I'Ll Go Home Then, It's Warm and Has Chairs. The Unpublished Emails. -
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From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 June 2011 10.59am
To: Holly Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Amazon order
It's not a jumpsuit, it's a flight suit. Discovery doesn't jump into orbit.
I purchased an Omega Speedmaster Professional. Apparently it keeps terrible time, can't get wet, has to be wound daily and its Hesalite crystal face scratches in a mild breeze, but it was the first watch worn on the moon.
Buzz Aldrin wore the exact model during the Apollo 11 mission and it has the words 'Flight qualified by NASA for all manned space missions' stamped into the back. It also has a tachymeter.
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From: Holly Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 June 2011 11.14am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Amazon order
That will come in handy the next time someone asks "Has anybody got a tachymeter?" I don't care if it was the first watch worn on the sun, $2,280 is a ridiculous amount of money to pay for a watch even if it has a tachymeter.
We're supposed to be saving money, not buying everything that has the NASA logo stuck on it.
I'm going to get home one day and find a space shuttle in the driveway and you sitting inside wearing your jumpsuit. When I didn't finish my food at Jalisco's last night you said "There are children in Africa who would kill for that taco."
How does a $2,280 watch fit in with your newfound altruism?
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From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 June 2011 11.33am
To: Holly Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Amazon order
I'm pretty sure the kids in Africa would want me to have the watch. And given the choice between a watch and a taco, I doubt any African child would choose the watch. It's not as if they have business meetings to attend or need to know when it is dinner time.
They could probably use a kayak though. When asked "what's the time?" by passersby, they would reply, from beneath the shade of their new kayak, "Why? Are you late for a business meeting?" and the passersby would respond, "Sarcasm is the lowest form of... is that a taco?"
I'm also fairly sure that if I showed the African kids the watch and asked, "Should I have sent you a cheque instead?" they would reply, "No, charity is detrimental unless it helps the recipient become independent of it. Besides, I'd rather have a taco.” They would probably then ask what the tachymeter is for and I would have to admit that I have no idea.
While I am all for altruism, it shouldn't entail exclusive concern for the welfare of others over one's own needs. It is all about balance; I ate all of my tacos so I get a watch. Which, incidently, was actually only $2,100. As it retails for nearly $4000, this means I have effectively saved us nineteen-hundred dollars. If I were to do this every week, by the end of the year we would have saved 4.7 million dollars. We could purchase as much altruism as we want with that kind of cash. And jetpacks. It's good to try new things.
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From: Holly Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 June 2011 11.41am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Amazon order
4.7 million? Even with a space watch I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for NASA to call as they probably prefer their astronauts to be capable of basic math. If we were in space and ground control asked you to plot the trajectory for re-entry, we would burn.
If the watch was only $2,100, what did you buy with the other $180? And does it also have a NASA logo on it?
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From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 June 2011 11.44am
To: Holly Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Amazon order
No, the extra $180 was for a pair of G-Star pants.
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From: Holly Thorne
Date: Thursday 9 June 2011 11.47am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Amazon order
Did Buzz Aldrin wear them on the moon?
The horn in the grill procedure
Step 1
Purchase one of those horn things that roll out when you blow into them. You have to get the ones that make a loud “brawwww” sound, not the stupid ones that you blow into and they are just a tube that makes no noise. This time around, I accidently bought the kind that don’t make the noise but as there is no sound in the book, I will just pretend that the one shown above is the kind that makes the noise. If you are going to carry on about the availability of the ones that make the noise, a plastic whistle will do. It’s really not that complicated.
To describe the horn in the grill procedure, I probably could have just said “You hide a horn/whistle in the grill” but cutting things up, rolling poster-putty and taking photographs, made it look like I was busy. During the process, My partner Holly asked if I wanted to go with her to Target to buy a shoe cupboard but, unfortunately, the horn/whistle/grill photographs weren’t going to take themselves.
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Step 2
Cut the bit off that rolls out when you blow into the horn.
You can throw that bit away unless you have another project or something you are working on that requires it.
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Step 3
Roll a blob of poster-putty around the horn. I had originally written the product name Blutac® in place of poster-putty but Americans have different names for things so I changed it to Plasticine but then I wasn’t sure if that was even a real word so I wrote poster-putty instead.
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Step 3
Squeeze the blob encircled horn/whistle, with the end you blow into facing outwards, into the front grill of a car belonging to somebody that has annoyed you / likes Nickelback.
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Step 4
Check the horn is not visible. When the driver of the vehicle reaches a speed of around fifty, air flowing into the horn opening will cause it to make the noise until the vehicle slows down.
When they get out to check where the noise is coming from, it will have stopped.
Free Oprah Winfrey Halloween mask
Left it too late to find a costume for that upcoming Halloween party? Simply photocopy this page (enlarging 400%), cut around the lines indicated, and attach a piece of string.
Ten reasons I probably shouldn’t be alive: stuffed animals
I have never really been ‘into’ fast cars. I can appreciate the ‘design icon’ merits of the Porche 911 and the sophistication of cars like BMW and Mercedes, but I would feel like a complete prat driving one. I’m not pretending I’m a safe or patient driver, quite the opposite, I passed my driving test by bribing the test officer with a hundred dollars and the knowledge that others on the road might be as an unqualified as I am results in not respect and courtesy for other drivers, but fear. Practically everyone I know owns a driver’s license and not one of them should realistically be allowed to operate a tap unsurpervised let alone heavy mobile machinery. If I was rich, I would drive a tank to work.
At the last agency I worked for, my boss Thomas drove a ridiculously small convertible sports car, called a Smart® Roadster, and I would refuse to go to with client meetings with him unless the roof was up. He told me once that girls throw their numbers into his car at traffic lights but the only time I drove with him with the top down, in minus degree weather with his scarf flapping, people at traffic lights looked down at us from their normal sized veh
icles and laughed. We pulled up next to a school bus at one stage and a child wrote ‘Gay’ on a piece of paper and held it up to the window.
I have been in a total of four vehicle accidents. The first occurred when I was driving on a dirt road in the rain, lost control and hit a cow. The second involved forgetting to set the handbrake and a river. The third occurred while driving home from a friend’s house. While there for a coffee, I had attached a black rubber spider on string to the inside of his cupboard with sticky tape so that the next time he opened it to grab a coffee mug, the spider swung out at him. The reaction was more than expected as he screamed, threw himself backwards onto the floor and actually sobbed a little. Later that afternoon as I was driving home, I lowered the sun visor and the rubber spider, which my friend had placed there in what he felt was appropriate retaliation, fell forward onto my lap.
My immediate reaction was to press hard on the brake and turn the steering wheel which sent the vehicle into a spin before clipping a white Mercedes and ending up in an elderly man's front hedge.
My most recent vehicle accident occured in a hospital carpark which, if you are going to have an accident, is probably the most convenient place to have it. I was visiting my grandmother, Mavis, in the Tea Tree Gully Memorial Hospital.
Mavis had experienced a stroke several months previously which affected her brain to such an extent that her memory was completely shot and she would wake up each day thinking it was the morning before the stroke. Her husband Henry, my grandfather, had died a few months after Mavis had the stroke so every day she would ask “Where’s Henry” and have to be told again that Henry had died. She would then spend the day crying, fall asleep, wake up, and ask, “Where’s Henry?”
The only positive part about the whole thing is that I had visited Mavis the night before the stroke so every day she would tell people “David came to visit me last night, he bought me in something called an iPod and a packet of Werther's Original Caramels.” This meant no matter how often I bothered to visit her, which I admitedly rarely did as it seemed slightly pointless if she wasn’t going to remember, she thought I had just done so. If I did bother, she was pleasantly suprised that I had done so twice in a row. This made me her favourite grandson.
When I did bother to visit, I visited the hospital shop and bought her a packet of Werther's Original Caramels before going up the elevator to her floor. In addition to horrible sweets only old people like, the shop sold flowers, stuffed animals, and suprisingly good coffee.
The last time I visited Mavis, I entered the shop and noticed a stuffed toy that I thought my son would like. It was a life-size and realistic looking black dog with glass eyes. Purchasing it, along with a packet of Werther's Original Caramels, I did not want to carry the stuffed animal around, or take it to her room in case she thought it was a present for her, so I went back out to the car and sat it on the backseat before returning into the hospital and taking the elevator up to her floor.
After an hour of listening to her go on about how nice I was to visit two nights in a row and questioning why Henry would be outside gardening in the dark between gobfulls of caramel, I made my farewells.
Stepping out of the elevator on the ground floor, I decided to buy a coffee ‘to go’ from the shop for the long drive home as it was fairly late in the evening. Entering my vehicle, I placed the large triple shot latté between my legs, started the engine, placed the gear in reverse and looked in the rear-view mirror. Forgetting that I had purchased the stuffed animal, I saw two shiny eyes staring back at me from the back seat.
I read once that the first second of how you react to a frightening situation dictates your chances of survival should a real life and death situation ever occur. The sentence made no sense to me at the time and nothing has changed. I do know, however, that if I get into a car at night, look into the rear-vision mirror, and find two shiny eyes are staring at me from the back seat, my immediate reaction is to tense up and squeeze my legs together, sending hot coffee exploding up my chest and face, while planting my foot down on the accelerator. The car hurtled backwards, over a curb, and down a steep grassy incline towards the hospital’s glass entrance doors. Luckily, an ambulance was parked in front of them.
Mavis died in her sleep that night. Photographs from the family gathering after her funeral a few days later show me wearing a neck brace and third degree burns to my neck and lower face. During her eulogy, I was described as “her favourite grandson who visited her every night while she was in the hospital and always took her in Werther's Original Caramels.”
Dear Comcast, please do not watch me on the internet
Both my offspring and I will watch anything that features robots and I quite enjoyed the first Transformer’s movie. My favourite part was when the robots held hands in a circle and sang. I wasn’t as impressed with the sequel and, although today’s technology allows access to movies with just a few clicks, I didn’t bother with Mr Bay’s third effort at all. I did download and watch the movie Thor though. It was terrible. I stopped watching half way through and watched HGTV’s Property Virgin’s instead. They picked house number 3, a bluestone cottage close to public transport.
I wasn’t going to publish this article, because Derek stopped responding and it is therefore more like half an article, but it contains a few references and quotes from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, so I snuck it in here. I thought of putting it at the end of the book and doing a squiggly line running off the page after “Regards, Da...” so it looked as if I had died while writing it, but then I remembered I wasn’t in a Scooby Doo cartoon.
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From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 4 August 2011 8.07pm
To: dmca@comcast.net
Subject: #392-8139992
Dear Comacats,
I have received your letter regarding the Millenium Falcon.
Despite the allure of spending an evening with Mr Bay and his marvelous exploding robot cars, at no time did I illegally download and watch the movie Transformers 3 or bitch all the way through it about how pixelised it was.
Please do not watch me on the Internet.
Regards, David.
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From: d.reid@comcast.net
Date: Friday 5 August 2011 11.18am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: #392-8139992
Dear Mr. Thorne,
Thank you for contacting us with your inquiry. The notice was sent to you as part of Comcast's proactive policy on copyright infringement. I assure you that we do not watch you while you are on the internet. The copyright owner reported an alleged infringement of one or more copyrighted works made through Comcast's service and identified the IP address associated with your account as the source of the infringing works.
Please note that use of the Comcast service in a manner that constitutes an infringement of any copyrighted work is a violation of our Acceptable Use Policy and may result in the suspension or termination of your account.
Best regards,
Derek Reid, Customer Service
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From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 5 August 2011 1.37pm
To: d.reid@comcast.net
Subject: Re: Re: #392-8139992
Dear Derek,
Thank you for your email. Having noted your repeated threat as politely requested, I repeat my denial of justification for the original. While I freely admit to seducing party members of both sexes, visiting proletarian areas and, together with other agents, counterfeiting bank notes, wrecking industrial machinery, polluting the water supply and guiding Eurasian rocket bombs to targets on Airstrip One by means of coded radio signals, at no time did I illegally download and watch the movie Transformers 3.
As my Comcast internet service is connected to a wireless router with no password, I question how you determined that it
was I who illegally downloaded the movie and not Roger and Dawn, the elderly couple who live across the road, who I suspect have been stealing my wi-fi for years.
They avoid eye contact when I wave and always wear sweat pants. If I needed to be ready to run from the law at any moment, sweat pants would be first on my list. Second and third would be a disguise and snacks. I would probably also take the car. I watched a movie recently in which bank robbers painted their getaway car with non-waterproof paint and then drove through a car-wash, which was pretty clever. The only part of the chase that made no sense was when the giant silhoutte walked across the screen and said it was going to get snacks.
While it may seem like self preservation to point the blame at others, sometimes when you are threatened with something you can't stand up to, you say, 'Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to Roger and Dawn.' Perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that you didn't really mean it, but that isn't true. At the time, you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.