A small story from the small world of the Sims: Jacob Martin, Riverblossom Hills

On the face of it, Riverblossom Hills, where I grew up, looks like one of the more boring Sims neighbourhoods. Quiet, peaceful, rural, the residents seem to have no interests other than gardening and fishing. We have winter for eight months of the year, and the rest of the year it rains, which is why our hills are always so lush and verdant, and even the weather is boring. But Riverblossom Hills also has more than its fair share of gossips, journalists and aspiring journalists, because I guess we all really know that every house has its share of secrets, and a huge scoop lies behind every doorway!
I don't remember much about my mother Elena, although my father Andrew tells me she taught me to talk and potty-trained me, whereas he only got to teach me to walk. We were all living at the time in the huge Viejo hacienda, home of Catherine and Julio Viejo, who always wanted it to be a true "family home". Unfortunately, Julio died, so Catherine never got to have the family she always wanted, although for a while Mum, Dad and I were her "substitute family". Then my mum died, when I was still quite small. She must have been something special, because Dad went to seed after that, and hasn't looked at another woman since.
Jules O'Mackey was the first love of my life, my puppy-love and childhood sweetheart. I had my first kiss with her, and then we did the usual teenage things of going steady, and breaking up. It was never clear why we broke up, at least not to me. But Jules has been known to have a bit of a temper, so she must have flown off the handle about something one day.
Then I met, and had my first kiss with Sandra Roth, who then had dazzling platinum blonde braids, and was duly swept off my feet - talk about a coup de foudre! - and we went steady for a while...
Jules wasn't happy. She had her own troubles, you see. She had also lost her mother, Alexander, when quite young. Only Alexandra had not died; she simply up and left one day, and ran off to sea to be a pirate... I kid you not! We know she really was a pirate in those "missing years" because she has since shown us her secret hoard of rare and primitive artefacts from the south seas. Jules has since then been working on "reclaiming" her mother as a kind of friend. Alexandra now lives up the road from us, although Riverblossom Hills was once too quiet and boring for her - or maybe it was just Jules' dad, the schoolteacher Gabe, who was just too quiet and boring for her! We are not quite sure what she does, and don't want to know, because it is probably something not quite legal; she shares a house with the Japanese professional studio musician Cleo Shibiku. Jules' dad Gabe has since found love with Cleo's former housemate, the sedate brunette Patricia Wan; he loves her because she is so unlike the fiery redhead Alexandra, who has been known to have the odd affair with married men even since her return from the high seas!
But Jules wasn't happy, while I was going steady with Sandra (Sandra's dad is the high-flying International Sim of Mystery, Morty Roth, who seems to have been the original inspiration for Ian Fleming's, and Sean Connery's, James Bond, and seems set to achieve his lifetime ambition of becoming a Space Pirate before his rapidly approaching retirement; Sandra is just starting out now, but she seems to want to follow in his footsteps, and they are big footsteps to fill!). I know Jules wasn't happy at this time, because Dad tells me he met her when we dined out at the Lucky Cards Shack in my first year of college, with my college buddy Gordon Kosmokos. Sandy bumped into Jules there, and wanted to scratch Jules' eyes out, and Jules was so upset, my dad had to try and cheer her up a bit!
Sandy, Jules and I all went to the local college, the Tower Academy, known locally, and somewhat sardonically, as "The Ivory Tower". At the start of my freshman year, I tried to do the frat. boy thing, and give hilarious parties; but my attempt at a dorm. party was a huge flop, and such a fizzer, I decided to give up the party-animal thing, and knuckle down, and become a nerd instead. So had Jules. We met up again in college, fell in love all over again, made out, and I lost my virginity to her, and she to me; one thing led to another, and we became engaged, and moved into double digs, and all in my freshman year!
Jules and I both majored in philosophy, because, for all the intra-faculty jokes about it only preparing us for the fast-food industry, it also trained us to use polysyllabic words with great aplomb, and we both have journalistic, and literary, aspirations! Pascal once said that all our troubles come from the fact that we do not know how to just sit quietly in a room. I am inclined to think he was right, because sometime after I had become engaged to Jules, I had an affair with Sandra - still a dazzling blonde at the time (not all gentlemen prefer blondes, but I certainly have a thing about them!) - and even moved in with her and her room-mate Emily Lee for a short while. For days, it seemed, she would not let me leave the bedroom; I was a very happy, and contented, prisoner of love... Jules went ballistic! She had it out with Sandra, and for a while I thought she would kill her, as I looked helplessly on from the sidelines, secretly flattered that they were fighting over little old ME! I didn't want either of them to die. I didn't want to lose either of them. I still don't.
Jules won the scrag-fight, so I was "legally" now her official property, and toyboy, lock, stock and barrel. I kept my head down, my nose clean, and my occasional visits to Sandra very discreet, so Jules would not know about them. In the meantime, Sandra had abandoned her original psych. major, and started studying lit. instead (with a view to following in her hero dad's footsteps), and, on the rebound from me, became involved in an intense lesbian affair with Emily, who had just been curious about all this sex-business, and wanted to find out what all the fuss was about! When SHE sprang Sandra with me one day, she was so upset, she stormed out, back to the dorm, and spent her last senior semester separated from Sandra, and trying to get over her, but still dreaming of her, and unable to let go... Now they are living together, with Sandra's dad, and her journalist mum Stella, from whom Sandy inherited her original platinum blonde looks. Despite the fact that she graduated with honours, and showed much promise in many disciplines, it took Emily a while to find any sort of job at all, and when she did, it was only as a blog writer, a very lowly step on the journalistic career ladder. Sandy had dropped out to be with her, and she has a similarly low-ranking job (spelunking) on her dad's adventuring career ladder.
My dad had quite high ambitions for me, but none at all for himself, it seems. As I said, he never got over the death of my mum Elena, and, even while I was at college, spent some time eking out an existence as lowlife scum, a mere pickpocket. He still LOOKS like lowlife scum (or the comic-book guy on the Simpsons!) with his greasy ponytail, perpetual five o'clock shadow and morbid obesity. He absolutely NEVER works out! But at least he has "gone straight" from his life of crime, unlike Jules' mum, presumably to make some sort of better role-model for me, as if I need one (!), and has taken to the gaming career instead. When Jules and I graduated from college, he did not nag us to get jobs straight away, presumably because he was preoccupied with rising to the status of gold farmer within that!
Catherine Viejo has since moved out of the old hacienda, to start up her own little love-nest with her elderly squeeze, Betty, a Jewish legal secretary, after the model of the two old lesbian ladies of Glebe House, in Robertson Davies' The Cunning Man, so there is much more room in the old hacienda, to be filled with more Martins, although Jules and I are in no hurry to do so... I am flat out giving every appearance of being a devoted fiance to Jules. Don't ask me to be a husband and father just yet!
I worry about the obesity genes I obviously inherit from my dad. Jules has had no trouble keeping in shape, and likes the husky, muscular jock-type. Unfortunately I will NEVER be one of those! But, like Sandra, I hate fatties, and, since I see in myself my father's tendency to precisely that, I don't mind working out, occasionally, in moderation, so I at least won't be too repulsive in the rare, stolen moments I still occasionally enjoy with Sandra. I must be careful Jules does not find out; Sandra must be careful Emily does not find out, which makes our moments together all the rarer and further between. Sandy knows I can only give her half my heart, because half of it belongs to Jules; I know Sandy can only give me half her heart, because half of it belongs to Emily. What Sandy and Emily get up to is no great concern to me; it is after all every guy's favorite fantasy, and I would love to be the proverbial fly on the wall! I can do the "metrosexual" thing and share the odd dirty joke with my gay friend Mitch, but shudder to think what he and his squeeze Max must be getting up to in the privacy of their... Never mind. Double standard? I guess so. Max and Mitch are still at college, by the way, soon to return to Riverblossom. Maybe all the lesbian partnerships that have become such a part of our community will smooth the way for their "queer-as-folk"-ness.
I forgot to tell you about Jules' other friendship, with yet another lesbian, the Satanic witch, Marla Biggs, also a graduate with honours, and medical doctor! Marla lives with a much older practising black witch called Jeannie, and I simply cannot comprehend what she sees in her! Jeannie still looks like a horribly withered, and malicious, old crone to me; maybe she knows the original secret of "glamour", which is actually a spell put on someone to bewitch them, and make them think you are terribly attractive, when you are not... Nor can I understand Sandy's little brother Xander, also still at college, falling for another geriatric, the Native American medicine woman and shaman Mrs Smoke, so-called because strange-smelling smoke is ALWAYS issuing from her chimney, and wanting to live with her when HE graduates, although Mrs Smoke is mildly more attractive than Jeannie at least, since she has the smooth, polished, weathered look of an old stone, or piece of driftwood, kind of ageless, and timeless really, with her silver braids...
But these are just some of the stories of Riverblossom Hills. In the meantime, Jules and I kicked back and started our first novels until we got jobs: Jules always says mine represents a "Magian world-view", which she circumscribes with words like "phantasmagoria" and "Arabian nights", and which she says ultimately derives from Spengler; this is a good thing, because it means I have fictionalised my real inspiration and muse sufficiently that she does not recognise it as Sandra, and me joking that, if I was the one who looked pregnant already, it was because we had two "babies" on the way, only her brain-child is more clear-eyed and dispassionate than mine, and celebrates what she calls the Great Justice, which we do not dish out ourselves, but every Sim gets, in the form of what comes to them!
Do we deserve what we get coming to us? My dad and I both got struck by lightning at the same time, just after I had moved home from college; it literally scared the crap out of me, and was a horribly embarrassing little "accident"!
Jules and I now both have reasonably respectable journalistic jobs, as obituary writers. At least we don't have to start out writing horoscopes, although SOMEONE has to churn out that crap peddled by the tabloids! At least you get to research real, if dead, people, when writing obits. We know quite a bit about real, if dead, people, because we had to study "old dead guys who thought stuff" at college. And it definitely beats the ultimate spectre of getting stuck in some dead-end job in the fast food industry, which they always said at college ultimately awaited us... I am still nearly as paunchy as dad, for all my efforts to shift the flab, for Sandy's, Jules' and my own sakes. Mind you, I did maximise the cooking skill, if only because I was a couch potato who enjoyed watching the cooking channel in my spare moments between assignments, while Jules was flat out becoming uber-charismatic, and we are both uber-creative types! Maybe I should start chomping on a cigar, so I can look suitably scowly and jowly, like Orson Wells in Citizen Kane, in anticipation of the day Jules and I presumably both become media magnates together...
I love Jules to death, and can't get enough of her, especially since she dyed her hair platinum blonde (Sandy has since dyed her hair brown, and paints her face with little hippie-stars and flower-decals, to cater to Emily's tastes!).
"But why did Pip never stop yearning for Estella?" is a question that still haunts me. (From one of Sandy's last term papers, while still at college). I, perhaps more than any Sim, already know all about "great expectations", and how we can't always get we want, no matter what we do. I still want both Jules and Sandy, and that is just not going to happen.
Why do I not stop yearning for Sandra, when I have Jules?
I'll see Jules tonight, when the car pool drops us both back home.
When will I get a chance to enjoy a sweet, stolen moment with Sandy again?

Sims2 Tarot: King of Wands

http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/story_detail.php?asset_id=244647&asset_type=story&user_id=2972270

Spidereal Monkey: the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Tarot

Glitterati is resurrected, and back, in Yahoo games (literati)!!!

Interesting dream last night, if scary: Bjorn Erik was cutting off my feet; not really painful, but I felt anxious about how many more body parts he would remove, before there was nothing left of me at all! ;-P

Shibboleth: a new meaning for an ancient word?

Shibboleth is a word that is often misused, and misunderstood, although in its proper English meaning it can have its uses, and I suggest one here (it went over the heads of literati gamers, but then I over-estimated the average IQ of the room? lol)

It comes from the Bible, Judges 12:6, in which the Hebrews use it as a test-word to distinguish the fleeing Ephraimites. How does this have relevance in the cyber-age, I hear you ask?

Since it denotes a word or sound which a person cannot pronounce correctly, a word used for detecting foreigners, I propose it in its proper meaning as a new word for those "word verification thingies" online, for which I had never before thought of a single descriptive word!

Alternatively, you could also use it to denote the jocular urging by Aussies of Kiwis to say "fish and chips", to betray their NZ origin! lol

The Wyrd of Words

Reading Julian Burnside's Word Watching: field notes from an amateur philologist has just re-kindled my juvenile passion (I did not know then one could call it amateur philology!), so this Sunday afternoon I choose to spend recalling some interesting snippets, and compiling them here.

• Pedal was once an adjective, deriving from the pedal pipes of an organ, i.e. those played by the foot.
• Admiral, despite its form, does not derive from admire, although for a short time in the 17thC it did mean admirable. In fact it derives from the Arabic amir al bahr: commander of the sea.
• Bridegroom also gives a false idea of its origins. A groom is a person who attends to animals, especially horses, by currying and feeding them. The original bridegroom was the Anglo-Saxon brydguma: bride man. It gradually shifted to brydgome, becoming conflated with groom (attendant).
• To curry favour <> (French), meaning to curry a horse of brownish or reddish yellow. In a 12thC story, this represented fraud or deceit, so the moral of the story was not to curry favour, i.e. waste care and effort on a deceiver. In English, fauvel become misunderstood as favour...
• The very Spanish word flamenco in fact was once a disparaging term for natives of Flanders.
• The Spanish word batador (one who administers a beating, or the instrument used for that purpose) came into English and became battledore (a paddle-shaped instrument used for beating clothes in washing, and also the flat-ended instrument used for placing loaves in the oven; the game we now call shuttlecock was called battledore and shuttlecock until the end of the 19thC.
• Venison originally meant any animal hunted for meat.
• Leveret = a young hare; grice = a young hog, if still sucking; a young weaned hog = a shoat. Pups = also baby rats or dragons. Eyas = a young hawk. Poult = young turkey or domestic chicken. Young cod = codling or sprag, or scrod. Elver = a baby eel. Young salmon = sprag or parr, then smolt, then grisle, and alevin. Spat = the spawn of oysters and other bivalves.
• Dasypodid = pertaining to armadillos. Vespertilian = pertaining to bats. Vituline = pertaining to calves. Pithecoid and simian => monkeys; pongid => gorillas and orang utans.
• Coleridge's albatross was more likely a pelican, deriving from the Portuguese alcatras; the notorious US prison derives its name from the large pelican colony there.
• Abaciscus = a square compartment enclosing part or whole of the design of a Mosaic pavement.
• Denariate = a piece of land worth a penny a year.
• Holluschickie = young males of the northern or Alaska fur seal.
• Turdiform = having the form or appearance of a thrush.
• We need an equivalent of the Italian magari ('Ah but that it were so').
• Bail up comes originally from dairy farming and was adopted ad hoc by Australian bushrangers. The bail was the frame used for holding the cow's head during milking; the farmer would tell her to "bail up" when he pushed her into the bail. By the time of Ned Kelly, it came to mean a demand for submission to another's will.
• For some reason, Australians also have a lot of slang terms for cicadas: cad, baker, floury baker, floury miller, green Monday, yellow Monday, miller, mealyback, red eye and double drummer.
• In 1791, "sparrow-grass" was so common a term, that its more correct version, asparagus, sounded stiff and pedantic.
• Miniature does not primarily refer small size, but rather "the action or process of rubricating letters or of illuminating a manuscript".
• Quantum leap has come to mean a very large change in amount, position or attitude; in fact, according to Max Planck who coined it, it refers to the smallest change in position possible in the known universe!
• Cyber derives originally from the Greek kubernetos, meaning steersman, which also gives us our English words gubernatorial, and related cognates.
• A parting shot was originally a Parthian shot. In 55 BC, ineffectual Roman general Crassus was defeated by the Parthians with the following tactic: they let fly a volley of arrows, then turned in retreat. Thinking their resources exhausted, the Romans followed, only to meet yet another volley unexpectedly.
• Bandicoot derives from the Telugu pandi-kokku, meaning pig-rat.
• The Australian plonk, meaning cheap wine, derives from the French vin blanc, although plonk can just as easily, and more usually, be red!
• Seersucker <>shir o shakkar, literally 'milk and sugar'.
• Do-si-do, as in square dancing, <>dos-a-dos, back to back.
• Nickname <> (or supplementary name).
• Penthouse < Old French pentis, a lean-to or covered walkway.
• Collective nouns: a skein of geese, when in flight (a gaggle on the ground); a skulk of foxes; a hover of trout; a drift of hogs; an exaltation of larks; a bouquet of pheasants (when they break cover in front of hunters); a murder of crows; a rafter of turkeys; a fall of woodcocks; a murmuration of starlings; a dule of doves; a cast of hawks; a deceit of lapwings; an ostentation of peacocks; an unkindness of ravens; a host of sparrows; a congregation of plovers; a mustering of storks; a flight of swallows; a watch of nightingales; a parliament of owls. A pod of seals; a gam of whales; a sloth of bears; a gang of elk; a crash of rhinoceroses; a barren of mules; a shrewdness of apes; a rout of wolves. And among humankind: a school of clerks, a sentence of judges, an eloquence of lawyers, a subtlety of sergeants (at law), a prudence of vicars, an obeisance of servants, a cutting of cobblers, a bleach of suitors (same as cobblers), a misbelieving of painters, a worship of writers, a superfluity of nuns, a herd of harlots, a scolding of seamstresses.
• Vietnam doublespeak: collateral damage = killing innocent civilians; removal with extreme prejudice = assassination; energetic disassembly = nuclear explosion; limited duration protective reaction air strikes = bombing villages in Vietnam; incontinent ordnance = bombs that hit schools and hospitals by mistake; active defence = invasion.
• Bushisms: "more and more of our imports come from overseas"; and my personal favorite: "French is a silly language: it has no word for entrepreneur"! lol
• Fart was more or less polite language until the 18thC. A fizzle = a close fart (1598). Interestingly enough, the French petard, which survives in our phrase 'hoist with his own petard', also means a fart!
• Originally naughty meant having nothing, needy, from naught/nought. Then it came to mean wicked, i.e. morally bankrupt, in the King James Bible. Shakespeare also used it to convey real wickedness. I.e. at least until the end of the 16thC, it was probably safer to call someone a fart or a turd, than suggest they were naughty!
• English has no single word for the act of sexual intercourse, other than fuck (think about it: for such a popular pastime, this makes it really difficult to talk about!) lol
• Poppycock <>(Dutch).
• Nice originally meant stupid, from the Latin nescius, ignorant. Shakespeare did not use it much, because it had acquired such a weight of ambiguous meanings by his time!
• Pedigree < foot of the crane (French), referring to the shape of old diagrams of pedigrees.
• Philtrum = the vertical groove from the nose to the upper lip, in case you wondered (and haven't we all?).
• Strait-laced = literally, someone with the tendency to tie their stay-laces too tightly.
• Halcyon days = literally the 14 days of calm around the midwinter solstice, interestingly, associated in mythology with the kingfisher, who gets its biological name from this.
• A clew or clue = first and foremost, a ball of string or twine, as in the thread Ariadne gave to Theseus to guide him through the labyrinth.
• Tawdry lace <> once a sign of real finery (she attributed her death by throat cancer to the vanity of wearing a silken lace around her neck). Tinsel also derives from the old French etincelle, a spark, which we also get in scintillate.
• They and their have a long and respectable history as a third-person singular, non-gender-specific pronoun, so advocates of political correctness, take heart: you may use it as a substitute for his or her, no matter what the grammatical purists say!
• Being baffled was originally a very dishonorable punishment meted out to dishonorable knights; I will spare you the sordid details: look it for yourself, if you must!
• Some obsolete Aussie slang: kangaroo feathers = a furphy, an impossible thing; Anzac button = a nail used in place of a button; camel dung = an Egyptian cigarette; throw a seven = to die; throw a six and a half = to almost die; Anzac stew = an urn of hot water and bacon rind; Anzac wafer = a very hard biscuit; Anzac soup = water in a shell-hole polluted by a corpse (ew! this has to be the foulest and most grisly I have encountered yet!) ;-P
• Tabloid was originally copyrighted by Burroughs, Wellcome & co of London to refer to
  the handy size of their pharmaceutical products

Stranger than fiction

> Stranger than Fiction

>> Harold Crick (Will Farrell) is an IRS auditor who almost
> compulsively measures, quantifies and rationalizes his life.
> Suddenly, he becomes aware of a voice narrating his
> life, "accurately and with a better vocabulary." The voice is that
> of a writer we learn is struggling with writer's block (Emma
> Thompson), mostly about the best way to make Harold die. When Harold
> overhears his impending doom, he takes action, and eventually makes
> his way to a professor of literary theory (Dustin Hoffman), who
> helps him understand the implications of the narrative life he is
> leading. The main story line seems to be around a woman he is
> auditing, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Realizing he could die at any
> moment, Harold begins to break free of his limited, orderly life,
> and joins Gyllenhaal in a romantic relationship. He tracks down
> Thompson and confronts her with the truth: if she writes about his
> death, then he will die. But Hoffman is convinced the novel must be
> written as intended, and Thompson herself is ambivalent. Crick
> himself reads the novel and encourages her to keep the original
> ending, which would kill him.

Interesting; kind of reminds me of the real-life/fictional interaction between J.K.Rowling and Harry Potter. Since she had resolved, arbitrarily or not, to have no more than seven books in the series, in the seventh he came closer than ever to finally "dying" once and for all; this possibility really upset me, for one, as I would have liked to see HP "grow up" out of perpetual adolescence! J.K. herself seemed determined to kill him off, but her millions of child readers prevailed, and "saved" Harry from premature death; he also lives on, as per the end of the Deathly Hallows, in my Sims game! lol

So maybe Harry did also come to experience that kind of real-life/fictional transcendence, or liberation, which we also see in The Truman Show, in which Harold Crick's compulsion to "script" his own life is seen completely externalised in the "evil" (gnostic demiurge) director Christof; Truman himself also came perilously close to dying, in the "reality TV show of his life", remember, until he finally also managed to escape, by literally smashing through the boundary between fiction and real life... ;-))

Not as "funny" as some of Jim Carrey's other movies, but infinitely deeper, and I have always thought it some kind of gnostic epiphany in itself (my hubby thought so too, and he normally could not stand Jim Carrey!) ;-))

Another novel that explores the boundaries between reality and fiction is Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaardner, also for younger readers, the more philosophically inclined and/or the more philosophically inclined among younger readers! I for one have always wanted to write a sequel to Sophie's World, which for some reason I imagine as beginning on a plane, leaving Bangkok, where she finds herself seated next to Thomas Merton (!), bound for Alaska, where he always imagined his "ideal hermitage", and perhaps a bit of "northern exposure"...? hehe

Then again it might also be fun to make a sequel to the Truman Show, if more cinematically inclined; does Truman make it to Fiji, I wonder? And does he catch up with his childhood sweetheart, who helped him escape Christof, along with all of us, as we sat on the edges of our seats, rooting for him? ;-))