Props Boy and the Day I Learnt I am not Cool

   During the 90's in New Zealand, there was a children's television programme called What Now. Technically, it's still going, but I haven't watched it since 2004-ish so as not to spoil my wonderful nostalgic memories. (Also my cousin was talking to me about it about a month ago and told me it has changed considerably from the format I remember.)

   As a kiddie, I loved that show. It had wacky presenters (Caro, Jase, Shavaughn, Props Boy etc) awesome cartoons (I remember it was where I was first introduced to Courage the Cowardly Dog) and a bizarre serial acted by Barbies called Serial Stuff which I loved for some reason.

I always wanted to know what Props Boy looked like with the hat off. Well now I know. Also while researching this, I learnt he's in a fairly mediocre band. Well, I lie. I always thought "Ways to Run" was an alright song.

   Anyway, only some of this is relevant to the traumatic childhood story I'm about to tell you.

   One segment they had on What Now was reading out the super cool letters that kids had sent into them. It was my absolute life goal as a six year old to write them a letter and have it read it out on the show. It would be almost like being New Zealand famous, to my six year old mind at least. So every Sunday morning while watching the show, I'd get out my half-dried up felt pens and my crummy Rose Art Crayons and try to write them a decent letter.

   I wasn't stupid. Well, not entirely. I knew in order to make my letter stand out, it had to have cool things like glitter and colour and stickers. I didn't have any of those and Rose Art was not going to cut it. I decided all I could do was try to draw the presenters of the show and hope my pathetic portrait would at least gain sympathy points. Well, that and some nice "decorations". I decided, in order to show how super cool I was, I'd draw awesome symbols in the margins like stars, hearts, and this really awesome spiral-looking thing I'd seen scrawled in permanent marker on one of the desks at my primary school. My mum looked over my shoulder to see what I was drawing, and immediately snatched up the letter, demanding to know why I was drawing swastikas all over it.

   Six year old me was wonderfully sheltered, and had no idea what a swastika was, or Nazis, or Hitler, or any of that. I just thought it was a cool square-ish spiral- and to be fair, for thousands of years it was, in many cultures, before Nazis adopted it as theirs. Regardless, my mother was well aware that it was not appropriate for children's television, and sat me down and explained to me in excrutiating detail about what the holocaust was.

   That was the last time I ever tried to write to What Now. I wonder if I could send them a letter now, and maybe win some stickers or a tshirt. I don't think they let adults enter though. What a shame.

Bonus: I found a small part of Serial Stuff and none of it makes sense.

Mr Whippy's Long Awaited Return to Fernhill

   I think it’s been close to fifteen years since I last heard “Greensleeves” (yes, that’s the icecream truck song) echoing through the suburb I grew up in. Well. We’re surrounded by hills. Everything echoes here. Regardless, yesterday the waves of nostalgia and Greensleeves drifted through my window. Holy wow. MR WHIPPY HAD RETURNED TO FERNHILL.

   The street I had grown up on was a small residential street that leads to nowhere, and has nothing but small, family houses. The most exciting things that happened there was a stranger danger incident from when I was quite small (I blame Barney the dinosaur) and Mr Whippy paying us occasional visits. If my mum was in a good mood and had some coins on her, I was allowed to go buy myself an ice-cream. But only the vanilla one with rainbow sprinkles. The other ones were too expensive.

Bane of my childhood.

   It became almost an expectation over the summer- that Mr Whippy would come up my otherwise uneventful street and cold tasty fun would be had. It was a marvellous arrangement. I mean, sure, we had ice cream at home. Heck, we even had rainbow sprinkles at home. (For fairybread purposes, of course.) But it just tasted better from the back of the icecream truck. Which, even I’ll admit in hindsight, sounds dodgy as hell.

   I don’t remember when Mr Whippy stopped coming. But over time, he slowly disappeared.

   In fact, I’d almost forgotten about Mr Whippy until a few weeks ago when I was skyping my friend Dom. Suddenly I heard a familiar sound in the background- Greensleeves! Shortly after, his dad entered with an icecream. Hurrah. He got one with the chocolate top (which I was never allowed) which showed that clearly, his parents love him more. Or have more disposable income than mine did. Close enough.

   I was slightly envious, but I thought that was that, and it was just that he lives in a more populated area than myself, and that Mr Whippy was a regular occurance for him.

   I was sitting in my bedroom, writing a blog post about how I swear I’ll write something decent soon when I heard it.

   Da- da- da- da- dee-dee- da- dee-da…

   Greensleeves!

   Mr Whippy had returned to Fernhill. As if to taunt me, he parked right outside my house. How I had missed him! How delicious ice cream would be at last!

   Alas. I had no money on me.  There was only one solution.

“Muuuuum! Mr Whippy’s back!”

“Yeah, I know…”

“Um, do you have any coinage I can borrow?”

“Coinage, yup. Borrow, nope.”

   And that is why I haven’t had Mr Whippy in fifteen years.

Why Disney's The Lion King is the Greatest Movie Ever

   Look, I grew up on this stuff since before I can remember. Actually I can remember some things about when I first saw Lion King. I was rather young, so I cannot accurately recall what I thought of the plot, the characterisation or the fact that the actor who voices Mufasa is so perfectly cast that if anyone else had done so, I may have not even liked the movie at all (and I love Lion King) but I do remember the day I first went to see it in the cinema. Because that’s how you saw movies back in the day before you just downloaded them off the internet and watched them when you were bored.

   I went to the movie with a girl called Lasmai, who was my best friend at the time. I remember we had a popcorn fight throughout the entire advertisement section at the beginning and getting severely reprimanded by my mother. Or her mother. Or whoever’s mother was burdened with the task of looking after us while we were at the movies. I remember little else except thinking the songs were cool, and crying once (oh no, spoiler alert!) Mufasa died in the stampede. I can’t think of a single child that does not cry during that scene. I can think of a few adults who still cry when they watch that bit. (Well, William and I do. But it’s so sad.)

I'm not even taking the piss now. I still cry in that scene. He just lost his dad, fuck you Scar!

    From that moment on in my young life, I was obsessed with lions. They were my favourite animal ever, the first exhibit I had to go see when I went to the zoo, I could recite a million and one facts about lions, and for my seventh birthday, I remember one girl giving me a present wrapped in lion wrapping paper, and I cannot even remember what she gave me, I just remember the lions.

   At the same time, I developed an obsession with all things Lion King. Our neighbours had the soundtrack on cassette tape (yes, cassette tape) and we made a copy of it. Every single car trip as a child, we were damn well listening to The Lion King, when my mum took me to the video store to hire a movie, we were hiring The Lion King, whenever I played with my toys we were re-enacting the opening scene where Rafiki is presenting the young cub Simba to the kingdom. I played Rafiki, if you want to know.

   My parents even ordered a custom-made Lion King book, with my name printed in it, for Christmas one year. I was stoked.

   While I was belting out more Elton John hits than a gay Idol-contestant, I still refused to watch that one scene where Mufasa dies. I would run out of the room and yell at my mum to come and get me once the hyenas come back in to chase Simba away from the pridelands. She called me silly every time, but I still couldn’t watch it without crying. Poor Simba, all alone in the world, having to leave behind his family even though he was still so young.

   Yeah, I can see a link between The Lion King and adoption. Perhaps that is why it affected me so profoundly from such a young age. It actually came up the other weekend when I was staying at my brother’s.
   We were watching The Lion King 1.5 which is pretty much the same thing as the first one, but from Timon and Pumbaa’s point of view. (Hey, why not milk the cash cow, the original is still a quality movie.) When Simba comes to them, there’s a particular line of Timon’s:

It does sound rather daunting.

   Then suddenly, William and I had a moment of revelation- Timon and Pumbaa are gay! Our other small discovery was that Simba was pretty much adopted by them. This is actually pretty cute. I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of Lion King 1.5 as William and I were too busy making adoption jokes to pay much notice.


   PS- Just so you know- I get to make adoption jokes. It’s one of the few advantages that come with being adopted.

The Washing Machine

Yesterday, I attended the Dan Davin creative writing workshop provided through my high school. We had Helen Lowe, a fantasy and sci-fi author talk to us about writing, and take us through a few exercises to develop our skills. The first exercise was to remember back to a time when we were young and experienced fear, and to write about our experience. This is the earliest clear memory I have of being afraid, perhaps when I was three or four, and terrified of a washing machine. Also, she had us writing in stream of consciousness (where we just keep writing, do not take our pen off the page and do not edit it as we write, which is useful for getting emotions and ideas out) so I apologise for any errors or rambling.

   I don’t remember how old I was. Let’s just say, very young. I had some unusual fears- almost to the point of being ridiculously OCD about some things, like making sure I never ate the red M&Ms before any of the other colours, for instance. I wasn’t afraid of dogs or the older boys who lived down the street. I didn’t have many rational fears. However, as far as irrational fears went, well… I was deathly afraid of our washing machine.

   The thing was probably ancient, but I just remember it being gleaming and white, and when I sat my petite self at its base, it appeared to stretch up forever. Not that I’d sit anywhere near it if it was on. It was noisy and grumpy, and would thump thump thump as it cleaned our clothes.


I was 98% sure that the washing machine was put in our house with the sole purpose of murdering me. I hated it. I’d run outside and hide in my sandpit and hope that the damn thing never became capable of moving from place to place.


Its method of murder? I hadn’t really thought that far ahead, but I think I believed that it would somehow intentionally fall on me and crush me, and hours later my poor mother would come into the laundry and see the murderous machine on its side, with little evidence of me but for my tiny legs sticking out from underneath. It was not a pleasant thought.


   Later on, I began to have nightmares about the washing machine. These tied in with the other nightmares I’d been having- about the monkey bars at the Fernhill Road playground (my father had encouraged me to play on them when I was very young and I fell off and decided they were also part of a plot to murder me) and of the dragonmonster that lived at the bottom of the garden. (Where it most likely still resides- although as I moved from that house a good ten years ago now, I can’t confirm this.) I used to have nightmares about sitting outside, at the other end of the garden (where the dragonmonster wasn’t) and hearing the sound of the washing machine starting. The panic would rise in my throat and I would look around for my mother or my father or some form of comfort, but I was alone. Once it got to the thump thump thump stage of the washing cycle, all chance of escape had been lost. The nightmare would always end the same way. My father would come and ask me if I wanted to go play on the monkey bars, and just as I was thinking about how ineffective his persuasive technique was, the washing machine would slowly fall out of the sky to crush us both.


   Of course, it never quite reached us by the time I awoke from this nightmare. But the horror of seeing a gigantic appliance falling out of the sky to attempt to murder you by crushing is in itself a purely horrific experience. However, the utter joy of my situation was that I had the absolute pleasure of this nightmare being a recurring dream. Night after night after night, I was nearly murdered by a piece of whiteware.

What Do Wasps Contribute to Society? (Nothing)

   When I was eleven, my mother used to give me little fruit jellies to take to school in my lunchbox. My favourite was raspberry and pear, mostly because red was my favourite colour and pears were my favourite fruit. Raspberries have never been a favourite of mine however. There is a raspberry bush just outside my rapisty bedroom window and sometimes when boyfriend comes to see me, he’s far more interested in leaning out the window and picking berries than he is in me. Anyway, I’m rambling again.
   When I was eleven, I used to sit outside the primary school library because it was in the sun, and after I’d eaten I could easily dash inside and pretend to be engrossed in a book because I had no friends. The unfortunate aspect of the library, however, was that it was where the wasps also liked to hang out. Gah.

   Raspberry and pear jelly, libraries, wasps, and me. You can already see where this is going, can’t you?

   I was stung on the face. Twice. Thus began my utter phobia of wasps.

   In Year 11 (when I was around 15 or 16, for our international readers) my maths class was the place where all the wasps wanted to be in the summer months. The teacher very kindly sat me by the window, which, unbeknownst to her, did not help the matter at all. Anyway, the bloody things insisted on flying around my head. And yeah. Yeah I screamed. Loudly. And everyone laughed at me and made buzzing noises for the next two weeks. Yeah. Thanks guys.

   Just yesterday, when trying to put a plastic bag in an “alfresco waste receptacle” (rubbish bin) a bloody wasp came out and chased me for a solid five minutes. This incident, naturally, got me wondering.

   Well, I’d like to start off by saying I take biology at school. Actually, I do so by correspondence now, because it clashed with Drama, and I didn’t want to drop either subject. But, due to my biology background (ha!) I figured I could provide a decent investigation.

   My Second (Non) Scientific Investigation: Are Wasps Useful?

   No. No they are not. That is all.

   No, that was not scientific, but damnit, do we really need science to tell us those bastards are evil and after our soul?

Calici the Rabbit and Friends

So today, my dear mother decided to have a garage sale. And by that, I mean she decided a week ago and the thing was today, but anyway. So we’ve spent the past few days sorting through junk in the garage, deciding whether or not to sell it, and putting on the little yellow price stickers.



Pictured: a freaking pain in the behind. It's hard enough just trying to get them out of the little dispenser.



While searching through the masses of junk and slowly getting covered in yellow stickers, I came across three toys of great significance in my childhood:

• A small, multicoloured elephant
• A blue magnadoodle
• A white rabbit (or, at least, it was white once. It was now a murky grey.)

Bam went the wave of nostalgia, and thus, I bring you more traumatising childhood memories…


The small, multicoloured elephant:

One of my earliest memories was of the day my birthmother and my brother William came to visit- David can’t have existed by this point, so I can’t have been that old. I remember him being a picky eater and refusing to eat the onions on his pizza. I also remember playing on the couch with him. I’m not sure exactly what we were playing. It appeared to be some sort of horrible murderous death game in which William kept dying. (This was nothing to do with me. He was, and still is considerably stronger than me.) Anyway, overprotective of him as ever, it was Super-Elephant to the rescue. I’m not entirely sure how Super-Elephant rescues dead Williams, but I do remember that Super-Elephant’s main form of transportation was using his ears like Dumbo to fly towards my brother, who miraculously came back to life, only to die again by launching himself of the couch like a lemming. Only it turns out lemmings are not suicidal and that the famous footage was created by throwing them off a cliff. Make that two Disney references thus far in my post.



No, I do not really know what lemmings look like. In every other regard, however, the scene looked exactly like this.




The Blue Magnadoodle


Magnadoodles were a little like Etch-a-Sketches back in the day, but with more scope for creative expression, mostly because rather than using little knobs, you were provided with a magnet pen which allowed you to create intriguing, thought-provoking artwork. For example:

It was the shiz.



The (formerly) white rabbit

It was a gift given to me when I was little, so little that I forget who gave it to me or the circumstances surrounding it. I do know that it was shortly after seeing Alice in Wonderland (Disney reference number three) on video, which I hadn't particularly enjoyed, that I received it, as I was originally going to name it "The White Rabbit." (Originality was not my strong point at that stage of my life.) Even then, however, I didn't like the name.

Shortly after, we went to stay with my Aunt Diana for a few days. Now, this was around '96 or '97, at any rate, during the heyday of the Calici virus. For those of you that are somewhat uneducated, it would pay to do a little googling. At any rate, it was a virus that caused bunnies to die somewhat horrible deaths, which was good news for the farmers, because rabbits are a pest. I'd heard it been talked about on the news a little, although I was far too young to comprehend what any of it meant. So when Diana suggested I name the toy bunny Calici, I thought it was a beautiful name for a rabbit. Which just goes to show what sort of a childhood I had.


   At any rate, the garage sale is over, and I made a total of $24, which I will probably blow on either cocaine, hookers, or cheese. Except I can't afford cocaine or hookers, nor do I have an interest in them very much, so cheese it shall be.

Hurrah!

Oh the memories!

   Still having problems getting those pics up.

  Anyway, I just wanted to link to something amazing, because it truly made my (sick) day.

  The Very Hungry Caterpillar in food form.

   Feel free to thank me.

Stranger Danger

   Being a child of the nineties, I grew up with Barney the Dinosaur on television. That cheerful purple creature attempted to teach us morals and values such as kindness and caring. And he was so enthusiastic about it that the show would generally end with a song and dance number. Metaphorically speaking, he was something of a god to me when I was little.

   One day, Barney tried to teach us nineties kids about Stranger Danger. This was when I was probably around three or four, at any rate probably before I'd started school. From what I remember (though this is going way back, of course) Barney told us that if a stranger (which, as he explained was just someone we didn't know) in a car offered us lollies, we should say no and go tell a parent or trusted adult. He also told us that it is dangerous to talk to strangers because we don't know them. So, in a nutshell, basic Stranger Danger for kids. Simple, right? How could a kid watch that and get the wrong message?

   I was a weird kid.

   At this same age, my mum kept introducing me to a lot of people- distant relatives, family friends, well known people in the community (local police, people from church, school teachers etc.) All adults. I don't think I really made an effort at such a young age to remember who these people were- they were adults and adults were boring because they didn't play with me, they just talked to my mum so I would get bored and start being obnoxious. Anyway, whenever we saw these people again my mum would say, "You remember the nice policeman we talked to the other day/ my cousin we went to visit when we were on holiday/ the girl that I told you I went to school with?" And I would just blankly stare at them, completely unable to remember (out of sheer disinterest), realise I was being rude and nod politely instead. As a result of this, I was somewhat confused as to what a stranger actually was, because although Barney had said that a stranger was someone you don't know, I was confused about who I did and didn't know because all these adults that my mum insisted I did know and I had met. I couldn't remember ever meeting them or knowing them. How on earth could a small girl tell which people were the strangers and which were the people that I was supposed to know?

   At the time, we lived on a small suburban street. Not really a street either. It didn't really lead to anywhere. As these were "simpler times" my parents were happy to let my friends and I play on the area of the footpath that was just outside my house- not many people came past anyway so were reasonably safe.We had a letterbox that at the time was covered in ivy and I thought it looked magical. My friends and I would sometimes play pretend that it was a stable for our My Little Ponies.

Back in the day.

   One day, when I was still very little, a friend and I were playing out on the path outside my house when a man walked past. I wasn't sure if I know him from somewhere or not- he might have be a stranger! Having been educated by a friendly purple dinosaur, I figured it was best to find out, just to be on the safe side.

   "Excuse me, but are you a stranger? 'Cause Barney the dinosaur says not to talk to strangers."

   I don't even remember how the man reacted to such interrogation from a small child. That man probably wasn't a pedophile. And he wasn't in a car, so he couldn't have lured me there with confectionery. But I bet he never watched Barney in the mornings.

   Barney would've been proud of me that day.