the sourcerer: Stuff I learnt about cars and glue.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Stuff I learnt about cars and glue.

The big car wouldn't start. So I took the little car to the shop and bought some jumper leads (they call them booster cables on the packet. R70 at Hammer&Tongs). I studied a tutorial on wiki-How. Once I had the cars in a favourable position - that is, 'working' up against 'disabled', I found I needed to phone a friend. Lacking the proper terminology, the conversation was peppered with 'red thing, black thing'. What had me in a mild state of panic was something I'd read earlier: As a last resort, you may connect the other black (-) clamp to the negative (-) post of the dead battery, but this risks igniting hydrogen gas coming off the battery. They suggested connecting it to the engine block. (where is that?). Also, they urged the donning of safety goggles and gloves. I don't have any. In the end I risked the gas explosion and five minutes later the big car was growling. Girls, I gotta tell you - your hands will get dirty, but the feeling of satisfaction is sublime.

wiki-How also helped me with that other can of worms - how to apply false eye lashes without getting glue in all the wrong places. Result: a night on the town with demi-whisps that stayed stuck and a big car that goes. =)

2 comments:

Chris said...: no-one stopped to help the damsel?; August 21, 2010 at 7:05 PM
the sourcerer said...: actually two guys in a pickup stopped to help and I waved them on with a smile.; August 22, 2010 at 8:38 AM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.