When crustaceans attack!

Bump

2005-05-02T21:26:00.000+11:00

Do the hustle.

What are you doing?

2005-01-13T20:12:00.000+10:00

Go to the new blog at once!

The crustacean is dead. Long live the crustacean!

2004-12-14T22:33:00.000+10:00

To live is to change, to stop to die. The natural world rises and falls in cycles. Just as the hermit crab must move to a larger shell when he gets a fat arse so too must I move to, er, a different blog host.

I’ve accepted the kind offer of Mark at donotuselifts to be hosted on his blog-host-server-thingy and be schooled in the arcane ways of non-blogspot blogging. Mark has already been voted Canberra ex-teenager of the year and is a veritable Black Mountain Tower of Canberra bloggers. (He also won the ‘fresh face of the retail industry’ award – liquor & tobacco division, 2002, 2003 and 2004. He’s a champ.)

The new URL will be crustaceans.donotuselifts.net but this blogspot site will be maintained for some time in the delicate transition phase. What can you expect? Plenty more of the same sporadic half-baked musings and anecdotes that go nowhere, that’s what!

Alas, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs (unless you happen to like omelettes with a high ‘crunch-factor’). While I can salvage my old posts, I can’t import comments from ordinary people like YOU who make it all worthwhile. But they’ll still be around on blogspot.

But I’d appreciate it if those of you who link to me could update their links in due course. Those of you who don’t link to me (New York Times, the Economist, I’m looking at you) well then maybe you should get with the program…

Hope to see you at the new digs…

Tokyo crustacean

2004-12-12T22:23:00.000+10:00

When I was in Tokyo last week (sorry, elsewhere, there’s no other way to say it) I wandered around with a borrowed digital camera trying to take the kind of hurried random snaps that will capture forever the soul of a complex and exotic nation.

Alas, I’m a crappy photographer and I have to say I feel self-consious taking photographs in public, especially if those photographs are of strangers.

So after a few shitty attempts at Tokyo night life:

And a crappy portrait of the author taken by a colleague (a little out-of-focus, I normally look better than this):

I decided to give up and fall back on that old standard: funny signs made by people who don’t speak proper English! as well as other vaguely amusing signs. Signs are easy. They don’t move, they don’t look at you accusingly and they don’t require any aesthetic input.

So as I shopped, I snapped. And here are the oh-so-amusing results.

Japan has been plagued by r’n’b and hip-hop created by robots. At last, there is a remedy:

A delightful pair of stickers on a Department store lift that demonstrates to Japanese and foreigners alike that when the doors close crustaceans attack!

Ever hunted for a spare key? Wondered where it went? Wonder no longer… (this Department store sign also explains soil erosion).

And from the tee-hee-hee department:

From a sign on a hotel in the Shibuya district (if you get any rest, you’re not doing it right):

I’m glad to say that it took me a while but I finally found Japan’s dark side beneath all the commercial glitz:

Yes, it was heady few days of profound cultural exchange. I like to think that when I flew out of Narita, both Japan and I were richer for the experience…

Homeless in Hokkaido

2004-12-08T20:07:00.000+10:00

In Tokyo last week, I was returning by metro from a frenzied but largely unsuccessful shopping trip in Shibuya when another Westerner entered my train compartment. He looked like Santa Claus in a lumberjack outfit, with a great beard stretching to the middle of his chest and kindly blue eyes.

‘You look familiar,’ he said as he sat next to me, which immediately marked him as either a jocular fellow whitey in a sea of Japanese or a common or garden public transport full bull goose looney. And he turned out to be a little of both.

Once seated, he immediately began removing clothes, a process which continued for most of the journey, so many layers was he wearing.

‘Where are you from?’ He asked.

‘Australia.’

‘Oh, I’ve heard that’s a great place. But a hard to place to retire in. Do you think they’d let someone like me move there?’

I said I didn’t know. But that wasn’t what I was thinking. He then said something about immigration to Australia and black people which I didn’t quite catch. I couldn’t be sure it was racist but I felt myself tense. Regular train loonies are amusing as long as you don’t have a three-hour journey but racist camel-jobs* are no one’s idea of a good time.

He asked me if Australia had any troops in Iraq. I said that we did but he wanted to know if they were actually shooting or just building bridges. It seemed somehow important to me that he not confuse us with the kindly Czechs, Koreans or whomever, who are solely there to dig latrines and get shot while dispensing oral hygiene leaflets.

‘No, we were there for the actual war,’ I said. And he seemed doubtful of this, miming the shooting of a rifle to make sure I understood. I assured him Australia had been in Iraq for the combat phase (as opposed to the current ‘non-combat phase’) but I don’t think he believed me. He probably thought there are only two countries, other than Iraq, dumb enough to have been there from the start.

He asked me why I was in Japan and I did something I don’t normally do with camel-jobs: I lied through my teeth. I knew the truth about my job would just cause more and more questions so I told him I was there for a wedding.

‘Oh I’m a protestant minister,’ he said, ‘I’ve done two weddings this week already.’ I imagine he does look like the Japanese ideal of a godly Christian priest.

I had my story roughly sketched out but he side-tracked back to war, saying that Australia had been there in Vietnam, now that he recalled. He told me an anecdote about having been around an Australian infantry unit who were stuck without their supplies and he tried to get them into an American mess tent for a feed. He talked them past the soldier on the door – an, er, black soldier – only to be challenged inside by a cook, to whom he replied: ‘I reckon we need all the men we got to do the fighting. You want to go up country to fight? Neither do I. But these men will. So let ‘em have a meal.’ Apparently this did the job.

Then he started talking about a friend who had been sleeping in Ueno park (which is the park around all the Tokyo art galleries and museums). And I was suddenly now sure that he himself was homeless, looking down at his enormous cheap plastic bag and his layers of clothing.

He showed me a photograph of his friend, who was a Japanese man with a long black beard lying on the foothpath. Inexplicably, the old man I was talking to also featured in this photograph, leaning into the frame and holding a banana in front of his friend’s grinning face. Go figure.

He never actually said he was homeless but he said that a hotel cost ‘two hundred Australian dollars’ a night and he could think of a lot better things to do with two hundred dollars than a bed for a night.

We parted a Ginza station; he to change trains and me to take my sad purchases back to my three hundred dollar a night hotel.

(* ‘Camel-job’ is a term invented by British comedian Jasper Carrot to refer to public transport loonies (as in the person sitting on his own, rocking gently, and saying ‘camel camel camel’ over and over) and is not to be confused with a racist epithet for a person of arabian origin.)

Heirophants & grilled swordfish cutlets

2004-12-06T20:22:00.000+10:00

The Great Canberra Blogger Picnic was abruptly changed from the botanic gardens to a private home – allegedly because of the weather. But it wasn't raining and it didn’t rain at all that day.

I had to check if I had the address right because when I pulled up to the ‘house’ it turned out to be a disused sardine cannery on the edge of a light industrial suburb in Canberra’s north.

I knocked three times and, just as I was about to leave, the roll-a-door on an adjacent building began to open slowly and noisily – like the sound of a robot being disemboweled in a snuff film for engineers.

Inside, all was dark except for one flickering fluorescent light. I called out as I warily entered.

‘Hello? Hello? Zoe?’

Only when I got to the other end of the warehouse, which still stank of the mechanised slaughter of a generation of tiny fish, did I hear another sound -- the sound of the door closing again. I hesitated for a moment before sprinting back to the entrance.

Too late. One hand flapped stupidly for a moment at the airy freedom on the other side but then I was trapped.

‘Hello?’ I called again, somewhat more nervously. ‘Zoe?’

Slowly, light after flickering light filled the room and a shape appeared on a steel balcony bolted to one water-stained wall.

‘Are you…Zoe?’ I asked, shielding my eyes from the glare with one hand. I approached until I could see the figure more clearly. It was a large dwarf – and by that I mean an obese dwarf, straining at the fabric of the only garment it was wearing, a hessian sack bearing the image of a single grey fish. The dwarf was wearing eye-shadow and appeared to petting a cat that looked for all the world like a shaved ferret. I peered more closely and discovered that it was in fact a shaved ferret.

‘I am Zoe.’ It said, in a voice like distant thunder recorded on a toy microphone underwater.

‘Er, you’re Zoe? From crazybrave? Ah, OK. So is, uh, Kay, here?’

‘I am Kay,’ it said.

‘Uh, OK. Carolinkus? Rachel? Are they here?’

‘They are here,’ the dwarf said, pointing to its forehead with a long discoloured bone which it produced from underneath the ferret. ‘I am Carolinkus. And I am Rachel.’

‘Um, OK, mate, look, I’ll just be going now.’ I started to back away, unsure of how I could make my escape.

‘I am everyone you are seeking. Everyone,’ it said, with a piercing stare. ‘And I am you!’ It shrieked, and with a sudden movement which sent the ferret flying through the air in my direction, it pulled a crab’s pincer from a hole within the sack. I screamed as it pointed the pincer at me and ran back to the roll-a-door.

As the dwarf howled with laughter, the ferret scampering at its feet, I pulled savagely at a chain on the door until I had opened it just enough to slide out.

I stood outside gasping at the fresh air, hugging my sides. And then from inside my ribcage there was a raucous new sound, stabbing at my heart.

My mobile phone. Ringing. And vibrating.

It was Zoe, with an update. Right address, wrong suburb. I hate it when that happens.

So we had the Great Canberra Blogger Picnic. And it was great and there were bloggers there, as well as blogger-nippers and blogger-bits-on-the-side. A fun time was had by all. Yay!

[* This story is obviously a work of fiction because I don’t own a mobile phone. And yes I was stuck for a title.]

Lost in transubstantiation

2004-11-30T20:10:00.000+10:00

Just days after promising a resurgence in crustaceanist blogging, I’m back to announce another hiatus. I’m going to Japan tomorrow and will be back on Sunday morning. Just in time for the great Canberra blogger picnic.

But please... let no one else say: 'hey, it will be just like that movie...with you know, that funny guy, and that girl. And they're, you know, lost.'

----------------------------------

Here’s a question picking up on a few blog posts of late: is Canberra bloggery increasing or does it just seem that way. Are we on the egde of a new golden age of prosperity?

Also, let me nominate Mark as Canberra’s loveliest blogger.

Sayonara.

By the light of a silvery moonbase

2004-11-28T21:09:00.000+10:00

I’m a bit of a fan of B-grade horror and SF films. The other night I noticed that channel nine was screening a film called Moonbase at 2:30 am so I strolled on over to IMDB to see if it was worth taping.

It turns out to be your basic tale of a disgraced astronaut seeking redemption in charge of an obscure moonbase waste disposal unit which is about to be taken over by a handful of homicidal escaped convicts.

The comments about this film aren’t kind. From one commenter, ‘rsoonsa’:

‘The plot involves an escape of life sentenced prisoners from a space station penal colony to a waste landfill upon our moon and their various attempts to obtain passage back to Earth, with some few capable players present who are execrably directed by first-timer Paolo Mazzucato, whose production team wastes effort upon such as holographic pornography while ignoring a pressing and basic requirement for the creation of states of suspense and of impetus.’

Which is all good fun until you see a later comment entitled ‘A note from the director...’. Yes, Mr Mazzucato himself weighs in:

“IMDB: While the following is not exactly a review, I think "equal time" is warranted when you do post a review that is so flawed. Your consideration is appreciated.

Regarding rsoonsa's "critique":

I suppose if one chooses to work in the sewer of low- budget production he should not take offense when his efforts are referred to as excrement. And perhaps you are correct in opining that with "essentially no budget... special effects of space opera warfare (will) appear only clownish." It might have been nobler, on my part, if when handed the script for "Moonbase" and asked if I wanted to direct the film, I had flatly refused on the grounds of the implausibility of the story and the impossibility of filming it for the meager budget allotted. But in the real world, those who seek to create something, anything, have to seize the opportunities afforded to them and do their best within the parameters set by the given project”

Ouch!

He then proceeds to offer paragraph after paragraph of defence of the allegedly implausible science behind ‘Moonbase’, including the fact that all exterior shots in space should be silent, the possibility of the establishment of an orbiting station at a stable point within the moon's orbit equidistant from the Earth and the moon, and the ‘problem of Earth's accumulation of garbage and the proposition that some future government might consider dumping refuse in a lunar crater out of view on the moon's far side.’

Jeez, lighten up, dude.

Still, I feel for Mr Mazzucato. ‘Moonbase’ is indeed his only credit as director (alongside a scattering of writing, art direction and ‘miscellaneous crew’ credits). And that was released in 1998; he hasn’t directed anything since then (in fact, he doesn’t seem to have worked at all since 1999).

He evidently invests something of himself in his film career and the products of his labour, only to see some random internet dude who happens to catch his one and only movie on late-night cable slam it into oblivion.

As he says: ‘You don't have to like it, I just wish you didn't get so much glee from tearing it down in your own "execrable" fashion.’

That’s the internet for you: recording what would otherwise have been private thoughts and feelings permanently so that somewhere, somehow, someone will be hurt by them.

I give the final word to my man, Paolo, a man who tried hard to tread the fine line between art and the commercial dictates of the motion picture industry to produce a little cinematic gem that might stand the test of time:

“Now, regarding your objection to the holographic stripper...well, okay. Let's just say sometimes the people who have to sell the end product request a little skin. And as my producer explained to me: It's the golden rule; He who has the gold, makes the rules. In my defense I will point out though, that I reworked that story point and the climax in Act 3 so that the holographic nudity was not entirely gratuitous.”

Well, that’s alright then…

(And it was pretty execrable by the way...)

Nick is winner, loved

2004-11-27T21:49:00.000+10:00

‘Nick is winner, loved, generous wise’ is how my novelty personalised socks – the pride of the South-East Asian garment manufacturing industry – describe me. Oftentimes this boast from my feet is an idle one.

But tonight it just happens to be true. I am winner, loved. For I have completed by nanowrimo novel two days ahead of schedule (why I rushed to complete it early is a hoary tale for another blogpost.) Suffice to say, I’m great.

That’s right, I have pumped out a 50,000 word novel in the last 28 days. (Actually it’s 50,079 words. And funnily enough I have more or less tied off all plot threads in the novel and have come to a reasonably satisfying conclusion – which is either evidence of the brutal Soviet-style efficiency of my writing or padding in the extreme.)

For those who want to congratulate me, I say: go right ahead.

For those who want to ask me: what it’s about, this novel of yours, I say: aw jeez, I hate that question.

For those who want to ask me: can I read it, I say: aw jeez, I guess so. The proprietor however accepts no liability for losses or damage incurred.

And finally, for those who want to ask me: is it any good, I say: see the answer to the third question. Then you’ll probably know more than I do.

Your regular crustacean blogging will shortly be resumed.

Bastard poms landed us on the wrong beach!

2004-11-21T19:16:00.000+10:00

Jack: What are your synapses?
Archy: Springs. Steel springs.
Jack: What are they going to do?
Archy: Hurl me down the word-count.
Jack: How fast can you write?
Archy: As fast as a leopard.
Jack: How fast are you going to write?
Archy: As fast as a leopard.
Jack: Then lets see you do it.

33 000 words down, 17 000 left to do in eight days including today (three and a half hours left!). I have to finish on the 28th rather than the more traditional end-of-the-month marker, the 30th, because I'm off to Japan for work on the 30th and I need the 29th to get ready.

So the next 8 days will see me charging the Turkish machine-gun nests of my own imagination in a rematch of Gallipoli. This time, it's personal...

This has been your official nanowrimo update.

Taste my desperation. It doesn’t taste like strawberry icecream

2004-11-15T21:31:00.000+10:00

Well, this is the end of week two of the nanowrimo rock festival in my brain and I’m sitting pretty (or as James Thurber would have it, in the catbird seat, God bless you high school English) on just over 25 000 words. Which is exactly on schedule for those of you without calculators.

But there’s a storm cloud on the horizon (see! I am a writer! Only a true original talent could have compared an impending writer’s block to a black wall of bad weather. It’s never been done before.)

The kind folks at nanowrimo HQ pop out a weekly pep talk. Here is how they describe first day of week two:

“If there were a zodiac sign for each cycle of the noveling escapade, Week One would undoubtedly be a magnificent galleon at full sail. Week Three would be a road-tested marathon runner, smiling as she catches her second wind. And Week Four would be a lone figure silhouetted against the setting sun, arms raised in triumph.

Unfortunately, Week Two would be represented by a pack of rabid weasels hurling themselves from the treetops onto a group of screaming campers below.

[…]
Because Week Two is when you'll likely begin having some second thoughts about your participation in NaNoWriMo. It's the point when the effects of sleep-deprivation, mind-wearying creative output, and a shortage of leisure time will combine to create the infamous Week Two Wall.”

Actually, the week two wall was made of foam and tasted like mango as far as I was concerned. (Though I love the weasels metaphor and will steal it at some point in the future.)

And here’s how the muthas describe week three:

“You just spent two weeks paying your noveling dues. And Week Three is when payback begins.

And how! This week, the whole thing gets easier. The words will come more fluidly, and your characters will finally start pulling their own weight, solving plot dilemmas and spicy personal dramas in surprisingly readable ways.”

Trust me to be contrary and counter-cyclical (how I love that word – it’d be worth doing a bachelor’s degree in economics just to be able to use that word every day) but I’m starting to hurt right now.

Tonight’s quota is no playful monkey slapped off its perch. It’s a 200kg mountain gorilla (much like the enourmous silver-backed male we saw in Melbourne Zoo three weeks ago about which the Dude said to me: Gettit!’).

And it’s playing knucklebones with my kidneys and pancreas.

So, in the interests of teaching the quota primate who’s top of the evolution tree, I beg your assistance.

Insert plot developments in the comments box and I SWEAR* I’ll use them.

*offer not valid in conjunction with any other offer or in South Australia or if I don’t actually feel like it or if your idea is really crap.

The loneliness of the long-distance punner

2004-11-10T22:06:00.000+10:00

I have nothing to declare but my genius and a few soft apples which may or may not be harbouring fruit-fly. Also known as drosophilia, which sounds like a nice name for a girl if you're so inclined.

Well, it's 11:09 pm and I still have 500 words to write before the quota monkey gets off my back and takes a quick nap until 12:00 am when he gets up and flings faeces once more at my tiny screen. Curse you quota monkey, why can't you be more like those freaking bonobos?

Yes, this is a nanowrimo post. My word count stands at 18 222 (believe me, I know because I hit that word count function more often than I press the space bar.)

On the good news front, I rediscovered Andy's CD from the great Canberra blogger CD swap. It was in the car, not in the stolen bag. Yay! It really is a fine compilation. Pulp's 'Babies' may be one of the finest tracks written by a skinny Englishman with bad teeth (and there are plenty of those).

OK, quota monkey, we do one more round. This time you my bitch.

Crime doesn't pay (very well and there's no super plan)

2004-11-07T21:08:00.000+10:00

Last night we were burgled. I went to bed at about 1:30 am, woke briefly at about 2:30 thinking that I’d heard a noise, listened for a moment then went back to sleep. (In the past, I’ve got up upon hearing strange noises. Last night I didn’t – chiefly because I thought the noise was outside.)

In the morning, Wifely found that the burglar had taken things from the empty bedroom he entered and from the hallway, before leaving. He (presumably it’s a he) didn’t venture any further into the house.

At first we thought nothing of significance had been taken, only to find that my wallet had gone, along with my bag which contains my MP3 player (including the only two CDs I’ve received from the great Canberra blogger CD swap – the other two are, shall we say a little tardy). Bummer!

When the police arrived, Wifely asked if it would have been better if somebody had got up when the burglar was in the house. Immediately and in unison, the two young cops said: ‘Yes.’

Wifely said: ‘So if you disturb them while they’re still here, then they’ll bolt, will they?’

One young cop: ‘Generally, generally, yeah. Sometimes you’ll get a nutcase.’

My humble view is that the police may need to re-think their automatic support for the ‘get up and interrupt a burglar’ strategy. Just saying, that’s all.

Later that afternoon, I got a sudden jones to get into the novel I started reading two days ago. (The Da Vinci Code -- no snobbery please, it was a birthday gift from an in-law and I'm contractually obliged to read it). I realised it was in my bag with my MP3 player for bus-trip distraction. Bummer again.

Later still, I’m working on my nanowrimo novel when my mind turns to the two notebooks with my scribbed ideas in them. The novel is at about 13 000 words after almost a week and I’m starting to stuggle a little. A fresh idea injection could be just the thing. Guess where the two notebooks were? The insurance company can reimburse me for the $5 cost of the notebooks but they can’t replace the ink.

This is what pisses me off most about crime like this. The burglar got away with a small amount of cash (about $40) and an MP3 player that’s probably worth about $100 at the back of a pub. But the cost to the victim in terms of psychological distress (a criminal walked through our house while me, Wifely and the Dude were sleeping!), of irritation (replacing all the plastic cards and other emblems of modern life in my wallet) and of genuine loss (of things like the notebooks) is enormous.

Mr Burglar, if you read Canberra blogs in between hits of smack: mate, you’re a jerk.

Southern fried electoral chicken

2004-11-06T01:29:00.000+10:00

Something that I’m surprised I haven’t read in connection with the Kerry loss in the US presidential election is that once again a Northern Democrat has failed in his bid for the Whitehouse. The last Northerner to occupy the White House, from Massachusetts no less, was Kennedy. Johnson (Texas) succeeded him and won in 1964 but did not contest the 1968 election. Carter (Georgia) won in 1976 and Clinton (Arkansas) in 1992 and 1996.

For the Democrats, that’s just 4 victories in 40 years, and all Southerners.

Gore, a kind of Southerner from Tennessee kind of lost in 2000, though he won the popular vote. The parade of losers before him:

Michael Dukakis (1988, Massacusetts)
Walter Mondale (1984, Minnesota, hammered 525 – 13 by Reagan)
George McGovernn (1972, South Dakota, hammered 520 – 17 by Nixon)
Hubert Humphrey (1968, Minnesota).

The simple message here is Democrats don’t win much and Democrat Northerners (after Kennedy) don’t win at all. And for God’s sake give Massachusetts and Minnesota a miss next time.

Everyone is wise in retrospect but maybe the best pick would have been smooth-talking Southerner John Edwards, despite his inexperience. Give him the nod in 2008 (probably against McCain or Jeb Bush), make sure he uses the word ‘God’ a lot and he may be in with a chance…

Post with no name

2004-11-03T19:51:00.000+10:00

OK, blogspot, now you're just making me look stupid. Aren't you? Feel better about yourself, do you, to lay somebody else low....?

Curse you, blogspot and President Bush, villains both

2004-11-03T19:38:00.000+10:00

I have no mouth and I must scream.

I have no mouth because blogspot just erased my freaking US election post. After many days of trekking across a vast desert on a horse with no name to find ink for my quill to scrawl my disbelief at the US election result, a blogspot shaped tornado swept over me and sped off into the distance, taking my hastily penned scroll with it.

It was a nice little post which featured tortured extended metaphors about pigeons, pendulums and sunbeds (I swear!) but it’s gone now. The horse read it and liked it but he has no name.

Pigeons, Pendulums and Sunbeds (Bush is returned)

2004-11-03T19:14:00.000+10:00

Two words: speech & less.

I have to say, I didn't see that coming. I was convinced that Kerry would win and those freaking exit polls -- playthings of the devil -- seemed to confirm it.

It's possible that Kerry might still finesse his way through Ohio and across the line but it doesn't look good.

Back in the bad old days when a Kerry victory was not inevitable (and way before those bad old days returned on November 2), I was thinking that a Bush re-election might not be such a bad thing: that Bush's pigeons, warped, stinking things that can't fly straight, would come home to roost for him and result in the destruction of the Bush/Rove/Delay wing of the Republican Party (and that electing Kerry might just have brought those same stinking pigeons winging their way to him in the same way Kennedy's Vietnam pigeons shat on Johnson).

But, jeez, how much self-destruction can one blogger foresee? Barely have I come from predicting that the Coalition in Australia will destroy itself now that it faces no native predators, when I find myself having nought to take comfort in but Bush's theoretical groundward trajectory.

All self-destruction all the time, here at Crustaceans...

But I do believe in this, I think. Everything comes in cycles. Pendulums swing and then they swing back. Conservatism is enjoying its moment in the sun while liberal types cower in the shadows, dreaming of sunbeds and sangria. But it won't stay that way forever. And the pendulum does not begin swinging back until it has reached the furtherest point of its swing.

Enjoy your poolside sunbed, President Bush, because even now a pigeon of your own making is headed your way with a pendulum in its beak. Or something.

In your face, blank screen!

2004-11-02T22:51:00.000+10:00

My word count for nanowrimo is now a tasty 5,005. This means that I’ve done 10% of my ‘novel’ in just two days.

If I can keep this up, I’ll be able to offer up the biggest piece of crap the world has ever seen in just nine more days!

Blogging will be light for the rest of November as a consequence….

Coalition self-destruction watch, part II

2004-10-31T19:46:00.000+10:00

In an earlier and highly perceptive post: Bad news for the Liberals: they control the House and the Senate... I offered the view that the Coalition would find control over the Senate less than fulfilling, mainly due to the fact that it would allow internal divisions to come to the fore.

And barely had the electrons dried on the AEC’s computerised election score card when this was reported:

While the Government will from July 1 next year no longer be forced to
negotiate with minor parties to pass legislation, newly elected Queensland Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce declared he wanted public funding for abortions stopped and restrictions on the market share of retail giants Woolworths and Coles Myer in return for his controlling vote.

The demands come on top of warnings from Mr Joyce and two of his four other Senate Nationals colleagues that Telstra service levels in the bush were not yet up to scratch and could stand in the way of the full sale of the telecommunications giant.

Mr Joyce, who with Liberal Russell Trood snared the last two Queensland spots in the declaration of the poll yesterday, insisted he was not obliged to toe the Coalition line.

’I will be a senator for the Queensland National Party first and foremost and it's the policies of the Queensland Nationals that I'll support,’ Mr Joyce said.

Jeez, the guy isn’t taking his seat for 8 months and is already laying down (politically very difficult) demands.

Nevermind the fact that Joyce is only part of a fourth-term governing coalition because of the Prime Minister’s amazing political acumen (love him or hate him, you’ve got to admit, he knows his stuff), he apparently believes that being the 39th confirmed Coalition Senator entitles him to behave like a bizarro world Bob Brown.

Can civil war and a breakdown of the rule of law be far away?

One blade of grass lies, the other tells the truth

2004-10-31T01:08:00.000+11:00

This morning I went to get petrol for the lawn mower (which doesn’t run on love, alas). The cashier dude engaged me in cashier dude banter as we waited for the massive apparatus of financial exchange to let us know that my electrons were sufficient payment for his employer’s petroleum.

Cashier dude: doing some lawn mowing, are you?

Me: yes, gotta be done.

CD: It’s always the way. Lovely day for it.

Me: well, I started yesterday and then ran out of petrol.

CD: it’s always the way, isn’t it?

Me: yes.

[Pause]

CD: so what’s your tip for the Melbourne Cup?

Me: I don’t really know the names of the horses.

CD: not into gambling?

Me: well, I only really get into it on Tuesday.

CD: it’s always the way, isn’t it?

Me: yes.

I imagine that when cashier dude got to work that morning he was given a cash float for the till and an envelope containing the catch-phrase of the day. Sunday’s will be: ‘you wouldn’t read about it’ and on Monday: ‘as you do.’

Alternatively, he moonlights as a zen master. ‘It was always this way, grasshopper, and always shall be so.’

It wasn’t always this way, you know. It used to be different. But not anymore.

Segue!

Later that day, I was actually mowing the lawn. As I vroomed along the side of my property, I was kicking up great clouds of red-brown dust which settled on the white 4WD Subaru station wagon belonging to my neighbour.

He came running out, objecting to my dust-related program activities. (That’s a deeply-buried and quite unnecessary Iraq War joke by the way).

I asked him if he could appreciate the irony of being bothered by dust landing on a car called the ‘Outback’.(Please don’t write in to tell me I’m misusing the word ‘irony’ because I might be and I don’t care. You irony police (and you know who you are) are getting out of control).

Actually I made this part of the anecdote up. It’s the first in a new series entitled ‘Imaginary retorts to imaginary complaints from real-life situations’. I’m in discussions with Fox about a late-night cable special.

I really did kick dust all over his car though. And -- and I guess you can tell this by the very fact of this blog post – I do feel a little bit sorry.

A little.

Choose life

2004-10-28T22:09:00.000+11:00

I would have first seen Trainspotting when it was released back in 1997. Tonight was the first time I’ve seen it since then.

The heroin-taking begins early, with the added bonus of a young infant crawling amongst the junkies, something which quietly horrified me.

But then – and how the FUCK could I have forgotten this scene – the child dies, presumably of dehydration, in her cot.

Yes, I know, the horror, the horror of drug-taking, warts and all. (After the mother wails in grief she begs for another hit).

Just how could I have not remembered that this scene was coming?

Well, I won’t forget now, thank you very much, Irvine fucking Welsh.

Man versus nature in a fight to the porch

2004-10-26T22:31:00.000+11:00

Two days ago it rained. (Hold the freakin’ front page!). I was walking home from the bus stop with about 150 metres to gone when it began to spot.

Pit-pat. The rain said.

Tap-tap. My feet said.

And from that moment, a contest sprang up between my feet and the cosmos as a whole. Would the rain fall fast enough to force me to break my gentle rhythmic stride and start running? Or would my shoes retain their honest working man’s dignity and casually snub any meagre increase in precipitation?

Would the pit-pat become a plop-plop forcing my tap-tap to become a thump-thump (to express the problem musically)?

It was a lot like duelling banjos (but with out the river rafting and the anal rape). I met the sky’s firm accelerando pit-pit-pat with a delightful allegro non troppo tap-tip-tap.

And gradually the rain quickened, forcing my feet to march in time with the new beat, but not yet quite forcing me to quit the race and begin the sprint.

So what happened? Who won? Me or God?

Actually I can’t remember. Who even gives a shit?

I got a bit wet though.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from the Wiggles

2004-10-24T16:30:00.000+11:00

The process of children learning about the world fascinates me. They take so many amazing things at face value because these things are presented to kids as utterly ordinary and because children have no means to understand the underlying systems.

Take television, that object of love and hatred in every parents home: a screen on which things can be made to appear (using videos or DVDs) and on which some things simply appear of their own accord (broadcasts).

It is frustrating for children (and therefore for their parents) that some images cannot be brought back for a second (and 87th) viewing. A quick burst of the equestrian events at the Olympics (the first ‘sport’ to be ditched the very second they make me IOC President, along with syncronised swimming and competitve antique clock-fixing) has the Dude clamoring for more: horses! Horses!

How to explain to the Dude that his father, normally Lord of all he surveys, cannot bring back the horses but can show Bob the Builder stuck atop a scaffold again and again? And again.

When I was a child I remember having a conversation with a chum about what we had seen on our respective TV sets:

‘Wow, you watched The Flintstones? Hey, The Flintstones was on my TV too!’

I mean, why would a child assume that every TV set, each a different shape and size and in a different home, is capable of showing exactly the same thing? A TV is just an unquestioned source of sound and vision

On Saturday morning, we had a friend over for brunch. On Sunday morning, the Dude saw her again on the TV on one of those journalists-chewing-over-the-week shows. At what point will he realise that family friends do not ordinarily turn up on that screen in the corner? (I quickly rang another family member to see if our friend was on their TV as well. She was! Unlike children, I remain amazed by television and all its wondrous ways).

One for the Gipper

2004-10-23T21:21:00.000+11:00

I actually wrote this little piece of US election whimsy in a comment on Tim Dunlop's Road to Surfdom site as part of my on-going obsession with the US presidential election. And then I thought such a thing of quality deserves its own post! (Thereby freeing me from the tyranny of originality this evening. Did I mention I got home last night at 1:30 am drunk as drunk person after drinking too much, only to have to get up at 5:30 am to look after the Dude and his tonsillitis...)

In other news... U.S Conservatives objected to the way that Edwards visibly blanched as Vice-President Cheney ate his own off-spring on stage before a television audience of 20 million Americans.

'Edwards' inability to hide his disgust whenever Cheney opened his mouth was very much reminiscent of Gore's sighing and eye-rolling from 2000' said Chuck Storer, a retired bank manager from Branson, Missouri.

And Rudiger P. Stoat, an unemployed billionaire from Akron, Ohio, questioned the commitment of liberals to racial and cultural diversity: 'If you're black, yellow, red or brown, the Democrats can't sign you up fast enough but if you happen to draw nutrition from your own young then suddenly the much-vaunted tolerance disappears. What I want to know is: who will stand up for the Predator-American community?'

'You know what their problem is?' said Stephen D'Eth of Houston. 'Pussy democrats are all vegetarians. They can't take it when a red-blooded American chows down on a little red meat.'

Breaking news: Howard plays down ‘early’ retirement talk

2004-10-20T21:45:00.000+11:00

Prime Minister John Howard, speaking today at the Holsworthy Army base in Western Sudney, played down speculation that he might retire only a year into his fourth term.

‘All this talk of retirement is highly premature,’ the Prime Minister said, ‘I still have much to contribute to Australia’s future.’

Howard posed with members of the Seventh Royal Australian Regiment while joking that they should be renamed ‘the Green Howards’, a reference to a British Army unit of long standing. ‘Or maybe just the Howards,’ he said, laughing with the soldiers, ‘that would be my preference.’

Although Mr Howard gave national security and economic management as the focuses of his incoming Government, he denied that his administration was in danger of becoming stale.

‘I totally refute the suggestion that I am not open to new ideas,’ he said, ‘for example, I feel I am having a change of heart on the Republic issue.’

Mr Howard said that he could see ‘considerable merit in the notion that the Australian Head of State should be born in Canterbury-Bankstown or anywhere else in Australia for that matter.’

‘I hold the Queen in high esteem, very high esteem, as you all know, but she has a lot on her plate. I will therefore be pressing ahead with a referendum for a President so that I can again give the Australian people more of what they want.’

Mr Howard would not address speculation that he might run for the Presidency of an Australian Republic.

‘Look, I’ve won four elections now. I can’t see that a fifth victory would add anything. No one has a better idea of the wants and needs of the Australian people than me.’ He said.

‘I intend to serve up a cocktail of greater security, lower interest rates and more prisons, with much less of the kind of ugly parliamentary squabbles that people are so tired of seeing on television.’

Mr Howard finished his tour of the base with a visit to the officer’s mess, the child care centre and the quartermaster where he accepted the gift of a field-marshal’s uniform before leaving for Canberra at the head of a column of armored personnel carriers.

Two tales of stoopid, one of smart (Part III)

2004-10-18T22:21:00.000+11:00

Having delivered on the tales of stoopid, I now make good on my promise of a chronicle of perspicasia-, perspecashewness, er, smarts.

Being the adorable, irepressible father that I am, living his life vicariously through an infant son too young to tell him to get a life, my tale of smarts belongs to the Dude.

His latest word is ‘different’ (or ‘diff’rent’). And he gets a lot of use out of it.

Wanna go to the park? [pointing to the park across the road].

Yes. Diff’rent park.

Wanna watch Bob, the world’s most unrealistic builder? [cueing up Bob DVD – in this episode, Bob turns up when he says he will. I guess a little fantasy doesn’t do kids any harm]

Yes. Diff’rent Bob.

It’s never to early to learn that variety is the freakin’ spice-a-life. Or the limitations of a father’s power to effect change: but they only ever made one Piglet movie! It’s called Piglet’s Big Movie and that’s the whole bloody Piglet ouvre!

Personally, I think diff’rent is a milestone in language development. The first important word kids learn (around the same time as ‘Mummy’, ‘Daddy’ and ‘econometrics’) is ‘no’. ‘No’ allows a child to address the conveyor belt of stuff that is reality and say ‘stop!’ ‘I don’t want the next item heading my way’.

The next big word is ‘more’. ‘More’ makes the conveyor belt double back on itself at just the right moment.

‘Yeah, that last thing, that last thing was good. Bring it back, double it in size and dip it in chocolate.’

And now, ‘diff’rent’.

‘Yes, Pater, what you are offering me has merit,, certainly. But not in that colour, not with that sauce and not with your goddamn finger-prints all over it. Diff’rent!’

Once you’ve mastered those three big words, the conveyor belt of reality is your plaything and every word thereafter is just a bonus really.

Until you learn ‘sleep-in’ which is an almost magical word but one with sadly no practical application in this universe.

Latham's down. Let the kicking begin!

2004-10-16T21:29:00.000+11:00

If he wants, John Howard can be Prime Minister for as long as he likes; the Liberal party is about to make him el President for life. The medal-covered military uniform and the gigantic statue in Martin Place can’t be far off.

Meanwhile, Labour is back to the drawing board. Hint: ditch Latham. He was always massively over-rated. With his constant self-mythologising allusions to Gough, the ALP couldn’t help but believe he was the Messiah to lead them from the Wildnerness. The immediate rise in approval ratings after the lead weight of Crean was kicked free seemed to confirm it. But he was just another ordinary leader. The ALP is always ready to believe that waiting in the wings is a leader with the magic touch. They need to be less attached to Whitlam and Keating and study Hawke more – who is after-all the most successful Labor leader ever.

Hawke governed on the strength of his commonsense and his charisma, neither of which Latham has in abundance.

Another model for the Labor party is Howard himself: A man who appeared to be really very ordinary and was kicked to the floor several times but has turned out to be the ‘greatest’ (I can’t bring myself to dispense with the inverted commas) Liberal leader since Menzies. (Actually this sounds like an argument to give Latham a second chance and maybe it is).

Really, what I’m saying is that the ALP believes in ‘magic’ in a way that the Liberals do not; that a leader will come along who will simply catch fire with the electorate. And it isn’t true (most of the time). Great leaders are built over time and are often products of their experience and their organisations; they don’t spring from Western Sydney perfectly formed.

So, ALP: kick back, relax, stop expecting miracles and quietly work towards rebuilding an effective front-bench.

(But what about Julia Gillard, huh? I reckon she could be the next Bob Hawke. What charisma! What a common touch! She just might sweep all before her… Julia Gillard, Australia’s next Prime Minister. Has a real ring to it, doesn’t it?)

Lobster in CD-swap sex romp! Pix!

2004-10-13T20:20:00.000+11:00

I finally got off my toukas and mailed off my CD in the great Canberra blogger CD-swap of 2004 (Andy is the genius criminal mastermind behind the whole enterprise, cackling fiendishly in his secret mountain laboratory in, er, Holt).

The cover of the CD features the following photo of a random girl holding a huge lobster somewhat seductively. It's all very tasteful and in keeping with my general sea-going exoskeleton fetish.

(The alternative title to his post would be: "Inside blogging: in-jokes of interest to only two or three people! At most!" Wait, doesn't that describe most blog posts? -- official obligatory blogging self-put-down.)

Bad news for the Liberals: they control the House and the Senate…

2004-10-11T21:00:00.000+11:00

So Howard won Government for the fourth time and control of the Senate. It’s generally assumed that the Liberals having control of the Senate is a VERY GOOD THING for the Coalition but I’m not so sure. Here’s why:

1) They’ll only have themselves to blame if (when) things go wrong. The Coalition now utterly dominates the Federal political landscape. Everything that happens, happens because they want it to. No compromises with the Opposition; no deals with the Democrats; no legislation pinging back and forth between House and Senate until agreement is reached. (And of course they don’t have that other tried and true political excuse – this or that problem is a legacy of the previous Government). You break it, you own it.

2) Lots of canvas to paint on, not much inspiration to paint. The Howard Government is a fourth term Government and so has already done most things it wanted to do (apart from the big controversial stuff like the full sale of Telstra and unfair dismissal laws – which can be taken care of in the first half of 2005.) Everything they want to pass will slip through like a greased pig. What do they do for the other two and a half years? The Coalition must either churn out Bills they don’t really believe in to feed the gaping maw that is Parliament or they let the chambers grind to a halt, admitting they have no fresh ideas. Can you say ‘tired’?

3) Keep your enemies close and your backbenchers closer. Today, there is effectively no opposition. The ALP can ask snarky question in question time but apart from that it’s irrelevant. But rest assured a new enemy will be found – from within. Internal divisions that are normally kept in check in the face of a common foe – the Opposition – will run free. As the Coalition grows desperate for things to do, they will be supplied with ideas from within – from social conservatives and from the wets, from economic rationalists and from protectionists, from the urbanites and from the Nationals. Look in the mirror, here is your enemy.

In short, I believe that the Government will find total control of Parliament to be less desirable than it appears.Whether this will result in spectacular One-Nation-like self-destruction in only three years is another matter…

Oh you bright and risen alpha-numerals!

2004-10-07T20:56:00.000+11:00

You may have noticed the viking squirrel creature that now adorns my side-bar (I finally worked out how to have images in my blog -- in your face, Internet!).

As well as swearing to dispatch my enemies to Valhalla, he is also the spokes-rodent for NaNoWriMO. You may be forgiven for thinking NaNoWriMo is some kind of microscopic versifying machine (I said, you may be forgiven for thinking...microscopic etc....geddit?).

NaNoWrimo (which you maybe be forgiven for thinking is the last Japanese Prime Minister) stands for National Novel Writing Month. The idea is beautiful in its simplicity and its simple beauty. You sign up to write a 'novel' (being 50 000 words) in the month of November. And then you stop. And then you win the Booker prize.

50 000 in a month equates to an average of 1 700 which is possible but difficult. Oh so difficult. But the weight of the deadline should make something happen, or break me in the process.

The vague aim is to get a rough draft done so's I can work it into shape for next year's Vogel competition, which is restricted to those under 35.

I'm not getting any younger, you know!

Two tales of stoopid, one of smart (Part II)

2004-10-04T22:45:00.000+11:00

I had just cooked the Dude’s dinner (lamb cutlets at $20 a kilo – he eats better than we do) when I got the bright idea of cleaning the fat out of the still hot fry pan before it could congeal into a tasty surprise for the washer-upperer.

I ran water from the tap straight into the pan whereupon it immediately vapourised. Seconds later, the smoke alarm was singing. I put the Dude into his chair and got him started on some corn while I struggled to stop the incessant beeping.

Now, we have a back-to-base system which means the little security gnomes back in the special alarm monitoring cave in the North Pole are supposed to ring various numbers when an alarm is activiated (so they call send the police or an ambulance or call in an air-strike on your home, as appropriate).

There was no phone call. There was hardly any smoke. I just thought the smoke alarm was a little tired and emotional and needed to get something of its chest. I pressed a few buttons on the alarm pad, hoping that I could thus placate the far away alarm gnomes.

The next few minutes were spent in a knock-down, drag-out brawl with the Dude. I alternated my ‘voice of authority’ with my usual begging, wheedling tone. Just one more piece of lamb, one more freakin’ little piece of lamb, and I’ll give you all the strawberries you want.

Storbees!

Just. One. Little. Piece.

Storbees!

You don’t even have to swallow it. Just put it in your mouth and chew once or twice.

It took him 15 full minutes to break my spirit. He’s slipping.

But then as I was bringing over the storbees, I heard a distinctive sound in the distance. The sound of a fire-engine. Oh please god don’t let it be coming here. Please God.

The fire-engine (they call them appliances, don’t they? I guess because you can buy them at Dick Smith’s) got closer and closer.

But, I thought, with my unshakeable logic, the phone never rang. I never took that call from the gnomes who know.

Sudden pertinent thought: the phone is on the hook isn’t it? (We often take it off so that Dude’s all important day sleep is not interrupted). Well, stoopid-fans, you already know the answer to this question. The phone receiver was dangling uselessly like an unpopular incumbent before a gruelling pre-selection battle (it’s the season for analogies like this one).

The Dude and I went to the door to see the fire engine go rushing past. I guess they were looking for, you kow, smoke. It quickly turned around and stopped in front of our house. I apologised profusely to the fire-dudes who were good natured macho young men. They didn’t seem to mind.

Less calm was my mother-in-law who turned up three minutes later. She had been called by the gnomes after our phone had registered its incessant busy signal.

I apologised profusely to her too.

What can I say? I said. I’m sorry. I’m a stupid person.

Hazelblackberry: I'm (Bridget) Jonesin'

2004-09-29T22:46:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick

When do the next year's diaries come out? Here it is September 2004 and I'm just ITCHING to get my 2005 diary. I'm sure they come out around now. I'm SURE. I don't know if I can hang out until October. I have such a pathetic reliance on my diary. The rot set in during high school when it was compulsory to use our homework diaries. As you may be able to tell from the name, they were primarily for recording our homework in - what it was and when it was due etc etc. Ours even had the school crest on them. (Everything was tastefully embossed with the school crest of course.) With us girls it wasn't long before the diaries were decorated with stickers and full of messages and recording the dates of all our best girly friends' birthdays and parties and sleep overs and which night you couldn't miss Family Ties because that's when Michael J Fox and Courtney Cox/Tracey Pollan would KISS.

[Mind you, my attendance at aforementioned sleep overs was severely restricted by Don Mary. Despite many tearful pleadings on the phone to Bloody Ern to PLEASE MAKE HER LET ME GO, Don Mary held firm. No granddaughter of hers was heading down the slippery slope to slutdom via supposedly innocent games of spin-the-bottle, let me tell you. And I suppose she was right. I can, most emphatically, claim that I am not a slut. I may be a raging prude, but by golly I'm no SLUT. Not that there was any danger of that. When all your friends are decorating their homework diaries with pictures of Simon Le Bon and Kurt from Tears for Fears and all the band members from Kids in the Kitchen and you choose pictures of Warren Zevon and Roger Taylor from Queen, probably your chances of growing into a slut are pretty slim. And when I look around at my friends, first-rate sluts one-and-all, I feel a little tingle of pride. I don't see any of THEM developing insane crushes on Jim Carver in The Bill. I'm talking about Jim Carver in the days before he had the tragic weight gain and drinking problem. You see, I'm fickle.]

Anyway...here's my point: it was in the 1980s that I decided to surrender my faculties for remembering dates and addresses unassisted and developed an addiction to diaries. Now I can't live without them! I love the smell and feel of a brand new diary; blank pages filled with promise: next year I will remember everyone's birthdays on time; next year all my work will be done a in a careful, measured manner and not in a last minute freaking-out rush. Look, I am even writing in each pay day and planning out my expenses and a savings plan. I may even keep some kind of system to make sure I email/phone people at appropriate intervals, not once every so often with, "So sorry I haven't written in aaaages. WILL write soon - PROMISE. Must dash - byeeee xxxxx." How perfect next year will be. So perfect that I cannot wait for it to arrive. It's only September and already this year is stale and old. I'm weary of it. Clearly it's been a complete failure. I want to leave it behind and concentrate on what's in front of me. Get a brand new start.

And it's around this time of year I start obsessively stalking various stationery stores waiting for their new diary stock to appear on the shelves. But patience, my pretty. Do not rush headlong into danger. A diary is a major purchase and I have a few requirements like nice creamy-coloured pages, one-day-to-a-page with a monthly summary, tabs for each month and the like. But here are two CRUCIAL deal-breaking criteria: the diary must be able to fit into my handbag (to give myself the impression that like Dominick Dunne writing for Vanity Fair I can just whip this little baby out and take notes of the fascinating conversations going on around me) and MUST BE SPIRAL BOUND.

Last year I got desperate to feed the monkey and, with no other options around, I bought a stitch-bound diary. A major mistake. It has no give, it doesn't work with me. I resent having to entrust to its keeping the minutiae of my life. But it was there when I was in a fix, and now I hate it for being so readily available. So easy to procure. So willing to make everything right. This year I'm staying strong and biding my time for the good gear.

I just hope it's out there somewhere, and soon.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

Two tales of stoopid, one of smart (Part 1)

2004-09-28T15:27:00.000+11:00

I’d known for several days that the petrol tank was getting pretty close to empty so I made up my mind to shoot in before my volleyball game and fill up the tank. I dropped off some videos and ducked into BP quickly. (This is the part of the story equivalent to ‘insert flap A into slot B’. Tedious but you have to do it if you want the toy monkey.)

By way of background: I’ve often found that the nozzle tends to shut off prematurely and I have to force it to keep, er, petrolling until the tank is full.

So this particular time, the nozzle shuts off immediately. Try again. Click. Again. Click. Again. Click. (In case you’re wondering, this is one of the tales of stoopid). The petrol I was trying to put into the tank was more or less running out of the tank and down the side of the car.

I went inside and asked Grumpy Cashier (no relation to Hazelblackberry’s Grumpy who is rather nice for all his perceived Grumpiness) if there was a problem with the pump. He said try another pump.

I did. Click. Again. Click. Again. Click. More petrol made its bid for freedom.

Went back inside. Look, I think something is wrong with my fuel tank. We’ll just leave it there. I used about $2.60 worth of petrol (now decorating your forecourt).

Strangely, he charged me $3.85, something I’ll never understand as long as I live.

I went back to my car, contemplating a trip to the mechanic to fix my, er, faulty fuel tank. Bad fuel tank! Must relearn thirst!

Put the key in the ignition. Noticed the fuel gauge was full.

I went back into the service station and got into line. At that point, I was thinking that the pump must have filled up my tank without registering it. I was going to ask if somehow the pump might have delivered petrol unbeknownst even to itself. A kind of sleep-pumping pump.

When a sudden thought hit me.

Maybe Wifey filley tankey already!

I did the old ‘pretend you’ve forgotten something’ routine. Quizzical looks. Tapping of pockets. And drove out of there, quickly but with dignity as my befuelled engine thrummed: idiot idiot idiot idiot idiot

Yes, I told you it was a take of stoopid. One more to follow, later, along with a tale of smart(ness).

Boys don't cry (until they grow-up)

2004-09-26T23:20:00.000+11:00

Ah, what a week it’s been! I won’t go into all the gory public service details but on Friday after lunch I was handed my second great professional set-back for the year. (See here http://crustaceans.blogspot.com/2004/07/kiss-off-of-spider-woman.html for my earlier personal and professional betryal).

The short story is that my career is stalled and that promotion is even further off than it appeared to be before last week. I was kinda upset and hoping that no one would come to ask me about what happened because, well, I’m a sensitive young lad.

It had also been a difficult week because the Dude had been down for 5 days with some charming form of gastro: the sluices were open at both ends (a joke I first heard delivered by Monty Python in a skit about Australian wines, written 30 years ago. Let’s see the pommy bastards joke about Australian wine now! (Even if they are mostly drinking Jacob’s Creek.))

That particular Friday I was coming down the Dude’s illness. I spent Friday night shivering under a pile of blankets. So physically I wasn’t in a great state (he said by way of justification for the horror to come…)

So sure enough at about 4:30, Very Senior Guy came to my office to ask how I am. (VSG was not personally involved in this week’s kick in the teeth but was very much involved in the run-up to said blow).

‘Oh, not good.’ I said, and the water works followed. That’s right, sports fans, I blubbed. He got up and shut the door and we talked about ‘my situation’. He was very nice about it without actually really being able to help me one iota.

I apologised for crying but what could I do? As I said, I’m er, sensitive. He claimed to be a big sook himself. Who knows?

I wonder if the world has moved far and fast enough to allow men to cry in from of their bosses at work? Maybe, as long as you don’t see it every week. (This is the first time I swear!) I expect to see a cover of Maxim magazine advertising an article: ‘Blubbing before the Boss: New way to get ahead or career suicide?’

At the end of our little talk, he approached me with one hand outstretched. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to hug me or shake my hand. Being an anglo-saxon, I went for the handshake option, as unlikely as it seemed. He shook my hand and went for the hug as well. I felt kinda uncomfortable (VSG is also gay – I offer apropos of almost nothing, just to muddy the workplace waters further).

This episode got me thinking about two things:

(1) How young I still feel. Even at the grand old age of 33, I still often feel like a child in some ways. I suspect that genuine adulthood will only strike me when I’m bouncing my first grandchild.

(2) How irritated I am at my continual inner-conflict about career progress. Here I am crying at being passed over (in essence) for a promotion I’m really not sure I want. In fact, having acted in the higher position before, I’m don’t really enjoy it.

I don’t really need the money (though everyone can always use more money) and God knows I don’t want the responsibility. So why do I give myself such a hard time about this?

I continually feel that career progress is something I should want. Even if I don’t.

Reflecting on it a lot, I boiled it down to this: Even though I’m dubious about the merit of the race I’m running, this is the race I’m running and I should try to win (or at least be in the front of the pack of) any race I’m in.

This is the attitude that I’m slowly coming to grips with. If you don’t care about the race you’re running then, Dude, don’t run it.

Sure, it sounds simple…

Hazelblackberry: Husker du?

2004-09-22T23:02:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick

A little while ago I had my Own Personal Big Chill Moment. I was at a funeral and caught up with old school friends I haven't seen in years. Sure enough, the conversation soon turned to all these other people we used to go to high school with (apparently we did, I couldn't remember any of them) and what they were up to now. My participation in this lively exchange was limited due to my shocking memory.

Someone or other: "Remember X?"
Me: "No."
Someone else: "No, surely you must."
Me: "No."
Yet another: "No, really, remember him? Tall, skinny, dark hair, pale skin."
Me: "Oh wait. Okay, was he the guy that one time I got partnered with in dancing and yeah he was really skinny because dancing with him it was like holding onto a dried up leaf. There was nothing to him! Would that be the guy?"
Everyone else: Uneasy silence.

And so the long afternoon wore on. You know, it WAS interesting to hear all about the lives of people you can't remember, because you're sure they're all decent people and so it's nice to know they're doing well. They must be decent people. Because you don't remember them. Because the people you remember, the ones SEARED on to your brain, are the ones you couldn't stand. It seemed a little wrong at the funeral of such a lovely and loving girl, but I think we all enjoyed indulging ourselves in a few spiteful stories too. Like the story of Goldilocks being confronted by one of our more, er, dramatic teachers, Ganja Trip. Ganja Trip had caught Goldilocks doing something and demanded to know what was going on. Goldilocks merely smiled sweetly and said that nothing was going on. Then Ganja Trip let her have it. "I see you Goldilocks," she said, "I see you out in the playground. Oh you're a pretty girl, aren't you, Goldilocks? You're like a young, fresh apple - all sweet and rosy on the outside." - up to this point her voice had been calm and menacing, but as she finished she got quite hysterical - "But like that deceptive apple, on the inside YOU ARE ROTTEN TO THE CORE!!!"

Goldilocks blanched. It was quite a sight.

And it shows how times have changed. We all thought this was a hoot. I remember one lad looking at Ganja Trip in frank admiration and there was a sense that the class was on the edge of applause. Nowadays the poor woman would probably be arrested and we'd all be put through intensive trauma counselling until we broke down and admitted how horrifying the whole episode had been.

One incident put the accuracy of all this reminiscing into perspective. At one point at the funeral I was bailed up by The Gatekeeper, an old acquaintance who seems to remember anyone he ever came into contact with ever, plus their grandmothers' birthdays, who wanted to confirm some facts and figures about my life.

"So, hb," asked The Gatekeeper, "How old are your kids?"
"Er, they're pretty young, Gatekeeper."
"Really, how young?"
"So young as to be virtually non-existent."

Blank look.

"Gatekeeper, I don't have any children."

Long pause.

"Really? Are you sure? Because I heard you had a couple."

As you can imagine, this revelation caused Grumpy and I to turn the house upside down that night in search of forgotten - and no doubt by now feral - infants who might be well and truly ready for a feed and possibly a nappy change.

But here's the amazing thing, Nick. I couldn't remember dozens of these names being flung around - and I even went home and dug out my old school mags and browsed through the photos, trying to prompt my memory and still I stayed mostly blank. But then a couple of days ago I was walking into my local Supa Valu (which I always think should be written SUUUPA! Valu) and as I walked in noticed a chap at one of the counters and thought to myself, "Well, goodness me, there's Maxi Priest."

Then I stopped dead. I haven't seen Maxi Priest since 1985 (I rang The Antiquer to confirm this) and most certainly wouldn't even have thought of him since then either. Then I walk into my corner store, see him and his name comes bubbling up, just like that. By the time I'd turned around he'd gone. I'm not sure I would have said anything to him anyway (once home, however, I did look him up in the phone book, in my usual creepy stalker-ish way, to see how far away from me he lived and to figure out if I might be bumping into him again, so I could say hello and inquire as to his interest in engaging in a red-hot affair followed by me keeping a silent vigil outside his front door night after night for oh, say, five years?). In high school, he seemed a decent guy but somehow aloof. He left to finish school at a fancy-pants establishment and at the time I heard he was taking up A Vocation in the Church. Clearly this didn't pan out, if it was even remotely true in the first place, as The Antiquer tells me he saw him on Rotto a couple of years later behaving in a manner unbecoming of a man of the cloth.

Though what that means these days...your guess is as good as mine.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

Young people don't know they're born

2004-09-20T23:28:00.000+11:00

I defy you to look at this blog and tell me that young people aren't an alien race (a puppy-eating insectoid race that communicates in farts and clicks).

OK, I'm being unfair. English is possibly not the author's first language. But even so... http://dorcaswee.blogspot.com/

It's dorca's something, alright.

The catchphrase says it all: 'twinkle, twinkle, who's it shining?'

Hazelblackberry: The Aeroguard. Don't forget it.

2004-09-18T21:11:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick,

Forgive me, I was talking about weekends and I was sidetracked.

(Allow me to sidetrack for a moment more: I trust your conjunctivitis has cleared up. This reminds me of a mildly amusing story (well, I found it funny) told to me by an acquaintance of mine who you may also know - The Stool Pigeon. The Stool Pigeon is always immaculately groomed and well-presented to society at large. Mostly he's well-behaved too. What I'm saying is, it matters to him how he comes across. Anyway, a few years ago he had a few days off work with conjunctivitis. When he came back to the office one of his co-workers asked him if he'd been sick. He said yes. Co-worker asked him what was wrong. Stool Pigeon told him he'd been off for three days with cunnilingus.)

Anyway, the weekend is coming up and I believe the last thing I told you was that Grumpy is no doubt planning a channel-surfing feast for himself, which, I reiterate, I have no real objections to. As long as the TV goes on sometime after 11am. I loathe early morning TV. Though only on the weekends. Nothing gets me ready for a day at work better than tuning into the latest madcap antics of Mel & Kochie. And that Grant Denyer! I laugh at the pathetic attempts of Steve & Tracey to shed their stiff, bureaucratic ways and just go with the flow like they do over on Channel 7.

But on the weekends it's a different story. I can find myself in a white hot rage when I hear Grumpy stagger into the lounge room at 7 o'clock and put the television on. I lie in bed indulging in murderous fantasies that bring about a collision between his soft, unsuspecting back and a freshly turned, glittering pig-stabber striking down again and again. I don't know why I hate it; I just do. Oh no, hang on, here's the reason why: because it's as though, having only just rolled out of bed, you've already given up on the day before even putting your nose out the door. The sun is shining, waves are gently breaking on the beach, magpies are swooping and you think that the world has nothing better to offer than the blasted TV.

What's that you're watching? Oooh, the Golden League. Okay, I'll sit down, but only until the end of this race....We should get some breakfast soon......Well, it's a bit late now. Just watch this and then we'll get lunch organised...........You know, we really should eat dinner.

However, this weekend, Nick, I am feeling magnanimous. Grumpy can watch all the TV he wants because I want to be left in peace to organise the shed. Our lovely little shack is, unfortunately, woefully low on storage space. We needed shelves at the back of the shed where Stuff could be stored. In stepped the Little Red Rooster. Little Red Rooster is a rare beast amongst our friends and acquaintances: that is, he's A Real Man. He makes stuff that people find useful, and he's been a farmer and played footy for years and drinks lots of beer. He's also got a Bravery Medal. And get this: he plays netball. So, you know, just be aware of who you're messing with here.

He is married to my dear friend, The Patented Burp, and they have two boys. Which is just as well. You wouldn't want to go sissifying a bloke like that with GIRLS. Though imagine the dirty tricks he could teach them for those roughhouse netball games.

So Little Red Rooster came over a couple of weeks ago and in two short days the back wall of our shed was covered in layer upon layer of useful shelves, waiting to absorb all our junk. When he'd finished, he even took a few old paint cans and bottles of linseed oil and put them up on one of the shelves - it was like a serving suggestion. We were enchanted. (Not that Grumpy would ever admit in the presence of A Real Man to being enchanted by something.) It's so nice knowing just one Real Man - apart from Bloody Ern of course, who is so much man he had to get lupus to reduce the manly quotient a little so other males would not spontaneously combust with awe and shame in his presence. When you've got a friend who is A Man, you can bask a little in the reflected glory. Like his handiness and practicality could just rub off on you any minute now and you could leap about fixing this and building that, covering yourself in glory.

And probably also a great deal of spakfilla.

Until next time, Nick. Avagooweegend.

hb

Australian hostages in Iraq: an anti-Tampa for the election?

2004-09-14T22:36:00.000+11:00

The still unconfirmed possibility that Australians may be being held as hostages is all over the news and Australian blogdom (john Q, tim D, tim B)

Prior to this, there has been occaisional speculation that there might be an ‘October surprise’ (and it’s still only September!) that would benefit the cause of the Government’s relection a la the MV Tampa at the last election. It’s always assumed that any significant national security happening benefits an incumbent Government (especially a Conservative one) because people don’t want to change horses in the middle of the lava stream.

But a hostage situation in Iraq is one of the few such situations which might harm the Government (putting aside for one moment the ick factor of discussing the electoral effect of hostages while actual hostages are still out there with actual guns held to their actual foreheads by actual scumbags).

The Government has made it clear that it will not negotiate with terrorists (and it certainly painted itself into a corner on this by criticising the Filipinos and the Spanish for ‘cutting (a deal) and running’ – although I agree with the Australian perspective myself. However satisfying it might be to secure the release of hostages at any cost, it only means other such groups will immediately be casting about for potential victims and you can kiss goodbye to having a foreign policy of your own).

Latham has backed the Government on this, which is sensible, but this won’t necessarily take all the sting out of it. It’s perfectly possible for the Opposition to say ‘we also don’t negotiate with terrorists but we sincerely regret that Australia is in this position today….’

If Australia heads into the final days of the election with two of our countrymen pleading for their lives in Iraq… If the Government stands firm: ‘we’re doing all we can to help but we can’t agree to their demands…’ If the hostages are murdered as their families beg unsuccesfully for a deal with the terrorists, an absolute no-win situation for any Government if ever there was one, it may cost Howard the election.

But we can only hope it never comes to that and the hostages, if there really are any, are released… (obligatory final line to try to reduce my personal discomfort level for engaging in such ugly speculation when lives are at stake).

Hazelblackberry: we are still good friends

2004-09-09T20:50:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick

Today is Wednesday, and that can only mean one thing. No, wait; actually it means two things. Right. So the first thing is: it now becomes freakish and weird to wander into someone's office and, for want of other conversation, to ask them what they did on their weekend. Conversely, and this is the second thing, it is now okay to start contemplating, and conversing about, what the coming weekend might hold for you.

Colleague enters your office. Yawn, stretch arms, "Weekend's just around the corner." "Yeah, thank God. What are you up to?" (Such are the exciting tête-à-têtes that take place round here.)

Mind you, I generally start planning my weekend first thing Monday morning. Those intervening five days are to be got through as expeditiously as possible. ("Don't wish your life away!" I can hear Don Mary screaming. I guess she knew that of which she spoke. Many was the family drama in our home - you know, weevils in the flour; that sort of thing - concluded with the mighty screech of Don Mary: "I wish I was DEAD! I wish you were ALL dead!" as she flounced off to sulk in bed for three days before re-emerging, feathers smoothed and turning to us, still standing with our jaws hanging open, to ask, "Well, what's got into you lot?")

I know what Grumpy probably has in mind for the weekend. Lots of televisual activities. Let me clarify: I am not opposed to the television. Indeed, I think what a miracle device it was in the last years of The Fuehrer's life when he no longer had the energy, concentration or patience to read or do crosswords, or even engage in prolonged conversation. Television was his entertainment, sometimes his lifeline, I think. One time Grumpy and I were visiting while The Fuehrer was having one of his stays in hospital. He was in a pretty cranky mood during this particular stint. He'd kicked a nurse - no harm done; it was with his gammy leg - who hadn't been able to interpret the complex lacing arrangements that The Fuehrer and Don Mary employed on his Florsheims. As she'd skedaddled from the room (I think the hurry was to avoid bursting out laughing in his presence) he turned to us and muttered, "Dull girl." This was the depths of damnation from The Fuehrer. His was a more moderate personality than Don Mary's.

So we'd come to visit one day and a particularly black cloud did shadow my grandfather's countenance. He denied that anything was wrong but answered questions and participated in the conversation with a heavy, sorrowful air. I looked at Grumpy. Grumpy looked mystified. He shrugged. What with The Fuehrer's lack of conversational sparkle, the chit chat was starting to dwindle a bit, when I suddenly realised something WAS amiss. How could I have not noticed it before?? The television was off! Whenever The Fuehrer was forced to endure the indignity of round-the-clock medical care he would soothe himself with a corresponding 24-hour television subscription. But his friend and companion was silent now. I finally managed to wrangle from him the truth: that he was in a snit because his TV access had run out. I couldn't believe that Don Mary or my aunt, Raggedy Ann, hadn't paid for a few more days when they'd come in. And then I found out that we'd been his only visitors that day. I did feel sorry for the poor old geezer. He would have felt abandoned and desolate, and on top of that the mind-curdling boredom - and a whole night of it in front of him. The Fuehrer was always the stoic, uncomplaining type, but he'd reached the end of his tether here. I believe his bottom lip may even have trembled momentarily.

I was leaning on the bed, feeling rather miserable myself, determined to keep him company for as long as possible but also wondering what on earth we could talk about and dreading having to leave him in his lonely, silent room. I was fiddling around with the remote control when I twirled a switch and suddenly, the TV sprang - sprang! - into life. It was like the circus had come to town and a marching band had entered the room. There was light, there was music, there was the Nescafe ad where that woman went to that valley and fell in love with that man. It may have just been the cathode rays, but The Fuehrer's face was bathed in a serene, heavenly glow. Turns out he'd accidentally turned the damn thing off without realising. Grumpy, being an in-law, suppressed his mirth but I was the old boy's flesh and blood so I got to grip the bed sheets while the tears of laughter ran down my face and The Fuehrer looked a combination of grateful and embarrassed.

We left him in much better spirits, absorbed in the plot line of some crappy show, the night looking not quite so wide and empty as it had a little while ago.

People like to put the television down, but it can work miracles in the smallest of ways.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

"...these go to 11" (reflecting on Beslan)

2004-09-06T22:10:00.000+11:00

Nigel Tufnell: You see, most blokes will be playing at 10. You're on 10, all the way up, all the way up...Where can you go from there? Nowhere. What we do, is if we need that extra push over the cliff...Eleven. One louder.
Marti DiBergi: Why don't you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder?
Nigel (after taking a moment to let this sink in): These go to 11.

The bloody end to the siege in Beslan, Russia, leaves any decent person reeling in horror. The effect on parents is even worse. Normally, the news scrolls by without affecting me but watching this story unfold left me feeling profoundly depressed.

I've been interested in the reaction to this terrible crime. Many people are agreed: that these terrorist (and all terrorists) must be made to suffer; and that any discussion of dreaded 'root causes' makes you a Chamberlain-like apologist of the worst kind. Any consideration of what drove the terrorists to commit this act is to allow them a 'victory'.

Certainly, its true that any thing done in support of the terrorists' cause jn response to this will incentivize future terrorism.

So where does that leave us? What can we do?

The answer is: hit the terrorists harder, more often, more viciously, in more places and in more ways. Turn it up to 11.

But what happens if you're already at 11? Where do you find that 'extra push over the cliff'?

There is something satisfying on a deep level about talking tough to terrorists such as these. And such language is politically necessary for politicians such as Putin. But what does it actually achieve?

Putin came to office in 1999 promising to turn it up to 11 in Chechnya. Since then the Russians have been fighting a truly nasty, dirty war in Chechnya that has led to thousands upon thousands of civilian deaths. The war there smashed Chechnya into a failed state run by warlords. What more can be done to that place that hasn't already been done? And still Chechnyan terrorists produced this shocking crime.

Never-the-less, the talking heads are pressuring Putin to turn it up to 12. This might satisfy the dictates of machismo but its not going to solve the problem of Chechnya.

Conservatives will tell you that 'negotiating with terrorists never works. The only language these people understand is force.' But is this really true?

Take Northern Ireland. The British under Thatcher tried ever more draconian tactics to stop the IRA. And it didn't work.

The only thing which has brought a period of calm to Northern Ireland is a peace agreement which addressed 'root causes'.

No one feels like addressing Chechnyan root causes right now (and understandably so) but in the a year or two, this has to be done quietly and bravely, without ceasing the fight to bring these perpetrators to justice.

Because the fight against terrorists is not about making right-wing pundits feel good about their manhood. It's about saving lives.

Crystal blue Italian time-vortex of never-ending misery

2004-09-05T23:06:00.000+11:00

I was riding home on the bus the other day, listening to the bus driver’s radio when Manic Monday by the Bangles came on. I hadn’t heard this song for many years but I was immediately reminded of something about the song that bothers me.

To refresh your memory, here’s a summary of the song’s core business: It’s another manic Monday (which the narrator doesn’t like). She wishes it was Sunday (because that’s her fun day, her ‘I don’t have to run’ day). But alas it is indeed another manic Monday.

To sum up: Monday, boo hiss. Sunday, yay! But what always bothered me is that Sunday is, as you probably learnt at University, the day immediately before Monday. The narrator’s point of miserable reflection is 6 AM Monday morning. It is her wish to be returned to the previous day but, as sure as shit follows chocolate, no sooner will she have got into the swing of her fun day when she will be catapulted into another manic Monday.

Yes, yes, I know, ‘Monday’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘Friday happy hour’…

But there is something very uncomfortable and sisyphean about wishing to be returned to a happier time, a time immediately before your current period of misery.

The song should be something like:

It’s just another manic Monday.
I wish it was Sunday.
It’s just another manic Monday.
I’m gonna shoot the whole day down.

Speaking of Sundays and Mondays… does/did anyone else experience the Sunday 2pm blues (felt as a kind of sudden gut churn)? You’re well and truly into your ‘I don’t have to run’ day when you suddenly realise that you have to go to work tomorrow. Lurch.

Why can’t we all go and live in the trees like pixies, eating fruit and swapping tree-climbing anecdotes? Then every Monday could be a fun day, just like Sunday. Paradise for all time (until you get eaten by Morlocks).

Beatrix Potter: Stalinist?

2004-09-02T22:29:00.000+11:00

My son, the Dude (aged 2) has taken to cute, British, self-involved, talking animals in a big way. He is going through a bit of a Beatrix Potter phase. But it’s only when you’ve seen a Beatrix Potter cartoon (yes, I know Potter also comes in the alternative interactive BOOK format but DVDs buy temporary quiet) for the 88th time that you really begun to notice how weird Potter’s creations are.

The Dude has been switched on of late by the most prominent porcine character in Potter’s stable, the interestingly named Pigling Bland. (PB’s brother, a fun-loving but irresponsible scally-wag, is simply called Alexander. Talk about one child being favoured over the other.)

Anway, young Master Bland and Alexander set off for market, some miles away on their first trip out off the farm, in order to purchase some groceries (to be honest, I’m always a bit hazy on the complete narrative progression of these stories because I dip in and out so often). I did wonder whether old Mrs Pig was not in fact sending her sons off to be slaughtered. Because they certainly didn’t make the grade as shoppers…

Anyway, Mrs Pig (not sure if that’s her real name) tells them to make sure they do their job properly because she’s gone to a lot of trouble to get their ‘licences’. To cut a really quite brief story even shorter, the brothers are stopped by a police officer while walking to the market. He asks to see their licences; Pigling Bland has his but Alexander lost his by being an irresponsible scally-wag. Seeing as Alexander is licenceless, the police officer escorts Alexander back to the farm leaving Master Bland to face his beige destiny alone.

So it’s come to this, has it? Pigs need a licence from their local police station to travel 5 miles to the nearest market town. Never mind Orwell’s Animal Farm (where the pigs did quite nicely, thank you very much), I’m beginning to suspect that Mrs Potter may have orginated the internal passport systems used to great repressive effect in apartheid-era South Africa and the Soviet Union. As well as creating some lovable characters, did she also design the blue-print for a massive apparatus of state oppression?

Wow, did the English invent everything?

The case of the thrice-warmed soup: a study in vomit

2004-08-31T22:14:00.000+11:00

I woke up unexpectedly at 1:30 am with a vague sense that something was wrong. A persistent queasy feeling my stomach defied every change of position that I attempted in order to find comfort again. I lay there thinking: OK, at some point, I guess I should get up and go to the bathroom in case this becomes an incident.

I calmly levered up out of bed and placed one foot on the ground, immediately feeling the first wave of vomit race up my esophagous and out, into the bedroom-confined night. I briefly tried holding it in with my hands but it splashed out and past. A salmon heading upstream, inexorable force of nature.

I lunged past the futon, heading for the door when the second wave made itself felt. A second pool to match the first on the opposite side of the bed, like occasional tables. The third came in the hall way and the fourth in the entrance to the bathroom. Curse you, large house without an ensuite!

I slipped in the fouth puddle, as the vomit seeped into my woolen bedsocks, and cracked my knee on the tiles.

At last sanctuary beckoned and I heaved again and again into the toilet. Surely no more. Surely no more. Ok, that’s enough. OK… OK, what the hell is that stuff? Frothy like a milkshake, yellow like the sun…

Wifey was by now up and poking ineffectually at the vomit, retching herself. She’s 15 weeks pregnant and I knew she wouldn’t last a minute pushing back the tide in the hallway. Chivalry bloomed suddenly from the toilet bowl. Love, don’t worry [heave], I’ll [heave] clean it up [heave] you go sleep in the spare bedroom.

One of the few bad things about being relatively tall is that vomit, when delivered from such a height, will splash a deceptively long way. I imagine midgets produce nicely circumspect pools of vomit.

I spent the next hour and half cleaning the stuff off the walls and off the floor. It took ages to clean because, at such a late hour and addled by gross sickness, my brain just wouldn’t perform all the tasks asked of it. Lots of needless walking back and forth to get cleaning products one by one when I could have collected them all in one sweep of the arms.

So many walls to clean! So many floors! The brainpower required to get the quilt cover, the top sheet, my clothes, the bathmat and sundry other spattered garments into the washing machine was almost beyond me.

Wifey came through at just the right moment with clean pyjamas and socks and, after a couple more ceremonial heaves into the toilet bowl, well hello again bile-mileshake, I made my way back to bed.

Of course, the next day I discovered the patches I’d missed. The strange dried yellow rivers on the back of the door, the undiscovered pool by the bed.

Wifey opined that as I was really only sick once or twice, it was probably food poisoning rather than a touch of the hand of gastro.

She copped it sweet on behalf of her otherwise lovely pumpkin and sweet potato soup. The soup had been cooked on Friday and then allowed to cool in anticipation of the Dude’s birthday party on Sunday when it was again heated to serve to guests. The leftovers went into the fridge until on Monday I gave them their third ordeal by fire before consuming them whole.

I spent yesterday looking after the Dude and holding my wounded stomach. It was my goal never to leave the couch if possible, which is tricky when you’re looking after a two-year old. No amount of television was too much, no bribe could not be paid.

So with only about 30 or 40 trips off the couch in the space of three hours, I steadily became whole again, girding my loins for the inevitable vegemite toast…

Hazelblackberry: don't perspirate the minutia

2004-08-28T13:57:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick,

Here's some more of the same:

(1) After our housewarming I was busy writing out thank you cards - I'm a bit of an old-fashioned girl in that regard - when I realised I didn't have Hong Kong Fooey's address. I rang The Antiquer to check if he had the address - no, not on him. All he could tell me was that Hong Kong Fooey lived on A Particular Street, but he couldn't remember the number. On my way home I realised my bus went up That Particular Street. Hong Kong Fooey drives a rather distinctive car so I idly thought I'd just have a look out as we motored along to see if I saw it in any driveways. Not really expecting to. This Particular Street is quite a long one. Then the bus pulled over at a stop and I happened to glance across the road and there in the driveway were BOTH of Hong Kong Fooey's cars - what a stroke of luck! I had his address. In a slightly creepy, stalkerish way. A feeling that won't go away each time I'm on the bus and we go up This Particular Street and past his house and I mutter to myself, "Well, hello, Hong Kong Fooey." Yesterday evening his kids were playing on the roof; which I found quite refreshingly charming. This morning my bus prevented him from pulling out of his drive way. Yes, this might be getting a little weird...

(2) Also this morning on the bus, as it swung past Garden City - or "Garbo" as some girls used to call it; sheesh - a young bloke started sprinting down the street to catch us at the next bus stop. The bus driver, a very good humoured chap, saw him and made his way as slowly through the traffic as he reasonably could to give marathon man time to get to the stop. When he pulled up he announced to us, "I think this guy deserves a round of applause." There was an amusing look of confusion and pleasure on the chap's face when he got on and some passengers broke into clapping, some cheered.

(3) When I realised I was spending about two-and-a-half hours each day just commuting, I suddenly thought that I'd better stop staring out the bus window and do something constructive with my time, like reading. It didn't take me too many rides, ploughing through Vanity Fair's new-found over-zealous preference for World Affairs over Gossip About High Society People Of Whom You've Never Heard, to weary of that idea. Staring out the window and at my fellow passengers is far more productive and entertaining. And then there's always the river. The things you miss when you're trying to convince your brain it really could be interested in geopolitics.

(4) The other day I caught an earlier bus than usual, in some misguided attempt at acquiring a work ethic. Normally my bus is full of teenage schoolchildren, most of whom get off at Garden City. These kids are loud and obnoxious and irritating. But I tell you what: they add some life to the bus. Without them, it's just a bunch of silent grey adults morosely making their way to work and if they do talk it's all about real estate and the new train line and the state of the world. The kids sit up the back and shriek about TV shows and who's a spunk (and who most decidedly isn't), pashing, sluts - pashing sluts - and getting out of phys ed. All the great stuff. And because they know everyone is listening, they lay it on pretty thick. They're annoying, especially the way some of those girls laugh and screech, but they inject a little pizzazz into proceedings.

(5) So it's pouring with rain and there isn't going to be any let up and you've forgotten your umbrella but you just have to take that unsheltered walk to the busport to get home. Well here's what you do: laugh at life. Lift that head, straighten those shoulders and stride out into the wet. And it helps to sing 'I Heard that Lonesome Whistle Blow' as you walk along. A sorrowful song that comforts the spirits. It is of course a Hank Williams song but I prefer Hank Snow singing it. He had quite a voice that Hank Snow.

Then, because you're on a Hank Snow roll, you might want to change tempo with '90 Miles an Hour Down a Dead End Street'. It's a trifle saucy.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

My life in the margin for error, part 3 (final)

2004-08-24T22:55:00.000+11:00

In the previous 2 parts of this tale in 3 parts, I promised to tell you about a wee episode of self-reflection brought on by my being polled on my door step by someone from the Morgan polling company.

I was peppered with question after question (did I mention I was there for forty minutes?) such as: ‘what bank do you have your mortgage with?’and ‘do you favour the decriminalisation of marijuana?’ and ‘who will you vote for in the next Federal election’.

But one question caught me by surprise. I was given four options and asked which of them I saw as being what my life principally about. Two of the options were immediately discarded by my brain so completely that I cannot even begin to remember what they were. But it took me a while to choose between the other two options.

(1) A life centred on achievement and winning the respect of others (or something like that) OR
(2) A life centred upon your family (or something like that).

After hesitating for a few moments, I chose the first option. Because it’s been my official internal reason-for-being since I was knee-high to a freakishly large grass-hopper. I’ve always dreamed of success in some field of endeavour, probably writing, perhaps as a novelist. And although my family is very important to me, it didn’t seem able in that moment on my porch to usurp my number one goal.

But I reflected on this choice for sometime afterwards. Had I betrayed my family by not choosing option 2? But am I really ready to give up my claim on the Booker prize?

I’ve been struggling as a writer for about ten or more years now (and legend has it that this blog is just another way to avoid writing – psshaw, as if I need a blog to do that). It’s occurred to me that I like being a writer or having written more than I actually like writing.

This is perhaps because I crave the attention that success brings. And this is the difficult thing about a life based upon ‘achievement’. If you are pursuing achievement for its own sake (rather than to achieve a specific result – for example, to write a novel that you are deeply proud of even if nobody reads it) then you have to wonder whether such achievement is not some kind of psychological prop for a damaged self.

On the other hand, a life centred on family seems to me to be more about a calm life of contendedness, wrapped in quotidian satisfaction. There are no medals or prizes to be won (except maybe ‘Dad of the Year’ which will never be featured as an Olympic sport).

So. The thinking is to relax my white-knuckle grip on dreams of achievement (because, let’s face it, my life is not weighed down with too much success) and to simply enjoy my family, sunshine, friends and a well-thrown frisbee after a barbecue in the park across the road. To abandon myself to a life of warm and easy mediocrity.

And then maybe one day, to write, if I feel like it.

Hazelblackberry: Mr Marbles comes to town

2004-08-20T22:01:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick,

It is late at night and I am sitting at home as a wild squall passes over. The wind certainly has some oomph to it tonight. There are lots of weird noises coming from outside. But I've checked the gate and it isn't banging and I've checked other stuff in the backyard and that all seems to be behaving itself so I don't know what is making these sounds. They shall have to remain a mystery. In the daytime noises seem to make so much more sense.

At least the house is quiet. I appreciate a quiet house. Staying down with Bloody Ern & Bez, whenever I was by myself, I'd be constantly freaked out by some strange, unidentifiable noise. And being in good old semi-rural location, I was pitifully aware of how my shrieks of terror would echo out into an empty unresponsive night.

Isn't it strange how a weird noise so often happens just when you are moving around making a bit of noise yourself. A new, unfamiliar half-heard sound.

"What the hell was that?" you think to yourself. So you stay still for a few minutes to see if it happens again and then, thinking it's gone away, you start moving around once more and there's that noise again. Only with something more to it.

"What the hell was THAT?!"

Then all the lights in the house go on and you're up all night watching 'Samurai Jack' (a real must-see) and 'Enjoying Everyday Life with Joyce Meyer'. She's one crazy laydeee.

But this house doesn't make a peep. It's had 60-odd years to settle on its foundations so one would hope it had stopped grumbling by now. Nonetheless, Grumpy is sensitive to my small, manageable fear of the dark and has purchased a night light for those evenings when I'm by myself. It's a friendly little chap, beaming out into the shadows, keeping fear and dread at bay.

I wasn't born afraid of the dark and it wasn't until I was about 6 or 7 that I developed a respectful terror of the shadows lurking in the corner of my room. The painfully ironic thing is that when I go to sleep I like everything to be ultra-quiet and ultra-dark.

Ern was always good about the fear-of-the-dark thing. He never tolerated sea-sickness or car-sickness. Thank God I never suffered from either, because he doesn't believe they exist. "Balderdash!" he'd bellow as some poor kid along for a bumpy ride out over the spinifex scrub vomited ham and beetroot all over the show. And I was never allowed to have training wheels on my bike or learn to swim with floaties. I've still got scars on my knees...and on my lungs, from all the inhaled water. But he understood about the dark. He would sit beside my bed night after night; one gnarled fist grasping a Camel Plain, the other holding my hand while I went to sleep.

Ern has never confessed to any fear. He isn't even particularly afraid of drowning - which would at least be practical, since he spends so much of his life out on the open water and he can't swim. But he did tell me once that he had a dream there was something wrong with him and he kept going to hospital to have bits cut off until all that was left was his head on a pillow.

I guess that occasionally even the fearless Ern gets the night shudders, just like the rest of us.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

My life in the margin of error, part 2.

2004-08-17T22:19:00.000+11:00

For those who came in late… So it had come to this, just me and him, the polling guy. Alone, together, on my porch, as the wind swept over us like one of those wide, stiff-bristled brooms being operated by an obsessive-compulsive janitor on PCP.

I looked at him and he looked at me. We stared at each other and we met each other’s gaze, taking in each other’s appearances with our eyes. I saw that he was ready to make a move and he saw that I saw he was ready to make a move.

Suddenly, he lunged at me with the business end of his clipboard, the steel-sprung paper-vice, sun flashing from its every angle, whirling through the air like a ninja throwing star rivetted to a piece of wood.

I blocked his thrust and then tore his esophagous out through a hole I made in his brain pan for that very purpose, slipping on his pancreas as I did so. I crashed to earth, clipping my head on the wicker cane chair. As unconsiousness lapped at me like an overly-friendly black labrador cross with halitosis, I whispered: ‘Enjoy your ‘victory’, polling guy but who’s going to fill in your giant survey book now?’

His arrogant laughter died suddenly in his throat which I was still clutching in my left hand. He shook his fist at me and then slinked guiltily away, like a marmoset that had been convicted of securities fraud. As he went, he called over the smoking ruin of his shoulder: ‘you may have won this round, random house-holder. But I will have my revenge! There will be phone calls. Not one but many. Each caller will be more irritating and insinuating than the last. Pressure will be applied. You will be made to feel as if you have let down a close and needy friend. And you will regret every hitherto innocently-enjoyed minute of television in the knowledge that you should have been filling in a little, ok not so little, survey book.’ At least I think that's what he said, because he was talking through a hole in his chest, using a flap of skin as a 'tongue'.

OK, it may not have happened exactly like that but it was damn close.

And Just to prove what a tease I am, I’m going to put off my little poll-born epiphany to the next post which will be a serious post.

My life in the margin for error

2004-08-14T21:57:00.000+11:00

Several weeks ago I found myself being polled by the Morgan polling company on my door step. It is only now that I am able to talk about the experience. (Because I have been reflecting…and because I have run out of other things to say on this blog).

The poll dude asked a number of searching and not so searching questions.

‘Have you read any part of the most recent issue of Business Review Weekly’?

‘Um, no.’

‘What about any other of these current issues?’

[Me flips through booklet with page after page of front covers of current magazine issues]. ‘Um, no. Wait. I’ve read this issue of the ABC Delicious magazine.’

But I swear it was only because they had a delightful angelhair pasta recipe. Other than that I don’t read magazines. Lord, why has thou forsaken me?

‘Oh, does the Internet count? I’ve read some of these publications on the Internet.’

‘No.’

Oh, Internet, I weep for thee. People still don't like you.

‘When you agreed to do this survey, did you realise that you would still be perched on your front verandah 40 minutes later missing out on your valuable nap opportunity during your infant son’s all too brief afternoon sleep and that you will be pestered by phone several times in the next week to fill out a further survey booklet the size of three bibles when in fact you will throw this book away as soon as my back is turned?’

‘Um, no.’

Actually, I relished the opportunity to do the survey (and kind of intended to follow through with the survey book until I was put off by its enormous size and aggressive demeanour) because I like any opportunity to pass off my puerile, sashimi-sucking, upper-middle-class viewpoints as the perspectives of the man on the clapham omnibus (who does not like sashimi).

I like to think that I alone could skew the survey in awkward directions. With enough effort on my part, some truly terrible products could be released onto the market.

(And a special prize to the first commenter to write in and say: 'And just what you makes you think you're upper-middle-class, jerkoff?')

Coming up in the next post: Morgan survey question inspires ‘what am I doing with my life’ epiphany. Kind of.

Another symptom of society's moral decay

2004-08-10T21:24:00.000+11:00

The newspapers have been full of the story of the kidnapping of baby Montana Barbaro (and the matter is altogether too serious to take even a moment to make fun of that name).

It turns out the kidnappers were a couple in their 40s who have six children aged between 6 and 21 and who wanted to raise Montana as their seventh. Clearly they must enjoy parenting. I know I do but I only have one, the Dude, who is a singularly attractive and winsome child. And I'm not just saying that because, you know...

But for people who must, on some level, really like children, they turned out to be a pair of absolute shitheels. They abandoned a three-week old infant in a junkie's shack open to the elements without so much as an anonymous call to 000.

Whatever happened to the moral code of the kidnapper? Sure, there's no honour among thieves but I thought child-abductors were a higher calibre of criminal. Let me make this clear: when you nab a kid, you solemnly undertake to look after that child properly until the police kick your front door down and pistol whip you into bleeding submission.

In my day, kidnappers knew what was expected of them. I blame Hollywood, video games and the anti-war movement.

(All flippancy aside: what a fucking horrific thing to go through. My sympathies, for what they're worth, to the Barbaro family. When the crime was first anounnced in the press, I thought that I could never have any sympathy for the perpetrators (hanging's too good, etc). But having heard the barest of details about the offenders, I find some room in my tiny black heart for their plight. They must be motivated out of some extremely misguided form of familial love, a love that will now cost them their other six children. Sad, sad. But they should still go to jail for a long time....)

The pen is meatier than the sword

2004-08-09T20:55:00.000+11:00

To continue my bloggish flirtation with South-East Asia (he said, grasping at tiny yellow straws with the words ‘weak segue’ stencilled in black copperplate writing down the side), let me tell you about a experience I had a couple of days ago.

I dashed into Sammy’s Kitchen in Civic to pick up some Malaysian-Lao-Thai-Vietnamese-Albanian take-aways. Shan-tung chicken; sizzling lamb with black pepper and snow peas; curry puffs (two). On such food as this is Australia now propelled into its dazzling future.

Standing at the counter, I drew myself up to my full impressive six feet and one inch to better impose my massive frame upon the room because, well, you know, would it kill somebody to give me some service? Criminy, I’ve been waiting five minutes now.

They finally noticed me and, upon receipt of my ordinary name, they proffered their triple treat. I was paying by credit card (yes, it is taking a long time to get to the point, isn’t it?) and so I was handed a black pen and a credit card slip to sign.

Now here’s where it gets kind of amusing. For some reason, I mistakenly thought the nib of the pen was retracted into the body and that I had to click the end to extract it. So I clicked the end. Only it wasn't the end. And it was not retracted.

Two young Asian women looked up in surprise to see my face, atop said impressive six-feet and one inch frame, contorted in sudden agony.

I drove that nib right through the skin of my thumb. Lordy! I don’t know my own strength!

There is something very embarrassing about a public display of pain, like it somehow violates the social contract. People who crawl, broken and bleeding, out of smashed, over-turned vehicles on busy public highways must just be so mortified. Can you imagine the awkwardness as the rush-hour rubber-neckers crawl by? Jeez, will that fucking ambulance never get here?

I gestured in the international language of unreadable gestures at the pen and my thumb. Then I signed and left, sporting a brand new tattoo to go with the other tattoo that I fashionably never obtained. I imagined that the circle of black ink beneath the skin might be there forever! What a story to tell the blog!

Alas four days later, like the indifferent Shantung chicken, the ink is gone. Leaving only: me, this post, stale crumbs of the broken crust of a curry puff.

That's one 'L' and two 'P's, dude

2004-08-06T23:05:00.000+11:00

I finally updated my list of blogs yesterday, making a couple of changes but primarily it was to move reckless writer to ‘World blogs’ from ‘Canberra blogs’ because, er, she lives, and apparently has always lived in, the Philippines, and not, er, Canberra. Could happen to anyone, right?

I was going to cap this piece of information off with a witty little bon mot about the Philippines; perhaps some kind of MacArthur connection but I don’t know if the Big Guy ever made it down here from Brisbane. And then I was going to make some joke about Islamic insurgents shooting up Namadgi National Park. At that point, it occurred to me how little I know about the Philippines (and that my jokes frequently suck).

Actually, in one dud job I had about 8 years ago, it was my task to to generate maps of various Asian nations for a telecommunications report by using an electronic scanning pen to trace over existing maps and then colouring them in and adding place names. (Ah, plagiarism, my old friend, where are you now?). I became intimately acquainted with every freakin’ tiny island in that most islandy of nations, the Philippines. Except for the ones I couldn’t be bothered drawing because they were too small.

Later, when strolling through a crappy antique store in the old brickworks, I came upon a woman staring in bemusement at a black guitar on the wall with the words ‘welcome to Cebu City’ painted on it. She asked her husband where he thought Cebu City might be. He didn’t know. Unsolicited, lurking nearby, I was able to pipe up: ‘the Philippines’.

‘Oh,’ she said.

I guess I know more about the Philippines than I give myself credit for. Boy, is blogging a voyage of self-discovery or what?

Hazelblackberry: the merry-go-round by the sea

2004-08-05T20:55:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick,

I quite like catching the bus to work. It takes just over an hour from the time I've opened my front door to the time I'm pressing - with a certain resigned sense of doom - the 'on' button on my computer. It's an hour-and-a-bit well spent observing my fellow humans and sometimes wondering who might be observing me (I don't really care; only, Lord, please let it be not in profile). I continue to be fascinated by the girl who can't stop rubbing her nose with her knuckles - back and forth across the nose she goes, getting more intense and manic the closer to the busport we get. Whoever ends up sitting next to her invariably spends a large part of the journey sneaking looks of fascination and/or irritation in her direction.

Wouldn't it be marvellous if we could just go up to people who were exhibiting strange behaviour (and who weren't obviously crackers) and say, "Excuse me, why are you behaving so fruitily?" And because it was perfectly okay to ask that question you would get, in return, a complete, information-rich answer that would reveal to you once again - just like that guy on SBS who goes up to people on the street and asks them questions about themselves - just how wonderfully interesting people are, if only we would take the time to find out. Also, sometimes you would get an answer wrapped up in a bunch of fives. Because you can't always pick the crazies.

(Actually, the thing about that SBS guy is that now lots of people know who he is and they come up to him trying to get on the show because they're just BUSTING to tell everyone how intriguing they are, which spoils it a bit. Did you ever see the episode where he interviewed Red Symons? Only maybe he didn't know who Red was. Red seemed somewhat befuddled and amused by this. Grumpy and I thought it was hilarious. But then we were the only two in a big crowd who guffawed, far too loudly, at the 2002 Brumbies awards dinner when Rod Kiefer emphatically announced that even though he was going overseas, he would one day return to Canberra where "I plan to end my career - and my life." We'd been drinking a bit at the time. But we watched Red sober, I swear.)

The bus I catch gets very busy. I get on early along the route, so I always snag a seat, a window seat at that. By the time we hit the freeway, things have become a little sardine-esque and all the foot passengers sway and lurch together like bite-size morsels packed in brine. I do admire the tenacity of those who get on at this point, day after day, armed with a book which they are going to read seated or standing, dammit. Gravity gets them every time.

After the regular bus, I get the CAT, which is free and tootles people round to various points of the city. I like the CAT, I do. It is sleek and smooth and low to the ground and makes lots of purring and hissing noises, just like a Big Cat. Yet like so many of the new and ultimately empty things that grace this fair city of ours, it replaced something older and shabbier, which we didn't realise we'd miss until it was gone. Before the CAT, there was the City Clipper. Doesn't 'the Clipper' have such a jaunty, nautical air to it? A spirit of adventure. And I tell you what, it was an adventure with the Clipper. There didn't seem to be any designated stops or timetables and you never knew whether one would come or not and when it did rumble into view, shrouded in a mysterious diesel mist, you were never sure where it was taking you. There were red, green, blue and yellow Clippers. Who cares! What did this mean to we urban freestylin' navigators? The Clipper was like some landlubbin' Flying Dutchman - next stop, Gilligan's (Traffic) Island!

Oh sure, the CAT has brightly coloured stops, it's reliable, quiet and relatively odour free - except for that one time, er, no, best not... But where is the charm and the spirit and the high-seas rollicking hijinks of the Clipper? Riding the Clipper made you want to don one of those peaked sailors caps that were so favoured by fans of Duran Duran in the 1980s. My friend Salamander wore one with great panache. She liked the New Romantics but I don't think she cared much for Duran Duran, come to think of it. Salamander was very cool and arty (of course) and she would, for no reason, write me letters filled with funny little illustrations telling me what happened to her on the bus ride home from school.

I wonder if she still has that cap.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

Life's lessons learned on a volleyball court

2004-08-03T00:39:00.000+11:00

Is there any exclamation more useless in the English language than heads!

You're bent down, tying your shoelace when someone yells

heads!

heads? heads? does that mean I should look

this way?

Thwack.

I would prefer some kind of one-syllable code word which means: execute a 145 degree stunt-roll over your left shoulder now! But, oh, watch out for the...wall.

Next time a volley ball is pinging through the air, knocking molecules this way and that, headed for someone's scone, this is what I'm going to say:

I regret that it's me who has to inform you but there is a ball in the air on a rapid collision course with your head. I'd like to offer you some hope of escape at this point but it would make a liar of me. All that the ball and I can offer you is pain and humiliation. Look up now and I promise you I will only smirk.

Where angels fear to tread, a cockroach has already crapped

2004-07-30T22:55:00.000+11:00

I was feeding coins into the slot to buy my little 55g slice of dessicated coconut dressed up as cherry when I noticed a dead cockroach, inside the machine. The cockroach was inside the machine!

Something about that struck me as, well, worthy of a few hastily-typed words in a scrolling web page that six people will read. Actually blogs are bit like cockroaches: as a group, damn near unkillable, even though dead specimens of each turn up all the time. And unloved. So many unloved blogs and cockroaches. Except for the really popular blogs that get 20 000 visits a day, which are equivalent to, er, those celebrity cockroaches you hear about all the time. The ones you see in Hello magazine, water-skiing off Biarritz with topless babes. Not topless cockroach babes, mind you. Because the very idea is disgusting.

Anyway, this cockroach I saw today was either of the unloved variety or a celeb very much down on his luck. I thought about how he came to die that lonely death inside a vending machine far from home.

I imagine he was nosing about, looking for that big break that all roaches dream of, half a kilo of rotting cheese or a three-movie deal with Salma Hayek, something like that. And he found his way into this huge, throbbing machine that promised nothing but a little warmth. He climbed and he climbed, turned left, turned right, backtracked, crept down passageways without any idea of their end. And then a small opening appeared, an opening he felt good about, a tiny crack into another world.

This roach peeked through. Aye carumba! El dorado! Santa Maria! (Because naturally a roach that dreams of acting with Salma Hayek has learnt some Spanish over the years) The mother-fucking lode.

Arranged beneath him, as far as the antenna can twitch, is row upon row of tasty treats, any one of which would keep him going for a month. Colours and shapes and smells the like of which he has only experienced in short, twitching dreams. He pushes forward, ready to embrace paradise. Oh Salma, Salma if only you could be here to share this with me. And drops twenty centimetres onto a black metal floor, a thump he barely notices as wonders which glorious feast he should start with.

And it’s then the tiny switch inside his universe flicks from dream to nightmare. He scrabbles over to the giant yellow Apricot and Pecan Muesli Bar with Yoghurt Icing and propels himself into its comely form, waiting for the explosion of sensation and saiety.

But it never comes. A tasteless substance, a rustling, slippery shell coats this Muesli Bar and every other thing inside this machine. As he rushes from bar to biscuit and back again, the fruit of victory become ashes in his mouths, although frankly even some ashes wouldn’t be so bad right now. But nothing, nothing. A gaudy illusion of paradise. A sickening feast of hollowness.

After a while, his mind turns from this place to escape. But he can’t remember how he got in! That vital fact was burnt from his tiny brain by the sun-burst of false promise as he entered.

Oh, nothing, nothing.

And he scrurries until he stops. And he does not move again. As his life slips away, he writhes in a fever-dream of pain and a better world. Oh, Salma, Salma, why hast thou forsaken me! And he twists onto his back, slipping in his own yellow ichor, turning his vitals up to the interior of the machine which has so cruelly tricked him. And he dies. Alone. Inside the machine.

I thought, as I pocketed my cherry ripe, o chocolatey goodness unsullied by twitching roach feet – there is a lesson in this for all of us.

But I’m not sure what it is…. maybe that hygiene inside vending machines leaves something to be desired and fresh produce is to be preferred…

Or maybe… As I walked slowly back to my office through passage-ways, turning left, turning right, I thought, I thought to myself, give the self-pity a miss, ok, buddy? You ain’t a roach.

Hazelblackberry: Sugar mama

2004-07-27T20:45:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick,

I do enjoy a costume drama. Especially when combined with a dastardly murder mystery that has really ruffled the feathers of some Pommy toffs. So I was a little disappointed on Sunday night when Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot finished up on the ABC. Then my spirits soared when I saw that it was being replaced by a repeat of Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle, all curls and bonnets, and Colin Firth in strangely reassuring flat-fronted pants.

I don't like to be overwhelmed with contours.

I know it's said all the time, but it really is so important to get the look right when a book is being made into a show. Think of all those mad fans out there tuning-in in droves to see if the hero and heroine look like they should. The fans can't exactly describe what the characters should look like themselves, but they know which look Just Isn't Right. If things aren't just so, many an Angry from Mayfair letter will be written to the local TV Guide - like THEY had anything to do with the casting.

I felt such a mixed sense of anticipation and anxiety when 'Anne of Green Gables' was made into a mini-series. Anne had to start out as a slightly scruffy, freckle-faced red-haired kid who smashes a slate over Gilbert Blythe's head (such spirit! such FIRE!) and then blossoms into a graceful, attractive, and at times beautiful, woman who comes to realise she loves the very same Gilbert Blythe when he lies hovering close to death.

Isn't it always the way? Whenever Grumpy looks at me he thanks his lucky stars for spinal meningitis.

Anne also rather cruelly crushed underfoot a sweet from Gilbert when he was trying to make up with her. It was one of those flat, round lollies with a love heart on them and a message inside. Wittily enough, they're called Sweet Hearts. I bought a packet the other day and was sitting at my desk unwrapping each one and enjoying the messages on them.

What a long, strange trip it was. It all started out innocently enough with the usual messages of 'Say yes', 'My hero', 'Dear one', 'Dream girl' and 'You're fab'. I sensed there was a commitment-shy type lurking in the pack with 'Good pals', and that I had stumbled on a moment of frostiness, anger even, with 'Grow up'. I was a little confused that this message was written inside a heart. Tough love from a sweet? Things got a little more adult with the inclusion of 'My woman', and then the next two pronounced the receiver to have 'True lips' (from Amsterdam? eh?) and, bizarrely enough, 'Glad eye'. However, I knew I had got down to the behind-closed-doors end of the packet with the final pieces. 'My wee girl' could be innocent enough but given that it was followed immediately by 'Web site' I had the uneasy feeling I'd blundered my way into a special-interests area and got out of there fast.

As it turned out, I was pretty satisfied with the girl they picked to play Anne. But the guy they picked to play Gilbert was all wrong. Too pudgy. A young man needs to have something lean and muscled about him to take a blackboard to the sconce and grow up to become a doctor who is his wife's rock when he delivers their first child stillborn. I just didn't think old Fatty Fatty Boomsticks had what it took.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

Great Moments in Hygiene

2004-07-24T22:05:00.000+11:00

60 BC – An Essene breakaway sect is driven from the walls of Jerusalem after the sect’s leader declared that ‘although pigs are indeed unclean animals, an exception should never-the-less be made for bacon sandwiches’.

8 April 1229 -- Emperor Frederick II’s attempt to wrest the Crusader castle of Pelerin in Northern Palestine from the Templar force which held it, ended prematurely after two-thirds of his officer corps expired after eating three-day old oysters.

6 December 1894 – On this day, Francois de Beziers of Paris is reputed to have invented ‘french-kissing’ together with his mistress, Karine Bineautruy, a woman he shared with painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and from whom she contracted syphilis. De Beziers invented tooth-paste six days later.

20 June, 1944 – A plan by officers of the German General Staff to kill Hitler by feeding him improperly cooked chicken failed when Hitler refused to eat the polla alla cardinale (chicken sauteed with prosciutto, wild mushrooms, marsala wine and finished with smoked mozzarella), labelling it ‘decadent wop food’.

Hypnerotomachia

2004-07-22T20:54:00.000+11:00

Is a word I recently rediscovered while rereading one of my favourite novels.

Hypnerotomachia translates (insofar as any semi-made-up Latin word from the Renaissance can be translated) as ‘the stuggle of love in a dream’. Once you know this word, you wonder how you ever did without it.

I find it crops up in conversation 6 or 7 times a day. How ya doin? Oh, you know, hypnerotomachian...

But deny me this if you will, isn’t ‘the stuggle of love in a dream’ a concept that was crying out for a word to contain it? (The word apparently comes from this book Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii, Poliphilo being the dude doin’ the strugglin’ and the lovin’ and the dreamin’. They translate it as the ‘strife of love in a dream’ but I like 'struggle' more….

------------------------

And speaking of dreams... I had a dream yesterday morning in which I wrote an absolute kick-ass blog-post that was funny and poignant but also brief and to the point. I woke up with a shit-eating grin, knowing that the world of blogdom would soon tremble before the terrible splendor of this post.

But then the more awake part of my brain, the part that handles balancing cheques books and loading software said to the greater lumpen mass of my brain that was still swimming is a sea of sleep and triumph: 'well, alright, let's see this oh-so fantastic blog post.' To which lumpen brain replied: 'it's right here, smarty-brain-pants.'

'Ah, dude, the writing is blurred. It's four lines of completely illegible text. It's just a rough outline of the idea of the greatest blog-post in the world. Mate, you were dreaming.'

Lumpen: nooooo!

You can bet that that post was fantastic. You can bet it was better than anything that has appeared on this blog, better than just about anything that has appeared on any other blog. Bloggers from all over the world would have linked to it approvingly and new blogs would have sprung up overnight in its honour.

You can bet it was a lot better than this piece of crap.

But you and I will never read it. Except perhaps in our dreams.

Ah, the struggle of blogging in a dream. Now why isn't there a word for that?

We won’t just bake your bread, we’ll stalk you until you eat it

2004-07-20T22:30:00.000+11:00

Woolworths, the supermarket company, has a new slogan ‘Woolworths Fresh Food People. It’s more than a job. It’s an obsession.’

I’ve noticed the rise of the ‘staff obsession’ meme in advertising of the last few years. While Woolworths only has the slogan (at this stage), others have explored this idea in greater detail in various humorous ads. For example, in one ad for tyres, staff are shown looking at what appears to be a Playboy centre-fold only for the camera to zoom in and reveal that the young men are getting exciting over a large picture of a tyre.

What exactly are these companies getting at with these ads? They want to suggest that their products are backed with excellent service but they also know that their customers realise the level of service will only be that which the marketplace allows. That is, the level of service is tied carefully to the dollars which you the customer bring through the door. If all you’re going to do is buy a loaf of bread, then they’re not going to rush it to you by high-speed courier moments after it’s come out of the oven.

So how do you suggest to a cynical customer that you’re going to give them really, really good service, above and beyond the value of their custom? By telling them that your staff are pyschologically unhinged and have a pathological obsession with some kind of ordinary household product.

You can be sure that the coriander is fresh because Michael, even though he only earns $22,000 a year, was there when it was picked and then rushed it here himself in the back of his Ford Laser. If the leaves start to curl, he becomes increasingly agitated and finally buys all remaining stock himself just to get it off the shelf. He would rather customers had nothing than make do with limp coriander.

Of course, this idea has its limits. ‘Yes, I had to fire Jenny, I’m afraid. She was a good worker, always came in early, stayed late, enthusiastic. But then I found her masturbating while french-kissing a red capsicum. And the worst part of it is that capsicum and I were engaged to be married in the Spring.’

Hazelblackberry: Tally ho!

2004-07-17T21:53:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick,

Quite recently I learnt something rather fascinating to me. After the war my grandfather, the Fuehrer, planned to take the whole family off to some other country. Zimbabwe (Rhodesia then, of course) was top of the pops, but he also considered Nauru and Papua New Guinea (Lord, what vision!). The Zimbabwean option really captured my interest. The Fuehrer was fond of a safari suit. I could just see him, thusly attired, striding through a lush farm field, pith helmet firmly in place, checking on the crop's progress, administering the occasional thrashing and tending to his neat moustache, which Ern always insisted hid a map tattooed on his upper lip; guide to a secret treasure trove in Borneo.

But Don Mary talked him out of it. Let's be frank about this: Don Mary probably shrieked him out of it. Not that I want you to think theirs was a loveless union filled with rancour and hostility. Don Mary is a woman of forceful and forthright opinion, but she and the Fuehrer were married for fifty-five years and they had time to get used to each other. In his later years - ie, when he was getting old - the Fuehrer was known to morosely remark that Don Mary showed the cat more love than him. And while it may be true that she would add a little hot water to the feline's milk dish on a chilly winter's morning, she could also be relied upon to subtly slip the Fuehrer a prune or two with his brekkie when he found himself in some difficulty. She ministered to him, is what I'm saying. And unlike the moggy, the Fuehrer never nipped Don Mary on the thigh if dinner was not procured quickly enough. Not that I know of....And now that I give it some thought, this is a line of inquiry best left here and never mentioned again.

When Bloody Ern told me about the Fuehrer's plans he looked rather wistful. I could see he had been captivated by visions of another, unknown life. But what other life would he have wanted to replace his sunburnt childhood, running away every weekend to camp and fish in the mangroves and on the tidal flats with his best mate, Cossack Jack? Maybe he was just thinking of all that free baccy.

And perhaps that, and not the maligned Don Mary, is what put the kibosh on the Fuehrer's dreams. He had a big family habit to support and before he'd even reached the promised land he could see the profits going the way of a Cheech and Chong film.

Grumpy says it doesn't matter. With the way the world turns, we would have found ourselves back here in WA anyway. On the lam. But I don't know. I can see Ern stalking his enemy through rich green tobacco plantations, armed to the back teeth, clad in his best warfare sarong. "Surrender, Baby Girl? Not on your life!" Well. Quite. The only part of the picture I can't figure out is what kind of smoke would be dangling from his sun-cracked lips: would it be his beloved Camel Plain, or would he have honoured the family livelihood and been strictly and literally a Roll Your Own man?

It's a mystery for the ages.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

Sweet taste, crisp, may regret consumption for all eternity

2004-07-15T22:45:00.000+11:00

Genesis, Book 2.
3. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

5. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
__________

17 And unto Adam [God] said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

Haven’t we all been there? Looking for a little snack between meals, something to clear the palate and which won’t rot your teeth? So you scoop a Pink Lady or a Golden Delicious out of the fruit bowl, take one loud, crisp bite and suddenly it’s nothing but sin, death and expulsion from paradise. Dude, next time try a kiwi fruit. Not as sweet and you'll have to peel it but it doesn’t, you know, greatly multiply thy sorrow.

How much luckier, on the other hand, was Celtic mythological gadabout Finn MacCool who instead ate the Salmon of Knowledge (which itself had first nibbled on the Hazelnuts of Wisdom)? He didn't have fiery cherubim dogging his ass for chowing down on semi-divine crudites. And with a name like that, he is also the demi-god mostly likely to join a boy band.

(Incidentally, if you want to go out for a slap-up meal but also need to swat for a big exam the next day then it might be a good idea order something like baked atlantic salmon of knowledge stuffed with hazelnuts of wisdom, sage-butter and leeks, on a bed of steamed bok-choy. You can't go wrong.)

I might take myself off for a little bruschetta topped with the chargrilled eggplant of pointless erudition covered with a light crumbling of the oven-roasted feta of self-regarding smarminess. I find its just the thing to munch on while blogging.

(And thank you, by the way, to young Mark at ...do not use lifts... for pointing out God Checker. Fun, fun, fun til Lord the Father takes your T-bird away and drops it on your disrespectful head.)

Hazelblackberry: choking back the tears

2004-07-13T17:24:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick,

So last night Grumpy and I pulled the faithful Georgia Satellite up at the Freo wharf to eat our fish and chips. We parked, as it were. [I like the phrase "as it were". I knew I would have a lifelong love affair with Dave van Ronk when I heard him use "as it were" in a song.] It was lovely sitting there watching the ships being loaded and boats motoring up and down the river, sending rounded, lazy waves towards the side of the wharf. As I watched the waves wash towards us I had a eureka moment re jam-making: "Maybe that's what a rolling boil should look like," I thought. I shall keep it mind.

We've been eating a lot of fish & chips lately. And eating them down at the wharf. It's most pleasant. Last night was a little pleasantus interruptus, though, when I choked on a squid ring (you may know them as calamari). This sometimes happens to me: half the squid ring starts heading down my gullet while the other half stays in my mouth, the two bits firmly connected by a resilient stringy bit. The bit in my mouth can't go down yet because it's still whole so I find myself having to grab it and hoick the other half-swallowed piece back up out of my throat via its little bungee rope.

It might be difficult to believe, but you'd be hard pressed to notice it was happening. I carry the whole operation out with a grim, silent gagging. It occurs to me as I perform the extraction that this is what it must feel like post-heart surgery as they take out The Tube. And with all the fish & chips I've been gobbling, the more experience I get on post-heart surgery procedures the better.

Then of course the seagulls arrive. Some of them tucking one leg up to look pitiful. I'm a sucker for a pitiful look. A bit like Charlie Brown taunting the kite-eating tree and then throwing his kite up into it because he feels sorry for it. Occasionally a pelican comes in. Not to scavenge food, simply to be sociable. They really are Spruce Gooses, aren't they? I like pelicans. Though...I have found them just a wee bit creepy ever since the day I noticed the little fingernail thing at the end of their beaks. Shudder. Like the day I got near a cocky on our balcony in Canberra and the little bugger hissed at me. I had to admire his guts (and he did have the cutest little round guts) but that hiss was mightily off-putting.

The birds, you will be relieved to know, are not the only life at the wharf. Which is just as well. Charming though they may be, I'm not sure how they'd go as stevedores. Night and day there's plenty of activity buzzing around the ships and people getting on and off the Rottnest ferries, others fishing late into the night, and yet other people just wandering back and forth enjoying the water and the breeze and the bustle. I can see why Otis Redding spent so much time sitting on the dock of the bay, contemplating his navel.

It's alright for some, innit?

Until next time, Nick.

hb

Your pig is not welcome at my hootenanny

2004-07-11T21:47:00.000+11:00

'Do not try to teach a pig how to sing -- It wastes your time. And it annoys the pig.' This is a piece of folk wisdom supposedly from the heart of the hillbilly country in the Ozarks.

It’s certainly true that there are few things in this world more vexatious than a frustrated pig with a limited vocal range. But are Jed and his kin are really justified in making this one of the those rules that absolutely must not be broken?

Surely, out there in the back woods of Arkansas, there exist pig-prodigies whose natural talent makes it worth your while persisting with vocal coaching? ‘I mean, for Christ’s sake, Jeremy, I could be the next P.J. Harvey and they won’t even try!’

I also have my doubts about this fatalistic approach to education: that the teaching of song to a pig will waste the time of the educator and irritate the educated. Well, welcome to the real world, buddy. How many music teachers have not felt the same way as they struggled to inculcate the joy of the clarinet in a recalcitrant 9-year old? How many such children have wrestled with the instruments of wind and reed only to give it all up as soon as their parents recognise that the only effective blowing their little Joshuas and Zoes are doing is on the mouthpiece of a bong?

Perhaps if these teaching resources had been spread a little more equitably across the animal kingdom, we might have had a few more pigs making it big in the Billboard Top 100 (other than Meatloaf, I mean).

And why, I wonder, did they focus on singing? Surely it would have been just as applicable to say: don’t try to teach pigs to become structual engineers. Pigs are rumoured to be amongst the most intelligent animals but the number of bridges built by porcine-dominated construction firms can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

I suspect a darker, more self-serving motive at work: simply that any consideration of pig careers of whatever type presents an undesirable obstacle on the road to the abattoir. ‘Yes, Babe, your vocal range shows real promise and your finely-honed moral sensibilities make you potentially suitable for some of the more demanding operatic roles being performed today, but, dude, I need the crackling.’

And who among us will argue with that?

I only ask that we treat the pig with the respect he deserves and not sugarcoat it. We should not hold out the false promise of a life on the stage if only the pig had a little more ability or worked a little harder or had a better agent. Will not the pig hold us in higher esteem if we simply say to him from day one: ‘the only singing you’ll be doing, bacon-boy, is when you get up close and personal with the business end of a spring-loaded bolt-gun.’

After all, isn’t honesty the best policy?

Cute. Funny. Occasional tendency to leave vapour-trails.

2004-07-09T22:35:00.000+11:00

Just about the cutest thing in the world is a child running very fast: the jigging up and down of the shoulders, the sledgehammer pounding of little shoed feet as they punch the floor. (Who ever coined the phrase the ‘pitter-patter of tiny feet’ never really had kids. Children ‘pitter-patter’ over floor-boards in much as the same way as an SR-71 Blackbird pitter-patters across the sound-barrier.)

And of course, such rapid movement is often acccompanied by a lunatic grin and a scream not unlike an SR-71 Blackbird scissor-kicking Mach 1.

Last night The Dude ran back and forth, back and forth, yelling at the top of his lungs. I said to my wife: ‘you know, if he wasn’t so adorable, that’d be kind of annoying.’ Of course a line like that is really just your sub-conscious gesturing to be heard, like the nerdy kid in class who’s never called upon because he always has his hand up.

One minute later: ‘my God, that’s annoying. I said, my GOD, that’s annoying. I SAID, never mind.’

Part of the whole cuteness package is the fragility of a child at speed. A kid at full pelt is like an avalanche. An avalanche wearing Wiggles overalls. At twice the normal speed. With a bowl hair-cut. An avalanche that deliberately steers itself to crush the villages in its path.

The only thing which stops gravity bringing the whole vegemite-filled edifice crashing to earth is constant forward motion. Sprawling, face-smacking accidents are not merely inevitable, they’re the only thing that can bring rest to a child’s flailing limbs.

However, barring some unforeseen mishap involving a small hurtling body, a precariously balanced tray of crockery and myself, children are pretty well unable to hurt anybody but themselves. They’ll hit you and ping off at an acute angle, leaving you unmoved, like they’re a pin-ball and you just gave them 50 points.

But cute. Did I mention the whole thing is cute? And other people’s kids running too fast are cute and funny. Which is why I like them more than an SR-71. No one ever laughed at an SR-71.

Hazelblackberry: crescent or gibbous?

2004-07-07T21:17:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick

Here's a little-noticed and underrated skill: women running fast in incredibly high heels.

You don't hear too much about it these days, but it was big in the 70s and early 80s when stilettos were not so much all the rage as all the norm. And perhaps women were shorter then. Looking back, as one must, I see that many of my friends' mothers were quite diminutive laydees.

I was contemplating this skill because I was thinking about my old primary-school chum Moony. I haven't seen Moony in years. The last time I heard from her, in 1993, she was drawing cartoons - for animation - in New Zealand. I used to love going to Moony's house. The Moonies were quite socially superior in our little township - they had carpet in the kitchen and bathroom. I remember Moony dramatically swinging the door open to reveal the flash floor coverings and me standing there greedily sniffing that lovely new carpet smell. I believe they may even have had a cocktail party to celebrate the event. Tres stylish. Ern might have attended out of obligation. Maybe that was the night he stepped on the Moonies' dog's tail. Or it might have been another night. If it wasn't for the Moonies throwing parties, everyone would have died of boredom waiting for something good to come on Channel 2. (And oh the excitement, the fervour, when we finally got GWN. The Moonies probably threw a party to celebrate THAT.)

Moony's mum (Mrs Moony, would you believe) was, in my eyes, the most glamorous thing I had ever seen. Even on the hottest, most humid days she never broke a sweat. But she always had a sheen on her face that I've come to associate with women who only wash their faces with cream, or creme, cleanser. You know, the vaguely greasy stuff that you rub all over your face and then remove with a tissue to leave you with that fresh, just stepped out of the hog-fat rendering plant feeling. Women who use that stuff and never have even a single, juicy pimple to show for it generally have a high glamour quotient. Consider our mutual friend, Amazing Grace. AG is constantly slathering herself in a variety of unguents. Rather than sliding greasily from pillar to post, she always looks perky & dewy...with a touch of glamour.

But here's the thing about Moony's mum - she wore stilettos of such ferocious incline that the poor woman was just about permanently en pointe. And she ran in them. Everywhere. Mrs Moony was always in a rush, and always running late. I may not have mentioned that her glamour was not haughty and cool, but was dishevelled and warm and all the more alluring for it. Being constantly behind time necessitated a lot of running. She ran from bank to milk bar to post office across the shiny red concrete at the local shops where she had a clothes store. Most impressively, though, she ran all over the uneven, tarred footpaths of our tiny town. Footpaths which melted under the summer sun and in which we kids would leave deep potholes after digging out the soft blue metal.

Her foot always landed solidly and evenly. There was never the slightest waver in ankle or step. The canniest, surest-footed mountain goat would have sat back on its haunches in awe.

There were many nice things about Mrs Moony. I used to love spending time at their place. But the nicest thing about her was that she always ran home too.

Until next time, Nick. Yes indeed.

hb

No, you can't get friendly with a crocodile, because inside he's hurting

2004-07-06T22:57:00.000+11:00

In her delightful tale of elderly relatives blowing her inheritance on frivolous trips overseas, Hazelblackberry (or rather that lovable rogue Bloody Ern) used a term that I’d not heard before to describe bad breath: ‘crocodile breath’.

Who exactly is sniffing at the top of a crocodile’s windpipe, pronouncing the air down there to be rancid and then living to complain about it? ‘I mean, jeez, I’ve smelt some distasteful carnivore exhalations in my time, but crocodylus porosus takes the freakin’ cake.’

Now, crocodiles may have some coarse manners which are not conducive to sweet-smelling breath but they are not scavengers and avoid rotting meat. This is more than you can say of the hyena, for example, who is quite happy to chow down on those two-week old left-overs you were hoping somebody else would throw out. And crocodiles take care of themselves; the Egyptian plover (pluvianus aegyptius) eats leftover meat from the teeth of the Nile Crocodile.

So I guess it must be the Egyptian plovers who are infecting the English language with defamatory anti-crocodile idioms. Who else gets close enough? And they alone have a vested interest in building-up crocodile insecurities about their personal hygiene. ‘Dude, you stink. Seriously. Do you really think all those fine crocodile bitches are gonna let you get your groove on with halitosis like that? Let me take care of that for you.’

And then there’s ‘crocodile tears’. Crocodiles do in fact, like humans, produce tears from their lachrymal glands. But how exactly did their tears become synonymous with insincere emotions? Do crocodiles, under the strain of one too many bad breath cracks, weep their little three-and-a-half chambered hearts out only to be accused by an Egyptian plover of faking it, of putting on the waterworks to manipulate their fellow river or esturary dwellers? Does a crocodile need the permission of a plover bird to really feel something?

In which case, the plovers have got crocodilian psychiatry and dentistry all sewn up. They must be raking in six figures and all the rotting ‘tween-teeth meat they can eat.

Apparently, the expression 'crocodile breath' comes from a Chinese proverb: 'You must have crossed the river before you may tell the crocodile he has bad breath.’ Which is true -- unless you’re an Egyptian plover, in which case you can do it while you screw with his mind and empty his wallet.

The kiss-off of the Spider-Woman

2004-07-05T23:49:00.000+11:00

Warning: desperately unfunny post

There was no spider-woman (that was pure titular cuteness on my part) but there was a kiss-off. On Friday I discovered that I had been unsuccessful in applying for a job that, once upon a time, I was very well qualified for. Trouble is, the entire recruitment process took about 18 months.

It’s a tale of woe that will one day make a dull and depressing motion picture that will ultinately screen on SBS at 1am, in Slovenian.

I had applied for a promotion in the area I used to work. Not at all sure I wanted to go back to that area and to that subject-matter, I applied because I was invited to and, well, because a promotion is a promotion.

The chair of the selection panel (and the person who invited me to apply) was a former friend of mine. From then on it was a ride on the back of a greased pig to the lowest plane of hell. Long delay, yadda yadda, interview, long, long delay, no referee’s report from former friend, futher delay, yadda, yadda, recruitment process falls over, new process starts, further delay, former friend disappears, reappears at second interview etc etc.

At the same time, this former friend started to pike, at the last minute, from every social engagement we arranged. My wife warned me that my former friend was gearing up to fuck me over. I scoffed at this. And now I scoff at my earlier naïve self.

(I actually edited this after I wrote it the first time, taking out all the long and gratuitious details about every twist of the knife, every tiny development in a now dead recruitment process. Because, at the end of the day, even I don’t care enough to read all that.)

When the second interview finished, I still had to wait four months (until last Friday) before the official result but by this time, I knew the jig was up. The two people who got the promotions, who had been my junior at my former workplace, had now been acting in the advertised positions for more than 18 months. There’s no way an ‘outsider’ can compete with that.

I actually felt better for getting the news from the new chair of the recruitment panel. I was always ambiguous about the job; it was really a matter of principle. Getting the bad news means I can move on from this and think about where my career is heading. (An exercise in futility which engages me on a daily basis) But damn, it still hurt to be treated like that, and to be leap-frogged for a promotion in that way.

And I feel even better having got this off my chest. Your regularly scheduled crustaceans will attack again tomorrow…

Hazelblackberry: The Lion and the Unicorn

2004-07-02T21:09:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick

Yesterday we had a family gathering at the international airport to farewell Don Mary & Aunty Aroma who are off for a six-week jaunt in England. They're spending their inheritance from my Aunty Tilly. Profligate, wanton old biddies. There's always something exciting about the international airport, isn't there? Gateway to other worlds. Even though the shops are never open and the coffee shops are dreadful and you always have about a three hour wait before you can shovel the passengers through the door, it's still exciting to be there. On the cusp of adventure.

I just love going to the newsagents at the airport. Even at the domestic terminal. The books and magazines all take on a fresher, more intriguing or entertaining aspect to them. And if the reading matter fails to move me I can always purchase a couple of packets of Tic Tacs or Mentos. When time drags, mints are your friend!

Fortunately the flight was a night time one. This meant that Don Mary, who favours wearing sun glasses indoors, was devoid of her Polaroid eyewear. She has these dark, square wrap-around numbers that make her look like she's just heading out to the stables with a rather large knife.

Anyway, it was all very exciting to be waving someone off on an overseas trip. Aunty Aroma has never been out of Australia and I do admire her trooping off at seventy-eight, with only her macular-degenerated eighty-four year old sister as her guide. Don Mary is a seasoned, and some would say hardened, traveller but they both had pre-flight jitters. Bloody Ern was full of bonhomie and bon mots for the cautious traveller; commenting on fire balls and way of achieving zero-gravity in flight. He clapped a beefy arm around the shoulders of each woman and said, "Now, girls, be sensible; I don't want to hear about you losing your heads in Dubai." Boom boom. He was running round the airport imitating planes banking sharply left and right. He'd had two cappuccinos and his face had a rather ruddy and over-excited aspect to it. I expected him to start vomiting and screaming for his teddy at any moment.

I offered him a mint, just to be sharing and caring. His exuberant face fell; his hand flew to his mouth. "Crocodile breath?" he whispered anxiously.

Chit chat can really flag when you're waiting for something to be over. Like boarding a plane. Or a hanging, I suppose. Finally after numerous cups of tea and dwindling conversation, the first call for their flight was made. From sitting around mumbling and looking down at outstretched legs, everyone suddenly sprang to their feet, clapping hands together: "Here we go then!" Don Mary may have passed on to me her jutting D'Entrecasteaux chin but, god bless her, we share the same genetic material that makes responding to that first boarding call A MUST. And it's only practical - after all, the sooner you get in, the sooner your oversize carry-on luggage can hog up the space in the overhead compartment. Don Mary was hustling Aunty Aroma towards the doors. She could smell all that empty space. There was a cacophony of farewells and last minute waves and then the two of them disappeared around the corner and were on their way.

I just hope she thinks to bring me home some Blackpool Rock.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

I want to spend the rest of my life with you, starting from 7:45pm

2004-07-01T21:00:00.000+11:00

In movies, weak but sympathetic and strangely good-looking young men sometimes telephone extraordinarily attractive women made up to look like merely attractive women. Summoning all their courage, they stumble through a proposition. Would you, uh. If you’re not doing anything then, uh. I have tickets to, uh.

This being the movies, the women say ‘I’d love to’ rather than ‘get bent, jerk.’ The young man, stupefied and more inarticulate than ever, mumbles his gratitude, hangs up the phone, then punches the air and lets out an almighty whoop.

There’s something missing.

Just once I’d like to that scene to go like this:

Bright-eyed nerd boy: Uh, previously aloof goddess, look, you’re probaby gonna say no but, uh, are you free this Friday?
Previously aloof goddess: sure.
BENB: But there’s no way you’d spend it with me, right?
PAG: Sure I would.
BENB: Huh? You would?
PAG: Of course, I’d love to.
BENB: Wow. Wow, that’s incredible. OK, see you on Friday. Bye. [Starts to hang up].
PAG: Wait. What are we doing?
BENB: Huh?
PAG: What are we doing on Friday?
BENB: Uh, what would you like to do?
PAG: Maybe see a movie?
BENB: Sure.
PAG: What movie?
BENB: I don’t mind. You choose.
PAG: No, you choose.
BENB: Uh, what about that disaster move. The Day After Tomorrow.
PAG: No, I just don’t fancy it. What about Shrek 2?
BENB: Isn’t that a kids movie?
PAG: Supposed to be pretty funny.
BENB: OK, what time’s it on?
PAG: I don’t know. Do you have the paper?
BENB: No.
PAG: Why don’t we just turn up at the Cinema in town and see what’s playing?
BENB: In town? On a Friday night? Be a bugger getting a park. What about the Megaplex?
PAG: I’m not crazy about that place. You know how much they charge for pop-corn?
BENB: I’ll buy the pop-corn.
PAG: Just ‘cos you buy the pop-corn and choc-top, doesn’t mean I have to put out.
BENB: Uh, uh, I didn’t mean to suggest---
PAG: Relax. Kidding. Pick me up at 7:30. My address– do you have a pen? – my address is –
BENB: Uh, shit, did I say Friday? Shit, I forgot, my Dad flies back from Thailand and I have to pick him up. Is Saturday any good for you?

Now that would have been a John Hughes film worth seeing…

(I just checked imdb.com. I’ve seen every movie John Hughes directed except for his last, Curly Sue (1991). After that, it’s creenplays only. And a cold, cold time it’s been since Flubber. I’d say the time is right for the DVD box set John Hughes: American Auteur -- The Director’s Cuts.)

Hazelblackberry: the dead tone

2004-06-30T21:21:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick,

Spanner is on the phone AGAIN.

On the one hand, what do I care? She can talk all she wants as long as her work's getting done. Hells bells, let her talk all she wants even if her work ISN'T getting done. Let's not get all prudey about this like none of us have ever sat for an unconscionable amount of time at work on a private call.

But on the other hand: bugger me, I care.

I care from a humanitarian perspective. Why fork out heaps of money on day care only to ring them every half hour to check if your sprog is wearing this or doing that? Have mercy on these poor people just trying to do their job: they've only got 49 other little monsters whose every need must be ministered to with infinite tender loving care.

I care from a busybody perspective. She can spend aaaages winding up a phone call with her mum who has put the child on for excruciating minutes of kissy noises and farewells. "Bye bye, my love...bye...bye...I love you, my darling...bye...bye bye...kiss kiss...bye...darling, goodbye...I love you, sweetheart...kiss mummy...goodbye...bye..." Twice a day. Four days a week.

I care from a selfish perspective that when it's MY work that's not getting done then damn well get off that phone and do it. Especially when that work involves waiting for calls to be returned to you. Then we return to the humanitarian perspective: my heart bleeds for the frustrated souls trying to make those return calls who only get the "beep-beep-beep" signal in their ear. A sound that is only slightly less irritating than the famous midnight mosquito whine. Many is the eardrum that has been burst by a violent slap to the ear because THIS TIME you're going to get that little bugger.

Anyway...according to CrustyP I'm supposed to manage this. Struth! I have a hard enough time asking for flex sheets. I have to give myself a pep talk in bed the night before. CrustyP doesn't view learning how to manage people as a development tool, he sees it as a moral obligation.

"See, that's the one thing about Hulahoop," says CrustyP. "Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking Hulahoop, he's a great bloke, but - and I AM trusting you here, this really is between you and me - but Hulahoop doesn't know how to manage people, does he? And he doesn't want to manage people, does he? That isn't right, is it? You see what I'm saying. I mean, you ARE with me on this one."

I admire Hulahoop to have come so far with so few strings attached. What is that man's secret?? So I look. I say nothing. I see that I carry within me a fatal flaw that will forever darken the otherwise bright and sunny relationship between me & CrustyP.

This gives me pause.

Until next time, Nick. Bye...love you...kiss kiss...

hb

Three little words that could change your life

2004-06-29T21:08:00.000+11:00

Do a favour for me. Write a short essay or story for me that is both up-lifting and grounded in the here and now; that takes the product of the human imagination at its most fertile and grinds it into something worthy and useful through a structured and considered process. Sing a song of yourself and your life. Sketch a tentative plan for this city, this country, this world for the next thousand years. Explain love, justify death and excoriate history as never before.

And do it using only the words: ‘door’, ‘bus’ and ‘ball’.

My son, The Dude, rarely strays too far beyond these words. (Oh, sure, his name and ‘Daddy’, ‘Mummy’, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ crop up a fair bit but they’re all kind of obvious and expected.) He has taken those three words as a grand summation of all that is presently interesting about the outside world.

And if they’re good enough for him, then they should be enough for you. Try to get through just one meeting at work next week with only ‘door’, ‘bus’ and ‘ball’.

Let me know how it goes.

Your tax-dollars, over-worked

2004-06-27T22:19:00.000+11:00

Last week, both chambers of the Australian Parliament sat a couple of marathon sessions (including what was apparently only the fourth time the House of Representatives has ever sat on a Saturday according to the ABC) to clear the decks before…,um, no reason. You know, just keeping busy.

You might like to know some of the output of that fevered legislative jelly-wrestling… And so I present several of the lesser known Bills which made it onto the Statute books in the early hours late last week (and remember, ignorance of the law is no defence):

Workplace Relations (Non-Traditional Hospital Employees) Amendment Act 2004: outlaws the presence of circus clowns and fire-men during open-heart surgery. (Note: exceptions exist for those who only perform as clowns at hospital ‘annual religious observance ceremonies’, those legitimately ‘considering career transition’ and patients.)

Aviation Navigation (Animals) Amendment Act 2004: adds domestic pets such as cats, dogs, goldfish and turtles to the list in Division IX as ‘persons who are presumed to be ineligible for a licence to pilot a small aircraft.’ However, section 214 operates as normal, that is, such persons may become ‘so qualified’ following an ‘approved course of study lasting not less than four years’.

Australian Yellow Citrus Commision Establishment Act 2004: establishes a new body under the Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry portfolio, the Australian Yellow Citrus Commission (AYCC). The AYCC will be tasked with the regulation of grapefruit production, dissemination and consumption (lemons being already regulated by the Australia and New Zealand Strong-Tasting Foods Authority). The Act further provides that where a grape-fruit has been certified as ‘excessively sour’, it may not be served at any breakfast (defined as the ‘first diurnal nutrition opportunity’) in Australia including all external territories.

The AYYC takes its place alongside the Australian Blood Orange Agency, the Bureau of Navel Orange Liaison and Development, Cumquats Australia and the National Marmalade Office.

Guest bloggers: Federal Minister for Local Government, Territories and Roads & Cyndi Lauper!

2004-06-26T00:05:00.000+11:00

I don’t have time to blog tonight because I want to watch something on TV so I’ve decided to hand the reins to two guest bloggers for the evening. Say hello to Senator the Honourable Ian Campbell, Australian Federal Minister for Local Government, Territories and Roads, Senator for Western Australia and to quirky songstress, Cyndi Lauper.

Senator Campbell: Good evening.
Cyndi Lauper: Hi Nick, thanks for having us.
Nick Crustacean: Look, you know how the machinery works. I’m just going to duck out to catch CSI: Miami. Go nuts. [Leaves].
SC: Thanks, Nick. Much appreciated.
CL: Yeah, thanks.
SC: So. [Pause.] Do girls just wanna have fun? Sorry, people must ask you that all the time.
CL: Not as enough as you might think. Not often enough.
SC: Ok, then. Do girls just wanna have fun?
CL: Mostly, yeah. Though fun is not as easy to come by as it used to be, ya know? [Pause]. How’re things going with you? Do you get enough fun?
SC:Oh, well, now that you mention it, I very much enjoy having Portfolio responsibility for Local Government and Territories and, er, and –
CL: Roads.
SC: And roads. Yes, thank you. Yes, it does give me a great deal of pleasure. I get immense satisfaction from, well, leading development in first-class policy in the area of local government, territories and, you know, roads. Immense satisfaction.
CL: Yeah? Doesn’t sound that exciting to me.
SC: Oh, you’d be surprised, really surprised at some of the issues that get thrown up. For example, to take an issue I was reading about in an industry paper about a fascinating infrastructure redevelopment project in your native Brooklyn –
CL: Wait. You read my bio?
SC: Never let it be said that I don’t do my research. For example, I know you turned 51 last week. [Pause]. But I’m sure you can still be like that girl in that song ‘Bop girl’.
CL: ‘She-bop.’
SC: ‘She-bop.’ Right. 51 is not so old, you know. Of course, I’m only 45 myself. But you know, as we grow older, we still try to have fun, in our own way, perhaps differently from when we were younger. You know, I really get a kick out of transport and regional policy. And I understand you still put the occasional record out. It’s all about keeping busy, even if you’re not necessarily tearing up the charts anymore.
CL: Look, when I agreed to do this –
SC: Oh, hey, Nick’s back.
NC: Wow, another amazing ep of CSI: Miami. Turns out the topless model who worked at the casino wasn’t really killed by the blow-gun dart made of lip-stick fired by the jealous ex-croupier but by a poison in her drink that was just a random mix of cigarette ash and the plastic used to make casino chips. Incredible.
CL: Huh.
NC: So anyway, thanks very much for helping out. Can’t wait to read the blog.
CL: Thanks.
SC: Yes, thanks very much. We should do it again some time.
NC: You know it. Time after time, heh. Goodnight all.
SC: Good night. Oh, I should add for the record that I’m also Manager of Governemnt Business in the Senate.
NC: Thanks, Minister, Cyndi.
CL: Yeah, bye.

Hazelblackberry: not to be taken with food

2004-06-24T22:09:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick

Grumpy thinks that the richer people get, the smaller their dogs get. Grumpy also believes that Pink may be running out of material.

I couldn't comment on the Pink thing; I just haven't watched enough TV Hits, which is a crying shame. All I know - and I may be wrong - is that she once had pink hair but now is blonde. Is that the case? To illustrate his case, Grumpy turned up a song of hers on the radio the other day in which she whinges about some bloke who didn't come to her show even though she left tickets at the door for him. Maybe she even got a ticket for him rather than her mother? Well, some friend HE turned out to be!

Mind you, I think they were a little more than friends. If you get my drift. I wonder if her mother knew....

Anyway, as for the dog bit - sometimes on our drives home we detour through the Nicer Suburbs. Lately, I've been noticing the kinds of dogs that are accompanying their owners on strolls through their leafy, privileged streets. It would seem - though I claim no thoroughness in establishing a working hypothesis or rigorously collecting data - that the preferred style of dog is a small and generally fluffy chap. Domesticated rats. Though I admit some are charming, in a NIMH-esque way.

NOT that I am anti-dog. Except for large, fangy dogs that live on properties with "ENTER AT OWN RISK - ATTACK DOG" signs on the front gate; gates which are often left wide open, swinging in the breeze. I like the concept of a dog. A loyal fella trotting at your heels, looking up at you lovingly while you wait to cross the road. But as wonderful as they may be as pets and friends and, yes, even members of the family, there is one compelling argument against dogs: scooping.

You KNOW what I'm talking about, but here's a bit of detail.

On the weekend Grumpy and I were cruising the streets in the faithful Georgia Satellite. We pulled up at South Perth foreshore to admire the view; where Grumpy once again displayed his unerring sense for finding the one car park with a bin in front of it. "Thank Christ we're finally here," he said (he can speak a little coarsely at times). "You wouldn't believe how many postcards of this view I've sorted in the last 6 months." We sat in contentment for a while, admiring the river and the city skyline and the lid of the bin, and then along came a family for a picnic. They had with them some big old galumphing pooch who had clearly seen better days (particularly in the worming department, he kept dragging his bum along the grass in a most pitiable fashion).

Well the fresh air and exercise clearly got the better of the big old boy and he graced the manicured sward with a poo. Then the mother of the family covered her hand with a plastic bag and scooped up the prize. I got to thinking about a bag of freshly-gassed rats I had to pick up one day at school from the front office for dissection. As I carried the warm bundle back to the classroom I put the wind up myself a bit wondering what it would be like if they all suddenly came back to life and started wriggling madly for freedom.

Wait, I do have a point and the point is this: as the woman walked over to the bin to...er...make a deposit, she had a look of repulsion about her. Grumpy and I pondered this and could only reach two conclusions. Either:

(1) no matter how many times you pick up a dog's poo it never ceases to be disgusting; or
(2) it isn't really all that disgusting to the owner, but you have to put on a show for all the people around you, because you wouldn't want anyone to think that you thought that picking up a dog's poo was somehow perfectly civilised and normal.

The family then laid their picnic blanket right down over the very grass where Rusty had been dragging his posterior round and round. We left then. I'm sure they had a lovely afternoon.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

The Wiggles: gritty realists or class traitors? You be the judge...

2004-06-23T22:53:00.000+11:00

The Wiggles Movie, part le deux. Last time we met, I was telling you that while The Dude (aged 1 ¾) might be impressed with the Wiggles Movie my higher faculties were left untouched by its artistic stylings.

As I mentioned, I nurture a tiny Wiggles obsession. I see all their differences, their subtle flaws and human failures and, above all, their shining successes as men of the stage and screen. And the Wiggles Movie (1997) provides a rich vein to be mined by the dedicated Wigglesologist.

The first thing that will strike you about the movie is how little they’re in it. At that first brain-storming meeting in which it was decided that the Wiggles were no one in this town until they had their own movie, the first order of business must have been: how the fuck do we fill 90 minutes? (I imagine it was Red Murray Wiggle who asked that question in all its coarse searing honesty. As their resident rock-God, he’s that kind of guy).

First answer: it’s just 83 minutes long.
Second answer: let this movie be about someone other than the Wiggles… crazy, no? Crazy like a fox!

The main plot is about Wally the magician, a hopeless gangly loser type, all curly hair and floppy limbs, trying to make it in the rough and tumble world of high-stakes theatrical magic. (Wally is played with a great deal of sighing and eye-rolling by Tony Harvey, the cynical dude on Amanda Keller’s Mondo Thingo Showo). The second plot-line, intertwined with the fortunes of Wally, is that Dorothy, everybody’s favourite infantile obese green dinosaur, thinks that the Wiggles have forgotten her birthday (because they’re secretly organising a surprise party! Surprise! It's a storyline borrowed originally from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.)

So, to cut an 83 minute story even shorter, (SPOLIERS BEWARE) Wally wants to win the Magic Club competition being held later that day and thus the wand which once belonged to Waldo the Magnificent, believing this will make him great. Problem: he’s a classic no-talent fuck-up. Standing in his way is Roland the Remarkable, a sneering effete magician who pisses on poor Wally from a great height.

Wally decides he needs a wand to compete and so steals one from Yellow Greg Wiggle. Enter the Dinosaur! Dorothy catches Wally in the act and together they accidentally break the wand. Resolving to get the wand fixed, they set off to visit Dorothy’s friends – such regulars as Wags the dog, Henry the Octopus and Captain Feathersword – as Dorothy cycles in and out of giddy joy and horrific self-loathing.

As Murray might have said in that first brain-storming session: so where’s the fucking lesson here for the kids?

Well, of course, Wally discovers that his problem is not the lack of a wand, but the lack of self-belief, natch. He makes it to the magic competition just in time to compete (oooh, the suspense!) and wins, with the help of Dorothy and a super-dooper magic cabinet revealed to him in a dream by the long-dead Waldo the Magnificent (damn but those peyote buttons work a treat…).

So believing in yourself is the key to success, right? Think again. Waldo the magnificent, who saved Wally’s lanky pink derriere, was actually Wally’s great-great grand-father. And the president of the Magic Club, who is also one of the three competition judges, is actually Wally’s uncle.

So self-belief wins the day if backed by a dollop of nepotism. It’s Roland the Remarkable I feel sorry for. He might be an arrogant son of a bitch, but he’s a self-made magician who got where he is today by yanking his own rabbits out of his own hats. In the end, his hopes are crushed by a clueless thief with a sense of entitlement who coasts in at the last minute and wins, enjoying the fruits of a dynastic elite.

And ain’t that a fucking lesson for life?

Hazelblackberry: A Banquette Fit for a King

2004-06-20T20:44:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick

The other night I was watching The Einstein Factor. What an entertaining show that can be. One of The Brains Trust panellists answered a question on dinosaurs, confident of the answer because she had picked up a lot of dinosaur facts and figures from her dinosaur-obsessed five- or six-year-old nephew. Of her relationship with her nephew she noted that he was someone whom:

"I regularly bathe and bed."

Was I the only person in Australia who guffawed at this slip? Was mine the only laughter that drifted upward into the lonely, starry night? Certainly the panellists said nowt. I suppose in this day and age one can't. And before you know it old Hetty Wainthrop, or whatever that 'Bravehearts' woman's name is, will be shutting down this web site for its suggestive and morally reprehensible content.

(I should note that The Brains Truster was dead wrong. The wages of sin may be death but before you collect your pay packet you get to enjoy a hearty dollop of embarrassment and humiliation in the here and now.)

Anyway, here's my point: while I was watching The Einstein Factor I was eating a Jelly Tip. Did you ever enjoy a Jelly Tip as a youngster, Nick? What a marvellous concoction they were: plain (not buttermilk) vanilla ice cream topped with a frozen slab of raspberry jelly, all coated in a thin, crackling chocolate shell. Bliss. (Grumpy claims that one of his lecturers at the Uni of Qld invented the Jelly Tip. Someone who knew about the Jelly Tip. A very very good reason to marry Grumpy. So I did.) At some point the Jelly Tip disappeared. My attention was momentarily captured by the Hazelnut Roll (a wanton treat if ever there was one) and the Redskin Split and the Giant Sandwich (which I believe you know by the name of Monaco Bar), and when I turned around the Jelly Tip was gone. I felt responsible. It seemed that through my neglect and insatiable appetite I had driven it from my life.

Then, a reprieve. A couple of years ago I was on holidays, staying with Bloody Ern and Bezley, when I decided to duck down to the local deli for ice creams for all of us. And I bet you know what I found in the freezer, don't you? Its packaging had been updated but it was like running into an old friend who you used to tomboy around with but who has taken to wearing make-up and cute skirts. At first you don't know what to make of all of this and then you get talking and the years melt away. The frills and mascara disappear and standing before you it's still the same old Big Russ you always knew. What a glorious reunion it was. The vanilla ice cream was as light as ever, the jelly as brain-freezing as I remember and the chocolate was still thin. My sweet Jelly Tip had stayed true. It had not followed in the footsteps of the Choc Wedge and the Fudge Bar who now choose to prostitute themselves in layers of too-thick, too-rich chocolate.

I must tell you that the deli which reunited me with Jelly Tips is called Festers. Adorning the front of the shop is a giant picture of Uncle Fester's head. An image of a googly-eyed experimenter-mortician looming in your vision is certainly enough to make even the most distracted homewards driver remember that forgotten carton of milk. Grumpy and I have occasionally mused that if the proprietors of Festers were looking for a new image they may want to call the shop Ol' Fess and set up a piano-player outside to pump out some Cajun tunes.

But I don't know if the good citizens of Perth's semi-rural districts are quite ready to order their steak burgers while serenaded by the Patron Saint of New Orleans. The wanna-be drummer who lives next door to Ern & Bez has yet to get past the first verse of Khe San.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

The (Tim) Blair Watch Project, Volume IV

2004-06-18T21:15:00.000+11:00

Let me tell you a story. I was about 13, in my first year of high school. There was this girl I liked and, you know, she didn’t know I existed. She was tall with black hair and dark eyes and kinda prominent white teeth. But not prominent in a bad way. Her name was Christa.

Well, we were all on a school camp in lovely Victor Harbour and there was a night-time outing to Granite Island to see the fairy penguins which is compulsory if you’re about 13 and in the vicinity. Now here’s the thing. I didn’t know her but I badly wanted to. So I... pretended I was a Richard Attenborough-type wildlife observer and every time I saw her I flashed my torch at her and made some reference to a ‘rare sighting of a Christa-beast’.

I did this about four times until my friend Charles looked me in the eye and said: ‘mate, mate, don’t, OK?’. And I took a good hard look at myself and stopped.

What does this have to do with Tim? Well, it’s like this. Tim is a pretty funny guy. Usually. But lately he’s been running with this John Kerry = Caged Hamster thing. The first time it was worth half-a-chuckle: the presumptive Democratic Party candidate for President of the United State of America is a wheel-running rodent. Quite, quite. How amusing.

But he’s up to 5 references now. And here’s betting Kerry-hamster reference number 6 is currently percolating away in that otherwise fertile brain.

So, Tim, next time you feel like slapping down some hamster love, here’s some advice straight from the fairy penguins of Granite Island: ‘mate, mate, don’t, OK?’

Cos, you know, that schtick is only slightly funnier than cervical cancer…

Hazelblackberry: There was one thing we weren't thinking of.

2004-06-17T21:49:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick

Here's a sign that has continued to puzzle and amuse me through the years:

"Please don't ask for credit as refusal may offend."

What is wrong with a simple and straightforward sign that says "No Credit Here" or "Credit Not Given"? And let me take care of my own offendedness, thank YOU very much. I dread to think what timid bar- or shop-keep first penned such a sign, spawning thousands like it in delis (or, if you will, deli's) and liquor outlets (walk-in AND drive-through) round our nation. Our once proud nation where, in days of yore, people could ask a question and realise that the response might be what they wanted to hear OR NOT. Are we all divided into one of two camps: snivelling proprietors too afraid to lay it on the line - respectfully - for the customers, and nervy shoppers ready to fly into a white-hot rage at the slightest perceived provocation, who can only be calmed down by signs presuming to hazard a guess at their potential state of mind?

Or could it be that I am being too harsh?

It's just that I'm a simple soul who yearns for a sweeter time when a freckle-faced chitlin could walk into the milk bar and ask for a 1c bag of mixed lollies and would receive a fair old fistful (of sweets!). Sometimes, if she was feeling a bit grown-up, she might even ask for a mixed assortment; she had a bit of an air about her on those occasions.

However, let's get this straight: I'm NOT talking about times when the same, or similar, freckled-faced chitlin might be convinced by her somewhat shambolic but bon vivant father to go into a shop and request a dozen prairie oysters. "Go on, kiddo - just say you want a dozen prairie oysters." The grin should have told me that I'd been had. Those were dark days indeed.

And yet, allow me to reconsider. Perhaps there's nothing at all wrong with the credit sign. Perhaps in a world of signs screaming in caps lock at us - STOP, WRONG WAY, NO ENTRY, NO STANDING, QUIT - this particular sign with its "please, consider" message harks back to a kinder, gentler age. In which case, the next time I am at my local newsagent, maybe purchasing a morning paper or gambling recklessly in the national sport of lotteries, I may make note of such a sign and feel gratitude to the genteel vendor who gave a thought to me and my easily-bruised feelings while also finding a way to avoid being ripped off.

A very good morning to you, kind sir, wherever your establishment may be.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

Wake up to yourself, Jeff

2004-06-16T22:42:00.000+11:00

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that redefines how you see the world. The Wiggles Movie is just such a movie… if you’re under 2.

My son, The Dude, is under 2. And The Wiggles Movie has rocked his tiny spinning world.

I purchased this, the most accomplished work in the whole Wiggles oeuvre, while Wifey and I were down the coast last weekend. Got up at 6:30 while Wifey languished under the covers and discreetly slipped the tape into the VCR. It was recorded in long-play mode and wouldn't play on this machine.

Noooo!

So there I am just before 8 am in Bateman’s Bay Woolworths pushing The Dude in a shopping trolley as he clutches The Wiggles Movie in his vegemited fingers. I tried to push other titles in front of his button nose. Finding Nemo, now’s that gotta be worth a look. See! A turtle! And a fish! A fish I tells ya! But one look at the spine of That Movie and he was not for turning.

In fact, it proved to be such a winner that he insisted on carrying the video case with him all day. One hand to pat kangaroos on Pebbly Beach, one hand to grasp plastic.

I’ve now seen That Movie about 5 times which is more than I’ve seen just about any other feature film. It’s been feeding my non-stop search for insight into the hidden machinations of the Wiggles clan. I can’t stop thinking about them, I see them so frigging much. And I wonder what makes them tick.

When the opening credits roll, straight away I notice that the producer is one Hilton Fatt who must be related to Asian Purple Wiggle Jeff (Fatt, obviously). How did he (she?) get that gig? Was it pure nepostism? Or did he earn his stripes doing the hard yards at the coal face in the school of hard knocks?

That attractive background dancer has appeared in more than one Wiggles flick. Is she having a relatioship with one of the Wiggles? With more than one of the Wiggles? At the same time? In the same room?

I learn a lot from the credits as they roll past my eyes for the 60th time and I find myself wondering again and again about Paul Paddick. Paddick plays the meaty role of Captain Feathersword. Lots of face-time, lots of lines but all of them as second fiddle to the Fab Four. The credits tell me he also often plays the role of Wags the dog: hidden from sight under an animal suit without lines, only the silent howl of a mischevious canine buffoon. Is this the Wiggles putting Paddick in his place? The kids may love you as the Captain, with your sea-borne japery and your pirate jigs but you’ll always be a dog to us.

Wake up to yourself, Jeff. Paddick wants your job. He has a feathersword with your name on it.

Later this week, more on the Wiggles Movie: The Dude may love it but I find the narrative unsatisfying and overtly schematic. Can't wait!

Hazelblackberry: what I like about you, senior cits

2004-06-14T22:02:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick

Grumpy organised a surprise night out on Saturday night at a jazz show. This show wasn't held down in Freo, where black and a penchant for strange hats would have been de rigueur, but at the Don Russell Performing Arts Centre, deep in the suburban wilds of Thornlie (the DRPAC is a proscenium arch theatre!). Well, it certainly was a surprise - I didn't know that Grumpy even knew where Thornlie was. However, he guided us there unerringly in the faithful mobile, the Georgia Satellite, but did inject a little overkill into the planning as we arrived an hour early. This necessitated a stop for drinks at the Forest Lakes Tavern, a rather pleasant and family-oriented venue. I like a pub where kids can drink a lemon squash and run around while Mum & Dad and Aunty Sheryl & Uncle Max enjoy a smoke and a beer and wait for the local covers band to get started.

It turns out that playing at the DRPAC was the James Morrison (WA) Scholarships Winners Group. (I noted to Grumpy, and I note it here again, that if this talented ensemble is to continue to tour together - and Insya Allah they will - they may wish to consider tweaking that name a little.) I put the WA in brackets so you'd understand that these are the scholarship winners from 1999, 2001, 2002 and 2003 who all happen to come from Western Australia - not wishing to imply that there are scholarship winners from each state each year, which would dilute the wow factor just a little. And wouldn't you know it, they play enough different instruments to form a band. Kismet.

The DRPAC clearly markets itself to the retired end of the market. Grumpy and I have a way of finding ourselves at these events, where the more senior of our fellow citizens run the cold fish eye over us, resenting our young whippersnapper intrusion into their sedate happenings. Something similar happened to us when we went to Norfolk Island. Neither of us was aware it was a retiree destination until we were in the departure lounge at Sydney, tickets in hand and raring to go. It was then we noticed with discomfort the unhappy and perhaps resentful and probably myopic gaze of various seniors-card holders alighting upon us. Unsettling. I still shiver at the thought of it.

So at the jazz night the audience was liberally sprinkled with blue rinses and pastel woollies and the sweet sound of dentures being sucked. One old chap in front of us hummed along to all the tunes he knew. It was quite marvellous.

And the music was good. Not that I can speak with any authority on music; but it WAS good. I became quite fixated on the drummer. He reminded me of someone. It wasn't until the next morning I realised it was the drummer-singer from The Romantics. And the bass guitarist was something else. I didn't know that a bass guitar could sound like a lullaby. What a wonderful instrument.

Music and images are so much more powerful than words, don't you think? It would be wonderful to have the ability to conjure up your feelings in sounds or sights. Words only seem to get in the way of themselves.

The best thing about the whole evening, though, was the canteen run in the intermission by three slightly older volunteers called something like Dot, May & June and wearing matching floral aprons. They dispensed tea, coffee, milo or soft drinks with a snack-size packet of biscuits (Orange Slice & Butternut Snap) for the extremely affordable sum of $1.50. That's Australian dollars, Nick. When I bought my drink and biscuits I was feeling a bit devilish. Not realising it was a drink-bickie combo deal I asked for another packet of biscuits. There was a momentary kerfuffle at the counter, Dot conferred with June on the price for another packet of biscuits not being sold with a drink, and with a "pffff" sound and a careless wave of her hand June decreed that the extra biscuits would be FREE. This is the kind of smooth and entrepreneurial operation they were running at half-time.

Even better, within about 5 metres of the canteen one could smell the sweet-acrid smell of scalded milk that is so essential to the whole experience, especially on a cool winter's night.

Hats off to our elders!

Until next time, Nick.

The (Tim) Blair Watch Project, Volume III

2004-06-10T22:53:00.000+11:00

Blogging on the ‘project’ -- as it has become known in WWI model aeroplance racing circles – has been light of late because well, who can be fucked?

But furry Blair stupidities have popped up and need to be smacked down with a mallet in the game of cerebral whack-a-mole that is the blogosphere.

Exhibit A: http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/006940.php

Rachel Hunter, world’s most famous kiwi ex-spouse of a Scottish has-been, dribbled in the general direction of the media and her words of wisdom quote endquote are only too eagerly picked up by Tim. Because the Right is so frickin’ desperate to have a celebrity, any celebrity, on its side.

She took several months to carefully compose a position-paper on the State of the World and had this to say:
Hunter explains,

"If I could, I would vote for Bush. He has done what needed to be done because if Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden had their way, none of us would be around in 10 years."

Look, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt as much as the next person but – how is this statement even remotely true? Was a tag-team of Saddam and Osama really going to denude the continental United States of all human beings in just ten years?

Two astonishing facts newly to hand to consider when reading Ms Hunter’s thoughts: (1) Saddam didn’t actually have any weapons of mass destruction. He probably wouldn’t have been able to kill every American in the world just with the power of his imagination. I think I can. I think I can. And (2) Osama bin Laden is, er, still out there.

"Clinton had a lot of tea parties with celebrities, but [right after] his term, somebody flew two planes into the Twin Towers. What do you want - somebody who keeps your children safe or somebody who throws nice tea parties?"

There’s nothing I like more than a massively unfair piece of disingenuous bullshit. Clinton did nothing but hold tea parties (um, whatever) – while dodging a right-wing witch-finder hell-bent on burning him at the stake for, well, anything he could come up with. Conservatives are found of saying that Clinton’s mind wasn’t on the job. Has it ever occurred to them that this is partly their fault? When you need to meet with your lawyers on a daily basis to fend of the latest piece of go-nowhere wingnut litigation, you’re not really able to devote all your time to fighting terrorism, are you? (Special note for the wilfully irritable: I’m not saying that Clinton would have prevented September 11 if he’d had a little more freedom to move but it didn’t help, did it?)

Is Rachel Hunter really the best you can do, mate?

Exhibit B: http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/006941.php

Tim-on-Tim smackdown! Blair thwacks Dunlop for this comment:

"And then there was the righterwing reaction. Tim Blair went into convulsions of confected "battler" outrage, objecting strenuously to the concept of a self-made millionaire with something like a conscience and no hair having any role whatsoever in our democracy."

Tim B demands some kind of correction because, er, I’m not really sure. I’ve tried to puzzle this one out and I’m not making a lot of progress. Dunlop objects to Blair’s snarkiness about Garrett having a ‘role in our democracy’ and Blair hits back by saying that, like, dude, it’s, like, Garrett who himself has no role because, like, he doesn’t seem to have, like, voted, man.

Tim, here’s what they teach kids in early high school: the context (remember that word for later) of Dunlop’s comment was to criticise those who object to Garrett running for office. While, sure, voting is a ‘role in our democracy’, it obviously has nothing to do with what Dunlop was saying. Tim might think he’s playing some sophisticated high-stakes game of gotcha but he’s really just snarky that Dunlop got him a good one…

‘Confected “battler” outrage’… Have to remember that one for another time.

Oblivion, I barely knew ye!

2004-06-09T21:27:00.000+11:00

My earliest memory of drinking whisky is this: I was about 18 (yes, I know, slow learner). My parents were overseas. It was just me and the bottle, mano-a-mano, as they say in a language I believe to be Spanish. I put the neck to my mouth and drank deeply of the peaty heritage of Scotland. A searing blast of taste flamed over my tongue and down my throat, warming me like a mountain man before a mountain fire. The whiskey coursed powerfully into my stomach. And immediately came up again.

As it flowed back into my mouth, I angled my head towards the ceiling and held my neck with one hand, rigidly, as if to strangle myself. Slowly, gravity did its thankless work and the whiskey drained back into my guts.

I’d like to say that there was some teenage hottie there also, surreptitiously toying with her bra strap and egging me on. But no, this was strictly a two-person affair, one boy on the cusp of manhood (and that was one fat cusp – I didn’t know they made cusps that big) and one bottle of Chivas Regal. It was me, pimply, alone, a failed drunk, with traces of whiskey and saliva on the kitchen floor. Rock’n’roll!

I was always one to struggle with alchohol. Throughout my university days, I wrestled with beer, trying to fling it down my throat and out of sight. What the hell was a I doing at a pub, unable to drink? I watched enviously as friends sucked the stuff down. They were having more fun than me, let’s face it. Substitutes drinks came and went. Red wine seemed a manly alternative (almost), and sophisticated to boot. But to the uncultured palate (and my palate had been bounced out of kindergarten for farting while the other kids finger-painted) red wine is worse than beer. And over-the-counter claret-in-a-box has recently been added to the poisons advisory list.

Sometime later, I discovered girly liqueurs. Kahula, Baileys, Midori, where were you when I needed you? Tastes like a chocolate milkshake, only it makes you better looking to the opposite sex!

Luckily in my mid-twenties, a switch inside my head flicked on and I grew to like beer. Beer grew to like me too and made itself at home under my belt, like a snuggling cat.

But somehow, I sensed my journey to manhood was not finished (I told you it was a big cusp, you could land a plane on it). A friend at work told me he drinks whiskey by himself at night sometimes. A first I was shocked, then, by turns, revolted, appalled, disgusted and secretly thrilled. Slowly, whiskey made its way into my life, beckoning me onto its velour-covered sedan. Now I too drink a little whiskey as the dark of the evening gives way to the black of night.

I’m no longer pimply and there is a hottie present. However, she’s not a teenager, she’s my wife and she’s 32. And she’s not egging me on.

hazelblackberry: ex marks the spot

2004-06-08T00:42:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick

Some people speak in exclamation marks. Have you ever noticed this? I noticed it because I got an email from a male acquaintance recently and each line ended with !. I usually find this gives me the irrits; but then, what doesn't give me the irrits eventually? I'm not talking about sweet, furry kittens here.

Anyway, as I was reading I suddenly realised that I wasn't experiencing the shooting pains I often get up the side of my head when I grind my teeth. Because I wasn't grinding my teeth. Let me just get the complete emotion of that point over to you:

Because I wasn't grinding my teeth!

I realised that all those exclamation marks at the end of each sentence weren't bothering me because that's how the guy speaks anyway. So who could begrudge him? Certainly not I. Or maybe me.

But who is this guy? I tell you this: right now I can't remember and my email archives are kaput so I can't check back through.

And from there it was only a small philosophical leap to realising that there are many people in the world who speak in constantly exclamatory (? - !) voices. Like the boss's secretary. Spanner. Spanner would have whole strings of !!!!!s at the end of each sentence, even just to say she was heading off to the cafe to get some milk. But she might surprise you with the complete lack of exclamation marks in her writing. It just goes to show there's more to Spanner than meets the eye. I've always said that. You can check.

[For some reason, this reminds me: Spanner and her husband, Spade, are into letting their kid know all about the proper names for body parts. So down there - you know, down there - on a man is a penis; yes, a peeeeenis; and down there on a laidy, a real proper laidy, is...a butterfly.]

But here's my point: exclamation marks are fairly annoying, aren't they? Even Lynn Truss in Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which gives the e.m. a pretty solid defence, couldn't sway me. Sometimes I start to shake with anxiety as I'm working my way through an email of the type:

Hi! How are you?! Haven't heard from you in ages! I'm well! Work sucks! But you get that! etc etc

Not that I'm not ever so grateful to hear from the world, but this is the ocular equivalent of listening to people - and this happens especially in excerpts on the news - whose voices keep getting higher and higher, working towards some end point and swamping me with anxiety that they might never get there. Then it all finally breaks and I can lie back and enjoy a good smoke.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

Bittersweet Implacable Yearning on the Orient Express

2004-06-05T21:05:00.000+11:00

Picture this: you’re a shit-hot writer and have just typed ‘The End’ at the bottom of tastefully-sized novelette which, with the right marketing, will literally tear the arts world apart!

But before you can lob up to a publisher to claim your six-figure advance, you need a title. And here’s where it gets complicated…

Literary novels -- you know, the books they make you read at University but which mostly serve as coffee-table decoration -- need to have a certain type of title or they won’t get stocked next to The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Angus and Robertson. Some examples: The Secret Language of Cranes, The Remains of the Day, The Buddha of Suburbia, The Name of the Rose, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Snow Falling on Cedars, Miss Smillas Feeling for Snow, The Executioner’s Song, The Optimist’s Daughter, The Moor’s Last Sigh.

Spy fiction, on the other hand, which is a genre written by small-dicked men who can barely write for small-dicked men who can barely read (just kidding!), has a very different set of naming conventions: The Bourne Identity, The Odessa Files, The Manchurian Candidate, The Matarese Circle, The Fifth Profession, The Fourth Protocol, The Icarus Agenda. But, at least, people buy and then read such novels. Even if they have to do so in the dead of night because of the shame.

Perhaps by exchanging titles, the spy novelists could gain some credibility and the literary writers could afford to feed their kids…

So, people might actually pick up and buy the following titles, mistaking them for books with a plot: The Lakemba Alienation, The Swinburne (University Sexuality Diversity Promotion Committee) Agenda, the Darlinghurst Ressentiment.

Likewise, how could the Booker Prize Committee resist the following spy titles: The Eye-watering Scent of Cordite, The Irresistable Conversation of Knuckles, The List of People Who Have to Be Shot, Miss Tasha’s Feeling for the Inside of Ivan's Chest Cavity; The Arab’s Last Breath.

If you can think of your own examples of amusing mis-matched titles, feel free to pepper them gratuitously through-out my comments box.

Hazelblackberry: mama don't want no peas, no rice, no coconut oil

2004-06-02T23:44:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick

When I was a girl I didn't realise there was any connection between the jingles played on ads and the songs on the radio. This continued well into early teenagerhood. I was in a car one day with one of the various uncles, probably Raffles, when "Drift Away" by Dobie Gray came on the radio. Remember the Drifter chocolate bar? I don't much either, but I do remember the advertisement had someone driving a convertible along a road. Maybe the road wound down along a coastal cliff or maybe through a valley; either way it was on a winding road, and the top was down, and "Drift Away" was playing. So I said something along the lines that I couldn't believe that they'd put the song from the ad on the radio. Raffles then took great delight in pointing out to his naive young niece that the song, in fact, pre-dated the ad; that ad makers plucked songs already in existence form the turntable and put them to work to spin more filthy lucre for them. And so it was that this young innocent - as she was then, my word - was inculcated into the dark world of the promotional arts.

(You may notice that this recollection doesn't include any direct quoting of conversation. I only just noticed it myself. This wasn't deliberate but it does remind me how often when reading autobiographies or memoirs I'm astounded by (at?) the large chunks of verbatim conversation from 53 years ago that are recalled by all these prominent memoir-worthy people. It is apparent to me that until I too have a memory capable of recording the thrust and parry of everyday chats, I will never stake for myself a place, never carve for myself a niche, in the memoir pantheon.)

Anyway, it should have come as no surprise what. so. ever. to young Raffles that I was so ignorant in the ways of the world. Bloody Ern didn't listen to the radio much, except to get the latest weather report, and we mostly trundled along listening to country songs, which I kind of thought were all autobiographical. I actually thought Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner were married (if that means anything to you). Listening to the sparkling banter in their marvellous duets I thought they'd been married and divorced (whatever that was, but it sounded terrible) several times, and endured the deaths of various children, not to mention all the AFFAIRS and general messin' round. That wicked Jolene. But I also knew that Dolly was WISE - hip, if you will - to Porter's carryings-on. This gave me comfort. And if you listen at a single sitting to all of Marty Robbins' "Gunfighter Ballads" and then throw in 'The Hanging Tree' and 'My Woman, My Woman, My Wife' you are left with the thought that, "Man, has he lived."

Fortunately we mostly had compilation tapes like The Great Country Folk or Country Gold, the kind of tapes favoured at the music stands of roadhouses, which shared the pain of life's sorrows amongst a collection of unfortunates. This only confirmed for me the idea that all country singers, and the people who listened to their music, were deeply tragic people struggling to rise above the endless daily sagas flung their way. It's why I became so manic about knowing the words to these songs; the words helped me lay out the full map of their lives in all their glorious drama. I'm sure it drove Bloody Ern nuts as we would bounce down a road, him humming along to the tune and throwing in the odd word here and there that he thought sounded about right only to be corrected in a hiss by me, wizened already at 8 years old. But you have to understand: he was disrespectin' mah crew.

I was reminded of this because Grumpy and I were driving along by the coast on Saturday, when "Drift Away" came on the radio and we reminisced about the Drifter Bar, realised neither of us could really remember it, and stopped for a Milky Way instead. Milky Ways are very sweet, aren't they? Chewing on one set all my new dental work singing.

Until next time, Nick.

hb

The Whininess of the Critic: CCTV on Calvareeee

2004-06-01T22:24:00.000+11:00

Let me complain about a film I haven’t seen and that everybody else has finished talking about: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Opinions on the film have ranged from absolutely fantastic! to bloody anti-semitic Jeebus-porn (without a whole lot in between).

A sizable component of Christendom loved the film and found that it enhanced their faith by showing them ‘what Christ really suffered.’ Hollywood Jesus (not to be confused with Joe Eszterhas's Hollywood Animal) had this to say about the film :

Through the centuries Christian depictions of the Crucifixion of Christ became so decorative that they lost the original passion. Beautiful works of art indeed, but they became nearly bloodless with no evidence of real emotion or pain. Artistic depictions of the Passion were reduced to a mere religious symbols... All the characters look bored, even Jesus looks bored. Again, no passion.
Mel Gibson's artistic masterpiece restores the lost dimension of the suffering of the Christ in a very graphic manner.

Another supporter of the film (on a website devoted to those whose lives were changed by the film) said this:

I have always known what Jesus went through in his last hours but seeing it in front of my eyes was an entirely different and sobering experience than reading it in a book or learning about it in church. I saw the movie last night with my mother and became so affected by the suffering Jesus endured that I was sobbing uncontrollably and could barely catch my breath. Jesus was truly a remarkable man and suffered tremendously for humanity. My eyes are open now and I am forced to face the reality of what Jesus did for us all. Many people know the story of Jesus' death but do not face the 'truth' of his torment and tremendous sacrifice.

A lot of Christians appear to have had their lives changed and their ‘faith restored’ by seeing this film because it presents the ‘truth’ of what really happened to Jesus Christ. (I don’t want to get into a discussion of ‘what is truth?’ but I will if I have to, OK, buddy?).

I don’t want to question other people’s religious experiences (especially given that I am not a Christian) but this seems very dangerous to me. In the olden days, when things were simple (but also brutal and unfair), depictions of Biblical figures were forbidden as blasphemous idolatry (in the Protestant world at least). The theory was that it was impossible to properly depict an omnipotent, omniscient God who stood outside time. Any image of Christ would inevitably be flawed and show far less than the truth of God; such images would themselves be worshipped rather than the unrepresentable divine beings they depicted.

This was never really a Catholic perspective but is worth thinking about in the context of Gibson's film. The success of the Passion of the Christ has blinded many to the fact that it is simply one man’s account of events which took place two thousand years ago and which were only partially and conflictingly documented.

Right after he said, in Aramaic, 'Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?' Jim Cavaziel, the actor playing Christ might have said:

'Mel, Mel, what’s my inspiration here? Do I secretly want to bang Mary Magdalene? What about a tasteful, soft-focus dream scene, you know, to establish beyond doubt my ordinary humanity? Cos that Monica Belluci’s a hottie and I can’t stop thinking about her milky-white gazongas.’

Because he’s, you know, an actor and not really Jesus, as some seem to have forgetten.

Of course, Martin Scorsese’s Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ did find his mind turning to Mary Magdalene’s milky-white gazongas, for which Scorsese was accused of blasphemy. Mary Magdalene has long been associated with sexuality, chiefly because she is wrongly thought to have been a prostitute (her very name has become a codeword for ‘whore’). I’m sure Gibson was playing to this by casting Belluci in the role. (Interestingly, Satan in the film was also played by an attractive (and Italian) woman. I will, uh, try not to read anything into this.) But put Jesus Christ together with sexuality and you run into immediate trouble, despite the fact that he was supposed to have been a (kind of) ordinary man.

There is a body of scholarship that holds that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife. This is (way) too radical for Gibson’s film but he is also apparently sufficiently a creature of the 21st Century to play down the hooker angle. And because it plays so strongly to many contemporary Christian perceptions of Christ (Jesus suffered a lot and not much else), it is fast on its way to being adopted as the 'true' depiction of Christ; indeed, one person described it as ‘almost like you’re watching CCTV of the crucifixion’. The gimmick of using the original biblical languages no doubt helped enormously with this.

Instead the Passion of the Christ should be seen as just one more account of the life of Jesus Christ… (Or maybe I should just go and see the freakin’ film and stop using so many parentheses).

Hazelblackberry: Matte finish

2004-05-29T21:52:00.000+11:00

Dear Nick,

Yesterday I was walking through Myer (or Myers, as we all tend to say; Myer's I suppose). It's a little like Tim Tams. Take a look at the packet sometimes: it says Tim Tam; without the word of a lie.

I was on my way to buy stockings. I had twenty minutes to spare before my dentist appointment, so I thought what better way to kill time than by purchasing some quality - or possibly mid-range - hosiery. Thank goodness I didn't attempt to buy them afterwards when my face was numbed by not-so-local anaesthetic. Although my face was generally okay, only looking a trifle post-stroke, my speech was deeply inarticulate and Joseph Carey Merrick-esque. I imagine the lady behind the stocking counter would have recoiled in distaste and horrified surprise in much the same fashion as those Victorian-era Poms at the freak show. Poor little Elephant Man. I still cry and cry and cry when I see that movie. Because he was so courageous and loving, and deserving of love. And yet who of us would love an Elephant Man in real life? Now that's a question for the ages.

So with twenty minutes to spare, and denial ever gentle on my mind, I wandered through Myer. I stopped first at the 'costume' jewellery section and I'm ever so glad I did because it was there that I heard a young woman ask someone, 'Do you have the correct time?' First of all, that really is an odd question. But second of all: I couldn't believe that one so young and dewy-fresh would ask a question in that way; in that old-time two-step way. Perhaps she was raised in a little two-bedroom cottage somewhere on a forgotten bend of the Swan - or Canning - River? Perhaps her great-grandmother was her only companion, educating the girl-child at home and dressing her in long floral-print skirts and sensible flat brown leather shoes? I know not. I do know that it gladdened my grizzled old heart to hear that turn of phrase.

A few weeks ago my friend, The Antiquer, told me he was in a bakery in South Perth admiring their range of vanilla slices and Paris buns when in walked a young apprentice-type lad. This antipodean Dickon had obviously worked up a healthy, outdoorsy appetite and ordered a meat pie. The surly, blonde chickie behind the counter asked "anything else?", to which he replied, "I'll just put my name to that beesting." Marvellous. The Antiquer was quite overcome with emotion.

I have a small though manageable addiction to journals and web-sites that devote themselves to old-style language and/or the Australian vernacular.

I think Bloody Ern must be the only person I know of who still uses the word 'cobber'. I know there is a small yet significant population out there who still use it, but Bloody Ern is the only one I know. You need a certain crustiness about you to use cobber, don't you? As the men of Australia get their crusty edges all knocked off (of) them, 'cobber' will probably die out; around the same time as the last 'legs eleven' call is made in a lonely multi-purpose bingo/CWA hall somewhere in the dusty wheat belt.

The visit to the dentist, it must be said, was not as awful as I had expected but bad enough - what with all the drilling and scraping and visions of blackboards dancing in my head. Dentists and hairdressers induce in me the most dreadful feelings of inadequacy and shame. And then, of course, you pay for the humiliation.

Until next time, Nick.

hazelblackberry

Forgotten Cinema, Volume I

2004-05-28T23:01:00.000+11:00

Tonight, When crustaceans attack! brings you a few fun facts about lesser known cinematic gems for you to sprinkle into dinner party conversation.

This Man's Navy (1945)
The engaging tale of two Navy vets who compete to see whose son is the bigger hero. Wallace Beery, James Gleason, Tom Drake. D: William A. Wellman. BW 100m

This propaganda effort, made in the closing days of World War Two, is notable for what was only the third homosexual screen kiss and the first to feature tongue.

Corporals on Parade! (1948)
A scewball comedy about new recruits from all over the United States being put through their paces at an army base in South Carolina. Jay C. Flippen, John Gilbert. D: Frank Capra. BW 100m.

Made during the depths of Capra’s little-known battle with depression (which Warner Brothers worked hard to suppress), this film is chiefly known for the closing scene where the young private from California screams into a thunderstorm ‘I did not take your shoes, I did not take your shoes,’ over and over again, as the torrential rain washes the Drill Sergeant’s blood from his broken fingers. Bracing!

It Happened One Afternoon (1934)
A newspaperman tracks a runaway heiress on a madcap cross-country tour, finishing in a men’s prison where the two find love at last. Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable, Walter Connolly. D: Mark Sandrich. BW 105m. CC

The first Hollywood film to capture the brutal reality of prison rape, this movie saw audiences walk out of the twelve minute ‘laundry’ scene. It is also thought to be the first film to feature the now standard line ‘don’t drop the soap!’.

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)
Asquith’s immortal film of Wilde’s most popular work. Michael Redgrave, Edith Evans, Richard Wattis. D: Anthony Asquith. C 95m

Audiences warmed to this film after initial discomfort with screen-writer Paul O’Hare liberal changes to the original script. Best scene: Lady Bracknell gives her famous line: 'To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness' to which Jack retorts in a flash: 'why don’t you just shut the fuck up?'

Adventure (1945)
A rough-living sailor has trouble adjusting to domestic life when he marries a librarian. Clark Gable, Greer Garson, Thomas Mitchell. D: Victor Fleming. BW 126m. CC

Poorly undertood when it was first released, this film has become highly influential. The scene where Clark Gable strides naked, clad only in a coat made from Greer Garson’s skin is, of course, later echoed in Silence of the Lambs. And the pulsating sound track was later imitated by Miami Vice.

Hazelblackberry: the hyphenation

2004-05-27T22:06:00.000+11:00

[Welcome to a regular feature here at crustaceans. Perth correspondent, Fightin' Hazelblackberry will post in with whatever floats her boat (down the Swan River. Did I mention she's in Perth?)]

Dear Nick,

Come and get it, come and get it
With Peter Russell-Clarke
Come and get it, come and get it
He's Australia's brightest spark
Come and get it, come and get it
Good food you'll love to eat
Come and get it, come and get it
And there's people you can meet

Cook a shark or make a damper
Feed your ego, pack a hamper
On the farm or out at sea
Learn a recipe or threeeee

Come and get it
With Peter - g'day
Russell - g'day
Claaaaaaaarke. (See ya later)

Where would Ian Parmenter be without the pioneering work of Peter Russell-Clarke? I saw Ian Parmenter a few weeks ago in Subiaco. In real life he is even more bon vivant than on TV. I was so anxious to keep an eye on him and hiss out of the corner of my mouth (and when I got home and checked out what I look like hissing out of the corner of my mouth while my eyes roll conspicuously in my head, I vowed I would never attempt such a covert operation again) at my lunch friend to turn around and notice Ian that I failed to notice that my lunch friend had turned a rather nasty colour and was quietly and most politely vomiting into her napkin. This wasn't due to the cuisine of the establishment at which we dined. She had a pre-existing queasiness.

And yet is there anything on the web - anything at all? - about Peter Russell-Clarke? The answer is a resounding yes. I did a search and came up with a few sites that mention him, but none (that I could find) that CELEBRATE the man. They all seemed intent on either selling books by him or taking the mickey.

I mean, come on, "Where's the cheese?" I think the only person who comes close to having such a great line is the lovely Yorkshire gent on Gardening Australia who signs off each show with, "Well that's your bloomin' lot..." Anyway, with that beard and mumbling laugh, PR-C was like a weird cross between Kenny Everett and Simon Townshend - and thank goodness Townshend didn't have a cooking show because, let's face it, food and drooling dogs just do not mix.

I used to come home from playing with my friends or swimming down at the town pool, eyes red & foggy with chlorine, sucking the remnants of bacteria-ridden pool water out of the bottom of my plaits, to watch Come and Get It while Bloody Ern cooked dinner. I never made much of a connection then between what was being concocted on TV and the food that Bloody Ern placed on the table. Not that I am knocking BE's cooking. He could whip up a mean bit of fish, would patiently stir pancake mix in a little yellow jug, getting the lumps out with a fork, knocked up a hearty porridge on a slightly cooler Sunday evening, with lettuce leaves sprinkled with sugar for dessert. And no one could touch Ern for heating up those roast meals lovingly cooked and packed into individual servings by my grandmother, Don Mary; snap frozen and air expressed to wherever we were living at the time. But when it came to stews and other, shall we say, combination cooking, even BE has to admit, "some days a diamond, some days a stone". Many a miserable evening was spent as a prisoner of the dining room table, exhorted to eat every last morsel.

In case I've been a little harsh on Bloody Ern's cuisinart, let me just note this: no one, but no one, comes close to him for appreciating just how delicious a tepid can of caramel Rice Cream can be when all the power's gone off.

Until next time, Nick.

hazelblackberry

The (Tim) Blair Watch Project, Volume II

2004-05-25T19:12:00.000+11:00

Tim's latest post takes Time journalist, Mary Corliss, to task for criticising US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumself when he said: 'I'm a survivor.' He was speaking to an audience of US personnel in Iraq.

Corliss' idiotic point was that the only things you could 'survive' were the Holocaust and cancer. Her argument only works if she's allowed to re-engineer the English language on the fly. So score 1 point to Tim for spotting journalistic stupidity.

But take 5 or 10 off for being immune to the astonishing chutzpah of a harried bureaucrat, Rumsfeld, telling a bunch of soldiers, marines and civilians-in-harm's-way that he's a survivor.

These guys have survived bullets, grenades, mines and car-bombs. What has Rumsfeld survived of late? Well, I understand he dodged a sharply-worded newspaper editorial that very morning!

The (Tim) Blair Watch Project, Volume I

2004-05-23T23:49:00.000+11:00

For those who don’t know, Tim Blair is like the Godfather of Australian bloggers – ever ready with words of wisdom and support, a (non-gay) kiss or two and a helping hand, punctuated by extreme violence for dramatic effect. (I’m not sure who I’m explaining this to. He has, like, two million readers; somewhat fewer are reading this.)

I’ve read a fair bit of Tim over the last couple of years. He has an amusing turn of phrase, strong (right-wing) opinions and he’s fast on the break. But sometimes he, well, talks shit. So, to act as a check and/or balance on Australia’s Blogger of Record, I present the (Tim) Blair Watch Project. (Also, of course, I’m hoping that he’ll acknowledge this blog and fling some meagre traffic morsels my way. Everything is self-interest, no?)

On to volume 1: I looked over the last ten or so posts and sure, there’s plenty to annoy the casual reader and there’s plenty of the same sort of material that Tim purveys on a daily basis (Michael Moore is a big fat liar, David Marr of Media Watch is, er, a skinnier liar) but there’s little there that is absolutely head-kickingly stupid. (Soft targets are easier and therefore my preference).

Luckily, there was something upon which I could cut my teeth. Tim’s post here puts the boot into Gary Trudeau (Mr Doonesbury) for following the lead of Ted Koppel’s Nightline and publishing the names of all US servicemen and women to die in Iraq. Tim claims: (i) it’s easier than actually drawing a cartoon (well, duh!) and (ii) that its essentially motivated by anti-war sentiment rather than a genuine motivation to honour the dead because they could have screened/drawn the names of the victims of September 11.

Granted, those who post the names of the US war dead are perhaps motivated to some degree out of opposition to the war. But is it really more appropriate to list the victims of September 11?

Firstly, the situation in Iraq is the number one news story day in, day out. The deaths of US soldiers and marines are relevant to that. The victims of September 11 are not. There is no proven connection between that terrorist atrocity and the regime of Saddam Hussein. Why not post a list of men who died building the Brooklyn Bridge? There’s no connection there, either. (There were 27, by the way).

Secondly, surely the victims of September 11 are some of the most honoured people in history. Their names (all of them) have rolled across television screens several times. Hundreds of websites are devoted to their memory. Major benefit concerts have been held for them. A hugely expensive memorial will be built for them and each and every name will be included. Is it really some kind of injustice that their names are not broadcast one more time instead of another set of dead being honoured?

By contrast, 1.3 million children die each year from diarrhea, for cying out loud. Where’s their memorial? Where the list of their names? Did all of them even have names?

Perhaps Tim might pause to consider the deaths of some people who have nothing to do with any of his political causes? (Of course, the same can be said of Messrs Koppel and Doonesbury, but I only signed up to bug Tim.)

Well, jeez, that started out light and upbeat and wound up kind of depressing, didn’t it?

[The (Tim) Blair Watch Project. Witty, huh? Alas, some Pommy SOBs got there first with reference to Mr Tony. But the really witty part is the ‘Tim’ in parentheses, eh readers?]

Pigeon research will not stand still

2004-05-23T18:13:00.000+11:00

Pigeon research will not stand still. The truth of that statement fairly reaches out and smacks you across the chops, doesn’t it?

The BBC reports on plans drawn up, but alas never acted upon, to extend the WWII war-fighting capabilities of the humble pigeon into the cooler and greyer skies of the Cold War. Pigeons did play their part in Hitler’s downfall, serving as a secure means of secret communication. (A trench-coated pigeon flits from shadow to shadow; one wing pressing a tiny package snugly to its downy breast. The bloody Jerries won’t get their hands on this, it coos to itself, even as it spies the distant but unmistakeable shape of a Gestapo falcon on the wing.)

After the close of WW2, the British started a ‘Pigeon Committee’ acting upon the blood-chilling warning that: ‘Pigeon research will not stand still; if we do not experiment, other powers will.’ Pigeons, the War Office mused idly to itself, could carry small explosives or even biological weapons directly to the enemy. The pigeons themselves were not asked for their views on this mode of warfare. One wonders whether sufficient feathered British volunteers would have been found or whether Whitehall would have been forced to rely on swaggering, sun-browned Colonial pigeons.

Of course, as in many fields of industry, ultimately the British blew it. They lost their pigeon edge. The gruff, no-nonsense English pigeon could not stand against the sky-darkening hordes of Chinese pigeons, raised as fearless fighting machines in the brutal hot-house of the Beijing State Circus.

I will add, however, that pigeons have been found in Iraq. Where these pigeons came from and what they were doing under Saddam's regime remain a mystery.

Stop thinking and start living!

2004-05-21T22:33:00.000+11:00

Since this blog first went public, we’ve been inundated with calls, emails, faxes, and facetious remarks from off-duty police officers. Everybody wants to know everything about When crustaceans attack! What’s your position on Zimbabwe? What’s your take on the new Sichuan cuisine? What letter does 'pharmacopoeia' start with and where can I buy one?

To get a few of the obvious questions out of the way and let us get on with the serious job of providing 24-hour news and commentary every couple of days or so, we decided to post this list of official When crustaceans attack! positions.

Terrorism: against it.
Gay marriage: only in church.
Digital photography: sure, why not?
Teenage sex: never tried it.
Belgium: no.
Democracy: against it.
Sitcoms: only if they’re set in a doctor’s office, a bar or space.
Space: against it.
The music of REM: love it except for their early stuff before they went commercial.
Googie-egg and toast soldiers: yes.
In: the new out.
Neutrons: way better than protons.
Intolerance: yes, if it’s carefully considered.

This blog: now in it's amazing 17th year!

2004-05-20T23:10:00.000+11:00

I hardly know how to begin celebrating the 17th anniversary of the blog that predates the web itself. What can be said that hasn't been said already? And better?

When the archeologists come, in their shiny eco-suits, fresh from a hard and fast round of ‘SupaRazz!’ played in the low-grav pleasure domes of Ganymede, they will pry the keyboard from my cold, dead fingers and know this:

I was a fresh-faced 15-year old, angry at the world and at myself, looking for a way to blow off steam, meet chicks and revolutionise the written word.

I rapidly outgrew poetry (too commercial), the novel (a dead art form) and the sitcom (rarely done well in Australia) but was still too young and full of hope to immerse myself in the unforgiving world of contemporary dance set to spoken word monologues.

I had a message and the world had a need to hear my message. Not next month, not next week, but now! As soon as I’d cashed my grant from the Australia Council, I was ready to be the cruel mistress that the English language was begging me to be.

In that first weekend, I must have used up a hundred pens, like a pimp goes through junkie prostitutes. I ‘posted’ several thousand entries (or ‘posts’) on the ‘cobweb board’ inside the shed, settled down with a hot cup of tea and a Boston bun and waited for the invention of some kind of electro-magnetic interactive hypertext protocol (any one would do).

And that was it! History was made though history didn’t know it at the time. (History is like a very pretty girl at a party – she won’t notice you unless you’re rich, good-looking or take Moscow before the winter).

My mind ranged freely in those early pre-web years (and my actual arrival on the web was delayed for some time because of a rusted lock on the shed door): music (I predicted the rise and rise of Shannon Noll – is he not a terrible strutting god? Where can I get me one of them tiny triangular sub-mouth beards? For they are heavy cool…), film (I authored a peer-reviewed paper that mathematically proves most movies suck the fat one) and the giddy heights to which the human spirit can soar (when it isn’t, you know, being machine-gunned or forced to learn French).

The remainder of this decade will be devoted to a steady unpacking of my thoughts from July-October 1987. If you wish to 'rap' with me about those heady days, send me a friendly pigeon.