft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU

One marvels that such advertisements make it past their first test screening, let alone into the forefront of a multimillion dollar crusade against copyright infringement. The average viewer must jump ship at the first premise:

"You wouldn't steal a car."

I would if it belonged to Sony. The first car, I'd steal to drive. The second one, I'd set fire to and photograph burning on a stolen Sony camera, so that later I could send them the pictures of me laughing watching it burn.

Monolith

I whittled this out of a lump of acrylic paint. To create the lump I layered different-coloured coats of paint on top of each other until the lump became thick enough to whittle.

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/sculpture.jpg

Arrakis

Sophie kept a boyfriend named Alan - the same way that one might keep a housecat or a gerbil. Alan belonged to that shadowy class of persons who somehow leave no discernable impression in your thoughts. You would've found him listed in the credits as 'fireman #3' or 'guest at party'.

He had a genial temperament; he'd amble out to see you when you arrived and make small talk. He just appeared underwritten. When you looked up from a conversation, you'd find him standing in the background fiddling with something, as if his actor didn't have any lines and needed to full up the time pretending to do something. His presence left so scant an impression that to this day I can remember only two facts about him: he owned a video camera and slept heavily.

Alan pointed his video camera down random city streets and empty staircases. He filmed car yards, corroded fire escapes and parking garages. But, like Thierry Guetta, he had no coherent plan for what he'd ever do with the footage.

From time to time, Alan would turn up in the evening to discover that Sophie had already gone out. He'd hang loose in the living room for a while, before taking a break to chill out while he worked up the energy to kick back for the rest of the evening. Exhausted from the effort, he'd fall asleep on the sofa (why he didn't move to Sophie's room eludes me). Nothing short of an air raid siren would wake him. I could blow my harp in the same room without rousing him.

Returning one evening after midnight, Hilary and I discovered we'd both forgotten our keys. While Hilary hammered on the door, I worked the intercom buzzer. I buzzed it on and off trying to avoid any sort of rhythm, which I reasoned the sleeper might adapt to.

"Bzzzzz b-b-bzzt bzzzzzzzz bzzzzzt bzz bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt b-bzzzzzz bzzzt bzzzz bz bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz bzzzzzzzzzzzzt"

Thus do the Fremen stride the great deserts.

Four flights of stairs down, I could hear Hilary hammering on the door. Inside it must've sounded like they'd detonated the family atomics.

When he answered the intercom at last it took me at least half a minute to notice.

"Bzzzt bzzz Yes? bt bzzzzzzzzzzz Who- bzzzzt this? bzt bzt bzt Can y- bzzzzzzz -rist's sake pl- bzzzzzzt bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz"

"Oh, Alan?" I said.

Hilary kept battering on the door.

"Oh God," he said, "not this again."

Space fish

I knitted this space fish together in Adobe Illustrator using Illustrator's punk and bloat functions, which replace the segments between the anchor points with curves:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/spacefish.jpg

Númenor

Despite contentions by many aggravated flatmates to the contrary, agreeing to live with someone has always meant agreeing to live with any girlfriend or boyfriend they may acquire down the track. Two millennia before the invention of television, Socrates' flatmates woke up at three in the morning to find some shirtless guy mending his sandals in their vestibule.

When Hilary and I first started going out, I became the House Boyfriend. Her housemate sometimes found me in a towel mending a harmonica in their living room. I paid no rent and never did any housework.

Later, when I moved out with Colin, we swapped and Hilary became our apartment's House Girlfriend. Colin sometimes waited for forty-five minutes to take his shower while she ran through some occult cosmetics lustration in the bathroom. I don't know anything about it except that it involved filling up the sink with water.

When Colin moved to California, Hilary and I moved in together. After we broke up, I kept the apartment and invited Ken to come live with me. For the first time, I found myself on the receiving end of the arrangement.

Between them, Ken and his girlfriend owned one dressing gown (and it, threadbare to the point of obscenity). Until they got around to getting dressed sometime around midday, only one of them could leave their bedroom at a time.

The close quarters also foists a haphazard cognisance of your flatmates' lovemaking upon your awareness (in particular if in its course they should involve the wall that divides their bedroom from yours). I'd never dealt with this before and had assumed I'd react with one (or both) of the usual two responses we make to sexuality: arousal or embarrassment. Instead, I found it cast the condition of my newfound bachelorhood into rather severe relief. When you find yourself designing a fantasy roleplaying system on the computer at three in the morning, while your flatmate has terrific sex next door, it becomes difficult not to wonder whether you might've taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Children's ice cream, Mandrake?

This started out as a sketch of Sterling Hayden as General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. I could never get it to look much like Ripper, so I softened it into a face with a more sympathetic expression.

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/face.jpg

Relocation

I've relocated Arc to a virtual server at,

http://208.91.129.206/

At the moment, the choicest virtual servers go for around $200 a month. For $200, you get a glamorous server-townhouse near the city with its own security force and a cleaning lady who visits twice a week. At the cheaper end of the market, $50 a month will lease the server equivalent of a modest apartment in the suburbs with one parking space and a functional hot water system. The $5 a month I pay (to a provider who spells the word 'experts' in their name with two Xs and a U) leases the equivalent of a cardboard box in a slum ruled by local gangs. Please let me know if you have any trouble getting in.