the simpsons s16 e10 'there's something about marrying'

Recently I sort of accidentally started watching old episodes of The Simpsons, a show I stopped keeping up with solidly about twenty years ago. Maybe more. The season I randomly landed on was (I now appreciate) season 16, which was screened in I think 2005. I could tell it wasn't super-recent because the style of animation was, while not as primitive as the first episodes obviously, still not as pristine as it appears today, but tbh I could not otherwise really figure out what the year was. I was figuring 21st century. 

Anyway, this episode intrigued me and I had to check it out more because it really, really shows how much times have changed in, well, 18 years, which I have to admit is quite a long time and imagine if times hadn't changed? I'm going to spoil it, by the way. 

Essentially the plot is that gay marriage is legalised in Springfield to assist in tourism (I suppose it's 'tourism', though really the gay people who are coming to Springfield are simply getting married, they're not exactly having any other kind of touristic experience that we see). Reverend Lovejoy refuses to marry gay people (apparently no-one sorted this out with him before the law came in and apparently there is only one church in Springfield) so Homer gets a priest's license off the internet and marries gay people for $200 a pop. Marge's sister Patty asks Homer to marry her to her fiancee, a pro golfer called Veronica. Marge is challenged by the news that one of her sisters is a lesbian and then discovers that Veronica is, actually, a man who (it is revealed) pretended to be a woman to get into some golfing league which we are supposed to understand through its acronym so I don't know whether it's just women's golf or gay women's golf.* Not important. The point is he is not a woman but also only pretended to be a woman to get some privileges or something? 

It's amazing to imagine that this episode was groundbreaking and controversial in its day, but wikipedia assures me it was. I wonder if I would have thought so at the time. The jokes about anyone marrying anything (Homer marries Reverend Lovejoy to the bible without his consent, for instance, but at the very end we see a line of people going into Homer's chapel to marry inanimate objects eg the Sea Captain is going to marry the figurehead off a ship, etc) are extremely Cory Bernardi as far as I'm concerned. There is also a lot of stereotypical male gay shizzle that feels like a real throwback, far older than 2005, but what do I know, I'm not a gay man or woman and I am probably - like so many things in this world - not really qualified to have an opinion except broadly as a consumer of culture, and I guess as an ally. 

Of course I watch The Simpsons with the Finnish subtitles turned on as though I'm ever going to learn anything from this, other than that languages have words for everything and you have to learn them all and it's probably impossible.  

'Could we hurry up?'

'Veronica is a man!' (Finnish has no definite or indefinite articles which makes it somewhat easier at the same time as it makes it harder, lol). 

'Patty, I love you but I pretended to be a woman long before we met.' 

I guess there is a joke in here somewhere that 'Leslie' is a man's name that sounds like the woman's name 'Lesley', and 'Robin' can be a man's or a woman's name, I don't get the last name, 'Swisher', though (yes I know the caption says 'Swisherinä' and names are often presented in this kind of way in Finnish and I don't know why, but the character's real name is actually 'Swisher'. 

'Even if you are a lesbian you are the same'. (Who'd have thought the Finnish word for 'lesbian' would be 'lesbo'?! 

*I looked it up. Ladies' Professional Golf Association or something like that. I assume there's a belief at the heart of this that men are intrinsically better at sport than women? Not sure. 

went to the show

Laura and I went to the Show on Saturday morning, it was rad as usual though I have to say (memo to my future self) that by the time 12 noon or so rolled around the place was absolutely packed and there were all kinds of insanity going on that did provoke feelings not unlike those a hackneyed psychodrama film can bring forth: harrowing, visceral, nightmarish. But I just wanted to get the bad stuff out of the way first because there was a lot of great stuff too. Here's some highlights:

A handsome sheep.

Nice curlies

I believe these are what are known as 'longbois'. In fact... 

Here (above) are a couple more, although I fear these might actually be cake-based. We're now in the artsy crafty section, where the magic of the Show really happens. The weird thing is how few people actually win all the prizes, but I guess some people just rise to the top. You can't fight it. 

I have a bad feeling this bunny who is going to have a birthday is actually also a cake. Enjoy it while it lasts, little one. 

Stumpy and friends. I don't know why Stumpy is called Stumpy. Part of the magic. 

Some beautiful dogs in the dog pavilion, and although I loved the shiba inus (always do, can't help it) I was probably most taken with the swedish vallhunds, a breed with which I had previously been unfamiliar, and I am very into their vibe. I think this might be a good companion animal for Perry, if one ever comes across our path, which it probably won't. 

And there was also this feisty individual. 

There were some birds too, lovely birds.

 As mentioned above, and this should be no surprise at all it being a Saturday, things got really packed as we neared midday and it was all a bit crowded so we were pleased I think to be leaving (when I was a kid, the show seemed massive, now it's manageable - I mean I know that some of the area was rationalised - still I feel that. Maybe since they took the chairlift down which, by the way, needed to be taken down). 

I just want to mention a couple of exciting elements viz the SEC exhibit for which I recorded a message (!?) so as to obtain a metal SEC mug. They were giving the yo-yos away whether you did a message or not so, you guessed it, they were no strings attached. 

This was just funny. 

'So have you ever shot anyone for not having a ticket?'

By the way Laura promised me she would blog about her show experience so that's something to look forward to. 

onion recipes and bonus fruit tart

 

bus

I note that in the early days of this blog I used to talk a lot about public transport and I did seem to be going hither and thither on outer suburban bus services in particular. That happens less now though I do still go far and wide, but often now it's by car. Why? I don't know but I will say that, while it is perfectly legal (or I choose to think it is) to take Perry on the train, he is anxious about it and so it can really only be short distances. He can't go on buses, he'll never know what that's like. 

This afternoon I was late for a meeting because the bus was l-a-t-e. I have really come to depend on the 402, I don't know why it comes so frequently and travels so valiantly between two places that don't per se need to be travelled between (Footscray and East Melbourne, I mean, that's fine but if you were in Footscray and you actually wanted to get to East Melbourne fastish, you'd go on the train right?) though obviously not many people actually travel the whole distance instead they take bits of the route. Anyway, I do expect it to be quick and so when it doesn't show I fall to pieces. 

I've got nothing else (or perhaps just nothing) to say on this topic. Do blogs waste energy i.e. are they bad for the environment? If so, then I've done a bad thing with this post, it has no point.

songs

 

I may even have posted this stupid picture before, it has no special value, I just hate seeing posts without an image. 

In fact the only thing I really wanted to blog today (aside from: the state government is ridiculously pulling down vintage housing commission buildings to erect new monstrosities and expects patting on the back for it, and also, that there is officially an el niŋo (ok, for some weird reason blogger doesn't have an n with a tilde on it, at least not in this font, I cbf finding how to do it)* coming and that s-u-x sux) is that I've been thinking about my post from I think five years ago (jesus, so much amazing stuff has happened since then) when I said I had written a song. 

I had, and Alanna and I even played it live, once, the only time I've ever played guitar in public. We wangled a brief spot before an Alastair Galbraith show at the Labor in Vain. It went OK, in a world of no-one had expectations and everyone knew it would be over soon so it was fine. 

But the weird thing now is how things like songwriting just course around my head with a back-and-forth of how much I think about doing it, but also, how much I cannot even remotely imagine anyone would be interested in anything I did in that vein, and 'anyone' even includes myself, and indeed I'm fairly sure no-one at all would find any pleasure in listening to any such thing. 

This is the very definition of self-thwarting thinking, and me writing this down is a way of breaking out of it (I am in roughly the same boat with my second graphic novel, though I have moved forward a little with that).  Really, I should play music not with the intention of presenting it to anyone specifically, but because it's really good for me mentally, by which I mainly mean brain, but possibly also attitude. 

*update a few minutes later: I just read an article about it and now I know there is no tilde on it anyway

update a day later: then I saw another article on the same general topic in the Guardian and they use a tilde

yes yesterday

Yesterday we went to the yes rally, it was huge. 

saturday night 18 september 2018

I am writing to you from - well, actually, it just turned midnight so 19 September 2018. Tonight I spent a cold but comfortable night at Talmage St Albion doing creative things.  I had asked Alanna if she wanted to go and see Caroline No at Some Velvet Morning tonight but she had something else on.   But I turned it productive, I wrote a song called 'The Acolyte' about Nancy. Actually I wrote the words some months ago and just had them there, they fitted perfectly to the five chords I assembled, I was pretty happy with the result. I also finally got around to properly drawing the picture for Guy Morton's album cover. He'd asked me to do this ages ago and I kept feeling unable to. Part of the weirdness was it was supposed to represent a balloon, however, he wanted the balloon to look like a house. I am still confused about that. Anyway I made a decent start:

It should come together OK, in my opinion. I like the people I assembled, it will be fun colouring them too. 

Nancy is sitting here on the couch with me, she's been in and out all night, I have played some records when I wasn't doing my own music - I played the Touchdown compilation with the Higsons and the Farmers Boys and so on, and a Versus album, and earlier in the day I was playing Small World Experience... Not much else is happening. Got work things to do tomorrow I guess. A confirmation report to read, a report to write on a book proposal from the UK.  

marie russak

Oakland Tribune 18 June 1911 p.6

Well I don't have anything to say about Marie Russak except that I wish someone would write a book about her so I could read it. 

Wikipedia tells us she was born in 1865 in California, (another source says Russia in 1888) and was best known as a theosophist but also an opera singer and late in life, I guess, she started designing houses, though how that was possible and whether she was an actual qualified architect is unclear. 

Anyway, I'd like to know more but who has the time really to get involved. 

smoking ban

This is from the Age's Good Weekend magazine on 9 December 1989, in a kind of 'farewell to the 80s' article called 'Remembrance of things passed' (p. 126+) by Anthony Dennis and David Monaghan. I dug it up because I was having a think about when smoking began to be banned in earnest in public places in Victoria/Australia (ironically, within an hour or so of being interested in this, I saw a headline in today's paper which mentioned a Crown employee suing that organisation as he had contracted lung cancer, he alleges, from working in a part of the casino that allows smoking still). 

I was only reviewing the Age in the 70s and 80s searching on terms like 'smoking ban' and not getting that far, but marvelling at yet another example of the ways in which general attitude appears to have been 'this is how it has always been, people smoke everywhere and that is what we are used to, so there is clearly no way it can ever change'. 

What surprises me I guess is the way that a lot of the reportage is taking the side of smokers eg the piece above. Maybe it's because smokers are so bad tempered, notoriously. I remember complaining to a worker at the Gladstone Park Woolworths that smokers were always getting served ahead of everyone else at the 8 items or less counter and she said it was because they got shitty if they didn't get immediate attention. 

esp

I guess I just wanted to say that I got very temporarily interested in the Eastern Suburbs Permanent Building Society after seeing that Sunny Bear was at Boronia Mall in 1973 with his free giveaways and that the kids will love him and his free giveaways. I don't know what his free giveaways were but I would really like to know. But in the meantime I just wanted to mention that the ESPBS started in the mid-1950s and grew big and then in the early 80s merged with another BS to become merely The Permanent Building Society which might have helped with the embarrassment of having branches in other places, such as the western suburbs or Frankston for that matter where they were victims of a major fraud by an employee who the judge decided not to give a custodial sentence to as her life had been awful. This ad is from the Age 14 September 1976 p. 23
 

sydney #5

That's right I got a whole row to myself

sydney #4

happy fiftieth anniversary boronia mall

 

Laura and I spent a while there on 27 May and noticed it was soon to have a significant birthday. 

It was much less rundown and drab than we had been led to believe, though it's true some shops were empty. Nevertheless - it's a really amazing place and needs more care and appreciation. May it live on.

Oh, and I (who titled a post on this blog with a reference to a 'right-off' about fifteen years ago and only noticed last week) always like to poke fun at others' typos/poor English/ whatever you want to call it: 

This isn't even an example of that, it's just, I don't know, funny emphasis I suppose. 

It was a Buchan, Laird and Buchan design (they've been featuring a lot in my research lately, though conversely I wouldn't know any of them if they stood up in my cornflakes). The building apparently once had a large sculpture in the foyer which I don't think it does anymore. No mention in the advertising material of who made the tiles or how. I will contact Sunny Bear and see what he has to say and/or whether he has any more of those free giveaways. Btw I didn't know, or had forgotten, Rosemary Morgan had died, shame, she seemed nice. 

11 September 1973 p. 17 passim