vintage!!!

Someone out in the street has a totally old-school car alarm. Reminds me of the old days when car alarms were first invented, or popularised, or available or whatever. It was when I just started working as a mail sorter at the Sydney GPO. You can imagine how I remember.

For a very quiet, very suburban street we have a lot of things going on out there. Why people drive down Lorraine Crescent at all is beyond me as it is basically a crescent so all you do is lose a minute of your life you'll never get back which you could have used more constructively if you'd kept driving down Johnstone St. But then again life's all about the journey, that's a philosophy I subscribe to, and it is a pretty attractive street, as long as there are no nappies in it, which I concede there sometimes have been.

I am drinking some nice Margaret River wine and thinking I really should go to bed, as I have an early start tomorrow. But (this is a revolting term but it does seem appropriate) we have broken the back of first semester, and speaking of breaking we have Easter coming up which means a week off, which for sessionals like myself also means not as much money, but fortunately I committed to marking every essay written at the Uni this semester and even though I only get a farthing for each it all adds up dunnit.

'life's a rich tapestry and you do things'

Quote of the year comes from Mr J. W. Howard who is about to not be hauled over the coals over the umpteenth time he has presided over some gross negligence but will get away with it because no-one told him it was happening. But 'life's a rich tapestry and... you do things', as he says. I guess this is the sixtysomething's 'shit happens'/'whatever'.

garboesque

I recall Peter Cook once saying of his own performance as a kind of Greta Garbo that he quite fancied himself in that get up or maybe with that look. I don't think Millie fancies herself in fact for all I know she has no idea who Greta Garbo is but you have to admit she is a very handsomely statuesque individual. She looks haughtier than she really is in fact she is prone to sucking her paws. Luckily she can't read so she won't know I broadcast this fact.

I decided finally to go all the way

Every Friday I teach peremptorily in South Melbourne, and becuase it doesn't happen until the afternoon and at the end of a fairly overstrenuous week I find myself often running late. The temptation is always too great to drive to the station (or a station) and take the train into town. Last Friday (I was going to say 'yesterday' but I realise it has just turned 10 past 12) I had a long work-related (if you were wondering) phone call around noon and I thought, no, today I can't even drive to the station - I'm going to have to drive all the way to South Melbourne. A minute later I had a song in my head. I realised it was 'Go All the Way' by the Raspberries, and in fact it was the rockin' bit at the beginning, not even the actual chorus where they sing 'Drive all the way - all the way to South Melbourne - down Clarendon Street and park in the ACMI car park in Park St'.

I know I'm not unique in this but it does amaze me how a phrase - not even a spoken phrase but I thought one - will trigger the memory of a song. Is this some distant cousin to synaesthesia?

I have been marking essays all day, with a short detour to Shane and Olivia's housewarming. The same old crap keeps turning up. I tried to explain to my second years (and I think I succeeded) a few days ago that there are weird mistakes that flow through essays each semester in waves. At the moment it's the word 'countries' for 'country's'. A few years ago it was the word 'intern' for 'in turn'. Somewhere in there it was the word 'apart' for 'a part'. These last two infuriating errors still show up but less so. Right now it's countries for country's. It probably doesn't look that horrible when you only see it a couple of times. Try seeing it a hundred times. Try getting to the last page of an otherwise pretty seamless and intelligent exploration and there it is three times in the last two paragraphs. Go on, try.

reeking havoc

Now I love the Flinders St kiosks as much as anyone else, including you who practically runs a fan club for them. But you have to admit they stink of rancid old oil and when you walk past them you often feel ill. I know I shouldn't complain about things I can't change but these things smell terrible and I don't even have a good sense of smell.

Technical information: Picture was taken through a train window purely for the purpose of reducing glare. Camera was a Motorola V620 on darkest setting. Scratches were caused not by me scraping ineffectually at the air in front of me as I try so hard to show my displeasure but by... something else.

it's raining now

Oh how awful I wish it would just go away.
Not really, although I did get pretty soaked in a .3 km stroll from a classroom. It's been so long since it last rained it is quite a shock.
Speaking of shocks Channel 10 showed Neighbours at 6 pm on Monday. This must have been the first Neighbours schedule change for about half my lifetime. It was disturbing. I thought it was the beginning of the end. Turns out that yes, it probably was, but it was only one night, so they could schedule a one-hour The Biggest Loser. I am very confused about Bree's parenthood now, as I have missed about three episodes in a row. Most unusual.

in which I ruminate on offending a farmer and cats in oxfam bags

I appear to have offended a farmer (see comments to previous entry) though only because I believed his or her comment to have come not from a farmer but from one of the two or three occasional commenters who regularly frequent this blog. I apologise to the farmer for calling him/her an idiot although I would prefer not to drive a tractor thanks, in fact I think it would suck. For me.

In other recent news, Bela got inside an Oxfam bag. Mia and I watched most of the first season of The Sopranos and I made a pretty good looking loaf of bread. Oh, and Saturday night.

First was Debbie's exhibition of drawings at that gallery over the road from the Standard in Fitzroy. The drawings were incredible! I remember a while ago she said she was doing some drawings for an exhibition and I kind of had nothing to say as I had no awareness of her artistic bent (I was sure she had one, but I had no idea of its type). Most of the drawings were like picture book illustrations in a picture book where you'd say, too bad even if I do know someone whose birthday is coming up, I'm buying this book for myself. There were some great drawings of axlotls and also some really nice ones of the big animal face sign (as you can see I am vague on the detail though I believe Wayne D has written about this before) in Elizabeth St. And also some animals looking through holes in walls. And Mia brought a terriffic fox one which Shane rather ludicrously described as being a bandicoot. Then we went to Peta and Greg's. Greg has a toothache, Peta made some pumpkin seeds baked (?) in soy sauce which were excellent and Paul and Karla came round and I bored Paul talking about Paul Fussell and Ern Malley (did you know they went out?) and then we went to Shane and Olivia's I'm not sure why but it gave me a chance to present Shane with Kirstie Alley's book How to Lose Your Ass blah blah blah which he seemed to respond too positively to so I took it back. Then we went to Colin's 40th. We gave him a present, Barbara Dane's album I Hate the Capitalist System, mainly for the title, because Colin does hate the capitalist system. So do I actually, but it was his birthday. The party was at the Trades Hall and there was 80s music and a big video screen, and I had a fairly detailed discussion with someone who I won't name we were talking about Broadmeadows station precinct as an activity centre because she was involved in a competition design for the future of B'meadows station area and I was saying how I thought it was a great idea to do a land swap to get a visual connection between Broady central and our open space and how great our space was and that it had a wetlands and she said 'how hard is it to make a wetland? You just let everything get wet'. And turned around and started talking to someone else. Funny. Then we went to a party at 6Hope St, in the house Mia lived in 10 years before, chiefly to have a look around. The theme of the party was The Jungle and there was someone who looked about 10 dressed as a big banana and I was sitting on the arm of a couch and some person with plastic adders in his hair kept banging me on the back with his snake heads. Mia said the carpet used to be orange. The living room had a huge range (the house was probably about 1920) that stretched the length of the wall and contained an old stove at one end, a cupboard in the middle that must once have been something else, and a fireplace at the other end. Very unusual.

Anyway considering I have a massive amount of marking to do I have got quite a bit of that done and more besides.

It was exciting to see that someone out of Troyka are starting a Troyka site (see other comment on previous entry) though there's not much there at the moment, just some pictures/handbills/reviews that take a long time to load if you have dialup.