hottest days

(written 12/1) Yesterday went up around the 44-45 mark which was shocking. I spent much of the day in the SLV with my mother researching the introduction of a social work degree at the University of Melbourne (1941) and the professionalisation of social work per se in Melbourne (1929 onwards). We went out of the library at 3-ish which was a bit of a shock but not quite as bad as I had expected, given the extra acclimatisation required (though the library is kept at a sensible level, not frozen). The bad bit was leaving work later in the day - between 4.30-5 – when it was the hottest. It was surprising though all things considered how many people and other creatures (ie birds) were around. I wouldn’t have expected so many.

Last night was particularly unpleasant, like sleeping in a shoebox on the fire. But sleeping nonetheless, so why complain you might ask. Well, I am in the kind of mood a day and a half of extremely hot weather gives one, which leads me to say, I complain because fuck you. It was bad enough where I was a few minutes ago at Glenroy station with a juvenile learning to smoke on the platform (making it impossible to sit out there) and someone old enough to know better – a man in his mid-20s, but an ugly mid-20s, he might have been older – playing a hand-held computer game which was probably supposed to be projecting the sounds of millions of rounds from some gun or other but actually sounded like someone shaking a packet of tic tacs, or an old recording of many typewriters played on a transistor.

I should have complained to them but fortunately for me and you I have a blog.

As I stood on the Glenroy platform I felt a cool breeze from the south up the railway line which was a nice thing and boded well for the future.

This morning I spent finessing some chapter proposals for a book I hope to publish (by which I mean to say, have a company publish for me). I think I jumped the shark with my corrections and reworkings but I felt reasonably OK about it.

the rot sets in

Our area is about the only one in Melbourne to have increased in value over the last six months, where everything else is in decline (this means little in real terms - it had a lot of catching up to do). Anyway, this is the kind of crap we have to look forward to as land values rise. These are big blocks. If these horrors get built, the vendor will do well (financially) but will go to hell.

city homicide v rush

Last year when City Homicide started we watched it a lot. I am still a little in thrall (can't help myself) to that old attractant of the possibility of seeing places one knows, on television. Why this is so interesting I don't really know. An early episode of City Homicide featured one of the State Savings Bank homes in Port Melbourne (well, Fishermans Bend) and I found that marvellous, though the idea that these houses have basements in which you can conceal people trussed and gagged and hide the entrance with a bathtub, was a little less of a buzz. However, CH started to pall a few months ago with the episode featuring a kind of poor man's Hannibal Lecter - actually he wasn't a cannibal, just some kind of taunting weirdo all bound up and crazy for mutilatin'. I can't actually remember what he did to his victims but I do know that the lack of imagination in this storyline put me off the whole shebang. (Just to thwart the clarity of this dismissal I watched CH last night and although it did involve a grisly dismemberment and some bizarrely bad plot twists, I didn't mind it. I think the blackmailing couple might have lived in Gowanbrae or Gladstone Park or something, which was cool). (Anyway anything with Noni 'n' Nadine in it has to be above average).

In fact, I don't really care for police/crime shows much, especially since they seem to concentrate almost exclusively on brutal murders of sassy adolescent girls (or, in the case of The Mentalist, poor girls savin' up to go to college). It seems to me to highlight a feature of present-day society in which no-one can think of young girls as anything more than something to sexually exploit and/or kill, or am I going way out on a limb there.

That said, I'm really enjoying Rush.

It's much deeper and more charactery than City Homicide and yes, of course, you still get the Melbourne locations, so I'm happy with that. A lot of Rush seems to have been shot in the inner west (looks like Kensington, etc - though mainly the industrial area). But one great thing about Rush is no-one necessarily gets murdered, a scenario I would posit (perhaps controversially) is often truer to life. Many times, in life, no-one gets murdered. Last week's Rush involved a faked kidnapping (or is it a kidnaping? That looks weird) which, natch, involved teenage girls but they did not end up dismembered and perhaps most interestingly - not only did the crooks get away, no-one particularly cared that they got away: the rescue was 'a good result'. My initial response was, 'they got away!?' but my second response, a little later, was: well, why not. You can watch Rush here* if you like.

*22/5/20 update: hi! I really shouldn't come here and interfere with things from twelve years ago but the dead links to what I assume were promos on youtube really bugged me. So I did. I guess I'm allowed to, why not. Anyway, the 'here' above still, in 2020, takes you to channel 10's website but I'm guessing you can't watch Rush there. Which is a pity, it was a good show.