not my contribution to the 'shit happens' debate

Last week - I was a bit out of the loop, not reading newspapers but checking a bit of half-understood tv news - Tony Abbott was in the stew over his comment that 'shit happens' in wartime.
I am always happy to see Abbott get stewed and made unhappy, so I enjoyed what I understood of it. But yesterday I just remembered a pathetic conversation overheard in Bermagui in the early morning at a cafe where I stopped around 7.30.
It was one of those conversations where one guy was holding forth and the other was agreeing for the sake of it. This oldish man was going on about how Abbott did not deserve to be roasted over the use of the term shit happens (though really it was the implied cavalier aspect to it that he was being roasted over, but never mind). What bugged me about this fellow was his insistence that 'shit happens' was an old Australian colloquialism.
I first heard the term in 1990. It was specifically introduced to me by a young Australian popstar I was interviewing, she was throwing out a little bit of international trend news, that people in the states now use this term 'shit happens.' It was almost a joke and it was proto-slacker. Bullshit is it an old Australian colloquialism.
If he reads my blog, mate, you're a bullshit artist.

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.

i was horrified...

...to hear presenters on RRR yesterday saying they were proud of the Australian flag and proud to be Australian. If I wanted to hear that kind of sentiment so antithetical to my own I would listen to some friggin' right wing talkback show. Pride is a bono emotion anyway but pride in one's country is like pride in having fingers, or pride that you haven't murdered someone lately. Go to hell with your patriotism shit.

holy shit!

Yesterday evening I got on the train at Strathmore going north and a young guy was talking to a friend on one of those hands free things so he seemed really to be talking into the air. He said 'Uh, Strathmore' and the friend said something and he said 'Oh, bullshit, what do I do?' and it was pretty clear he was going in the wrong direction. He said, 'How far to Southern Cross?' and got an answer, then said he'd talk to his friend soon. And then he just went and sat down. And I thought, do I say something to him like, 'you do realise you're going the wrong way?' and then I thought, oh well he's young maybe that was some kind of elaborate sardonic game, I'll stay out of it. But then after about five minutes he said to the woman next to him, 'Excuse me, how far is it to Southern Cross?' and she said, 'you're going the wrong way' and he got up and she and someone else said to him, 'it's about ten stations in the other direction' and we were at Oak Park by this stage and she said, 'You're going to have to get off here, and go under the platform and catch the train going back that way.'

'Holy shit', said the guy. And alighted.