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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Miscellany

Published: 27 January 2019

Hits: 1506

13 degrees today, an amazing day, the season fast approaches and I'd better familiarize myself with my target.

Diamonds. Why not? Go big or go home. 

I've looked at a million pictures of diamonds, rough and otherwise, and am starting to get a feel for the subject. And then I get onto the clickhole of youtube.

Rough diamonds, searching, searching, buggerdly fuck for information. Like, I'm not looking for a map, I have that, I just want some good images, but - like most of the internet it's largely bullshit.

Videos with poor images enlarged to 100 times their original size, computer generated voiceovers. Bad, bad, bad. Then there's the people trying to sell shit, parcels of rough diamonds, they're OK. 

Then there's the "Independent Prospectors", fucking nut-jobs every one of 'em. I mean, hold a piece of quartz on a tray with a piece of silk. Hold it in your left hand. The silk lends value to the piece of quartz. With your right hand wave your phone around the quartz, don't let it focus, and talk about the diamond you found. Or just throw it on an old newspaper - nothing persuades me of success and quality like a Nigerian newspaper. Or a slideshow of rocks that - even to my limited knowledge - are clearly not rough diamonds. River cobbles, Calcite, Citrine, talk about that 2 kg (10,000 Carat) chunk of "diamond" you found and press the $10.00 diamond tester you bought off E-bay from China against it to "prove it's real" and then rail for a bit about how the jewelers don't know anything and they're inflating prices by not buying your piece of diamond at the more than reasonable price of $100.00 per Carat but if you, the educated you-tube viewer are interested please contact at...

You can't even parody this stuff, but I've got a lot of rocks to sell and so maybe I should start making a few videos of my own...

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Miscellany

Published: 21 January 2019

Hits: 1557

A good day of random shit selling. Bulk purchases, one lady, grotesque chalkware piggy bank head, 3 tip-n-strip pens, a file drawer and old clock. Another a set of Irish Linen Tea-Napkins. Another a wood block (clave, apparently, is what they call it in the percussion world, and when I knew that I wanted to charge a dollar more...). Dive watch gone to buddy who wanted to smoke a joint with me outside...

I have this feeling that a lot of these people are just buying junk trying to work up the courage to ask about the Banana Pump.

And a load of random stuff for Batshit to shopdrop next time I'm passing through Nelson - an artist's mannequin with a fishhook to replace a missing hand, a horses tooth, a scarab from the Tomb of Tutankhamen, a preserved souvenir alligators head, a voo-doo doll, more, more... all with notes as to provenance...

So it goes. slowly, slowly, there's no predicting - I mean NO predicting - as to what will sell, and after 12 weeks it hasn't gone, why, wait another 2, relist it, and it'll sell. This is experience speaking. It's keeping me in cigarettes.

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Miscellany

Published: 21 January 2019

Hits: 1466

Spotted these in the supermarket. WTF? Motivational Kleenex?

Load of bullshit. I could get "Sneeze the Day" but the rest? Bloody Hell...

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Miscellany

Published: 18 January 2019

Hits: 1512

'TERENCE, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,  
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.' 

Reading aloud, now adding Shelley, Keats, in addition to T.S. Eliot, it's good practice - often taking a few pages before I settle into the rhythm of the verse, scanning ahead for unfamiliar - or rather, more familiar but never pronounced words, to work them into the rhythm. It gets better, like meditation, seldom am I ever anywhere close to Zen but I imagine, I fancy that with a bit of practice I'll get better at it.

But the quality of reading - especially when reading the likes of Shelley and Keats and Eliot, well, it rather infuriates me. These people were writing a poem or 2 a day; I have no excuses, for the doggerel that I'm writing there's no high bar, I should be cranking out a book a day, and so, really, what the fuck is up? Both inspiring and chastising...