cookie-cutter comments

Blue balls of fire. Make that “scintillating balls of fire, blue in particular”, as if sexing up a description would do it any good. Funny I should think of balls of fire the colour of well-tuned bunsen burners, but ahh.. the nostalgia…

Cue Don’t roleplay the bugs and I’m instantly transported back to memories of D&D madness. And I mean “D&D madness”, not the pussy-whipped crap-a-minute AD&D 2nd Edition ruleset. I imagine dark, festering gardens full of trees behind the canteen. Imagine a storm of mosquitoes threatening instant dengue with every savage, commando infiltration. Imagine a coterie of unwashed pubescent males screaming with every toss of multi-sided dice. Imagine a bunch of kids intoning grave pronouncements about death and weapon speed factor.

Imagine all of that while the normal people played police-and-thief (flirtation: why do kids start off so young, eh?).

My DM (Dungeon Master) was this mousy looking fella; short, pointy chin and bespectacled with a perpetual sneer on thin lips. He was DM by default because daddy was rich enough, or indulgent enough, to buy the original D&D boxed sets, though we clobbered each other every day for a month to see who could DM (we were, if you haven’t noticed yet, boys). That asshole always won, of course, because he’d threaten to leave with the goods.

And no one wanted to spend a day without D&D.

We came up with stupid rule conventions; you couldn’t sleep if you didn’t have a portable house and BBQ campfire set with you stashed away in your backpack. You could eat anything you caught including, but not limited to, misanthropic miniature elf-gnomes. Gross, I know, but boy was our DM twisted.

We had a particularly nasty way of excluding girls from playing, though it wasn’t conscious on our part. It was pathetic, actually, because we used to force girls who begged to join in to play stereotypical “Xena”-type women, without the testosterone and with intricately detailed assets in their character sheets, complete with imaginary two-piece outfits.

A product of our wild, bubbling imaginations I’m sure . Yeah, we were chauvanists, but we didn’t know the meaning of the word at the time and some ladies stuck around anyway. Ha!

Among the stupidest things we had to endure, though, were blue balls of fire. Why he couldn’t just stick to red, flaming fireballs, I will never know.

(Red, flaming fireballs enveloping 30′ x 30′ doing 6d6 dmg are, btw, sacred. Sacred, I tell you!! Imagine a dark, ominous wizard hurling pink, rose-scented fireballs and you kinda get the picture! So pondan!)

His obsessive need to express himself in terms of his then-fad, DragonballZ, took over and drove us up the wall; soon our PCs (player characters) were sporting long robes and bloody beads with as much practicality built-in - and decided on the fly - as Batman’s utility belts!

But we had a rare kind of fun.

My radio was off on the way back from Selesa Jaya. I was trying to think. I zoomed past traffic, half-way giving up maintaining a dismal 80km/h while wondering what he had told me.

What would lawyers say about proximate cause? As far as I understand it, proximate cause refers to the most immediate cause of a particular phenomenon, without which said phenomenon would not arise. That is to say, there is a direct causal and necessary relationship of events that have led up to a particular phenomenon.

Say, for example, a fire breaks out after a flashover. Now, in standard parlance, we say that the proximate cause of the fire damage or, fire, was the flashover. But there are antecedents to the flashover, of course. If we track back, for um.. other purposes, we could examine how the flashover occurred.

So, for example, a build-up of ambient moisture between copper busbars/phases under high current could have sufficiently created conditions for a spark to leap over phase-to-phase if, for example, the ambient moisture had sufficiently caused the sheathing of the busbar to deteriorate.

Or, the flashover could have occurred because the sheathes failed either because the sheathes became brittle over the years and fell away from at least one busbar (and an insufficiently earthed neutral would have caused a phase-to-ground flashover). Or, moisture between the sheath and the busbars within caused the sheathe to fail over time. The possibilities are varied.

When determining liability, I suppose, the question would be how far back would you have to go definitively?

When you’re talking about all risks, for example, wear and tear is a definite exclusion because, the theory goes, wear and tear is a natural consequence of operation, and therefore cannot be said to be unforseen so that any loss arising cannot be, strictly speaking, be said to be fortuitous. If there is no uncertainty, then logically, no transfer of risk is effected (in reference to certain do-able kinds of risk).

To say event A is caused by wear and tear, however, is insufficient in and of itself. The question that immediately arises is: is this wear and tear a “natural consequence of operation”? If it can be established that it is, then there is no dispute. That is to say, it must be established that the “natural consequence of operation” was the sufficient and only cause of the failure/damage (this is almost impossibly hard to do without a process of elimination).

If, however, one asks if the cause is an extraordinary case of wear and tear, one is actually asking if the wear and tear was due only to the “natural consequence of operation”.

So back to his case. Here, a bearing failed, causing the arm to lean against the sides of its sheath thus causing, during operation, damage.

The failure was discovered to be wear on said bearing. The question that’s arisen is: is this an extraordinary case of wear and tear?

Simply, this means moving back the causal chain and discovering how the wear and tear could have arisen.

This then is a whole slew of different questions, and a whole new set of problems. The bearing could have failed prematurely, which either means the manufacturer of the bearing is to blame, or the manufacturer of the machine is to blame, if the bearings were never changed.

Or the client’s staff could be at fault if they did not carry out maintenance promptly or well. Worse, if they were circumspect with maintenance and using the right bearings etc, then the question reverts to blame on the manufacturers.. which in this case would still mean that liability is in question.

All this hangs on obtaining a metallurgical report urgently, and I told him so over the phone when I reached home. Hmmm… something to watch out for, this case.

And I can’t get over that song.

It’s “Maps” from the album “Fever to Tell” by the Yeah yeah yeahs, a NY based band. Obsessed as ever, I scoured the internet looking for news and reviews on this art-punk band. It’s such an elevated track, head and shoulders over alot of shit that you hear on the radio.

“Wait, they don’t love you like I love you” she croons, muted when juxtaposed against the other tracks in that album, and so brittle and honest.

“Made off
Don’t stray
My kind’s your kind
I’ll stay the same”

You could almost see her singing this while overlooking the rooftops of suburbia and yearning.

And the reviews, the ones that disparage the Yeah yeah yeahs focus on the hype built up around the 3-piece outfit whilst dissecting the whole album with a cynical eye. I can’t say much (and shouldn’t) since I’ve not heard the whole album, but if there’s a song that would elevate any band, it’s “Maps”.