Robyn’s Secret Passage

I have friends in other countries who are currently despairing at the Fußball/Football/Futbol-mania that is currently gripping their nation.

So it makes me a little bit relieved that while New Zealand prides itself as being a proud sporting nation, it’s not actually good enough at football to have even qualified for the World Cup.

Best stick to the fringe sports like rugbys league and union, eh?

—

Sometimes when I visit the local dairy during the day, I’ve noticed staff there making up bags filled with various grocery items. The contents of a typical bag would be loose tobacco and rolling papers, a large bag of Burger Rings, a packet of Toffee Pops and a 1.25 litre bottle of Coke.

At first I thought it was maybe an order for an invalid, but then I thought it was strange that such a person would be ordering no basic staples, just junk food and smokes.

But today I finally figured it out. I saw a Department of Corrections logo on a list and realised it’s for prisoners down the road at Mt Eden Prison.

See, life on the inside isn’t all that bad when you have your weekly Burger Rings ration.

Harvestbird tagged me to do one of those list things. Homie don’t usually play that, but this one was fun, and if it helps just one person give up drugs, well, then it will have all been worth it.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your livejournal along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

1. Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin
I had an intense craving for this and have been heartily obsessing over it. It represents everything that’s good about America, and makes me want to be in Manhattan.

2. You’re Gonna Lose Us by the Cribs
The Cribs are my new favourite band. This is one has a brilliant shoutalong chorus (”When I’m drunk I can be an arsehole, but that don’t mean I’ve got no class, no.”), that’s just right for boozing with your mates and/or the Jarman brothers.

3. Stars Are Blind by P**** H*****
I don’t care how much of this song belongs to the talent of its singer or not. It’s lovely and sunny and cheerful (though not without its dark moments), and frankly, we could all use a little sunshine right now.

4. Batdance by Prince
Unlike most of Prince’s hit songs, this one gets little radio play, probably because it’s kind of unusual and kind of needed the hype of 1989’s Batman film to prop it up in the mainstream. But it’s a corker nonetheless.

5. Grind Your Bones by Svelte
Svelte is a couple of guys who used to be in Supergroove and the cousin of that guy from Blindspott who used to go out with Nicky Watson. With that pedigree, you’d expect Svelte to be shit, but this one’s dirty and bluesy.

6. Slave To The Rhythm [Hot Blooded Version] by Grace Jones
It’s an 8.18 minute remix of Slave To The Rhythm, one of my favourite songs of all time. The extra times comes from the first half being instrumental which means, yes, it’s karaoke time. Slaaaaaaave!

7. Mary Jane’s Last Dance by Tom Petty
I revisited this in the wake of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ controversy. The song is apparently about Mr Petty giving up the marijuana drugs, but the video had Kim Basinger necrolove. Like Mr Petty says, oh my my, oh hell yes.

In lieu of tagging others, just, like, do it if you want, man.

The final part of Tales of the Old Skool, brings us an incident even older than my webpage. This goes all the way back to 1995 and involves a hobby horse, Marcus Lush and an email.

Remember Newsnight on TV2? It was a late-night (10.30, usually) news programme that was broadcast in the mid-90s. The first half was the serious news section hosted by Simon Dallow and Lorelei Mason (later Alison Mau), then the second half was the entertaining part hosted by Marcus Lush.

Among the many entertaining things in the Marcus section was the appearance of a hobby horse that was named Horseboy. I think Horseboy had been rescued from outside someone’s house at inorganic rubbish collection time.

An excited viewer had written in with news that they had a Horseboy too, so there was much merriment at the news of two Horseboys.

Then on another episode it was announced that Newsnight had one of those newfangled “email address” things, and Marcus invited viewers to email him. (See, back then, email was a novelty. Its power had not yet been harnessed.) My brother and I decided that we should take advantage of Marcus’ offer, so I wrote a poem about Horseboy:

Horseboy is more than a toy
He fills the screen with love and joy
He’s more than a head on a pole
He fills up television’s empty hole

I would like to take Horseboy for a spin
Lots of fun would soon begin
We could gallop down the street
I think that would be really neat

I like Horseboy’s fuzzy blue face
He travels at a moderate pace
Horseboy is a very nice thing
A good use of old bits of string

Horseboy’s friend has got a mohawk
That must make the neighbours talk
Now that Horseboy has a friend
It seems the fun will never end!

So off it went to newsnight@tvnz.co.nz and lo and behold, a reply came:

brillianty. we will brodcast it. we have put it in out
shrine

lush

And then on the Newsnight of 7 November, 1995, Marcus mentioned that they had received a viewer email, and said something like that is was even more exciting than the viewer faxes on Holmes. It was joking called “email of the week”.

The email was shown on screen, including my email address, and the poem was read out on air, which was awfully thrilling.

I wrote in my diary at the time:

On Newsnight, Marcus read out the Horseboy poem. He said something like it proved that not all interneters were geeks.

The next day I got an email from some guy who’d seen the item, scribbled down the address and thought he’d email it to see if it was real. I was excited that he’d emailed me, and he was excited that I’d replied. Such was the excitement of the ‘net back in those days.

So I don’t know for sure, but I think this may point to me being the author of the first email ever read out on New Zealand television. Excellent.

Right about now, mid-June, is the 10th anniversary of… actually, I’m not sure what of. What I do know is that in mid-June, 1996, I uploaded the very first version of my website.

I’d got online in about September 1995 and I’d been an admirer of the websites of people like Justin Hall and the dudes at Suck.com. I’d just switched to a new ISP - Wave - that offered 20MB web hosting in its pricing plan. HTML seemed pretty easy, so I decided to make one of those web page things.

I furiously tested it; checking each and every link to make sure everything worked before I uploaded it. Finally “Robyn’s Page of Various Assorted Stuff” was ready to go. The URL was something like www.wave.co.nz/pages/rhg

In the first few months, I kept redesigning the website. As I got to know more HTML, I was able to make it look how I wanted. I kept changing the name too. “Robyn’s Page of Various Assorted Stuff” became “Summer”, then “Disco Bitch”. (Shut up. I was only 21.)

I had a section of my website called The Secret Passage where I kept stuff I’d written. It was so named because originally it was a secret part of the website, with hidden links. But I liked the name, and renamed my website “Robyn’s Secret Passage”. No sexual innuendo intended - I just didn’t want to hide under a pseudonym. Eventually I got tired of redesigning, and “Robyn’s Secret Passage” stayed.

After about a year I moved to Ihug and transferred my website there, and crash.ihug.co.nz/~rhg was my new home. In 1998 I decided to get a domain name. secretpassage.com was taken, but secret-passage.com was available, so that became my new web address, and eventually hosting was moved to wibble.net.

I just kept adding to it and culled very little. Back in the early days of the web, there was a vogue for “under construction” graphics on websites, showing that the site was incomplete; that there was still more to come. But I read someone saying that a good website should always be under construction; it shouldn’t be a complete, static, never-changing experience, so I kept that in mind.

I redesigned my website a few times, but it got trickier to do. In the beginning I’d have only a dozen pages to change, but as my HTML empire grew, it was dozens of pages that would need updating.

In late 2002 I started writing stuff at LiveJournal. It hadn’t really been my intention to switch to LiveJournal as my place for online writing, but it was just so much easier than the old system of uploading stuff by FTP, and people could comment on and discuss my posts. I knew something had changed when people started linking to my LiveJournal site over my old website.

So I guess I’m celebrating 10 years of writing stuff and putting it on my parts of the internet.

Sometimes it feels a bit lonely writing online, but every now and then I hear from people who say they were inspired by my website to go and do their own thing. Y’know, there weren’t a lot of New Zealanders out there doing stuff online in the early days. I even had some of my writing used as course material in a first-year English paper at Auckland Uni. Not bad for a non-graduate.

It’s been a choice 10 years. Here’s to 10 more.

I woke up this morning at about 8.30, except I didn’t know what the time was because my clock radio screen was blank. After making sure it wasn’t my fault (power bill - paid; fuses - all present and accounted for), I rang Vector. I knew something was up when instead of getting through to Vector, I got the overloaded recording from TelstraClear.

So I grabbed my watch off the coffee table (8.47) and went back to bed and slept until later in the morning. (I’m not a lazy-arse, I’m still a bit illin’.)

By noon I decided to get out of bed and get in the shower. Fortunately I had plentiful hot water, but unfortunately I still couldn’t wash my hair because my hair dryer was inoperable and I didn’t want to sit around with wet hair.

I went for a walk down to the Mt Eden shops and discovered most of them were shut. But I was enticed by the candlelit Time Out bookshop, so I wandered in and saw that Douglas Coupland’s latest novel, JPod was in store, so I bought it with a manual Visa payment. The lady behind the counter had never used the zip-zap machine before, but I reminded her that if it was good enough for our forefathers in the ’80s, it’s good enough for us today.

I was due to start work at 2.30, and for a while it looked like I might not have to go in, but sure enough the power came back on and I was called to the office.

I made another visit back down to the shops. The lights were on at the bank, but no one was inside. “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog” was blasting from inside a fully lit cafe, but no one was in it. It was rather spooky.

“It’s been a bit of a day,” said to the taxi driver on the way home from work. Indeed it has. Checking my email just now, I found a spam with the randomly generated subject line, “You never miss the water till the well runs dry.”