Not a boy, not yet a man

Yet another interlude before the last of the McNamyver posts.

It's Diorraing's first day of secondary school tomorrow.

Deirdre insisted on making a cake for him; she asked him what kind of cake he wanted; he said that he did not want one; she kept at him; insisting.

Eventually he told her to guess. She went with a sponge cake with orange icing- he hated it. She was annoyed.

Based on this mother–son dynamic: he is officially a teenager!

[There would have been party poppers and balloons, but he grunted about us not knowing him.]

A scatological rambling and a scatological dosing

[Editors note: An interlude before the conclusion of the much anticipated McNamyver Trilogy]

Two amusing and telling Facebook exchanges in the last 24 hours:

First was from Eimhin, being his usual uncouth and irreverent self.¹

I think his crowning moment in the exchange was:

"I'm no dissonant churnings of voices, I am phalanx of united manchoir"

It is up there with his fem-eimhin 1, 2, 3 line, in my opinion. It is note worthy that he uses the plural of churning. It is hard to tell if it is a joke within a joke or a mistake. I'll wager he'll claim it a joke regardless.

As to the intimations that herself is like Lois from Malcolm in the Middle. Not 12 hours after that thread wound down, she wrote two damning comments on my wall:

I think we can all agree that this is exactly the kind of stuff that Lois pulled... If Malcolm in the Middle was after watershed.

Exactly.

Also, I checked out the cake and biscuits and there was no evidence of tampering, so I ate them.²

Bluff. Called.

***

¹Word of the day toilet paper for the win!

²It was just sitting there in front of me! If I didn't eat it, I would have become everything I hate.

McNamyver: Chemical Burn Notice

My name is Máirtín McNamara. I used to be an undergraduate until...

"We've got a graduation for you. Your postgraded."

When you are postgraded, you've got nothing. No cash, no credit and no job history.¹ You're stuck in whatever lab they decide to dump you in.

You do what ever work comes your way...

"Someone needs your help, Máirtín."

Bottom line: Until you figure out your thesis, you're not going anywhere.

[Cue "glamorous" montage of rain covered UCD: People waiting for buses, campus security chasing skateboarders, nerds highfiving beside a chalkboard, people in lab coats and goggles slowly jumping away from an explosion or some genetic experiment gone wrong², guys with popped collars mispronouncing words with orange-skinned girls]

I was chilling in my lab doing scientificy stuff. My cell rings.

It's an ol' buddy of mine from back in my undergrad' days. He's in a bind. He locked his keys in his car.

My partner-in-problem-solving [and pale Bruce Campbell stand-in], and I coolly walked out to the parking lot, to assess the situation.

If you are going to break into a friend's car, it is important that you don't do any damage. A lot of people are inclined to go for a fast break and grab, but that is going to sour a friendship real fast.

Most cars have a design flaw that can be exploited; this late model blahblah happened to have a slightly flexible door frame. A mistake a lot of people make at this point is trying to get the door open; just because it is how you usually get in to a car doesn't mean that it is the only way to get into one. In many cases the trunk will do just as well...

I strode back inside to get some things. I strode out with a heavy-duty screwdriver, section of 1/6" steel pipe and a spool of electrical wiring.

It's important when you are doing something suspicious, which could draw the attention of security personnel, that you act like you are meant to be there.³ More operations fail because of someone's nerves than effective countermeasures.

I threaded some of the wire, a loop tied in the end, through the steel pipe. I casually used the screwdriver^3.5 to lever a gap between the car and the door frame. All I needed was space to stick the wire-in-pipe. With the pipe wedged in the door frame, the wire was free to move up, down and swing side-to-side.

My eye fixed on the target. Sweat beading on my brow, I smoothly handled the wire-in-pipe to catch the lever. We held back on the celebrations. Now the hard part began.

With infinite care, I pulled back on the wire until...

My ol' buddy dove through the open trunk and grabbed the keys just in time.⁴

_________________________

Stay tuned for the final installment of McNamyver: The Living Skylights.

***

¹Well, not much anyway.

²"Glow in the dark mucus!"

³I'm not saying we were cool as cucumbers, but in the car park, in broad daylight we were standing around and ultimately breaking into a car and campus security didn't come our way at all.

^3.5Ostensibly it was a screwdriver, but that foot-long lump of steel would only fit screws that grew up beside a nuclear power plant in the 1950s.

⁴The narrative laws governing Heists require certain phrases to be included. Continuity be damned.

***

Afterword: For those that aren't fans of Burn Notice, I hope there was still some amusement and basking-in-my-uncanny-skills-of-improvisation to be had. The incident did happen and the only liberties I took in its description were how coolly we went to the "parking lot," how much striding I did and I didn't break a sweat during the incident; that was purely for dramatic effect.

For anyone that is interested, I got the Eye on Springfield clip here and the "click" sound effect here. Of course Blogger does not host audio, so I had to sign-up for a place that did. I went here.

I cut out the Kent Brockman intro to EoS and put that up. And then the wav for "click" format was not playing, and I converted it to mp3. I could almost write a whole entry about the charade; well, I could, if there was any more to it.

McNamyver part 1

[Blogger's note: I had intended to write this series up before I left Dublin, but I forgot about it until I was taking pictures off of my phone.]

Every now and again I get a chance to shine.

Sometimes if a friend of mine (sometimes even a compadre) has a problem, if no one else can help and if they can find them me, maybe you he/she can hire me.^0,1

It all began waaaaay back in autumn 2003....

It was the first day of term, and fresh out of the day's last lecture I get a call from Ro-Ro. Due to circumstance more amusing not to mention, he locked himself out of the apartment with the oven on.² He had just moved in with his girlfriend and it was essentially his first day in the little flat on unsupervised. Even though herself had a key and was only a 10 minute walk away, Ro-Ro felt it best not to involve her.

The apartment is in the basement of a converted Georgian house, and there are two access points: the door and a narrow, narrow window overlooking by the backyard.^2.1 The keys were in a backpack on the bed at the opposite side of the flat (2.5 m from the window).^2.5 Being the strapping examples of human form that we were, neither him nor I could fit through the window.

On my way to his rescue, some friendly carpenters renovating a pub, gave me a discarded switch of timber, which Ro-Ro used as a fing-longer to turn off the oven. His most pressing concern solved, we stood in the garden for a while thinking on how to get to the keys. Eventually, Ro-Ro mentioned there was a roll of stiff tubing under the stairs; I felt that this should have been mentioned earlier.³

It being a dingy garden on the Northside, there was plenty of junk lying around: 5L paint drums, rusty nails, bricks, rusted wheelless bikes, etc. I hammered some nails into one end of the tubing to make a rudimentary hooking device and we fed it through the window.⁴ But it didn't pan out because the bag was too heavy and kept slipping off its perch.

Struck by inspiration,⁵ I jammed the sturdy steel handle of a foreshadowed paint drum down the end of the tube, holding it in place with those nails that were not good for much else. And thus, with my rudimentary hooking device somewhat less rudimentary, we were able to get the bag and our rightful ingress to the premises.

Stay tuned for the next installment of of McNamyver: Chemical Burn Notice.

***

⁰Will work for food.

¹"Talk about poor production values, he references one 80s classic with his title and another in the introductory section; hack."

²If you like, imagine him with a too-small towel clasped around his waist, shampoo still in his hair and a back-scrubber in his free hand.

^2.1It makes sense if you tried looking out the window.

^2.5It does smack of an online game such as this, but that is how it happened to be.

³"Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak."

⁴More accurately: bricked. And on a related note: Real Men Don't Need Swiss Army Knives.

⁵Recently such moments of inspiration have been shown to be detectable by monitoring brain activity. Again, I am reminded how young neuro-psyhcology is in the grand schemes of things. By which I mean they are largely focussed on things filed away under "That's Obvious;"ⁱ you only have to look in someone's eyes to see that light bulb switch on. Or for that matter, one can feel the change in the mind when the solution to a problem crystallizes.

***

ⁱOf course a number of things are incorrectly filed away under this heading so better off checking things thoroughly. As a whole that blog is worth a read [Thanks to Kevin for sending it on to me], if you can stand being told ad multiplicum how bad we are at thinking and remembering.