Hooting Yard Lost Property: An Efficacious Cure..

"I have always thought the most efficacious cure for melancholy was to lean on the fence of a sty and watch pigs. "

It is so true. These are photos of my mother's new crop of kunikuni pigs. (I raided her laptop for photos when she visited last. That's the way family albums are built these days.) Like all extravagantly ugly animals, kunikunis have extremely cute babies. The tassel-like appendage you see under this piglet's ear is called a pire pire; it is a sensory organ used to detect love.

I have made a little effigy of Larry Baldock and put it through "some sort of Aztec-voodoo wax doll curse-and-abomination pin-sticking procedure". If it is working, then right now Larry is realising that making child-beating a symbol of Christian identity in New Zealand was a perverse and dangerous idea, and he is feeling pangs of guilt.

[Update: It's not working. In fact, he is making me dizzy with just how shameless he is.]

Hooting Yard Lost Property: The Temple Of Hoon Fat Gaar

The Chthonic Rococo of the Mandelbulb.

"... It is easy for us to dismiss their very existence. Until, that is, we have struggled, stylishly, across the inhospitable tarputa, and stooped down to crawl through the sacred flap, to enter the Temple. Then we see what all those believers through the centuries saw, a sight so magnificent and terrifying that we sprawl helplessly in the mud, shrieking, brains bedizened, gaga for the god of all gods."

Hooting Yard Lost Property: A Disillusionment.

I'm beginning to suspect that Frank Key just makes things up sometimes.

An Innocent Pastime: Surf Casting

[I almost certainly pinched this picture from Golden Age Comic Book Stories.]

(I'm a bit under the weather at the moment, but summer's on its way and the instrument platforms are back out on the duckponds. More about those later.)

Hooting Yard Lost Property: Public Transport Services In And Around Hooting Yard

"A thumping great tome lands on the Reviews Editor's desk. It is nothing less than the Incredibly Detailed Report Of The Commission Of Enquiry Into The Provision Of Public Transport Services In And Around Hooting Yard As Requested By Civic Functionaries Many, Many Years Ago. It would, one feels, be a kindness simply to burn the thing. ...

"This enormous volume is basically a mishmash of risible twaddle. ..."

Wrong. This is not the Mustard ParvAir airport shuttle.
It is a cartload of disreputable Romanian scrapmetal merchants.

Right. This is the Innumerable Ponds Tours sub-aqua taxi.
Note the agreeable demeanor of the driver. He is what is known as a "good keen bloke".

A Sudden Enthusiasm: I have a new favorite Aunty.

Aunt Feminina Boots

She is a very sensible person.

A Sudden Enthusiasm: Strange Vintage Fictions

Tell me if this doesn't remind you of the work of a particular author: *

"Dawn of happiness" - a M.A.S.A. document

"A pictorial document (Aethergraph) from Sukhothai. circa 1347. Depicting a parliament of crows welcoming the triumphant return of one of the King's lost elephants, Mae Chang."
[by smithlight]

There are many other weird, lovely photos like this in the Strange Vintage Fictions Flickr pool. There's morphic resonance or some similar monkey business going on here.

* Frank Key, damn it, it reminds you of Frank Key!

Another Giant Elephant-like Being!

[By John Schoenherr.]

What could be more exciting? There are bound to be many more in the VISCO Science Fiction Cover Art Archive.

An Innocent Pastime: Playing the Hard-Drive.

John Cage and Lejaren Hiller up to no good in the computer room.

I've just learnt that I can feed my computer's hard-drive straight into its sound card! Weird sounds come out!

$ sudo cat /dev/sda1 > /dev/audio

My hard drive has a lot of dull blips at the start (it mustn't be full enough) so I went on to try individual files:

$ cd .mozilla/firefox/hhbcewe2.default
$ cat places.sqlite > /dev/audio (Wow!)
$ cat places.sqlite-journal > /dev/audio

Firefox's database files are very musical. They remind me a lot of the bloopy parts of John Cage's HPSCHD. (The Hamilton Library once had a copy of the HPSCHD LP, until bastards like this threw it out.) Perhaps those sounds were made by feeding computer backup tapes into a reel-to-reel tape desk? That's very similar to what I'm doing here.

Image files aren't much more than hissing. This image should have sounded exciting, if any was going to:

$ cat /home/glyn/the-zebra-riders.jpg > /dev/audio

Executable files sound like I am rapidly spinning the tuning knob on an FM radio. Some of the "channels" that go past sound eerily like human voices moaning. Those must be trapped moments of programmer despair. Vast quantities of despair go into the production of software, weeks to years of it in every program. (That's the part of computing that gives you cancer, it's nothing to do with Wi-Fi.) The same voices blurt out of damaged MP3s from Archive.org too, so it could be that certain chords just sound like voices if they're brief enough, but it's a much duller theory.

An Innocent Pastime: Seal Making.

Outa_Spaceman alerted me to the existence of an Online Seal Maker.

I have been playing with it all day.

Things in Rows and Columns: Nem Fémesszínű Koik.

This is the missing page of the Codex Seraphinanus.

Hooting Yard Lost Property: Incomprehensible Weather.

"... Having twice been struck by lightning while doing Dobson's bidding, I had taken the precaution of sprinkling finely-ground purslane on to my slops, and stashing a small pouch of the stuff in my haversack. Another half hour and I was out of the door and on my way. The weather was incomprehensible: I shall not record it here. I checked my watch by the gasworks' clock and spat into a hedgerow."

Hooting Yard Lost Property: Ne'er-do-wells.

An Innocent Pastime: Computer Programming.

Hooting Yard Lost Property: Kate Pierson, Tofu.

This pamphlet was ghostwritten by Dobson.

I am sure of it.

A Dubious Pastime.

I don't know the purpose of this practice, but I'm quite sure it's not an innocent pastime. I'm going with my gut instincts on this one.

My Favorite Pavilion, and Person

The Tea Pavilion of the Rotorua Government Gardens. (The building on the left [not the right, I get the two mixed up].) My late Grandma held her hundredth birthday there, some time around the turn of this century. It's a lovely building.

The building at the back was an enormous radioactive bathhouse at the time this photo was taken. It is the Rotorua Museum of Art and History now. The therapeutic radium has dissipated and decayed to undetectable levels.

Heres Grandma, in the Tea Pavilion, on her birthday:

Hooting Yard Lost Property: A Mighty Tugboat Crew.

Keen listeners to Tugboat Crew Playtime all.

"... Although most of the captain’s commands were senseless and deranged, he had good reason to keep his crew away from the radio. He wanted to ensure that no one twiddled the dial away from important seafaring information channels and tuned in to a programme very popular at that time, called Tugboat Crew Playtime. This was a music show which was bound to distract tugboat crews from their tugboat duties, for it featured a roster of presenters with mellifluous voices who played tunes requested by tugboat crew members from near and far. ..."

The Portable Temple of the Minigod.

Its shelves are stuffed with ecclesiastical microdots.