SPAGridden and Ever So Evil household objects

[Tabouli]

Despite all my mutterings about intellectual snobbery and ivory towers, I have to confess that bad spelling makes me gnash my teeth.  *Especially* when they're proudly displayed on glowing signs and billboards that have obviously been designed at great expense.

Take the day before yesterday, for example.  I was giving a presentation in a glitzy upper Collins Street (=central Melbourne's most upmarket street), and went to have lunch.  I steered wisely clear of Collins Street cafes and restaurants and made my way to the Collins Place food hall, where I bought some vague stirfry takeaway, sat down, glanced up and then stiffened.

In front of me was this funky little snack bar, all cool 70s orange lights and cube shaped seats in lurid colours.  Glowing funkily on the wall of said snack bar was a backlit picture of its new speciality: some sort of marinaded chicken schnitzel thing, all trussed up in funky lurid colours and groovy graphic designer selected fonts.  "From zero to 220 degrees celcius in two minutes!" it proclaimed happily.

I couldn't cope.  I had to turn my back on it.  Had I continued to look at this sign I would not have been able to stop myself ranting (at least in my head) "AAARGH!  If you are prepared to spend five figures on funky furniture and graphic design, couldn't you have spent one extra minute Checking The Spelling On Your Signs??  Haven't you ever looked at the knob on your funky chrome oven, which says "Celsius"??"  (or at least, I hope it does...).

Things are definitely getting worse.  I've been a spelling pendant since my teens and I'm sure I didn't see nearly as many cuppachinos and video's for sale then.  One of these days I swear I am going to buy a big black felt tipped pen and go on a correction rampage.

Then there was the time, a couple of years ago, when I did some data entry for an Honours Psychology student.  He had an open-ended, long answer survey on East Timor, which he handed out to first year Psychology students.  My job was to read their answers and rate them out of five for their compassion, level of awareness, and so on.  This I did.  However, in the process, the spelling I observed (and, I might add, from first year university students mostly specialising in the humanities at the university with the highest entry scores in the state) was enough to drive a spelling snob to drink.  Intelagence.  Compashon.  "When your in a safe country, you're prioraty's are diferent."

The memory still makes me shudder.

The Elk:
> There was a smooth roundish boulder in the woods near the house that I used 
to believe was Evil.  It was some glacial relic, much paler than all 
of the other various rocks and outcroppings that littered that part 
of the woods, and it had an indentation just the right shape to serve 
as a kind of a seat; in dim lighting, it seemed to gleam.  It scared 
me.  I called it "The Throne of the Bone" and believed that it was 
the ancient chair of some malign spirit.  I was absolutely convinced 
that it was trying to lure me into sitting down on it, but that if I 
ever once succumbed, it would be able to possess me and control my mind.<

Heh heh heh.  You really must write your memoirs one day, you know Elkins.

My own tale of Evil is far less dignified.  In fact, beside the Throne of the Bone it looks downright silly.  However.

When I was five, we wee ones were told at school that it was Mother's Day soon.  Great excitement ensued.  We got an illustrated list of gifts to choose from, including such timeless must-haves as lavender sachets, embroidered oven gloves, and scented handkerchiefs.  I myself was particularly taken by a pale pink, heart-shaped pincushion, edged with lace. I thought it was the most beautiful thing my five year old eyes had ever seen, and hastened to procure it for my mother.  I took it home, carefully wrapped in art class, and stashed it under my bed to wait for Mother's Day on the following Sunday.

Alas, on the Saturday, I contrived to have a prolonged and bitter fight with my mother.  I was furious.  I was going to run away from home.  I decided I wouldn't love her any more.  *That* would show her.  In fact, better still, I would refuse to give her her Mother's Day present, and then she'd be the only mother who didn't get one!  In fact, best of all, I would *CURSE* her Mother's Day present, and make it turn on her and punish her for being so mean!  HA!

Sniffing tragically, I ripped open the package and hurled the pincushion repeatedly at the wall, blistering with resentment.  I focussed all my five year old hatred on it.  I thought dark thoughts.  Then I shoved it back under my bed and forgot about it.

The next day, my mother was really nice to me.  So nice that I suddenly remembered the cursed pincushion under my bed and was seized with remorse.  My mother was nice after all, and I'd wanted to curse her!  I'd planned to withhold her Mother's Day present!  What a dreadful child I was!  Cringing with shame, I meekly told her that I had a present for her and slunk off to get it.  She was suitably grateful, and this made me feel even worse.  Looking at the pincushion in my mother's hands I felt a terrible guilt.  I hadn't lifted the curse!  What if something bad happened to her and it was all my fault?  It was a cursed gift, a gift given in spite not love!

>From that day forth, I devoutly believed that that pincushion, in all its pale pink, heart-shaped, lace-edged glory, was Evil.

I dreaded being sent to fetch something from my mother's sewing box.  I would lever the lid off with my jumper sleeves wrapped around my hands, and flick the pincushion aside with a stick before I dared look for anything inside.  So malign was the spirit infused in that pincushion, I was convinced that it had infected everything in the sewing box, from the spools of thread to the thimbles, and would hand my mother whatever she wanted and then retreat to my room rigid with fear and contamination.

I was foolish enough to tell my little brother about the evil pincushion (thought it was only fair to warn him), and he too started flicking it away with a stick, usually onto me.  He would then laugh at my terror at having had it touch me and run away, sneering about how stupid I was to be scared of a pincushion.  All the same, would he himself pick it up with his bare hands?  Ha!  Not a chance.  He didn't want to be cursed any more than I did.  My mother, of course, lived in blissful ignorance of the sinister object in her sewing box, and would actually sit there *holding it in her hand* while she sewed!  It made my blood run cold.

Decades later, she still has that pincushion, stashed away in her sewing box as before.  And I, of course, am *totally* over such childish nonsense.  Totally.

I just happen not to like sewing, that's all.

Tabouli.


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