Monday, November 07, 2005

Displacement Behaviour

Displacement Behaviour.

I am supposed to be working on my CV (resume). There is a job I want apply for, another TIE acting job and they want a CV. Never done a CV before and, well, I’m not really doing it now either…

After the big firework display in the quarry on Friday, our display in the schoolyard was less than impressive. A few months ago, I got given a whole pile of stuff from someone who was moving out of the village and was fully aware of my inability to say “No!” when asked the question:

“I am throwing this out. Do you want it?”

So, in addition to all the tools and weird chunks of “this may come in useful one day” stuff, I found a carrier bag with a bundle of Smoke Bombs, Signal Flares, and Distress Flares which had come off his boat.
“Yipee!” said Morag. “Let’s set them off now!” (Which made me wonder is this the sort of thing you really want to hear from your doctor? “Cool! Out of date explosives. Let’s set them off!”).

Anyway, we decided that Saturday night was going to be the best night to do this given that the sky was going to be full of fireworks anyway and the chances of us accidentally sparking off an air sea rescue with a 15,000 candlepower parachute flare were therefore at a minimum. Even then, I succumbed to an attack of the wussiness and phoned the police to warn them to ignore any reports of boats in distress. Especially if these boats in distress were reported to be inland, or in the middle of the village…

So there we were reading the instructions for these things by torchlight… “Aha! I see… Pull this off!...Then twist that… Line up the arrows and strike the base firmly… “
(How the hell anyone was supposed to work out how to do all that in the dark, on a sinking ship, at sea is beyond me - but I guess you learn fast under such circumstances)

Nothing happened.

“What was that last bit again?”
“Strike the base firmly…”
“I wonder how firmly ‘firmly’ is?... I’ll go get a hammer…”

I am delivering the third mighty whack to the base of this thing (I am holding it in my left hand and hitting the bottom of it with a hammer) when it occurs to me that I am heading towards a potential Darwin Award at speed. Anyway, nothing happened and it didn’t stop me doing exactly the same thing with 3 others. None of the flares went off but we did have great fun with the smoke.






  • Current listening: Philip Glass’ Dancepieces and the 90mph winds ripping the leaves and smaller branches off the trees outside…

  • Current Reading: Still reading Kinflicks. I manage about 3 pages then fall asleep. It’s not boring, I’m just knackered.


1 comment:

Phoebe J. Southwood said...

Ok - my favorite part of the story is that you tell the police TO IGNORE BOAT DISTRESS SIGNALS.

How many sunk that night?

I wonder....

(That sounds like so much FUN!!! And hey, at least your doctor was there to reapply fingers, limbs, heads, etc!)

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