more train thoughts

I have had reading glasses for probably about six months now and like various other orbiting geegaws they dominate my life at the same time as generally speaking I try to ignore them. Of course I remember I need them the minute I sit down to read because my eyes are now far too lazy to focus properly on small print. I knew I needed them initially because some very small print on bottles was indecipherable as was stuff like my staff card ‘bar code’ (as it’s known, though in fact it’s a string of Arabic numerals) which has an evil sequence of zeros in it I can never untangle.

It’s not that I’m not used to wearing glasses though, because I have always taken comfort in sunglasses. One of the things about sunglasses though is that they allow you to look at other people – for instance your fellow commuters on the 8:10 out of Broady station – without them necessarily knowing that’s what you’re doing. And this becomes a habit, and then you (by which I mean I) might be wearing my reading glasses on the train and I forget that not only can everyone see my eyes as I glance irritatedly at the woman opposite me who is either suffering from flu or the world’s worst hayfever (in March?) and apologizing under her breath as she drinks her snot, but that my eyes are in fact magnified and probably under magnification reveal the innermost workings of my tawdry mind like some kind of blog.

I suppose I am comfortable with glasses generally though, because I keep forgetting to take them off. One of the reasons is no doubt that they are reading glasses therefore intended just to assist me reading things close, and they have no bearing on my long vision, so if I am reading and then look up at something further away, I am not alerted to the fact that I still have glasses on, by any kind of vision issue. Wow that was a boring paragraph.

Last night we watched The Mentalist (I think they really are just recycling old Columbo scripts now) and Q&A. I thought Shorten came out OK and to my surprise I warmed to Catherine Deveney without too much trouble. Miranda Devine was seemingly level headed but also seemingly out of her depth (I would be like her in that situation: she was privately thinking, ‘look, I’m a writer, not a talker, and if it was just me broadcasting to you without all this dumb interaction, I could make you believe whatever I wanted’) and Waleed Aly was most entertaining. Mia couldn’t watch the Liberal guy because she found him excruciatingly boring.

Fuck I hate people who pick at their fingernails on public transport. They should have their own carriage like smokers used to. It should then be decoupled from the train and allowed to roll gently into a siding and then be exploded.

Young people often talk like dicks. A girl just answered the phone on the train with that bizarre ‘o’ sound in ‘hello’. It’s kind of like helleaux, but with a shorter ‘o’ sound and somewhere in there there is an ‘e’ sound too and a hint of an ‘oi’ sound too. How do they do that? It’s talented. But it still sounds dicky.

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.