Ken Sae Kai
Last night I made the long overdue and inevitable pilgrimage to my karate club to resume my study of the way of the empty hand. My return after about a years absence was made slightly more stressful by the fact that Trish had decided to come along and give it a go. She has been maintaining a website for a Kung Fu organisation and all the mystical blurb must have somehow seeped in and warped her mind. But having trained in karate for a some time I advised her that jumping around in a Kung Fu suit was ridiculous whereas jumping around in a karate-gi (effectively white pyjamas) was perfectly reasonable and should in fact, be encouraged. Being a martial arts novice she believed me and so we ended up going to karate together. Hence the stress. Being beaten up in front of your girlfriend has historically never been a main feature of any kind of mating ritual. Least of all in oversize white pyjamas. But sensei seemed pleased to see me again and he went easy on me. Having said that, my ability to walk straight has been temporarily altered, my joints feel like they’re held together with elastic bands, and the rest of my body feels like it’s about to file a report with the Health and Safety Executive. Trish seemed to enjoy it though. Tickets for upcoming domestic arguments will be available soon.
Dec 11, 2003 at 14:33 Filed Under: Blog Comment
Survival Of The Fittest
Today I am in the gallery. The office is cold and outside a small sculpture is buzzing quite loudly. (On purpose).
On the plus side, I have just noticed a chocolate Santa and a bag of foreign looking things that appear to be edible. And what is probably a bottle of wine wrapped up. So I’ve got some supplies if things get tough.
I went down to see my parents on Sunday and on the way we stopped by Ikea to return a faulty cactus. The cactus in question was quite a specimen, standing about three feet tall, but should have been a further seven inches taller had Trish not done some freestyle pruning with the car door. So we took it back and acted dumb. Erm, this cactus has got a sort of flat bit on the top, we think there might be a part missing. And so the good people of Ikea replaced it with a similar model.
Trish bought another plant for my mum. More specifically an aquatic plant for the aquarium. It was quite small but its water-based nature meant that my journey home involved holding a plastic plant pot full of water and checking to make sure that the replacement cactus didn’t roll off the back seat. When we got there we saw that the aquarium seems to be thriving. It’s full of energetic fish and healthy looking foliage. Then I remembered that the previous occupants of said aquarium were still in my mum’s custody. In the freezer to be exact. I had completely forgotten that when I moved flat I had temporarily moved my piranhas (four of, stone dead) back home in order to avoid them thawing out and starting to smell. So I was amazed and delighted to discover that my mum still had them filed away at the back of the freezer in their icy Tupperware grave. But then I forgot to get them when I was leaving. So they’re still in there behind boxes of waffles, cartons of ice cream and various bags of frozen veg.
People often ask why I’ve got four frozen red-bellied piranhas in my (currently my mum’s) freezer. The answer to this question is easy. Because they died. I didn’t just put them into the fridge and then wonder why they weren’t moving around as much. I raised the little blighters with care and attention until they grew big enough to bite the hand that fed them. Despite this, I did keep feeding them. Despite that, they died. So I froze them.
Then people ask, Well what are you going to do with them? This question is not as easy to answer. Apart from occasionally taking them out when drunk to show to the more curious of my friends they tend to just sit there frozen. I was, and still am considering taking them to a taxidermist and having him perform the marine equivalent of having them stuffed. And then displaying them above the mantelpiece. But alternative fates for the wee fellas occasionally suggest themselves to me. A nice necklace perhaps. Piranha soup. Or even harnessing the power of science and creating some kind of reanimated Franken-piranhas. I don’t know yet, so in the mean time they remain in cryogenic stasis.
What I did remember to bring back with me was another cactus that my mum had been looking after since I moved. Admittedly cacti don’t take a lot of looking after. You have to water them regularly of course, but you have to forget to water them for about two years to actually kill them. And if you have forgotten to water your cactus for a couple of years, it’s probably because you’ve forgotten that you actually own a cactus and are therefore unlikely to mourn its passing. But my mum is good at growing houseplants and this particular cactus was looking pretty healthy. So we left in the morning with about 90% of a cactus and returned home with two cacti. (My favourite plural- one cactus, two cacti; one octopus, two octopi; but what about ‘bus’?).
Anyway, I’m going to look after them until they grow big and strong. Big enough and strong enough to be used as offensive weapons against burglars. And then I might freeze them. Who knows? We already have a few houseplants but they are mostly pretty boring. One in particular is extremely dull. It looks to me like the plant that you would see a picture of if you looked up ‘plant’ in The Idiots Encyclopaedia. Its green, it’s got leaves, it grows, that’s it. I doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t look interesting and more importantly it doesn’t look like it will ever do anything interesting. So I don’t water it. Which is why I was perplexed and annoyed to find that it just kept growing despite my hard-line policy of neglect. When I pointed this anomaly out to Trish she told me that she watered it because I kept ‘forgetting’. So now it looks like I’m going to have to poison the damn thing.
I have also embarked on a campaign to convince Trish of the virtues of owning a cat. She hasn’t bought it yet. One of the issues surrounding the cat situation is whether or not it gets let outside. I tend to think that the answer is yes; it should get to go outside. Cats seem to like it outside. The problem is that it’s a pedigree cat I want. A Havana to be exact. Most people assume that pedigrees are stupid but the Havana is said to be a particularly bright breed. Probably not bright enough to make a cup of tea or toast bread but bright all the same. Although a lady who breeds them told me- ‘They’re not very street-wise, you know’. The precise implications of this fact are open to interpretation but it probably means that it would get beaten up by other cats, locked inside wheelie-bins, blown away in a gale etc. Maybe even stolen on account of its fancy looks. Whereas if it’s a house cat then it will have to crap in a box and things like that. I don’t know, we’ll see. I still have to brainwash Trish. It’s going to take a bit of work but I’ve already found a weakness concerning mice which I intend to exploit.
Dec 2, 2003 at 11:06 Filed Under: Blog Comment
blah
I am in an unusually good mood because my pal Jamie is coming over from New York to stay and I just finished setting up my mailing list. Ha!
Nov 30, 2003 at 0:52 Filed Under: Blog Comment
Salad Days
*the sound of trumpets*
Well, here it is. The all new and improved Burning Salad, Now With Sanity Destroying Micro-Granules!
The reasons for the move are various and mostly uninteresting. So here they are…
Previously,
1. Full integration with my finely hand-crafted website was impossible.
2. Everything was published to their remote server.
3. Various features were irreversibly offsite.
4. I am a brat.
So, I just upped and left. What does this mean for the future of The ‘Salad? I hear you cry. Well…with respect to the above it means…
Now,
1. I can use document relative paths.
2. Burning Salad is now fully indexed by the search engine on the website.
3. Everything is irreversibly onsite.
4. I am still a brat. I can do whatever I like.
In an nutshell, everything behind the scenes is much tighter. Everything in front of the scenes is, well, a matter of opinion. No doubt there will be a few teething problems but luckily my attitude to teeth is that although you should be diligent about brushing them on a regular basis, you shouldn’t be too shy about yanking them out if needs be. I have single handedly ported across every last entry. The only adjustment was to correct spelling mistakes. (There were hardly any). The greatest loss incurred by the move is the deletion of every single comment previously made. This was unavoidable but luckily not impossible to solve. I would greatly appreciate it if everyone would take the time to re-read my entire blog and re-insert the same comments in the appropriate place at the correct time.
Nov 27, 2003 at 16:11 Filed Under: Blog Comment
blah
The new and very unofficial Park Attack poster is now available from all good charity shops.
Nov 24, 2003 at 18:31 Filed Under: Blog Comment
blah
Burning Salad is currently in the process of being refried. Expect a certain amount of mayhem over the next week or so.
Nov 22, 2003 at 16:00 Filed Under: Blog Comment
Home
I’m back. I got back on Monday afternoon after waking up very hung-over and almost missing my plane. Trento is a fairly small place up north a bit chilly it was. The hotel was pretty swanky and the view was pretty impressive since most people are impressed by enormous mountains. Apart from that there wasn’t a whole lot going on. No internet cafe – hence no Burning Salad. The floor was pretty damn big but I had a team of helpers eager to destroy their knee caps in the name of art. Everything got done in the end in the usual way- stick down tape until your legs go numb, (drink), sleep, wake up, repeat. And it looked impressive in the end. Always does. Mission accomplished.
There’s really nothing very interesting to report apart from maybe a man on crutches who lurched towards me speaking Italian. I said ‘I’m sorry- I don’t speak Italian’ (in English, not Italian obviously) and he said ‘Ah, so you are English’, to which I replied ‘No. I am Scottish‘. And he grinned and said ‘John O’ Groats’. To which there is no obvious retort, so I said ‘That’s right, John O’ Groats’. Then he told me how he had travelled all over the world and spent some time in Scotland, including John O’ Groats and Edinburgh where he was sleeping rough and Scottish people are the nicest people he met because when he woke up somewhere in some hedge or other an old lady would came out in the morning and gave him some breakfast.
And I also got a postcard which seemed to depict some kind of local festival involving a very large wooden goose being hauled around in a boat.
And I got a cat lighter. Not as good as the other cat lighter that I got in Turin and later gave to Danny Saunders in a moment of drunken generosity but a nice one all the same.
So here I am back in Glasgow feeling a bit flat. It looks as if November has been the worst month for Burning Salad updates so far, so lets hope something happens before the end of the week. Like an earthquake or a plague of locusts. Otherwise I’m just going to post up some pictures.
Also I noticed last night that there has been some interest in the dream generator from a couple of random sites on the net- a Frank Zappa site and some blog or other.
Nov 20, 2003 at 17:13 Filed Under: Blog Comment
blah
I’m leaving for Italy in two hours for another Zobop gig. I’ll try and update whenever I can. Take it away janitor…
(Janitor is dead).
Nov 9, 2003 at 2:25 Filed Under: Blog Comment
Boxes
It’s almost Wednesday tomorrow. Well, in fifteen minutes. The end of the start of the week and the start of the end of the week, all conveniently rolled into one manageable twenty four hour period. Trish arrived last Monday, the day after I got back from Athens and everything has been a blur since then. We went to Ikea- for me the second time, for Trish the eight hundred and second time. It’s still a strange place. Maybe the Ikea of the future will sell flat-packed robots and I’ll like it more. It’s not a bad place its just a bit of an overload. It’s a bit like an art fair. When you see something good you stop and look at it and then you’re not sure if its good or not because there’s so much stuff everywhere that is definitely bad. Then you’re not sure if some of the bad stuff might actually be good and then you’re not sure what’s bad and what’s good anymore. So we left with an assortment of furniture that seemed good, went bad for a while and is currently fluctuating between the two.
So we painted a bit, built a wardrobe, painted a bit more, built another wardrobe…etc. All my stuff is still in boxes and has been shunted around the flat a few times. Currently it’s all in the living room. Against my better judgement, an executive decision was taken to think long term and not just paint around the boxes.
Everything seems to be tidy and in the ‘right’ place and the flat is running like a well oiled machine. Precisely what kind of machine is still as yet unclear. Maybe my only escape will be to get really drunk so I can see everything as an unfocussed, overlapping mess again.