bathroom renovations

From yesterday: Mia is doing all that is required on the bathroom renovations thus far. All I do (which is not to be sneezed at) is ponder why spiders built webs inside walls. I suppose they were 70s spiders and maybe had ideas we might now see as particularly zany. Perhaps those things aren’t spider webs but some kind of stringy accumulation of dust formed in mid-air through mysterious inner wall and underhouse currents, affected by planetary gravity.

So the story is that we are without a bathroom for the time being. Fortunately my mother went overseas on Tuesday so we can use hers. Unfortunately she lives a long way away.

I am typing this at Broadmeadows station at 7:46 am and I am very pleased to report Wa Wa Nee’s ‘Stimulation’ is being played over the pa. Congratulations to Metro for such unexpected fine taste in late 1980s pop music. I think the 80s pop music is actually the local version of playing classical music at railway stations to discourage vandalism. I must say I can think of nothing more likely to discourage vandalism in me as the music of Wa Wa Nee, though as I have no doubt said in this forum before, it’s the difficult second album I am into not the first, peasier, one.

Last night we watched Bran Nue Dae which got very good reviews and was awful. I wonder what the idea behind that was, but I do know when I saw ads for it at the cinema I immediately wanted to see it (I suppose that want was not so intensely compelling that it translated to going to the cinema to see it, but if I remember rightly there were attempts that didn’t work out). Missy Higgins and Jessica Mauboy are quite good actors. Keep an eye out for ‘Geoffrey Rush’ in the future too.

From today: Shane left for Portland via LA and Brisbane this morning. We nearly didn’t make it as I nearly crashed the car as there was ice on the passenger side of the windscreen (it was about 4:50 am). But we did make it, unless we are dead a la the early part of Beetlejuice. He seemed chipper enough all things considered, we had a conversation about deodorant. End of an era, even if he does come back (everyone says he won’t, but who’s going to say that to the boxes under our house?).

You know what, I am finding the news really irritating these days. I am finding it hard to listen to Radio National in the morning as well, it’s not just because the political party I barrack for aren’t doing so well or that there’s some kind of soccer game being played in South Africa, I just find it all predictable, samey and annoying. Is this a stage of life, or am I correct?

under a bus

For a long time now people have been using falling under a bus as a convenient way of representing mundane, random death. I don't want to get all philosophical but why a bus? In Melbourne we tend to see trams as the people mover in streets, though you hear a lot more of people falling under trains and dying, than you do under trams, for some reason. Of course the most common transport-related cause of death is car accidents, but for some reason these seem more gruesome and 'that's horrible' than falling under a bus, though most of us can expect on present indicators to die prolongedly in drawn-out and miserable care institutions. Is there something vaguely comforting about falling under a bus? Does one think of Big Ears driving the bus full of cotton-reel people, and it's only the Mayor of Toytown who's hit, and he just gets a red mark on his forehead?

Usually falling under a bus is summoned by people who generally indulge in thoughtless, risky self-harming behaviour eg smoking, as 'oh well, I could die from lung or throat or some other cancer, but I could fall under a bus, so...' (the 'so...' meaning, 'The randomness of the world means I refuse to partake in any consideration of what, all other things being equal, the likely outcome of my behaviour will be.') But I have also in work scenarios had it suggested to me that I keep various files and other research materials user-friendly in case I fall under a bus. Strangely, I did feel this was a pretty benign way of putting it, and I wouldn't have felt that way if instead it was suggested I might have been garrotted or fall off a tall building.

So what exactly is so great about falling under a bus?