is dis a system

Crazy situation that I now find myself in of having a sore throat (woke me up a couple of times) and unemotional tearing up so I bit the bullet and went and got a covid test. Ridiculous, because I am fully vaccinated despite the best efforts of the federal government to withhold that option. I gather there is a small percentage of people who can get the virus anyway despite being vaccinated (but it doesn't kill them - is that how it's supposed to work?) but the only way I could possibly have got it is if someone from the government crept into the house and sprayed me with germs as I slept, because I have never not been eminently sensible re: covid caution. Anyway, the actual test was every bit as gross as I imagined it would be, and very uncomfortable but whatever. It was easy to walk into the Royal Melbourne (thank you Elizabite, Queen of Australia)* and took no time whatsoever. The weirdest thing was having to give my name, DOB and phone number thrice in ten minutes but the second time being asked if I still lived at 1 Scott St, Hawthorn. Well, I last lived there in 1984 (I actually told them 1982 but that was just because I was so surprised, I couldn't do the maths). (I guess if it ever comes up again and someone reads off a screen that I hadn't lived there since 1982 I'll know dis is a system). Apparently the RMH has merged its records with the Children's; I was last a patient at the Children's in 1977 when I was 12. (Some RCH records overrode the RMH records, but that's a moot point for me as I have never been an RMH patient, though I have been a visitor there eg when my father had his car accident two years ago). 

So anyway now I'm self-isolating, so send hopes and prayers. I expect to get a result later today, I'm told they are super-speedy at RMH. My phone is charging downstairs so who knows perhaps they are already calling me to say pack your bags you're going to covid detention. Speaking of which, this is probably not the way to deal with possible illness, but I am half way through reading the profile of Michaelia Cash in the Good Weekend today. Fuck me ragged, what a comprehensively horrible person. I cannot but see her as the epitome of awfulness. But the article (by Jane Cadzow) feels fair. Michaelia C seems very Perth. I admit I kind of like that (Cadzow takes MC to task for the way she speaks, which I find interesting, seems to be an unspoken Pru-Tru thing to it ('She pronounces “to” as “toe”, and “you” as “yoe”.') I have known Perth people who do this and tbh initially I thought they were putting it on but ultimately I figured it's just a way of talking. It's not illegal. OK so I will say that MC's love of cats is a plus, but you know, H****** loved cats didn't he, or at least, that's the kind of thing people say to get out of regarding some people as irredeemable. Which btw from my pov she probably is, but you know what I mean. 

* I went on a search for the real Elizabite and I was surprised to find only this image of the book's cover:

Now, that is the book I remember having as a child, but the subtitle I'm almost certain was not a part of my copy and it seems to spoil the overall, I guess I would think that, as it's a disgusting intrusion on my treasured childhood. Makes me want to get a copy of this book, which I enjoyed, and definitely no subtitle on the cover, if I can only get one with a subtitle, I'll white it out. 

Update: got the result back, I don't have the coronavirus. 

what a time to be alive

 

horner

 

It was really good to be able to give Arthur Horner's lost weekly cartoon strip Tall Poppies another viewing, even if one of the episodes was virtually unreadable and many of them have lost their tart edge, I'm going to suggest, by dint of (1) world's moved on (2) relatedly, some jokes now unfunny/whimsy faded (3) also relatedly, visual refs now completely incomprehensible/ good caricatures but of whom? And why? That's what newspapers used to be, I guess. It was like memes. It made sense in the big broader context and then one day it didn't. 

Tall Poppies was based clearly on Ronald Searle's Rake's Progress or the original Hogarth series that Searle's book was based on, or both or more. I like that Horner, who was Australian-born but spent most of his career in the UK, could be both Australian and an outsider, just as in the UK he had been an outsider too. 

I love Horner's art (he could also be very funny too). If I live to be, um, 80 I think I will try and bring some of his work back to the public eye for instance there might be a biography in there perhaps? Very interesting man. 

This picture from the Age 'Saturday extra' section 25 October 1986 p. 11

no more after this I promise

...because apart from anything else, it's clearly palpably nothing, except mysterious. It's 'why did someone put a bit of screwed up paper in that keyhole' mysterious, or Nancy lying on the rug and meowing at me mysterious. There's a reason but it's surely about the dullest reason you can imagine. So this is the visitors to this blog in the last week. As you can see, the vast majority of them are from Sweden although I'm fairly positive they are not. You may recall a few weeks ago the second tranche of visitors, many, I can't remember how many but hundreds, were from the Netherlands. That has now completely gone: the dutch have become absolutely no longer interested in what I have to say. The second tier now is Australia which all things considered is how it should be. 

So clearly some scattershot internet reflex is visiting this blog pretending to be Sweden but leaving no messages and doing nothing more than visit, I don't know how but I am fairly sure that no-one is actually reading or looking at anything. If anyone can explain why this is happening I'd be interested to hear it, but I can also happily ignore it. 

I am offended no-one at all visits from South America or Africa, my south-of-the-equator brethren have forsaken me almost completely (kudos to Indonesia and Thailand where the real fans are). Not even New Zealand?! Disgusting. 

tall poppies 26 july 1986

 

community

I've wondered this before, and I probably won't do it because names take on a life of their own. but since my move to City Gardens there is more of a case than ever before for me changing the title of this blog. I haven't lived in Lorraine Crescent since 2013, I mean that's close to ten years. We finally did the property settlement a few months ago and the house is now Mia's. I really enjoyed my early years in that house as is probably evident from what I wrote back then (and from the fact that I named the blog after it). I still feel a considerable connection to the area, it's the first place I really felt vested in as an adult. So it's oddly still a bit of a wrench. I don't know if I can have the same kind of feeling for North Melbourne as I did for Jacana/Broadmeadows, I think NM is a bit too big and harsh and complicated. That said I was out with the grabber yesterday and a woman with a fluffy dog in a pram asked me where I got the grabber from, and for a second I felt like well this is kind of a community-styled conversation. 

1234

 

OK, I brought this one on myself obviously, and shouldn't complain. I had got some kind of sense through the ether that this book would be different and it was critically acclaimed etc. Also, all I really wanted was, as per the Late Shift book, something I could listen to that would fill the gaps between my usual podcasts. But to my mind Brown makes some really big stupid errors early on that completely put me offside (let's put aside the fact that this book is read by three people and they all put on funny German, Liverpudlian etc accents - that's on Audible not Craig Brown). Obviously if I was to be utterly fair to CB I would invest the full 18 hours 46 minutes I still have to go with this work and then make a pronouncement. Instead, these are the reasons I'm writing this one off and going on to something else (btw Audible now makes it impossible to delete things - you make one purchase you live with it forever apparently): 

(1) I don't know how far I am in to the work but over an hour and already he has committed, well, not a cardinal sin but one of the stupidest errors anyone writing history can do, IMO. Relaying the various (admittedly fairly famous, so maybe you figure you have to do something with the incontrovertible facts of the biographies of the Beatles) milestones in Beatle lives, he has so far posited two 'scenario A' and 'scenario B' situations where, for instance, Paul passes Latin at school and goes on to a university career, or, Paul doesn't pass Latin and stays down a year (that's what happened) and is suddenly in the same year as, and befriends, George Harrison. I would like to posit a scenario C: the comet which created the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event hits another piece of space rock in the asteroid belt instead and smashes to bits there, and so evolution on Earth is not impacted by mass extinction in the way that the Earth experienced it in our current timeline, and Louise Harrison gets rostered on to work at the shop on the night of June 1942 when she and Harold would otherwise have conceived a boring and grumpy guitarist. The impacts on the Travelling Wilburys are minimal. 

I understand (I think) why Brown goes for this stupid approach - he wants us to understand that the universe is random whimsy. But once you unleash that genie you are fucked, Craig. There are literally infinite ways to go. 

(2) The early part of the book is an account of CB going to visit Lennon's and McCartney's childhood homes, wherein CB goes on a big riff on how stupid it is that the National Trust UK has accumulated representative household items from the 1950s-60s to make the houses look as they did the day the lads wrote 'I Saw Her Standing There' (or whatever). It is not clear what he would have preferred, but the message is seems to be 'this isn't history unless this is really Mimi's wooden spoon'. He goes into big detail about the Beatles industry (like he's not, and we his readers are not, buying into that shizzle here and now) and then relates his unease about being caught surreptitiously recording the tour guides and then how he then decides to take notes and gets told off for it. Hey, since I am not going to read/listen to the rest of the book, I shouldn't pronounce but seriously the disrespect he has for the whole situation and the people involved does not make him come out shiny and pristine. 

Btw he then goes to Hamburg and does another Beatles tour and this time we get (as mentioned, this is not CB's fault) interminably extensive parody German accent as some guy who's been making a living (presumably) from being a Beatles in Hamburg tour guide for fifty years (not an exaggeration, he's been doing it since 1970) goes through the motions. This is where I stopped. 

Now I've written it down I feel maybe I'm missing out on a very fine set up for something bigger but fuck it even though I just wanted something to listen to while I stacked the dishwasher I can't take it anymore. Particularly the accents. 

tall poppies '93

Helping Bezos spend ten minutes in space has its upside eg I get to choose some audiobooks from the curious pile at Audible. I have no idea why this one came into my mind when I was trying to decide what was the best mental chewing gum for the week. I had heard of the book dimly but I can't imagine why I thought it would be interesting except that I had somehow been put in mind of it by starting to watch, again, American Splendour (Harvey Pekar had been an occasional guest on Letterman's NBC show but was thrown off because he wouldn't stop critiquing the station's parent company General Electric). 

So this is a book about Johnny Carson's retirement from The Late Show, the machinations behind NBC's decision to replace him not with David Letterman who had been hosting the show after The Late Show for a decade but with Jay Leno, who had been a frequent guest host on The Late Show, then Letterman's decision to leave NBC and set up a competing show to Leno's Late Show on CBS. Even I, who has a certain affection for showbiz arcana, am wondering why anyone would care about these things, even when they are grounded in important ideas like big-advertising-dollars etc. I just can't see this as important, and obviously, I'm not American so why would it be. I tried to think about how in this country, Channel 9 used to mean something (um - family-friendly, glossy, best-practice television but not really that engaging to me most of the time) Channel 7 I suppose meant something to some people though I'm not sure what (it wasn't Channel 10 though) and Channel 10 was trashy and bratty. Channel 2 was a whole different ballgame and so of course was SBS, they're not important for the purposes of the comparison. Still, I don't know what NBC / CBS meant in the 80s-90s in the US and it's a completely different system anyway - the networks - they're much more like networks of distinct broadcasting companies than we had in this country. 

So what's the interest value? Basically that these people, particularly Letterman, but also just the knobs in management, and the CEOs and producers etc, are the most unbelievably neurotic fools you can imagine, all somehow stoked up by the preposterously shallow and fickle enthusiasms of millions of people who are as likely to reject them tomorrow as continue to do the most passive thing you can do and be a 'fan' (that is, not turn off a tv). Carter subtly suggests Jay Leno is a childish automaton whereas Letterman is presented as gifted but, as mentioned, an ego so fragile as to be most susceptible to the criticisms of the voices in his own freakin' head. Also, I guess, that this shit mattered so much to so many; I suppose it was like the zeitgeist news, checking in to see-how-the-culture's-going-kind-of-thing and now thirty years later you're kind of like 'well, the zeitgeist looked after itself, that world is over now, vale'. But seriously - to report with such seriousness (and I have to say, skill in reportage) about the trivial behaviour of big adult babies - at some point, surely, Carter said to himself (or someone) who are these creepy soft-shelled millionaire idiots. I'm close to the end and he hasn't actually asked any question like that really (beyond one moment of reported self-analysis from Letterman along the lines of, 'it's just a TV show'). So. It's interesting but it's mental. 

I would love to read an Australian equivalent, and I have enjoyed things like Gerard Henderson's 60 Minutes book, etc. I'd like to read about Daryl Somers, Ernie Carroll and Gavan Disney etc. But there's no real big set-up war dynamic for them as there is in this book. 

By the way, I gather Leno's manager/producer Helen Kushnick sued Carter for $30M for the way she was portrayed in this book and I don't see how she couldn't have. She comes out so badly it's almost embarrassing to read, and once again, you end up thinking: no-one could have been this bad or, if she was this bad, what kind of milieu was she in that allows the creation/fostering of people who behave this badly? There was a settlement, and Kushnick died not long after (from cancer).  

Oh and also they made it into an HBO film as well. For what that's worth. 

tall poppies 19 July 1985

 

doing things

I know how stupidly meta and self-obsessive it is but it just intrigues me why most of my readers lately have been in Sweden (or have somehow managed to have the system eg Google Analytics whatever that is think they are coming from Sweden) with the second biggest readership the Netherlands. Don't get me wrong I love Sweden and the Netherlands, in fact all of the places that apparently house my readership here are intriguing, sensational, delightful places I am sure in many ways. But still why Sweden! If you are one of these people, please let me know. Yes, I did see a Swedish film the other day and I wrote about it, but I don't think that can really be the reason (Swedes aren't going to care greatly about what this dork thinks about that movie I am sure). 

Looking at what people look at makes me look at things I have written here (I note that a lot of the video links are now dead, I really don't know what to do about that but I guess you can't keep spinning the plates forever, and for all that, often in the past I haven't even explained what I've linked to, just led into it, and now going back I have no idea what it was). I remember over a decade ago somebody I haven't spoken to for a long time said he was surprised at how much personal information I gave away in this blog, and I was quite taken aback - because I thought I played my cards very close to my chest. I noted a little while ago that all my posts were credited to me with my full name. That intrigues me because I couldn't even imagine a time when I'd make it possible to align my full name with this production. But there you go. It obviously happened. 

Nancy and I have had another really nice low-key companionable day today just hanging out by the heater. I cleaned the kitchen, watched some bits and pieces of movies (for the course I'm teaching this semester), the only time I went out was to go to Newmarket - Cheaper Buy Miles, the chemist, the supermarket - nothing special. It has been raining fairly heavily a lot of the time as I noted the few times I took rubbish to the bins etc. 

Some of the time I've been listening to the audiobook of Bill Carter's book The Late Shift. I don't really know why - I have no huge stake in late-night tv shows in the US though I did watch Letterman quite often in the 1990s - but Audible told me I had credits and for some reason that book came into my mind. It's engaging enough. It does all seem kind of incredibly petty and juvenile, at the same time. 

I have to say so far so great with this apartment. I am very impressed by it. It's a really nice place to live and a testament to a great architect with a bit of a vision. Looking forward to doing things with it. 

psykos i stockholm

Beautifully made, clever, frequently surprising and oddly gentle film about a mother and daughter who visit Stockholm from somewhere (else in Sweden) unspecified to celebrate the (name never revealed) daughter's 14th birthday, but on the way there the mother (whose name is also not revealed as I recall) becomes delusional and is hospitalised for doing something which we also don't see, at the airport. Now I start writing it down I guess what we don't see is almost as important as what we do. But still. This is obviously problematic for the daughter but it is also, surprisingly, somewhat liberating and she spends some days in this beautiful, splendid, rich city dodging problems and looking after herself and exploring some things she couldn't have had her mother been there with her including the mystery of her father. 

The only thing I would object to is that towards the end I think it veers a little close to a heavy handed challenge to our perceptions of reality - but I won't let this be a negative criticism - I said it veers a little close to it, not that it does it. The poster, which has a kind of a Hitchcockian feel to it, is not indicative of the content of the film exactly but it still seems oddly appropriate. 

nancy won't clean up her mess

She sees her responsibilities beginning and ending at her own person, which is surely wrong. 
 

just some good looking melbourne buildings really

I should have cropped a little more but you can use your imagination and imagine I am a good cropper OK.

tall poppies 12 july 1986

 

games people play

Not unengaging Finnish film (there are four) at the Scandinavian Film Festival. With a few standout exceptions (the envy displayed by the Finnish men towards the Swedish film star for instance, which is less about him being a film star I think and more about him just being a fine specimen of Swedishness/maleness) it could have been made almost anywhere and for instance could easily be remade as a Hollywood movie if you could get eight Hollywood actors in their thirties to agree they deserved equal billing/equal screen time (also however the massive amount of drinking in this film which is presented as unremarkable here would have to become notable in an American reading - also there's no class/privilege issues - maybe I'm wrong, maybe it couldn't be easily translated to another culture). 

The premise is simple: a group of friends assemble on an island to celebrate one of their number's 35th birthday. They all agree, whimsically I think, to put their phones away for the duration, which is less of a device than you might think although there is quite a good joke revelation pertaining to that, at the very end. There are a lot of tears, lies, truths, some nudity, and a very strange/funny song that the other women sing to Mitzi when they give her her birthday cake. 

I looked it up on Finnish Wikipedia, to find that it is director Jenni Toivoniemi's first feature, and that 'the film received eight Jussi nominations at the 2021 gala for best film, directing, screenplay, female lead (Parviainen), male (Niittymäki) and female (Heinonen).' The word 'seurapeli' seems to mean 'board game', 'club game' or 'party game', and so I guess the English title is apt.  

a scritti politti record review from fifteen years ago. not sure where (or if) published.

Scritti Politti

White Bread and Black Beer

Rough Trade/Shock

I never set much store by record labels, although I suppose there might be something in the notion that a certain culture at certain record labels give a certain something to certain artists. And this could perhaps explain why the new Scritti Politti album – the group’s umpteenth but their first back on their basically-original label Rough Trade – is their best since their first album, Songs to Remember.

The above paragraph was so freakin’ complicated, I didn’t want to have to add in the additional information that the group is not really a group, just a guy, or perhaps the guy, Green Gartside, this just-pretty-much-a genius, at home doing some recording on equipment that, if it doesn’t exactly constitute a home studio, is at least enough recording equipment to fit into his home. The album is sparse, fragile, slipperier’n an oily rag, and glows like a gold brick. I think it’s a masterpiece.

Scritti last bothered the charts in 1984 with ‘Wood Beez’, a song that was surely a hit because it was an early example of a record no-one, including its perpetrators probably, could ever sing along to (so you had to buy it). T(he)y had a pretty prominent near-hit in the ‘91 with a minor Beatles song, ‘She’s a Woman’, in which Shabba Ranks often popped in and said ‘Shabba!’ (or did I dream that?). And then there was a decent album called Anomie and Bonhomie a few years ago which I haven’t listened to since it came out.

Now, Green appears to have a beard and has become funnier than ever. Even as slight a slice of funk as ‘Throw’ is a hoot (‘you could throw a party and maybe I’ll be there’, he sings, which amuses me, anyway). Green, like Jon Michell, likes Marc Bolan, and like Jon Michell, it shows (just listen to ‘After Six’, forget the strange godbotherer references, and imagine it speeded up – it’s Jesus in a Jeepster). He also – you’ll remember he once covered the Beatles – likes, or likes to sound like, Paul McCartney; that final track, ‘Robin Hood’, one of the best, would have fit perfectly on any McCartney album except, um, Run Devil Run. There’s a crazy, slightly creepy song called ‘Mrs Hughes’ which is kind of Simon and Garfunkel and scary but totally brilliant.

Can’t recommend this record highly enough.

By the way (this is me in 2021 now), I still stand by this review, uninterestingly written as it may be. I see that in the original I slightly erred in the record's title - it's White Bread Black Beer, that's not particularly important. I would like to hear this album again because who knows what's happened to my CD of it. I think it might have come out on vinyl but I'm trying to keep a lid on my vinyl purchases if at all possible. Instead I'm spending all my dosh on books and films, what a prat. And ornaments and car repair. And food. And, you know, bills. 

tall poppies 5 july 1986

 

woody allen

Blogging (sigh) you want to be able to revel in the freedoms you are allowed by it, particularly as there's a good argument they are always tenuous and they're a muscle that'll waste away if you don't use them often and freely, and you don't want to be deterred from wading into the mire just because there's a general distaste for those that do. Remember when I got the shits about an old Fall song and got a snapshot of a genuine racist troll in the process for what it was worth (precisely nothing, or at least, it just made me feel dirty). 

I read Woody Allen's memoir Apropos of Nothing yesterday, as prep for something related to work, and it's true, I am the kind of flip-flop whose opinion can be twisted by whatever argument I was most recently exposed to. But I have also read Mia Farrow's memoir from long ago which discusses the same topic (I tried to watch Allen vs Farrow but I couldn't, but I tend not to trust documentaries even when there is far more evidence they are even-handed). I am not going to argue the intricacies of everyone's testimony - just say that the court of public opinion usually sucks as a court, and while nothing I get to hear about in the day-to-day makes me feel that the real legal system in the US has a huge amount going for it, WA has never been found guilty of anything. It seems to me there's a better case that MF cynically weaponised her children against WA using the most awful accusation she could think of, but there I go, getting caught up in the intricacies of testimony, which isn't my place, and a silly blog like this one is not the place to make pronouncements on anything serious unless - and this is a huge 'unless' - the blogger in question is willing to go all out and treat it in a journalistic fashion like a pro. 

I often think of the Joe Orton diaries, where - I'm going to paraphrase because I don't have the book to hand but if I made this up in my unconscious imagination then I have bigger problems than I thought - he records someone in mid-late 60s Britain congratulating him on the decriminalisation of homosexuality and he says well I'm a paedophile and that'll never be decriminalised. Of course Orton is extremely dead (and liked to shock and disgust people) but I note there's not a lot of mention of this self-identification in his wikipedia entry, aside from something about 'rent boys'.  Obviously these 'boys' weren't Kenneth Halliwell's children, but I do still see a bit of a double standard going on, insofar as Orton - his star admittedly a little on the wane these days, based as it is on a brief flurry of celebrity/productivity fifty years ago - has much of a profile to be cancelled. 

Apropos of Nothing is not a great book, I'm sorry to say. It starts out good humouredly, an overview of the artist's first thirty-plus years, including his first two marriages, interesting (to me) bits and pieces around the way a boy humourist in New York in the early 1950s could make twice as much as his parents' combined income in a few hours of typing up jokes-to-order. His he is in his late 30s by the time he is actually making his earliest canon films. He mentions (I think - I didn't tabulate) all his films and if he doesn't actually do justice to each (some discussions are just an anecdote to tick a box), well, there's been a lot of them and in his defence he never watches them again after making them and never reads his reviews, an approach I endorse (that said, for someone who's really down on awards, he often mentions his own and others'). When he gets to the Farrow period he drops the jokiness and adopts a monotone. Following that, back to an extended, and also rather jarring after the two very different tones we have been exposed to, reflection on later career, and finally an account of the 20-teens cancellation, after which the whole thing kind of grinds to a halt. 

I am not sure if it's tone deafness that makes him want to mention without comment Bill Cosby (at least once) and Roman Polanski (in a couple of different contexts) without making any pronouncement on their famous sex crime controversies or whether he's trying to be provocative (he distances himself from Harvey Weinstein professionally saying he wouldn't work with someone who insisted on reediting movies, without making any comment on HW's behaviour; he also makes some oblique comments on Louis CK getting into trouble, without saying anything about the nature of such trouble). I am pretty sure that you can't be in show business for over sixty years without hearing terrible things about everyone, which isn't a reason to turn a blind eye, but might make you less inclined towards believing social justice is achievable even in small measure, particularly if you feel you have been completely denied it yourself as WA apparently does.

One of the real freedoms of blogging IMO is that you don't have an editor saying 'weak conclusion, you need to revise', as though anyone ever reads to the end of any article, ever, anyway. I don't have a conclusion. I don't recommend reading Apropos of Nothing though. You don't learn much, and you don't have much fun along the way. 

a review of the winduptoys from fifteen years ago

Winduptoys

Double Exposure

Clan Analogue

Winduptoys really know how to string it together. ‘Lost and found’ is not entirely non-reminiscent of Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’. ‘WindupDUB’ has this kind of Arabic, painted-mural-on-a-café-wall kind of aspect that the trebly reggae beat does not dispel. ‘Switched on’ has a similarly wild muslim feel, which has to be embraced. Other tracks take a really revolutionary unbassy but furious, heady approach, suggesting that these are not just a couple of guys probing around with jacks and units, but actual thinkers making thoughtful and, well, atmospheric (though atomspheric would be a better word) somewhat druggy music that would have gone down really well in that scene in the film Dalmas where the cops bust the trippy club. Sometimes the psychedelia buttons get stuck and the guys are just there, in their pyjamas, eating Angas Park dried fruit salad and constantly probing their ears with their pinkies because they hear this whining noise. And at the same time you can see the most definite trails back to rock, Public Image (who they cover) style rock, or the Pop Group who have always been a personal favourite of mine, or back further to blues workouts from the 60s, or The Twilights or whatever. Absolutely highly recommended, my friends.

världen är liten

I occasionally peek at the stats for my blog. I am not obsessy about it, because after all, why bother. I am amazed anyone reads this stuff at all, as it's unlikely really to mean anything to anyone other than me and Nancy and a few other nearest and dearest and even they are unlikely to get too much of enormous value out of it - IMO. Particularly since I am fairly sure it's repetitive anecdotes and/or versions of the same general philosophies, if you could call them that. Anyway. I am still intrigued at the top five above, although frankly I am not sure what period that covers - the last 15 years or however long it's been since I started this shizzle? The last year? The last month? It's not clear. Nor is it really important. It is weird though that Sweden is leading the way, it's not famous for its bots, but maybe that's what they want you to believe. The Netherlands, similarly, I don't really get although when it comes down to it, I don't absolutely get any of these countries' interest particularly, although of course I know all too well that the majority of visitors are coming attracted by the blood-in-the-water of a particular keyword or one of the very popular entries I have come up with such as the one where I muse on the words to the H R Pufnstuf theme song or the one where I muse on Knockout comic from the 70s. I'm not going to link to them you'll only click on them and continue to skew the demographic for those especially boring entries though tbf maybe slightly less boring than most of the others, at least in what they promise. Since you've read this far I'll tell you what I've been doing today: I was writing a lecture this morning, and watching The Towering Inferno (I'm about half way through it) - this is not as random as it seems, or at least, it is but the lecture was at least in part about The Towering Inferno. Then I had two meetings, one IRL and one online, with men whose PhDs I am cosupervising. Then I tried to revise/boil down my CV for an application I'm helping someone with at work and it didn't save, so I spent probably all up one fruitless hour divided into two fruitless half-hours in contact with Apple to try and figure out why, when I have almost 300GB of memory on my laptop, a simple word document was causing the computer to tell me I had no memory left. I got some messages from Alanna asking if I would be able to go to Daylesford or Castlemaine or wherever the hell it is Jon Michell lives to record some drums/percussion on a couple of her wonderful songs, which of course I would, although I am woefully out of practice when it comes to drums and never really mastered percussion (yet). Also, late in the day a delivery man came and gave me some things I had ordered in the mail, including this book by Bret Lunsford which looks really good and suitably delightfully esoteric (I haven't read much of it yet, but I note that Harry Smith doesn't get born until around p. 83 of a 200-page narrative, which by the way I'm fine with). Also some recent record releases from K and some button badges which I didn't order but I'm very happy to have. 

Pretty cool huh

So tonight I think I will most likely finish watching The Towering Inferno, maybe have a light supper... packet soup? Possibly finish drinking the bottle of Lakka I have in the fridge and maybe try and write some more book-chapter-that-has-been-hindered-by-the-house-move, and also possibly put a few more things away, although I'm really hanging out for Lachlan to build my shelves - then I'll know I'm really ensconced, although the curtains in the bedroom are a very find grounding (thank you Laura). 

midway 2021

Alright so I will say that 2021 has been extremely unexpected overall, but then, what year does turn out the way you expect? I hope I never have one like that. I am sitting here in my new home, there are things piled up everywhere because I don't feel enabled to settle properly until I get my shelves built (the install I think starts on Friday - waiting to hear) so I have, for instance, a huge pile of CDs atop a cabinet and I haven't even really started thinking about unpacking CDs (CDs are like something I don't even really think about much, and the ones I have are only around because essentially I throw very little of anything out - !).  I also have a big pile of junk at one end of my car parking space down below. 

It has come to my attention that a pipe in the ceiling outside the laundry is leaking, so that's the first big wake-up call re: home ownership, but OK, I can handle whatever it takes for the right to put pictures on the wall as I please and not have an inspection every six months. I have been told in any case that this might be remedied today... we'll see... (not because anyone responded to my request for a repair, but because a repair was scheduled anyway). I also have ordered a new stove because the stove here sucks and also - unpleasantly - it's kind of grimy and I deserve better. So I will receive my due soon enough. 

The big problem for me that worries me the most is Helmi is clearly very unsettled and unhappy, and while I actually wouldn't have described her as happy at Parkville, at least there were times when she would come out and spend the day with me and Nancy. Now, as far as I can tell, she has not left the bedroom and adjoining bathroom since we got here and spends most of her time either under the bed or in hiding somewhere, I'm not sure where. I hope she will rally soon because it can't be good for her to be so scared and sad. 

Otherwise, everything's pretty great, to be honest. 

rabbit